Napoleon and Josephine
Napoleon was a famously unattractive man, and even his most flattering portraiture is often hard-pressed to gloss over his portly figure, lank and thinning hair and his grey and rather an unhealthy pallor. Nonetheless, he was a man to be reckoned with, and after delivering the Italians and the Austrians a thoroughgoing beating during the War of the First Coalition, he began to look around for female companionship.
Josephine, on the other hand, was a high-born Creole woman from the French Island of Martinique, well entrenched in the Parisian social scene, and rather active in the bedroom. According to the late 19th-century historian Frédéric Masson, she was a woman of easy virtue who spent a huge amount of money.
She admitted to finding Napoleon repellent, but then she was past her prime, and he represented a final, and lucrative meal ticket. Almost at the moment that they married – the date was 9 March 1796 – Napoleon was called away to campaign, and while he was away, rumors of Josephine’s infidelity followed him. For all of 1798, he was in Egypt, trapped by a British blockade, and unable to do a thing as Josephine conducted a high-profile affair with a young French officer by the name of Hippolyte Charles.
When finally the two were reunited, Hippolyte Charles commenced a long stagnation in his career, and Napoleon treated Josephine to a display of histrionics through which she yawned and stared out the window. She committed herself thereafter to just one liaison at a time and realizing that he needed to pick his battles, Napoleon, for the most part, looked the other way and pursued dalliances of his own.
Her affection for Napoleon was acquired, but there can be no doubt that she was fond of him, but she did not return the passionate love that he felt for her. What she gave, him, however, which was perhaps her signature contribution, was a social passport. Napoleon, although admired, was not universally liked, and it was she who presented him to the social elites of Paris, who welcomed him into the various salons for no other reason than he was hers. She acquired the Château de Malmaison on the western outskirts of Paris, and created from it a stately home.
As a hint of how she might have influenced and affected Napoleon’s attitude to policy matters, his rescinding of an act of abolition, passed in 1799, has often been attributed to her background on a slave-owning estate in the Caribbean. Unilateral French Abolition would have made French sugar production sub-economic. Napoleon justified the reinstatement of slavery with the now-famous utterance: ‘How could I grant freedom to Africans, to utterly uncivilized men who did not even know what a colony was, what France was?‘
Napoleon in the end divorced Josephine in 1814 simply for her failure to deliver him a son. His second wife did, but the child died, and besides which, within a year, Napoleon was defeated and exiled to the island of St Helena. Josephine died soon after the separation.