History: 'I win battles," said Napoleon Bonaparte, "but Josephine wins hearts." He was born in Corsica. She was born Marie-Josephe-Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie on a sugar plantation in Martinique. The complementary talents of the Corsican and the Creole, both immigrants to France, enabled them to become the Emperor and Empress of the biggest, most powerful empire since the heyday of the Romans, writes Patrick Skene Catling.
While most previous Napoleonic biographers, understandably, have concentrated their attention on the military and political leader, Andrea Stuart has elected to portray the couple from the viewpoint of the sometime wife, "one of history's great style icons". Five years' research and writing - precise and picturesque writing - have proved well worthwhile. This is an excellent work of history made entertainingly readable, depicting a personification of privilege and vulnerability at the peak of one of the most grandiose and precarious social structures of all time.
Stuart is particularly well qualified to appreciate Rose's idyllic Caribbean childhood and her sense of strangeness when she arrived in Europe. Stuart was born in Jamaica, of Barbadian parentage, and brought up there.
"I came to England at age 14," she says. "I found adjustment very challenging. I was a fish out of water - almost the only black girl in my very traditional girls' school. Like Josephine, I worked hard to learn how to fit in." She studied English at the University of East Anglia, that hot-house of successful authors, and French at the Sorbonne. She regularly visits her family in Barbados. "It is here, on my mother's family's plantation, that I was inspired to write about Josephine." When Rose/Josephine arrived in Paris in 1779 at the age of 15, for an arranged marriage with a minor aristocrat she did not know, she was awed by the capital's sophistication and the stench of its open sewers. Stuart sympathetically understands the Creole's nostalgia for the plantation "gaudy with colour", "the air thick and wet and scented with honeysuckle, jasmine and frangipani". "As an adult she would recollect primarily the sensations of her childhood: the intense quality of light, the warmth of sun-baked skin, above all the feeling of being light, free, unencumbered." She was naive and gauche at first, but not for long. With her innate charm and what Stuart calls "her opportunistically apolitical attitude, she was able to navigate the maze of radical revolutionaries, Bourbon spies, foreign visitors, financiers and Caribbean lobbyists, picking up friends, flirtations and useful contacts along the way". In a dangerous epoch, she was a survivor.
Her unhappy first marriage came to an early end. Her husband banished her to a convent, which providentially served as a sort of finishing school. During the Terror, he was executed; and, for a short time, she was imprisoned under the shadow of the guillotine.
As a Martinique obeah woman had predicted, Rose soon met and enchanted "a dark man of little fortune" who was destined to achieve glory and to make her "greater than a queen".
In post-revolutionary Paris, Stuart writes, Rose "seemed to epitomize what this period was all about, with its passion and spontaneity, its love of the exotic and its relentless pursuit of pleasure. Rose was both a product and an emblem of the prevailing zeitgeist". Stuart quotes from the erotic letters that Napoleon wrote to her while he was away waging wars during the early days of their relationship. When he elevated themselves to pseudo-royalty in a court more elaborate and ornate than that of any past king, Napoleon's military campaigns became fatally ambitious, his absences more prolonged, and Josephine presided over a strict code of etiquette in 44 luxurious palaces, with more ladies-in-waiting than Marie Antoinette had commanded.
Evidently it was while Napoleon was busy militarily over-reaching himself, in places such as Russia and Egypt, that Josephine became "one of the great shoppers of all time". Stuart is good on pomp and ceremony and retail therapy.
Josephine was such an extravagant collector of all kinds of works of art and personal embellishment that Napoleon exclaimed: "My wife wants everything!" Even after he reluctantly divorced her in the hope of begetting an heir, their love somehow endured. He continued to support her lavishly, with an annual allowance of three million francs. Stuart does not say what the present equivalent would be, but it certainly seems a lot.
At Malmaison, her last estate near Paris, the great divorcée amassed exotic plants and animals from all over the world. Remembering Martinique and her original name, she gathered and cultivated 250 species of roses. "She encouraged the French nation's enthusiasm for the species," Stuart writes, "and the 500,000 now found in public parks in Paris are part of her legacy." Napoleon's last utterance as he lay dying in exile in 1821 was only the name he had given her, "Josephine".
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
The Rose of Martinique: A Life of Napoleon's Josephine. By Andrea Stuart
Macmillan, 455pp. £20