Nigel Cawthorne: Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

During his Egyptian campaign in 1798, Napoleon was again told of Josephine’s unfaithfulness — and that he was the laughing-stock of Paris. To get his own back, he got his secretary to round up all the women he could find, but they were all too fat and ugly for his tastes.

Then nineteen-year-old Pauline Foures came to his attention. She had dressed in a man’s uniform to accompany her husband to Egypt. The skin-tight pantaloon that the French army wore at the time pandered to Napoleon’s tastes. According to a contemporary, she had a “rose-petal complexion, beautiful teeth and a good geometrical figure”.

Napoleon sent her husband off up the Nile, while he staged a very public seduction. At a dinner party, he deliberately spilt some wine on her dress, then took her upstairs to sponge it off. When Lieutenant Foures returned to Cairo, Napoleon sent him back to Paris with despatches and installed Pauline in a house near his headquarters in Cairo.

Like many soldiers, Napoleon had a thing about uniforms. Pauline would dress in a plumed hat and gold-braided coat to inflame his passion. She was soon nicknamed “Madame la Generale” or “Our Lady of the Orient”.

Poor Lieutenant Foures finally had to divorce his wife, while she publicly flaunted herself as Napoleon’s mistress.

It suited Napoleon for news of the affair to get back to Josephine. Napoleon ensured this by having Josephine’s son, Eugene, riding escort when Madame Foures rode around Cairo in her carriage. Napoleon even promised to marry her, if she had a baby. When she did not become pregnant, she complained that the “little idiot” did not know how to have a child. She said that it was not her fault and pointed out that, in the two years they had been married, Josephine had not had a baby either, though she had had two by her previous husband.

After the Battle of the Nile, in August 1799, Napoleon left Madame Foures in Cairo and slipped through the British blockade of Egypt. He never saw Pauline Foures again, though during the Empire he bought her a house and gave her a liberal allowance. She died at the age of ninety, in 1869, during the reign of Napoleon III.

Josephine found out about the affair in the most embarrassing possible way. Letters describing the intimate details of the liaison had been captured by the British and published in London, where correspondents for the French papers soon picked them up.

Meanwhile, a scandal over the army contracts she had secured for Lieutenant Charles had brought about an end to their relationship. So Josephine had no choice but to attempt a reconciliation with her husband. She heard that Napoleon had left Egypt and she raced for the coast, ahead of his brothers.

She got as far as Lyons before hearing that she had missed him on the road and turned back for Paris. Napoleon arrived back at their home in Rue de la Victoire to find the house empty. A few hours later, his brothers turned up. They told him everything and urged a divorce. But Napoleon loved Josephine so much he still found it hard to deal with the fact that she really had been unfaithful to him. When she finally arrived home, three days later, Napoleon had locked himself in his study. No amount of knocking or pleading would get him to open the door. She remained outside sobbing all night. In the morning, the maid suggested she get Hortense and Eugene. Napoleon loved his stepchildren and eventually he opened the door. His eyes were red with weeping and while he embraced Eugene, Josephine and Hortense knelt on the floor and hugged his knees. Soon he was unable to resist her. When his brother Lucien dropped round later, he found Napoleon and Josephine in bed together, totally reconciled.

However, the relationship had been turned on its head. Josephine now tried desperately to hold on to his love while Napoleon sought pleasure elsewhere though he never allowed the name of Hippolyte Charles to be mentioned in his presence. After the coup that made Napoleon military dictator in 1800, his chief aide-de-camp, Duroc, would procure young women and take them up to a bedroom next to Napoleon’s study. They would be told to strip and get into bed, so that they could attend to le pent general’s needs as soon as he had finished working. He even fell in love two or three times.

He made no excuse for his behaviour, telling Josephine simply: “You ought to think it perfectly natural that I am allowed amusements of this kind.”

Adultery, he said, was “a joke behind a mask… not by any means a rare phenomenon but a very ordinary occurrence on the sofa”.

Desperate to secure her position, Josephine decided that her daughter Hortense should marry his brother Louis. That way, if she could not be mother of Napoleon’s heir, she could at least be grandmother. She won Napoleon around to the scheme by “the influence exerted in the boudoir, by her repeated entreaties and her caresses”, one of Napoleon’s aides said. However, the marriage foundered when Louis heard the rumour that eighteen-year-old Hortense was having an affair with her stepfather — Napoleon himself.

During Napoleon’s second Italian campaign, in the afternoons, Napoleon would regularly send for an Italian girl “to pass the time agreeably”. He also seduced La Grassini, the prima donna of La Scala, and installed her in a house in Paris. But having a triumphant affair with the conquering hero in Milan was one thing; being the official mistress of a head of state was quite another, and Napoleon was quickly replaced by a violinist named Rhode.

Next came Louise Rolandeau of the Opera-Comique. While Josephine was away at the spa town of Plombieres, where the waters were supposed to make a woman more fertile, Napoleon invited Louise to entertain the guests at Malmaison, their country home. Josephine wrote to Hortense, who was official hostess there, to put an end to the visits.

“As if I could do anything about it,” Hortense replied.

Josephine returned to try to take control of the situation; but things went from bad to worse, when Josephine began to suspect her husband was having an affair with her young lady-in-waiting and confidante, Claire de Remusat. Josephine railed against her husband’s sexual depravity. She warned Claire that he was the “most immoral” of men.

“To hear her tell it, he had no moral principles whatsoever,” wrote Madame de Remusat. “And he concealed his vicious inclinations only for fear they would damage his reputation. If he were allowed to follow his inclinations without restraint, he would sink into the most shameful excesses. Had he not seduced his own sisters one about another? Did he consider himself especially privileged to satisfy his sexual inclinations?”

Napoleon responded innocently, asking Claire why Josephine should get upset over “these innocuous diversions of mine which in no way involve my affections”.

“I am not like other men,” he would thunder when Josephine made accusations. “The laws of morality and society are not applicable to me. I have the right to answer all your objections with the eternal I.”

Nevertheless when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor in 1803, Josephine was at his side.

Josephine used the coronation skilfully to her own advantage. When Pope Pius VII travelled to France to anoint the new Emperor, she arranged to see him privately and told him that she was concerned about the legality of her marriage. Indeed, there had only been a civil service, not a religious one. The pope was shocked and refused to play his part in the coronation unless the situation was remedied immediately.

On the evening of 1 December, 1804, in the greatest secrecy, an altar was set up in Napoleon’s study. Napoleon’s uncle, Cardinal Fesch, performed the ceremony in front of two witnesses. Afterwards, Josephine asked the Cardinal for a certificate proving that this marriage was legal and binding.