Empress Joséphine never actually called herself Joséphine de Beauharnais
The woman history files as Joséphine de Beauharnais went by Rose until Napoleon renamed her, and she dropped the Beauharnais surname once she married him. The label stuck only because the restored Bourbons balked at using either her imperial title or the Bonaparte name. Even her birthplace, Martinique or Saint Lucia, is disputed.
She was born Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie on 23 June 1763, into an old noble family with little money. Her grandfather had settled at Le Carbet on Martinique in 1726, and her father, a planter and marine lieutenant who had once served as a page to the Dauphine, lurched from one money crisis to the next. The baptism entry at Les Trois-Îlets records her christening but not where she was born, and a rival tradition places her birth at Paix Bouche on Saint Lucia, an island that passed between Britain and France fourteen times and kept no civil registers then.
Her first marriage was a family arrangement. An aunt, who was mistress and later wife of the Martinique governor François de Beauharnais, wanted his son Alexandre matched with one of her nieces. The first choice, Catherine-Désirée, died in 1777 and the youngest sister was not yet twelve, so Rose took her place and married Alexandre at Noisy-le-Grand on 13 December 1779. They had two children, Eugène and Hortense, but the marriage soured into a court-ordered separation.
The Terror almost ended her story. Alexandre was arrested in March 1794 and Rose in April, both held in the Carmes prison in Paris. He went to the guillotine on 23 July 1794; she was released five days later, after Robespierre fell. In 1795 she met Napoleon Bonaparte, six years younger, and they married on 9 March 1796. She was Empress of the French from 18 May 1804 and Queen of Italy from 1805, but she gave him no children, and he annulled the marriage on 10 January 1810 to wed Marie Louise of Austria.
Her mark survives in taste and in bloodlines. At the Château de Malmaison she worked with painters, sculptors and decorators to shape the Consular and empire style, built one of the great art collections of her day and closely supervised a famous rose garden. Through Eugène and Hortense she was grandmother to Napoleon III and to Empress Amélie of Brazil, and the royal houses of Belgium, Norway, Denmark and Sweden descend from her. She died on 29 May 1814.
Source: Joséphine de Beauharnais
