Mathilde Bonaparte, a princess at the court of Napoleon III
Mathilde Bonaparte (1820-1904) was the daughter of Jerome Bonaparte, the youngest of Napoleon‘s brothers and former King of Westphalia, and his second wife, Katharina of Württemberg. The princess was born in Trieste and was educated in Rome and Florence, where her parents were in exile after Napoleon’s defeat.
Mathilde was not very close to her mother. Later in life, she would recall: ‘I never got much love from my mother because I was a girl. She was rather quick with her hand‘. Mathilde saw her ‘as a torturer who was jealous of her‘. The princess also disliked her paternal grandmother, Maria Letizia Ramolino, whom she and her younger brother visited every Sunday after mass. ‘Madame Letizia greeted us politely, but without affection,’ she confesses in her memoirs.
On the contrary, Mathilde developed a close relationship with her nanny, Madame de Reding. ‘I love her more than my own mother…. Her memory is a religion to me,’ she writes. Reding’s death in 1851 left Mathilde devastated, so much so that she said: ‘The loss I have suffered is all the more cruel because it is irreparable‘.
Mathilde was a close friend of her cousin, Sophie of Württemberg (who became Queen of the Netherlands in 1849), with whom she formed a bond that would remain so until Sophie’s death. ‘Dear Mathilde, in finding you I have found a friend for life. I know that, even when we are far apart, nothing can break the bond between our hearts,’ Sophie wrote.
In 1835 Mathilde became engaged to her cousin Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the future Napoleon III. She was 15 years old at the time. Her father, recently widowed, had been deprived of much of his wealth, which came mainly from his father-in-law, Wilhelm I of Württemberg. However, the engagement failed, both because King Wilhelm I disapproved of the union and because of the financial objections raised by Louis Napoleon’s father.
On 1 November 1840, in Florence, Mathilde married Count Anatole Demidoff, who shortly before the wedding had obtained the title of Prince of San Donato from Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany (a title that was not recognised in Russia). The marriage remained childless.
Mathilde knew that, as Countess Demidoff, she would live lavishly and, above all, be able to travel, especially to Paris, but she paid a high price for these privileges. Embittered by Jerome’s non-payment of Mathilde’s dowry and his father-in-law’s constant demands for loans, Demidoff soon resumed his bachelor habits, flaunting in public his mistress, Valentine de Sainte-Aldegonde, wife of the third Duke of Dino. Exasperated, Mathilde insulted the duchess during a masked ball they both attended, only to be resoundingly slapped by her irate husband. This scandalous episode ended their relationship.
Mathilde fled to Paris, taking with her the jewels that were supposed to be her dowry, but which her father, always short of money, had sold to Demidoff before the wedding. In the end, her husband was forced by the court in St. Petersburg to pay Princess Mathilde a pension of 200,000 francs a year and never recovered his wife’s precious jewels.
The couple was finally allowed to separate in 1847 by personal order of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I. In the meantime, Mathilde had already moved to Paris in 1846, at the end of Louis Philippe’s reign, to live with her lover Count Emilien de Nieuwerkerke, whom she had met a few years earlier in San Donato.
Two years later, his cousin Louis Napoleon was elected President of the Republic. At his side she found a leading role. From 1848 to 1852, Mathilde was the first woman at the Elysée Palace for the President, who was officially single (although since 1846 he had been in a relationship with Harriet Howard, a divorced English woman). Today it can be said that Mathilde Bonaparte was the first woman to hold the position of First Lady in France.
Lucid and realistic, she knew she was very lucky and often wondered what life would have in store for her if her uncle had not been the great Napoleon. She used to say: ‘If it had not been for Napoleon I, I would be selling oranges on the streets of Ajaccio‘.
During the Second Empire and the Third Republic, she ran a popular literary salon in Paris. A convinced Bonapartist, this did not prevent her from welcoming writers from all political backgrounds into her home (Paul Bourget, the Goncourt brothers, Gustave Flaubert, Tourgueniev, among others). ‘This salon is the true salon of the 19th century, with a hostess who is the perfect model of the modern woman,’ wrote the Goncourt brothers.
An enemy of etiquette, she ‘welcomed all her visitors‘, according to Abel Hermant, ‘with a nonchalance that was the ultimate refinement of condescension and courtesy‘.
The fact that she held a salon earned her, as was customary at the time, some sharp comments from a dandy. Boni de Castellane, who was very young at the time, took the liberty of criticising one of her portraits, saying: ‘Her portrait, by Benjamin-Constant, gives her the air of a theatre usheress, only she lacks a cap and blue or pink bows‘. He also criticised her private home in Rue de Berri, with this comment: ‘Her house in Rue de Berri, carpeted with plush and furnished in the Napoleonic style, was hideous‘.
According to Léon Daudet, ‘the princess herself, to whom everyone recognised – I don’t know why – a magnificent appearance, was a heavy old lady, with an imperious rather than an imperial face, who made the mistake of cutting her hair‘.
After the fall of the Empire in 1870, she moved to Belgium for one year, then returned to France. In 1879, news was published that she had secretly married her latest lover, the poet Claudius Popelin, which she hastened to deny. She later separated from him.
Mathilde Bonaparte was also an artist. She trained in the arts, particularly painting, in Italy with Michel Ghislain Stapleaux and Ida Botti Scifoni.
When she arrived in Paris, she continued her training with Eugène Giraud, one of her closest friends. She practised watercolour and exhibited several times at the Salon between 1859 and 1867. She obtained an honourable mention in 1861 and a medal in 1865. In addition to her literary salon, she helped several artists by buying works from them and building up a collection. Sainte-Beuve even gave her the name of Notre-Dame des Arts.
The following anecdote is enough to describe her strong character: the only member of the House of Bonaparte to remain in France after the vote on the second law on exile (June 1886), ten years later Mathilde was invited by Félix Faure, the then President of the French Republic, to the ceremony to welcome the Russian imperial couple to the Chapelle des Invalides.
The princess, in her seventies but still defiant, returned the card to the president with these words: ‘This card is useless to me, I have the key‘, and made it clear that she would either use it to go freely to the place to whose right of access belonged to her by inheritance or that she would refrain from attending the ceremony altogether.
In 1903, her foot caught on her skirt, fracturing her femur. Her condition worsened day by day. Mathilde died on 2 January 1904 at her home at 20 rue de Berri and was buried in the church of Saint-Gratien (Val-d’Oise), which she herself had built.
