Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Josephine fostered out her thirteen-year-old son, Eugene, to General Hoche, a fellow prisoner and former lover. Then she began borrowing money to fund an extravagant lifestyle, squandering it on carriages, furniture, exotic food, flowers and fashionable clothes.

  With her slender build, topped by a riot of chestnut curls, Josephine had the perfect seductive figure for the new Directoire style. Although she did not go quite as far as her friend Madame Hamelin who walked down the Champs-Elysees naked to the waist, she could be seen bare-armed and practically bare-breasted in flimsy gowns over flesh-coloured body stockings.

  She used her well-displayed charms to persuade those in authority to give back the property that had been confiscated from her during the Terror. Her Paris apartment was unsealed and her clothes, jewels and furnishings returned. She was granted access to her late husband’s chateau and was richly compensated for the furniture, silver-ware and books that had already been sold. She was also reimbursed for the horses and equipment her husband had lost when he was stripped of his command of the Army of the Rhine. This exercise gave her all sorts of important contacts. Josephine made such a habit of sleeping with the important men in postrevolutionary France that the security services paid her for the pillow talk she garnered. It was truly amazing, a contemporary wit remarked of Josephine, that bountiful nature had the foresight to put “the wherewithal to pay her bills beneath her navel”.

  One of Josephine’s closest friends was another fellow prisoner, Therese de Fontenay. She was the daughter of a Spanish banker who distributed her favours so liberally around high government circles that she was said to have been stamped “government property”. She was the mistress of financier Gabriel Ouvard, government minister Jean Tallien, to whom she was later briefly married, and the Director himself, Paul Barras.

  Barras was a former nobleman who had joined the Revolution when he saw which way the wind was blowing. He supported the Terror; then, when the time was right, engineered Robespierre’s downfall. He became the most important man in post-revolutionary Paris and he lived in the Luxembourg Palace in a style as lavish as any pre-revolutionary salon. His taste for pleasure, a contemporary remarked, was like that of “an opulent, extravagant, magnificent and dissipated prince”.

  Therese introduced Josephine to Barras — indeed, the two of them had danced naked before him. When Barras grew tired of Therese, Josephine took her place in his bed. Some of her acquaintances were shocked, but to Josephine this was perfectly natural. Both her husband and father had been tireless adulterers and she had an aunt who slept with her father-in-law. Besides, Barras was a very handsome man.

  Josephine was definitely not the type of woman Napoleon was looking for. He was quite dismayed by the way powerful men seemed to be controlled by feckless and immoral women.

  “Women are everywhere,” he wrote to his brother, disapprovingly, “applauding in the theatre, strolling in the parks, reading in the bookshops. You will find these lovely creatures even in the wise man’s study. This is the only place in the world where they deserve to steer the ship of state. The men are mad about them, think of nothing else, and live only for them.”

  As commander of the Army of the Interior, Napoleon was now invited to all the important salons. Although there was still some debate about his charms, some young women were impressed by his classical “Grecian” features and his large eyes that seemed to light up when he spoke.

  “You would never have guessed that he was a military man,” wrote one. “There was nothing dashing about him, no swagger, no bluster, nothing rough.” Most agreed that he looked painfully thin.

  He met Josephine after an order had been issued that all weapons in private hands were to be handed in to the authorities. Josephine’s son, Eugene, had a sword that had belonged to his father. Eugene did not want to hand this memento in, so he approached the General commanding the Army of the Interior to ask if he could keep it. Impressed by the child’s filial devotion, Napoleon gave his consent.

  The next day, Josephine came to thank General Bonaparte in person. Napoleon admitted later that he was bowled over by her “extraordinary grace and her irresistibly sweet manner”. He asked if he could call on her.

  Josephine can hardly have been impressed with what she saw. This short, skinny man, with gaunt, angular features and lank hair, was hardly the sort to turn a girl’s head. But she spotted that Bonaparte was the coming man and invited him to one of her regular Thursday receptions.

  Napoleon was not comfortable in such surroundings. He was appalled that the money she spent on flowers and food for one of these soirees would have been enough to keep his family for a week. Josephine’s house, a neighbour noted, was stacked with luxuries — “only the essentials are missing”.

  Josephine’s salon was full of actors and playwrights, leaving Napoleon tongue-tied; and the beautiful women intimidated him.

  “I was not indifferent to the charms of women, but up to this time they had not spoiled me,” he said, “and my disposition made me shy in their company.”

  But with Josephine, it was different. Her attentiveness reassured him. A friend noted later that there was “a certain intriguing air of languorousness about her — a Creole characteristic apparent in her attitudes of repose as well as in her movements; all these qualities lent her a charm which more than offset the dazzling beauty of her rivals”. Before long, Napoleon was hopelessly in love.

