By all accounts, Napoleon Bonaparte liked Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie very much. Not enough to let her keep her name instead of changing it to Josephine, but hey. Love looks different to different people.
Marie, who served as the broad-strokes inspiration for the character Josephine played by Vanessa Kirby in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, was born June 23, 1763, to the owners of a sugar plantation. The family business changed her life in a number of ways – for one, the market for sugar in the late 1700s was a lot like the NFT market six weeks after people started making NFTs, in that everyone was making too much product, and there wasn’t any money in it. Additionally, with a functionally limitless supply of sugar and a collection of toothbrushes somewhere in the “none at all” range, young Marie’s teeth reportedly looked like a series of tiny, high-value dominos.
But that didn’t stop her from marrying her aunt’s lover’s son, Alexandre François Marie, after his first choice (her older sister) died and his second choice (her younger sister) was, irreconcilably, 12 years old. The pair had two children, as well as a contentious disunion due to Alexandre’s numerous affairs, and decided to go their separate ways on a permanent basis when Alexandre had his head chopped off by a guillotine on July 23, 1794.
In 1795, she met Napoleon Bonaparte, a military man six years her junior who, judging by his letters, was deeply besotted with Marie’s mouth full of still-decaying teeth. He started calling her “Josephine,” and the name stuck. They were engaged in January of 1796 and married two months later, fudging the numbers on the licenses to make the age difference seem less pronounced.
The occasionally happy life and wife of Napoleon Bonaparte
Which brings us back to where we started: Napoleon really liked his wife. He talked about it a lot. What he didn’t like was the fact that she couldn’t seem to provide him with an heir, a fact that became a bigger deal as the young commander gathered more and more power. He named his wife Empress of France when he took over as Emperor in 1804, even after both he and Josephine had carried out loud, illicit affairs – including one between Napoleon and Josephine’s lady-in-waiting, which ended in Josephine catching Napoleon in the act and Napoleon retorting “Well then why don’t you make me a baby?” We are, of course, paraphrasing.
A continuing lack of bouncing baby Napoleons drove his majesty to take drastic action. In November 1809, he took his wife out for a nice dinner and gently explained that he really, really wanted to get someone pregnant. Josephine tearfully understood, and the couple threw a divorce party – not the kind that your aunt keeps throwing at the same dive bar whenever she winds up single, more of a funeral for their marriage. The two read statements of devotion to one another. It honestly sounds like it was probably a bummer.
Napoleon got remarried two months later to Marie-Louise of Austria, but spoke openly about how he was basically just getting hitched to a baby oven. It wasn’t particularly romantic. In 1811, his son, Napoleon II, was born.
By 1814, Josephine had been living comfortably in a chateau outside of Paris, enjoying the luxuries afforded her by her titles. With Napoleon in exile, she reached out to the emperor of Russia, asking for permission to live with her ex-husband on the island of Elba. Shortly after making the request, Josephine died of pneumonia at age 50.
When Napoleon got word of Josephine’s death, he was beyond dismayed, reportedly locking himself in his room for two days without food, companionship, or a fresh oversized hat. He lamented that he had loved his first wife, but not respected her. He was so devastated that he went nearly five years without escaping from exile and trying to overthrow the French government which, if you know about Napoleon, you’ll understand was a pretty dramatic stretch for the guy.
It’s apparent that the French king and military mastermind continued to think about his first wife for the remainder of his relatively short life, up to the very moment of his passing. Lying in bed on May 5, 1821, the deposed leader said roughly “France, the army, head of the army, Josephine,” then died.