Who Did Napoleon Marry? Joséphine and Marie Louise

Napoleon married twice, and the two marriages could hardly have been more different. The first, to Joséphine de Beauharnais, was a passionate, chaotic relationship forged in the uncertainty of the revolutionary era. The second, to Marie-Louise of Austria, was a coldly calculated dynastic alliance designed to secure his empire's future — and it succeeded at the one thing the first marriage never did.

Joséphine: a marriage of passion, not politics

Napoleon married Joséphine de Beauharnais, a widowed Martinique-born aristocrat six years his senior, in March 1796, just days before departing to command the Army of Italy. Their early correspondence is famously intense — Napoleon wrote to her constantly and passionately, often frustrated by her comparatively irregular replies. Joséphine was crowned Empress alongside him in 1804, but the marriage produced no children, and by 1809, with no heir and his dynasty's future in question, Napoleon made the painful decision to annul the marriage.

Marie-Louise: a marriage built for an heir

Napoleon's second marriage, to the eighteen-year-old Habsburg archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria in April 1810, was explicitly dynastic — a formal alliance with a power he had defeated in battle only the year before, intended above all to secure a legitimate heir and a measure of royal legitimacy for his still-young empire. The strategy worked: Marie-Louise gave birth to a son, Napoleon II, in March 1811, styled King of Rome from birth. The marriage lacked the emotional intensity of his first, but it achieved precisely what it was designed to.

Two marriages, two kinds of record

Because both women spent long stretches apart from Napoleon during his campaigns, both relationships left substantial written records — though Joséphine's correspondence, spanning nearly the entirety of his rise from general to emperor, is considerably larger and more revealing of his day-to-day state of mind than the shorter, later exchange with Marie-Louise.

Letters to and from both Joséphine and Marie-Louise are plotted on the interactive map, letting you follow both marriages against the places and campaigns Napoleon was writing from at the time.