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> future doctor in psychology!! I am Hypergraphia incarnate
> personal info in link hub (red text above then the last spinning vinyl)
> mostly rants with the occasional historical / analysis posts; I'm not a historian, history is ultimately a group effort!
> wip intro post, to be edited...
> should i mention that i love my bf..
I wake up I think of How I Was Wronged I go about my day I think of How I Was Wronged I daydream I think of How I Was Wronged I go to sleep I think of How I Was Wronged and I never escape it!! yay!!!!!
mfs will be like "you wouldn't understand," and then I'll have experienced the exact same feelings and the exact same events in the exact same ways as them except they didn't care when it was happening to me and not them
Lol great comeback! I confused 'inherent' for 'inherit' when they're both words that sound alike but are applied to different contexts: You really stuck it to the man, correcting a semi-lingual person's grammar!
How I wish to be the type of person who decides that the highest and best use of his already limited intellect is wailing into a megaphone rather than contributing anything of inherent value.. hm.
What If They'd Swapped? Augustin in Alsace, Saint-Just in Nice
Explicitly speculative. Follow up of this post.
Augustin in Alsace
He arrives October 24, 1793 with Lebas. The Austrian armies are on French soil. The lines of Wissembourg broke nine days ago. Strasbourg is genuinely at risk of falling.
The first thing to establish is that he would have read this correctly: His method of deliberate delay as detailed in the Précis — postponing conclusions even when he already knew the answer, waiting for more testimony even when the inquiry was clearly closed — was a strategic choice for a specific situation, not a personality trait. Noticeably; He delayed in Vesoul because Bernard de Saintes was going to challenge his conclusions and he needed an unimpeachable record. In Strasbourg, there is no Bernard to rebut. There is an Austrian army forty kilometers from the city: Given this, the logic that produced the delay in Franche-Comté simply doesn't apply here, and he would have known it.
He'd spent five months in the Midi watching what happens when supply chains collapse, and civilian trust evaporates, and military situations deteriorate while administrators caught up. Augustin undoubtedly understood crisis. The Aix-en-Provence letter shows him reading a deteriorating situation with clear eyes very quickly — "one has to be very skilful to do good in these southern departments... the civil war will be interminable" — and that letter was written after only weeks on the ground in an unfamiliar theater.
So: He arrives in Strasbourg and he sees barefoot soldiers and a broken command structure and Austrian forces consolidating to his northeast, and whatever his instinct in calmer times, he knows what this is.
Additionally, maybe it's just me, but from what I can see: The Lebas factor matters enormously here. Augustin's documented relationship with Lebas was specifically characterized by ease and mutual familiarity — "we were the same age, I was more familiar with him" — in contrast to the slightly more formal, more disciplined warmth between Saint-Just and Lebas(?). A Bonbon-Lebas partnership on mission would have been fast and practically frictionless (or, their documented familiarity likely reduced internal coordination costs). They'd have divided the problems within days of arrival without friction or negotiation: Augustin takes the civilian population, the supply situation, the Popular Society; Lebas takes the military relationships, the officer assessments, the day-to-day contact with the troops. Both feed what they're learning to each other constantly. And. That division of labor would have compensated significantly for whatever individual slowness Augustin brought to the problem.
Therefore I can only conclude that The supply situation gets addressed within the first week. Not in twenty-four hours — the shoes decree, Saint-Just's single most famous act, was a specific piece of rhetorical theater that required a specific kind of certainty and willingness to threaten that Augustin would have reached through a slightly different route. He'd have arrived at the same result through a combination of requisition and relationship: identifying who in Strasbourg had supply connections, what the municipal stores actually held, where the bottlenecks were, and moving on all of it simultaneously. By day five or six there are shoes moving toward general headquarters. Not seventeen thousand pairs by morning. Enough by the end of the week. The army notices.
Then Schneider.
This is where the counterfactual diverges most sharply from what Saint-Just actually did, and where I think the divergence works out better for Augustin: Saint-Just worked alongside Schneider and the Propagande révolutionnaire for the first weeks of the mission because he needed their organizational infrastructure before he could dismantle them. This was tactically understandable and strategically costly: the Alsatian moderates stayed alienated through the entire actual mission, the Popular Society remained hostile, the villages resented the dechristianization campaign bitterly and never fully came around.
