Lucien Bonaparte

• 1. The Oath

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  Lucien Bonaparte swore, during the Coup of 18 Brumaire, that he would personally stab Napoleon in the chest. The pledge was conditional: if Napoleon ever betrayed Liberté, égalité, fraternité, Lucien would stop him himself. This was November 1799, and Lucien had just spent two days orchestrating the overthrow of the French Republic. He had pamphlets distributed across Paris describing a fabricated Jacobin conspiracy. He used that story to justify moving the legislature to the suburban estate of Saint-Cloud. He then kept a furious assembly in session until Napoleon arrived with grenadiers. Born on the 21st of May 1775 in Ajaccio, Corsica, Lucien was the third surviving son of Carlo Bonaparte and his wife Letizia Ramolino. He helped bring the most powerful political dynasty in modern European history to power, and then refused to live inside it. What drove this man from the center of French politics into years of exile? How does a Bonaparte end up welcomed by English crowds, digging for Roman antiquities, and granted titles by three different popes?

• 2. Corsican Roots

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  Lucien's first formal education took him from Ajaccio to the military schools of Autun and Brienne. After his father's death, he enrolled at the seminary of Aix-en-Provence, dropping out in 1789. The French Revolution broke out that same year, and Lucien returned to Corsica as a fervent supporter of the cause. He joined the Corsican chapter of the Jacobin Club in Ajaccio, where he became an outspoken orator. There he adopted the alias "Brutus Bonaparte," a name that declared his republican commitments.

  In 1791, Lucien took a post as secretary to Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican patriot. That association lasted fewer than two years. In May 1793, Lucien broke with Paoli, at the same moment his brother Napoleon did.

  Back on the mainland, Lucien held a series of minor administrative posts from 1793 until 1795. His Jacobin associations eventually brought him into conflict with the Thermidorian authorities, and he was briefly jailed for his political activity. Napoleon secured his release and arranged an administrative posting for him in the Army of the North. Within a few years, Lucien would hold a seat in the national legislature that he was technically too young to occupy.

• 3. The Council of Five Hundred

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  In 1798, Lucien won a seat representing Corsica's Liamone department, despite being too young to hold the office under the rules then in force. In the legislature, he mostly aligned with the Neo-Jacobin faction and took part in the Coup of 30 Prairial VII. Then two forces combined to shift his political direction. One was the growing influence of the statesman Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès. The other was news arriving from Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. Lucien became one of the principal architects of the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire.

  On the 23rd of October 1799, his fellow councilors elected Lucien as president of the assembly. That post gave him authority over the very legislature he and his co-conspirators were planning to dismantle. After the coup, it was Lucien who arranged Napoleon's formal election as First Consul. On the 25th of December 1799, that First Consul appointed Lucien Minister of the Interior.

• 4. Minister and Diplomat

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  Among Lucien's first acts in office was overseeing the appointment of France's very first prefects. He also administered the constitutional referendum of February 1800 and, according to the historical record, falsified its results.

  On the 14th of May 1800, Lucien's first wife, Christine Boyer, died. She was his landlord's daughter and the illiterate sister of an innkeeper from Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. They had married in that same town on the 4th of May 1794.

  Joseph Fouché, the Minister of Police, had by then become Lucien's most dangerous adversary in government. The two men clashed over the right to oversee Paris police matters. Fouché showed Napoleon a subversive pamphlet attributed to Lucien, and that document opened a lasting breach between the brothers. Some evidence suggests Napoleon himself wrote the pamphlet and used Lucien as a convenient scapegoat when it was received poorly. Lucien resigned as minister in November 1800.

  On the 7th of November 1800, Lucien was dispatched as French ambassador to the court of King Charles IV of Spain. His diplomatic abilities won over both the Bourbon royal family and the Spanish minister Manuel de Godoy. In March 1801, Lucien and Godoy signed the Treaty of Aranjuez, which established a French client kingdom called Etruria. On the 4th of August 1801, Lucien was created a Grand-Officer of the National Order of the Legion of Honour. Within three years, a marriage Napoleon had arranged for Lucien would end that political partnership entirely.

