The Rose of Martinique
A Life of Napoleon's Josephine
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed biography of Josephine Bonaparte, the Caribbean-born Creole who became the first wife of Napoleon and Empress of France.
One of the most remarkable women of the modern era, Josephine Bonaparte was born Rose de Tasher on her family’s sugar plantation in Martinique. She embodied all the characteristics of a true Creole—sensuality, vivacity, and willfulness.
Rescued from near starvation, she grew to epitomize the wild decadence of post-revolutionary Paris. It was there that Josephine first caught the eye of Napoleon Bonaparte. A true partner to Napoleon, she was equal parts political adviser, hostess par excellence, confidante, and passionate lover.
Josephine managed to be in the forefront of every important episode of her era’s turbulent history: from the rise of the West Indian slave plantations that bankrolled Europe’s rapid economic development, to the decaying of the ancien régime, to the French Revolution itself, from which she barely escaped the guillotine.
Using diaries and letters, Andrea Stuart brings her so utterly to life that we finally understand why Napoleon’s last word before dying was the name he had given her: Josephine.
“A comprehensive and truly empathetic biography. Andrea Stuart, who was raised in the Caribbean, combines scholarly distance with a genuine attempt to understand her heroine.” —The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Born in Martinique, her name was Rose when she arrived in France at age 15 to marry her first husband, a handsome man-about-court who quickly neglected his disappointingly provincial wife. Rose matured and built alliances in unlikely places, including the convent where her husband forced her to retire and the prison where she spent the last months of the French Revolution. It was after this period and her husband's execution that she became one of Paris's great hostesses and attracted the attention of an awkward but rising military hero named Napoleon Bonaparte. Stuart (Showgirls) captures the tentativeness of their first years of marriage, when letters of the often-absent, sexually inexperienced Napoleon raged with jealousy while Rose, whom he renamed Josephine, continued to have the affairs common in her social circle. Sources provide a challenge to the biographer, who must wade through material written much later when writers were fully aware of the importance of the actors and scenes they described. The twin dangers of contemporary romanticization and criticism haunt Stuart's text, yet the shifting sands of identity they create seem appropriate, for Rose and Napoleon were both remaking themselves. The almost pathological ways they complemented each other remain painfully clear as Stuart traces the denouements of their lives. It was hardly a happy marriage, and Stuart's argument that the emperor's harsh treatment of women in the Code Napol on reflected the dynamics and frustrations of his own marriage seems quite convincing in this context. 16 pages of color illus. not seen by PW.
