by Alan Schom
Rose’s mother, nee Rose Claire des Vergers de Sannois, was left with the management of the plantation and the raising of their three children, all girls: Catherine Désirée following one year after Rose, and Marie Franchise two years later, in 1766.[43]
Both parents were disappointed; they needed sons to manage the plantation and daughters-in-law with substantial dowries to restore it and pay their debts. Having three daughters had inflicted only further despair on a family hopelessly in debt, with the misfortune of having to provide three dowries instead of receive them. Thus Rose’s father drank himself into a premature old age.
Education was not a priority for girls in colonial families, however prestigious their name, and at ten the almost illiterate Yvette was sent to a convent school at nearby Fort Royal, where dancing and music classes were the focus of the curriculum, with all scholarly subjects carefully omitted. At the age of fourteen she returned home. She had grown prematurely almost into a woman, but she was little enhanced so far as knowledge was concerned, knowing nothing of mathematics, history, geography, or literature. The girl was a burden on the family and had to be married off.
And thus father and daughter (now called Rose) set sail for France in October 1777, where Joseph Tascher’s sister, Désirée, agreed to look after the girl and find a suitable spouse for her. A marriage contract had been arranged with the son of Martinique’s worthless former governor and lieutenant-general of all the French Windward Island possessions (then including Guadeloupe, Dominique, St. Lucia, Grenada, and Tobago) — the marquis de Beauharnais. Although the marquis’s first choice had been Catherine Désirée, she had just died of tuberculosis and Rose was accepted in her stead. In September 1779 Joseph Tascher de La Pagerie and his daughter duly landed at Brest, where a carriage was waiting to fetch them to the imposing Beauharnais mansion in Paris. For Rose a new world had opened, and she was terribly excited.
After months of haggling the final marriage contract was signed, Rose’s father agreeing to pay a dowry of one hundred thousand livres — the franc did not replace the livre until 1795 — and the cost of her trousseau. He did not have a sou to his name but signed anyway — as he had his many gambling debts. In December 1779 the plump sixteen-year-old Rose married the self-styled Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais.
It did not prove a good match. After counseling his wife on what to study and read in order to repair her shocking — indeed embarrassing — illiteracy in every field and on every subject, he gave her long reading lists and thence repaired to his regiment in Brittany, where one of his many aristocratic mistresses was impatiently awaiting his return. Remaining at home with her in-laws during his long absences, Rose, ever a lazy child, proved an equally lazy student, doing little to improve herself. Nor did her husband mend his ways, one of his mistresses giving birth to a son, while Rose provided him with two children, a son, Eugène Rose, born in 1781, followed by a daughter, Hortense Eugénie, two years later.
Relations deteriorated quickly, the two rarely meeting. The dashing young husband finally sent her some acrimonious, even menacing letters, calling her “in my eyes, the vilest of creatures” and accusing her of having an affair and of providing him with a “bastard” daughter, Hortense, all of which was utter nonsense. Still not content, the soldier then kidnapped his son and sold all their furniture as well as all the jewelry he had given Rose, leaving her both bewildered and broke. A lawsuit was brought against Alexandre de Beauharnais, and he agreed to a separation. He would pay his wife five thousand livres per annum and retract all his unfounded accusations. That grotesque misalliance was effectively at an end.
Suddenly on her own, with two children to care for, Rose now applied herself to the reading and social education that she so badly needed in the French aristocratic circles of the day. She also acquired several agreeable gentlemen, much older than herself, to provide her with a little companionship — and financial help.
Finally reduced to a state of absolute poverty, however, in 1787 she borrowed enough money to sail back to Martinique, where she remained for the next two years, enjoying what social opportunities the local garrison officers and fellow planters could provide. But even there, with little to spend, she accumulated considerable debts to local merchants. It was a weakness she was never to overcome. If she saw a pretty pair of boots, or just some fetching lace, she had to buy them.
