Alexandre Colonna-Walewski

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexandre Colonna-Walewski was born on the 4th of May 1810 during a thunderstorm, and according to family lore, the lightning was taken as a sign that his life would be stormy and even life-changing. He would later write of that moment himself, noting that he was held at the baptismal font by two beggars, a family custom meant to bring luck. What the family custom could not have predicted was the particular nature of his parentage. His mother was Maria Walewska, a Polish noblewoman and mistress of Napoleon Bonaparte. His father, for all practical purposes, was the emperor of France.

  Napoleon never formally acknowledged the boy, yet he gave him a title, lands, and a tearful farewell. Alexandre grew up in the shadow of that absent father, carrying a secret that everyone around him suspected but no one could officially confirm. He would go on to serve as foreign minister of France under Napoleon's nephew, to preside over the Congress of Paris that ended the Crimean War, and to help shape modern international law of the sea. His life runs from a Polish manor near Warsaw to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, touching virtually every corner of nineteenth-century European power. The question worth sitting with is how a child born out of wedlock and raised across three countries managed to reach the very summit of French diplomacy.

• 2. Napoleon's Unacknowledged Son

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  Marie Walewska conceived Alexandre while staying near Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, where Napoleon was temporarily resident. When she asked to give birth in Paris, he sent her back to her husband's estate in Poland instead. Count Athanasius Walewski, who was nearly eighty years old at the time, legally recognized the child as his own, giving Alexandre a respectable name to carry into the world.

  Napoleon, meanwhile, was in Belgium with his new bride, Empress Marie Louise, when news of the birth reached him. He sent an affectionate message and a gift of Brussels laces to Marie, and he made sure the household was comfortable. He arranged for Marie and young Alexandre to live at a residence in Rue de Montmorency in Paris and granted them a pension of 120,000 francs a year.

  Napoleon's valet, Constant, recorded his employer's reaction on first seeing the infant. The child bore a striking resemblance to Napoleon, Constant wrote, and the emperor was so moved that he took the boy in his arms and said: "I will make thee a count." He kept that promise. On the 5th of May 1812, Napoleon decreed Alexandre a Count of the French Empire and bestowed upon him lands in the Kingdom of Naples. The endowment included sixty-nine farms generating an annual income of 169,516 francs.

  On the 15th of June that same year, while in Königsberg, Napoleon signed letters patent confirming the title. The boy's new coat of arms combined the insignias of the Walewski and Laczynski families, an emblem that stitched together his Polish maternal ancestry and the imperial French world his father ruled.

• 3. A Childhood Between Worlds

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  Marie Walewska and Napoleon had one final meeting that involved Alexandre directly. After Napoleon's abdication in 1814, Marie took four-year-old Alexandre to the island of Elba, where the exiled emperor was living. Islanders mistook Marie for Empress Marie Louise and mistook Alexandre for the King of Rome, Napoleon's legitimate heir.

  On Elba, Napoleon played with the boy and spent affectionate time with him. One exchange survived in the record. Napoleon reportedly asked Alexandre why he never mentioned the emperor's name in his prayers. The boy admitted he did not, but said he remembered to say "Papa Empereur." Napoleon's response was: "He'll be a great social success, this boy: he's got wit."

  Napoleon's physician, Foureau de Beauregard, later wrote to Alexandre recalling seeing him "almost twenty-nine years ago, on the Emperor's lap near the Madonna delle Grazie on the island of Elba." But with Empress Marie Louise expected to arrive, Napoleon quietly arranged for Marie and Alexandre to leave so as not to cause a scandal.

  Back in Paris by early 1815, they were present at Malmaison to bid farewell to Napoleon before his departure for Saint Helena. Alexandre, recalling that day as an adult, wrote: "I can still see the Emperor... every single feature of his face.... He took me in his arms and I remember a tear ran down his face."

  In his final will, Napoleon mentioned Alexandre alongside his other illegitimate son, Charles Léon. Of Alexandre, he wrote that he would like him to enter the service of France as a soldier. The son would follow that instruction, though not before considerable wandering.

• 4. Orphan, Exile, Soldier

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  Marie Walewska remarried on the 7th of September 1816, taking Napoleon's cousin Philippe Antoine d'Ornano as her husband. She died just over a year later, on the 11th of December 1817, leaving Alexandre and his younger half-brother Antoine in Paris under the care of a trusted friend named M. Carite.