Augustin would not have worked alongside Schneider for a single week. Importantly, he would probably have accepted temporary administrative disarray as the price of removing Schneider sooner. His opposition to dechristianization was not strategically calibrated — but it was principled, formed from months of watching this specific campaign devastate civilian trust in the Midi, articulated explicitly to Maximilien and to the Jacobins and to the Committee of Public Safety. The morning after arriving he would have walked into the Popular Society, listened to what was actually happening in the Alsatian villages, and moved against Schneider's operation immediately.
Yes, this costs him Schneider's organizational network in the short term. But what he does with the Alsatian villages in the days that follow is what he already knew how to do: he goes to them, he explains in terms they understand why the dechristianization campaign is not revolutionary and is now being stopped, he releases the people who were arrested for attending the wrong mass, he leaves the Lutheran churches alone, he asks for testimony before making any further decisions: And In Vesoul and Gray this same sequence had produced genuine, documented civilian warmth — women filling courtyard squares to petition him, crowds weeping as his carriage left, villages defending him by name in municipal records ten months after his death.
The Alsatian villages, which had suffered under Schneider and desperately wanted someone to tell them the Republic wasn't going to destroy their religion, would have responded the same way. He loses Schneider's organizational infrastructure. But. He gains something Saint-Just never quite managed to get in Alsace: the actual civilian population with him.
The officer question is where things are genuinely harder. Saint-Just identified Pichegru and installed him as commander of the Army of the Rhine on October 26 — forty-eight hours after arrival. This was extraordinary speed born from a specific method: Saint-Just assessed officers fast, through the military tribunal mechanism, by watching who performed and executing who didn't, and trusted his own rapid judgment completely. Augustin's method was slower and more relational — months of proximity with Napoleon before the April 1794 letter, sustained observation, trust built incrementally:
He probably finds Pichegru in one to two weeks (or even more generously, 5-6 days) rather than forty-eight hours. The question is what happens in those one to two weeks, and the answer is: the Austrian pressure intensifies. There are days in late October and early November when Strasbourg's situation looks genuinely dangerous, when the city's fall is not impossible. Lebas is managing the immediate military relationships and buying time, but buying time is what it is: The army needs its commander.
Then, By mid-November Augustin has seen enough. He backs Pichegru with the same total commitment he gave Napoleon — his full political authority, a dispatch to the Committee characterizing him in terms of transcendent merit and reliability demonstrated under pressure, the kind of unambiguous public endorsement that makes a commander's position unassailable: With that endorsement Pichegru reorganizes. The counter-offensive begins in late November or very early December, two to three weeks later than it actually did.
Those two to three weeks are genuinely dangerous, though. The Austrian armies, seeing no decisive French action, push the pressure on Strasbourg harder than they did in the actual timeline. Strasbourg holds, but it comes significantly closer to not holding than it did in reality. There are nights when the situation is bad enough that the letters going to Paris are alarming: Lebas probably writes to Élisabeth that he is not certain he will come home from this one, and do you blame him!!
And then the counter-offensive rolls, and the Austrians are not yet consolidated enough to resist it fully, and by December the lines are pushing back, and the crisis is over.
What remains after the crisis is a different Alsace than the one Saint-Just's actual mission produced. The civilian population is with him in a way they never fully were with Saint-Just. The Popular Societies have stopped hemorrhaging moderate members. The villages that resented Schneider now have a specific, named representative they associate with having been protected — the same association the people of Vesoul had, and kept, for years after Augustin's death. The long-term integration of Alsace into the Republic goes better. Whether it goes better enough to be worth the rougher first six weeks is the question the counterfactual can't fully resolve, but the people of Alsace in Year III would probably have said yes.
TL;DR.
Rougher start. Better long-term outcome, and Strasbourg survives but sweats.
