Joséphine de Beauharnais

Who is Joséphine de Beauharnais?

Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie was born on a sugar plantation in Trois-Îlets, Martinique, the daughter of an impoverished French colonial family. She lived on the island until age fifteen, when she was sent to France for an arranged marriage in 1779 to Alexandre de Beauharnais, with whom she had two children, Eugène and Hortense, before the marriage ended in separation; Alexandre was later guillotined during the French Revolution, and she herself was briefly imprisoned. In 1796 she married the young general Napoleon Bonaparte, who gave her the name "Joséphine," and when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804 she became Empress. Though the couple divorced in 1809 after she failed to produce an heir, Napoleon allowed her to retain the title of Empress, and she remained on good terms with him, spending her later years at the Château de Malmaison outside Paris, where she cultivated an internationally renowned garden and rose collection. She died at Malmaison in 1814. Joséphine remains Martinique's most globally recognized historical figure, though her legacy is debated on the island because her family's wealth came from a slave-worked plantation and she is linked to Napoleon's 1802 restoration of slavery in the French colonies; a statue of her in Fort-de-France was vandalized and beheaded in 1991 and later removed by the city in 2020.

Sources: napoleon.org, "Joséphine (Marie-Joseph-Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie)" · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Josephine, Empress of the French" · Atlas Obscura, "The Headless Empress in Fort-de-France"