How the Whole World Came to Believe That Napoleon Bonaparte Liked Smelly Women

What is Napoleon most famous for? There are, obviously, the conquests of Egypt, Portugal, and Russia, where the general-cum-emperor leveraged his remarkable military acumen and unrelenting political ambition to redraw the borders of Europe. You may also be familiar with his systematic social reforms (including the creation of a centralized bank and a more formalized higher-education apparatus), his penchant for unbelievable malice on the battlefield, or even his stoic aphorisms about leadership that are repeated by unimaginative CEO types to this day.

All of those are important cornerstones of the Napoleonic legacy, but if you’ve spent some time on the internet, you might also know him for a different reason: his alleged fetish for fetid, days-old body odor.

I speak, of course, of a letter that Napoleon supposedly sent his beloved Joséphine de Beauharnais in 1800, while he was knee-deep in the valorous Italian campaign. It reads, purportedly, “Home in three days, don’t wash.”

The implication here is obvious: Napoleon is eager to return to Paris so he may have sex with his wife, and he’d prefer to do so while Joséphine is luxuriating in mildewy stank. Given the legend of Napoleon’s oddball character, it was never that hard to believe that the emperor had a kink for the sour tang of rotten sweat.

The story of Napoleon’s alleged letter has been passed on by a variety of legacy institutions. It’s also been codified into a meme among history nerds—just look at all these TikToks celebrating le petit caporal’s rancid horndoggedness. And personally, I’m holding out hope that Ridley Scott makes, at the very least, a coded reference to the foul odors of Joséphine somewhere in the 158 minutes of his upcoming epic, Napoleon.

There’s just one problem. That letter is total bunk. According to interviews with three experts, Napoleon never asked Joséphine to stop washing in order to enhance their chemistry in the bedroom. The whole thing is totally made up. I’m sorry, guys. Or maybe you’re welcome?

“Having read all of Napoleon’s letters to Joséphine, I’ve never come across it,” Philip Dwyer, a professor at the University of Newcastle who has authored multiple biographies of Napoleon, told me. “His letters were intimate, and they did contain sexual allusions, but nothing as graphic.”

“It’s totally false,” added Peter Hicks, a historian at the Napoleonic research fund Fondation Napoléon. “It was probably invented by someone who was ferociously anti-Napoleon. Such people do exist.”

“I certainly would love to see the original letter or at least a reputable source citing the original,” said Alexander Mikaberidze, author of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History. “The story seems to be a latter-day invention, which keeps being repeated from source to source without anyone bothering to check the original.”

Indeed, the specific origins of the legend are murky at best. A little-known French book, titled Napoléon: Lettres d’amour à Joséphine, appears to contain the first known reference to the alleged letter, but that book was published in 1981. (Given that many of Napoleon’s letters to Joséphine have been in the public record since the 19^th century, it seems awfully hard to believe that such a salacious detail would’ve stayed buried until Reagan was in office.) And Andrew Roberts, perhaps the most well-known Napoleon biographer on the planet, parroted the story of Napoleon’s affection for filthy, filthy lovemaking in a 2015 interview with the Standard. (“Napoleon was obsessed by cunnilingus. Talked about it constantly. He’d say to [Joséphine], ‘don’t wash for three days’ because he’d enjoy going down on her when she was unwashed,” said Roberts. “It was really basic.”)

However, when I reached out to Roberts and inquired about the veracity of the letter—and the emperor’s lust for rankness in general—he replied, plain and simply, “I’m afraid I just don’t know!” (Roberts also mentioned that he steered clear of the topic in his 976-page tome Napoleon: A Life.)

Perhaps you’re still clinging onto the hope that while Napoleon never officially stated that he enjoyed a round of stanky lovemaking, he still held on to the fetish in the inner sanctums of his mind. Mikaberidze poured water on that theory too. Apparently, the emperor had a uniquely keen sense of smell. “He detested unpleasant odors of all kinds,” he said. “He took regular baths.” Mikaberidze cited Napoleon’s personal secretary Claude François Méneval, who once wrote that Napoleon’s nose was so good he could “detect the vicinity of a subterranean passage, a cellar, or a sewer a long way off.”

For Napoleon, this olfactory superiority seemed to be more of a curse than a blessing. Mikaberidze quoted another one of Napoleon’s secretaries, Baron Fain, who remembered that Napoleon would “move away from more than one servant who was far from suspecting the secret aversion his smell had inspired.” That must be the most polite way anyone has described BO.

“Of course, one might argue that Napoleon had peculiar sexual preferences and that he could have been predisposed to certain smells inside the boudoir,” finished Mikaberidze. “But we do know that in Spain, Egypt, and elsewhere, he actually turned women away because he could not stand their body smell.”

Why do I feel disappointed by this? For whatever reason, I want to live in a world where Napoleon had a weird, messy kink, if only because it better frames his enduring image in popular society—simultaneously a genius tactician and a weird little gremlin. (This is why Scott cast Joaquin Phoenix in the titular role, for he is Hollywood’s foremost supremely talented weird little gremlin.) Scott has evinced disdain for those who would ding his movie on grounds of historical accuracy, and given that, I hope he’s willing to keep this particular fantasy alive in the movie theaters. Leave truth, accuracy, and primary sources to the scholars; give us the reeking, pestilential Joséphine sex scene we deserve. Make Napoleon Freaky Again!