Saint-Just in Nice
He arrives in Nice in late July 1793 with his assigned colleague Ricord. He has not brought Lebas, unfortunately, though Lebas is the person Saint-Just chose to take everywhere — the one person whose company he actively wanted on mission. He's stuck with Ricord, whose civisme is "not quite above question" per the Committee's own reports, who is from Grasse and has local connections Saint-Just doesn't understand and doesn't trust.
He writes to the Committee about Ricord within the month. The letter doesn't demand his recall — not yet — but it flags concerns. Ricord, who in the actual timeline worked closely with Augustin for months and became his most sustained professional companion (and pal), finds himself under quiet surveillance from a colleague who has decided not to develop familiarity with anyone he's not already chosen.
Charlotte is obviously not there. Saint-Just would not have brought a civilian woman who had no official mandate on his mission. This saves a particular kind of social complication: Though It doesn't save the mission from its other problems.
The Manosque incident happens differently. When federalist section members stop their carriage and force them to flee on horseback, Saint-Just's response is obviously not Augustin's — not the days of patient effort to "do away with all ill-feeling," not the careful language of reconciliation. He sends immediately for military detachments and has the section leaders arrested. The message reaches the surrounding departments within a week: resist the representatives and there will be consequences. This is faster and more violent and more effective in the short term. It also generates the kind of smoldering local resentment that makes subsequent administration harder.
Then Haller arrives in October. Saint-Just looks at him once — tall, thin-faced, red beard, Swiss banker, Genoese connections, civisme not quite above question — and puts him under strict oversight. He uses him because he needs him, but the informal trust that made Haller's network genuinely functional, the kind of relationship where Haller can make decisions on the army's behalf without checking every step, doesn't develop. The supply situation improves less than it did under Augustin's management, and there are gaps.
The Toulon operation is the pivotal moment: Saint-Just arrives at the siege, and he sees the artillery commander — young, Corsican, extraordinarily effective, politically reliable because he resisted Paoli when it would have been profitable to cooperate. Saint-Just promotes him, and he writes to the Committee recommending Bonaparte for brigade general after the fort falls. But "little familiarity with generals" means the relationship stops there. There are no months of shared meals and daily consultation and there is no "Saint-Just would never sign anything without consulting me." There is a promotion and a functional professional respect.
The Italian plan also still exists in embryo. Napoleon has it in his head because the logic of the theater produces it from anyone thinking carefully about the geography. Saint-Just can see it — his strategic instincts, as demonstrated at the Army of the North, are aggressively offensive. He writes to the Committee in November 1793: the Army of Italy can threaten Piedmont and Sardinia simultaneously. The Austrian position in the north depends on the Ligurian passes. Attack now through the coast road and force them to split their forces. The letter is most likely confident, direct, and contains none of the months of careful case-building that Augustin invested in the same argument. Notably It demands rather than persuades.
Carnot, once more, says no, or a qualified no. The same qualified no he said to Augustin's version, and to Saint-Just's version at the Army of the North. Saint-Just writes again, more forcefully. There are two or three exchanges. Carnot holds: And Saint-Just files the disagreement and moves on, furious, storing the grievance.
Toulon falls in December. And Saint-Just does not leave early. He stays through the reprisals. He doesn't run them — that's Barras and Fréron's operation — but he is present, he signs the collective dispatches, and he does not develop the ability to say he left before they were complete. His Thermidor record, if it comes to that, will be harder to separate from what happened at Toulon. He is more implicated than Augustin was.
The Barras-Fréron conflict comes in January 1794 at the latest. Saint-Just has been watching these two for six months and the letter he writes to the Committee is most likely devastating and specific: financial irregularities in the administration of enemy property, arbitrary arrests not authorized by any decree, personal enrichment from the sequestered goods of condemned federalists. He is correct about all of it. Barras has enough political capital to survive one letter. A second letter arrives in March. Barras begins working against Saint-Just at the Committee level, quietly, through exactly the channels he knows and Saint-Just doesn't.
