Jérôme Bonaparte

Jérôme Bonaparte (born November 15, 1784, Ajaccio, Corsica—died June 24, 1860, Villegenis, France) was Napoleon I’s youngest brother, who became king of Westphalia and marshal of France. It was through Jérôme that the Bonaparte line extended into the United States; his eldest son, Jerome, grew up in Maryland with his American mother.

The Bonaparte family had endured poverty and hardship in Corsica before Napoleon’s military successes during the French Revolution moved the family up the social and economic ladder. Jérôme was still a child when his increasingly powerful brother sent him to Paris for schooling.

A member of the consular guard from 1800, Jérôme was transferred to the navy soon after he was wounded in a duel. Napoleon sent Jérôme to the French West Indian colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in late 1801 as a member of the expeditionary forces to put down the slave revolt there. He was ordered to return to France in the summer of 1803. Fearing British capture if he sailed for France from the Caribbean, Jérôme sailed instead for the United States. There, while visiting Baltimore, Maryland, he met and soon married (December 24, 1803) Elizabeth Patterson, the 18-year-old daughter of a wealthy merchant. The pair sailed for Europe in 1805. Because Napoleon intended to expand his power in Europe by making politically advantageous marriages for his siblings, he ordered Jérôme’s pregnant wife to be excluded from his realm. As a result, Jérôme’s son was born in England. Jérôme soon saw the advantage in complying with the emperor’s wishes and rejected his wife and child in order to partake of the advantages of empire.

Britannica Quiz

Kings and Emperors (Part III) Quiz

He took command of a small squadron in the Mediterranean and took part in the campaign of 1806. An imperial decree annulled his first marriage in 1807. The emperor then arranged Jérôme’s marriage to Princess Catherine of Württemberg (by whom Jérôme would have three children) and made him king of Westphalia. During his short reign (1807–13), Jérôme spent enormous amounts of money on improving the streets, parks, and buildings in his kingdom and especially on renovating his palace. In addition to this, the men he appointed to high office were either inept or corrupt. He soon drained his country’s treasury and enraged Napoleon. His most noteworthy accomplishment was the then-unusual granting of rights to the Jews of Westphalia. In the Russian campaign of 1812, Jérôme failed in his assigned mission and was returned to Kassel, the kingdom’s capital city.

In 1813, on the fall of the Napoleonic regime in Germany, Jérôme returned to France. He commanded a division on the French left wing at Waterloo and attacked with great pertinacity. With Napoleon’s second abdication, Jérôme left France, spending most of the years of his exile in Italy. He returned to France in 1847, and, after the rise of his nephew Louis-Napoléon (as Napoleon III), he became, successively, governor of the Invalides, marshal of France, and president of the Senate.