Eugène de Beauharnais

Eugène de Beauharnais: Napoleon's Most Loyal Heir

In 1795, a boy of fourteen went looking for a general to ask for his dead father's sword back. His father had been guillotined the previous year; the general was Napoleon Bonaparte. The meeting led to Bonaparte's introduction to the boy's mother, Joséphine, and so to a marriage, an empire, and a career. Eugène de Beauharnais would spend the next nineteen years repaying that sword with a loyalty nobody else in Napoleon's family managed to sustain.

The Guillotine and the General

He was born in Paris on 3 September 1781, son of the Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais and Marie-Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie. His parents separated when he was small — accounts put it at 1785, when he was three or four — and he stayed with his father while his sister Hortense went to Martinique. Through his father's seat in the National Constituent Assembly, the child attended debates that were dismantling the world he had been born into.

The Revolution then came for the family directly. Alexandre de Beauharnais, having served as a general in the Revolutionary Wars, was guillotined on 23 July 1794 in the aftermath of the Siege of Mainz, days before the fall of Robespierre. Joséphine was imprisoned. General Lazare Hoche took the orphaned Eugène under his wing during the War in the Vendée, and Eugène's verdict on that apprenticeship was characteristically dry: "The teacher was strict; the school, for having been harsh, was no less good."

Aide-de-Camp

He joined the 1st Hussar Regiment on 30 June 1797 and served as Bonaparte's aide-de-camp in Italy and then in Egypt and Syria, including the sieges of Jaffa and Acre in 1799. He was present at the coup of 18 Brumaire. Promotion followed the family's fortunes: colonel in 1802, general in 1804. Unlike Napoleon's brothers, who spent the imperial years quarrelling over crowns, Eugène was learning the trade from the inside of the tent.

Viceroy of Italy

On 7 June 1805 Napoleon proclaimed him Viceroy of the Kingdom of Italy, based in Milan, a post he held until 11 April 1814. On 12 January 1806 Napoleon formally adopted him, and two days later he married Princess Augusta of Bavaria — the first of Napoleon's relatives to marry into a reigning royal house. On 16 February 1806 he was declared heir presumptive to the Italian throne.

As an administrator he oversaw fortifications, public works, legal reform and the introduction of the Napoleonic Code. The judgement of French historiography is measured rather than glowing: he possessed ordinary abilities, compensated by conscientiousness and hard work, and had the advantage of experienced advisers Napoleon supplied. His one real failure was that he never endeared himself to the Italians, who continued to regard their viceroy as a foreigner. The marriage, arranged for purely political reasons, turned out unusually happy.

Raab

His military reputation was made in 1809. When Austria invaded Italy, Eugène was beaten at Sacile in April by Archduke John and needed Macdonald's help to steady the front. He recovered at the Piave in May, and then on 14 June won the Battle of Raab. Napoleon called it "the granddaughter of Marengo and Friedland" — the victory prevented Austrian reinforcements from reaching Archduke Charles and allowed Eugène's army to join the main force in time for Wagram. It was the first time he had been tested in independent command and had passed.

Russia

In 1812 he took the Army of Italy into Russia as commander of IV Corps, some 80,000 men. He fought at Ostrovno in late July, at Borodino on 7 September, then through Maloyaroslavets, Krasnoi and the crossing of the Berezina on 27–28 November. What distinguished him was not the advance but the ruin. Napoleon left the army in December; Murat abandoned command the following month; and Eugène took over the remnants of the Grande Armée at Poznań.

The retreat he then conducted is the strongest single claim on his behalf. He brought a shattered force across Poland under combined Russian and Prussian pressure and delivered it into Saxony as a body of troops rather than a rabble — which is why Napoleon had an army to fight with at Lützen in May 1813, and why he won there.

The Last Defence

Eugène fought at Lützen and was then sent back to Italy to hold the peninsula against Austrian invasion. He conducted a disciplined fighting withdrawal through the Po valley, won at the Mincio on 8 February 1814, and was beaten at the Taro and the Nure. In January 1814 he had refused an order to abandon Italy and bring his army to France to help the Emperor directly — the one clear moment of insubordination in his career, and one that has been argued over ever since.

It made little difference. Paris fell, Napoleon abdicated, and further resistance in Italy became pointless. Riots in Milan ended the viceroyalty; Eugène signed the Convention of Schiarino-Rizzino on 16 April 1814 and left for Bavaria in the spring, at his father-in-law's urging. During the Hundred Days he stayed put, pledging not to leave Bavaria, and took no part in the final campaign.

Munich

King Maximilian I made him Duke of Leuchtenberg and Prince of Eichstätt on 14 November 1817. He spent his last years managing estates, enlarging an art collection and quietly assisting political refugees. Two attacks of apoplexy in 1823 were followed by a fatal one on 21 February 1824. He was forty-two. He is buried in the crypt of St Michael's Church in Munich, beneath a cenotaph by Thorvaldsen.

Why Eugène Is Called a Genius

He is not, in any serious sense, and the sources are unusually blunt about it. French assessments credit him with "ordinary abilities" as a ruler, redeemed by diligence and by the quality of the advisers Napoleon placed around him; his administration of Italy never won over the people he governed. There is no body of strategic thought, no innovation in war or statecraft, nothing that would place him among the Napoleonic era's first-rate minds.

The defensible claim is narrower and more interesting: a talent for holding things together under conditions where almost everyone else broke. Raab showed he could win an independent battle that mattered strategically. The 1813 retreat from Poznań showed something rarer — the ability to take command of a destroyed army, abandoned in sequence by its Emperor and then by Murat, and walk it out of Poland into Saxony intact enough to fight and win at Lützen. That is a specific and difficult competence: organisational nerve, not brilliance.

The rest of his reputation is character. In a family that spent the Empire scheming, Eugène was the one who did the job, obeyed the orders (with the single exception of January 1814), married where he was told and found happiness there anyway, and declined to sell his stepfather out when it would have been profitable. Historians who admire him admire his steadiness. That is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up as genius.

Legacy

His durability turned out to be dynastic. Of seven children with Augusta, Joséphine became Queen of Sweden, Amélie Empress of Brazil, Auguste prince consort of Portugal, and Maximilian married a Russian grand duchess; his descendants sit in the ancestry of the crowned houses of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Greece. The Bonapartes lost their thrones. The stepson kept his family in Europe's royal bloodlines for two centuries.

Achievements

• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour
• Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece
• Worked as politician, military officer and military personnel