The Ligurian villages are the disaster. In February 1794, a local sans-culotte club from one of the villages the French have just passed through decides to do what sans-culotte clubs were doing everywhere in the Midi: they break some statues in the church, expel the priest, rename the street. Saint-Just is sixty kilometers away dealing with supply correspondence. By the time he hears about it the damage is already visible: the families that had crept back to their villages after fleeing when the French arrived have fled again. The émigré propaganda — "the French will burn your churches" — has been confirmed, and the Genoese Senate, which has been watching carefully for exactly this kind of provocation, sends a formal note of concern. The French diplomatic relationship with Genoa, which Augustin had spent months carefully managing through Haller's network, cools perceptibly.
Haller, under increased pressure and surveillance, makes contact with his Genoese connections about an exit route.
By the summer of 1794 the Army of Italy is in roughly the same strategic position it was under Augustin — the Saorge campaign has opened the coastal approach, the Italian plan is theoretically available — but the support infrastructure is weaker, the diplomatic relationship with Genoa is worse, and the general who might have commanded the campaign has been promoted but not developed into the kind of intimate operational partner he became under Augustin's management.
Napoleon would still have been Napoleon in 1796. He is in the army, he has the plan, and he has demonstrated ability. Carnot would still eventually have given him the command. Whether the supply network and Genoese cooperation necessary to make the 1796 campaign actually work would have been in place — whether Haller's network would have survived, whether the Ligurian civilian population would have remained sympathetic enough to support French logistics — is the question the counterfactual can't quite resolve.
The optimistic version: Saint-Just's confrontational style pushed the Italian plan through the Committee earlier than Augustin managed, the campaign happens in late 1794 or early 1795 with a somewhat depleted support infrastructure but Napoleon's military genius compensates, and the Republic gains Italy a year earlier.
The realistic version: the supply and diplomatic infrastructure damage is significant enough that the 1796 campaign, when it happens, faces problems Augustin's careful management had specifically prevented. Napoleon compensates for some of it. Not all of it.
What can we make of this?
Undoubtedly, both counterfactuals end in functional outcomes. And neither is a disaster. This is the first thing to say, because the temptation of counterfactual history is to make the alternative catastrophic, and the honest answer here is that both men were more adaptable than their methods would predict.
Augustin in Alsace reads the crisis correctly, moves faster than his Franche-Comté record would suggest, and produces a rougher start and a better long-term outcome than Saint-Just's actual mission did. Saint-Just in Nice produces more short-term disruption and diplomatic friction than Augustin did, but he's not incompetent, and the Army of Italy doesn't collapse under him.
What the comparison actually reveals is something more specific than "right people right places": it's about where each man's failure modes landed, and whether the theater could absorb them.
Augustin's specific failure modes in Alsace show — slower officer identification, no twenty-four-hour shoes decree, a sharper early confrontation with the Popular Societies over Schneider — all land in the first six weeks of the mission, when the crisis is acute and every delay is dangerous. But they're recoverable, because the Austrians in October 1793 aren't yet consolidated enough to fully exploit a two-to-three week gap in the French counter-offensive: He (thankfully) survives his own slowness. The theater can absorb his specific mistakes at the specific moment they happen.
Saint-Just's specific failure modes in Nice — the Ligurian village incident, the Haller surveillance, the damaged Genoese relationship, the Napoleon promotion without the Napoleon partnership — land later in the mission and have longer tails. Diplomatic trust with a neutral sovereign republic, once damaged, takes months to rebuild. A supply network built on informal relationships, once put under suspicion, doesn't just snap back when the suspicion lifts. The Italian campaign planning, when it comes, depends on infrastructure that Augustin built carefully over months and that Saint-Just's methods would have compromised. The theater can absorb his mistakes eventually. It absorbs them more slowly than Alsace absorbed Augustin's.
This, I find, is the asymmetry that matters: Augustin's failure mode was acute and recoverable. Saint-Just's failure mode was chronic and expensive.
Which means the Revolution's personnel decision — Augustin in Nice, Saint-Just in Alsace — was not just accidentally correct. It was correct in a specific structural way: it put the man whose mistakes were recoverable in the theater where recovery was possible, and put the man whose mistakes were expensive in the theater where the margin for error was wide enough to absorb them. Strasbourg under siege could survive two weeks of slower action. The Genoese diplomatic relationship could not survive a Saint-Just month of blunt force.
