Pauline Bonaparte

Pauline Bonaparte, in French, Marie-Pauline Bonaparte (Ajaccio, October 20, 1780-Florence, June 9, 1825), also known as Paulina Borghese or Borghesse, was a French noblewoman, sister of Napoleon Bonaparte. She was portrayed in the Victorious Venus (1805-1808) by the Italian sculptor and painter Antonio Canova. Her stay in Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) between the end of 1801 and 1802 was fictionalized by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in his work The kingdom of this world , published in 1949.

Biography

Family and first marriage

Maria Paola Buonaparte (in Corsican) was the tenth child (Carolina and Jerónimo will still follow) of the marriage formed by Carlo Buonaparte (d. 1785) and María Leticia Ramolino, both born in Corsica and nobles. When she is thirteen years old, she moves with her family to Marseille and, later, to Paris.

On June 14, 1797, she married General Charles-Victoire-Emmanuel Leclerc, in Milan. On April 20 of the following year, her only son was born, Dermide Louis Napoleon Leclerc, who died prematurely in 1804.

Consulate (1799-1804) and Empire (1804-1815)

Antonio Canova. Victorious Venus,
1805-1808

Front view.

Dorsal view.

At the end of 1801, Napoleon commissioned Leclerc to move to Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in command of 40,000 soldiers to quell Toussaint Louverture's uprising.

Paulina Bonaparte embarked on December 14 and settled in the colony together with Leclerc and little Dermide in February 1802.

However, when Leclerc gives the order to transfer his wife and son on a ship to a safer place, Paulina, deaf to the pleas of the local ladies, who knew what terrible enemies they could face, told them. says:

You may weep, you; for you are not sisters of Bonaparte. But I don't get pregnant more than my husband, or I'll die.

This stage ended with the death of her husband on November 2, 1802, also a victim of black vomit, after which Pauline Bonaparte returned to France.

On August 28, 1803 she married Camillo Borghese, Prince of Sulmona and Rossano, head of one of the most powerful families in Italy.

Her husband commissioned the most famous sculptor of the time, Antonio Canova, to create a work for which she herself would pose as a model. The sculpture, in which she appears naked and which is currently kept in the Borghese Gallery (which is why it is also known as Venus Borghese), shakes the moral principles of Roman society. epoch.

In August 1804 his son Dermide died at the age of six, after which he returned to Paris. Later, she was linked to the painter Nicolas de Forbin (1779-1841), and then to the Italian composer Felice Blangini (1781-1841) and the actor and theater director François Joseph Talma.

Probable portrait of Paulina Borghese

Also dating from these years is a magnificent life-size oil portrait of the French painter Louis Benjamin Marie Devouges (1770-1842), almost certainly made in the former suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, in the area Metropolitan of Paris.

The protagonist of the work appears sitting inside a luxurious bathroom of the time, barely covered with a provocative dress so extremely transparent that it practically leaves her entire body exposed, at the moment of putting on her stockings. In the background, a dark mountainous landscape can be seen, which expands the figurative space of the painting, giving it greater depth. The beautiful pinkish tones of the flesh contrast with the grey, reddish and green of the rest of the painting, which accentuates the sensuality of the whole.

As for the probable identity of the model, it could indeed be Paulina Bonaparte, with whom the woman represented bears a notable physical resemblance, even more so, taking into account that, according to specialized critics, the work was commissioned by Devouges (1770-1842) by his brother King Joseph I, who after his exile to the United States in 1813 kept it in his mansion in Bordentown (New Jersey), being acquired after his death in 1844 by the banker and prominent art collector American Nicholas Longworth (1783-1863).

But it seems that the puritanical American society of the time was not prepared to contemplate a painting of such characteristics, so Longworth had to remove it from the sight of his fellow citizens.

Years later, it became the property of a certain Edward N. Roth, who had it displayed for a time in the St. Nicholas Hotel in Cincinnati (Ohio), being purchased from his widow by John Ringling, for an amount of something more than 20,000 dollars, whose private collection will give rise to the well-known Ringling Museum in Sarasota (Florida), where it entered in 1936.

After the fall of Napoleon

When Napoleon is forced to abdicate and go into exile on the island of Elba (1814), Paulina decides to accompany him, pawning her properties to do so. Once he decides to return to France to regain power, Paulina once again offers him all her support and even gives him her valuable collection of jewelry in order to help him finance the subsequent military campaign.

After her brother's defeat in the Battle of Waterloo and his definitive exile in Saint Helena, Paulina returns to Rome, from where she tries to seek the support of various foreign rulers to improve her brother's living conditions in the island. When he died in May 1821, Paulina, who had been expressly forbidden to visit him, collapsed.

From the beginning of 1825, her health deteriorated due to uterine cancer. Shortly before she dies, she reconciles with her husband, Prince Camillo. She died in Florence on June 9, at 44 years of age. Against her wish to be buried alongside her son and her first husband at Montgobert Castle in the Picardy region, she was buried in the Borghesian Chapel of the Papal Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome.

Ancestors

Powers

Predecessor: Fernando I de Parma	Duchess of Guastalla (30 March-14 August 1806)	Successor: Annexed to Duchy of Parma
Predecessor: Created	Princess of Guastalla (1806-1815)	Successor: Extinguish
Predecessor: Anna Maria Salviati	Princess consort of Sulmona and Rossano (1803-1825)	Successor: Adèle de La Rochefoucauld

Paulina Bonaparte in fiction

Film and television

Original title	Premiere date	Country	Director	Like Pauline.
Madame Sans-Gêne	15 Mar. 1945	Argentina	Luis César Amadori	Herminia Franco
Austerlitz	1960	Yugoslavia	Abel Garce	Claudia Cardinale
Venere imperiale	14 Oct. 1963	SpainSpain	Jean Delannoy	Gina Lollobrigida
Madame Sans-Gêne	11 Feb. 2002	France	Philippe de Broca	Alexandra Mercouroff
Napoleon	11 Nov. 2007	United KingdomUnited Kingdom	Nick Murphy.	Laura Greenwood