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.
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.
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.
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.
also read this post by joachimnapoleon about their relationship
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