Joséphine de Beauharnais: Napoleon's First Empress

Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie — known to history as Joséphine — was born in 1763 on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, the daughter of a minor plantation-owning family. Her path from a modest colonial upbringing to the throne of France is one of the more improbable stories of the revolutionary era, and it is preserved today in an unusually rich body of correspondence between her and Napoleon.

From the Terror to the Directory

Joséphine's first marriage, to Alexandre de Beauharnais, ended with his execution during the Terror in 1794 — she herself was imprisoned and narrowly escaped the same fate. Widowed and moving in the political and social circles of the Directory, she met a young, ambitious general named Napoleon Bonaparte in 1795. They married in March 1796, just days before Napoleon departed to take command of the Army of Italy.

The letters that followed

It is from this near-immediate separation that one of the most famous correspondences of the era begins. Napoleon's letters to Joséphine from the Italian campaign are by turns urgent, devoted, and demanding — he wrote to her constantly, often frustrated by the irregularity of her replies. This pattern of separation and letter-writing would recur throughout their marriage as Napoleon's campaigns took him across Europe, from Egypt to Austria to Poland, generating a written record that lets historians trace his movements and state of mind with unusual precision.

Empress, then set aside

Joséphine was crowned Empress alongside Napoleon at Notre-Dame in December 1804. But the marriage produced no children, and by 1809 — with the survival of his dynasty a growing preoccupation — Napoleon moved to annul the marriage and remarry Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, who would bear him an heir the following year. Joséphine retired to the Château de Malmaison outside Paris, where she remained on notably cordial terms with Napoleon until her death in 1814.

A correspondence as a historical record

Because Joséphine spent much of her marriage apart from Napoleon rather than travelling with him, the letters he sent her form a kind of parallel travel diary of his campaigns — datable, locatable, and often specific about where he was and what he was doing. That makes her correspondence one of the most useful threads for reconstructing his movements across the period.

The interactive map plots letters to and from Joséphine against the places Napoleon was writing from, letting you follow the relationship — and the campaigns around it — chronologically and geographically.