After Marie-Antoinette, Empress Josephine 👸🏻, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, is also greatly known for her rather impressive jewelry collection. Indeed, several jewelers served the couple - one alone could not handle the load of all these orders! She is also famous for her significant expenses, considered excessive by some, but which others believe helped revive and preserve French luxury and savoir-faire after the Revolution.

Here is a selection of our favorite pieces.

✨ Pearls, a little, a lot,...

Josephine loved pearls: round or pear-shaped, small or large,... It's hard to find a depiction of the Empress where she isn't wearing them!

Her collection includes several pearl sets, such as these magnificent dangling earrings with two pear-shaped pearls and several diamonds. They are now exhibited at the Louvre.

✨ The jewelry to decode

Napoleon had two acrostic bracelets made for his wife with the names of her children (from a previous marriage) Hortense and Eugène.

The principle: the first letter of each stone forms the names. Thus, we find: a Hessonite, an Opal, a Ruby, a Turquoise, ....

✨The tiaras

Of course, we can't talk about Empress Josephine without showing you a tiara!

The particularity of this one: its cameos, small relief engravings, and of course its numerous pearls. Many pieces in her collection feature cameos or intaglios, which are carved engravings, as on this set. This tiara, for its part, now belongs to the Swedish royal family. 

✨ As a fun fact, Josephine matched her jewelry not to her outfit, but to the room she was going into, in order to truly be "the queen of the place"...

Very chic, isn't it 😉