In the meantime, of course, the French Revolution had broken out, quickly making itself felt in the colonies as well. In the first week of September 1790 the white population of Martinique was warned that French mutineers and rebelling blacks were about to attack their settlements, which gave Rose the impetus she needed to leave. With the launching of the attack against Fort Royal and the French naval fleet, she was given emergency permission to sail to France.
The Paris she found in 1790 was emotionally a very different place from the city she had left. Most of the aristocrats who had not emigrated, such as Mirabeau, Lafayette, and Talleyrand, supported the initial revolutionary reforms. Her estranged husband, Alexandre, had been elected to the Constituent Assembly, while Rose remained politically undecided. But events moved quickly, including King Louis XVI’s attempted flight from the country and return to Paris as a state prisoner in June 1791. The Constituent Assembly was replaced by the Legislative Assembly, and all sorts of traditional aristocratic rights and privileges were abolished. Then on April 20, 1792, France declared war on Austria.
Wartime France was very different indeed. By 1793 Rose’s husband, now commanding the powerful Army of the Rhine, was defeated and fled from Mainz, for which he was arrested. Rose attempted to intervene on his behalf only to find herself arrested as well, in April 1794, perhaps because of her attempt to save her husband, or perhaps because she was an aristocrat and the prejudices of the masses ruled the day.
No sooner did she find herself imprisoned, in the former Carmelite monastery in Paris known as Les Carmes, than she discovered Beauharnais there. He was beheaded on July 22, and Josephine was informed she would inevitably follow. So the days passed in the crowded, fetid conditions of the dank stone prison. But after the active intervention of Citizen Jean-Lambert Tallien on her behalf, and the fall of Robespierre on July 27, 1794, much to her astonishment Rose suddenly found herself free.
By now she had acquired definite political views, which she shared with another liberated inmate of Les Carmes, Lazare Hoche, as they began their long liaison. It was months after her release that she became closely involved with the Chaumière crowd, which included Barras.
In mid-October 1795 Napoleon was invited for the first time to Rose’s little house on the Rue Chantereine. Thereafter, at her request, they saw each other frequently. By now Napoleon had become quite the grand homme of the capital. Not only were his boots shining, but he kept an immaculate new coach drawn by four splendid horses, which took him regularly to the Opera, where he maintained a private box. These were just the sort of things to appeal to the feckless Rose, who still continued to sleep with both Barras and Hoche, while — perhaps not yet realizing it — beginning a new romance with the Corsican general.
Napoleon for his part was now working hand-in-glove with Barras, seeing him almost daily after the Directory moved, on November 5, from the Tuileries into the Luxembourg Palace, where Barras headed both the Ministries of the Interior and of the Police, with Lazare Carnot temporarily at the War Office and Jean-François Reubell directing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Hotel Gallifet. Despite his debauched nightlife, somehow Barras managed to maintain a dignified air, in his long, old-fashioned military coat and glistening black boots, all enhanced by “a martial air.” He was also very clever, a political survivor. He alone of the five ruling directors, however, rejected the absurd costume devised by the “art dictator of France,” Jacques-Louis David, which included a scarlet toga, knee breeches, and an azure sash. It was a comedy, and he said so. That Rose was at the Luxembourg almost nightly, along with her inseparable friend, Thérésia Tallien, could
hardly have been lost on the eagle-eyed Napoleon, nor could the continuing echoes of Rose’s close ties with the mighty revolutionary hero, General Hoche.
But it was she who had encouraged Napoleon in the first place, writing on October 20: “You no longer come to see a friend who is fond of you...Come to lunch with me tomorrow...Goodnight, mon ami, je vous embrasse.” Signed “the Widow Beauharnais.”
“No one desires your friendship more than I,” he replied the same day. But within a matter of weeks the tone had changed, passion ringing through his replies — if not hers. “I awake every day with thoughts only of you...Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what a strange effect you have on me!”[44] Napoleon did not like the name Rose — or the old reputation attached to it. He changed her name for her. And by the next letter he also had dropped the formal vous for tu. Indeed, despite the lady’s reputation, Napoleon was soon pressing her to marry him, a suit she teasingly refused to take seriously. When it got down to basics, he was startled to learn that though her family did own a large property in Martinique, it was still deeply in debt, providing her with less than two thousand francs a year in income. By the end of the year Napoleon was sharing her nights alternately with Barras and Hoche. It was becoming a bit complicated, even by French standards.
