Overview
"The love story of Josephine de Beauharnais and Napoleon Bonaparte is one of the most dramatic in history, but the crucial role this beautiful, intelligent woman played in their partnership has rarely been completely understood or explained. In this biography, rich in detail and anecdote, Eleanor DeLorme brings the exotic Josephine to life, revealing how frequently Napoleon confided in her and how much he depended upon her sense of style and her sympathetic personality to set the tone of his empire." This book, illustrated with works of art that depict many of the individuals and episodes in Josephine's remarkable life, focuses not only on the crucial role that she played in Napoleon's political and military career but also on her support of the arts. Called by historians the finest ornament of the French court, Josephine was clearly a match for the emperor and one who left a brilliant artistic legacy. The text also provides captivating details of her social and personal life, based on the memoirs of her children and on the remembrances of her contemporaries who remarked on her unfailing grace, her exceptional warmth, and her singular distinction. It was these qualities above all that caused Napoleon to call her "my incomparable Josephine."Synopsis
In exploring Joséphine's relationship to the man she married, DeLorme (history, Wellesley College) hopes to reveal her as a more complex person than many of her biographers have depicted. Though Boneparte was madly in love with her, she argues, she did not fall in love with him until the relationship was about to end. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Publishers Weekly
DeLorme, a fellow of the International Napoleon Society, is a self-professed lover of France and of Josephine. Her admiration for the empress does not, however, tip over into worship; her subject clearly had her flaws, chief among them extravagance and a degree of sexual looseness. In presenting Josephine's story from her birth on Martinique to her marriage to the aristocrat Alexandre de Beauharnais, who died on the guillotine, and her own narrow escape from that same fate, her marriage to Napoleon, her reluctant divorce and early death at her chateau, Malmaison, at the age of 50, DeLorme provides an attractive and largely convincing portrait of a woman whose grace, dignity and exquisite taste in decoration helped legitimize her upstart Corsican husband as one who could claim the empire for reasons not confined solely to his military triumphs. In DeLorme's view, the marriage between Napoleon and Josephine remains one of the great romances of history, only lightly marred by Napoleon's extramarital amours and his divorce and remarriage to the Archduchess Marie-Louise for dynastic reasons. In a year marked by revisionist views of Napoleon (Paul Johnson's entry in the Penguin Lives series and Christopher Hibbert's forthcoming Napoleon: His Wives and Women, reviewed above), this sumptuously illustrated and charming volume will bring comfort to readers still under the spell of the magnetic emperor and his glittering wife. (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.