Jérôme Bonaparte

• 1. Introduction

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  Jérôme Bonaparte married Elizabeth Patterson on Christmas Eve, the 24th of December 1803, in Baltimore, against her father's explicit objections. William Patterson had already received an anonymous letter before the ceremony. It detailed the groom's womanizing, his enormous debts, and his plan to use the marriage as a comfortable arrangement until he could return to France. Every word proved accurate. Within two years, Jérôme had abandoned Elizabeth and accepted, as the price of his compliance, a crown and a new royal bride. He was the youngest brother of Napoleon I, born in Ajaccio, Corsica, on the 15th of November 1784. His life offered extraordinary chances: a navy command, a kingdom, a marshal's baton. Historian Owen Connelly argued he was a loyal, useful, and soldierly asset to his brother. Most historians, including Helen Jean Burn, concluded he was the most unsuccessful of all Napoleon's siblings. His actions in Russia may have cost the lives of tens of thousands. And yet his American grandson would one day found what became the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

• 2. The Road to Baltimore

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  Jérôme joined the French Navy in January 1800, and Napoleon placed him in command of a French frigate in the West Indies. The mission ended in crisis. He accidentally fired on a British vessel, an incident that threatened to inflame relations between France and Britain. Rather than face the consequences, he fled northward under the assumed name "Mr. Albert." He traveled to the United States, planning to wait out his brother's anger. His time in America followed a familiar pattern. New debts accumulated, and he came close to fighting a duel after damaging at least one woman's reputation. An old naval friend's boast that Baltimore held the most beautiful women in the country drew him to that city in July 1803. There he met Elizabeth Patterson, reportedly the most beautiful woman in Baltimore. Her father tried to stop the match. The wedding went ahead on Christmas Eve regardless. The groom was nineteen; the bride was eighteen.

  Napoleon was furious. He wanted all his siblings married into European royal families to extend the Bonaparte dynasty. Unable to persuade Pope Pius VII to annul the union, he did so himself by imperial decree on the 11th of March 1805. Elizabeth was pregnant when the decree arrived. She tried to land in Amsterdam, hoping to give birth on French soil, but Napoleon barred her ship from entering the harbor. She sailed to England instead and gave birth to a son, Jérôme Napoléon Bonaparte, in London. Jérôme would not attempt to see his son for two decades. In exchange for abandoning his marriage, he received the rank of admiral commanding the Genoa Squadron from May 1805. He was also made a general and an imperial prince. The crown of Westphalia followed in 1807, along with a royal marriage Napoleon had already arranged.

• 3. King of Westphalia

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  Napoleon built the Kingdom of Westphalia from several states and principalities in northwestern Germany. These territories had once been part of the Holy Roman Empire. Its capital was Kassel, and the kingdom lasted from 1807 to 1813. Napoleon intended the realm to serve as a model state, demonstrating French-style governance to neighboring German territories. Jérôme's arranged wife was Princess Catharina of Württemberg, the daughter of Frederick I, King of Württemberg. The marriage was designed to boost the young king's dynastic standing.

  When the royal couple arrived in Kassel, they found the palaces in a plundered state. Jérôme responded by ordering expensive furniture and silverware from leading manufacturers in Paris. He commissioned grand state portraits of himself and Queen Catharina from France's most prominent painters. He employed the architect Leo von Klenze to design a new court theatre next to the summer residence. He renamed that residence from "Wilhelmshöhe" to "Napoleonshöhe." His spending emptied the kingdom's treasury and put the realm into debt. Napoleon refused to provide financial support.

  Despite the recklessness, Westphalia carried genuine historical weight. It received the first written constitution and the first parliament to appear on German soil. These institutions arrived decades before comparable bodies elsewhere in Germany, including the Frankfurt parliament of 1848. The kingdom drew more international attention than the region had seen since the Treaty of Westphalia. That treaty had ended the Thirty Years' War one hundred and sixty years before, in 1648. Local artisans, responding to the court's Parisian tastes, oriented their own work toward French models. Kassel enjoyed an enormous cultural upturn. In 1812, Napoleon gave Jérôme command of a corps in the invasion of Russia, a demand far more consequential than any matter of cultural patronage.

• 4. Failure in the Field

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  In 1812, Napoleon assigned Jérôme command of a corps in the Grande Armée, tasked with marching toward Minsk. Napoleon's orders were direct: leave the court and its luxuries behind. Jérôme insisted on travelling in full royal state. Napoleon reprimanded him. In pique at the criticism, Jérôme abandoned the campaign altogether. He gathered his entire court and its retinue and returned with them to Westphalia, at the moment his forces were most needed. Before this withdrawal, Jérôme had occupied Mir Castle following the Battle of Mir in 1812. The following winter brought the French defeat in Russia. Jérôme then petitioned Napoleon to allow Queen Catharina to travel to Paris, citing the approach of Allied armies. Napoleon refused the first request and granted the second.

