Josephine Empress

James Kemble

Description

How is it that one woman's health and personality so deeply affected thousands of 18th and early 19th century Europeans? Born in a distant French colony, Josephine, the future wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, was unwittingly to have a major influence on Europe. Yet she has often beenoverlooked by the masculine machinations and intrigues of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. She was very nearly, by only a few days, born a British subject. By fate of opportunity she came to France at the whim of a chance encounter. By mischance she was rendered a widow of the French Revolution only a few days before it ended with Robespierre's execution.As a companion sequel to the author's previous bookNapoleon Immortal, the author examines, with a doctor's detailed eye, how her mental and physical health permeated events across Europe. The mother of two children by her first husband, now widowed and facing penury, with characteristic boldness she introduced herself to Napoleon who was bewitched by her eloquence and demeanour, to the extent that his ardour resulted in their marriage within five months.But her inability to bear him a son, as the Emperor required to perpetuate his lineage, was for her a disaster. Was it her or her new husband's inability? The consequences of her illnesses were as far-reaching as they were devastating for her, her family and for Europe.

Sujets

• Médecine
• History of medicine
• History of Europe
• French Revolution
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781803138497
• Langue: English

Extrait

Other books by
JAMES KEMBLE



Idols and Invalids
Hero-Dust
Surgery for Nurses
Napoleon Immortal
St Helena during Napoleon’s Exile, Gorrequer’s Diary






Copyright © 2022 James Kemble

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.


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ISBN 978 1803138 497

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd



To Dorothy and Robert


Contents
Prefatory Note

Chapter One
Martinique
Chapter Two
Birth and Childhood
Chapter Three
The Teenage Bride
Chapter Four
Eugene and Hortense
Chapter Five
Revolution
Chapter Six
Wild Oats
Chapter Seven
Napoleon
Chapter Eight
The Wife of Napoleon
Chapter Nine
The Mistress of Malmaison
Chapter Ten
The First Lady of France
Chapter Eleven
Forty
Chapter Twelve
Sterility
Chapter Thirteen
Josephine Empress
Chapter Fourteen
Hatches, Matches and Despatches
Chapter Fifteen
Divorce
Chapter Sixteen
Marie Louise
Chapter Seventeen
The Stars begin to Wane
Chapter Eighteen
The Last Illness and Death
Chapter Nineteen
Post Mortem
Chapter Twenty
Requiem

Notes and Comments
Chronology
Bibliography



Tout comprendre rend très indulgent

Madame de Sta ȅ l, 1766-1817


Prefatory Note
How often does History record events as though they happened purely by chance, as though they were the result of Fate and Destiny? Josephine Bonaparte, born Marie-Joseph-Rose, is one of those people whom History has often remembered as a subtitle to the cataclysm of the madness of the French Revolution and its aftermath, the pan-European upheavals of The Napoleonic Wars. Yet here was a woman born on Martinique, a distant French colonial Atlantic island, from which Josephine’s father Lieutenant Joseph-Gaspard as a young man had been involved against British naval marine attacks, who came to Europe on a promise and became embroiled with the man who was to lead France in wars from Spain to Russia. Had Britain restored Martinique to France nine days later than it was, Josephine might have been born British.
At critical moments, physical and mental illnesses impinged irrevocably on a turn of events. How different might History have turned out had Josephine had a son by Napoleon, or if the guillotine had not fallen on her first husband’s neck just five days before Robespierre’s Reign of Terror was ended? Examined through the eyes of the physician or surgeon, their illnesses can be understood to have been key factors determining events. The biographies in this book are the result of many years of researching in archives, museums and libraries, seeking original sources, and personal visits to places where Josephine lived or visited. Particular gratitude is given to the librarians, archivists and curators of Royal Society of Medicine, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the British Medical Association, Musée de Versailles, Montpellier University, Casse Nationale des Monuments Historiques, Musée de Malmaison, Institut Français, and to the many who have given their permissions and access.

James Kemble


Chapter One
Martinique
From Martinique to Malmaison is a very long way. It was a long way if you had travelled it by sea in a wooden square-rigged sailing ship two hundred years ago, and it was a long way if you travel it in the pages of history. Josephine travelled it both ways. The voyage by sea across the Atlantic was rough, stormy and dangerous; the journey in history was even more adventurous, for it is the story of her life from birth to death. Born in 1783 in Martinique, that little remote island in the tropical West Indies, she arrived finally after her most hazardous journey at Malmaison near Paris. There, when the worst storms seem to have passed, the skies cleared and she discovered in ecstasy the end of the rainbow; she was given a crown of glittering gold, and became “the most fascinating female of Paris and of her court”.
When she was a little girl her companions were usually the children of the negro slaves on their plantation home; and one day when playing together the mother of one of the children, who had some local reputation as a fortune teller, called to Josephine who came and sat by her side on the ground. The old woman looked earnestly at the palm of the little white hand of the child, and with very serious face and in her deep sonorous black-velvet voice, told her that she would one day wear a crown. It made no impression on the child’s mind; she just giggled and ran off to tell her playmates, thinking no doubt to herself “Oh, won’t it be fun”. If she mentioned it to her parents in her girlish babble it also made little impact; it would have gone in one ear and out the other.
The fortune-teller did not go into any details about her prophecy; she did not say that she was to become the wife of the Emperor of France; nor did she risk spoiling the infant’s delighted fantasy with pious warnings or dark forebodings of any trials in store for her, of possible disappointments or distressing anxieties on the way. Such tribulations were indeed to be met along the road of the pilgrim’s progress; but for the present the infant Josephine saw only the brighter prospects that had been foretold and she continued to enjoy a child’s undemanding pleasures in the sunny environment of this leisurely isle of her birth.
Martinique was a tiny unsophisticated outpost of colonial France, with primitive opportunities for education and little social refinement. It is an island, one of the smallest in the Lesser Antilles group of the West Indies, only fifteen degrees north of the equator. It is this group of islands which Christopher Columbus discovered in 1492 and where by bribery and brigandage he acquired from the aboriginal Carib Indians gold and treasure which he brought back home, to the delight of the Spanish court. Colombus’s crew had acquired from the native women less glittering gains of the spirochaete-infected harvest of their wild oats, which they rapidly disseminated in the population of the Old World.
Martinique was indeed a New World. To counterbalance its remoteness from civilization, it had certain attractions of its own which made a special appeal to many of the frustrated young men of troubled Europe. It was a tropical island off the coast of South America. Its contour suggests a small immature foetus floating in the warm waters of the Caribbean womb.
Mount Pelée is its head, and a range of mountains looks like a supporting vertebral spine. The perpetual sunshine and the constant temperature produce luscious green vegetation everywhere in the woodlands, tall coconut palms and scented frangipani, hedges of red hibiscus and branching bougainvillea. The people led a leisurely life, lazy and indolent; no one went with an empty stomach, for food and drink were there by the roadside, bread fruit and banana trees, mango, melon and pineapple.
Scattered over the total area of some four hundred square miles, the European immigrants had grants of land which thy cultivated in plantations of sugar cane, coffee and maize, worked by black African slaves who constituted the massive majority of the population. At the time there were some sixty thousand of them.
If there were positive delights of nature and climate, there were also negative discomforts. Medical facilities were minimal so that endemic diseases, such as dysentery, malaria and yellow fever were rampant; infant mortality was high and expectation of life low. These conditions were made no easier, indeed they were promoted, by the plague of mosquitoes and ticks, soldier-ants and spiders, snakes and scorpions.
Possession of the island had first been taken by a trading company about 1635 and si