A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (19 page)

Napoleon’s rapid rise to glory was particularly hard on his older brother, Joseph, who had grown accustomed to being the respected leader of the fatherless family. It was to him they always turned in times of trouble, and his word was law. Even Napoleon—who bowed to no man—handed over his salary to Joseph for investment and dispersal. “Whatever circumstances fate reserves for you,” Napoleon wrote his older brother in an uncharacteristically mushy letter in the years before his fame surged and his heart closed, “you certainly know, my friend, you can have no better friend than I, who holds you most dear and who desires most sincerely your happiness. . . . We have lived together for so many years, and have been so closely united, that our hearts are one, and you know better than anyone how fond I am of you. I find in writing these words an emotion I have rarely felt in my life.”

The warm feelings between the Bonaparte brothers would soon evaporate. Joseph was left seething with jealousy as his younger brother eclipsed him and came to dominate not only the family, but Europe as well. He was losing his treasured place of honor, and though Napoleon tossed him lucrative positions and other consolation prizes along the way, it still rankled.

The emperor wanted his family to participate in his new dynasty, but he made a decision that would forever alienate him from Joseph. Childless at the time, Napoleon named his nephew heir to the throne—a position Joseph naturally assumed would be his. “If my brother cannot entrust this to me,” Joseph fumed after firing a pistol at a portrait of Napoleon, “if he does not do for me what is expected of him [then] . . . to sacrifice one’s tastes, one’s ambitions, for nothing, for the mere possibility of an eventual position of power, to endure all that, and then possibly in vain, one must be either insane or a born intriguer.”

A fearful scene between the brothers erupted a few months before Napoleon’s coronation, with Joseph screeching about his rights as the eldest member of the family and Napoleon becoming infuriated at his presumption. “How dare he speak to me of
his
rights and of
his
interests!” Napoleon raged. “To do this before me, his brother, to arouse his jealousy and pretensions, is to wound me at my most sensitive point. I shall not forget that . . . It is as if he had said to an impassioned lover that he had fucked his mistress. Well . . . my mistress is the power I have created. I have done far too much to achieve this conquest to permit someone else to ravish or even covet her.”

When one of his counselors attempted to speak up for Joseph, Napoleon lashed out again: “You forget therefore that my brothers are nothing without me, that they are great now because I have made them so . . . there are thousands of men in France who have rendered far greater services to the state. But let’s face the hard facts. Joseph is not destined to reign. He is older than I: I will live longer than he, and in addition, I am in good health. Moreover, he was not born in a high enough social position to have warranted such an illusion on his part . . . He, like myself, was born in a common position. But I raised myself by my own abilities. He, on the other hand, has remained exactly the same since birth. To rule in France, one must either be born in grandeur . . . or else be capable of distinguishing oneself above all the others . . . For the succession to the throne to succeed, it must therefore be passed on to our children born in that grandeur.”

The spat between Joseph and Napoleon continued unabated as the coronation approached and Joseph threatened to boycott the entire ceremony. This did nothing to ease the tension. “If you refuse to come to the Coronation,” Napoleon warned, “from that very moment you may consider yourself my enemy. In such a situation how do you propose to fight me? Where is your army with which to carry out your attack? You lack everything and I will annihilate you.” Joseph did show up, in a huff, glowering at Napoleon as he sat across from him in the royal carriage taking them to Notre Dame Cathedral. He was hardly mollified when he was given the throne of Naples after Napoleon conquered it, and the relationship would deteriorate even further when the emperor later propped him up on the Spanish throne.

Believing Napoleon’s campaign to conquer Spain ill-conceived and a horrendous waste of lives and money, Joseph never wanted the crown. But after his other three brothers rejected it for their own reasons, Joseph reluctantly agreed to trade in his relatively peaceful realm of Naples for the agitated peninsula bristling under French domination. He did so under the condition that the emperor promise not to give Naples to anyone outside the immediate family. Yet no sooner had he crossed the border into Spain than Napoleon went back on his word—as he so often did—and handed Naples over to a brother-in-law, Joachim Murat.

