Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie Bonaparte, Viscountess of Beauharnais, better known as Joséphine de Beauharnais (June 23, 1763 – May 29, 1814) was a French noblewoman and empress, the most prominent woman in the life of Napoléon Bonaparte, the Emperor of the French and the finest battle strategist and tactician of his time. She was his first wife from 1796 until their marriage was annulled in 1810, and as such she was Empress of the French, Queen of Italy and Duchess of Navarre from 1804 to 1810. "Joséphine" was how Napoleon called her, it was not her birth name.
She was born in a family of békés (a creole word for descendants of white French colonists) in Martinique. She was first married to Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais (a béké as well) and moved to Paris. Alexandre ended up a suspect during the Reign of Terror, was arrested by a Revolutionary Tribunal in 1794, and guillotined. Joséphine herself was imprisoned at the same time, then released after the fall of Maximilien Robespierre.
She met Napoleon at an intellectual salon in Paris then at a dinner hosted by Paul Barras. Napoleon was engaged to Désirée Clary at the time, he broke the engagement (Désirée ended up marrying Charles XIV Bernadotte of Sweden) and he and Joséphine married in 1796, mutually falsifying their birth dates to mitigate the fact that she was six years older than him. While Napoleon loved her (even though they both had affairs and especially Napoleon, they even had a domestic argument about this on 2 December 1804, the very day of Napoleon's coronation), she faced both hostility from his family and the pressure of producing a male heir, which she and Napoleon never managed to do (she had two children with her previous husband).
Since the need for said male heir was a crucial state matter, and since Napoleon managed to father a child with another woman, the couple divorced on January 10, 1810, and Napoleon married Marie-Louise of Austria, who gave him a legitimate son (Napoleon II, King of Rome, Duke of Reichstadt and Prince of Parma, who would never reign). Joséphine then spent the rest of her days at her mansion of Malmaison, where she passed away from a brutal pneumonia on May 29, 1814, while Napoleon was exiled on the isle of Elba.
Joséphine had much influence on women's fashion of her time, and her love for botany drove her to have many exotic plants imported from her birthplace of Martinique to put in the gardens of several of her residences, and as such she ended up the cause of the cultivation of them wherever possible in France.
Portrayals in fiction:
She's been featured in many works about her second husband and the wars he fought, of course. Among them:
Anime & Manga
- Appears in Eikou no Napoleon – Eroica, the sequel to The Rose of Versailles.
Film
- Napoléon (1927), portrayed by Gina Manès.
- Mademoiselle Désirée (1942), portrayed by Lise Delamare.
- Désirée (1954), portrayed by Merle Oberon.
- Napoléon (1955), portrayed by Michèle Morgan.
- Austerlitz (1960), portrayed by Martine Carol.
- The Loves and Times of Scaramouche (1976), portrayed by Ursula Andress.
- Napoleon (2023), portrayed by Vanessa Kirby.
Literature
- In the Arsène Lupin novels, Countess Joséphine Balsamo de Cagliostro is the namesake daughter Joséphine's had in secret with Count Alessandro Cagliostro, also known in French as Joseph Balsamo.
Television
- Joséphine ou la Comédie des ambitions (1979), portrayed by Danièle Lebrun.
- Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story (1987), portrayed by Jacqueline Bisset.
- Napoléon (2002), portrayed by Isabella Rossellini.
Video Games
- Banner of the Maid, where she is Pauline Bonaparte's landlady and major social contact in Paris.
