Désirée Clary

• 1. Introduction

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  Désirée Clary arrived in Sweden in December 1810 during the dead of winter, stepping off a ship at Helsingborg having traveled through Hamburg and Denmark across the Öresund. She had spent her journey dreading what awaited her. Her French servants had tried to frighten her off the trip entirely, warning that Sweden was a land close to the North Pole, overrun with polar bears. She was not a soldier or an adventurer. She was the daughter of a silk merchant from Marseille, a woman who had once been engaged to Napoleon Bonaparte, and who now, through a sequence of extraordinary turns, held the title of Crown Princess of Sweden. She hated the snow so much that she cried.

  How does a merchant's daughter from the south of France end up on the Swedish throne? How does a woman who never learned a word of Swedish become queen? And what does it mean to spend a lifetime being useful to powerful men while caring only about the life you left behind? Those are the questions Désirée's story raises, and the answers are stranger, and more human, than almost any other royal biography of her era.

• 2. A Marseille Childhood

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  François Clary, born in 1725 in the parish of Saint-Ferreol in Marseille, built a prosperous business in silk. He married twice: first in 1751, then, following the death of his first wife in 1758, he married Françoise Rose Somis in 1759. Bernardine Eugénie Désirée was born on the 8th of November 1777, his daughter by that second marriage. The family was wealthy and respectable, the kind that sent daughters to convent schools, which was precisely where young Désirée received her early education.

  Then 1789 arrived. The French Revolution forced the convents to close, and Désirée, barely eleven years old, was sent home to be educated by her parents instead. Historians later described her education as shallow. She would grow up deeply attached to her birth family: her brother Nicolas Joseph, who was created Count Clary, and especially her elder sister Julie, who would become one of the most consequential relationships of her life. When François Clary died in 1794, that bond was tested immediately, and it was Désirée who stepped forward.

• 3. Bonaparte and Bernadotte

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  In 1794, with her father dead, the Clary family discovered that he had quietly applied before the revolution to be granted noble status, and that appeal had been refused. Her brother Etienne, now head of the family, was arrested because of this. Désirée went to negotiate his release and, in doing so, met Joseph Bonaparte. Joseph became engaged to her sister Julie. Napoleon then became engaged to Désirée herself on the 21st of April 1795.

  By 1795, Napoleon had become involved with Joséphine de Beauharnais. He broke the engagement with Désirée on the 6th of September and married Joséphine in 1796. Désirée followed her sister Julie to Rome in 1797, where Joseph served as French ambassador to the Papal States. There she became briefly engaged to a French general named Mathurin-Léonard Duphot. On the 30th of December 1797, on the eve of their wedding, Duphot was killed in an anti-French riot outside the Palazzo Corsini in Rome. In later years Désirée vehemently denied that the engagement to Duphot had ever existed.

  Back in Paris, living with Julie and Joseph, Désirée moved in Bonaparte family circles. She eventually met Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, a French general and politician. They married in a secular ceremony at Sceaux on the 17th of August 1798, with Désirée receiving economic independence written into the marriage contract. Their only child, a son named Oscar, was born on the 4th of July 1799.

• 4. Pawn and Messenger

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  During the coup of 1799, when Napoleon seized power, both the Bonaparte family and the Bernadotte faction attempted to use Désirée as a lever over her husband. She was aware of this pressure from both sides. Bernadotte chose not to tell her his plans precisely because he knew she was being worked on; he later said family influence had kept him passive during the coup. The couple fled to the country villa of General Sarrazin at Villeneuve St. Georges during the crisis, and she reportedly dressed as a man during the escape.

  In 1800, she was present when a bomb exploded between Napoleon's carriage and the carriage carrying her and Caroline Bonaparte. She survived unharmed. Her position in Paris made her a persistent diplomatic instrument. In 1802, Napoleon suspected her husband of involvement in a conspiracy. He interrogated Désirée, who naively told him Bernadotte had not been involved, while also revealing that Moreau had visited their home and that Bernadotte had muttered the words conspiracy and Moreau in his sleep. Napoleon responded by appointing Bernadotte governor of Louisiana. The couple was preparing to sail when the appointment was retracted.

  On the 19th of May 1804, Bernadotte was made Marshal of France, which gave Désirée the equivalent rank. At the Coronation of Napoleon on the 2nd of December 1804, she followed Joséphine in procession, carrying Joséphine's handkerchief and veil on a pillow. Napoleon gave her an allowance and a house on Rue d'Anjou Saint-Honoré, where she would remain, whenever she could manage it, for the rest of her working life.

• 5. Never Leaving Paris

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  In August 1810, Bernadotte was elected heir to the Swedish throne, and Désirée became heir presumptive. She was given the official Swedish name Desideria, though she never used it. Her first reaction was revealing: she assumed it would be like the title of Prince of Pontecorvo, a distant honor requiring only occasional visits. When she was told she would actually be expected to leave Paris, she fell into despair. Her servants tried to help her resist by describing Sweden as a frozen land full of polar bears near the North Pole.

