FBI founded by Napoleon Bonaparte’s great-nephew Charles Joseph Bonaparte
While Donald Trump fights accusations of turning on the FBI in the face of a Russian dictator it is an interesting fact that the forerunner of the FBI was founded by the grandson of a dictator’s brother
Today in History
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US President Donald Trump recently had to confront accusations he sold out the FBI when he buckled to Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s denials of interference in the US election at the Helsinki Summit.
Given many political pundits compare Putin to a dictator, it is an interesting piece of historical trivia that the US government agency that would became the FBI was founded, 110 years ago today, by a relative of another European dictator.
US attorney-general Charles Joseph Bonaparte, the grandson of Napoleon’s brother Jerome, was the man behind the establishment of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) in 1908.
Born in the US, Charles’s branch of the family had long since forgone all titles and claims on power in France. A reformist who tried to break up the despotic power of big corporations, one of the first major tasks he assigned the BOI was to enforce antitrust and anti-monopoly laws. It evolved into one of the most respected, and even sometimes feared, law enforcement agencies in the world.
The story of how a Bonaparte became a reformer in America is a fascinating one.
It begins with Charles’s grandfather Jerome, who was born in Corsica in 1784, the fifth surviving son of Italian lawyer and diplomat Carlo Bonaparte.
Jerome grew up somewhat in the shadow of his brilliant brother Napoleon, who at nearly 15 years his senior was commissioned an officer in 1785 and rapidly rose through the ranks after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.
Napoleon had become head of the Bonaparte family when Carlo died in 1785 but found Jerome difficult to deal with. When his studies faltered, with his brother’s influence Jerome was given a prestige appointment to the Consular Guard in 1800. But he was a troublemaker.
After being wounded in a duel with the brother of one of Napoleon’s trusted marshals, he was transferred to the navy.
In the navy in 1801 he was sent to put down a slave revolt in a French colony in the West Indies, but worried about British patrols in the Caribbean he refused to return to France when ordered, instead setting a course for America.
There he met Elizabeth “Betsy” Patterson, daughter of a wealthy and influential Baltimore merchant, and in 1803 they were married. The marriage infuriated Napoleon who forbade Betsy from setting foot in France when Jerome returned for his brother’s coronation as emperor. She was forced to settle down in Camberwell, England, where she gave birth to a son, Jerome Napoleon “Bo” Bonaparte, in 1805.
When Emperor Napoleon annulled the marriage so he could marry his brother off to a princess, Catharina of Württemberg, in 1807 and install him as King of Westphalia, Jerome’s American son was effectively cut off from any claims to the French throne.
Betsy later returned to the US to live with her father in Baltimore where Maryland’s legislature granted her a divorce in 1812. Regardless, she became something of a celebrity embellished by her airs of being French nobility.
An advocate for aristocracy, she derided America’s republicanism to the point people feared she might even try to claim the French throne for her son. It was one of the reasons US congress tried to pass a constitutional amendment preventing American citizens from accepting foreign titles or wealth from monarchs. It failed to pass.
Bo resisted his mother’s aspirations for him to marry French nobility, instead choosing Susan Williams, the daughter of a Baltimore merchant.
He became a farmer and interested himself in the development of agriculture in the US as president of the Maryland Agricultural Society. The couple had two sons, Jerome and Charles.
Charles was born in 1851, studied law at Harvard and became prominent in legal, municipal, civil service and political reform, a founder of the Reform League of Baltimore. This brought him to the notice of up-and-coming politician Theodore Roosevelt, then head of US Civil Service Commission.
When he entered the Oval Office in 1905 Roosevelt called on Charles’s services, appointing him secretary of the navy and later attorney-general.
With Roosevelt’s program of breaking up monopolies, trusts and reining in corruption, Charles realised the government needed an agency that could investigate and prosecute breaches of federal law. He proposed the formation of a special bureau for the purpose and, with Roosevelt’s blessing, gathered a group of former secret service operatives and justice department employees.
On July 26, 1908, he appointed Department of Justice chief examiner Stanley Wellington Finch to oversee the organisation then simply known as the “special agent force”, which was formally named the Bureau of Investigation in 1909.
In 1935 it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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