Joseph was incensed by the betrayal, but he had more to worry about when he reached Madrid. The city was in revolt against the brutal French occupation and the new king was forced to flee almost immediately upon arriving. “You make war like a postal inspector, not a general!” Napoleon scolded him after the flight. Although Joseph was restored to the throne by the emperor and his army, he was never given a chance to rule. Napoleon waved aside his plea for benevolence toward Spain which Joseph argued was essential to quelling the intense hatred for France and in restoring order. “Joseph still believes himself to be my elder,” the emperor snorted, “he still has pretensions to head the family. Is there anything more absurd!”

Instead of heeding his brother’s advice, Napoleon stepped up his effort to crush Spain. And by putting his forces in charge of the government, he rendered Joseph a virtual puppet king. “If his . . . purpose is to make me feel disgusted with Spain,” Joseph wrote his wife, “he has achieved his end. . . . The vexing position in which he wishes to leave me as ruler of a great country is quite unacceptable. I want to know precisely what he wants of me, and if that position includes humiliating me, then I wish to retire from here. I do not want to be under tutelage of those beneath me [French officers and other officials]. I do not want to see my provinces administered by men I do not trust. I do not want to be merely a crowned child-king, because I do not need a crown to prove myself a man, and I feel myself quite great enough on my own merits without having to put up with such charades.”

Joseph traveled to Paris and confronted his brother, demanding more political and military independence for himself and more financial help for Spain. Napoleon appeared to acquiesce and Joseph returned to his “kingdom” somewhat placated. But only four days later the emperor announced that all Bonapartes ruling as monarchs within his European empire (there were three) were thereby reduced from kings to mere French princes. This did not enhance Joseph’s standing in the country he was supposed to be ruling and the Spanish Cortez immediately pounced on Napoleon’s decree. “Joseph is more than ever a marionette in the power of the French, a man without authority,” it was proclaimed, “[and] can be considered only an object of profound contempt by all Spaniards who love the independence and honor of their country.”

With a simultaneous campaign to conquer Russia going as disastrously as the one to subdue Spain, Napoleon decided to withdraw from the latter. He just never bothered to tell Joseph of his plans. Instead, he finally gave his older brother some responsibility by putting him in charge of the military assault against Spanish rebels—a sham that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and accomplished nothing in light of the predetermined French withdrawal. Though Napoleon had betrayed him time and again—and even had the audacity to blame him for the failures in Spain—Joseph remained loyal to his brother to the bitter end.

Not so, the other Bonaparte siblings.

 

Sitting beside Joseph on that tense carriage ride to the coronation was his brother Louis. If Joseph was feeling resentment toward the emperor, Louis was churning with a hatred only the deranged can muster. And Louis was indeed deranged, possibly due to an advanced case of gonorrhea. Like Joseph, Louis had been bypassed from the succession in favor of his son because of his deteriorating mental condition.

“No, I shall never consent to it!” Louis had burst out upon hearing Napoleon’s plan to disinherit him and personally raise his son as heir. “Rather than renounce my right to the throne, rather than agree to bow my head before my own son, I will leave France. . . . Then we will see if you will dare to kidnap the son from his father in broad daylight!”

Louis, who had married Napoleon’s stepdaughter Hortense, by his wife Josephine, was convinced Hortense was part of the plot to shunt him aside and took all his wrath out on her. He refused to let her see her mother, confined her to the house, and put spies on her twenty-four hours a day. “If you support your mother’s interests at the expense of mine,” he threatened, “I swear I will make you regret it. I will separate you from your son. I will have you locked up behind high walls in some utterly unknown place from which no human power can ever extricate you, and you will spend the rest of your life paying for your condescending view of me and my family. And just you take special care that none of my threats reaches my brother’s ears! All his power cannot protect you from my wrath.”

Napoleon made Louis king of Holland in 1806, leaving the country nominally autonomous rather than annexing it outright. The effectiveness of King Louis’s reign would closely mirror Joseph’s in Spain—only with the added handicap of mental illness. He fancied himself a Dutchman and insisted on speaking the language, no matter how badly he butchered it. He dismissed most of the French advisers Napoleon had sent and ordered the remainder to renounce their French citizenship and speak Dutch, too.

