page_title: Bonapartism
section_title: Bonapartist claimants
hierarchical_section_title: Bonapartism / Bonapartist claimants
context_page_description: Bonapartism is the political ideology supervening from Napoleon Bonaparte and his followers and successors. The term was later used to refer to people who hoped to restore the House of Bonaparte and its style of government. In this sense, a Bonapartiste was a person who either actively participated in or advocated for conservative, monarchist and imperial political factions in 19th-century France. After Napoleon, the term was applied to the French politicians who seized power in the Coup of 18 Brumaire, ruling in the French Consulate and subsequently in the First and Second French Empires. The Bonapartistes desired an empire under the House of Bonaparte, the Corsican family of Napoleon Bonaparte and his nephew Louis.
  The term has been used more generally for a political movement that advocated a dictatorship or an authoritarian centralized state, with a strongman charismatic leader based on anti-elitist rhetoric, army support, and conservatism.
  Marxism and Leninism developed a vocabulary of political terms that included Bonapartism, derived from their analysis of the career of Napoleon Bonaparte.
context_section_description: After becoming emperor in 1804, Napoleon I established a Law of Succession, providing that the Bonapartist claim to the throne should pass firstly to Napoleon's own legitimate male descendants through the male line. At that time he had no legitimate sons, and it seemed unlikely he would have any due to the age of his wife Joséphine. He eventually achieved an annulment, without Papal approval, of his marriage to Josephine. He married the younger Marie Louise, with whom he had one son.
  The law of succession provided that if Napoleon's own direct line died out, the claim passed first to his older brother Joseph and his legitimate male descendants through the male line, then to his younger brother Louis and his legitimate male descendants through the male line. His other brothers, Lucien and Jérôme, and their descendants, were omitted from the succession (even though Lucien was older than Louis) because they had either politically opposed the Emperor or made marriages of which he disapproved. Napoleon abdicated in favor of his son after his defeat in 1815. Although the Bonapartes were deposed and the old Bourbon monarchy restored, Bonapartists recognized Napoleon's son as Napoleon II. A sickly child, he was virtually imprisoned in Austria, and died young and unmarried, without any descendants. When the French Empire was restored to power in 1852, the emperor was Napoleon III, Louis Bonaparte's only living legitimate son (their brother Joseph having died in 1844 without having had a legitimate son, only daughters).
  In 1852, Napoleon III enacted a new decree on the succession. The claim was given to his own male legitimate descendants in the male line (though at that time he had no son, Louis later had a legitimate son, Eugène, who was recognized by Bonapartists as "Napoleon IV" before dying young and unmarried). If Napoleon III's line died out, he decreed that the claim should pass to Jérôme, Napoleon's youngest brother (who had previously been excluded), and his male descendants by Princess Catharina of Württemberg in the male line. (Excluded were his descendants by his first marriage, to the American commoner Elizabeth Patterson, of which Napoleon I had greatly disapproved.) The Bonapartist claimants since 1879, have been the descendants of Jérôme and Catherine of Württemberg in the male line.
  The Bonapartist laws of succession were far from traditional. The family members ignored primogeniture (by excluding Lucien Bonaparte and his descendants); they annulled marriages to achieve their goals; and they did not submit to the Pope's rights as final arbiter on the validity of marriages. The very claim of the Bonaparte family to rule France was far from traditional.
caption: Jérôme Bonaparte, founder of the legitimate line
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