Bonaparty Girl

JOANNE: Now Wallis Simpson was far from the first American woman to find a royal match. She wasn’t even the first woman from Baltimore to marry into a European power. That would be Elizabeth Patterson, a wealthy young Maryland socialite whose marriage into France’s imperial family became a major social and political scandal.

BRIAN: In 1803, as Napoleon was consolidating power in France, he sent his youngest brother, Jerome, on a mission to the French Caribbean. On his way back, the young Bonaparte stopped in Baltimore where the best families of the city vied to entertain him.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: And he meets Elizabeth at a ball.

BRIAN: This is historian Charlene Boyer Lewis.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: They dance a dance together and literally get entangled, it’s either her hair in his watch chain or his watch chain in her button– the stories differ– and it really was mutual attraction.

BRIAN: It wasn’t long before the two were legally entangled as well. After a whirlwind courtship, they married on Christmas Eve.

ED: Napoleon was furious when he found out his brother had gotten hitched to an untitled American. When the newlyweds arrived in Europe in 1805, the Emperor personally annulled their marriage. He promptly married Jerome off to a German princess and banished a pregnant Elizabeth from the French Empire. Despite her very public humiliation at the hands of France’s Imperial Family, Patterson Bonaparte had no intention of relinquishing her new aristocratic ties. She returned to the US with her infant son, a new wardrobe and a plan to work her way into Napoleon’s good graces.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: So even though she returns to Baltimore a rejected woman, she knows she has something incredibly valuable, because this is the time period when Napoleon cannot have any children, there’s only one nephew and he’s kind of sickly. And so Elizabeth calculates, as long as I have a male Bonaparte, they’re going to still want me. So she does not at all act like a rejected woman who had this scandalous past, instead, she decks herself out in all of the European clothing she bought while she was in Lisbon, which includes jeweled tiaras and diamond and ruby perfume cases. And she goes to every single party that she gets invited to. So she flaunts her status, flaunts her connection to the Emperor and Americans love it.

ED: And everybody knows the full deal.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Everybody knows the full story. It was written up in all the newspapers. I found a copy of a Russellville, Kentucky newspaper who had written up the whole story. So everybody in the United States, even in the most remote corners knew this whole story.

ED: Now doesn’t this sort of make her less charming and interesting in the American scene, which is basically a huge marriage market?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: It is a huge marriage market, but no, she’s incredibly alluring because of that Bonaparte cachet. Because Napoleon had divorced her, she is considered available. And so she’s courted by many men, she gets five or six marriage proposals, she rejects every single one of them. She seriously however, considers one from a Secretary to the British legation, Sir Oakley, and that’s what galvanizes Napoleon to start a correspondence between the two of them, because Napoleon doesn’t want his potential heir, her son, to have a stepfather who’s British.

So she writes Napoleon, takes advantage of that and says, well, if you offer me an annuity, which would be like a pension, and you pay for my son’s schooling and you give me a title, then I won’t accept any marriage proposals. And Napoleon agrees. And he gives her $12,000 a year. He’s going to pay for her son’s education. And he says, I’m thinking about making you the Duchess of Oldenburg.

ED: Wow.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Yeah, she was very savvy.

ED: She has some nerve, doesn’t she.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: She sure does.

ED: Get eye to eye with Napoleon. Well, actually, she’s probably above eye to eye with Napoleon.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Well, Napoleon had created himself. I mean, so in that way, he’s kind of like the classic American story. He was from and an absolutely poor, impoverished, nobody knew them family from Corsica, so not even France, right? And he makes his family imperial, he makes his family royal. But Americans saw Napoleon as just this upstart, nobody Corsican– so who is he to reject a young woman of one of the finest families in America. And so Americans rankle at Napoleon when Napoleon rejects her.

ED: So she goes head to head with Napoleon and he actually says, sure, I’ll give you all these things, and $12,000 then–

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: That’s a lot of money.

