Imaginary Wish List: Empress Josephine
The tale of Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie—better known as Empress Joséphine or Joséphine de Beauharnais—is replete with scandal, social climbing and lost love. Her first marriage to Alexandre de Beauharnais, a French political figure and general, ended in separation, dual imprisonment and, ultimately, his beheading for political reasons. Now a widow with two children, Eugène and Hortense, Joséphine started to climb the social ladder, making many political alliances in the bedroom before meeting Napoléon Bonaparte, Emperor of France. They began a fiery affair (captured in his letters to her) and were married within five months. Their union ended in divorce after Joséphine—now the first Empress of France through her marriage—was unable to bear an heir. In an ironic twist of fate, Hortense, her daughter from de Beauharnais, ended up marrying Louis Bonaparte, Joséphine’s ex-husband’s brother and their son was Napoléon III, Emperor of the French from 1852 to 1870. Meanwhile, Eugène went on to marry a German princess, meaning, through her children, Joséphine is a direct ancestor of the incumbent heads of the royal houses of Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden. (Napoléon, meanwhile, never had the heir he was after as his only child died and never reigned.) In honour of Empress Joséphine’s regal style through a separation, a husband's beheading, coronation and divorce, here’s what we imagine she might wear (with suitable flair) today.
