‘Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte,’ by Kate Williams

This year marks the bicentennial of the death of Josephine Bonaparte, but Napoleon’s empress has been having a moment for some time now. In the past two decades, she has starred in at least 20 new biographies, six museum exhibitions and six novels. Three editions of her correspondence have also appeared during this time, as have many more studies (of Napoleon and other Bonapartes) in which she features. The latest addition to this corpus is “Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte,” by Kate Williams, a biographer of Queen Victoria and Emma Hamilton. Beyond her appreciation for “flawed, vulnerable, engaging, powerful” women, Williams does not seem to have a compelling reason to tell this story. In the absence of new material or a new approach, she offers a breathless paean to the woman who, while “no great beauty,” could with “one twitch of her skirt . . . enthrall the man who terrorized Europe.”

Born in 1763 to a clan of blue-blooded French colonists on Martinique, Marie-Josèphe de Tascher de La Pagerie grew up “in a paradise of pleasure,” where she “splashed in the sea like a dolphin” and “sucked on sugarcane plucked from the fields.” In 1779, her family shipped her off to Paris to marry the self-styled Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais, a “languidly aggressive” blackguard by whom she had two children before separating from him in 1785. (Fond of alliteration, clichés and mixed metaphors, Williams indulges in all three when noting that “hotheaded Alexandre also had to eat humble pie.”)

Four years later, revolution broke out in Paris, followed by the fall of the monarchy in September 1792 and by the king’s execution in January 1793. In September 1793, militant revolutionaries instituted the Reign of Terror, rounding up suspected royalists as enemies of the state. As part of this sweep, the former Vicomtesse de Beauharnais was incarcerated in April 1794.

She was released three months later when the Terror’s architects themselves were guillotined and “those who had suffered imprisonment were immediately at the top of the social tree.” On the Parisian party circuit, Madame de Beauharnais reinvented herself as a seductress of some note, notwithstanding the toll jail may or may not have taken on her looks. (Williams writes first that “Marie-Josèphe had tried hard to conserve her beauty in prison, but it had been a hopeless quest,” and then, a few pages later, remarks that “she was still alluring, despite her travails in prison.”) In 1795, on the arm of one of her conquests, the politician Paul de Barras, she met a 26-year-old Corsican-born general called Napoleon Bonaparte.

Though ugly, unkempt and crass, Napoleon was fiercely intelligent, with grand ambitions that belied his unimpressive appearance. (He declared that he “should . . . be crowned king,” well before anyone else shared that opinion.) He was also captivated by Marie-Josèphe. Initially she rebuffed him, but “Paris in the summer of 1795 was food for cynicism,” and she took a correspondingly jaded view of romance and sex, which for her “were a path to status and security.” Unlike Barras, Napoleon was eager to provide her with both, and that fall, he conveniently earned enough wealth and fame with his military exploits that Marie-Josèphe decided to give him a chance. By December, they were lovers, and they wed three months later.

For the groom, these early days with his “Josephine” — a diminutive variation on her middle name — were bliss. Six years younger than she and far greener in the bedroom, he was “baffled and excited by her repertoire of techniques,” especially a set of moves he called her “zigzags” (a term that may for contemporary readers recall Jerry Seinfeld’s “swirl”). In steamy billets-doux, the general praised his darling’s “little black forest”: “I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the moment I will be in it. To live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian fields.” He also “dreamed of being her shoes and her gown.”

Josephine, for her part, tolerated his passion but didn’t exactly enjoy it — she even cheated on him while he was off conquering Italy in the summer of 1796. The balance of power between them shifted, however, as soon as Napoleon confronted her about the affair. From then on, Madame Bonaparte “was no longer the all-powerful, dishing out her favors from a pedestal,” and as her husband’s military and political fortunes continued to rise she grew increasingly fretful that he would leave her.

With good reason. By the time he crowned himself emperor in 1804, Napoleon’s obsession with her “little black forest” had yielded not only to countless extramarital amours but to an urgent desire for an heir, which Josephine never managed to provide. Although she lent elegance and grace to a court otherwise known “for its gold-splashed brashness,” the emperor decided he could do better, dissolving their marriage in 1809 so that he could wed the Austrian emperor’s 18-year-old daughter, Marie Louise.

But that union fell apart when Europe’s other sovereigns, his new father-in-law among them, succeeded in crushing Napoleon’s empire. Forced to abdicate in April 1814, he staged a brief comeback the following year, then lost again, definitively, at Waterloo — an occurrence his ex-wife didn’t live to see. In May 1814, she expired after a bout of what was probably pneumonia. According to her maid, though, Josephine “died of grief,” heartbroken to have learned of her faithless lover’s fall.

This news shattered Bonaparte in turn. Once in exile, “Napoleon never stopped thinking of her, surrounding himself with pictures of her at St. Helena (and eating off plates bearing her face).” And when he died in March 1821, the last word he spoke was, apparently, “Josephine.”

AMBITION AND DESIRE
The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte
By Kate Williams
Illustrated. 384 pp. Ballantine Books. $30.
Caroline Weber, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is working on a book about Proust and the salons of fin de siècle Paris.