Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

by Nigel Cawthorne

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

  Impassioned letters did not work either; neither did veiled threats.

  “Think how much dearer your country would be to me if you take pity on my poor heart,” he wrote.

  A delegation begged Count Walewski to force Marie to “surrender herself for Poland. He did so and she went unwillingly to Napoleon’s private apartments in Warsaw. There, he flung his watch on the floor and crushed it under his heel, saying that he would grind her people into the dust if she did not succumb. Then he “swooped” on her like “an eagle on a dove”. She fainted. So he raped the unconscious woman, merely noting that “she did not struggle overmuch”.

  Despite this inauspicious beginning, the affair lasted for three years and contemporaries maintained that the charming and devoted Marie was the only woman he ever really loved.

  During his stay in Poland they lived together in Schloss Finckenstein and Napoleon called her his “Polish wife”. The only problem was that, despite the fact that she had had one child by her seventy-year-old husband, Napoleon did not seem to be able to make her pregnant. But eventually, after he had returned to France, she sent word that she had had a son.

  While there had always been some doubt over the paternity of Eleonore Denuelle’s child, Napoleon believed that Marie’s child was his. Marie’s husband gave the child his name and, as Count Alexandre Walewski, he rose to prominence under Napoleon III. However, Countess Walewska’s “sacrifice” was seen to be in vain. Later, Napoleon made a treaty with the Czar, agreeing that the very words “Poland” and “Polish” be “obliterated not only from any transaction, but from history itself”.

  Convinced, at last, that he was not sterile, Napoleon decided to divorce Josephine and marry someone who could give him a legitimate heir. Tired of war, he decided that dynastic alliance was a better policy. He fancied marrying a Russian Grand Duchess. The Dowager Empress was against it, claiming that Napoleon was “not as other men”. If the Grand Duchess did marry him, she warned, in order to have children she would have to entertain another man in her bed.

  Prince Frederick Louis of Mecklenburg-Schwerin was despatched to Paris to investigate. Josephine, terrified of divorce as ever, lost Napoleon his Romanov bride by telling the Prince that Napoleon was impotent — “Bonaparte est bon a faire rien [Bonaparte is good for nothing],” she said.

  Later, after her divorce, the twenty-nine-year-old Prince Frederick proposed marriage to the forty-seven-year-old Josephine. She refused.

  Josephine also said publicly that Napoleon’s semen was “no use at all; it’s just like so much water”. He may look like other men, she said, but then so did the famous castrato tenors of the time. Napoleon’s bouts of impotence were also discussed openly in the family and news of it spread across Europe.

  As Josephine had still failed to produce a son and heir, in 1809 Napoleon had their marriage annulled. Out of political necessity, Napoleon picked Marie Louise of Austria — Marie Antoinette’s niece — to be his second wife. Nevertheless, he concluded that the eighteen-year-old virgin was “the kind of womb I want to marry”.

  He told his brother Lucien: “Naturally I would prefer to have my mistress [meaning Walewska] crowned, but I must be allied with sovereigns.”

  The alliance with Austria was a political mistake. It soon led to war with Russia.

  Although she had lost the battle over the divorce, Josephine continued to fight. She backed his marriage to Marie Louise in the hope that the young princess might look to her for advice. The three of them could set up a menage a trois, she thought. As the older of the two Empresses, she would naturally take precedence. However, two weeks after his marriage by proxy in March 1810, Napoleon banished Josephine from Paris. They met occasionally at Malmaison when both shed tears of joy.

  Marie Louise was over twenty years Napoleon’s junior. On the evening they first met, she consented to go to bed with him. His behaviour was described at the time as “more rape than wooing”, but Marie Louise did not seem to mind. In fact, afterwards “she asked me to do it again,” Napoleon said in a celebrated quote.

  Napoleon was very much in love with her and in 1811, she produced a son and heir, though there were rumours that artificial insemination was used. Napoleon was ecstatic. Even Josephine was pleased. Despite Marie Louise’s expressed orders, she managed to see the baby secretly. She also received Countess Walewska when she visited France with her son Alexei.

