Divorce of Joséphine

The religious marriage celebrated on the eve of the coronation had produced no child. The birth in 1806 of Éléonore Denuelle's son, then that of Count Walewski in 1810, proved that the sterility was not the Emperor's. After Wagram the dynastic question became urgent: without a direct heir the Empire fell back to the brothers, none of whom had proved himself.

In the Throne Room of the Tuileries, before the imperial family, Cambacérès and the arch-chancellor, the Emperor and then the Empress read the act of dissolution. Joséphine, her voice breaking, could not finish and Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angély ended it for her. The senatus-consultum of the next day pronounced the civil divorce; the Paris diocesan court annulled the religious marriage in January 1810, on the grounds of defective consent and absence of witnesses.

Joséphine kept the title of empress, Malmaison, the château of Navarre and three million a year. She received Alexander I in 1814 and died at Malmaison on 29 May of that year; the Emperor, on Elba, learned of it from a newspaper.

The dynastic calculation both succeeded and failed: Marie Louise gave him a son in March 1811, but the Austrian alliance did not stop Vienna joining the coalition in 1813, and the King of Rome never reigned.