Napoleon’s complicated sex life

Napoleon Bonaparte, legendary general, legendary emperor, legendary lover…or was he? It seems his feelings about sex were all over the map. He was an insecure guy who’s love life with Josephine ran the gamut from red hot to ice cold.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm. Napoleon Bonaparte a brilliant general and a passionate lover
with Josephine. But what were her zigzags and what made
him eventually hate sex? I'm Patty Steele, not tonight, Josephine.
Next on the backstory. The backstory is back Napoleon Bonaparte

(00:23):
top of mind, course with the new Joaquin Phoenix flick.
We know he craved onlimited power, which actually eventually brought
him down. But what kind of a guy was he?
He began his rise to power at a really young age,
even before the French Revolution. He had a really clear
vision of what he thought was right for France. In
the aftermath of the revolution itself, he believed that the

(00:46):
nation had become over sexualized. When he was young, Napoleon
wasn't what you would call a romantic guy. At eighteen,
he lost his virginity to a prostitute. The next morning
he wrote about it like it was some sort of
scientific experiment. He had picked her up on a cold
evening in Paris, and he said, I looked at her.

(01:08):
She stopped, not with the impudent air common to her class,
but with a manner that was quite in harmony. With
the charm of her appearance. He says he walked in
a garden with her, and he asked her if there
wasn't an occupation more suited to her health, to which
she replied, no, sir, one must live. Then he asked
her how she lost her virginity, and she said a

(01:30):
soldier spoiled me. He asked if that upset her, and
she said very much so. After that, he says, he
brought her back to her rooms so she could satisfy
her desire. Interesting that, he says, her desire no mention
of his own. Around the same time, while in military school,
he wrote an article titled a Dialogue on the Nature

(01:51):
of Love, and he basically said that sex and love
were a distraction and incredibly harmful to society. But all
of that changed a number of years later when he
met Josephine. Now, at that point he was already fairly
famous as a military leader and had been made a
general at the age of just twenty four. When he
married Josephine, he was twenty six. She was thirty two

(02:15):
and the widow of an aristocrat who was beheaded during
the French Revolution. They had an insanely passionate relationship from
the get go. A lot of their love letters still
survive and are, let's just say x rated. He would
tell her not to bathe until he returned from battle,
and he'd talk about how they'd welcome each other. She

(02:37):
was pretty accomplished on that front, and she returned his
erotic letters with her own, although much to his disappointment,
she wrote far fewer letters to him than he did
to her. He was kind of like an anxious kid,
writing her every day, sometimes several times a day. Biographers
and historians say Josephine did something in bed called zigzags,

(03:01):
but they've been unable to figure out exactly what that was.
I guess kind of like the move where the swirl
on Seinfeld. But they say in his salty but sexy
letters to her, Napoleon had a pet name for Josephine's
private parts, referring to that region as the Baron de Keppin.
Nobody has been able to figure out that one either.

(03:22):
Who was that guy? Problem is, Josephine was sexually voracious,
and she began cheating on Napoleon within weeks of their
marriage while he was away at war. He found out
and figured he'd fight fire with fire, and he began
the first of his many as twenty two love affairs
during his marriage. When he was home, he realized he

(03:43):
could not keep up with her sexual needs. Legend has
it he told friends he often had to turn her down,
saying not tonight. Josephine. By this time, even though he
had fought against the monarchy and the revolution, he wanted
unlimited powers and had crowned himself emperor. Problem is, he

(04:03):
wanted an heir to his throne, and although Josephine had
two children with her first husband, it appeared she was
unable to have any more. Napoleon didn't appear to be
the problem on that front, since he had those illegitimate
children anywhere from two to eight. Between the lack of
a baby and her cheating, Napoleon decided it was time

(04:25):
to move on. They separated just four years after their wedding,
but stayed close. He finally had the marriage and nulled
years later so he could remarry and have a legitimate air.
He did have plenty of illegitimate kids running around, as
we said, but all of this upset brought him full
circle to his original stance on sex. He introduced a

(04:47):
new code in France called the Code Napoleon. Part of
it claimed sex was disruptive to society and men's minds.
It set strict limits on sex in French society, and
because Napoleon believed women needed to be controlled, Thank you
very much, Josephine, it actually gave women in France fewer
rights than children had and established complete supremacy of the

(05:10):
husband over the wife. Eventually, especially because they couldn't have children,
Napoleon had the marriage annulled, and he immediately married a
nineteen year old Austrian duchess, Marie Louise, but she wasn't Josephine.
His power as emperor seemed to begin to diminish with
Josephine gone. When he lost his throne in eighteen fourteen

(05:31):
and was exiled to Elba, Marie Louise took their son
and fled to Austria. They never saw each other again.
Napoleon and Josephine's love affair never really ended. When she
died in eighteen fourteen, they say her final words were Bonaparte, Elba,
the King of Rome, and when Napoleon still in exile,

(05:52):
but now on a remote island in the Atlantic called
Saint Helena, died in eighteen twenty one. His last words
were said to be France the Army, Head of the Army, Josephine.

(06:17):
I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our
executive producer is Steve Goldstein of Amplified Media. We're out
with new episodes twice a week. Thanks for listening to
the Backstory, the pieces of history you didn't know you
needed to know.