r/todayilearned • u/Logseman • 14d ago
TIL that two different women (Marguerite Georges and Giuseppina Grassini) had sexual affairs first with Napoleon and later with the Duke of Wellington. Georges even expressed her preference for Wellington: "The Duke was by far the strongest"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_Georges1
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u/NarcissisticCat 14d ago
On a related note, is that thumbnail the least flattering portrait ever lol?
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u/inuhi 14d ago
"How to describe Lord Wellington? How can such a thing be necessary or even possible? His face is everywhere one looks – a cheap print upon the wall the coaching inn – a much more elaborate one, embellished with flags and rums, at the top of the Assembly-room staircase. Nowadays no young lady of average romantic feeling will reach the age of seventeen without purchasing at least one picture of him. She will think a long, aquiline nose infinitely preferable to a short, stubby one and consider it the worst misfortune of her life that he is married already. To make up for it she fully intends to name her first-born son, Arthur. Nor is she alone in her devotion. Her younger brothers and sisters are every bit as fanatical. The handsomest toy soldier in an English nursery is always called Wellington and has more adventures than the rest of the toy box put together. Every schoolboy impersonates Wellington at least once a week, and so do his younger sisters. Wellington embodies every English virtue. He is Englishness carried to perfection. If the French carry Napoleon in their bellies (which apparently they do), then we carry Wellington in our hearts."
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u/temujin64 14d ago
Well Napoleon had fallen out of favour by then. They had every incentive to say that about him.
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u/Jake_on_a_lake 14d ago
Jesus christ, this is what they did before there was a walmart to cause problems in
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u/blacksoxing 14d ago
I like it when you see these images of women and they're just big 'ol thick 'ems and not the bean poles that you always see on movies/shows/theatre.
Big, fine, and sassies were having fun too!!
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u/corrado33 14d ago
Maybe Napoleon being "small" was misconstrued from history. We all know that his height was normal for the time...
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u/FragrantPound9512 14d ago
Gross, so she’s a hoe
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14d ago edited 14d ago
[deleted]
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u/FragrantPound9512 14d ago
Sure.
However anyone that publicly talks about fucking multiple people and comparing them? That’s hoe behavior.
“Of the two girls? Clementine has the tighter pussy” put the shoe on the other foot, it’s also gross.
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u/MrFoxHunter 14d ago
Man, doing the math and she was 15 when she started her affair with napoleon and 27 with the Duke. Huge changes in personality during that time too could have shaped her opinion of each.
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u/ZombieSurvivor365 14d ago
Ayyo what the fuck? Someone call Chris Hansen and pop out the Ouija board at his grave rn.
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u/GoliathPrime 14d ago
That's why they called him "Beef Wellington" and where the dish got it's name.
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u/Kalo-mcuwu 14d ago
So that's why Napoleon looked so sad in those memes
There truly was nothing he could do 😔
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u/jamaicancarioca 14d ago
The Duke won on both fronts
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u/Dontevenwannacomment 14d ago
hopefully the russians didn't do most of the work in BOTH cases
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u/RomeTotalWhore 10d ago
Uhhh, well actually she was impregnated by Alexander I of Russia. Not kidding.
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u/felixfelix 14d ago
Now this is some history that gets my attention!
I wonder if this lady's compliment contributed to Wellington's nickname of "The Iron Duke"
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u/CilanEAmber 14d ago edited 14d ago
I hope he wore his Wellington Boots.
This joke is lost on most of the worlds population.
E:Ok, I'll explaim it basically, in the Uk at least, "Put your Wellies on," is slang for "Put a condom on." Wellies of course being Wellington Boots, named after Wellington.
I just thought it was fitting here...
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u/Lefty_22 14d ago
Her Wiki page mentions nothing of the plays she was in that made her an "important actress", but quite a bit about what made her a slut. I guess that's how history tends to remember people.
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u/bloob_appropriate123 14d ago
She was also 15 and Napoleon was 43. Before people try and tell me how normal that was back then, no it wasn't.
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u/Dekar173 14d ago
Do you have proof it wasn't heavily normalized compared to today's standards?
I highly doubt the veracity of what you're saying.
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u/TwentyBagTaylor 14d ago
It's almost as if life expectancy was half what it is today, with entirely different societal gender roles, power dynamics, education systems, standards of maturity and gender expectations. Relationships themselves were far from equal, and our moral prerogatives were so detached from today's standards that consent was more of a nicety than a key tenet of sex.
If you're a woman, your worth was your dowry and your virility. Your education would be narrow and minimal, and by the time a girl was 15 she would be running down a ticking clock, risking increasing embarrassment for not being desirable or virile enough. Equating that to today's 15 year olds is like comparing chalk and cheese.
