Charles XIV John

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles XIV John of Sweden was born Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte on the 26th of January 1763 in Pau, a small city in the southwestern province of Béarn. He was the son of a local prosecutor, the youngest of five siblings, and a boy who at fourteen was apprenticed to a local attorney. Nobody at the time could have guessed that this minor provincial child would one day found a royal dynasty still reigning today.

  Before he took the Swedish throne, he had been a French sergeant nicknamed Sergeant Belle-Jambe, a Marshal of Napoleon's Empire, a prince of southern Italy, and the man who helped write the campaign plan that broke Napoleon at Leipzig. He joined armies he would later fight against. He served a revolution he claimed to believe in, then converted to a religion he had not been raised in. Napoleon at one point considered him a possible successor to the Empire; instead, Bernadotte ended his life as Napoleon's enemy and as the king of two countries.

  How did a prosecutor's son from Béarn end up founding a Scandinavian royal house? What drove the turbulent relationship between Bernadotte and Napoleon? And what kind of king did this soldier become once the wars were over?

• 2. The Soldier from Béarn

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  Bernadotte enlisted as a private in the Régiment Royal-La Marine on the 3rd of September 1780. His first posting was the newly conquered territory of Corsica. The regiment later moved through Besançon, Grenoble, Vienne, Marseille, and Île de Ré, giving the young soldier a thorough tour of France before the Revolution changed everything.

  By August 1785 he had reached sergeant. His fellow soldiers gave him the nickname Sergeant Belle-Jambe, meaning "fine leg," for his crisp appearance. That attention to personal presentation masked something more serious: a gift for inspiring men in impossible moments.

  As a Colonel commanding the 71st Demi-Brigade, he faced troops retreating in disorder before an Austrian attack. He tore off his own epaulettes, threw them to the ground, and shouted to his men that if they dishonored themselves by flight, he refused to remain their colonel. His soldiers left the ranks, retrieved his epaulettes, pressed them back into his hands, reformed their line, and counter-attacked. Historians have compared his style to a fellow Gascon, d'Artagnan. One of his biographers goes further, asserting that Alexandre Dumas used Bernadotte as the actual model for that famous character.

  By 1794 he had been promoted to brigadier, attached to the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse. After Jourdan's victory at Fleurus on the 26th of June 1794, where Bernadotte's decisive attack seized key terrain and contributed to the Austrian retreat, he was elevated again to divisional general. The pattern of his career was set: bold action in the field rewarded with rapid promotion, followed by a talent for administration that kept him useful when the fighting paused.

• 3. Napoleon's Difficult Marshal

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  Bernadotte's first interview with Napoleon took place at Mantua in early 1797, when he arrived with 20,000 men as reinforcements for the Army of Italy. His successful crossing of the Alps through a midwinter storm was widely praised, but the Army of Italy received him coldly.

  Almost immediately, a quarrel broke out. When the commander of Milan, Dominique Martin Dupuy, insulted Bernadotte, Bernadotte moved to arrest him. Dupuy happened to be a close friend of Louis-Alexandre Berthier, who would go on to become Napoleon's chief of staff. The feud between Bernadotte and Berthier that followed lasted for years and would damage Bernadotte's standing at critical moments.

  His relationship with Napoleon himself oscillated between mutual respect and barely contained antagonism. He publicly proclaimed himself in 1797 "a Republican both by principle and conviction" who would "to the moment of my death, oppose all Royalists and enemies to the Directory." He declined to help Napoleon stage his coup of November 1799. Napoleon, in response, called him the "Obstacle Man" but showered him with honors anyway, acknowledging that Bernadotte had both the political skill and the popular standing that made him dangerous to alienate.

  As one of the eighteen original Marshals of the Empire, Bernadotte served as governor of Hanover from June 1804 to September 1805. His rule there was notably popular. He extended personal protection to Gottingen University, befriended its professors, and invited them regularly to dinner. He also paid out of his own pocket for food for his troops and gave personal money awards to soldiers who merited recognition. His fellow marshals noticed: while they dined on fine service and employed chefs, Bernadotte's table was considered poor, because his own money went to his men.

  The Battle of Austerlitz on the 2nd of December 1805 brought him the most tangible of Napoleon's rewards. Posted in the center between Soult and Lannes, he helped defeat the Allied attempt to outflank the French. As recognition, he was named the 1st Sovereign Prince of Pontecorvo on the 5th of June 1806, a district in southern Italy previously subject to the Pope.

  At the Battle of Jena and Auerstädt in October 1806, he was later accused of deliberately refusing to support Davout out of jealousy. The documentary record tells a different story. No orders from Napoleon directing Bernadotte to march with Davout were ever found in the French Imperial Archives. Berthier's ambiguous relay of Napoleon's orders, combined with Napoleon's unawareness of Prussian positions, bore the more fundamental responsibility. After the battle, Bernadotte's troops stormed the defenses of Lübeck and forced the capitulation of Prussian general Blücher at Ratekau on the 7th of November 1806. When French soldiers began looting the city, Bernadotte fought desperately to stop them; the Council of Lübeck gave him six horses as a token of their gratitude.

