On August 19, 1815, the Commerce, an American brig of 200 tons, Captain Misservey commanding, raced through the Narrows under full sail after outrunning two British frigates in the lower Bay. Someone—Misservey never said who—had paid him 18,000 francs in gold to depart immediately from Bordeaux for New York, and some say the ship had sailed without receiving her cargo of cognac.
On July 24, she had made an unscheduled stop off Royan, at the mouth of the Gironde. That night, several passengers boarded from an open boat. Misservey did not examine their papers closely, including those of the dignified middle-aged man called the Comte Surviglieri. Under the circumstances, perhaps ignorance was best.
Napoleon Bonaparte, second son of a Corsican notary with noble pretensions, who within twenty years had gone from receiving a lieutenant’s commission to crowning himself Emperor of the French, had made his last play. On March 1, Napoleon had escaped from Elba; nineteen days later he had entered Paris in triumph. Within weeks, he had raised an army against the European powers (they had proclaimed him an outlaw—literally, “one beyond the protection of the law,” a man whose murderer would go unpunished), and taken the field by June 12.
He had not quite the Grand Army that had triumphed from Lisbon to the walls of Moscow, but it had him. He was in Belgium within three days. On June 16, the forces under his personal command smashed the Prussians at Ligny. If he struck swiftly, smashing his enemies one by one before they could unite… After all, he had done it before.
The luck ran out. On June 18, sick and worn out, he fought the British and the Dutch at a Belgian hamlet, little more than some buildings by the road, called Waterloo. At the last he sent the Imperial Guard up the hill, drums rolling, and they broke, and night and the Prussians came, and it was over.
Many had compromised themselves during Napoleon’s two decades in power. Some went to the wall. Others, like the man who called himself the Comte Surviglieri, went into exile. He took rooms in Mrs. Powell’s boarding house just off City Hall Park, on Park Place, west of Broadway, under the name “Monsieur Bouchard.” The New York Evening Post reported rumors of the arrival of a mysterious Frenchman.
One afternoon, the gentleman who now called himself Monsieur Bouchard strolled down Broadway. Another Frenchman, an ex-grenadier who had served with the imperial armies in Spain, was walking up. The veteran glanced at Bouchard, who gazed back with polite reserve. Then the old soldier fell to his knees, bawled out “Majesty,” and kissed the hands of Bouchard, whom he had recognized as His Most Catholic Majesty Jose I, King of Spain and of the Indies.
That had been merely one of the lives of Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother.
Joseph had been born in 1768 at Ajaccio—the capital of Corsica—and, after realizing he did not have a calling to the priesthood (neither celibacy nor chastity ran in that family), earned a law degree at the University of Pisa and returned to Corsica to practice law.
For all its sound and fury, the French Revolution—which began as Joseph completed his studies—had involved merely the violent substitution of one elite for another, accompanied by a massive transfer of wealth to the new class. In the politics of their time, the Bonapartes were extreme leftists, a pose that proved most profitable: Napoleon was a general by the age of 25; Joseph was elected mayor of Ajaccio in 1790 and then a deputy to the National Assembly.
But Joseph understood which Bonaparte was in charge. A wealthy, powerful uncle, on his deathbed, said to him: “You, Joseph, are the eldest, but Napoleon is the real head of the family. Never forget it.”
Neither man did. After 1795, no one did. As head of the family, Napoleon devoted considerable effort to placing his brothers in good, high-paying jobs. He placed Joseph with the army in a clerical post paying 6,000 francs a year. At this time, Joseph met the girl of his dreams. Julie Clary was short and horse-faced; she was also kindhearted, intelligent, and heiress to her father’s fortune; and she adored Joseph Bonaparte. In its own way, their marriage was a success: they had two daughters; she would become a queen; and she would be with him at the end.