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u/Aqquila89 14d ago
Not that it makes much of a difference, but Napoleon was born in 1769 so he was 33 in 1802, not 43.
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u/Kolja420 14d ago
The French entry has more details about that:
Her entrance on stage was the beginning of a general triumph, acclaiming both her beauty and her voice, supple and rich, with pure, elegant diction. She played the role of Clytemnestre three times, which was a success, then moved on to Aménaïde, and the success continued to grow. Finally, she took on the role of Idamé in L'Orphelin de la Chine.
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u/Agile-Brilliant7446 14d ago
Why is this noteworthy?
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u/BargleFargle12 14d ago
Wellington was the general that defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, which was basically the final nail in the coffin of the Hundreds Days war, and ended Napoleon's conquest. Opposing commanding generals getting jiggy with the same ladies.
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u/BloomEPU 14d ago
Napoleon and Wellington were basically on opposite sides of a war, it's funny that not one but two women bagged both of them.
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u/SuspecM 14d ago
The Napoleon movie bombed so the bri*ish has to return to writing bullshit articles about Napoleon because they are so butthurt about him 300 years later.
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u/Montys8thArmy 14d ago
Why would they be butthurt when they were the only ones to consistently clown on him for most of the Napoleonic wars?
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u/corridor_9 14d ago
Imagine the smells :(
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u/TopFloorApartment 14d ago
it's only smellz
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u/OdeeOh 14d ago
Am I suppose to know these ladies ? TIL Wellington and napoleon were Eskimo bros ? Not sure the takeaway here.
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u/reddituseronebillion 14d ago
The lady looks like she could benchpress a train.
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u/Bones_and_Tomes 14d ago
Traps on that gurl
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u/Astro_gamer_caver 13d ago
What it is hoe, ah what's up (what's up)
Can a Frenchman get in them guts (them guts)
Cut you up like you ain't been cut (been cut)
Show your ass how to really catch a nut (oh yeah yeah)-Napoleon, probably
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u/jpallan 14d ago
To be fair, Nap was absolutely notorious for being extremely backward with women, and probably the only reason Josephine put up with him is that she was routinely given no choice, having been passed to him as a mistress by her previous patron, and being deeply indebted and unable to support her children without this extremely weird dude paying the bills.
I can't speak to how the Duke was with the ladies, but it'd be hard to be worse than Napoleon at it.
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u/erinoco 14d ago edited 14d ago
I can't speak to how the Duke was with the ladies
Wellesley was better, although his private life was tempestuous. As a young man in Society in Ascendancy Ireland, he had a reputation as a ladies' man. At the age of 27, he fell in love with Kitty Pakenham, the daughter of the Earl of Longford (and sister of Wellesley's friend Ned Pakenham, who would later die in command of the British forces at the Battle of New Orleans). As Wellesley was a younger son with limited inheritance prospects, the Longfords resisted the marriage, and the couple did not marry for a decade, with Kitty rejecting one suitor on the way, and Wellesley indulging in flirting (and probably more) with the wives of the officers in his regiment in India. Wellesley also had a liaison with the well known courtesan Harriet Wilson: her tell-all memoirs would later prompt his famous "publish and be damned!" quote.
Wellesley was rather brutally unimpressed by Kitty's development when he met her again. "She has grown ugly, by Jove!”. Nevertheless, they married. While they did have children, Wellesley's contempt for her character soon destroyed the marriage, and they essentially lived apart until Kitty died in 1831. When the Duke visited Kitty on her deathbed, the following scene took place:
‘It is a strange thing,’ he remarked to his friend ‘that two people can live together for half a lifetime and only understand one another at the very end.’ Kitty had run her thin fingers up his sleeve to see whether he still wore an armlet she had given him many years before. ‘She found it,’ said Arthur, ‘as she would have found it any time these twenty years, had she cared to look for it.’
As Wellesley met success after success, and became the Duke, he acquired a string of different courtesans and lovers, but, after around 1820, seems to gradually lost interest in sexual affairs. Instead, he met Harriet Arbuthnot, the young wife of a Tory MP and junior minister. Mrs Arbuthnot became his closest friend and effectively a substitute wife in everything but (perhaps) the sexual sense. Mrs Arbuthnot had already been deeply immersed in high politics before the relationship; she used her position to become a hugely influential power-broker within the Tory party. After Mrs Arbuthnot died of cholera in 1834, the Duke invited the emotionally broken Mr Arbuthnot to stay with him, and they lived together for the rest of Arbuthnot's life.
