Joséphine de Beauharnais

Joséphine de Beauharnais (23 June 1763 – 29 May 1814) was the first wife of Napoleon and Empress of the French from 1804 to 1810. Born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie on the sugar island of Martinique, she married the executed revolutionary general Beauharnais, survived imprisonment during the Terror, and became a leading figure of Parisian society. Napoleon married her in a civil ceremony in March 1796 and was passionately devoted to her, though she never shared his intensity. Crowned beside him at Notre-Dame in 1804, she presided over the splendour of the new court. Because the marriage produced no heir, Napoleon divorced her in 1810 to marry Marie Louise. Joséphine retired to Malmaison, where she died in 1814, weeks after Napoleon's first abdication. Her taste shaped Empire style, and her memory haunted Napoleon's exile; his reported last words included her name. Her great-grandson would become Napoleon III, so that the blood of the first Empress returned to the French throne a generation later.