Declining Descendants

THE GOLDEN BEES by Theo Aronson. 407 pages. New York Graphic Society. $8.95.

Socially, the Bonapartes always had a problem: while Napoleon conquered Europe, the family never conquered European society. This was a grave disappointment to all of them, including Napoleon I. Even after he became Emperor, he felt it necessary to suggest that the Bonapartes had been the Bourbons of Corsica, a claim that greatly amused his niece, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. "If it had not been for Napoleon's armies," she once confessed, "I would be selling oranges on the quayside at Ajaccio."

The social ups and downs of the Bonapartes are the subject of South African Author Theo Aronson's overromanticized but staggeringly detailed book. The best that can be said for most of the clan is that they had the courage of their social pretensions.

Readymade Kings. Napoleon I, Author Aronson points out, had "an almost primitive sense of Corsican clannishness," and it led him to elevate his four brothers and three sisters to positions in the Empire that they were ludicrously unsuited to fill. After Austerlitz, for instance, he made his misanthropic brother Louis King of Holland; Brother Joseph became King of Naples; Brother Jerome became King of Westphalia; Sisters Elisa, Caroline and Pauline received various duchies in Italy; and Napoleon's widowed mother became Son Altesse Imperiale Madame la Mere de l'Empereur. Napoleon gave them all immense allowances (which they all shrewdly kited into fortunes--Elisa by reopening the marble quarries at Carrara and flooding Europe with marble busts of the Emperor).

All of them gave Napoleon ceaseless trouble. Pauline, an apparent nymphomaniac, had herself sculpted in the nude by Canova, slept indiscriminately with ambassadors and tradesmen, and fostered the rumor that she was engaged in an incestuous affair with Napoleon himself. The brothers and sisters squabbled among themselves about whose titles took precedence and complained regularly to Napoleon about details of protocol at the court (Elisa and Caroline never forgave him for seating them on stools at one state reception when they felt their rank entitled them to arm chairs). Worst of all, Napoleon's addled brothers got the notion that they were supposed to rule over their various subjects rather than act as emissaries for the Emperor. "If I made one of my brothers a king," said Napoleon bitterly at St. Helena, "he imagined that he was king by the grace of God."

Also Postmasters. With the fall of the Empire, the brothers, sisters and in-laws scattered, most of them to Italy, Joseph to America, where he set himself up as landed gentry on an estate in New Jersey. The Bonapartes were a sexually agile lot, and by the time Napoleon III (son of Louis) became Emperor in 1852, it was necessary to distinguish between the legitimate and illegitimate Bonapartes by dividing them into the famille Imperiale and the famille civile. The Emperor supported an immense number of them out of the privy purse and even allowed the women to retain the title of princess, although they were technically supposed to abandon it on marriage. One of the most persistent social embarrassments to the court was Count Leon Bonaparte, Napoleon's illegitimate son by a lady-in-waiting, who publicly claimed a right to the Crown, pestered the Emperor for lifelong handouts, and died penniless and insane in 1881.

The second generation of Bonapartes tried without much success to marry well-seasoned European royalty. Achille Murat Bonaparte, son of Caroline, found that his title (Crown Prince of Naples) was getting him nowhere and decamped for Florida, where he became postmaster of Tallahassee and married a great-niece of George Washington's, thus complying with Napoleon I's edict to the American Bonapartes to marry only into the Washington and Jefferson families. Socially, the most successful of the second generation aside from Louis-Napoleon himself was Prince Napoleon Bonaparte ("Prince Plon-Plon"), son of Jerome; he married the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel II and became King of Sardinia.

In more recent generations, Author Aronson computes, the Bonapartes have married their way into just about every royal family in Europe. The present Bonaparte pretender, Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, is a chap in his late 50s who lives in Paris with his wife and four children on an inherited income and rarely speaks to the Count of Paris, pretender to the Bourbon throne. The American branch of the family produced several distinguished men (including Charles Patterson Bonaparte, Secretary of the Navy under Theodore Roosevelt). But the line petered out with Jerome-Napoleon Patterson Bonaparte in 1943. The great-grandnephew of Napoleon I was taking his dog for a walk in Central Park one afternoon, when he tripped over the leash and suffered a skull fracture that killed him.

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