In 1797 he served as French ambassador to the Papal States, insisting on a salary of 60,000 gold francs. (The paper franc had become wildly inflated; the gold franc was worth 75 paper francs in 1794, 2,000 in 1795 and 80,000 in 1798.) All the while, Joseph was making a fortune through commodities speculation, using insider knowledge from his brother.
In 1799, Napoleon overthrew the Republic, instituting a military dictatorship. Five years later, in 1804, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon emperor. As Napoleon then had no son, Joseph was nominated as his heir, proclaimed a prince of the empire, appointed Grand Elector (the emperor’s representative in the Senate), and given the Luxembourg Palace as his residence. Joseph being Joseph, he held out for an annual allowance and expense account totaling more than 1.3 million gold francs. Around this time, Napoleon complained of him and of his other brothers, “…my brothers are nothing without me; they are great only because I have made them great.”
On December 2, 1804, Napoleon’s coronation was held at Notre Dame. Before setting out for the cathedral, Napoleon took Joseph by the arm and whispered, “If our father could see us!” In Jacques-Louis David’s painting of the ceremony, Joseph appears at the extreme left, dressed in a white silk tunic and a flame-colored, ermine-lined mantle, wearing a velvet hat with turned-up brim and ostrich plumes.
In 1806, Napoleon had Joseph proclaimed King of Naples, where he proved quite popular. Two years later, in May 1808, Napoleon invited the Spanish royal family to visit him in France, at Bayonne, just beyond the northeastern-most border of Spain. That they accepted the invitation is proof that brains had been bred out of them. They found a large French army at the Spanish border and a genial emperor who firmly suggested the abdication of King Charles IV and his son, King Ferdinand VII, in favor of Joseph. Proof that courage, too, had been bred out of the Spanish royals is that both men signed the papers. It is as if a corporate executive was being transferred from one division to another.
Initially, Joseph seems to have been persuaded by his brother’s propagandists that the Spanish people wanted him. He found they loathed him as a foreigner. Within days, Madrid was torn by riots put down by French troops, which Goya’s brush would make immortal.
Joseph found the streets empty and the windows barred against him. The only persons who welcomed him were soldiers of the French occupying armies and collaborators on the French payroll. The Spanish nationalist propaganda painted Joseph as a monster, a lecher and a drunk-Pepe Botellas (Joey Bottles), the Intrusive King. The Spanish resistance would cost millions of francs and hundreds of thousands of lives. It would bleed the French Empire to death.
If intentions were realities, Joseph would have been a good king. He was kindly and affable, and enough of an old Revolutionary to decree constant social improvements: universal suffrage, representative bodies in local, provincial and national governments, and universal free education for boys and girls (the latter was truly revolutionary in Spain). Today, the Prado, Spain’s greatest museum, quietly admits that King Jose founded it by decree in 1809.
But despite his uniforms and medals, Joseph had never commanded troops in battle. Only in 1812, when Napoleon shifted his first-rate military talent from Spain to the Russian campaign, did Joseph become supreme commander of imperial forces in Spain. The result was a succession of disasters, the loss of Madrid and the final, grotesque defeat on June 21, 1813, at Vitoria.
Joseph commanded some 57,000 men and more than 150 guns. His Anglo-Spanish opponents would have to ford the River Zadorra to advance against him. But the King neither ordered the river bridges burned nor even create a plan of battle, being distracted by one of his mistresses.
The British broke through the French lines. Around 1 p.m., the King ordered a general retreat. Neither he nor his staff had planned for an orderly withdrawal, as any competent commander might have done. Thus, his soldiers simply turned and ran. A British cavalryman, Capt. Windham of the 14th Light Dragoons, galloped alongside Joseph’s coach and fired his pistols into its near window. The Intrusive King extruded himself from the other side and, as a guard stopped a bullet that had been meant for him, leapt onto a gray, clapped spurs to its sides, and rode for his life.
In her biography of Wellington, Elizabeth Longford describes how the victorious British were distracted by loot. “It was as nothing the world had seen since the days of Alexander the Great: 151 cannon, just on two million cartridges, immense quantities of ammunition.” The French army’s payroll, some $5 million, had arrived at Vitoria just before the battle. Nearly all of it vanished, probably into British pockets.
