See also: Bonaparte

The prince Roland Napoleon Bonaparte , sixth prince de Canino and Musignano (but it never carried this title), is a geographer and French botanist, born with Paris the May 19th 1858 and died in Paris the April 14th 1924.

Wire of Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte, the assassin of Black Victor, and Eléonore-Justine Ruffin, grandson of Lucien Bonaparte, prince de Canino, and last male descendant of this last, it marries on November 18th 1880 Marie-Felix Blanc (1859-1882), girl of the richissime François Blanc, founder of the casino of Monte Carlo and the Company of the sea bathings of Monaco. This one dies in 1882, by putting at the world a girl, the princess Marie Bonaparte, who will become princess of Greece, woman of letters and friendly psychoanalyst of Freud.

Left well the military special School of Saint-Cyr military school, it is useful as second lieutenant in the infantry. The Prince resided at Guyancourt about 1880 as a second lieutenant, with the 36° regiment of infantry, of the Batterie of Herdsmen. But must give up the military career after the law of June 4th 1886 prohibiting to the members of a family having reigned on France to be useful in the army.

It turns then to the geography, geology and the ethnology. Large traveller, it tries to use photography to carry out an anthropological inventory of the human populations. The project which it gives up thereafter to devote to the Botanique and with the constitution of largest the private Herbier of the world. It collects many samples itself but also made work of many collectors throughout the world.

Thanks to the considerable fortune inherited his wife, it installs the herbarium in the private mansion which it makes build in Paris with the n° 10 Avenue of Iéna (in the course of reconversion in luxury hotel, after having been the seat of Ubifrance, arranges French for the international expansion of the companies). It also contains there a rich person collection of Napoleonean memories, and a library of: 150000 volumes sheltered in four rooms decorated with rich person woodworks.

The Prince , written Andre Becq de Fouquières, was of beautiful stature, with massive shoulders, a broad face, with the somewhat pasted features, the moustache and the eyebrows thick and black: a connected physique, to some extent, with the caryatids of white stone the chimney of its dining room and which appeared two pomegranates of the Guard, according to Raffet.

Recognized by his pars, Roland Bonaparte was president of the Société of geography of 1910 to his death and, in 1907, member of the Academy of Science, of which he becomes president in 1919.

The herbarium of Roland Bonaparte gathers more: 2500000 samples concerning close to: 100000 species. Proposed after its death with the national Muséum of natural history of Paris, which refuses it for lack of place, it is transported to Lyon on the initiative of Edouard Herriot. This herbarium, increased other collections, is lodged today by the university Claude Bernard on the Campus of Endowed with Villeurbanne and constitutes the second herbarium of France and the seventh in the world.

Roland Bonaparte also leaves with his death funds important who will enrich the library by the Company of geography like that of the town of Ajaccio. He leaves the memory of a man of culture and a patron of science. Not having left a male posterity, Roland Bonaparte was the last one representing branch of Lucien.

Publications

• Inhabitants of Suriname, notes collected with the colonial Exposure of Amsterdam in 1883 (Paris, 1884);
• Last voyages of the Netherlanders in New Guinea (Paris, 1885);
• First establishment of the Netherlanders with Maurice (Paris, 1890);
• an Excursion in Corsica (Paris, 1891);
• Prince Bonaparte,… Pteridologic notes (fourteen booklets, Paris, 1915-1924);
• many articles in the Bulletin of the Natural history museum of natural history and in the Bulletin of the botanical Company of France , like in other publications.

External bonds

• Herbarium of Lyon