The Forgotten Bonapartes: How Napoleon’s Family Helped Build the FBI
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, when Napoleon’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte met a young Baltimore woman named Elizabeth Patterson in 1803, it seemed like a love story that could never last. Their marriage was annulled by the emperor himself, but it sparked a family line that would take root in America and quietly reshape its future.
Their grandson, Charles J. Bonaparte, carried the ambition of his lineage in a different direction. Educated at Harvard and driven by public service, he became U.S. Attorney General under Theodore Roosevelt and went on to establish a small investigative office within the Justice Department, an office that would later evolve into the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The History Guy traces how Napoleon Bonaparte’s legacy reached across oceans, blending old-world nobility with new-world purpose.
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Transcript
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| 0:28.8 | Listen to Dodger Blue Dream on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is our American stories, and our next story comes to us from a man who's simply known as the History Guy. His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages |
| 0:56.0 | on YouTube. The History Guy is also heard here at Our American Stories. If at the height of his |
| 1:01.9 | power in 1810 someone had approached Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and told him that in about |
| 1:08.5 | 100 years, his great nephew would be the Secretary of the United States Navy |
| 1:14.3 | and be responsible for setting up arguably the most successful law enforcement agency in the world in the new country of America. |
| 1:23.2 | He probably would have laughed or had you sent to an asylum. |
| 1:27.4 | Here's the history guy with the story |
| 1:29.7 | of the American Bonaparte's. |
| 1:40.4 | On June 18, 1815, one of the most important and well-known battles in history was fought in Belgium |
| 1:47.0 | between the French army of the Emperor Napoleon and armies of the 7th Coalition commanded by the Duke of Wellington. |
| 1:53.0 | The battle, Waterloo. |
| 1:57.0 | A significant part of that story battle occurred on Napoleon's left at a walled farmhouse called Yugamon. |
| 2:03.6 | Napoleon sent a division to attack the farm, which Wilmington knew he must hold. |
| 2:09.6 | Historians today disagree whether that attack was merely a diversion intended to draw Willington's reserves away from his center, |
| 2:15.6 | or whether Napoleon thought that |
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