And just think, it all began as an act of pure political and military calculation around the mid-sixteenth century, when Pope Paul III Farnese appointed his illegitimate son Pier Luigi, Duke of Parma, in order to establish a safe buffer zone between the Papal States and the Spanish powers ruling Lombardy, threatening expansion.
The Farnese family has an odd history, and after rising to power in Parma they went on to become owners of one of the most beautiful Renaissance palazzos in Rome, now home of the French embassy. As the nineteenth-century German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius wrote in a book chronicling his travels throughout Italy, they started out as just “a small, predatory, feudal dynasty in Etruria,” (northern Latium).1 Just picture the scene: herds of sheep, milk, cheese, fields granting only meager harvests, their patrician residence surrounded by miserable hovels, stunted children, hardships, people worn down by barely remunerated labor. Giulia Farnese, as we will see, was one of the people who brought about real change. She was a beautiful young woman, and helped to better the family’s fate by ushering it into a larger story that, strange as it sounds, was destined to merge with that of Parma. These obscure, quintessentially Italian tales combining lust, love, money, power, intrigue, illegitimate children, and personal predilections inspired nineteenth-century writers and artists just as the early romantic movement began to dissolve into atmospheres steeped in melodramatic plots, poisonings, and betrayals.
Pier Luigi Farnese was an illegitimate child. His father was still a cardinal when he fathered him with Silvia Ruffini, a Roman noblewoman who went on to give the future pope three more children. The nobles of Piacenza and Parma used to contemptuously call him “the pope’s bastard,” which certainly did not improve his ability to govern, and also worsened the steely temperament Titian so perfectly captured in his famous portrait. It ended badly, as the trustworthy account left by the chronicler Lorenzo Molossi tells us. Molossi’s text also contains the first historical mention of Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla and former French empress. We will discuss her fascinating life in a little bit; for now you need know only that in 1832 Marie Louise commissioned Molossi, an economist and geographer, to draw up a history of these places, including key events in the area. According to Molossi, this is how Pier Luigi met his miserable end:
On the fateful day of September 10, 1547, Pierluigi was in the old citadel of Piacenza. The conspirators had taken their positions, the few German guards had been bound and gagged, and some had even been killed. Count Anguissola resolutely stormed into the room where the duke was and repeatedly stabbed him until he showed no more signs of life. Anguissola and Landi then opened the window that most directly faced onto the square below and showed the corpse to the people, shouting “Freedom” and “Empire,” and then tossed it down into the pit. Once this tragedy was completed, imperial soldiers stationed nearby marched into the city, and the following day Don Ferrante Gonzaga came to take possession of the city in the name of Caesar.2
So it was a political assassination, followed by defenestration. The conspiracy was organized by Don Ferrante Gonzaga, governor of Milan, who briskly did away with anyone who annoyed him. In this particular case, Pier Luigi had annoyed Emperor Charles V. As a loyal imperial subject, Don Ferrante Gonzaga did not hesitate to enlist Anguissola and, with his help, other nobles who lent a hand in the assassination. The civic museum in Palazzo Farnese in nearby Piacenza houses a nineteenth-century painting by Lorenzo Toncini depicting the moment the daggers strike the duke, who has already collapsed on the floor. The lights, colors, and mood all look like they come straight out of the backdrop of a Verdi opera.
Despite this, the Farnese family ruled the territory for another two centuries, up until 1731. In their own way, as much as the times allowed, they led rather well: They reorganized government, founded a university, and restructured the justice system. A series of events then followed that made their mark on the duchy and its history, alternately pushing it toward conservative reaction followed by periods of fervid enlightenment, complete with the expulsion of the Jesuits, confiscation of Church property, and suppression of the ecclesiastical tribunals.