Neither man was the better administrator in some general sense. They were differently calibrated instruments, and it seems the Revolution happened to reach for the right one each time.
I cant believe that there's nothing on tumblr about Viéra Pavlovna Rozalskaïa meanwhile Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is popular as ever.. i guess we know who won that philosophical debate, huh?
Was Caroline really an unloving/abusive wife to Murat?: "Loss of fortune seems nothing beside the agonies which oppress me"
On the TikTok idea that Caroline Murat was a heartless, manipulative gold-digger who couldn't care less that her husband died
Okay. We need to talk about this, because it keeps circulating and it is, frankly, garbage history. I regret not making this post a year ago..
The version going around — more or less "Caroline when Murat died: oh no, anyway, MY MONEY" — plus the accompanying idea that she spent their marriage manipulating a naive, tragic Murat into disaster after disaster (Spain, the 1814 defection, take your pick) isn't really supported by anything in the actual record: It's a caricature built out of hostile 19th-century memoirs, one very bitter quote from her own brother, and the same reflex that shows up every time a woman in history is powerful and ambitious: assume the worst possible motive, subtract all the evidence of feeling, and call it fact.
So let's look at what's actually there:
"She didn't care when he died"
We actually have a fairly detailed record of how Caroline found out her husband had been executed, and it isn't a woman shrugging over an inheritance.
She'd had no reliable news of Murat's whereabouts for weeks after his doomed landing at Pizzo. Writing to her sister Elisa while she still only knew he'd been captured, not shot, Caroline said outright that losing everything they owned meant nothing next to her fear for him — that she'd rather be destitute than have either of them go through what they were going through: Dunno about you, but that's not the voice of someone doing math on a will.
Days later, in Trieste, the newspaper she read every morning printed the news of his execution. Her household tried to intercept the paper and swap in a different edition so she wouldn't see it; she insisted on reading it anyway. Catherine Davies, an Englishwoman who'd served the Murat household since 1804 and was in the house that day, recorded that Caroline was seized by violent fits that didn't let up until morning. The children were asleep and didn't find out until the next day, when one of them noticed everyone's faces and asked if their father was dead.
Murat's own last letter, written in the minutes before he faced the firing squad, is addressed to her by name, full of tenderness for her and their four children, and closes with him asking never to be forgotten: He himself died with miniatures of his wife and kids pressed to his chest. Whatever else was true about their marriage, "she didn't care" is not a reading either of them would recognize.
"she only wanted power and money"
Straight from Joachimnapoleons translation of Vandal's Le Roi et la Reine de Naples: in 1810, Napoleon offered Caroline an extraordinary position — superintendent of the new Empress Marie-Louise's household, a role so prestigious it would have made her the equal of the family's kings, not just its queens. Caroline turned it down. Sarah's source is explicit about why: it would have meant two years away from her children, and she worried it would offend her already-insecure husband. A woman chasing power for its own sake does not say no to Napoleon personally offering her more of it, for her kids' sake.
There's also Metternich's own memoir (yes, the Metternich she was allegedly having an affair with) describing her as someone of real intelligence who understood both her brother's and her husband's flaws clearly — and specifically says she'd have "led" Murat "if he could have been led," meaning even Metternich, no fan of Napoleon's family, didn't think Murat was some puppet she pulled strings on. Metternich frames her ambition as wanting independence and security for her family beyond the reach of Napoleon's temper — which, given what actually happened to every other Bonaparte satellite throne, was not a paranoid instinct.
"she wanted to dominate/replace Murat"
Even sources that leans more critical of Caroline's ambition still won't back the "she wanted him gone" framing. From the same Vandal translation: Murat's fear of being reduced to a figurehead came from how Napoleon worded the Treaty of Bayonne, not from anything Caroline did. And from Louise Murat's own memoir — their daughter, writing about her parents directly — Louise says outright that Caroline, "although ambitious, had too much feeling for her own dignity to ever consent to making her husband play such a ridiculous role" as a mere consort. That's their own daughter's testimony directly contradicting "all the kids only had bad things to say about her."