  He must have known about her relationship with Barras — all of Paris did. They were hardly discreet. When she entertained him at her house in Croissy which he paid for- the neighbours would see baskets of luxuries turning up from early in the morning. Then a detachment of mounted police would arrive, followed by Barras and a huge party of friends.

  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 expres
sive, 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.

  Barras was as good as his word. The marriage did advance Napoleon. A week before the ceremony, Barras had made him commander of the Army of Italy.

  After the wedding Napoleon moved into Josephine’s new house at 6 Rue Chanterine. It was a secluded house set in a wooded garden. The walls and ceiling of her boudoir were mirrored, but the gilded swans gliding through a sea of pink roses on the ceiling of her bedroom had to go. In honour of Napoleon, Josephine had her bedroom redecorated like a soldier’s tent.

  On their wedding night, while they were consummating the marriage, Josephine’s pug dog Fortune, fearing that his mistress was being attacked, bit Napoleon on the leg. The dog and his insatiable mistress were all too much for Napoleon. After the necessary deed had been done, he refused further enticement and retreated to his books of strategy and tactics. After thirty-six hours, he cut the honeymoon short and went to take up his posting in Italy. It was definitely a case of “Not tonight, Josephine”.

  While Napoleon threw himself into war, the voracious Josephine amused herself with a score of generous lovers. Among them was a handsome young cavalry officer, Lieutenant Hippolyte Charles. He was tall, dashing and handsome, and she immediately fell head-over-heels in love with him.

  But Napoleon was missing his darling Josephine and summoned her to Milan.

  “Come and join me as soon as you can,” he wrote, “so that at least before we die we can say we were happy for a few days.”

  He assured her that “never was a woman loved with more devotion, more fire or more tenderness. Never has a woman been in such complete mastery of another’s heart.”

  She was busy with Charles and did not respond. When he returned one day to find that, yet again, she had not arrived “sorrow crushed my soul”, he wrote. He begged her to write to him and told her: “I love you with a love beyond the limits of imagination, that every minute of my life is consecrated to you, that never an hour passes without my thinking of you, that I have never thought of another woman.”

  Josephine eventually arrived, but was bored. Napoleon was occupied with the siege of Mantua at the time and she wrote home, saying how much she missed her other lovers. Napoleon, on the other hand, could hardly concentrate on the battle for kissing, teasing, fondling and caressing her “beautiful body”, even in front of a room full of people.

  He did not mind going even further. The French diplomat, Miot de Melito, wrote an account of a carriage ride around Lake Maggiore. He and General Berthier sat in a state of shock, he said, while on the seat opposite, Napoleon took “conjugal liberties” with his wife. The visit made him the happiest man in the world.

  “A few days ago, I thought I loved you,” he wrote afterwards, “but now since I have seen you again I love you a th
ousand times more. Everyday since I met you I have loved you more. Thousands of kisses — even one for Fortune, wicked beast that he is.”

  This was precious little comfort for Josephine.

  “My husband does not love me,” she wrote. “He worships me. I think he will go mad.”

  When Napoleon and his army advanced, he wrote to her begging her to come to Brescia where “the tenderest of lovers awaits you”. She went immediately, but only because her lover, Lieutenant Charles was now attached to Napoleon’s command.

  When the campaign turned disastrously against the French, Josephine, back in Milan, feared for the lives of her husband and her lover. Things may have been going badly because, instead of concentrating on the battle, Napoleon was taking the time to write long, passionate love letters to Josephine once or twice a day. There was just one thing on his mind.

  “A kiss upon your heart, another a little lower, another lower still, far lower!” he wrote. On another occasion, he wrote: “I kiss your breasts, and lower down, much lower down.” It is hard to strike out decisively against the enemy when all you can think of is oral sex.

  Despite the passion of his letters, Josephine rarely wrote back. When she did, she would address him as “vous” rather than the familiar “tu”. However, in her letters to Lieutenant Charles, she expresses an ardour that matches anything Napoleon came up with.

  Josephine was happy to share her husband’s intimate thoughts with others. One friend she showed his letters to noted:

  They were extraordinary letters; the handwriting almost indecipherable, the spelling shaky, the style bizarre and confused, but marked by a tone so impassioned, by emotions so turbulent, by expressions so vibrant and at the same time so poetic, by a love so apart from all other loves that no woman in the world could fail to take pride in having been their inspiration. Besides, what a position for a woman to find herself in — being the motivating force behind the triumphal march of an entire army.