But the period that most heavily shaped the history and destiny of the city was the more than thirty-year reign of the young woman whose name appeared a few lines above, a woman history both favored and frowned upon at the same time. She was the firstborn child of Francis I, future emperor of Austria, in 1791 (the same year Mozart died). She was named Maria Ludovica Leopoldina Franziska Therese Josepha Lucia von Habsburg-Lothringen, so all her parents and grandparents were represented. At eighteen, her virginity intact, she was promised in marriage to the forty-year-old Napoleon to seal the truce between the two countries after the Austrian defeat at Wagram (1809). She had not wanted to move to Paris. Throughout the courts of Europe, Napoleon, a Corsican social climber who had ascended to the throne with a coup d’état, was considered an ogre—a violent man born into a rustic family on a semisavage island. He had usurped the imperial throne and invaded Vienna twice—once in 1805, and again in 1809—forcing the entire court to flee all the way to Hungary in search of refuge. Furthermore, Marie Louise could not forget that less than twenty years before, those same people had sent her great-aunt Marie Antoinette, nicknamed “the Austrian bitch,” to the guillotine. Nevertheless, she did go to Paris and successfully gave Napoleon the son his first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, had been unable to conceive.
At twenty-five she took possession of the Grand Duchy of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. The price she paid to get there, and how it happened, is one of the most exciting stories of the century, on both the political as well as the personal level. So many events happened, and with such speed, that in many respects her tale seems closer to fiction than to reality.
Marie Louise, or Maria Luigia as she was referred to in Italy, entered the city mid-month, on April 18, 1816. You could certainly say that she had already experienced a lot, for someone only twenty-five years old. And since she had left Vienna on March 7, you could also say that the voyage was slow going, even considering the means of transportation back then. She had very low expectations for Parma, a provincial town where (as she once wrote her father, now emperor of Austria) “I am told that there are no resources and no society, few educated women, and even fewer of any real value.”3 Her harsh judgment was confirmed soon thereafter by direct observation: “Here, society is even more boring than you might expect. I have not been able to wrest a single sensible word from the women.”4
The archduchess was certainly no intellectual, and she had always had only the most general idea of culture. But she had lived in two imperial courts where everyone, especially her ladies-in-waiting, excelled at the brilliant art of conversation, interweaving fine chit-chat with the occasional spicy bit of insinuating slander, the occasional provocative detail—in short, everything at the atmospheric core of courtly life, where anyone unfamiliar with the art of being in the world is quickly cast aside, and those who remain know no other way of life. These idle, astute little ladies spent much of their time chatting about this and that, gossiping (circumstances permitting) about the prowess, tastes, preferences, and prerogatives of the men they knew, all accompanied by complicit giggles, mischievous reticence, gracious little gestures, and allusive smiles quickly masked behind their fluttering fans.
All this was clearly lacking in Parma, although Marie Louise only occasionally expressed worry over it. Indeed, in another letter to her father she wrote: “My sole desire is to spend my life here in the greatest calm possible.”5
Her marriage to Napoleon had been difficult, nor could it have been otherwise, when you consider the tempestuous tumult that rained down on her indomitable husband between 1810 and 1815.
The emperor probably had loved, in his own way, the timid young woman who had given him his much-desired son, king of Rome, l’Aiglon (“The Eaglet,” as he was nicknamed), the boy he dreamed would one day be crowned Napoleon II. But the status of their marriag
e was disputed by many, and Pope Pius VII actually considered it null and void, as if it had never happened. In this sense, Napoleon found himself in the same bind as the English king Henry VIII. He, too, had been unable to raise a male heir from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and he needed a son in order to ensure the continuation of his dynasty. The Spanish-born Catherine was six years older than her husband and had had numerous pregnancies, but all except one ended in miscarriage. The one she carried to term resulted in the birth of a female queen, who later earned herself the nickname Bloody Mary.
Henry had solved the problem by making a clean break with the Church. When Pope Clement VII refused to grant him a divorce from Catherine, he simply declared a schism and founded his own church, headed by the king of England—himself—and his successors. Napoleon could not afford to do the same. Henry knew that, in so doing, he was also following the deep desire of his people, who supported the idea of cutting all ties to the Church of Rome, which they considered so far away, so corrupt, and ultimately too “Mediterranean.” Things were different for Napoleon because his subjects had different religious sentiments. Pope Pius VII’s excommunication of Napoleon had damaged his standing—we must not forget that (outside of England, at least) the coronation of a king took place “by the Grace of God,” and that the pope was God’s representative on Earth. A schism would have been too much. And so he resorted to an oft-used stratagem within the bounds of the Roman Rota (the Roman Catholic Church’s highest appellate tribunal), even for less illustrious men. The ecclesiastical tribunal in Paris annulled Napoleon’s marriage to Joséphine, using the simplest, most abrupt way of working the system to avoid a formal divorce decree.
