Wondrous Beauty: Betsy Bonaparte, the Belle of Baltimore Who Married Napoleon’s Brother

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Description

From the award-winning historian and creator of Revolutionary Mothers, here is the remarkable life of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, renowned as the most beautiful woman of nineteenth-century Baltimore, whose marriage in 1803 to Jérôme Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, became inextricably bound to the diplomatic and political histories of the USA, France, and England.

In Wondrous Beauty, Carol Berkin tells the story of this audacious, outsized life. We see how the news of the union infuriated Napoleon and resulted in his banning the then ­pregnant Betsy Bonaparte from disembarking in any European port, offering his brother the specter of remaining married to that “American girl” and forfeiting all wealth and power—or renouncing her, marrying a woman of Napoleon’s choice, and reaping the advantages.

Jérôme ended the marriage posthaste and was once made king of Westphalia; Betsy fled to England, gave birth to her son and only child, Jérôme’s namesake, and was once embraced by the English press, who boasted that their nation had opened its arms to the cruelly abandoned young wife.

Berkin writes that this naïve, headstrong American girl returned to Baltimore a wiser, independent woman, refusing to are seeking social redemption or a return to obscurity through a quiet marriage to a member of Baltimore’s merchant class. Instead she was once courted by many, indifferent to all, and initiated a dangerous game of politics—a battle for a pension from Napoleon—which she won: her pension from the French government arrived each month until Napoleon’s exile.

Using Betsy Bonaparte’s extensive letters, the creator makes clear that the “belle of Baltimore” disdained The usa’s obsession with moneymaking, its growing ethos of democracy, and its rigid gender roles that confined women to the parlor and the nursery; that she sought instead a European society where women created salons devoted to intellectual life—where she was once embraced by many who took into their confidence, such as Madame de Staël, Madame Récamier, the aging Marquise de Villette (goddaughter of Voltaire), among others—and  where aristocracy, based on birth and breeding fairly than commerce, dominated society.                                   
             
Wondrous Beauty is a riveting portrait of a woman torn between two worlds, unable to find peace in either—one a provincial, convention-bound new The usa; the other a sophisticated, extravagant Old World Europe that embraced freedoms, a Europe in the long run swallowed up by decadence and idleness.
A stunning revelation of an peculiar age.

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