Author: Michelle Moran
First Published: August 14, 2012
Publisher: Crown
312 pages (hardcover)
My first book read in 2013!
I received The Second Empress as a Christmas present from my sister, because I was interested in branching out from historical royalty novels based on England. I was very excited to read this! I don’t know anything about Napoleon’s time period, and I did not know anything about his second wife, Marie-Louise either, so I was eager to read all about them. There’s certainly a sort of wonder in reading a historical novel without actually knowing the history behind it.
The Second Empress encompasses the last six years of Emperor Napoleon’s reign of the first French Empire. The point-of-view alternates between three characters: Marie-Lousie is an Austrian princess who grew up hating the French Empire. Unfortunately, she is in no position to turn down Napoleon’s marriage proposal as he would invade Austria otherwise and likely win. The second character is Princess Pauline, Napoleon’s sister. She has many, many lovers and suffers from some STDs which she takes mercury for. Of course, we know mercury actually will slowly poison you and impair your mental abilities. Pauline is absolutely infatuated with her brother and wants to rule the empire with him as his queen, like the Egyptians did as brother and sister two thousand years ago. The third character is Paul, a half-French half-Haitian man who traveled to France with Pauline after Napoleon took over Haiti. He is in love with Pauline and is waiting for her to fulfill her promise of going back to Haiti with him to live out the rest of their days.
Of course, lastly, we have Napoleon. He does not have his own point-of-view chapters, but he is certainly a major character in this story. Napoleon is at the peak of his power at the start of the novel and in need of an heir for his empire. Although he loves his wife, Josephine, despite her unfaithfulness, she cannot give him children so he feels compelled to divorce her and find someone who can. Also, he feels a strong need to associate himself with “true” royalty (he is, after all, from more humble origins), and thus, sets his gaze on Princess Marie-Louise.
I lament the fact that this book is quite short as I had a wonderful time reading it and didn’t want it to end so soon. I can’t vouch on how historically accurate it is because, as I mentioned earlier, I haven’t a clue as to what real history entailed during this period, but it seems to be very well researched, and it is certainly well written. I had absolutely no troubles reading it, it was so easy to slip into the time period and put myself at Napoleon’s court and be immersed in the lives of the characters and their lavish and difficult lives.
Even though the title character is Marie Louise, I felt Pauline and Napoleon are the characters that stuck out the most to me. The author does a great job creating the charismatic personalities of the Bonaparte siblings, even though they were also cruel and unlikable at the same time. I like how the book portrayed Napoleon even if he was kind of unlikable but I could tell there was something about him that guided him from being a commoner to the emperor of a vast empire. As for Pauline, I never heard of Pauline prior to this book and this novel showed how much influence she wielded over her brother. You know what, I actually would have loved this book even more if the book focused only on the two of them, because they were such interesting characters. They were hugely ambitious, passionate and selfish. Not always positive traits, but somehow entrancing at the same time.
As for the title character, Marie-Louise, she was okay. Just okay. She’s likable and all that, but her character did not shine as bright as one would hope. She was an obedient wife who did not want to anger Napoleon for fear of him invading her home country. Napoleon was a little cruel to her at times, but did care for her greatly overall. So, sad to say, she wasn’t actually that interesting. And the last point-of-view character Paul was also just okay to me too. He seemed to be a pretty intelligent fellow but he couldn’t tear himself away from Pauline, who was so obviously toxic. Actually, I didn’t really understand why he had a point-of-view in the novel, he didn’t seem like a particularly important character. Even in the afterword, all he got was two sentences whereas everyone else got entire paragraphs.
I enjoyed this book a lot and definitely would recommend to others to read. I actually have another Michelle Moran book — Nefertiti — that I bought ages ago and has been just sitting idly on my bookshelf; think I’ll go and read that one soon! This book has inspired me to look more into the Napoleonic time period, it was such a wonderful read.
My Rating: 4/5
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