Back in Vienna, however, things were not so simple. Sigismund Anton von Hohenwart, archbishop of the Austrian capital, reminded Emperor Francis I that his daughter would not have been able to marry Napoleon without concrete proof that his previous marriage to Joséphine was null and void. They called upon the skills of Prince Metternich to ensure that their union was within legal bounds.
I bring all this up not to add biographical color to the story’s characters, but simply because this episode—in which Marie Louise was a passive subject, rather than an active participant—ended up affecting her life until the day she arrived in Parma.
In any case, the woman had fulfilled her primary duty to Bonaparte by giving birth to an heir. The wedding was celebrated by proxy in Vienna on March 27, 1810. The crown prince and king of Rome was born in Paris on March 20, 1811, after twelve hours of labor. The process had been so painful that afterward the poor girl had fainted, and the child was left on the floor for a few minutes because the doctors thought he was stillborn. When the obstetrician finally lifted him up, just to follow protocol and scrub him off a bit, he noticed the baby’s heart was beating.
But lingering doubts about the legitimacy of their wedding never entirely dissipated. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which sought to restore the balance between the European monarchies following Napoleon’s turbulent sweep across the continent, the legitimists continued to cast doubt on whether Marie Louise could really be considered the wife of the emperor, instead of his concubine—which would make her the mother of a bastard.
Such a situation would have been a source of deep pain for any mother, and it certainly was for Marie Louise as well—but that was only partially due to the circumstances of her life between March 29, 1814, the day when she had to leave Paris after being appointed regent, and the final collapse following Waterloo on June 18, 1815.
Chateaubriand paints the details of her flight from Paris in vivid detail. It was as hasty and humiliating as the fall of any dying regime, and took place amid great pressure from the Austrian Uhlans and Tsar Alexander’s Cossacks:
The Regency had retired to Blois. Bonaparte had given orders for the Empress and the King of Rome to leave Paris, saying he would rather see them at the bottom of the Seine than taken to Vienna in triumph; but at the same time he urged [his brother] Joseph to stay in the capital. His brother’s flight made him furious, and he accused the King of Spain of ruining everything. The Ministers, the members of the Regency, Napoleon’s brothers, his wife and his son arrived in disorder at Blois, swept away by the debacle; wagons, baggage-vans, carriages, everything was there; even the King’s coaches had been brought along and were dragged through the mud of the Beauce … Some of the ministers did not stop there, but went on to hide in Brittany.…6
How did Marie Louise react to the trauma of those terrible events? Some claim that her emotional, sensual, and externally determined relationship with Napoleon, which had never been entirely resolved, finally broke off. On March 30, 1814, Paris capitulated, and the next day the Allies marched victoriously through the city.
The Cossacks were led by Tsar Alexander himself, and even Frederick William III of Prussia wallowed in the victory, followed by his retinue. Francis I of Austria was not present, and sent Field Marshal Schwarzenberg in his place—a delicate gesture in recognition of his fugitive daughter and grandson, and perhaps even of his defeated son-in-law.