ED: And so I’m sure that Americans go, hey, good for you girl.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Well, it’s not exactly, hey, good for you girl. But they are captivated by her because they don’t know what her future will be. But rumors start to swirl around about this $12,000 annuity, about this potential title. And so it was one thing to have kind of this captivating woman who’s a cosmopolitan, linked to Bonaparte in their midst, it was another thing to think about having somebody with a title– she being a duchess and her son being a prince– living in their midst. And that kind of changes the way Americans start to think about her.

So once the rumors go around that Napoleon’s really connecting with Elizabeth and his potential heir, the concern is that Elizabeth’s son, who is only four years old at the time, will potentially become, as one congressman called him, the emperor of the West. Other congressman– Timothy Pickering, a Federalist of Massachusetts, believes that what Napoleon is going to do is set up a court, a palace right there in the United States, perhaps in Baltimore and Elizabeth and her princely son will live in it. And so Pickering writes, this palace is going to make the president’s mansion look like nothing. And then he says, our eyes will be introduced to gorgeous scenes of royalty and soon, Americans will become seduced and corrupted by these charms and will choose a king over a president, a monarchy over a republic, so we have to do something.

ED: Yeah, that’s very strange language. Watch out, we’re going to like this too much.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: That’s right. That’s right.

ED: It’s going to be too beautiful. We’re not going to be able to control ourselves.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: And they’re still not sure this republic is going to work, because people can be seduced by gorgeous scenes of royalty.

ED: Yeah, we’re still in the first 20 years of the country, right? So what do they propose to do about this.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: So they propose– several members of Congress– the title of nobility amendment, that no citizen of the United States can receive a title or an annuity from an emperor or a King or a prince. And so you would have to give up your US citizenship and you could never hold office. So here, they’re clearly thinking about her son, right?

ED: Yeah. What’s his name, by the way?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Of course, it’s Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte.

ED: Yeah, that’s subtle.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: That’s right. His nickname is Bo. And so his nickname is Bo. And so they the plan is that they will have this amendment that will neutralize the threat of Elizabeth and her son, Bo. And it sweeps through the Senate, it sweeps through the House and it’s sent out to the states for ratification and everyone thinks it’s going to become the 13th Amendment. But then it falls two states short and it never becomes the 13th Amendment.

ED: So this is a lot for a young woman still in her 20s, not to mention a young boy, who’s 4, to go through all of this. So what’s he think about all this as he sort of comes aware of what’s going on in the world, he says, give me my kingdom?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: No, her son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte much to his mother’s dismay, loves the United States, loves being a small-r republican and doesn’t want really anything to do with the whole aristocracy nobility stuff. He’s sent over to visit his father when he’s 14, 15 years old and he hates every moment of it. He just thinks it’s a vapid kind of too luxurious lifestyle and he wants nothing to do with that.

So he tells his mother this and he says, no, I’m going back to the United States, I’m going to take the Pledge of American Citizenship, I don’t want to be an aristocrat. And she is so infuriated with him and she thinks the work of her life has just come to not, because he’s decided to be a patriotic American instead of an aristocrat.

ED: Wow.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: Yeah.

ED: So when you add it all up Charlene, what lessons do we draw from this story?

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: I think there are several lessons here. One, that Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude about royalty, about aristocracy from the very beginning. Yes, they threw off a monarchy, yes, they thought republican simplicity was the way to go, but aristocratic luxury was still seductive to them, it still had a place. Another lesson I think we learn is, Americans have loved celebrities from the beginning of this country too.

So even in an era without mass media, without mass culture, the celebrity who has that cache– and much of it is being an aristocrat, right, or the trappings of aristocracy, the trappings of royalty and nobility. Americans like that. And she’s kind of a lightning rod for all of that.

ED: Well, bless her heart, but I’m glad she failed. It sounds like it’s a good trial for early America to look this in the face and decide, you know, I think we like our own way better. But I do believe that celebrities today are the Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s of 1803. I mean, has everything, all the trappings of aristocracy without the threat of Napoleon taking over the country.

CHARLENE BOYER LEWIS: I think celebrities today wish they were as good as Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. She had it all. She totally had it all.

JOANNE: Charlene Boyer Lewis is a historian at Kalamazoo college and author of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, an American aristocrat in the early republic. Earlier in the show, we heard from Anne Sebba, author of That Woman, The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor.