Napoleon's grandnephew created the forerunner of the FBI.
A grandson of Napoleon Bonaparte's younger brother Jérôme, Charles Bonaparte lacked his famous relative's ambition for world domination yet displayed a talent for visionary authority that might have impressed the Little Corporal. In the late 19th century, Charles Bonaparte, then a lawyer from Baltimore, came into the orbit of fast-rising New York politician Theodore Roosevelt through their shared interest in civil service reform. Bonaparte later became President Roosevelt's secretary of the Navy and then attorney general, a position that thrust "Charlie the Crook Chaser" into the spotlight as a face of the administration's trust-busting efforts.
Behind the scenes, the attorney general fumed at the lack of an established investigative team within the Department of Justice, which often led to the borrowing of spare Secret Service agents from the Treasury Department for investigating cases that involved federal law. Congressional leaders also frowned on what they felt was becoming an overreach of the executive branch, and in May 1908, Congress passed a bill that halted the DOJ's ability to commandeer Secret Service personnel. Seizing the opportunity, Bonaparte culled together a "special agent force" of 31 detectives, and on July 26, 1908, he issued an order that directed DOJ attorneys to refer investigative matters to his chief examiner, Stanley Finch.
Bonaparte's oversight of this unit was short-lived, as he exited the federal government at the end of the Roosevelt administration in March 1909. