Few love stories in history burn as fiercely—and as destructively—as that of Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine de Beauharnais. It was a relationship founded on infatuation, sustained by longing, and ultimately undone by ambition.
When Napoleon met Joséphine in 1795, he was a brilliant but still unproven general; she was older, worldly, charming, and well-connected. He fell in love with a speed and intensity that bordered on obsession, laying siege to her affections with the same zeal he took to his military operations. The marriage was financially advantageous to him, since he was virtually penniless at the time, but his surviving letters, written while he was on the Italian campaign, are alternately tender, jealous, exultant, and despairing. One such letter gives a sense of his emotional turbulence:
‘I arrive in Milan, I rush to your apartment, I left everything to see you, to hug you; … you weren’t there: you run to cities with parties; you move away from me when I arrive, you no longer care about your dear Napoleon. A whim made you love him, inconstancy makes you indifferent. Accustomed to dangers, I know the remedy for the troubles and evils of life. The unhappiness I experience is incalculable; I had the right not to count on it. I will be here until 9th. Do not bother ; run pleasures; happiness is for you. The whole world is too happy if you like it, and your husband alone is very, very unhappy.‘
In short, he seems to have been head over heels in love. Joséphine, by contrast, loved him less absolutely and more pragmatically. She admired his genius and enjoyed his devotion, though she came to fear his temper. Born in Martinique to a plantation owner who was always on the edge of bankruptcy, she married Alexandre de Beauharnais in 1779 and proceeded to have two children by him. But one of the convulsions of the revolution took Alexandre to the guillotine, leaving Josephine in precarious widowhood. Marriage to Napoleon, the rising political star of the republic, could give her the stability and security she craved. But she did not surrender easily, and the impetuous general’s missives were frequently met with silence, and she herself confided to friends that she felt ‘lackadaisical’ about the relationship.
Eventually, though, they were married, on 9th March 1796; amusingly, on the marriage certificate she reduced her age by four years and increased his by 18 months, so that they would seem to be closer in years than they were; already, appearances counted!
Their marriage was rarely calm. Napoleon’s absences fed his natural insecurity; Joséphine’s independence fed his suspicion. Yet when they were together, the bond was unmistakable. Though politically astute and a charismatic leader of soldiers, he was at heart still a Corsican provincial; she softened him, polished his manners, and introduced him to a world of elegance he secretly longed to master. Still, this was no mere transactional relationship. Napoleon’s deep affection for Joséphine never wavered, while she came to care deeply for her husband.
In return, he offered her glory beyond anything she could have imagined: a crown, a court, and a place at the centre of European history. Imagine what thoughts must have been going through her head when Napoleon placed an imperial crown on it in 1804! It had been an extraordinary and dizzying journey from her youth in the West Indies.
In love they undoubtedly were, but neither of them seemed capable of physical fidelity. Both had affairs, Joséphine most famously with a young man with the unlikely name of Hyppolite Charles, while Napoleon had several mistresses, including the Polish Countess Marie Walewska, who bore him a son, Alexandre.
But the greatest tragedy of their union lay in the fact that Joséphine could not give Napoleon the one thing he came to crave above all else—an heir. When he set her aside in 1809, it was an act of state dressed up as personal sacrifice. He wept as he divorced her; she remained emotionally loyal to him until her death in 1814. Even after he had remarried, Napoleon kept her memory close, frequently murmuring her name in moments of stress. When he heard that she had died, while he was in exile on the island of Elba, he shut himself up for days in mourning.
The Painting
In Napoleon and Joséphine, Harold Piffard chooses intimacy over spectacle. This is not the conqueror on horseback or the empress in coronation splendour. Rather, we are given a domestic scene of great emotional intensity. Napoleon’s face is stern as he looks at her over the letter he is reading. She does not meet his eyes, gazing off into the distance, composed but resigned. She, too, holds a piece of paper, and others are scattered about the floor.
What is in the paper that Napoleon is reading? And what are the other notes on the floor? Are they indiscreet letters that Josephine has written to another man? Or perhaps they are bills, for the empress was notably careless with money, while Napoleon never lost his Corsican sense of thrift. Whatever they are, the painter suggests that they are the cause of a quarrel that seems ready to break out at any minute. Somehow, we know that the fight will be brief, intense, and followed by a passionate reconciliation, for that was the nature of their relationship.
Piffard’s painting feels like a private moment glimpsed through a half-open door, yet it conveys the complex nature of the relationship between these two world-historical figures very eloquently, and is made more poignant by the fact that we know it will end tragically.
Anthony R Wildman 