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Joseph Bonaparte
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The French statesman Joseph Bonaparte (1768-1844), older brother of Napoleon I, was king of Naples from 1806 to 1808 and king of Spain from 1808 to 1813.
Joseph Bonaparte was born on Jan. 7, 1768, in Corte, Corsica. He was the third child of Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino but the first to survive infancy. He was educated in Corsica and France and studied law at Pisa. In the Corsican civil war, which marked the early years of the French Revolution, he sided with the French, as did his brother Napoleon. When the anti-French forces were victorious, he and the entire Bonaparte family fled to the Continent.
Settling in Marseilles, he married Julie Clary, the daughter of a local merchant. During the first years of the Directory (1795-1799), Joseph served as a foreign diplomat. In 1796 he helped to negotiate the armistice with Sardinia; in 1797 he was minister to Parma and later Rome. He then sat in the Council of Five Hundred as a representative from Corsica.
Joseph played an insignificant role in the coup d'etat of Brumaire, which placed Napoleon at the head of the French government. In the years of the Consulate (1799-1804), he negotiated the treaties of Lunéville with Austria (1801) and Amiens with England (1802).
After the Bourbons were expelled from the kingdom of Naples in 1806, Napoleon named Joseph king of that poor, backward, and misgoverned state. Joseph introduced educational, judicial, and financial reforms, but his work was cut short in 1808, when Napoleon made him king of Spain. Although Joseph did all within his power to win over the Spanish people - he tried to learn the language, attended bullfights, professed devotion to the Catholic religion, and attempted to discipline the French army - they refused to accept a Bonaparte, as they had refused a Bourbon a hundred years earlier. Driven out of the capital in August 1808, after only 3 months on the throne, Joseph was restored to power by French troops, upon whom he depended during his brief reign.
As the French Empire disintegrated after 1812, Joseph was forced to abandon Spain in 1813 and return to Paris. He served as lieutenant general of France during the last months of his brother's reign. When Napoleon returned to France in March 1815, Joseph was once again at his side, but he played no important role during the Hundred Days. Following Napoleon's second abdication, Joseph went to the United States, where he remained for 17 years. In his declining years he lived first in Genoa and finally in Florence, where he died on July 28, 1844.
Further Reading
John S. C. Abbott, History of Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples and of Italy (1869), is sympathetic toward Joseph Bonaparte; it remains the best work in English. The anonymous The Confidential Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte with His Brother Joseph Bonaparte (2 vols., 1855) is a translated selection of the correspondence of the two brothers. R. F. Delderfield, The Golden Millstones: Napoleon's Brothers and Sisters (1964), is the best of three good works which deal with the Bonaparte family. The other two are A. Hilliard Atteridge, Napoleon's Brothers (1909), and Walter Geer, Napoleon and His Family: The Story of a Corsican Clan (3 vols., 1927-1929). See also Alain Decaux, Napoleon's Mother (1959; trans. 1962).
| Wikipedia: Joseph Bonaparte |
Joseph-Napoléon Bonaparte, King of Naples and Sicily, King of Spain and the Indies, Comte de Survilliers (Corte, France, 7 January 1768 – Florence, Italy, 28 July 1844) was the elder brother of Napoleon I of France, who made him King of Naples and Sicily (1806–1808) and later King of Spain as Joseph I of Spain. In Spain he was known as Pepe Botella (Pepe Bottle in reference to his supposed alcoholism). He was king of Spain from 6 June 1808[1] to 11 December 1813, but from 13 June 1812 he was back in France.[citation needed]
Early yearsBonaparte was born Giuseppe Buonaparte to Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino at Corte in Corsica. As a lawyer, politician, and diplomat, he served in the Cinq-Cents and was the French ambassador to Rome. He married Julie Clary on 1 August 1794 in Cuges-les-Pins, France. They had had three daughters, Julie Joséphine Bonaparte (1796–1796), Zénaïde Laetitia Julie Bonaparte (1801–1854) and Charlotte Napoléone Bonaparte (1802–1839). He claimed the surviving two daughters as his heirs. He also sired two children with Maria Giulia, the Countess of Atri (Giulio, born 1806 and Teresa, born 1808). Joseph had two American daughters born at Point Breeze his estate in New Jersey by his mistress Annette Savage (Madame de la Folie), Pauline Anne who died young and Caroline Charlotte (b. 1822, d. 1890) who married Col. Zebulon Howell Benton of Jefferson County, New York, and had issue. In 1795 Joseph was a member of the Council of Ancients where he used his position to help his brother overthrow the Directory. The Château de Villandry had been seized by the French Revolutionary government and in the early 1800s Joseph's brother, Emperor Napoleon, acquired the château for him. In 1806, Bonaparte was given military command of Naples, and shortly afterward was made king by Napoleon, to be replaced after two years by his sister's husband, Joachim Murat, when Joseph was made king of Spain in August 1808, soon after the French invasion. 
He somewhat reluctantly left Naples and arrived in Spain just in time for their revolt against French rule, and the beginning of the Peninsular War, in which the French were eventually expelled by Spanish guerilla fighters and by an Anglo-Portuguese army. After retreating with much of his army to northern Spain he attempted to abdicate the Spanish throne and exchange it back for the Neapolitan Throne; Napoleon dismissed this as out of hand and sent reinforcements to assist in suppressing Spain. The rest of his reign was tenuous and constantly warring with Spanish guerrillas. He never established complete control over the country. 
Joseph Bonaparte's supporters were called josefinos or afrancesados (frenchified). During his reign, he ended the Spanish Inquisition, partly because Napoleon was at odds with Pope Pius VII at the time. Despite such efforts to win popularity, Bonaparte's foreign birth and support, plus his membership in a Masonic lodge [2], virtually guaranteed he would never be accepted as legitimate by the bulk of the Spanish people. During his rule of Spain, Venezuela declared independence (1810) from Spain, the first nation to do so. During the Peninsular War, his command of French forces in Spain proved to be only nominal, as his commanders insisted on checking with the king's younger brother before carrying out Joseph's instructions. Bonaparte abdicated and returned to France after defeat at the Battle of Vitoria in 1813. He was seen by Bonapartists as the rightful Emperor of the French after the death of Napoleon's own son Napoleon II in 1832, although he did little to advance his claim.
In AmericaBonaparte lived primarily in the United States in the period 1817-1832[3], initially in New York City and Philadelphia, where his house became the centre of activity for French expatriates[4], but later moved to an estate, formerly owned by Stephen Sayre, called Point Breeze in Bordentown, New Jersey. Joseph's home was located near the confluence of Crosswicks Creek and the Delaware River. He considerably expanded Sayre's home and created extensive gardens in the picturesque style. When his first home was destroyed by fire in January of 1820 he converted his stables into a second grand house. At Point Breeze Joseph entertained many of the leading intellectuals and politicians of his day. He was also reputed to have encountered the Jersey Devil while hunting there.[5] Joseph Bonaparte returned to Europe, where he died in Florence, Italy and was buried in the Les Invalides building complex in Paris.[6] Legacy
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