Bonaparte, exiled to the island of Elba, wrote to his wife several times, first asking and then ordering her to join him. There was a significant precedent that allowed the former emperor to hold out hope: When he took off on the Russian campaign in May 1812, Marie Louise had accompanied him to Dresden before he went onward en route to Moscow with his 600,000 troops, the largest army ever assembled. Once again, Chateaubriand portrays the scene for us:
Whenever Bonaparte walked through the palace at Dresden to go to a reception which had been prepared, he went first, in advance, his hat on his head; Francis II followed, hat in hand, accompanying his daughter, the Empress Marie-Louise; the crowd of princes followed behind, randomly, in respectful silence.7
This masterful sketch conveys the situation in the court, as well as the hierarchical differences between father-in-law and son-in-law. But those days were now over. The Russian campaign—where 400,000 men died, a full two thirds of the army—marked the end of Napoleon, and Waterloo was nothing more than the tragic confirmation of his fall. Those grand days are over, and the situation has radically changed. Napoleon is exiled to Elba and asks his wife to join him, but she refuses, replying that she would rather go to Vienna to look after their son and safeguard his future. Chateaubriand goes on to say:
Marie-Louise hastened to join her father: indifferently attached to Bonaparte, she found the opportunity to console herself and rejoiced at being freed from the double tyranny of a husband and master.8
“She found the opportunity to console herself,” the author wryly remarks. Indeed, that “consolation” accompanied her all the way to Parma. Marie Louise often consulted General Neipperg, whom her father had sent her as counselor, for advice. His full name was Count Adam Albert von Neipperg, and he was a brilliant hussar officer. He had lost his right eye in battle, and was distinguished both in combat and as a diplomat—first at the Swedish court in Stockholm, then for the king of Naples, Joachim Murat, whom he had (temporarily) persuaded to abandon Napoleon. He had been the married father of four children, but became a widower in his early forties. He wore a showy black patch, covering his eye socket with ostentatious pride—such was the man who was to guide the inexperienced Marie Louise. He performed his task with great skill, accompanying the deposed regent first to Aix-les-Bains, then on the return journey to Vienna. While they were in Switzerland, during a hike on Mount Rigi, known locally as the Königin der Berge or “Queen of the Mountains,” the couple was caught in a heavy rainstorm. They took refuge at an inn promisingly named Zur goldenen Sonne, “Under the Golden Sun.” Soaked to the bone, they dried off in front of a robust fire and sipped a glass of wine to warm up. Meanwhile, night had fallen. In the darkness between September 25 and 26, 1814, the event that had been a long time coming finally took place, and it changed Marie Louise’s life forever.
This explains why the doubts surrounding the legitimacy of her marriage only troubled t
he archduchess up to a point. If, as the legitimists claimed, her marriage to Napoleon had never really occurred and was null from the very start, then by becoming General Neipperg’s mistress she was not committing adultery, she was simply a free woman pursuing a relationship with the man she loved. During the Congress of Vienna the papal ambassador Antonio Gabriele Severoli distributed a memorandum that reiterated the fact that the marriage between Napoleon and Marie Louise had never been valid from the canonical point of view, because the pope had not officially annulled his previous marriage to Joséphine. Furthermore, some informants had reported that the former emperor had received visits from his former lover, Maria Walewska, in his residence on Elba. She had apparently traveled all the way from Poland to alleviate his exile. These two reasons more than sufficed to cure Marie Louise of any guilt she might have felt for having succumbed to the attentions of the bold general.
This, then, was the woman who entered Parma on April 18, 1816. She left the turmoil of recent events behind her and looked squarely ahead, fostering some tentative hopes for greater tranquility.
She had had to leave her son in Vienna; the victorious powers had sent his father off to rot on an isolated rock in the middle of the ocean, and did not want the child to remain in Parma, for fear he might attract attention from potential pro-Bonaparte nostalgics. They thought it best he return to Vienna, where he would be brought up as an Austrian archduke and forget all about his father and mother. They even changed his name: he was no longer Napoleon, but became Francis, just like his grandfather—Franz for short. For a while Marie Louise hoped, in truth without much conviction, that the boy might one day succeed her. But she soon had to abandon the idea and settle for what her new life offered, which was quite a lot. Neipperg became de facto ruler of the duchy and stayed in close contact with Vienna, but made sure that Marie Louise retained the power granted her as duchess. She proved to be an enlightened ruler, not least because Neipperg held much more liberal positions than those that prevailed in the Austrian capital. Indeed, his differences with Vienna were often stark enough to trigger serious dispute. As for Marie Louise, as soon as she got to town she had to deal with an outbreak of typhoid fever. She rose to the occasion, and even ventured out to assess the situation firsthand. Almost five hundred people died, but the epidemic was eradicated in just a few short months. She was also committed to bettering the lives of women, and since she had suffered so horribly during childbirth she decided to found a new clinic for obstetrics and gynecology. She also displayed an endearing sense of imagination, a rather unusual quality in your average government functionary, and commissioned a new bridge over the Taro River, inaugurated in 1819. Twenty-five “girls of marriageable age” were summoned for the occasion, and each was given a dowry of 250 lire. A few days later Marie Louise wrote to her governess and confidante Vittoria Colloredo: “The party was superb, thanks both to the weather and the number of spectators, and although my health remains fragile I nevertheless rejoiced because that bridge and another one across the Trebbia River, as well as some of my charitable ventures, are the only monuments I want to leave behind; I shall leave luxury to my successors.”9
The Secrets of Italy Page 16
