BONAPARTE

BONAPARTE. - An Italian family, said by some to descend from the Lombard Cadoingi, mentioned in the 11th and 12th centuries; according to others, from a notary B. of Sarzana. In the 16th century a member of this family moved to Corsica. At Ajaccio, Carlo (1746-85) Buonaparte (this is the original spelling, changed by Napoleon in 1796 to the form B.) and Maria Letizia Ramolino (1750-1836) had Napoleon (1769-1821), who had four brothers: Giuseppe (1768-1844), first king of Naples and then of Spain; Luciano (1775-1840), who settled in Rome in 1804 and in 1814 obtained from Pius VII the title of Prince of Canino; Luigi (1778-1846), king of Holland and father of Napoleon III (1808-73); Girolamo (1784-1860), king of Westphalia; and three sisters: Maria Anna Elisa (1777-1820), Grand Duchess of Tuscany and wife of Felice Baciocchi; Maria Paolina (1780-1825), who first married General Leclerc and, after his death, remarried Prince Camillo Borghese, taking the title Duchess of Guastalla; Maria Annunziata Carolina (1782-1839), wife of Gioacchino Murat and Queen of Naples. After Napoleon’s fall, Pius VII warmly welcomed several members of the Bonaparte family in Rome, an act viewed with suspicion by the other European powers.

Among the Bonapartes who had particular ties with the Church and Italy:

I. CHARLES-LUCEN B

Prince of Canino, born in Paris on 24 May 1803, died there on 29 July 1857. Son of Luciano B. and Alexandrine Laure Bleschamp, he was taken to Rome a few months after his birth, where his father, estranged from his imperial brother, had settled. From childhood he showed a marked inclination for the study of botany and zoology. After his marriage to Zenaide B., he traveled to the United States, and the frequent scientific excursions provided him with material for a work on American ornithology, published in 1832, an opus that earned him fame as a scientist. After publishing an *Iconografia della fauna italica*, he took a leading role in the gatherings of Italian scientists (the circular for the first Congress, held in Pisa in 1839, bore his signature at the head of the other promoters) and participated in all the congresses up to the eighth, held in Genoa in 1846. After the accession of Pius IX to the papacy, the Prince of Canino was among the most ardent revolutionaries and, if nothing else, morally responsible for the climate of cynical violence that led to the assassination of Pellegrino Rossi. When the republic was proclaimed, he was elected deputy. After the Pope’s return from Gaeta, he left Rome.

Silvio Furlani

II. LUCIANO, LUIGI, GIUSEPPE, NAPOLEONE B

Cardinal, son of the learned and turbulent Carlo Luciano, Prince of Canino, and of Zenaide, the only daughter of Giuseppe Bonaparte, born in Rome on 15 November 1828 and died there in 1895. His features bore a striking resemblance to Napoleon I, but his character was gentle and charitable. In 1848 he accompanied his father in the uniform of a volunteer to the Piedmontese camp, but the death of his intimate friend Gustavo Spada, who fell on 27 June 1849 on the Janiculum fighting against the French, led him to renounce the title of Prince of Canino and the palace on Piazza Venezia in favor of his brother Luigi Napoleone, in order to devote himself to exemplary acts of piety and a life of seclusion. In 1853 he took holy orders. Against his will, he became a Secret Chamberlain to Pius IX, but firmly refused the office of Grand Almoner offered to him by his cousin and godfather Napoleon III, in whose honor, however, the Pope created him a cardinal priest of S. Pudenziana in 1868, where he was buried.

He was deeply devoted to Pius IX. A prodigal giver to relatives and the poor, he was a constant friend of Gioacchino Belli, who in a significant letter excused himself from the cardinal’s invitation to translate the Gospel of St. Matthew into Romanesque dialect.

Paolo Dalla Torre

III. NAPOLÉON JOSEPH-CHARLES-PAUL B

Born on 9 September 1822 in Trieste, died on 17 March 1891 in Rome. Third son of Girolamo B., King of Westphalia, and of Catherine of Württemberg. Having obtained permission in 1823 for his father to reside in Rome, he moved there, but after the uprisings of 1831 he went to Florence and then to Switzerland. His tutor was Enrico Mayer, with whom he remained friends for life. In 1837, after his mother’s death and through the intercession of his uncle William, sovereign of Württemberg, he was admitted to the military school at Ludwigsburg. Resigning from the Württemberg army, where he had entered as a staff officer, he was elected in 1848, after the February revolution, as a deputy to the French Parliament. A republican, he spoke critically of his cousin’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851 and, although designated by the senatus-consultum of 7 November 1852 as heir to the throne, often expressed opinions contrary to those of the emperor. He took part in the Crimean War and in 1859 married the venerable Maria Clotilde, eldest daughter of Victor Emmanuel II. A senator from 1852, he was vehemently anticlerical and on 1 March 1861 delivered a violent speech against the temporal power of the popes, declaring that there were “only two possible solutions: the unity of Italy with Rome as its capital or the intervention of revolution.” After the fall of the empire, he became in 1879 leader of the Bonapartist party. Some years later he was exiled from France. He died in Rome, attended by his pious wife and reconciled with the Church, and was buried in the basilica of Superga, beside the princes of the House of Savoy.

IV. NAPOLÉON-LOUIS B

Born on 11 October 1804 in Paris, died on 17 March 1831 in Forlì. He was baptized at St-Cloud by Pope Pius VII. Second son of Louis B. and Hortense de Beauharnais, he succeeded his father on the throne of Holland in 1810, when the latter abdicated. But a few days later Napoleon incorporated that kingdom into the French Empire. After 1815 he settled, together with his father, first in Rome and then in Florence. In 1827 he married Charlotte, daughter of Giuseppe B. In 1831, during the revolutionary disturbances in the Papal States, he came from Tuscany with his brother Charles Louis, the future Napoleon III, intending to join General Sercognani’s army and serve the Italian cause; he died a few days later in a skirmish near Spoleto.