View of Princess Zenaïde's former residence, Bordentown, New JerseyJOSEPH BONAPARTE’S PHILADELPHIA DESCENDANTS
Biography
When she was 14, in 1815, Napoleon offered Zénaïde in marriage to Ferdinand, the deposed king of Spain, but the offer was refused.[1]
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.[2]
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.[2]
In 1823, after emigrating to the United States, she and her husband resided in the Lake House on her father's Point Breeze estate.[3]
Charles was an ornithologist (who named the Zenaida doves after her). They had twelve children, listed below.
^Point Breeze, National Gallery of Art. Accessed May 12, 2024. "In addition to the new mansion, Bonaparte built several other dwellings on the property. The largest of these was a three-story Lake House, erected near the new mansion probably in the spring of 1820. Bonaparte’s daughter Zénaïde (1801–1854) resided in the Lake House with her husband, the ornithologist Charles-Lucien Bonaparte (1803–1857), after they emigrated in 1823."
Bibliography
Glover, Michael, The Peninsular War 1807–1814. London: Penguin Books, 2001. ISBN0-14-139041-7
Stroud, Patricia Tyson. The Emperor of Nature: Charles-Lucien Bonaparte and His World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. ISBN0-8122-3546-0.
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