Meanwhile, Napoleon’s days had suddenly become extremely busy, as his revised campaign plan for the invasion of Italy was approved by War Minister Carnot in January 1796. In the last week of February, Napoleon was formally nominated as commander of the Army of Italy — Barras’s dowry, the humorists quipped. A long-vacillating Josephine, over the protests of her friends and her own children, now finally agreed to a civil wedding with “Bonaparte,” as she always called him. It was still pretty much of a joke, she told her friends.
A little before 7:00 P.M. on March 6, in the office of one of the arrondissement mayors of Paris, Josephine arrived in a white (Napoleon’s favourite color for women) muslin dress and a tricolor sash, with a necklace of chains of her hair around her slender neck, bearing a medallion on which was engraved: “To Destiny.” Jean-Lambert Tallien and his wife, Theresia, Paul Barras, and her notary,[45] Calmelet, served as the bride’s witnesses. Napoleon had sent only the eighteen-year-old Captain Le Marois. By 10:00 P.M., with no sign of the groom, the mayor gave up and stalked out. When Napoleon finally did arrive from his office, quite distrait, the various certificates and documents were hastily — and fraudulently — completed, Josephine giving her birth date as 1767 (instead of 1763), and Napoleon his as 1768 (instead of 1769), adding to his misdemeanor by naming Paris as the place of his birth (not Ajaccio). These irregularities were compounded by two more, Napoleon’s witness being underage (still technically a minor), and the mayor’s replacement, one Collin, in fact not even legally authorized to perform wedding ceremonies!
The bells of the Eglise St.-Roch were still ringing out the last seconds of the day as General and Madame Bonaparte passed on their way to number 6 Rue Chantereine. Two days later the bridegroom’s carriage left the capital for the Comté de Nice and the invasion of Italy.
Chapter Three – “A New Alexander the Great”
‘For the first time, I no longer considered myself a mere general but a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples.’
The military situation in Europe was somewhat confused. France faced the remaining members of the First Coalition: the emperor of Austria; the king of Sardinia, Victor Amadeus III; and Great Britain. Habsburg-dominated northern Italy included the Duchy of Milan, Mantua, Modena, and Lucca, while a scion of the Austrian royal house reigned over the Duchy of Tuscany at Florence. A Spanish Bourbon, Ferdinand IV, ruled the southern part of the peninsula, including Naples and Sicily, while also controlling the Duchy of Parma in the north. There was considerable dissatisfaction in the Papal States, including Rome and Bologna, where signs of revolt had already appeared. To the north, the king of Sardinia had already lost Savoy and Nice to the French and was bent on revenge, leaving Piedmont as well as Lombardy in a tense state.
French strategy was to launch two northern armies across the Rhine, their objective to crush the Austrians and seize Vienna, where (it was hoped) Napoleon’s Army of Italy would join them after sweeping across northern Italy. The French government was concentrating its major effort in the north, considering Napoleon’s ragtag Army of Italy a mere sideshow.
The latter was indeed in a poor state on Napoleon’s arrival at Nice in late March 1796. He found its subcommanders — Gens. Andre Masséna, Charles Pierre François Augereau, Jean Mathieu Philibert Sérurier, A. E. F. Laharpe, and H. O. M. Stengel, not to mention his chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Louis Alexandre Berthier — demoralized. Their spirits were hardly lifted on seeing this stunted, grim-looking twenty-six-year-old foreigner, who was their junior both in age and seniority of rank. Just another political general, most of them had described him, this darling of the Directory whose new wife, “that Beauharnais woman,” was the talk of Paris. In fact, Napoleon only had four friends with him, his aides-de-camp Col. Joachim Murat, Major Junot, the twenty-two-year-old Captain Marmont, and his own seventeen-year-old brother, Louis. Little did Bonaparte or any of these men realize that over the next few years six of them were destined to become legendary military figures as the marshals of an empire that was to seize, shake, and throttle Europe and the world.