Joseph also lost his state papers, his private correspondence (including some interesting love letters that provided general amusement when published), and the crown and regalia of a king of Spain. His large silver chamber pot was taken as a trophy of battle by Captain Windham’s regiment, now the King’s Royal Hussars, which nicknamed it “The Emperor.” For nearly two centuries, the regiment has required distinguished visitors at its mess dinners to use the pot for drinking toasts in champagne, after which it is placed ceremoniously on the visitor’s head.
Joseph and 55,000 men sprinted over the Pyrenees to France, as well as some 12,000 Spanish families—collaborators who followed him into exile. Napoleon ordered him to his estate at Mortefontaine, where he passed his time in playing music, shooting, boating, sulking, and fornication. At last, Joseph was appointed lieutenant general of France, the traditional title of a protector of the realm, with responsibility for the defense of Paris. Naturally, Joseph surrendered Paris to the Allies nearly without a shot. Upon Napoleon’s first abdication, he exiled himself to Switzerland.
When Napoleon returned from Elba, Joseph returned to Paris (after burying five million francs’ worth of uncut diamonds on his estate). Amazingly, he was appointed prime minister. It is unclear whether he did anything during his brief tenure. After Waterloo, as the imperial regime collapsed about him, he rejoined Napoleon at Rochefort, while Joseph’s agents had chartered the Commerce to transport them to America.
A few days before his arrival at Rochefort, Joseph had been mistaken for Napoleon, arrested, and then released. Now, Joseph offered to remain, impersonating his brother while Napoleon sailed for America. Whether Napoleon thought this beneath an emperor’s dignity or resisted owing Joseph a favor is unclear. He refused and surrendered to the British, believing they would grant him asylum in England. He was wrong. Two months later, they landed him at the island of St. Helena, 1,200 miles off the Angolan coast, where he remained a prisoner until his death in 1821. In 1818, Joseph financed a substantial attempt to rescue Napoleon. As one might expect from anything to which Joseph lent his talents, it failed.
Once Joseph’s presence in New York was exposed, the press lionized him as an heroic figure of the Napoleonic adventure, a version of events with which he happily agreed. Joseph spent seventeen happy years in America. He purchased Point Breeze, an estate near Bordentown, New Jersey, in the summer of 1816. He frequently entertained his neighbors, who found him polite, unpretentious, and kind. He imported the first company of ballet dancers seen in the United States. He was also denounced by the high-minded ladies of the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance for serving champagne at breakfast.
Queen Julie had remained in Europe and, despite Joseph’s frequent requests, never came to America with their daughters. But he did not lack for companionship. He kept one mistress at his hunting lodge in upstate New York—Annette Savage, a Quaker girl whom he had met in Philadelphia. Their daughter, Caroline, grew up to be a striking beauty and Joseph both gave her a dowry and paid for her wedding (one of the most elaborate ever seen in Watertown). Alas, her improvident husband lost everything and she ended up teaching French in Richfield Springs. Joseph also maintained a principal mistress, Madame Sari, and fathered yet another child by Madame Lacoste, a Creole lady whom he was rumored to have bought from her husband.
Under Napoleon’s Law of Succession of 1804, Joseph would succeed to the imperial throne if Napoleon’s descent failed. In 1832, after Napoleon’s sole legitimate son died at Vienna, Joseph became the Bonapartist pretender. Later that year, after seventeen happy years in America, Joseph called on President Jackson to thank him for the hospitality of the American people. He then returned to Europe, where he was reunited with Queen Julie, and yet again assumed a role his brother had created for him.
Joseph died in Florence in 1844 with Julie at his side, and by his express command was buried wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece, Spain’s oldest, most distinguished, and most noble order of chivalry. He had awarded it to himself.
New York Press, December 21, 1999