Nigel Cawthorne: Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

Barras himself said: “Bonaparte was as well acquainted with all of the lady’s adventures as we were; I knew he knew, because he heard the stories in my presence. And Madame de Beauharnais was generally recognized as one of my early liaisons. With Bonaparte a frequent visitor to my apartment, he could not have remained ignorant of such a state of affairs, nor could he have believed that everything was over between her and me.”

Napoleon also knew of her affair with General Hoche. One evening at a party given by Therese Tallien, in a playful mood, Napoleon pretended to read palms, but when he got to General Hoche’s hand, his mood changed.

“General, you will die in your bed,” he said darkly. This was an insult, coming from one soldier to another. Only Josephine’s speedy intervention prevented it developing into a full-scale row.

Plainly, Napoleon could not handle his feelings and he stopped seeing her. Josephine wrote to him: “You no longer come to see a friend who is fond of you. You have completely deserted her, which is a great mistake, for she is tenderly devoted to you. Come to lunch tomorrow. I must talk to you about things that will be of advantage to you. Goodnight, my friend. A fond embrace.”

Napoleon replied immediately.

“I cannot imagine the reason for the tone of your letter,” he wrote. “I beg you to believe me when I say that no one so yearns for your friendship as I do, that no one can be more eager for the opportunity to prove it. If my duties had permitted, I would have come to deliver this note in person.”

Soon he was visiting her more than ever.

“One day, when I was sitting next to her at table,” he recalled later, “she began to pay me all manner of compliments on my military expertise. Her praise intoxicated me. From that moment I confined my conversation to her and never left her side.”

Josephine’s thirteen-year-old daughter Hortense confirmed his puppy-like devotion. One evening she accompanied her mother to a dinner party being held by Barras at the Luxembourg Palace.

“I found myself placed between my mother and a general who, in order to talk to her, kept leaning forward so often and with so much vivacity that he wearied me and obliged me to lean back,” she wrote. “In spite of myself, I looked attentively at his face, which was handsome and expressive, but remarkably pale. He spoke ardently and seemed to devote all his attention to my mother.”

Soon after that they became lovers. For Josephine, making love was a pleasant way to round off a memorable evening together. For Napoleon, it was transcendent. At seven o’clock the next morning, he wrote breathlessly: “I wake full of you. Between your portrait and the memory of our intoxicating night, my senses have no respite. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what is this strange effect you have on my heart? What if you were to be angry? What if I were to see you sad or troubled? Then my soul would be shattered by distress. Then your lover would find no peace, no rest. But I find none, either, when I succumb to the profound emotion that overwhelms me, when I draw from your lips, from your heart, a flame that consumes me… I shall see you in three hours. Until then, mio dolce amor, I send you a thousand kisses — but send me none in return, for they set my blood on fire.”

Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Auguste Marmont witnessed the effect this consummation had: “He was madly in love, in the full sense of the word, in its widest possible meaning. It was, apparently, his first real passion, a primordial passion, and he responded to it with all the vigour of nature. A love so pure, so true, so exclusive had never before possessed a man. Although she no longer had the freshness of youth, she knew how to please him, and we know that to lovers the question of “why” is superfluous. One loves because one loves and nothing is less susceptible to explanation and analysis than this emotion.”

Long after they divorced, Napoleon embittered by defeat and exile, stood on St Helena and admitted still: “I was passionately in love with her, and our friends were aware of this long before I ever dared to say a word about it.”

Many were shocked at his love for Josephine who, they considered, had “lost all her bloom”. Napoleon was twenty-six. She was thirty-two, though she thoughtfully shaved four years off her age for the marriage certificate while he, gallantly, added two years to his.

Full of the optimism of young love, Napoleon wrote to Josephine: “You could not have inspired in me so infinite a love unless you felt it too.”

She did not. He was deluding himself. She was amusing herself with what she called her “funny little Corsican”.

But Barras was eager to shed the spendthrift Josephine and Josephine needed a new sugar daddy — all the better if he was young and naive.

Napoleon later admitted that it was Barras who advised him to marry Josephine. He made it clear that Napoleon would gain both socially and financially. Barras also encouraged Napoleon’s mistaken idea that Josephine was rich. In fact, her dowry would be a stack of unpaid bills. But she was from an aristocratic family and Napoleon was an incurable snob.

Josephine was quite taken aback when Napoleon proposed. She had expected to be his mistress for a while, not his wife. She admitted to a friend that she did not love him, feeling only “indifference, tepidness”. Frightened by his ardour, she accused him of having some ulterior reason for marrying her. He was mortified:

For you even to think that I do not love you for yourself alone!!! For whom, then? For what? I am astonished at you, but still more astonished at myself — back at your feet this morning without the will power to resent or resist. The height of weakness and abjection! What is this strange power you have over me, my incomparable Josephine, that a mere thought of yours has the power to poison my life and rend my heart, when at the same time another emotion stronger still and another less sombre mood lead me back to grovel before you?

Eventually, the force of his passion overwhelmed her.

“I don’t know why,” she said to a friend, “but sometimes his absurd self-confidence impresses me to the point of believing anything is possible to this singular man — anything that might come to his mind to undertake. With his imagination, who can guess what he might undertake?”

Later, on St Helena, Napoleon gave a more objective account of his reasons for marrying Josephine: “I really loved Josephine, but I had no respect for her… Actually, I married her only because I thought she had a large fortune. She said she had, but it was not true.”

Napoleon’s family opposed the match. They disapproved of Josephine’s frivolous ways and her outre clothes. Josephine’s children were also against it.

“Mama won’t love us so much,” Hortense told her brother. But they were eventually persuaded that having a General as a stepfather would be a help to Eugene, who was planning to be a soldier. Even so, Hortense never quite reconciled herself to the marriage. Later, when her headmistress — and the rest of France — were lauding his victories, Hortense said: “Madame, I will give him credit for all his other conquests, but I will never forgive him for having conquered my mother.”

When they went to draw up the marriage contract, the homme d’affaires who dealt with the property settlement advised Josephine against tying herself to a penniless young soldier who might get killed in battle leaving her nothing but “his cloak and his sword”. Nevertheless, she went ahead.

Barras gave her away. Napoleon was two hours late for the ceremony — the mayor had gone home — but at ten o’clock on 9 March, 1796, Napoleon and Josephine were married by a minor official who did not even have the proper authority to conduct the two-minute ceremony.