Lucien Bonaparte - Later Years

Later Years

In 1809 Napoleon increased pressure on Lucien to divorce his wife and return to France, even having their mother write a letter encouraging him to abandon her and return. With the whole of the Papal States annexed to France and the Pope imprisoned, Lucien was a virtual prisoner in his Italian estates, requiring permission of the Military Governor to venture off his property. He attempted to sail to the United States to escape his situation but was captured by the British. When he disembarked in England, he was greeted with cheers and applause by the crowd, which saw him as anti-Napoleon.

The government permitted him to settle comfortably, but under house arrest, at the country house at Thorngrove in Worcestershire, where he worked on a heroic poem on Charlemagne. Napoleon, believing Lucien had deliberately gone to Britain and thus a traitor, had Lucien omitted from the Imperial almanacs of the Bonapartes from 1811 onward.

Lucien returned to France following his brother's abdication in April 1814. He continued to Rome where on 18 August 1814 he was made Prince of Canino by Pope Pius VII and Prince of Musignano on 21 March 1824 by Pope Leo XII.

In the Hundred Days after Napoleon's return from exile at Elba, Lucien rallied to the imperial cause. His brother made him a French Prince and included his children into the Imperial Family, but this was not recognized by the Bourbons after Napoleon's second abdication. Subsequently Lucien was proscribed at the Restoration and deprived of his fauteuil at the Académie française. In 1836 he wrote his Mémoires. He died in Viterbo, Italy, on 29 June 1840, of stomach cancer, the same disease that claimed his father, his sister Pauline and his brother Napoleon.