11. Good King Joseph of Naples, and Disastrous King Joseph of Spain
Joseph Bonaparte turned out to be a good king in Naples, but a disastrous one in Spain. His royal career came to a pathetic end, and King Joseph went into exile. Incongruously, he ended up in New Jersey. There, he had an encounter with the Garden State’s spookiest creature, the Jersey Devil. Long before his encounter with a spooky New Jersey apparition, however, Joseph Bonaparte had been born Giuseppe Bounaparte in 1768. He later Gallicized it into the name by which he came to be known to history. Joseph’s father was a Corsican patriot who resisted France’s invasion of Corsica in 1768 – 1769. Eventually, he joined the winners and became a supporter of French rule. Joseph, the third of his parents’ children but the first to survive infancy, was raised in a middle class environment that afforded him access to formal education.