  She finally departed, but not with her husband. She traveled through Hamburg and Denmark, crossing the Öresund to Helsingborg, arriving on the 22nd of December 1810. On the 6th of January 1811, she was presented at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. The Countess Caroline Lewenhaupt had been appointed her Mistress of the Robes; one of her maids of honor was a noblewoman named Mariana Koskull. Desideria found she could not adapt to formal court life. Queen Hedwig Elizabeth Charlotte, who kept a famous diary, described her as good hearted and pleasant when she chose to be, but also as an immature spoiled child incapable of handling any form of representation, and a French woman in every inch who complained about everything that was not French.

  By the summer of 1811, Desideria had left Sweden under the alias Countess of Gotland, officially citing health. She left behind her husband and her son. In Sweden, Bernadotte took a mistress: the same noblewoman Mariana Koskull who had been assigned as Desideria's maid of honor.

• 6. The Incognito Queen

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  Back in Paris at her house on Rue d'Anjou, Desideria lived officially incognito, which gave her cover to avoid politics as Sweden and France moved toward war. Her letters were read by Napoleon's secret police and her house was watched. Talleyrand and Fouché visited her receptions and used them to try to reach her husband through her. In 1812, she served as a mediator when Napoleon negotiated with Bernadotte through the Duke de Bassano.

  In 1818, when Bernadotte became King Charles XIV John of Sweden, Desideria became queen. She still stayed in France, officially for health. She hosted receptions on Thursdays and Sundays, still using the title of countess, and visited the court of Louis XVIII regularly. During this period she fell in love with the French prime minister, the Duc de Richelieu. Richelieu did not return the feeling. According to the memoirist Laure Junot, Desideria followed him wherever he went, had flowers placed in his room, and trailed after him on his trip to Spa. Richelieu referred to her privately as his crazy Queen. She continued this pursuit until his death in 1822.

  In 1823, she finally returned to Sweden for good, accompanying her son Oscar's new bride, Josephine of Leuchtenberg, arriving in Stockholm on the 13th of June 1823. A well-known story from her return: during a dry summer spell, peasants who turned out to see her were coached to call out in the Scanian dialect "Vi vill ha regn!" meaning "We want rain!" To French ears, that phrase sounds almost identical to "Vive la Reine!" meaning "Long live the Queen!"

• 7. Coronation and Eccentricity

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  On the 21st of August 1829, Desideria was crowned Queen of Sweden in Storkyrkan in Stockholm. The coronation had been delayed by years; Charles John had feared religious complications because she was Catholic. A suggestion that she convert to Lutheranism before the ceremony was ultimately dropped as not pressing enough. Desideria had pushed insistently for the coronation, believing it offered her protection against ever being divorced. She was never crowned in Norway, despite requesting it, because of her Catholicism. She was the first commoner to become Queen of Sweden since Karin Månsdotter in 1568.

  Her relationship with Charles John was distant but not hostile. She called him Bernadotte when she needed to calm his notorious temper, and this reportedly worked reliably. One anecdote recorded at court: when Charles John, furious with some political advisors, described a range of punishments he intended to inflict, Desideria struck her fan on the table after each threat and told the courtiers that he could not hurt a cat. The court laughed.

  Her eccentricities grew more pronounced over time. She never learned Swedish, though she did acquire a handful of words and phrases. She kept chickens as pets at Rosersberg Palace. She was afraid of the dark but walked in the palace park at night, instructing a lady-in-waiting to walk ahead of her dressed in white to ward off bats. She reversed her sleeping hours entirely: she retired at four in the morning and woke at two in the afternoon. In 1843, a palace guard spotted her on a palace balcony fully dressed in the middle of the night and went home to tell his wife she was lazy by comparison, believing the queen had risen before dawn when in fact she had not yet gone to bed. Desideria called her habit of circling the palace courtyard in her carriage "Kring kring," meaning around and around, one of the few Swedish expressions she ever made her own.

• 8. Queen Mother and Final Years

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  Charles XIV John died in 1844, and Desideria became queen mother. Her son King Oscar I allowed her to keep the queen's quarters in the Royal Palace and retain her entire court staff, so that her habits would not be disrupted. When her daughter-in-law Josephine suggested she voluntarily reduce her court, Desideria replied that she no longer needed them all, but all of them still needed her.

  Her charity was described as considerable but conducted in silence. She supported poor upper-class women by giving them sewing work, and she served as official protector of institutions such as the Women's Society Girl School. She had patronized Maria Schandorff's Eugenia Foundation for poor girls in Oslo, named in her honor, visiting it regularly from 1828 until 1847. In May 1853, she prepared to return at last to her house on Rue d'Anjou in Paris, where her sister Catherine Honorine Villeneuve had maintained it with the original French staff throughout the years. Her grandson Prince Oscar, Duke of Östergötland, escorted her to her ship in Karlskrona. Her fear of sea travel made it impossible for her to board.

  On the 17th of December 1860, Desideria arrived at the Royal Swedish Opera just as the performance ended. Returning to Stockholm Palace, she collapsed before reaching her apartment. She died at the age of 83, in the reign of her grandson King Charles XV, having outlived her son Oscar I. Following a Catholic ceremony on the 10th of January 1861, she was interred the following day alongside her husband at Riddarholmen Church.