Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Napoleon finally turned the tide at Rivoli; and his passion for her did seem to spur him on.

  “My every action is designed with the sole purpose of reuniting with you,” he wrote. “I am driving myself to death to reach you again.”

  Two days after the battle, he wrote to her in relief:

  I am going to bed with my heart full of your adorable image. I cannot wait to give you proof of my ardent love. I-low happy I would be if I could assist at your undressing the little firm white breasts, the adorable face, the hair tied up in a scarf a la Creole. You know that I never forget the little visits to, you know, the little black forest. I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the moment I will be in it. To live with Josephine is to live in the Elysian fields. Kisses on your mouth, your eyes, your breast, everywhere, everywhere.

  Six days later he was back in Milan. He ran up the staircase of the Serbelloni Palace to find her bedroom empty. She was in Genoa with Lieutenant Charles. For nine days he waited for her, writing her tortured, passionate, pitiful letters:

  I left everything to see you, to hold you in my arms. The pain I feel is incalculable. I don’t want you to change any plans for parties, or to be interested in the happiness of a man who lives only for you. I am not worth it. When I beg you to equal a love like mine, I am wrong. Why should I expect lace to weigh as much as gold? May the fates concentrate in me all sorrows and all grief, but give Josephine only happy days. When I am sure that she can no longer love me, I will be silent and content only to be useful to her.

  After he sealed the envelope, he re-opened it and added desperately: “Oh Josephine, Josephine!”

  Napoleon still did not understand his wife’s depth of feeling for Lieutenant Charles.

  Although he had heard that they spent a lot of time together, he considered Charles a fop — hardly a rival for a victorious general like himself. Back in Paris, his brother and sister told Napoleon that Josephine was using her influence to secure lucrative army contracts for her lover.

  When Napoleon confronted Josephine, she burst into tears and denied everything. If he wanted a divorce, he should just say so, she said. Napoleon was all too eager to believe his wife innocent. He even believed her when she said that she would break all communication with Charles. But directly after the confrontation, she wrote to Charles, saying: “No matter how they torment me, they will never separate me from my Hippolyte. My last sigh will be for him. Goodbye my Hippolyte, a thousand kisses as fiery as my heart, and as loving.”

  A few days later they were back together again in a secret assignation because “only you can restore me to happiness. Tell me that you love me, that you love me alone. That will make me the happiest of women. I am yours, all yours.”

  The two lovers were separated when Napoleon took Josephine to Toulon, where he was embarking his army for Egypt. Before leaving, Napoleon summoned General Dumas to his bedroom where Napoleon and Josephine were lying naked under a sheet. Once they had conquered Egypt, Napoleon said, they would send for their wives and do their utmost to impregnate them with sons. Dumas would stand godfather to the young Bonaparte.

  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 w
ould 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.

  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.