  When Napoleon fell from power, Josephine wanted to accompany him to Elba, but was prevented “by his wife”. Marie Louise did not go with him either though. She became Grand Duchess of Parma. Her father sent Count von Neipperg as her aide. He seduced her and she remained his mistress until the day she died. By the time Napoleon returned from Elba, Josephine was dead. Then, after Waterloo, he was exiled to St Helena and took with him four friends, all men.

  There has been a great deal of speculation that Napoleon was gay. He tolerated homosexuality in the army and refused to outlaw homosexual practices in his Napoleonic Code. Many men wrote of his “seductive charm”. General de Segur put it most succinctly: “In moments of sublime power, he no longer commands like a man but seduces like a woman.”

  Napoleon himself admitted that his friendships with men usually began with physical attraction. General Caulaincourt said: “He told me that for him the heart was not, the organ of sentiment; that he felt emotions only where men experience feelings of another kind: nothing in the heart, everything in the loins and in another place, which I leave nameless.”

  Napoleon was obsessed with the golden-haired young Czar Alexander I. This obsession eventually brought about Napoleon’s downfall after the disastrous Russian expedition in 1812. When they first met on a raft on the River Tilsit, Napoleon exclaimed: “It is Apollo!”

  Afterwards, he wrote to Josephine, saying: “If he were a woman I would make him my mistress.”

  Josephine’s maid talked about Napoleon’s “predilection for handsome men”. His aides were often young and effeminate, and he would caress them. His secretary Meneval said Napoleon would “come and sit on the corner of my desk, or on the arm of my armchair, sometimes on my knees. He would put his arm around my neck and amuse himself by gently pulling my ear.”

  His aide Louis Marchand was referred to as “Mademoiselle Marchand” and Chevalier de Sainte-Croix — “a slightly built, dapper little fellow, with a pretty, smooth face more like a girl’s than that of a brave soldier” — was called “Mademoiselle Sainte-Croix”, while Baron Gaspard Gourgard, Napoleon’s orderly for six years, referred to the Emperor as “Her Majesty”.

  After his disastrous campaign against Russia, Napoleon became impotent at the age of forty-two, probably due to the failure of his endocrine glands. He was also afflicted by “burning urine”, caused by deposits of calcium in his urethra.

  * * *

  While Napoleon may have been a little uncertain of his sexuality, his sister Pauline was one of the loveliest women of the age and, by all accounts, sexually insatiable.

  “She was an extraordinary combination of perfect beauty and the strangest moral laxity,” said a contemporary. “She was the loveliest creature I had ever seen; she was also the most frivolous.”

  The Countess Anna Potocka agreed:

  “She combined the finest and most regular features imaginable with a most shapely figure, admired — alas! too often.”

  In an age when most people rarely washed, Pauline’s bath-time was practically a public event. Every morning a bath tub would be filled with twenty litres of fresh milk. She would strip naked, then Paul, her black slave, would carry her to the tub. When people were shocked, she said brazenly: “Why not? Are you scandalized because he is not married?”

  So Pauline married Paul off to one of her maids, but he continued to carry her, naked, to her bath.

  At fifteen, Pauline fell in love with forty-year-old Louis Freron, who was known as the king of the dandies. The family thought that the match
was unsuitable, so Napoleon had Freron removed. To get her own back, Pauline began flirting with his officers.

  To reassert control, Napoleon found Pauline a husband — Victor Leclerc, the blond, clean-cut son of a miller. As a wedding present, Napoleon promoted him to Brigadier General. Although it was no great love match, Pauline was happy enough and bore him a son, Dremide, in 1798.

  In 1801, the French colony of Saint Domingue — now Haiti — was overrun by the slave rebellion of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Leclerc was sent to put down the uprising. Pauline did not want to leave Paris and her several lovers. (One of them wrote later: “Before she left for Saint Domingue, there were no fewer than five of us in the same house sharing Pauline’s favours. She was the greatest tramp imaginable and the most desirable.”) She locked herself in her bedroom for three days and only consented to go to Saint Domingue when Napoleon promised to send her regular shipments of Paris gowns.

  Leclerc successfully put the rebellion down in 1802. Soon after, he caught yellow fever and died. Pauline returned to France, and back in Paris her mourning was shortlived.

