Queen Desideria (1777-1860)

[cute_girl]

King Jean Baptist and Queen Desiree

[Josefine]

i would love to see a swedish movie about the queen maybe a project with the french production

[lilytornado]

yes, Désirée and Desideria both mean the desired one, one in french and one in latin. My parents both liked the meaning and my mother has read the book by Annemarie Selinko, that's why my second name is Désirée.

[Stefan]

Originally Posted by Josefine

its here where she lay in rest i do not know what church it is

It is Riddarholmskyrkan at Stockholm where the swedish Kings are buried. The last one who was buried there was King Gustaf V. in 1950. King Gustaf VI. Adolf is buried at the Royal burial Ground at Haga.

[Dona Cayetana]

Additionally, Julie Clary, sister of Désirée, was married to Joseph Bonaparte elder brother of Napoleon. Joseph and Julie were placed on the Spanish throne by Napoleon.

[Jo of Palatine]

In a book I read about Desirée it said that her nephew, the son of her brother Eugene Clary, followed her to Sweden. Are there still Clarys around?

[Furienna]

Two different pictures of queen Desideria
http://img438.imageshack.us/img438/2136/1b3kn.jpg
http://img55.imageshack.us/img55/7755/1695vq.jpg

The royal house of Sweden in the 1830s.
http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/6...nadotte9hz.jpg

[Josefine]

what movies has been done bout her or her in it

[Furienna]

I think there was one made in the 50s.

[EmpressRouge]

Originally Posted by Furienna

I think there was one made in the 50s.

It was made in 1954 and called Desirée and starred Marlon Brando as Napoleon, Jean Simmons as Desiree, and Merle Oberon as Josephine.
Desirée (1954)

[Marengo]

I just read ' Rites of peace' by Adam Zamoyski a few weeks ago, Desiree Clary gave me a good laugh. When she heard she actually had to go to Sweden she eclaimed 'but I thought it was one of these titles that we didn' t had to move!' (considering all Napoleontic generals got one new title after another).

[Jo of Palatine]

Originally Posted by Furienna

That would be the one. Thanks, EmpressRouge!

The film is based on the wonderful novel "Desiree" by Austrian/Danish author Annemarie Selinko, who wrote it as the diary of Desirée and completely from her perspective, portraying her as a very romantic and kind person with courage and humour but not overly much interest in politics, so it has a kind of naive/fairytale tone to it which makes it a fabulous read.

I later found that Selinko based a lot of her facts about Desirée's later life as queen in Sweden on a biography of her daughter-in-law Josephine de Beauharnais of Leuchtenberg, daughter of Eugène de Beaharnais and Bavarian princess Amalie which appeared from the bibliography to be well researcheds os it could have been in fact like that.

[Jo of Palatine]

Originally Posted by Marengo

I just read ' Rites of peace' by Adam Zamoyski a few weeks ago, Desiree Clary gave me a good laugh. When she heard she actually had to go to Sweden she eclaimed 'but I thought it was one of these titles that we didn' t had to move!' (considering all Napoleontic generals got one new title after another).

I'm not sure that she actually said that. It's one of the central scenes in the "Desirée"-book by Selinko but I wonder how this exclamation could have been reported - by whom? I recall a discussion about that in a biography that I read years ago and the author thought it was very untypical for Desirée to say something like that.It was known that Jean Baptiste Bernadotte was spied on by Fouché and that some of these reports are still available in the archives in Paris. I seem to recall that they found one about a scene where Napoleon seem to have said to Bernadotte that even his wife doesn't want to go to Sweden in order to sway him and this could be the source for that quote. But it's obviously not sure if Desiree really said it or if it was invented for Napoleon.

Of course, one can assume that it was not easy for a lady from the south of France who had lived most of her life in fashionable Paris as a high-society lady to move to teh cold backwaters of Stockholm and that she didn't look forward to it when her own sister Julie Bonaparte lived in comfort in Paris wearing the "crown" of Spain.

[Josefine]

in movies about napoleon is she a character in those movies?

[Jo of Palatine]

Originally Posted by Josefine

in movies about napoleon is she a character in those movies?

I could find the film "Napoleon" by Sasha Guitry from 1955 where Dany Robin played Desirée and the film "Napoleon" by Able Gance from 1927 where Annabelle played Desiree.

There was a film "Le Destin fabuleux de Désirée Clary" by Sasha Guitry from 1942 where Gaby Morlay played the adult Désirée.
An Italian film "La Sposa dei Re" by Duilio Coletti from 1938 with Elsa di Giorgi as Desiree.

[Thomasine]

Josephine,

Queen Desideria (Desiree) is burried in the Riddarholmen church (Riddarholmsskyrkan) in Stockholm where most of the Swedish Kings and Queens are burried.

Desideria means desired and she didn't feel very desired in Sweden when she arrived.

[Furienna]

She was really French and missed France terribly. In fact, she went back to France and stayed there for many years, even though her husband and her son stayed in Sweden. But somehow, she didn't manage to return to France again after that.

[Marengo]

Some images:

[Furienna]

Nice pictures! :)

[Catharina]

I loved some of the anecdotes about her life in Sweden that I found in Wikipedia: Désirée Clary - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It seems Queen Desideria was a bit of an eccentric, partly because of her character and partly because she never really felt at home in Sweden.

"She never became very popular at the royal court and never learned to speak Swedish, and there are many anecdotes of her attempts to speak the language. She kept her French personal staff. She spent her summers at Drottningholm Palace, (a residence her husband disliked) or Rosersberg Palace, and often visited Swedish spas, such as Ramlösa spa. She visited Norway a couple of times, the first time in 1825. The court was astonished by her informal behaviour. Every morning, she visited her husband in her nightgown, which was shocking, as her husband usually conferred with members of the council of state in his bed chamber at that time. Otherwise, they met only on formal occasions. In 1826, because she was always late at dinner, he stopped having his meals with her. She went to bed late, and woke up late."

"In 1844, her husband died. In 1853, she wished to return to Paris, but her fear of sea travel made it impossible. After becoming a widow, she grew more and more eccentric. She went to bed in the morning, got up in the evening, ate breakfast at night, and drove around in a carriage through the streets, in the courtyard, or wandered around the corridors of the sleeping castle with a light. An anecdote illustrates this: in 1843, a palace guard saw the queen fully dressed on the palace balcony in the middle of the night. When he came home to his wife, he told her, that she was lazy in comparison to the queen, who had gotten up hours before sunrise. He had thought Queen Désirée was up earlier than anyone else in town, but, in fact, she had not yet gone to bed - she would eventually get up from bed at three or four in the afternoon. She enjoyed making unannounced visits and, sometimes, she would take in children from the streets to the palace and give them sweets: she could not speak to them, but she would say "Kom, kom!", which is Swedish for : "Come come!" There are other stories about people having been awakened by her carriage when she drove through the streets at night; the carriage sometimes stopped. She would sleep for a while, and then she would wake and the carriage would continue on its way. Sometimes she drove in circles around the royal palace: this habit was called 'Kring Kring', one of the few Swedish words she learned, which means 'around and around'. On the last day of her life, she entered her box at the opera just as the performance had ended."

I can just picture her in her carriage going "Kring! Kring!"