Lucien Bonaparte

Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino (May 21, 1775 – June 29, 1840) was the third surviving son of Carlo Buonaparte and his wife Letizia Ramolino.

He was a younger brother of Joseph Bonaparte and Napoleon I of France. He was an older brother of Elisa Bonaparte, Louis Bonaparte, Pauline Bonaparte, Caroline Bonaparte and Jérôme Bonaparte. Lucien was the genuinely Revolutionary Bonaparte, and his relations with his brother Napoleon were often abrasive.

Revolutionary activities

Born in Ajaccio, Corsica, and educated in mainland France, Lucien returned to Corsica at the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and became an outspoken speaker in the Jacobin Club at Ajaccio, where he renamed himself "Brutus". An ally of Maximilien Robespierre during the Reign of Terror, he was briefly imprisoned (at Aix-en-Provence) after the coup of 9 Thermidor.

As president of the Council of Five Hundred — which he removed to the suburban security of Saint-Cloud — Lucien Bonaparte's combination of bravado and disinformation was crucial to the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire, according to the French Revolutionary Calendar, in which General Bonaparte overthrew the government of the Directory to replace it by the Consulate. Lucien mounted a horse and galvanized the grenadiers by pointing a sword at his brother and swearing to run him through if he ever betrayed the principles of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité". The following day Lucien arranged for Napoleon's formal election as First Consul.

Napoleon made him Minister of the Interior under the Consulate, which enabled Lucien to falsify the results of the plebiscite but which brought him into competition with Joseph Fouché the chief of police, who showed Napoleon a subversive pamphlet that was probably written by Lucien, and effected a breach between the brothers. Lucien was sent as ambassador to the court of Charles IV of Spain, (November, 1800), where his diplomatic talents won over the Bourbon royal family and, perhaps as importantly, the minister Manuel de Godoy.

Though he was a member of the Tribunat in 1802 and was made a senator of the First French Empire, Lucien came to oppose many of Napoleon's imperial ideas. In 1804, spurning imperial honors, he went into self-imposed exile, living initially in Rome, where Pope Pius VII made him "Prince of Canino", he bought the Villa Rufinella in Frascati.

Later years

With the pope a prisoner of Napoleon in 1809, Lucien was sailing for the United States, when he was captured instead by the British and passed the years 1810 to 1814 as a prisoner of the British, settled comfortably in the English countryside, and working on a heroic poem on the subject of Charlemagne. He was even omitted from the Imperial almanachs listing the Bonapartes from 1811.

Then, in the "Hundred Days" after Napoleon's return from exile at Elba, Lucien rallied to the imperial cause. His brother made him a French Prince and included his children into the Imperial Family, this was however not recognized by the Bourbons after Waterloo and Napoleon's second abdication. Subsequently Lucien was proscribed at the Restoration and deprived of his fauteuil at the Académie Francaise. He died in Viterbo, Italy, on June 29, 1840, of stomach cancer, as did his father, his sister Pauline and very probably Napoleon I himself.

Academic activities

Lucien Bonaparte was the inspiration behind the Napoleonic reconstitution of the dispersed Académie française in 1803, where he took a seat. He collected paintings in his maison de campagne at Brienne, was a member of Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Récamier's salon and wrote a novel, La Tribu indienne.

Marriages and children

His first wife was his landlord's daughter, Christine Boyer, the illiterate sister of an innkeeper, and by her he had four children, one of whom was stillborn. His second wife was Alexandrine de Bleschamp, widow of Hippolyte Jouberthon, known as "Madame Jouberthon", and by her he had ten children, including:

Charles Lucien Bonaparte (1803–1857), the naturalist and ornithologist.
Louis Lucien Bonaparte (1813–1891).
Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte (1815–1881).

External links

Académie Francaise: Les Immortels: (in French)
Lucien Bonaparte

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Revolutionary activities

Later years

Academic activities

Marriages and children

External links