Here’s What Really Happened to Napoleon's Wife, Josephine

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There’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a biopic, and Ridley Scott’s new film Napoleon takes another deep look at the titular historical figure. The movie takes you inside Napoleon’s fierce army and war strategy, as well as his personal life, with a strong spotlight on his relationship and marriage to Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerim, or the person we all now know as Josephine Bonaparte. Fun fact—Napoleon was the one that dubbed her Josephine, as the future French empress had previously gone by Rose for most of her life.

British actress Vanessa Kirby (who earned an Oscar nomination for Pieces of a Woman and also has appeared in both the Mission: Impossible and Fast and Furious franchises) stars as Josephine, opposite Joaquin Phoenix in the title role of Napoleon. She recently opened up to Vogue France about how she prepped for the role. “Playing Joséphine de Beauharnais was very different [than playing Princess Margaret on The Crown]. Of course, there are things written about her, but these accounts are often in the context of the things that Napoleon did, and there are fewer writings on her than there are about him,” Kirby explained.

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But while there are fewer writings about Josephine, there definitely isn’t a lack of interest in her real life story. Josephine lived an interesting life prior to meeting Napoleon, as she had actually been married before. Her first husband, the French politician Alexandre de Beauharnais, was killed by guillotine during the French Revolution, and Josephine herself was imprisoned for three months.

The Napoleon movie does a great job of showcasing Josephine’s life while she was with Napoleon, but many people don’t know what happened to her upon her 1810 divorce with Napoleon after they were unable to have a child; there were even rumors that she later died of a “broken heart.”

Here’s the real story on what we know about Josephine’s death.

How did Josephine Bonaparte die?

Josephine died of pneumonia in the town of Rueil-Malmaison in France on May 29, 1814. After divorcing Napoleon, she lived in the Château de Malmaison, and although the two were no longer together, they were said to be on good terms, and Napoleon was distraught after hearing of her death. He was in exile on the Tuscan island of Elba, and upon reading the news in a newspaper, he went into a period of seclusion. Allegedly, Napoleon’s last words upon his own death in 1821 were—when translated into English—“France, the Army, the Head of the Army, Josephine."

Josephine is buried at the Saint Pierre-Saint Paul Church in Rueil-Malmaison, and you can actually visit both her home and her final resting place. There also used to be a statue of the former empress on her home island of Martinique, but in 1991 the statue was beheaded and splashed with red paint. The reason? Less than 10 years after France abolished slavery, Napoleon and Josephine reinstated the ugly practice, and many people believed this was due in part to the fact that the couple wanted to benefit Josephine’s family’s failing plantation on the island. In 2020, anti-racism activists tore the statue down after France’s president Emmanuel Macron refused to take down statues of other colonial-era figures.

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