  Among those he treated courteously at Lübeck were 1,600 Swedish prisoners under Colonel Count Gustaf Mörner, whom he allowed to return home. The impression this made on those Swedish officers would, several years later, help determine the succession of a throne.

• 4. A Crown No One Expected

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  Sweden in 1810 had a problem. King Charles XIII was 61 years old, in poor health, and had no living children. A Danish prince adopted as his heir had died within months of his arrival. Napoleon's preferred candidate, his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais, was passed over: a Swedish envoy reported to Stockholm that Eugène "does not seem to be a man of strong character" and had not "developed any distinguishing talents." Eugène also refused to convert to Lutheranism, which was a prerequisite. Napoleon's brothers had no interest in moving to Sweden, and his nephews were considered too young.

  The decision fell to an obscure figure: Baron Karl Otto Mörner, nephew of the very Count Gustaf Mörner whose Swedish prisoners Bernadotte had freed at Lübeck. Entirely on his own initiative, without authorization from the Swedish government, Mörner offered the succession of the Swedish crown to Bernadotte. The Swedish government was so appalled by Mörner's audacity that it placed him under arrest the moment he returned to Stockholm. But the idea had already taken hold.

  On the 21st of August 1810, Bernadotte was elected by the Riksdag of the Estates in Örebro as the new crown prince. Napoleon, who had initially dismissed the idea as absurd, quietly provided financial and diplomatic support while publicly maintaining an attitude of indifference. Before releasing Bernadotte from his French allegiance, Napoleon asked him to promise never to take up arms against France. Bernadotte refused, arguing his obligations to Sweden would not allow it. Napoleon responded: "Go, and let our destinies be accomplished," and signed the act of emancipation without conditions.

  Bernadotte chose to convert from Roman Catholicism to Lutheranism, recalling the conversion of Henry IV and noting that both he and that king had hailed from Pau. His wife Désirée, however, never renounced Catholicism. He assumed the name Charles John on the 5th of November 1810 when he received the homage of the Riksdag, having been adopted by King Charles XIII. After his first meeting with his new heir, Charles XIII, who had initially opposed the candidacy, told his aide-de-camp, "My dear Suremain, I have gambled heavily, and I believe that after all I have won."

• 5. Building the Sixth Coalition

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  In January 1812, French troops suddenly invaded Swedish Pomerania and the island of Rügen without warning. Napoleon's official justification was that Sweden had violated the Continental System, but Charles John believed the timing was calculated as a personal insult: he thought Napoleon had scheduled the occupation to fall on his own birthday and assigned the operation deliberately to his old rival, Marshal Davout.

  The invasion was a turning point. Swedish public opinion was outraged, and even the pro-French faction at court was antagonized. Charles John declared Swedish neutrality and opened negotiations with Russia and the United Kingdom. He had to move carefully: Sweden was technically at war with Britain, a war so nominal that both governments had treated it as fiction, though Swedish imports of British goods had fallen sharply after Napoleon forced Sweden to join the Continental System.

  The diplomatic work that followed was intricate. Charles John's personal efforts served as a bridge between Russia and Britain, and on the 18th of July 1812, the Treaty of Örebro formally ended the wars between Britain and Sweden and between Britain and Russia, assembling the alliance that became the Sixth Coalition. Sweden committed to landing at least 25,000 soldiers on the continent to fight France. In exchange, Russia and Britain pledged to support the transfer of Norway from Denmark to Sweden.

  Through the summer and fall of 1812, Bernadotte negotiated further, even concluding a treaty with the Spanish Supreme Central Junta against his own brother-in-law, who was then the French-backed King of Spain. He corresponded with the King of Prussia, encouraging him to break his forced alliance with France. Following the Convention of Tauroggen, Prussia signed a separate peace with Sweden, formally joining the Coalition in spring 1813.

  After French victories at Lützen on the 2nd of May 1813 and at Bautzen on the 21st of May 1813 threatened to collapse Allied morale, it was Charles John who, at the conference of Trachenberg, drew up the Trachenberg Plan: the general campaign strategy that guided the Allies through the decisive battles that followed.

• 6. Leipzig and Norway

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  As commander of the Allied Army of the North, Charles John successfully defended the approaches to Berlin in the summer of 1813. He defeated Marshal Oudinot in August and Marshal Ney in September at the Battles of Großbeeren and Dennewitz. While the other Allied armies maneuvered toward Napoleon's main force, Bernadotte's army kept watch on Davout's forces in Hamburg.