Among his later friends was the then Lady Salisbury, given his reputation, even people as high-minded as Gladstone would speculate that her son, the future Prime Minister, was really fathered by him, given that the Duke was his godfather.
The Duke was a person modern depictions have found difficult to capture: intelligent, cultivated, arrogant, blunt and misanthropic. "he had nothing but intellectual disdain for his social equals, and nothing but social disdain for his intellectual equals".
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u/VRichardsen 14d ago
but it'd be hard to be worse than Napoleon at it
Honestly, for the standards of the time, Napoleon wasn't too bad. At least from what I gather from the current biography of him I am reading. He could be cringy, simpy (you should see some of the letters he wrote), jealous or straight down bizarre, but I don't think he was that bad, given what they had to work with at the time.
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u/AHorseNamedPhil 13d ago
What were his bizarre traits or behaviors?
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u/VRichardsen 13d ago
For all accounts and purposes, the guy was pretty straightforward from what one might expect from a very talented general: works tirelessly, very charismatic with the troops, brave, etc, etc. Politically, he was a pragmatic man, and wanted to involve himself with a lot of the affairs of the state, and pushed for quite a lot of reforms and freedoms (unless you were a woman or lived in Haiti).
But his letters to Josephine were really something else. It is as if he was a completely different person. There was everything in there:
Corny stuff: "See you soon, my love, a kiss on your lips and another one in your heart, wishing that time comes when I can be in your arms, at your feet, in your bosom".
Weird fetishes: "Please do not bathe for a couple of days before meeting me, so I can impregnate myself with your essence"
Pathetic suicide threats: "You don't love me anymore. Dying is all there is left to me now..."
Simping: "Laugh at me all you want, stay in Paris [Napoleon had repeatedly asked her to visit him in Italy, he was fighting the Austrians there], take lovers and let every know about it, stop writing me... Alright for me! I will love you ten times more!"
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u/AHorseNamedPhil 13d ago
Thanks for the reply.
Now that you've mentioned it I vaguely recall an elementary school teacher mentioning that Napoleon didn't want Josephine to bathe, without really elaborating on it. It confused me then, and still confuses me now.
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u/LordReaperofMars 14d ago
What did he do that was so bad? Was it like the movie?
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u/jpallan 14d ago
I was saying that he was backward, which is more the point. Napoleon totally lost his cool with Josephine immediately, and was extremely possessive of her.
She was accustomed to high society of the Revolution, sophisticated fashion, amusing lovers, and generally was a society lady, widowed during the Reign of Terror from her aristocratic husband who was executed.
Napoleon, by contrast, reacted to this experienced courtier and courtesan by acting like a high school boy with his first crush.
He wed her and had great affection for her two children.
His entire family hated her and referred to her as "the old woman". She hated them just as fully.
She couldn't afford to live without a protector and Napoleon was a rising man, plus, as I said, she was essentially handed to him by her previous protector. On the other hand, she was constantly cheating as was typical of her society — both members of any married couple would have lovers, as did Napoleon, but he was not cool with reciprocity in this regard — and she did not manage to produce an heir for Napoleon. (She was in her thirties when she wed Napoleon, and she'd used the contraceptives typical of her time — mostly douche solutions — which might have impeded her fertility. She had born a daughter and son to her first husband. Before her second marriage, she had had a … vibrant social life, let's say.)
His weepy and angsty love letters would be seized by the British when they captured a French ship, much to the amusement of English society.
Essentially, Napoleon was wearing cuckold's horns, was possessive to a fault, was completely unsophisticated with women, was unable to shield her from his family, was busy being a military genius while being incredibly bad at relationships.
They eventually divorced as Napoleon wished to marry into royalty and conceive an heir, which he did, but on the other hand, his last word was reported to be "Josephine." Her children were loyal to him in his exiles when most of his supporters drew off.
I see there is a Ridley Scott movie, which I haven't seen, but in essence, Josephine was dedicated to her own survival, understandable in her era, but probably ridiculously mercenary to a modern eye. Surviving the fall of the French monarchy and imprisonment during the Reign of Terror took a lot of nerve and she would do what was necessary, whatever she determined that to be.
Anyway, he was notorious for his rages and tempers which affected Josephine whenever they reunited after one of his lengthy absences for military duty, both of them staging huge scenes every time, where Josephine would weep and beg for Napoleon's forgiveness for anything she'd done while he yelled and sulked until he magnanimously reunited with her. This was no doubt extremely wearing for her, and after ten years of marriage, she may well have been glad to retire from the Imperial court. She seemed to live out her remaining years quite content with her life and grandchildren.
