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the gentle bonaparte

Preface

Ever since its founding, the United States has been a refuge for millions of people, of all nationalities and classes. Following the Revolution of 1789, many members of the French aristocracy crossed the ocean to escape the guillotine. Less than twenty years later, a second wave of French émigrés would arrive--the generals, soldiers, sympathizers of Napoleon, who sought a safe haven following the final defeat at Waterloo. Among these was the emperor’s oldest brother, Joseph (1768–1844), King of Naples and Spain.

It comes as a surprise to most people that Joseph Bonaparte spent more than seventeen years in exile, living in splendor high above the banks of the Delaware River in New Jersey. Even before his escape from France in 1815 he had American connections. When negotiating the peace treaty of 1800 between Napoleon and the United States, he had met the leading diplomats of the day at his château of Mortefontaine, outside Paris. Before leaving Europe, he had acquired vast tracts of land in upstate New York. He arrived in America with a fortune in hand, and would shortly embark upon building and fitting out the magnificent estate he would call Point Breeze.

But as his friend Madame de Staël wrote when banished from France, “Exile acts on imagination and constantly presents itself as an obstacle to all desires, all plans, all hopes.” Joseph would never cease to long for his homeland. An intelligent man who knew French, Italian, and Spanish, he would never manage to learn English adequately, even after living in his adopted country for so many seventeen years. He never wished to become an American citizen, and even in the elegant setting of Point Breeze, surrounded by cultured, gifted new friends and neighbors, he continually dreamed of returning to France. Although he would repeatedly plead with his wife to join him, he had never been a faithful husband, and this amorous man would find other loves. But he felt the separation from his two daughters keenly.

Joseph claimed that he had never wanted the overpowering roles thrust upon him by his illustrious younger brother Napoleon. Left to his own devices, he would probably have been a lawyer in his native Corsica, a country gentleman with leisure to read the great literature he treasured and time to oversee the maintenance of his property. When Napoleon’s downfall forced Joseph into exile, he was able to become that country gentleman at last, but far away from so much he held dear.

What follows is the story of a man who was nevertheless able to turn the memories of his and his family’s glorious and tumultuous recent past to his advantage—and, as it happened, to the advantage of his adopted home as well. For the superb collection of European art that Joseph had shipped to America to embellish the estate at Point Breeze made of that house the finest gallery of its kind by far in the young country, one that served to educate and influence generations of aspiring artists. In that sense at least, his exile was indeed beneficial for Americans. Ever glancing back at his beloved France, the man who had been king and whose brother had been an emperor helped to shape the fabric of the new republic.