A week earlier, Barras's 'wedding present' had been made official: Napoleon's nomination as

Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Italy. The background to this was Napoleon's abiding
obsession that the key to victory over Austria lay in Italy. While Commander of the Army of the
Interior, he continued to bombard the Directory with criticisms of the conduct of the war on the
Italian front. Increasingly, an undeclared struggle for power took place between Napoleon in
Paris and General Scherer in Nice. Scherer, more and more irritated at Napoleon's sniping,
complained to the Directory that its boy wonder's plans were chimerical and quixotic. After
getting his way a couple of times by threatening to resign unless the Directory backed him,
Scherer finally overplayed his hand, and the Directory accepted his resignation, effective 2
March 1 796. But when Napoleon was appointed in his stead, the Parisian press reacted hostilely,
alleging that Barras had rewarded one of his favourites because he feared generals of real talent:
Hoche, Moreau, Marceau and Pichegru were mentioned in this category. Once he had decided to
marry Josephine, Napoleon's first task was to get out of his engagement with Desiree. As soon as
the thought of marriage entered his mind, he started distancing himself from Desiree. The ending
of a letter to Joseph in November is eloquent: he merely sent his regards to Desiree, no longer
referring to her as 'Eugenie'. Once his mind was definitely made up, in January 1796, he
informed Desiree that unless she got the consent of her family immediately, they must end their
engagement. This was Machiavellian, for he knew perfectly well that Madame Clary opposed the
match on grounds of her daughter's youth and would withhold her consent while she was still a
minor. The next Desiree knew was the announcement that her beloved was married. There is no
need to doubt the sincerity of the heartbroken letter she sent Napoleon: 104 You have made me
so unhappy, and I am weak enough to forgive you! You married! Poor Desiree must no longer
love you or think of you? ... My one consolation is that you will know how steadfast I am ... I
have nothing more to hope for but death. Life is a torment to me, since I may no longer dedicate
it to you ... You married! I cannot grasp the thought - it kills me. Never shall I belong to
another ... And I had so hoped soon to be the happiest of women, your wife! Your marriage has
shattered my happiness ... All the same I wish you the greatest joy and blessing in your marriage.
May the woman you have chosen make you as happy as I had intended to make you and as
happy as you deserve to be. In the midst of your present happiness do not quite forget poor
Eugenie, and be sorry for her fate. What possessed Napoleon to marry a penniless Creole, six
years his elder and with fading looks? There can be many answers, ranging from the banal to the
pathological. At the simplest level, it can be argued that Napoleon anchored himself to the ruling
elite by this marriage to one of its leading female icons. Some have gone so far as to say that
Barras forced him to marry Josephine as a quid pro quo for the supreme command in Italy. But
this view hinges on the mistaken idea that Napoleon had no relationship with Barras before
Josephine; in fact he was a firm favourite long before Rose de Beauharnais ever featured in his
life. An alternative view is that Napoleon was naive, thought Josephine was of higher rank than
she was, and imagined that he had married into the aristocracy. It is true that in a letter to Joseph
he described the Chaumiere circle as 'the most distinguished society in Paris', and if we incline to
this view Napoleon would emerge as a victim of snobbery, imagining that he now had entree into
royalist and aristocratic circles. Marmont thought this was the explanation and wrote in his
memoirs: 'Napoleon almost certainly believed at the time that he had taken a greater step
upwards than ever he felt when he married the daughter of the Caesars.' But all this makes the
match a marriage of convenience and it was never that. Napoleon himself, aware that he had lost
his head over Josephine, tried to rewrite this episode on St Helena, as he rewrote all the others in
his life, and insinuated that reason of state was involved. Perhaps he hated himself for the one
spontaneous, unmeditated action of his life. What decisively refutes the idea of marriage of
convenience is Napoleon's sexual besottedness with Josephine, for which the evidence is
overwhelming. 'She had the prettiest little cunt in the world, the Trois Islets of Martinique were
there,' is one of many expressions of his appreciation of her physical charms. Besides, Josephine
was exactly the 105 kind of woman who was likely to appeal to a man who was sexually
insecure and misogynistic. She was unchallenging, featherbrained, feminine in all the traditional
ways. She was luxury-loving, obsessed with clothes and make-up, hopeless with money; she
spoke in a little girl voice, lied transparently and could burst into tears apparently at will.