  Napoleon quickly found her a second husband, Count Camillo Borghese. He was an enormously wealthy Italian, with one of the world’s biggest collections of diamonds. Pauline liked his money and his title, but there was one great drawback: sexually he did not measure up. Pauline wrote to an uncle from the Villa Borghese in Rome, saying: “I would rather have been Leclerc’s widow on just 20,000 francs a year than be married to a eunuch.”

  Pauline, however, managed to bounce from one extreme to the other. Back in Paris, she fell for Louis Philippe Auguste de Forbin, a society painter. He was reportedly hugely well endowed and Pauline could not get enough of him; but his size caused her acute vaginal distress. A doctor was called in, who found the poor girl on the verge of exhaustion. Her uterus was swollen by constant excitement and her vagina was showing signs of damage due to friction. For the sake of Pauline’s health, Forbin was persuaded to join the army and was posted out of harm’s way.

  Pauline soon found comfort. In Nice she hired a young musician named Felix Blangini to “conduct her orchestra”. She understudied the leading actor of the day, Francois Talma, and bedded the twenty-five-year-old aide to Napoleon’s chief of staff, Colonel Armand Jules de Canouville. Again, Napoleon stepped in and posted the unfortunate man to Danzig. He died in 1812 during the retreat from Moscow with a locket containing her picture hanging around his neck. Pauline was inconsolable for days.

  She shared her brother’s exile to Elba and, after the “Hundred Days”, expressed a desire to go with him to St Helena. When the British prevented it, she returned to her husband and died of cancer, mirror in hand, at the Villa Borghese, aged forty-four.

  But there is a lasting monument to her beauty. In her heyday, she had been sculpted famously as Venus reclining on a couch by Antonio Canova. Asked how she could have posed nude, she replied: “It wasn’t cold. There was a fire in the studio.”

  Her last wish was that, at her funeral, her coffin should be closed. Instead, Canova’s nude statue was brought out of storage and displayed in the church.

  * * *

  Louis Napoleon, the son of Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, who he installed as King of Holland, and Josephine’s daughter Hortense, became the dictator Napoleon III in 1852.

  After the fall of Napoleon, the Bonaparte family was exiled from France and Louis Napoleon was brought up in Switzerland. From an early age, he had a string of lovers and illegitimate children.

  Once the Duke of Reichstadt (Napoleon’s only legitimate son and consequently considered to be Napoleon II) died, Louis Napoleon headed the family claim to the throne of France. To strengthen his claim, he proposed marriage to his cousin Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. However, his hopes of marriage were dashed by his abortive attempt to overthrow the French government in 1836 and he was exiled to England.

  Trying again in 1840, he landed with a small force at Boulogne and was immediately captured. Imprisoned in the fortress of Ham, he begged for female company. The French government allowed him visits from a voluptuous twenty-year-old named Alexandrine Vergeot. She was officially employed to iron the guards” clothes but became known as “bedmaker to the number one state prisoner”. Louis Napoleon spent six years in prison at Ham, during which time Alexandrine bore him two sons.

  In 1846, Louis Napoleon managed to escape and fled back to England. In London, he lived with English beauty Elizabeth Howard, who kept him for the next two years. She also financed his return to France in 1848, where he seized power. He rewarded her with the title Comtesse de Beauregard and five million francs.

  In 1853, Louis married the Spanish aristocrat Eugenie de Montijo, but Eugenie was positively the last person he should have married. She thought that sex was disgusting. A devout Catholic, she believed that it should only be tolerated as an act of procreation. Princess Mathilde believed she should have been a nun.

  She was a twenty-seven-year-old virgin when they met and married and, two years later, after the birth of their only son, sex between them ceased. Nevertheless, she was jealous of her husband’s lovers, accusing him of sleeping with the “scum of the Earth” just to embarrass her. Indeed, he had a taste for courtesans and prostitutes. He once paid £10,000 for a single night with the English prostitute Corn Pearl. She was notorious. When Bertie, the Prince of Wales, asked to see her, she had herself served up al his dinner table on a silver salver. When the cover was removed, she was naked except for a string of pearls and a sprig of parsley.

