Joséphine de Beauharnais

• 1. Introduction

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  "France, the Army, the Head of the Army, Joséphine." These were the last words Napoleon spoke on his deathbed at Saint Helena. The woman he named had not been his wife for eleven years by then. He had annulled their marriage, remarried, and fathered the heir she never gave him. Yet hers was the name on his lips at the end. She was born Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie on the 23rd of June 1763, on a sugar island in the Caribbean. The world remembers her as Joséphine de Beauharnais, a name she herself never used. So who was the woman behind the name no one called her? How did a planter's daughter become Empress of the French, only to surrender the crown? And why, after annulment and remarriage, did Napoleon weep behind a locked door for two days when he learned she had died?

• 2. The Name She Never Used

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  "Beauharnais" belonged to her first husband, and she dropped it the moment she married Napoleon, taking the surname Bonaparte. The name by which history knows her is a misnomer. It surfaced during the restoration of the Bourbons, who would not call her by Napoleon's surname nor by her imperial title, and reached for the name of a dead first husband instead. Before she met Napoleon, she went by Rose, or Marie-Rose. "Joséphine" was his invention. He was the first person ever to call her that, and the name stuck for the rest of her life. Late in life she sometimes reverted to her maiden name. The label that survives, then, was chosen by people who wanted to erase the very marriage that made her famous.

• 3. An Island Birth In Dispute

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  The church registry in Les Trois-Îlets on Martinique records a baptism by a Capuchin priest named Emmanuel, but it never says she was born there. Her birthplace remains contested. Her father owned an estate on Saint Lucia called Malmaison, the same name she would later give her famous residence outside Paris. In 1802, Dom Daviot, a parish priest in Gros Islet, wrote to a friend that the wife of the first consul had been born near his parish. He claimed to know her cousin well. In 1844, the writer Henry H. Breen recorded that several well-informed people on Saint Lucia were convinced she had been born on a hill once called La Cauzette, later Morne Paix Bouche. Breen even spoke with her enslaved nanny, Dede, who said she had nursed the infant there. Saint Lucia changed hands between Britain and France fourteen times, and held no civil registers when she was born. That instability may explain why her birthplace vanished from the record, since it would have decided her nationality.

• 4. The Guillotine And The Carmes

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  On the 2nd of March 1794, during the Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety ordered the arrest of her first husband. Alexandre de Beauharnais was jailed in the Carmes Prison in Paris, accused of having poorly defended Mainz the previous July. Joséphine had been married to him since the 13th of December 1779, when she was sent from Martinique to France in his sister's place after the intended bride died. It was not a happy union. Alexandre abandoned the family for over a year to live with a mistress, and a court ordered them separated. They had two children, Eugène and Hortense. The Committee judged Joséphine too close to counter-revolutionary financial circles and ordered her own arrest. By the 21st of April 1794 she too was held in the Carmes. She could reach her children only through their scrawls on the laundry list, until the jailers forbade even that. Her husband was guillotined on the 23rd of July 1794, on the Place de la Révolution. Five days later, the fall of Robespierre ended the Terror, and she walked free.

• 5. The Love Letters

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  "I awake full of you," Napoleon wrote to her in December 1795. "Your image and the memory of last night's intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses." She had met him that year, six years her junior, and become his mistress. In January 1796 he proposed, and they married on the 9th of March. On the marriage certificate she shaved four years off her age and added eighteen months to his, so the couple might appear roughly matched. His family was appalled that he had married an older widow with two children. Two days after the wedding he left to lead the Army of Italy, and the letters poured out. In February 1797 he wrote of the "absolute empire" she held over his heart. Yet she lingered in Paris and began an affair with a Hussar lieutenant named Hippolyte Charles. When rumors reached Napoleon, his love changed entirely. In Egypt in 1798 he took up with Pauline Fourès, the wife of a junior officer, who became known as "Napoleon's Cleopatra." The relationship between them was never the same.

• 6. Empress And Annulment

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  On the 2nd of December 1804, Pope Pius VII presided at Notre-Dame de Paris, but Napoleon crowned himself, then placed the crown on Joséphine's head and proclaimed her empress. A few years could not undo the central problem. She bore him no child. When his nephew and her grandson Napoléon-Charles Bonaparte, declared his heir, died of croup in 1807, the matter was settled. At dinner on the 30th of November 1809, he told her that for the sake of France he must find a wife who could give him an heir. The divorce ceremony came on the 10th of January 1810, a grand but solemn occasion at which each read a statement of devotion to the other. He marked it by commissioning the Sèvres Egyptian Service as a parting gift. On the 11th of March he married Marie-Louise of Austria by proxy, remarking coldly, "It is a womb that I am marrying." Even after the separation, Joséphine kept the title and rank of empress, and that April he created her Duchess of Navarre.

• 7. The Roses Of Malmaison

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  In 1799, while Napoleon was in Egypt, Joséphine bought the Château de Malmaison and set out to collect every rose then known. Napoleon ordered his warship commanders to search seized vessels for plants and forward them to her garden. The cause crossed enemy lines. The English nursery Lee and Kennedy shipped to her despite Britain and France being at war, and in 1810 the two admiralties arranged for Hume's Blush Tea-Scented China to pass naval blockades for her beds. She hired British landscapers, among them the Scottish horticulturist Thomas Blaikie, and learned botany from her staff. She commissioned Pierre-Joseph Redouté to paint her flowers, work published as Les Roses with 168 plates. Her horticulturist André Dupont began modern rose hybridizing through controlled pollination, and created twenty-five new roses while in her employ. She produced the first written history of rose cultivation and is believed to have hosted the first rose exhibition, in 1810. By 1910, less than a century after her death, one French garden held about 8,000 rose types. She is called the godmother of modern rose lovers, and she gave the rose R. alba incarnata the vernacular name "Cuisse de Nymphe Emue."

• 8. The Patron And The End

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  Antoine-Jean Gros worked to get an introduction the moment he heard Joséphine would visit Genoa, knowing her favor could make his name. She brought him back to live in her residences and had him paint her husband as Bonaparte at the Pont d'Arcole, a portrait that became central to Napoleon's iconography. She was the first French female royal collector of her scale, leading the Consular and Empire style. She commissioned four major works from the sculptor Antonio Canova, including The Three Graces, finished in 1816 after her death, and all four were eventually sold to Tsar Alexander of Russia. Joséphine died of pneumonia at Rueil-Malmaison on the 29th of May 1814, soon after walking with Emperor Alexander I in her gardens. Napoleon learned of it from a French journal while exiled on Elba, and stayed locked in his room for two days. He once told a friend, "I truly loved my Joséphine, but I did not respect her." Through her children she became grandmother to Emperor Napoleon III, and an ancestor of the present royal houses of Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden.