Letizia Bonaparte (24 August 1750-2 February 1836) was a Corsican noblewoman and the mother of French emperor Napoleon I.
Biography[]
Maria-Letizia Ramolino was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, Republic of Genoa in 1750, and she came from a family of Lombard nobility. At the age of 14, she married the 18-year-old law student Carlo Buonaparte, and she gave birth to thirteen children, with eight surviving: Joseph, Napoleon, Lucien, Elisa, Louis, Pauline, Caroline, and Jerome Bonaparte. Her husband died of stomach cancer in 1785, and she struggled to raise her eight children on tight finances. In 1793, after Napoleon turned against the Corsican nationalist leader Pasquale Paoli, Letizia and her children fled to France as Paoli's partisans pillaged and burned her house. The family resettled in Toulon at the height of the Reign of Terror, and they were forced to flee to Marseille after the Royal Navy took possession of Toulon. Napoleon gave much of his officer's salary to his struggling mother, who queued for food at the soup kitchen. After Napoleon became a general, he moved his family to a chateau in Antibes. Napoleon and his mother frequently met during his campaigns, including in Milan during the Italian Campaign and at Ajaccio after the Egyptian Campaign. She moved to Paris on the eve of the Coup of 18 Brumaire, but she sided with her son Lucien when he fell out with Napoleon over Lucien's unauthorized marriage, and she accompanied Lucien to Rome, where Pauline was already living and where her half-brother Cardinal Joseph Fesch lived. In 1804, she was given the title Mother of his Majesty the Emperor on Napoleon's foundation of the First French Empire, and she was called "Madame Mother" by the people. She returned to Paris in 1804 and lived at the Chateau de Pont-sur-Seine from 1805 to 1813, living on a generous appendage. She shared Napoleon's exile on Elba from 1814 to 1815 before accompanying him to Paris during the Hundred Days, and they last met on 29 June 1815 before Napoleon was forced into exile in Saint Helena. Letizia then lived in Rome under Pope Pius VII's protection, and she lived in seclusion until her death in 1836 at the age of 85, having outlived Napoleon by 15 years.