  Another courtesan Napoleon III shared with the Prince of Wales was “La Barucci”, a beautiful Italian girl called Giulia Beneni. She kept a silver goblet in her salon, engraved with the letter “N” and the imperial crest. He also had a long-running affair with the famous French actress, Rachael.

  Napoleon III did not just sleep with working girls; he had aristocratic lovers too. The Marquise Taisey-Chatenoy reported Napoleon turning up in her bedroom one night, wearing mauve silk pyjamas. With little conversation and no foreplay, they began having sex. After a bit of sweating and grunting, the deed was done and he left. He also seduced Madame Walewska, the wife of his foreign minister.

  His last mistress was a sturdy peasant woman, Marguerite Bellanger. Napoleon III was already ill and Eugenie was convinced that a new love affair would kill him, so she persuaded Marguerite to give him up.

  Asked why he had so many mistresses, Napoleon III replied: “I need my little amusements.”

  However, his “little amusements” were a constant political danger. His ministers begged him to be careful and warned him that he might end up in the hands of an adventurers. Indeed he did. The beautiful nineteen-year-old Contessa di Castiglione was sent by the prime minister of Sardinia to enlist his help in the struggle to unify Italy. She accomplished this in bed.

  Napoleon III lacked political judgement all round. He embroiled France in several disastrous wars and defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 lost him his throne. He died in exile in England in 1873.

  2. TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE BED

  Vladimir Ilyich Ulynov — better known as Lenin — was a bit of a ladies” man, but he was only attracted to women who were involved in the revolutionary struggle. His first lover was Nadezhda Konstantina Krupskaya. She was a year older than him and already a committed Marxist. When as a young girl she read the first volume of Das Kapital, she said she heard “the knell of capital sound — the expropriators are expropriated” and her “heart beat so that it could be heard”. Obviously, she was a romantic.

  Nadya was dark-haired and attractive, and she was impressed by the ardour of the young Lenin’s revolutionary zeal. They would walk along the banks of the Neva and he would talk about the overthrow of capitalism and avenging his brother who had been hanged for attempting to assassinate the Tsar.

  Lenin, however, also had eyes for one of Nadya’s friends, the quick-witted and adventurous Apollinaria Yakubova. Lenin proposed to Apollinaria just before he
was arrested for subversion. From his prison cell, he wrote to Apollinaria and Nadya, asking them to stand on Shpalernaya Street outside the prison, where he might be able to catch a glimpse of them from a window. Apollinaria did not come and Nadya took up the vigil alone. Lenin took this to mean that his proposal had been rejected.

  Apollinaria and Nadya were arrested too. They were exiled to Siberia but, just a few months into her sentence, Apollinaria was rescued by a young law professor named Takhterev. They fled to London where Lenin met them during his stay there in 1902. Apollinaria helped Lenin and Nadya find rooms at 30 Holford Square, off Grays Inn Road.

  After a short jail sentence, Lenin was also exiled to Siberia. By that time, he was engaged to Nadya and asked the authorities if they could be together during their exile. The authorities agreed on condition they got married. Lenin’s sister Anna was less than thrilled. “Nadya,” she wrote, “looks like a herring.”

  Although Nadya had been pretty when she was younger, by the time she married Lenin, she was plain and looked older than her years. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg said unkindly: “One look at Krupskaya, and you can see that Lenin wasn’t interested in women.” She suffered from Graves disease, which meant they could not have children. He was no picture either. Nadya’s first words to her fiance, when she eventually arrived in his Siberian village, were: “My, you’ve grown awfully fat.” That night they stayed up drinking with the locals and it was nearly dawn before they went to bed.

  Whatever chance they had of wedded bliss was shattered when Nadya’s mother turned up. A deeply religious woman with a tart tongue, she and Lenin constantly quarrelled.

  * * *

  Lenin developed a taste for upper-class women. In 1905, when he was living in St Petersburg under an assumed name to protect himself from arrest, he met a divorcee known simply as Elizabeth de K. She was aristocratic and independently wealthy, with a refined taste for the arts, literature and gracious living.