Napoleon: A Biography

man as the son-lover benefits by the partially sexual, partially mother
interest of the woman. Thus such a relationship can be satisfactory in
every respect for an indefinite period, but the advancing years would
certainly put a definite limit to it as it is not quite natural. It may even be
that an artistic nature becomes so adult that the need of becoming a
father and a grown-up man in general begins to prevail against the
original son-attitude. When that is the case the relationship is overdue.'
Jung's formulation by no means covers all aspects of the Napoleon­
Josephine relationship. Josephine was only six years older than her
husband, he himself, though a genius, was scarcely an 'artistic person',
and it was not really the 'maturing' of Napoleon that brought the
relationship to an end. But Jung does convey the important insight that a
relationship with a significantly older woman may show that the mother
is lurking in the male unconscious. Freud suggested that Napoleon's
'complex' about Joseph was why he insisted on renaming Rose de
Beauharnais Josephine. But it seems more plausible to assume that the
deep dynamic in this case focused on Napoleon's unconscious feelings
about Letizia rather than Joseph.
It has sometimes been suggested that Napoleon was so nai've about
Josephine that he knew nothing of her chequered past and was thus
astonished when he was first cuckolded. Theories about Napoleon's
alleged 'nai'vete' seldom convince; he was always exceptionally well
informed and as soon as he had a whiff of power employed a host of spies
and secret agents. Of course Napoleon reacted with anger to slights to his
pride and honour caused by his wife's infidelity, but at the unconscious
level it was what he expected. His ambivalent emotions about Letizia, and
his love for his mother alongside the certainty that she had been
unfaithful to his father, could coexist without conflict in the unconscious,
but at the conscious level had to be displaced on to other women. Hence
his contemptuous and discourteous behaviour later when he had a court
of his own. But most of all, he needed to find a woman who was at once
entirely dissimilar to Letizia yet at root the same kind of female.
In taking an older and promiscuous woman as his wife, Napoleon
showed himself to be in thrall to a peculiar mother-complex. His mother,
the object of his unintegrated emotion, was also someone he loved but did
not respect, and the principal reason was her infidelity. This is
undoubtedly the most profound reason why he opted for Josephine rather
than Desiree. As a young girl who was almost religiously faithful to him
during his long absence in Paris, Desiree did not have the attributes
required. Josephine, the unfaithful 'mother', on the other hand, satisfied
all the deep drives in the Napoleonic unconscious.