Elisa Bonaparte

• 1. Introduction

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  Elisa Bonaparte was born on the 3rd of January 1777 in Ajaccio, Corsica, and she grew up to become something her famous brother never expected: a genuine ruler. Napoleon Bonaparte distrusted politically active women as a rule. He appointed his second wife regent during his absences, but that post was purely nominal. Elisa was different. Of all his siblings, she alone was given real political authority over real territory. How did the eldest surviving daughter of Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino move from a royal boarding school in France to governing a corner of Italy? And what did she do with that power once she had it? Her decade in charge of Lucca, Piombino, and eventually the Grand Duchy of Tuscany is a story of ambition, administration, and the limits of imperial loyalty.

• 2. Ajaccio to Saint-Cyr

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  Christened Maria-Anna at birth, the girl who would govern Tuscany first acquired her lasting name from her brother Lucien, to whom she was very close in childhood. He called her Elisa, and the nickname stuck. In June 1784, a bursary secured her a place at the Maison royale de Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr, one of the most prestigious schools for girls in France. Her brother Napoleon visited her there regularly. The French Revolution cut that chapter short. The Legislative Assembly decreed the Maison's closure on the 16th of August 1792, as it was seen as an institution tied to the aristocracy. Elisa left on the 1st of September that year, traveling with Napoleon back to Ajaccio. Around 1795, the Bonaparte family relocated to Marseille, where Elisa met a Corsican nobleman named Felice Pasquale Baciocchi, formerly a captain in the Royal Corse who had been stripped of his rank when the Revolution began.

• 3. Marriage and the Paris Years

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  Elisa married Baciocchi in a civil ceremony in Marseille on the 1st of May 1797. Napoleon had initial reservations; he considered Baciocchi a poor captain and worried about the match. A religious ceremony followed at Mombello, where Napoleon had a villa, and it took place on the same day as her sister Pauline's wedding to general Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc. By 1799 the extended Bonaparte family had moved to Paris, and Elisa set up home at 125 rue de Miromesnil in the Quartier du Roule, where she hosted receptions and staged plays. She and her brother Lucien ran an artistic and literary salon at the Hôtel de Brissac during the rise of the Consulate. It was there she formed a deep friendship with the journalist Louis de Fontanes that lasted several years. When Lucien's first wife Christine Boyer died on the 14th of May 1800, Elisa took his two daughters under her protection, placing the eldest, Charlotte, in Madame Campan's boarding school at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. On the 18th of May 1804, the French Senate voted to establish the First French Empire, and Elisa joined Napoleon's other sisters as a member of the Imperial family, taking the style "Imperial Highness".

• 4. Ruling Lucca and Piombino

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  On the 19th of March 1805, Napoleon awarded Elisa the Principality of Piombino, a territory he valued for its proximity to Elba and Corsica. Napoleon had mockingly called Lucca the "dwarf republic" because of its small size, yet the place had long defended its political, religious, and commercial independence. The inhabitants, chafing under French occupation and the loss of that independence, referred to Elisa ironically as "la Madame". Felix took a minor role, leaving Elisa to exercise most of the actual power. She surrounded herself with a stable team of ministers who stayed in place through most of her reign, among them her Minister of Justice Luigi Matteucci and her Minister of the Interior and Foreign Affairs Francesco Belluomini, who was replaced in October 1807 by his own son Giuseppe.

  Carrara, added to her territories on the 31st of March 1806 when Napoleon withdrew Massa and Carrara from the Kingdom of Italy, gave Elisa a strategic asset: the town was one of the largest white marble suppliers in Europe. She founded an Académie des Beaux-Arts there to attract leading sculptors, aiming to turn Carrara into an exporter of finished marble statues rather than raw stone, which commanded a higher price. She also created the Banque Élisienne to provide financial support to sculptors and workers dealing with marble taxes.

  Her reforms extended well beyond the arts. She nationalized the property of the clergy in Lucca and Piombino from May 1806, closed convents that served no practical function as hotels or schools, and issued a new rural legal code, the "Codice rurale del Principato di Piombino", on the 24th of March 1808. A new penal code was promulgated in 1807 and first revised in 1810. In 1807 she created the Committee of Public Charity and instituted free medical consultations for the poor. She demolished Piombino's existing hospital to construct a new one in the former monastery of Sant' Anastasia, which opened in 1810, and built the Casa Sanitaria dispensary at the town's port.

