Hortense Eugénie Cécile Bonaparte (born de Beauharnais) (10 April 1783 – 5 October 1837), Queen Consort of Holland, was a stepdaughter of Napoleon, wife of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland and the mother of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.
Hortense was born in Paris, France on 10 April 1783, the daughter of Alexandre, Vicomte de Beauharnais and of his wife Joséphine Tascher de la Pagerie. Her parents separated shortly after her birth. In 1794, her father was executed during the Reign of Terror and her mother was imprisoned in the Carmes prison. She was later released on 6 August, due to the intervention of her best friend Thérèse Tallien. Two years later her mother married Napoleon Bonaparte. Hortense was educated at the school of Madame Jeanne Campan at St-Germain-en-Laye together with Napoleon’s youngest sister Caroline Bonaparte Murat. She had an elder brother, Eugène de Beauharnais. Hortense was an accomplished amateur musical composer and supplied the army of her stepfather Napoleon with rousing marches.
She traveled in Germany and Italy before purchasing the Château of Arenenberg in the Swiss canton of Thurgau in 1817. She lived there until her death on 5 October 1837, at the age of fifty-four. She is buried next to her mother Joséphine in the Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul church in Rueil-Malmaison.

“Madame de Staël now also remembered the kindness Queen Hortense had shown her during her exile; and not to her only, but also to her friend, Madame Récamier, who had also been exiled by Napoleon, not, however, as his enemies said, “because she was Madame de Staël’s friend,” but simply because she patronized and belonged to the so-called “little church.” The “little church” was an organization born of the spirit of opposition of the Faubourg St. Germain, and a portion of the Catholic clergy, and was one of those things appertaining to the internal relations of France that were most annoying and disagreeable to the emperor.”Queen Hortense, by L. Mühlbach

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