  The German campaign of 1813 gave Jérôme a brief return to active command. His kingdom was under threat from advancing Prussian and Russian armies. He led a small force to challenge their advance and clashed with an enemy detachment. He then made camp, waiting for reinforcements from the French army to the west. The main Allied force reached Kassel first. The capital was liberated, the Kingdom of Westphalia declared dissolved, and Jérôme fled to join his wife in France.

  During the Hundred Days, Napoleon placed Jérôme in command of the 6th Division of the II Corps under General Honoré Charles Reille. At Waterloo, Jérôme's division was ordered to open the battle with an attack on the position at Hougoumont. The stated intent was to draw the Duke of Wellington's reserves away from the main French thrust. Instead, Jérôme committed his entire division to Hougoumont to the exclusion of every other possible deployment. Wellington's centre held. Napoleon's final defeat came in 1815, during the War of the Seventh Coalition. The Allies reorganized the former Westphalian territories into a German Confederation under Austrian leadership. Jérôme was now in exile, and the next title he would hold would come not from Napoleon but from Frederick I of Württemberg.

• 5. Exile and Return

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  In July 1816, Frederick I of Württemberg granted Jérôme the title of Prince of Montfort. This came despite having expelled Jérôme and Catharina from the country in 1814. During their years of wandering, the couple visited the United States; it was Jérôme's second time in the country. He later settled in Italy and married a third wife, Giustina Pecori-Suárez. She had been the widow of the Italian Marquess Luigi Bartolini-Baldelli and Jérôme's own mistress during his second marriage. Catharina had known about his womanizing and many affairs but remained loyal throughout. Their sons included Prince Jérôme Napoléon Charles Bonaparte, born in 1814, and Prince Napoléon Bonaparte, born in 1822, who went by the nickname "Plon-Plon." Their daughter, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, became a prominent social hostess during the Second French Empire of Napoleon III, from 1852 to 1870.

  In 1848, Jérôme's nephew Louis Napoleon became President of the French Second Republic. Jérôme was appointed Governor of Les Invalides in Paris, the burial place of Napoleon I. The position carried a substantial salary and made modest demands on his time. It suited a man whose debts and record of failed leadership had exhausted most other claims to public office. When Louis Napoleon declared himself Emperor as Napoleon III, Jérôme was recognized as heir presumptive to the re-established imperial throne. He held that status until the birth of the Prince Imperial. In 1850, he was made a Marshal of France. In 1852, he served as President of the Senate and received the title of "Prince Français." Jérôme Bonaparte died on the 24th of June 1860 at Villegenis, a village now known as Massy in Essonne. He was buried at Les Invalides. His firstborn son, Jérôme Napoléon Bonaparte, born in London in 1805, had grown up in America without his father. That son's own child, Charles Joseph Bonaparte, born in 1851, was nine years old when Jérôme died.

• 6. The American Legacy

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  Charles Joseph Bonaparte, born in 1851, was the grandson of the former King of Westphalia. He became a lawyer in the United States and argued before the Supreme Court more than five hundred times. He served as United States Secretary of the Navy and then as Attorney General in President Theodore Roosevelt's administration from 1901 to 1909. In 1908, he established a Bureau of Investigation within the Department of Justice, which was then thirty-eight years old. Under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau grew. In 1935, it was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte II, born in 1829, was another grandson from the American branch. In the early 1850s, he graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was commissioned as an officer in the United States Army and served with the Mounted Rifles on the southwestern frontier in Texas. He eventually resigned his commission and joined the forces of his cousin, the Emperor Napoleon III, in the Second French Empire.

  Among Jérôme's illegitimate children was Baroness Jenny von Gustedt, born in 1811 as Jeromée Catharina Rabe von Pappenheim. She became the grandmother of the German socialist and feminist writer Lily Braun.

  The 1923 German comedy film The Little Napoleon drew loosely on Jérôme's life, with Paul Heidemann playing him. The 1928 Vitaphone film Glorious Betsy depicted the courtship, marriage, and forced separation of Jérôme and Elizabeth Patterson. Conrad Nagel played Jérôme; Dolores Costello played Elizabeth. Dick Powell portrayed him in the 1936 film Hearts Divided, alongside Marion Davies as Elizabeth Patterson and Claude Rains as Napoleon. In the Hornblower television series, British actor David Birkin played him. Ruth Hull Chatlien's historical novel The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte, published in 2013, returned to the Baltimore marriage as its central subject.

  Elizabeth Patterson secured her own legal standing after Jérôme's departure. The Maryland General Assembly dissolved her marriage by special decree in 1815. She lived until 1879, outlasting Jérôme by nineteen years, and never spoke to him again.