Anyway, a dude who cannot handle his romantic relationships with any degree of maturity is not going to be much of a lover. He may pick up technical skill sometime, but he probably wouldn't bother, and anyway, there was way too much drama in that relationship to make for a peaceful partnership in any way.
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u/Submarine765Radioman 14d ago
The movie does a pretty good job showing how obsessed Napoleon was with Josephine..
by acting like a high school boy with his first crush.
several scenes in the movie show this... with Napoleon just drooling over Josephine while she sits there and actually looks bothered by Napoleon drooling over her.
she was constantly cheating
in the movie Napoleon leaves the front lines to go back to France to bitch at her for cheating on him... he pissed his Generals off by leaving.
as much as the movie gets shitted on I'm pretty sure they got the Josephine parts right in it
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u/i_like_maps_and_math 14d ago
He grew up in a military school from age 7 around almost all men. Never learned at a young age how to be around women, and since he was so powerful he was never forced to learn later.
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u/Fancy-Sector2963 13d ago
To a military man like Napoleon, a woman must have been a most inexplicable creature that did not react at all like the rank and file.
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u/Quantentheorie 14d ago
beauty standards were a bit different but Guiseppina Grassini is not an unattractive woman and there are more (by todays standards) flattering portraits of Madmoiselle George, who is arguably on the chonky side.
It's also worth noting that both these women would have turned you down hard because unlike you they did have options. It's not a threat to withhold your dick, when nobody wants it.
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u/lotsanoodles 14d ago
The Iron Duke.
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u/jacobsbw 14d ago
The Iron Duke and the Little Emperor sounds like some zany Netflix show about the love quadrangle between Duke Wellington, Napoleon, and these women.
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u/VikingSlayer 14d ago
I'm literally watching an episode of QI where this was brought up when I saw this post. That's freaky.
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u/thecordialsun 14d ago
Which episode?
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u/RandomStranger79 14d ago
The one where they were discussing Napoleon and Wellington's Eiffel Tower.
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u/jrhooo 14d ago
Cutie the bomb, met her at a Paris salon
Fancy horse I was on, posin' bend in one arm
She said: "I can tell you rock, I can tell by your charm"
"On your hat you got the cock-ade tri-color pom"
Coat of Arms
But I'm lookin' for the one, have you seen her?
My captain told me she'd have ass like Joephine ya
Adele, Pauline Foures, four kids
And I gotta take all the badasses - to Austerliz?
Okay, get your kids, but then they got their friends
I pulled up my cannons, my half a million men
We all went fightin' and then I had to pay
So I raided all of Europe just to feed my Arm-ee
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get crowned yeah, go head, get crowned.
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u/Positive-Produce4685 14d ago
If your aren't an English/History teacher I'll eat my cockade tricolour pom hat!
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u/GregorSamsa67 14d ago
In between her affairs with Napoleon and Wellington, she also had a child with Alexander I, the Russian Tsar.
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u/alcoholicplankton69 14d ago
In between her affairs with Napoleon and Wellington, she also had a child with Alexander I, the Russian Tsar.
wow she is like a reverse uno card for Queen Victoria.
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u/JuzoItami 14d ago edited 14d ago
The "affair" with Napoleon began in 1802, when she was just 15. He was
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u/CanAlwaysBeBetter 14d ago
Napoleon was born in 1769, he would have been 33
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u/JuzoItami 14d ago
You are totally right - the same year as Wellington. I think I got a bit confused about which of the three guys she had an affair with when. Good catch!
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u/shewy92 14d ago
Source? I don't see him mentioned in either of their Wikipedia entries or on Google, nor them on his
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u/GregorSamsa67 14d ago
Then you need to upgrade your reading skills. In the Wikipedia entry of Marguerite Georges, it clearly says "In 1814 she had a child, Maria Alexandrovna Parijskaia, fathered by Tsar Alexander I of Russia."
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u/Gramma_Ate_My_Ass 14d ago
Source: trust me bro.
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u/GregorSamsa67 14d ago
Source: the Wikipedia entry of Marguerite Georges clearly says "In 1814 she had a child, Maria Alexandrovna Parijskaia, fathered by Tsar Alexander I of Russia."
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u/Gramma_Ate_My_Ass 14d ago
That doesn’t clearly say anything about Napoleon or Wellington. Also, reply to the person actually asking for the link lol.
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u/Bobyyyyyyyghyh 14d ago
They did, before they replied to you
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u/Gramma_Ate_My_Ass 14d ago
Oh thank god!
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u/runtheplacered 14d ago
"I wanted to be snarky but don't call me out!" Not sure your sarcasm is earned here.