Napoleon's own judgement is interesting: 'She was a woman to her finger-tips. I really did love
her but I had no respect for her.' But what is often overlooked or forgotten by students of this
illmatched pair and analysts of this improbable marriage is that after Vendemiaire Napoleon
could have had almost any woman in Paris. So why this one? Why a woman of mediocre looks
and fading beauty? Some have speculated that Napoleon was sexually inexperienced and needed
the reassurance of an older woman well versed in the arts of love. His own words are often
quoted: 'I was not insensible to women's charms but I had hardly been spoiled by them. I was shy
with them. Madame Bonaparte was the first to give me confidence.' That could be construed as
referring to lack of sexual confidence, but it suggests more strongly a man in need of maternal
feelings and training in social graces and savoirfaire. It is by no means so clear that Napoleon
was the sexual novice this theory requires him to be. The Bonaparte clan were united in their
dislike of Josephine. Lucien referred to her contemptuously as an 'ageing Creole', and Letizia in
particular, who had wanted her son to marry Desiree, always hated Josephine. The conventional
view is that Letizia was enraged that Josephine was of higher rank than she, that she had a chip
on her shoulder accordingly, and that her charming letter of friendship to her daughter-in-law
(dictated, some say, by Napoleon himself) masked a vengeful fury. The shrewdest critics have
seen that Letizia is important to this story in a quite different sense. Dorothy Carrington wrote:
'Was his marriage to Josephine, who combined all the traits of character Letizia deplored, his
masterpiece against the adored mother who had deceived him?' There are two aspects of
Josephine that strike observers who have only the most cursory knowledge of her: she was an
older woman, and she was habitually unfaithful. If we accept that Napoleon had a 'complex'
about Letizia, then it is interesting to note what C. G. Jung has to say about the 'mother complex'
in general. 'If a young man loves a woman who could almost be his mother, then it always has to
do with a mother complex. Such a union is sometimes quite fruitful for many years, particularly
in the case of artistic persons who have not fully matured. The woman in such a case is helped by
an almost biological instinct. She is hatching eggs. The 106 man as the son-lover benefits by the
partially sexual, partially mother interest of the woman. Thus such a relationship can be
satisfactory in every respect for an indefinite period, but the advancing years would certainly put
a definite limit to it as it is not quite natural. It may even be that an artistic nature becomes so
adult that the need of becoming a father and a grown-up man in general begins to prevail against
the original son-attitude. When that is the case the relationship is overdue.' Jung's formulation by
no means covers all aspects of the NapoleonJosephine relationship. Josephine was only six years
older than her husband, he himself, though a genius, was scarcely an 'artistic person', and it was
not really the 'maturing' of Napoleon that brought the relationship to an end. But Jung does
convey the important insight that a relationship with a significantly older woman may show that
the mother is lurking in the male unconscious. Freud suggested that Napoleon's 'complex' about
Joseph was why he insisted on renaming Rose de Beauharnais Josephine. But it seems more
plausible to assume that the deep dynamic in this case focused on Napoleon's unconscious
feelings about Letizia rather than Joseph. It has sometimes been suggested that Napoleon was so
nai've about Josephine that he knew nothing of her chequered past and was thus astonished when
he was first cuckolded. Theories about Napoleon's alleged 'nai'vete' seldom convince; he was
always exceptionally well informed and as soon as he had a whiff of power employed a host of
spies and secret agents. Of course Napoleon reacted with anger to slights to his pride and honour
caused by his wife's infidelity, but at the unconscious level it was what he expected. His
ambivalent emotions about Letizia, and his love for his mother alongside the certainty that she
had been unfaithful to his father, could coexist without conflict in the unconscious, but at the
conscious level had to be displaced on to other women. Hence his contemptuous and
discourteous behaviour later when he had a court of his own. But most of all, he needed to find a
woman who was at once entirely dissimilar to Letizia yet at root the same kind of female. In
taking an older and promiscuous woman as his wife, Napoleon showed himself to be in thrall to
a peculiar mother-complex. His mother, the object of his unintegrated emotion, was also
someone he loved but did not respect, and the principal reason was her infidelity. This is
undoubtedly the most profound reason why he opted for Josephine rather than Desiree. As a
young girl who was almost religiously faithful to him during his long absence in Paris, Desiree
did not have the attributes required. Josephine, the unfaithful 'mother', on the other hand,
satisfied all the deep drives in the Napoleonic unconscious.