23 Facts About Lucien Bonaparte

Lucien Bonaparte served as Minister of the Interior from 1799 to 1800 and as the president of the Council of Five Hundred in late 1799.

The third surviving son of Carlo Bonaparte and his wife Letizia Ramolino, Lucien was the younger brother of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Lucien Bonaparte was educated in mainland France and initially studied at the military schools of Autun and Brienne but later, after his father's death, at the seminary of Aix-en-Provence from which he dropped out in 1789.

Lucien Bonaparte became a staunch supporter of the French Revolution upon its outbreak in 1789, when he was 14 years old.

Lucien Bonaparte returned to Corsica at the start of the Revolution, and became an outspoken orator at the Corsican chapter of the Jacobin Club in Ajaccio, where he adopted the alias "Brutus Bonaparte".

Lucien Bonaparte was released after an intervention by Napoleon, who then found him an administrative assignment in the Army of the North.

In 1798, Lucien Bonaparte was elected member of the Council of Five Hundred for Corsica's Liamone department.

Lucien Bonaparte mounted a horse and galvanized the grenadiers by pointing a sword at his brother and swearing to run him through if he ever betrayed the principles of Liberte, egalite, fraternite.

Napoleon made him Minister of the Interior under the consulate, which enabled Lucien Bonaparte to falsify the results of the plebiscite for First Consul but brought him into competition with Joseph Fouche, the chief of police, who showed Napoleon a subversive pamphlet possibly written by Lucien Bonaparte and effected a breach between the brothers.

Lucien Bonaparte attempted to sail to the United States to escape his situation but was captured by the British.

The government permitted Lucien Bonaparte to settle comfortably with his family at Ludlow, and later at Thorngrove House in Grimley, 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 until his 1814 abdication.

Lucien Bonaparte returned to France following his brother's abdication in April 1814.

Lucien Bonaparte continued to Rome, where on 18 August 1814 he was made Prince of Canino, Count of Apollino, and Lord of Nemori by Pope Pius VII and Prince of Musignano on 21 March 1824 by Pope Leo XII.

Lucien Bonaparte's 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 Bonaparte was proscribed at the Restoration and deprived of his fauteuil at the Academie Francaise.

Lucien Bonaparte died in Viterbo, Italy, on 29 June 1840, of stomach cancer, the same disease that claimed his father and, reportedly, his brother Napoleon.

Lucien Bonaparte was the inspiration behind the Napoleonic reconstitution of the dispersed Academie Francaise in 1803, where he took a seat.

Lucien Bonaparte collected paintings in la maison de campagne at Brienne, was a member of Jeanne Francoise Julie Adelaide Recamier's salon and wrote a novel, La Tribu indienne.

Lucien Bonaparte was an amateur archeologist, establishing excavations at his property in Frascati which produced a complete statue of Tiberius, and at Musignano which rendered a bust of Juno.

Lucien Bonaparte owned a parcel which had once formed part of Cicero's estate called Tusculum, and was much given to commenting on the fact.

In 1825, Lucien Bonaparte excavated the so-called Tusculum portrait of Julius Caesar at the Tusculum's forum.

In 1823, Lucien Bonaparte was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.