Same post also has a striking detail sourced to Cole: when Napoleon publicly humiliated Murat over a citizenship decree, Murat tore his Legion of Honor off his uniform and grabbed a pistol, threatening to kill himself. Caroline kept his ministers away from him for two days specifically so nobody would see him in that state. Not someone undermining her husband's authority — but that's someone actively protecting his dignity from his own worst moment.
"She forced him to betray Napoleon in 1814"
This one, I can only ASSUME, has a very specific origin point: Napoleon himself. On hearing that Murat had signed a treaty with Austria to save his throne, he reportedly said it was his wife's doing — that Murat loved him, but Caroline was the cause of the desertion. That's the quote everyone since has been running with apparently.
But context matters here: By January 1814, Napoleon's empire was collapsing, and with it the entire political order that had secured Murat's throne. Austria was advancing through northern Italy against Eugène's Army of Italy while offering Murat a bargain: preserve his kingdom in exchange for abandoning Napoleon and joining the Coalition. Murat and Caroline had spent years watching Napoleon treat his satellite monarchies as expendable whenever imperial priorities demanded it. Cutting a deal to preserve Naples wasn't Caroline whispering poison into a passive husband's ear — it was a joint political calculation by two rulers trying to keep the crown they had built their lives around at the exact moment the empire sustaining it seemed to be falling apart. Murat himself, defending the decision afterward, spoke of the political "volcanoes" they were sitting on — hardly the language of a man who didn't understand what he'd agreed to or why.
It's worth sitting with why this particular betrayal got pinned on Caroline specifically. Murat is the one who signed the treaty. Murat is the one who commanded the army: Nobody was writing "Murat made Caroline commit treason" — because a man making a hard political call under existential pressure reads as strategy, and a woman doing the same reads as manipulation. Napoleon, humiliated by a defection from a man he'd raised from nothing, had every reason to prefer a narrative where his sister was the real villain rather than one where his handpicked marshal simply chose his own kingdom over him: Later historians, working off of Napoleon's own framing and off memoirists who despised Caroline anyway (looking at you, Laure Junot), just kept passing that framing along.
"She was a cold, neglectful mother"
This is the one piece of the pile that isn't just spin — I admit, there's a real, documented account behind it: The Murats' English governess, who lived in their household for over a decade, wrote that during Caroline's 1812 regency Caroline was so consumed by state business that for a fortnight together, she neither saw nor inquired for her children. A real primary source, and not an invention, which is worth sitting with rather than waving away.
But I MEAN??? look at what it's actually describing: a woman running a kingdom, alone, during the exact stretch when Napoleon's Russian campaign was disintegrating and Naples's own safety was genuinely in question. That's not a portrait of indifference to her children so much as it's a portrait of what total immersion in a wartime regency looked like — the same total immersion that, when a king does it, gets called dedication. Nobody reads Murat's own frequent absences from his children during years of campaigning as evidence he didn't love them (and by his own account, via Pépé's memoirs, the only truly happy hours of his life were the ones he spent with them). The double standard isn't that people deny Caroline was ever less present than she might have liked to be — it's that the same behavior earns her "cold mother" and earns him nothing at all.
And.
A note on where the hostile accounts come from
A lot of the negative testimony about Caroline comes from people who had their own specific reasons to dislike her, not neutral observers rendering a verdict from nowhere. General Pépé, for instance, is an honest and genuinely valuable witness on Murat — but he was also a Neapolitan constitutionalist who spent years at odds with the crown over exactly the kind of political assertiveness Caroline represented, and he says outright that the Queen disliked him back.
Madame Cavaignac's memoirs are worth reading for the texture of Naples court life, but her account of Murat as an essentially good man worn down by "the intrigues of his wife" repeats the same move every hostile source makes: it takes ordinary marital conflict — two people disagreeing, both of them difficult in their own ways — and narrates it as something Murat suffered and Caroline did to him, as though he had no hand in his own choices. It's telling that even Cavaignac's account concedes Murat was unfaithful and that Caroline "returned this in kind" — mutual, not one-sided, is right there in the source people cite to prove the opposite:
Additionally she ends up criticizing Murat because he didn't act like "husband and master." And that phrase alone reveals a huge assumption: A proper husband ought to dominate his wife. So if he doesn't, the wife becomes suspect. Mme. Cavaignac is ALSO interpreting events through a social framework where a wife's political assertiveness is inherently inappropriate.
