Marie Bonaparte, princesse de Grèce et de Danemark

Princess Marie Bonaparte (2 July 1882 – 21 September 1962) was a French author and psychoanalyst, closely linked with Sigmund Freud. Her wealth contributed to the popularity of psychoanalysis, and enabled Freud's escape from Nazi Germany.

Marie Bonaparte was a great-grandniece of Emperor Napoleon I of France. She was a daughter of Prince Roland Bonaparte (19 May 1858–14 April 1924) and Marie-Félix Blanc (1859–1882). Her paternal grandfather was Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte, son of Lucien Bonaparte, who was one of Napoleon's rebellious and disinherited younger brothers. For this reason, despite her title Marie was not a member of the dynastic branch of the Bonapartes who claimed the French imperial throne from exile. However, her maternal grandfather was François Blanc, the principal real-estate developer of Monte Carlo. It was from this side of her family that Marie inherited her great fortune.

She was born at Saint-Cloud, a town in Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France. Her mother died of an embolism induced when giving birth to Marie.

On 21 November 1907 in Paris, she married Prince George of Greece and Denmark, the second son of King George I of the Hellenes, in a civil ceremony, with a subsequent religious ceremony on 12 December 1907, at Athens. She was thereafter officially also known as Princess George of Greece and Denmark. They had two children, Peter (1908-1980) and Eugénie (1910-1988).

On 2 June 1953, Marie and her husband represented their nephew, King Paul of Greece, at the coronation of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in London. Bored with the pageantry, Marie offered psychoanalysis to the gentleman seated next to her, who was the future French president François Mitterrand. Mitterrand obliged Marie, and the couple barely witnessed the pomp and ceremony, finding their own activity far more interesting.

She practiced as a psychoanalyst until her death in 1962, providing substantial services to the development and promotion of psychoanalysis. She translated Freud's work into French and founded the French Institute of Psychoanalysis (Société Psychoanalytique de Paris SPP) in 1926. In addition to her own work and preservation of Freud's legacy, she also offered financial support for Geza Roheim's anthropological explorations. A scholar on Edgar Allan Poe, she wrote a biography and an interpretation of his work.

She died of leukemia in Saint-Tropez, was cremated in Marseilles, and her ashes were interred in Prince George's tomb at Tatoï, near Athens.

Links

• The Peerage
• Geneall
• Wikipedia; English Ελληνικά
• Aleksanderpalace