When Hortense—seeking refuge from her erratic husband in Paris—gave birth to another son in 1808, she refused to hand the child over to Louis. Napoleon ignored his brother’s demand that he force Hortense’s cooperation and announced instead that he was adopting the boy himself. The fraternal breach was growing ever wider. It would be completed two years later when Napoleon swept Louis off his throne and took Holland for himself.

The emperor had funneled all the country’s resources to fight his wars all over Europe and blamed Louis for its instability. A British attack on Holland gave the emperor a convenient excuse to take the crown away from his brother. The younger Bonaparte did not want to abdicate, but Napoleon’s will was implacable. “There is only one way I will agree to do this if Your Majesty absolutely wants this,” Louis wrote, as if he had a choice, “and that is by replacing me with my son.”

Desiring Holland for himself, the emperor swiftly rejected the idea. “If the king abdicates,” he responded, “in no case do I intend to replace him by the prince royal. . . . His throne has been destroyed as a result of the English expedition. When the king demonstrated his total inability to defend himself and therefore Holland can no longer exist.”

So much for that relationship.

 

Joseph and Louis were the only brothers of Napoleon to show up at his coronation. Lucien Bonaparte wasn’t there because he happened to be in exile after having displeased big brother Napoleon. The two had been allies during the emperor’s rapid ascent and as a reward for his services, Lucien was given the plum position of interior minister when Napoleon achieved power as First Counsel.

Charming, affable, and as greedy as any Bonaparte could be, Lucien plundered the French treasury, to which he had full access, and spent wildly on himself and his mistresses. With most of France living in poverty at the time, Napoleon preferred to see the family accumulate wealth quietly. But this wasn’t the real problem, nor was the fact that Lucien was utterly incompetent as interior minister and left the department in shambles. The real problem was the younger brother’s ambition for power, which rivaled Napoleon’s in its intensity. Unfortunately, it also came at the elder’s expense.

Lucien presented himself as a moderate version of Napoleon, who was then trying to solidify his new autocratic government. He even went as far as to publish a pamphlet, at government expense, called
Parallels Between Caesar, Cromwell, Monck, and Bonaparte.
This was too much. Napoleon, who came off looking like a fanatic in the tract, which in fact he was, quickly edged his brother out of his post and assigned him the far less rewarding job of ambassador to Spain.

This turned out to be a disaster as well. After receiving enormous bribes from King Carlos IV to ensure a peace treaty with France, Lucien fled the country with all the loot the king had given him. He was afraid he would be forced to give it back when Napoleon refused to ratify the treaty delivered to him as a done deal without his prior approval and consultation. “Lucien’s complete lack of judgment, and of any moral sense, pushed ambition to the point of utter frenzy, and the thirst for riches, to sheer robbery,” wrote historian Louis Madelin. But what was worse in Napoleon’s eyes, was that he got his mistress Alexandrine Jouberthon pregnant and married her. It was this single event that severed the relationship between Lucien and Napoleon forever.

The older brother had big dynastic plans for his siblings, and the tart Lucien had married most definitely did not fit into them. “Betrayal!” he fumed. “Sheer betrayal.” The couple was forced to leave Paris for an Italian exile from which they never returned. Over the years that followed, Napoleon, now emperor, was relentless in his attempts to break up the marriage, but Lucien always stubbornly refused to leave his wife. “I cannot, without dishonoring myself, divorce a woman who has given me four children,” he wrote in response to one of Napoleon’s final demands. “In the Imperial Administration I could perhaps usefully serve my brother. Why can I not be allowed to prove my devotion to him by holding a nonhereditary post, where the position of my wife and children would not matter?”

“So be it!” the emperor responded. “Let him live and die as he pleases. I know what I must do, what politics dictate. Lucien implored my clemency. That clemency would include my recognition of his children, provided that he rids himself of that wife of a bankrupt [Alexandrine’s first husband]. . . . What he has proposed, however, is quite absurd. Lucien can assume a proper role in my empire only by assuming the role of a dynastic prince, nothing less, and his children can serve me properly only as princes of my house. Lucien cannot accept this. All right! It is all over! I charge you with instructing my family never again to speak to me about this matter.”