Marie Louise of Austria

Marie Louise was raised to hate Napoleon, married him at eighteen, gave him the son he needed, and never went back to him after 1814. She was the eldest daughter of Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, and had twice been driven out of Vienna by French armies as a child; the Austrian court educated her in a straightforward loathing of the man she was then handed to. Metternich arranged the marriage in 1810, after Napoleon divorced Josephine for failing to produce an heir, as the price of Austria's survival following the defeat at Wagram. She was married by proxy in Vienna and met Napoleon for the first time on the road to Compiegne. By every account the marriage worked better than either court expected; their son, styled the King of Rome, was born in March 1811. She acted as regent in Paris during the campaigns of 1812 and 1813. When the allies closed on Paris in 1814 she left with the child on her father's instructions and Napoleon's own orders, and was steered away from joining him on Elba by Metternich, who attached to her household the one-eyed Austrian general Adam von Neipperg with instructions to prevent it. She lived with Neipperg, married him after Napoleon died, and had three children by him. The Congress of Vienna gave her the duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, which she governed for thirty-two years with a mildness her subjects remembered; she built a theatre and a bridge and endowed schools. Her son was kept in Vienna as the Duke of Reichstadt and died of tuberculosis at twenty-one, and she saw little of him.

• Lived: 1791 CE – 1847 CE
• Nationality: Austrian
• Roles: royalty