Louis Bonaparte

Eugene de Beauharnais (1781-1824) was the son of Josephine de Beauharnais by her first marriage and thus the stepson of Napoleon I, who adopted him as a French prince in 1806. Born in Paris, he served as his stepfather's aide-de-camp in Italy and Egypt and proved the most capable soldier of the imperial family, commanding the Army of Italy and fighting in the Russian campaign of 1812, where he took over the retreating army's rearguard. From 1805 he governed the Kingdom of Italy as Viceroy at Milan, and was widely respected there as an administrator. He married Princess Augusta of Bavaria, and after the Empire fell he settled in Munich as Duke of Leuchtenberg, where he died in 1824. He was the elder brother of Hortense de Beauharnais.

Charles Lucien Bonaparte (1803-1857) was a naturalist and one of the founders of modern ornithology, and the eldest son of Lucien Bonaparte and Alexandrine de Bleschamp. A nephew of Napoleon I, he grew up in Italy and spent the years 1822 to 1828 in the United States, where he studied the birds of the eastern states and published a continuation of Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology; Bonaparte's gull carries his name. Back in Europe he worked on the classification of birds and mammals, produced the Conspectus Generum Avium, and helped organise the first Italian congresses of scientists. He succeeded his father as Prince of Canino and Musignano, took part in the Roman Republic of 1849 as a member of its assembly, and spent his last years in Paris, where he died in 1857.

Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte (1815-1881) was a son of Lucien Bonaparte and Alexandrine de Bleschamp, and a nephew of Napoleon I. Born in Rome during his parents' Italian exile, he led an unsettled early life in the Americas, spending time in the United States, Colombia and Brazil, before returning to Europe. After the revolution of 1848 he was elected a deputy for Corsica in the Constituent Assembly, where he sat with the left and often opposed his cousin Louis Napoleon, the future Napoleon III. He remained a marginal figure at the imperial court and lived largely away from Paris, in Belgium and in the south of France. He died at Versailles in 1881. His son Roland Bonaparte became a geographer and president of the Societe de Geographie.

Prince Charles Napoleon Bonaparte, born in 1950, is the son of Prince Louis Napoleon and a senior living descendant of Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon I's youngest brother. Trained as an economist, he has worked as a consultant and written books on his family and on Napoleonic history, and has been active in local politics in Corsica and in Provence, serving as a municipal councillor and deputy mayor of Ajaccio, the town where the family began. He has helped found associations that promote Napoleonic heritage sites across Europe. His father's will named his son Jean-Christophe rather than him as head of the house, a decision he has publicly disputed, and Bonapartist opinion has been divided between them since 1997. His children with Princess Beatrice of Bourbon-Two Sicilies are Caroline and Jean-Christophe.

Jean-Christophe, Prince Napoleon, born in 1986, is the current head of the House of Bonaparte and the senior representative of Napoleon I's family today. The son of Prince Charles Napoleon and Princess Beatrice of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, he was named heir in the will of his grandfather Prince Louis Napoleon, who died in 1997 and passed over his own son, a decision that has been contested within the family. He studied at HEC Paris and took an MBA at Harvard Business School, and has worked in private equity and investment banking in London and Paris. He takes part in Napoleonic commemorations in France and abroad, including the bicentenary observances of 2021. In 2019 he married Countess Olympia von und zu Arco-Zinneberg at Les Invalides in Paris, where Napoleon I is buried.

Prince Victor Napoleon Bonaparte (1862-1926) was the elder son of Prince Napoleon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte and Princess Maria Clotilde of Savoy, and head of the House of Bonaparte from 1891 until his death. Born in Paris during the Second Empire, he grew up in exile after its fall in 1870. Bonapartists who found his father's radicalism unacceptable transferred their allegiance to him in 1884, and his father's will confirmed the breach; the French law exiling pretenders kept him out of the country, so he settled in Brussels and lived there for the rest of his life. In 1910 he married Princess Clementine of Belgium, daughter of King Leopold II, and their children were Princess Marie Clotilde and Prince Louis Napoleon, his successor as head of the family. He died in Brussels in 1926.

Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1914-1997) was the son of Prince Victor Napoleon and Princess Clementine of Belgium, and head of the House of Bonaparte from 1926, when he succeeded his father at the age of twelve, until his death. Born in Brussels during the family's exile, he was still barred from France by the law on pretenders when the Second World War began, so he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion under an assumed name and later joined the Resistance in the Alps, for which he was decorated. He was able to live in France after the exile law lapsed, and worked in business while maintaining the family's historical role and its archives. He married Alix de Foresta in 1949; their children included Prince Charles Napoleon. His will named his grandson Jean-Christophe as his successor.

Prince Napoleon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte (1822-1891), known as Plon-Plon, was the son of Jerome Bonaparte and Catharina of Wurttemberg and, from 1879, head of the House of Bonaparte. Born in Trieste and raised in exile, he was elected a deputy for Corsica in 1848, supported his cousin Napoleon III while frequently quarrelling with him, and held the rank of general, commanding a division in the Crimean War. He sat on the left of the imperial family, sympathetic to Italian unification and anticlerical in politics, and organised the French section of the 1855 Paris exhibition. The death of the Prince Imperial in 1879 made him the Bonapartist claimant, though his politics divided the party and he was briefly expelled from France. He married Princess Maria Clotilde of Savoy in 1859 and died in Rome in 1891.

Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte (1805-1870) was the only child of Jerome Bonaparte and his American first wife, Elizabeth Patterson, and the head of the American branch of the family. He was born near London because his mother had been refused permission to land in France, and was raised in Baltimore by her and her Patterson relatives. Napoleon I never recognised the marriage, so he had no rights in the imperial succession, though he visited his father in Italy and was received by the family, and later spent time at the court of his cousin Napoleon III. He graduated from Harvard, married Susan May Williams of Baltimore and lived as a landowner in Maryland. His sons were the Civil War cavalry officer Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte II and Charles Joseph Bonaparte, who became United States Attorney General.

Napoleon Francois Joseph Charles Bonaparte (1811-1832), known to Bonapartists as Napoleon II, was the only legitimate child of Napoleon I and his second wife Marie Louise of Austria. Born at the Tuileries in Paris and titled King of Rome from birth, he was the heir the first Empire had been reorganised to produce. When Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, and again after Waterloo in 1815, he named the boy as his successor, but the child never reigned. Taken to Vienna by his mother, he was raised at the Austrian court as the Duke of Reichstadt, kept away from French affairs and from his father's name, and served briefly as an officer in the Austrian army. He died in Vienna in 1832 at the age of twenty-one.