Pauline Bonaparte (20 October 1780-9 June 1825) was Duchess of Guastalla from 24 March to 14 August 1806, succeeding Ferdinand of Parma.
Biography[]
Maria Paola Buonaparte was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, France in 1780, the daughter of Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino and the sister of Napoleon. The family relocated to the mainland in 1793 after her brother Lucien Bonaparte made seditious comments at the local Jacobin chapter, and Pauline and her sisters were forced to wash clothes to maintain a living during the hard times of the French Revolutionary Wars. Her mother vetoed Pauline's plan to marry the proconsul of Marseille Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron, and she instead married General Charles Leclerc in Milan on 14 June 1797. Pauline accompanied her husband to Saint-Domingue on his appointment as governor in 1801, but he died of yellow fever in November 1802, after which Pauline returned to mainland France on 1 January 1803. She remarried to Camillo Borghese, 6th Prince of Sulmona that same year to consolidate ties with French-occupied Italy, and she was made Duchess of Guastalla in 1806 before selling the duchy to Parma for 6 million francs. On Napoleon's fall in 1814, she liquidated all of her assets and joined him on Elba, using that money to better his condition; she was the only Bonaparte sibling to visit her brother during his exile. After the Battle of Waterloo, she and her mother lived in Rome under the protection of Pope Pius VII, and she died in Florence in 1825.