ALSO. Cavaignac's memoirs do describe Caroline's ambition as "vanity taking the wrong road" and claim she had little real affection for Murat — I'm not hiding that this claim exists within the source, because pretending every primary source is pro-Caroline would be its own kind of dishonesty. But it's worth noting Sarahs (joachimnapoleons) own framing of it: even she describes Cavaignac as "clearly not enamored of Caroline," and Cavaignac was writing from inside a specific court faction with its own grudges, same as Pépé (who Caroline openly called "the savage" — mutual dislike, not one-sided villainy, since Pépé was leading a push for a constitution the throne was actively resisting).
None of this means these memoirists were lying. It means testimony from people with an existing stake in the fight isn't the same thing as objective proof, and treating every unflattering line about Caroline as settled fact while reading every unflattering line about Murat as an unfair exaggeration is a choice, not a neutral reading of the evidence.
The Josephine letter
This one gets cited constantly as proof Caroline was emotionally abusive to Murat, and it deserves a real look, because it's actually a perfect specimen of the whole problem:
The letter is Josephine scolding Caroline for reducing Murat to tears, and it is soaked in the gender ideology of the period, not some timeless statement about cruelty. Josephine tells her that a woman's power is supposed to come from being irresistible and gentle, not from giving orders — that Caroline had the poor taste to "compel poor Murat to shed tears" instead of simply charming him into doing what she wanted. The whole argument is that Caroline's real crime is being visibly in command of her own husband: "the pride of women consists in submission," Josephine writes, more or less literally instructing her sister-in-law to perform a socially acceptable kind of femininity instead of an assertive one.
This, to put it plainly, is a 19th-century woman coaching another 19th-century woman on how to wield influence without being caught doing it — because a woman who visibly commands is monstrous, and a woman who invisibly manipulates via her charms is simply behaving. Retrofitting that framework onto modern language about emotional abuse doesn't reveal that Caroline mistreated Murat; it reveals how completely the double standard survives, since apparently a wife's visible assertiveness reads as more damning than any of the actual documented harm men in this story did to each other and to the people under their rule.
And on Murat crying: he cried a lot, IM JUST GOING TO SAY IT?? by everyone's account, including people who loved him. He cried at his own coronation-adjacent slights, he cried in his letters to Napoleon, contemporaries across multiple unrelated memoirs describe him as emotionally volatile in exactly this way: A wife whose disagreements with her husband sometimes ended in him crying is not a special indictment of that wife when the man in question cried about nearly everything that mattered to him. It's a data point about Murat's temperament, not a smoking gun about Caroline's cruelty.
The "ambition" problem, generally
What irritates me the most is what I find to be the actual pattern underneath most of this: Caroline was politically active, openly ambitious, and refused to sit quietly in the decorative-consort role people expected of her — and instead of that reading as leadership, it reads, in source after source, as scheming. She's "vain," "commanding," "intriguing." Murat, meanwhile, gets remembered as brave but emotionally fragile, prone to paranoia, a man whose bad decisions were things that happened to him rather than choices he made: Two people with comparably outsized ambition, and only one of them gets treated as a monster for having it.
plus im not even going to HUMOUR the way people go "oh she cheated on murat!!" as if murat wasnt doing it constantly. shut the fuck up man. im not even addressing it
None of this requires making Caroline a saint. She had real flaws — pettiness, jealousy, affairs of her own, a willingness to use people when it served her. But there's a wide gulf between "flawed, ambitious woman who sometimes hurt people close to her" and "unloving, abusive traitor who barely noticed her husband died." The record supports the first. It does not support the second.
TL;DR
What we actually have, letter after letter, is two people who kept tearing their relationship apart and kept mending it again for fifteen years — through affairs, through years of separation and reconciliation and separation again — right up until a firing squad in a Calabrian courtyard ended it for good. That's not nothing: and It's certainly NOT the plot of a woman who didn't care.
RANT OVER!!!!!!!!!
also read this post by joachimnapoleon about their relationship
