VANESSA KIRBY AS JOSÉPHINE DE BEAUHARNAIS Costume designers: Janty Yates and David Crossman NAPOLEON (2023)

Without his Josephine, without the assurance of her love, what is left him upon earth? 

Napoleon, Josephine and the tarot cart:

VI The lovers

late night sketch

Some illustrations from the Ladybird book 'The Story of Napoleon'

1: cover of the book / 2: Napoleon and Josephine / 3: Napoleon in Egypt / 4: Napoleon crossing the Alps / 5: Napoleon's coronation / 6: Napoleon meets Tsar Alexander / 7: the battle of Waterloo

German caricature of Josephine as a “nocturnal apparition” waking up Napoleon from his sleep

Nächtliche Geister-Erscheinung, anonymous, early 19th century

Portrait of Joséphine de Beauharnais by Andrea Appiani

Vanessa Kirby as Joséphine de Beauharnais

Napoleon (2023) | dir. Ridley Scott

Something that I will never forget is the fact that when Napoleon was in Russia, he wrote a letter to Josephinse, his WIFE, where he basically told her that he was in love with Alexander, the Tsar of Russia. (Plus a little comic I made of the scenario.)

"She read voraciously -- especially biographies -- Josephine Bonaparte, Lady Emma Hamilton, Marie Antoinette, and Eleonora Duse -- bold women who invented themselves, seized control of their image; women whose personalities defined the age they lived in and glittered out from the past. "She was fascinated," said Amy (Greene), "by women who had made it." Sometimes Amy found her sitting on the stairs, gazing at a portrait of Lady Hamilton, a coal miner's daughter who launched herself into the highest echelon of 18th-century society. Then she discovered Josephine and scooped up every book she could find about her, chattering at dinner about the empress and her friends. She regaled them with stories about Juliette Recamier, a brainy beauty who comissioned a nude statue of herself. When Juliette's breasts began to age she smashed the girlish marble ones -- controlling her image just like Marilyn."

- Elizabeth Winder, Marilyn in Manhattan. Her Year of Joy 

After an estimated hiatus of 20 years, this show-stopper of a minium colored pelisse with paisley appliqués, first seen on none other than Isabella Rossellini as Josephine Bonaparte in 2002’s Napolèon entered British shores on Alice Orr-Ewing as Lydia Montrose in the third season of Sanditon.

Costume Credit: carsNcors

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L'angoisse

I found this autochrome photo (very early colour photography) from the early 1900s-1910s of a woman in a dress that appears to be inspired by Empress Josephine’s coronation gown! I am so in shock because this genuinely looks like a photo of Josephine.

Napoleon hallucinates Josephine a week before his death in 1821

From the timeline based on the St Helena notebooks of General Henri Gatien Bertrand, Cahiers de Sainte-Hélène. Les 500 derniers jours (1820-1821)

28 April 1821:

Napoleon was no longer himself, was becoming anaemic because of internal bleeding, was becoming less and less lucid, indeed occasionally delirious. During the night he said that he had seen Josephine and spoken to her, he thought he had been walking in the garden at Longwood, he kept requesting oranges. The doctors began to fear the worst. The Grand Marshal Bertrand exclaimed: “I kept thinking about how great the change was! Tears kept coming to my eyes as I looked at that man, so awe-inspiring, who had commanded so proudly, so absolutely, beg for a coffee spoon, asking permission, obedient like a child… “Voilà le grand Napoléon”: to be pitied, brought low!”

(Fondation Napoléon)