17 Facts about Princess Marie Bonaparte: The Unconventional Royal and her Lifelong Search for Orgasm

Princess Marie Bonaparte. Image source: Wikimedia/Flickr

"If ever anyone writes the story of my life, it should be called The Last Bonaparte, for I am the last.  My cousins of the Imperial line are only Napoleons,” wrote Princess Marie Bonaparte. Indeed, she made a legacy not as a scion of Napoleon’s clan (she, in fact, called her great-grand uncle the “ultimate mass murderer”) but as a woman well ahead of her time who used her enormous fortune to advance Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis.  More interestingly, the unconventional princess embarked on a lifelong search for orgasm , which eluded her for so long. Here are 21 facts about Princess Marie Bonaparte.

Watch: Princess Marie Bonaparte and the Lifelong Search for Orgasm

1. She was an only child and heir to an enormous fortune.

Princess Marie Bonaparte was born on July 2, 1882 at Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France. She was the only child of Prince Roland Napoléon Bonaparte and his wife Marie-Félix Blanc. Her family affectionately called her “Mimi”. While from her father’s side, she claimed her royal title, the family barely had a fortune. Her paternal grandfather, Prince Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte, was the son of the rebellious and disinherited Lucien Bonaparte, Prince Français, 1st Prince of Canino and Musignano. Marie’s maternal grandfather, “The Magician of Monte Carlo” François Blanc, left a massive fortune estimated at FF 88 million when he died. However, Marie-Felix only received FF 8.4 million in trust, thanks to her mother’s enormous debts when she died.

2. Marie lost her mother when after she was born

Princess Marie’s mother died of embolism shortly after her birth. She inherited half of Marie-Félix’s FF 8.4 million bequest, while the other half went to her father. The fortune left to Roland eventually grew and she inherited 60 million francs on his death in 1924.

3. She suffered from hypochondria when she was a child.

 Suffering from hypochondria and phobias, which stemmed from her knowledge of herself bearing symptoms of tuberculosis, she spent much of her youth in seclusion, writing personal journals and reading literature.

4. She married into the Greek Royal Family

Princess Marie and her future husband Prince George of Greece and Denmark, son of King George I of Greece, first met at a luncheon hosted by Prince Roland in September of 1906. The prince courted her for twenty-eight days, and though both of them had reservations—Princess Marie did not want to leave Paris for Athens for fear of being bored by the Athenian society, and Prince George could not relent to Marie’s hopes of their staying permanently in France as he had obligations back home—the two eventually married in a civil ceremony in Paris on November 21, 1907, and in an Orthodox wedding in Athens, Greece on December 12, 1907. Thereafter, Marie she became known as Her Imperial and Royal Highness Princess Marie of Greece and Denmark, her rank taking precedence of his husband’s own.

5. Her children inherited her entire fortune.

 In a move that surprised Prince Roland, Prince George waived his rights to the whole of Marie’s inheritance, which gave his wife the freedom to manage and spend her fortune any way she wanted. She would only be expected to give legacies to their future children.

6. Hers was an unconventional marriage

Though the union produced two children—Prince Peter and Princess Eugenie—Prince George was physically and emotionally distant from his wife. As a result, Princess Marie went searching for affection from other men, one of the first ones being Prince Aage, eldest son of George’s uncle, Prince Valdemar. The two allegedly shared an episode of “passionate flirtation”, an affair that did not seem to bother Prince George.

7. She flirted with boy.

Princess Marie was on a flirtation spree with French Prime Minister Aristide Briand from1913 up to 1916, but she halted the affair as she did not want to share him with the politician’s other mistress, actress Berthe Cerny. The illicit relationship resumed on April of 1916 when Cerny broke up with Briand. The affair lasted until May of 1919. It has been suspected that Marie lured Aritide into ousting Constantine from the Greek throne in favor of her husband Prince George, or that she was lured by the prime minister to have Greece to support the Allied side.

8. Her sexual dysfunction led her to study psychoanalsysis

It was her affair with Sigmund Freud’s disciple, Rudolph Loewenstein, which gave her much interest about psychoanalysis and which drove her to study what she initially called as sexual dysfunction as she had not felt sexual fulfillment despite her many sexual relationships.

9. She was a published scientific author

In 1924, Princess Marie’s “Theory of Frigidity” was published in the Bruxelles-Médical medical journal under the pseudonym A. E. Narjani. She conducted the research by studying 243 women and measuring the distance between their clitoris and vagina, which, she believed, was critical in achieving orgasm. She categorized women with short distances as “paraclitoridiennes", and they were the ones who easily reached orgasm during intercourse. On the one hand, she classified those with longer distances (more than two and a half centimeters) as "téleclitoridiennes", which included women who had difficulty reaching orgasm during intercourse. Those in between were categorized as "mesoclitoriennes".

11. She was a "téleclitoridiennes"

Classifying herself as "téleclitoridiennes", she sought the help of Josef Halban, who surgically moved her clitoris closer to her vagina in a procedure the princess dubbed and published as the “Halban-Narjani operation”. When she did not get the desired results, she had the operation repeated.

12. Her escapades were beyond the ordinary

 She stirred up a scandal when she modeled for Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși in 1919. The modernist artist represented Marie as a giant bronze penis, which mirrored the subject’s obsession to the male phallus, as well as her lifelong search for orgasm.

13. She was “frigid” in bed

 In 1925, she consulted Sigmund Freud about her “frigidity”, which was later found out to be her failure to reach orgasm in missionary position during intercourse. It was Marie who had the Austrian neurologist asking, "The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'".

14. Her fortune bailed out the impoverished Greek royals

 Princess Marie helped her husband’s banished relatives when the Greek royal family was exiled, even paying for the private schooling of Prince George’s nephew, Prince Philip of Greece, while her own children were attending the public lycées.

15. She forged a special relationship with Sigmund Freud

It was Freud who helped Marie remember that time when she caught her wet-nurse and her father’s half-brother having sex. The two drugged her to keep her quiet while they went on with their sexual exploit. Princess Marie ransomed Freud out of the shackles of the Nazis, making possible the doctor’s and his family’s  escape from Austria, as well as the transport of his analytic couch, his antiquities, and books to London. Also, through her massive fortune, Marie was able to help 200 Jewish families flee Germany.

16. Marie helped advance Psychoanalysis

Princess Marie used her wealth to make psychoanalysis popular in France, setting up a training school for future psychoanalysts. She founded the Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP) or the French Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1926, published a number of books on psychoanalysis, and even translated Freud’s works into French.

17. Marie became a practicing psychoanalyst

A practicing psychoanalyst until her death, Princess Marie would only take five or six patients at  time, had them sit with her in her garden and later in her boudoir when she got older, crocheting while they talked. She showed an interest in the criminal mind, conducting interviews with American Caryl Chessman, who had been in the death row for several years, and Madame Lefebrve, who shot dead her pregnant daughter-in-law.

Living a rather extraordinary life, Princess Marie Bonaparte, Princess George of Greece and Denmark, died of leukemia on September 21, 1962 in Saint-Tropez, France. She was 80 years old. Her ashes were interred in the royal cemetery in Tatoi, Greece.