Jérôme Bonaparte

Biography

Jérôme Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio in 1784, the youngest surviving brother of Napoleon. After schooling at the College of Juilly and the Irish College in Paris he joined the French Navy in 1800. Sent to the West Indies, he fled to the United States after an incident with a British ship, and in December 1803 he married Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore. Napoleon refused to accept the match and annulled it by imperial decree in 1805; Jérôme gave way and was rewarded with naval and army commands.

In 1807 Napoleon made him King of Westphalia, a new state in north-western Germany with its capital at Kassel, and married him to Princess Catharina of Württemberg. Westphalia received the first written constitution and parliament on German soil and became a showcase of French-style administration, but Jérôme's lavish court left the treasury in debt. In the 1812 invasion of Russia he commanded a corps but quarrelled with his brother and returned home. The kingdom collapsed in October 1813 when allied forces took Kassel.

During the Hundred Days he commanded a division at Waterloo, where his attacks on Hougoumont absorbed his whole force. After 1815 his father-in-law made him Prince of Montfort, and he lived mainly in exile, later in Italy, where he married a third time. With Catharina he had two sons and a daughter, Mathilde, who later became a leading Paris hostess.

When his nephew Louis Napoleon came to power, Jérôme returned to public life as governor of Les Invalides. He was made a Marshal of France in 1850 and served as President of the Senate in 1852, and he was heir presumptive to Napoleon III until the birth of the Prince Imperial. He died near Paris in June 1860 and was buried at Les Invalides.