  Care of Alexandre then passed to his uncle, Theodore Laczyński, who took the boys to Kiernozia in Poland. Laczyński taught them about the French Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns, and he expressed a dream of one day taking them to Saint Helena when they were old enough. The tutor he initially hired in Warsaw held strong republican and anti-Napoleonic views, which alarmed Laczyński. He moved the boys to a Jesuit college instead, where Alexandre made his first communion.

  In 1820, at the age of ten, Alexandre left Poland for Geneva and spent four years at a boarding school there. At fourteen, he refused to join the Imperial Russian army and fled to London. The French government, for its part, refused Tsar Alexander I's demands for his extradition to Russia.

  When Louis-Philippe d'Orléans came to the French throne in 1830, Walewski was sent to Poland. The leaders of the Polish November Uprising of 1830 then entrusted him as a diplomatic envoy to the Court of St James's in London. After the Fall of Warsaw, he took out letters of French naturalization and joined the French Army, serving in Algeria as a Captain in the Chasseurs d'Afrique of the French Foreign Legion. He had answered his father's wish at last.

• 5. Playwright, Journalist, Diplomat

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  In 1837 Walewski resigned his military commission and turned to writing. He worked as a journalist and is said to have collaborated with Alexandre Dumas the elder on the play Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle. His own comedy, L'Ecole du monde, was produced at the Theâtre Français in 1840.

  That same year the path back toward politics opened. Prime minister Thiers, himself a man of letters, became patron to one of Walewski's papers, Le Messager des Chambres, and dispatched him on a mission to Egypt. Under the subsequent Guizot government, Walewski was posted to Buenos Aires to liaise with the British Ambassador, John Cradock, 1st Baron Howden.

  When his cousin Prince Louis Napoleon came to power as Napoleon III, Walewski's career accelerated sharply. He received successive postings as envoy extraordinary to Florence, to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, before moving to London in 1851. There he was tasked with one of the more delicate assignments of his diplomatic career: announcing Napoleon III's coup d'état to Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister. Walewski held the London post through 1855, a period that placed him at the center of the diplomatic tensions surrounding the Crimean War.

• 6. The Congress of Paris

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  In 1855 Walewski succeeded Drouyn de Lhuys as France's Minister of Foreign Affairs. The following year he acted as both president and French plenipotentiary at the Congress of Paris, the multinational gathering that brought the Crimean War to a formal close.

  The Congress produced two lasting results. The first was peace between the combatants. The second was the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, a treaty that carried an important novelty in international law: it created the possibility for nations that had played no part in drafting the agreement to join it afterwards simply by acceding to the Declaration. That feature, relatively unremarkable on its face, meant the agreement could spread across the international community far beyond the original signatories, laying a foundation for how maritime law would develop in the decades that followed.

  As foreign minister, Walewski's instincts ran toward restraint in foreign affairs. He advocated for a de-escalating approach toward Russia, a policy known as entente. That stance put him at odds with Napoleon III's ambitions in Italy, which led France into war with Austria in 1859. The disagreement cost Walewski his ministry. He left the Foreign Ministry in 1860, though he moved laterally rather than falling from power altogether, taking the post of France's Minister of State and holding it until 1863.

• 7. Late Career and Legacy

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  Walewski served as Senator from 1855 to 1865, at which point the Emperor appointed him to the Corps Législatif and then to the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies. Two years later, after a revolt against his authority in that body, Napoleon III returned him to the Senate.

  The honors he accumulated across his career were extensive. In 1866 he was made a Duke of the Empire on a personal basis, meaning the title would not pass to his heirs. He was elected a member of the Académie des beaux-arts, appointed Grand-Cross of the Imperial Order of the Legion of Honour, and made a Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. He also received the Gold Cross of the Virtuti Militari, the highest Polish military decoration.

  In 2013, published scholarship comparing DNA haplotype evidence from Emperor Napoleon, from a descendant of Napoleon's brother King Jérôme Bonaparte, and from a descendant of Walewski confirmed what family tradition had long maintained: Alexandre belonged to the genetic male line of the House of Bonaparte. The biological connection that Napoleon never publicly acknowledged was finally traceable in the historical record.

  Alexandre Colonna-Walewski died of a stroke in Strasbourg on the 27th of September 1868 and is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. He was fifty-eight years old. Among his children was a son by the actress Rachel Felix, Count Alexandre-Antoine-Jean Colonna-Walewski, who was recognized in 1844 and formally adopted by Walewski in 1860, and whose numerous surviving descendants carry the line forward today.