Small wonder that in after years Napoleon referred to his second marriage as “That abyss covered with flowers which was my ruin.”
To compare Napoleon’s two consorts is extremely difficult, because their temperaments were essentially different. Josephine was vivacious, witty, fond of dress and of admiration, and brought up in a very different school of thought to that of Marie Louise. The former had witnessed, and to some extent felt, the terrors of the Revolution at their worst; she had mixed with all sorts and conditions of men and women, some good, many bad; the latter had been nurtured with scrupulous care, so shielded and safeguarded that she scarcely knew of the follies and sins which mar the everyday world. She once wrote to a friend that she believed Napoleon “is none other than Anti-Christ.” When she heard that the man she felt to be “our oppressor” was to become her husband, she lifted her pale blue eyes to the skies and remarked that the birds were happier because they could choose their own mates! And yet, although she was so horrified, she had a certain nobility of character which enabled her to understand that in making the surrender she would be performing a double duty to her father and to her country: “This marriage gives pleasure to my father, and though separation from my family always will make me miserable, I will have the consolation of having obeyed his wishes. And Providence, it is my firm belief, directs the lot of us princesses in a special manner; and in obeying my father I feel I am obeying Providence.”
But what were the reasons for Napoleon’s dissolution of his first marriage when his love for Josephine is beyond question? Pasquier thus sums up the matter for us:
“For some time past,” he says, “the greater number of those about him, and especially the members of his family, had been urging him to repudiate a union which could not give him an heir, and which precluded the idea of his dreaming of certain most advantageous alliances. As early as the time of his consecration as Emperor, the greatest pressure had been put upon him to prevent him from strengthening the bonds uniting him to Josephine, by having her crowned by his side; but all these endeavours had been neutralized by the natural and potent ascendancy of a woman full of charm and grace, who had given herself to him at a time when nothing gave any indication of his high destinies, whose conciliatory spirit had often removed from his path difficulties of a somewhat serious nature, and brought back to him many embittered or hostile minds, who seemed to have been constantly a kind of good genius, entrusted with the care of watching over his destiny and of dispelling the clouds which came to darken its horizon....