Zénaïde Bonaparte

Zénaïde Laetitia Julie Bonaparte, Princess of Canino and Musignano (8 July 1801 – 8 August 1854) was the elder daughter of Joseph Bonaparte and Julie Clary, and thus the niece of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the wife of naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte, who was also her cousin. She joined her father in exile for several years in Bordentown, New Jersey.

Biography

When she was 14, in 1815, Napoleon offered Zénaïde in marriage to King Ferdinand VII of Spain, but the offer was refused. There had been earlier plans to marry Zénaïde to the son of then marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, Oscar, who were also her cousin, but the plans were later abandoned.

After the fall of her uncle Emperor Napoleon in 1815, her father moved to America and purchased Point Breeze, an estate on the Delaware River in Bordentown, New Jersey. Zénaïde and her sister, however, stayed with their mother in Europe. They lived in Frankfurt and Brussels from 1815 to 1821, and then in Florence.

On 29 June 1822, in Brussels, she married her cousin Charles Lucien Bonaparte, son of her uncle Lucien. Her father Joseph had suggested marriage to his wife when Zénaïde was only five; the idea was to carry on the Napoleonic succession (a return to power was always anticipated) by marrying his two daughters to sons of two of his brothers.

The wedding was met with surprisingly little fanfare, perhaps because Zénaïde's mother was outraged at the excessive sum of the dowry (730,000 francs, which was unreasonable considering that Lucien's villa in Rome had cost only 150,000), which had strained her resources.

Charles was an ornithologist (who named the genus Zenaida after her). They had twelve children, listed below.

Issue

Ancestry