  On the 5th of May 1807 she created the "Committee for the Encouragement of Agriculture, Arts and Commerce", which funded new agricultural machinery and experimental plantations. Mulberry cultivation at Massa produced an École Normale de la Soie, a silk school, established on the 16th of August 1808. She established the "Collège Félix" on the 1st of December 1807, the only boys' secondary school in the principality. For girls, she made teaching compulsory for those aged 5 to 8, founded the "Institut Élisa" on the 2nd of July 1807 for noble-born girls within a former convent, and later set up the "Congregazione San Felice" on the 29th of July 1812 for poor girls. City improvement works were equally ambitious, if controversial. The demolition of the Church of San Pietro in March 1807 to expand the princely palaces in Lucca provoked fierce local opposition. Razing an entire city block, including the Church of San Paolo and its venerated image of the Madonna dei miracoli, nearly sparked a revolt. At Massa, she demolished a cathedral on the 30th of April 1807. The construction of a botanical garden with a menagerie and aviary in 1811, an aqueduct begun the same year, and a road linking Massa and Carrara, begun on the 15th of August 1807 and not finished until 1820, completed the scope of her ambitions.

• 5. Grand Duchess of Tuscany

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  Napoleon established the Grand Duchy of Tuscany on the 3rd of March 1809, with Florence as its capital and Elisa as its grand duchess. The terms were restrictive: she was required to enforce Napoleon's decisions and his ministers' rulings without modification, a sharp contrast to the relative independence she had enjoyed in Lucca and Piombino. Her husband Felix was promoted to général de division. Elisa arrived in Florence on the 2nd of April 1809, where the local nobility received her coldly. Her arrival coincided with a revolt against compulsory conscription that ended only after a mayor and a judge were assassinated.

  Napoleon later said of his sister: "My sister, Elisa, has a masculine mind, a forceful character, noble qualities and outstanding intelligence; she will endure adversity with fortitude." He had disliked politically active women as a general matter, but Elisa represented an exception he acknowledged directly. She continued the arts patronage she had practiced in Lucca. In 1809 she commissioned the sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini to create busts of her immediate family. The first two volumes of the Annali del Museo Imperiale di Fisica e Storia Naturale of Florence, published in 1808 and 1809, were dedicated to her. The museum's observatory was the predecessor of Florence's present-day Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri.

  Elisa was drawn into the conflict between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII almost against her will. Pius had excommunicated Napoleon in the bull Quum memoranda on the 10th of June 1809, and Napoleon had him removed from Rome on the 6th of July and sent to Savona. When Pius passed through Florence, Elisa declined to meet him in person and asked him to leave the region promptly, unwilling to be seen as sheltering her brother's enemy.

  The relationship between the siblings grew steadily more strained. Elisa arrived in Paris on the 17th of March 1810 for Napoleon's marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria, and Napoleon used the occasion to demand repayment of his grants of Massa and Carrara. Back in Tuscany, she found his envoys still pursuing the same payments. She refused to pay a second time, arguing the territories could not sustain the 200,000 lira Napoleon demanded. Napoleon threatened to seize Carrara and pushed Lucca, previously exempt, to supply conscripts after May 1811. She withdrew from Florence to Lucca and restored the villa now known as the Villa Reale di Marlia, despite a cool reception from the local community.

• 6. Fall and Exile

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  In January 1814, the Neapolitan army led by Joachim Murat, Caroline Bonaparte's husband, marched toward Florence after abandoning Napoleon and joining the Austrian cause. Elisa retreated from Tuscany to Lucca. Massa and Carrara fell to the Neapolitans in March. Shortly after, an Anglo-Austrian force under Lord William Bentinck captured Lucca, and a pregnant Elisa fled on the night of the 13th of March 1814. She was forced to abdicate as Grand Duchess of Tuscany in favor of the restoration of Grand Duke Ferdinand III. Napoleon was exiled to Elba on the 13th of April 1814 under the Treaty of Fontainebleau, and Elisa was arrested on the 25th of March and interned in the Austrian fortress of Brünn.

  Freed at the end of August, she was authorized to stay in Trieste with the title "Countess of Compignano". She made several short stays in Italy and France, seeking support in Marseille to return to Italy as a private individual. Those requests were denied. Her brother Jérôme Bonaparte helped her secure permission to remain in Austria before she settled at the Villa Caprara in Trieste. She later acquired a country house at Villa Vicentina near Cervignano and used her own funds to finance archaeological digs in the region.

  Elisa contracted a fatal illness in June 1820, probably at an excavation site. She died on the 7th of August at the age of 43. She became the only adult sibling of Napoleon Bonaparte not to outlive the emperor. She was buried in the San Petronio Basilica of Bologna.