Joséphine de Beauharnais

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joséphine de Beauharnais
(painting by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière )

Joséphine de Beauharnais (born Marie Josephe Rose de Tascher de La Pagerie ; born June 23, 1763 in Les Trois-Îlets , Canton Les Trois-Îlets / Martinique ; † May 29, 1814 in Rueil-Malmaison / Dép. Hauts-de-Seine ) was the wife of Napoleon as Empress of the French.

biography

origin

Side article → The plantation of the Joséphine de Beauharnais

Marie Josèphe Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie (Joséphine was Napoleon's nickname for her) came as the second daughter of the naval officer Joseph-Gaspard de Tascher (1735–1790) and Rose-Claire des Vergers de Sannois (1736–1807) on their parents' sugar cane plantation La Pagerie in Martinique , where she was baptized in the Notre-Dame church . From 1773 she attended the girls' boarding school Dames de la Providence in Fort-Royal ( Fort-de-France ).

Marriage to Alexandre de Beauharnais and time to marriage to Napoleon (1779–1796)

La Cocarde by William James Grant. Joséphine de Beauharnais and her daughter Hortense , ( Musée de la Révolution française ).

She married on 13 December 1779 the French army officer Alexandre, Vicomte de Beauharnais , who in 1794 during the reign of terror of the French Revolution guillotine was. The marriage was arranged by his father, the governor of Martinique, François de Beauharnais (1714-1800) , who lived with her father's sister. Alexandre de Beauharnais was supposed to marry Joséphine's sister Catherine-Désirée Alexandre, who was three years younger than him, but she died of tuberculosis and the third sister, Marie Françoise, was only eleven years old. After some hesitation - at 16, Joséphine was too old for him - Beauharnais accepted her as his wife. The couple had two children, Eugène and Hortense . The marriage was unhappy. A psychological and physical alienation developed that went so far that Alexandre Joséphine assumed that their daughter was a cuckoo child . The fact that he publicly called his wife a whore also outraged his own father, whereupon he placed the young woman and the two children in the Penthemont Abbey in Paris. The Parisian ladies met here, and Joséphine developed into a grande dame of society. In 1785, the couple decided to separate by mutual agreement after Alexandre brought forward a full admission of guilt for the failure of the marriage. When the divorce was declared on May 4, 1785, Alexandre had to undertake to pay her 5000 livres and 1000 livres for each of her two children. His only condition was to have custody of their son Eugène as soon as he was five years old. Alexandre did not always meet his financial obligations. As a result, Joséphine was heavily indebted to several creditors, despite an official monthly income of 11,000 livres. Her father-in-law had also offered her Gut Fontainebleau as a place of residence.

She returned to her homeland for a short time to check how the plantations were unable to generate income. When the situation in Martinique became more and more dangerous because of the advancing revolution, she traveled back to France.

After her husband's execution, Joséphine was also arrested and was due to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal when Robespierre and his regime were overthrown on Thermidor 9 (July 27, 1794) . Using the Thérésia Cabarrus known as Notre-Dame de Thermidor , the later wife of Jean Lambert Talliens , whom she had met in prison, she was freed from Tallien and received from him a small part of her confiscated property.

Marriage to Napoleon (1796–1809)

Period of directorate and consulate (1796–1804)

Side article → Malmaison Castle

Joséphine de Beauharnais
(painting by François Gérard )

As a widow , Joséphine de Beauharnais met General Napoleon Bonaparte , whom she married on March 9, 1796. She decided to marry at the urging of her friend Paul de Barras . Napoleon was passionately in love with Joséphine, who was six years his senior. It is thanks in part to her - and the relationships she maintained with high-ranking politicians of the Republic - that Napoleon became the commanding general of the Italian Army.

In fact, through her contacts with representatives of the Ancien Régime , the Revolution and members of the Board of Directors, she proved to be valuable support in Napoleon's coup d'état of 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799).

Because of her résumé, which combined elements of the old aristocracy with those of the revolution, she gave her husband a social acceptance that he could not have achieved on his own because of his origins and career. Napoleon benefited from his wife's social status. However, he initially only paid part of their debts. He only took over their complete repayment when he was to be crowned emperor. Joséphine did not actively influence her husband's politics beyond the time of the consulate . Napoleon crowned her empress in the Church of Notre-Dame in Paris in 1804 , much to the displeasure of his family, especially his mother Laetitia, who stayed away from the ceremony.

Succession problem (1804-1809)

on the problem of succession to the throne and divorce → marriage of Napoléon I to Marie-Louise

Life after Napoleon (1809-1814)

Tomb of the Empress Joséphine

When it became clear that Joséphine would no longer bear children to the emperor, she agreed to the divorce. On December 15, 1809, the emperor had invited to a reception where he announced his divorce - Joséphine fainted as a result. The divorce of January 10, 1810 was the first to be pronounced under the Civil Code . Joséphine retired to Malmaison Castle near Paris, which she had bought in 1799, with the title and court of empress . She spent her last years there.

After the military collapse of the Empire and Napoleon's forced abdication on April 6, 1814, Josephine received opponents of Napoleon, such as the Russian Tsar Alexander I , in order to alleviate possible hardships . She died a natural but excruciating death in Malmaison on May 29, 1814 . The cause of her death consisted of an ulcerated larynx, a swollen windpipe and heavy lung bleeding. She was buried in the Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul church in the city center of Rueil-Malmaison near Paris. Her daughter Hortense's grave is also there.

progeny

Through the daughter of her son Eugène, the Duke of Leuchtenberg , Josephine von Leuchtenberg , wife of King Oskar I of Sweden , she is one of the ancestors of the ruling dynasties in Belgium , Denmark , Luxembourg , Liechtenstein , Norway and Sweden . Her grandson's marriage to the Queen of Portugal remained childless.

Joséphine de Beauharnais and slavery

Monument in Fort de France on the island of Martinique (1893)

The slavery in the French colonies was already in 1794, shortly after the French Revolution abolished in accordance with the ideals of the revolution. Joséphine, however, persuaded Napoleon to reintroduce slavery in 1802 because her parents' sugar cane plantation in Martinique could no longer be operated without slaves. On May 22, 1848, at the instigation of Victor Schœlcher , slavery was finally abolished in France.

A small statue in memory of Joséphine and her home still stands in the central square in Fort de France, Martinique. The farmhouse and plantation can still be visited today. In the 1990s, freedom fighters carried out an attack on the small museum in the farmhouse, in which part of the buildings burned down. The statuette was beheaded, and despite repairs by the French state, the head disappeared in late revenge on Joséphine's attitude to slavery.

Honors

The plant genera Josephinia Vent are named after the empress . from the sesame family (Pedaliaceae) with the species Josephinia imperatricis and Lapageria Ruiz & Pav. from the Philesiaceae family .

literature

Web links

Commons : Joséphine de Beauharnais  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Family genealogy
  2. ↑ Sigrid-Maria Großering : To power and luck - fates of history , Amalthea Verlag
  3. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names - Extended Edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Beauharnais, Joséphine de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Empress of France
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1763
PLACE OF BIRTH Trois-Îlets , Martinique
DATE OF DEATH May 29, 1814
Place of death Rueil-Malmaison