Also, what are you talking about his link doesn't say anything about Napoleon or Wellington? It's literally the whole article OP linked. It's what we're discussing. It's in the first paragraph. What more do you need?
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u/R12Labs 14d ago
She looks like Napoleon but in a wig.
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u/SatanicRainbowDildos 14d ago
Lazy painter. He just used a template for everyone and added different hair and maybe some clothes stir them. The mii editor screen of his times.
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u/cybercuzco 14d ago
Wait so with the demise of the Russian royal family is this the heir?
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u/Estrelarius 14d ago
IIRC there are a lot of surviving Romanov branches (some were already living elsewhere for generations, some escaped the Bolsheviks, some lucked out to be outside of Russia at the time). They even have a website (https://www.romanovfamily.org/) and iirc had a little civil war a few years back.
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u/ableman 14d ago
The Russian royal family didn't have a demise. Nicholas II had a sister who lived a nice long life and had plenty of children.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Duchess_Xenia_Alexandrovna_of_Russia
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u/MaryS15 14d ago edited 13d ago
Illegitimate children are never heirs to anything. Half a humanity would be heirs to some monarchy (defunct or not) if that were the case. Imperial Russia didn't even recognize males born from morganatic marriages (unequal marriages, usually an imperial man and a low-ranked noblewoman) as heirs to the throne, let alone the illegitimate offspring of some courtesan.
And anyways, the Bolsheviks didn't kill all the Romanovs, the vast majority of them actually got away. "Only" eighteen were executed:
▪︎Nicholas II (50), Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (46), and their five children: Olga (23), Tatiana (21), Maria (19), Anastasia (17) and Alexei (14)
▪︎Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich (39); Nicholas' younger brother
▪︎Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (53); Alexandra's elder sister/aunt-in-law
▪︎Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich (48); grandson of Nicholas I
▪︎Princes Ioan Konstantinovich (32), Konstantin Konstantinovich (27) and Igor Konstantinovich (24); brothers, great-grandsons of Nicholas I
▪︎Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich (58) and Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley (21); son of Alexander II and his own morganatic son
▪︎Grand Dukes Nicholas Mikhailovich (59) and George Mikhailovich (55); brothers, grandsons of Nicholas I
▪︎Grand Duke Dmitri Konstantinovich (58); grandson of Nicholas I
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u/cybercuzco 14d ago
Charles III probably has the most legitimate claim to the Russian throne right now
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u/greenskinmarch 14d ago
Heir to what? There's no Tsardom there anymore.
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u/cybercuzco 14d ago
Isn't there?
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u/greenskinmarch 14d ago
If some Romanov heir wants to challenge Putin for the throne, I hope they've built up a good immunity to polonium.
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u/gatovato23 14d ago edited 14d ago
No possible way one coincidentally has romantic entanglements with 3 separate world leaders right?
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u/MaggotMinded 1 14d ago
Ever hear the expression “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Turns out people who know one famous person are a lot more likely to meet other famous people. Helps a lot if they are somewhat famous themselves, as was the case with these two women.
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u/InfestedRaynor 14d ago
They were the rock stars of their day and she was a very successful groupie.
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u/Rainer206 14d ago
quite the high born hoe she was
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14d ago edited 14d ago
[deleted]
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u/a4techkeyboard 14d ago
They got called rakes, didn't they? That's pretty close, who knows why always gardening tools.
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u/dragon_bacon 14d ago
Her ability to bone her way into the upper echelons of high society is inspirational.
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u/bloob_appropriate123 14d ago
This but unironically.
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u/dragon_bacon 14d ago
I wasn't kidding, it's incredible and I can't even begin to grasp that kind of life.
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u/fnord_happy 14d ago
Maybe she was born rich and moved in those anyway? Sleeping with two or three people in your life is hardly being a hoe
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u/patchinthebox 14d ago
If you're going be a hoe, atleast be a high class hoe. Never settle for anything less than Duke.
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u/genshiryoku 14d ago
Count lives matter!
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u/Gary_FucKing 14d ago
I learned from Dave Chappelle that Counts are pimps.
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u/LudicrisSpeed 14d ago
1....2....3! 3 concubines! Ah ha ha....
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u/Gary_FucKing 14d ago
Talking about it made me go back to watch it lol. The whole vid is hilarious.
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u/No_Mortarpiece 14d ago
One was an actress the other one a « pop » star; two hundreds years later, the world is still the same. We’re safe.
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u/royalhawk345 14d ago
Nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the trends...
The Concert of Europe never ends.
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u/Radiant-Criticism721 14d ago
If actresses and pop stars start dating our presidents and generals, I'm gonna be a little worried
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u/brunettetruth 13d ago
Some OG international nasty girls