The background of these future marshals — most of them from working-class families — was as varied as it was frequently startling. Masséna was born in Nizza (Nice) in 1758. The small, dark, slender boy came from a long line of grocers. If until the age of six life appeared to offer this young subject of the king of Sardinia some stability and modest prospects, all was much changed with his father’s premature death.
His mother remarried quickly and soon abandoned André, leaving him with one of his uncles. For the next few years the boy worked in the uncle’s pasta shop, preparing and cutting spaghetti. As for school, for the working classes there was none. Approaching his tenth birthday, André fled over the Var and into France, where a relative found him a position for the next several years as a cabin boy and then a sailor on long sea voyages. By the age of seventeen, however, he never wanted to see another ship as long as he lived. Unusually small and wiry, he was as fully grown as he ever would be. The future did not seem bright; still illiterate, he had little to offer the world.
The Royal Italian Regiment of the French Army did accept him, however, and in its ranks he spent the next fourteen years. Quite intelligent, he finally learned how to read and write and ultimately reached the rank of sergeant-major in 1789, when he was automatically required to retire. The coming of the Revolution was to prove his salvation: He was elected an officer of the National Guard and then advanced to a battalion of volunteers in 1791. By 1794 Masséna found himself a major general in the French army.
He may not have had “either education or good manners,” as Captain Thiébault, just assigned to his regiment in Nice in 1796, remarked, “but his face reflected much wisdom and energy, while he had the penetrating eyes of an eagle.” He was respected by his officers and men alike, who had real confidence in him. He bore himself “in a most dignified manner and proved to be provokingly audacious. His gestures were imperative...and his speech brief and to the point.”[46] His relations with an equally dapper Italian-speaking Bonaparte would not always be easy, given both men’s proud, strong, independent nature.
If Masséna’s youth seemed uninspiring, it had been a veritable bed of roses compared with that of Augereau. Born in Paris in 1757, the son of a household servant, the boy spent his childhood in the streets of the capital without any parental interest or supervision, and with the inevitable results. Recruited into the army at the age of seventeen, the tall, scarcely literate, gruff Augereau did not survive even in the barracks, being dishonorably discharged for a serious but hushed-up offense. Undiscouraged, the cold Augereau — “the brigand,” his own troops would later call him — joined a private regiment of carabiniers. Instead of bein
g grateful for a fresh start, however, Augereau deserted in Switzerland.
By now no one wanted the roughneck except the aging King Frederick of Prussia, on condition that he remain a private. After a few more years Augereau deserted again — or was he cashiered? Ever the optimist, the swashbuckling rogue decided to exchange dreary gray Prussian skies for the azure waters of Italy, serving for a while as a sergeant in the army of the king of the Two Sicilies, at Naples. For once ending his career honorably, he next established himself as a fencing master, at which he did well enough to marry the daughter of a Greek merchant. But when the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Augereau, regrettably a member of the barbarous French who had arrested the French royal family, was ordered to quit the kingdom forthwith. Returning eventually to France, he joined the Paris National Guard, transferring to a volunteer regiment two years later, and by the end of the next year the ex-sergeant suddenly found himself elected a major general! Only in France...After campaigning in the western Pyrenees for two years, he now found himself in Nice facing a little Corsican general a full head shorter than himself and equally arrogant. They disliked each other on sight.
As for Sérurier, in him Bonaparte had a very different man indeed. Born in Laon fifty-four years earlier, the son of a “royal mole-catcher” for the breeding stables of Louis XV, the young man was surprisingly granted a commission in a militia battalion in 1755, then integrated into the regular army, serving in the Seven Years’ War, but thereafter limited in advancement because he was not of noble birth. Thanks to the Revolution, however, he was a colonel by 1792 and was promoted to major general a year before joining Napoleon at Nice. He was one of the few general officers during the Empire to have served in a regular capacity as a career officer before the Revolution.