  When the climactic Battle of Leipzig began on the 18th of October 1813, Bernadotte crossed the Elbe and joined on the 19th. His fresh troops, reinforced by 30,000 Prussians, struck the already battered French lines. At a critical moment, entire Saxon regiments defected to his army, answering a proclamation he had released a week before inviting the Saxons to join their old commander. The Saxon officers had not forgotten his mild and courteous treatment of them years earlier, when he commanded the Saxon-heavy IX Corps. Bernadotte was the first of the Allied sovereigns to enter Leipzig.

  After Leipzig, he moved north with his own objectives in mind. He invaded Denmark, defeated the Danish Army, and forced King Frederick VI to sign the Treaty of Kiel on the 15th of January 1814, which transferred Norway to Swedish control. Norway's response was to reject the transfer outright: Norwegians declared independence, adopted a liberal constitution, and elected their own king. The ensuing Swedish-Norwegian War of 1814 lasted nineteen days. Sweden won, but Charles John made a striking concession: rather than imposing terms by force, he accepted the Norwegian Constitution and Norway's political autonomy, allowing Norway to enter a personal union with Sweden. The union would last for almost a century before its peaceful dissolution in 1905.

  During the Allied invasion of France in 1814, Tsar Alexander I, backed by the French liberals Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël, advocated placing Charles John on the French throne as a constitutional monarch. Britain and Austria vetoed the idea, insisting on restoring the House of Bourbon. Bernadotte, who had refused as a young soldier to take up arms against his own countrymen and had declined Napoleon's offer of the Spanish crown, was passed over for a French throne as well. He had come a very long way from Pau, and still the crowns kept finding other heads.

• 7. The King's Long Reign

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  Charles XIII died on the 5th of February 1818, and Charles John ascended the Swedish throne, a position he held for 26 years until his own death. If one counts his time as regent from 1810 onward, he was effectively head of state for 34 years.

  The reign was shaped by an explicit rejection of Sweden's old habits. For centuries, Sweden had pursued hegemonic expansion and fought uninterrupted wars with its neighbors. Charles John reversed that tradition. In 1834, when tensions between Britain and Russia over the Near East Crisis threatened a wider conflict, he sent memoranda to both governments and proclaimed Swedish neutrality in advance. Historians point to this as the origin of what would become Sweden's long tradition of neutrality.

  On the domestic side, the national debt accumulated over decades of war and mismanagement was paid off. Population grew to the point where Sweden's inhabitants alone equaled the combined population of Sweden and Finland before Finland's loss to Russia. Education was promoted, agriculture and commerce prospered, and internal communications expanded. Charles John used his own fortune, honestly earned during his years as a French Marshal, to pay off much of the debt himself and extended a personal loan of £300,000 sterling to the state at five percent interest.

  His conservatism hardened as he aged. The man who had declared himself a Republican by principle in 1797 became, by the time he took the throne, an ultra-conservative. His press censorship grew deeply unpopular after 1823. The Lèse-majesté conviction of the journalist Magnus Jacob Crusenstolpe triggered the Rabulist riots and calls for his abdication. He survived it. His silver jubilee on the 18th of February 1843 was celebrated with genuine public enthusiasm.

  Norway tested him differently. The Norwegian constitution gave the Storting more power than virtually any legislature in Europe, and Charles John found he held only a suspensive veto there, not the absolute veto he possessed in Sweden. He demanded an absolute veto and was refused. The Storting repeatedly withheld funds for a Royal Palace in Oslo. Construction began in 1825, was halted after the foundation was laid, and the palace was not completed until 1849, five years after his death. His son Oscar I inaugurated it. The main street of Oslo, eventually renamed Karl Johans gate in 1852, stands as a monument more enduring than any palace.

• 8. The Words on His Deathbed

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  On the 26th of January 1844, his 81st birthday, Charles John was found unconscious in his chambers after suffering a stroke. He regained consciousness but never fully recovered.

  He died on the afternoon of the 8th of March 1844. On his deathbed, he was heard to say: "Nobody has had a career in life like mine. I could perhaps have been able to agree to become Napoleon's ally: but when he attacked the country that had placed its fate in my hands, he could find in me no other than an opponent. The events that shook Europe and that gave her back her freedom are known. It is also known which part I played in that."

  His remains were interred after a state funeral at Stockholm's Riddarholmen Church. He was succeeded by his only son, Oscar I, the boy he had converted to Lutheranism decades earlier while Désirée quietly held to her Catholic faith.

  A play staged in 1833, Louis-Émile Vanderburch and Ferdinand Langlé's Le Camarade de lit, had imagined Bernadotte carrying a republican tattoo on his skin reading "Death to kings." The play was so widely enjoyed that the story was often repeated as fact. The tattoo, if it ever existed at all, is unsubstantiated; what is documented is that the former republican sergeant from Béarn was buried as a king, in a church in Stockholm, having outlasted Napoleon by more than two decades.