Nigel Cawthorne: Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

Napoleon’s family hated Josephine and would do anything to get rid of her. They frequently put potential lovers his way. His sister Caroline introduced the ambitious and attractive Marie Antoinette Duchatel to court. Josephine soon suspected that Napoleon had taken her as his mistress. One day, she noticed that both her husband and Madame Duchatel were absent from the salon. She found them in a locked room and began frantically banging on the door. When Napoleon opened it, he and Madame Duchatel were naked. Madame Duchatel fled and Josephine burst into tears, while Napoleon stormed up and down, kicking the furniture and threatening to divorce her if she did not stop her spying.

Josephine lived in constant fear that one of Napoleon’s mistresses would conceive. She was certain that he would divorce her as barren and marry someone who could give him a son.

Next Caroline provided the attractive eighteen-year-old Eleonore Denuelle, whose husband had just been arrested for forgery. Caroline kept Eleonore under constant surveillance and delivered her to the Tuileries for regular meetings with Napoleon. That way Napoleon could be sure that, if she conceived, the child would be his.

In September 1806, she became pregnant. Josephine said nothing and simply resigned herself to her fate. When Eleonore Denuelle gave birth to a son, Napoleon proudly claimed to be the father. But still he did not drop Josephine. Later he learned that his sister’s attempts to keep Eleonore Denuelle away from other men may not have been as successful as they had hoped. It seems that Caroline’s own husband, Joachim Murat, may well have been the father of Eleonore’s child.

Many of Napoleon’s affairs passed unnoticed, but his liaison with Marguerite Weymer (later called the “whale” because she became immensely fat) caused quite a scandal. When Napoleon knew her, she was a voluptuous sixteen-year-old actress from the Comedie-Francaise. In the evenings, Marguerite would be smuggled into a room near his study where, after his day’s work was over, he would amuse himself with her before finding his way back to his own bedroom.

Josephine would sometimes find the waiting unbearable. One night she tried to catch Napoleon and Marguerite together, only to find her way barred by Roustam, Napoleon’s fierce Mameluke guard.

On another occasion, just as Napoleon and Marguerite were starting to make love, he blacked out with an epileptic convulsion. Marguerite let out a scream that woke the whole household. Napoleon came round to find Josephine, Claire de Remusat and a dozen members of the palace staff crowded around the bed. In bed beside him was a naked Marguerite.

If this was not bad enough, Marguerite Weymer was also known in Parisian society as Mademoiselle Georges. Napoleon finally dropped her when an erotic book was published showing her engaged in homosexual acts with her lesbian lover, Raucort.

Napoleon did nothing to hide his lovers from Josephine. In front of the court, he would recount the virtues, physical imperfections and anatomical peculiarities of his latest lover “with the most indecent openness”. Soon the details would be winging their way via diplomats” couriers to the governments of Europe. But Josephine was so determined to hang on to her position as consort that she tolerated this humiliation. She even helped him get rid of women he had tired of.

Although pamphlets circulated making out that Napoleon was a Hercules among lovers, the truth was far more mundane. In her memoirs, Mademoiselle Georges said it was only at their third meeting that they went to bed together. He was not very physical and never forced himself on her, though he occasionally displayed outbursts of jealousy over former lovers. Once, she recalled, he pranced about the bedroom naked with a wreath of white roses on his head.

The novelist Stendhal knew Napoleon and described the Emperor in the evening, sitting at a small table signing decrees. “When a lady was announced, he would ask her — without looking up from his work — to go and wait for him in the bed. Later, with a candlestick in his hand, he would show her out of the bedroom and return to his table and his endless decrees.

The essential part of the rendezvous had not lasted three minutes.”

One nervous actress was greeted curtly with: “Come in. Undress. Lie down.”

Sometimes it did not even get that far. Once he sent a servant to get Mademoiselle Duchesnois, another actress from the Comedie-Francaise. When she arrived at his apartment in the Tuileries she was told to wait. After two hours, the servant went to Napoleon to remind him that Mademoiselle Duchesnois was waiting. He said: “Tell her to get undressed.”

She stripped off. For another hour, she sat there nude. Then the servant went to Napoleon to remind him again. This time the Emperor said: “Tell her to go home.” She dressed and left.

Josephine actually made things easier for him. She liked to be surrounded by pretty young ladies-in-waiting. When Napoleon was in what he called his “rutting season”, he would take his pick.

“Love is a singular passion, turning men into beasts,” he said. “I come into season like a dog.”

As Napoleon’s power increased, his lovemaking became more perfunctory; but it was important for him to keep up his image. In later life, he admitted his “feebleness in the game of love; it did not amount to much”.

Napoleon’s confidant General Louis de Caulaincourt summed up the situation: “It was rarely that he felt any need of love, or indeed pleasure in it. The Emperor was so eager to recount his amorous successes that one might almost have imagined he only engaged in them for the sake of talking about them.”

In fact, Napoleon did not like women very much. He was candid in his opinions: “We treat women too well and by doing so have spoilt everything. We have been very wrong indeed to raise them to our own level. The Orientals are much more intelligent and sensible making women slaves.”

Men, he thought, should have several wives.

“What do most ladies have to complain of? Don’t we acknowledge they have souls… They demand equality! Pure madness! Woman is our property.. just as the fruit tree belongs to the gardener.”

Napoleon was also convinced of the “weakness of the female intellect”. His brother Joseph, he complained, was “forever shut away with some woman reading Torquato Tasso and Aretino”. No doubt the flames of Napoleon’s romanticism had certainly been dampened by Josephine’s affair with Hippolyte Charles.

Not only did Josephine have to worry about her husband’s infidelity at home, he was frequently abroad where she could not keep an eye on him. After a successful campaign against the Prussians in 1806, he moved on into Poland and Josephine began to fret about “Polish beauties”.

“Here in the wastes of Poland, one gives little thought to beauties,” he wrote back. “Besides there is only one woman for me. Do you know her? I could describe her to you but I don’t want you to become conceited; yet, in truth, I could say nothing but good about her. The nights are long here, all alone.”

But he was not all alone for long. After a minor victory over the Russians at Pultusk, Napoleon was hailed as the liberator of Poland. At a huge reception given for him in the Palace of the Kings in Warsaw, Napoleon spotted the twenty-year-old Countess Marie Walewska. She looked up to him as her hero. He made it clear that she was the sort of woman that he wanted to see later, in private.

She was married to a seventy-year-old count and was reputed to be chaste, modest and deeply religious. She refused his profuse invitations to share his bed. Expensive gifts did not work. When he sent her a box of jewels, she threw it on the floor.

“He must take me for a prostitute,” she said.