• 5. The Family Fracture

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  In 1803, Lucien secretly married Alexandrine de Bleschamp, a widow known as "Madame Jouberthon," in a religious ceremony in Paris. A civil marriage followed on the 26th of October 1803 at Chamant, Plessis. Napoleon's objection to the match was serious.

  In 1804, Napoleon announced his intention to declare himself Emperor of the French. At the same time, he ordered Lucien to divorce Alexandrine. Napoleon had arranged a new match for his brother: a union with the Queen of Etruria, a Bourbon Spanish princess. Lucien refused both demands, rejected all imperial honors, and went into voluntary exile.

  In Rome, Lucien purchased the Villa Rufinella in Frascati. Despite his membership in the Tribunat and the French Senate, no title or office on offer would change his mind. Napoleon's pressure would escalate through the following years, eventually leaving Lucien a virtual prisoner on his own Italian estates.

• 6. Captivity and Exile

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  In 1809, Napoleon intensified his campaign to bring Lucien to heel, pressuring him to divorce Alexandrine and return to France. He went so far as to have their mother write a letter urging Lucien to abandon his wife.

  France's annexation of the Papal States and the imprisonment of the Pope made Lucien's situation in Italy untenable. He was confined to his estates and needed permission from the Military Governor to leave his property. On the 27th of September 1810, he ceased to be a senator.

  The British frigate HMS Pomone intercepted Lucien's ship as he was attempting to reach the United States. He had not defected to Britain; he had simply been caught trying to flee. Napoleon, interpreting his arrival on British soil as treason, had him removed from the official Bonaparte family almanacs from 1811 onward.

  When Lucien disembarked in England, a local crowd greeted him with cheers and applause. Many of those who welcomed him saw his opposition to Napoleon as proof of his integrity. The British government permitted him to settle comfortably with his family, first at Ludlow and later at Thorngrove House in Grimley, Worcestershire. There, Lucien worked on a heroic poem about Charlemagne.

  Napoleon's abdication in April 1814 allowed Lucien to return to France and then travel on to Rome. On the 18th of August 1814, Pope Pius VII created him Prince of Canino, Count of Apollino, and Lord of Nemori. As early as 1803, Lucien had been shaping French cultural institutions in ways that had nothing to do with his famous brother.

• 7. The Scholar Prince

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  Lucien Bonaparte was the inspiration behind the Napoleonic reconstitution of the Académie Française in 1803, and he took one of its seats. He collected paintings at his country house at Brienne and joined the salon of Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Récamier. He also wrote a novel called La Tribu indienne.

  At his estate in Frascati, Lucien established excavations that eventually produced a complete statue of Tiberius. A second set of excavations, at Musignano, yielded a bust of Juno. He also owned a parcel of land that had once formed part of Cicero's estate at Tusculum. This historical connection was one he was much given to noting.

  In 1823, Lucien was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. Two years later, in 1825, his excavations at the forum of Tusculum yielded the so-called Tusculum portrait of Julius Caesar. His final recognitions would come not from archaeological digs but from popes and from his own written recollections.

• 8. Last Acts

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  When Napoleon escaped from Elba and returned to France, Lucien rallied to his cause. The brothers joined forces again during the Hundred Days. Napoleon made Lucien a French Prince and included his children in the Imperial Family. After Napoleon's second abdication, the returning Bourbons refused to recognize any of it.

  At the Restoration, Lucien was proscribed and stripped of his seat at the Académie Française. Pope Leo XII proved more generous: on the 21st of March 1824, he created Lucien Prince of Musignano. In 1836, Lucien wrote his Mémoires. Pope Gregory XVI then created him Prince Buonaparte on the 16th of April 1837.

  Lucien Bonaparte died in Viterbo, in the Papal States, on the 29th of June 1840. Stomach cancer was the cause, the same disease that had taken his father. Reportedly, it was also the disease that had killed Napoleon. His son Louis Lucien Bonaparte had been born in Grimley, Worcestershire on the 4th of January 1813, during the years of British captivity. That son grew up to become a distinguished philologist and an expert on the Basque language.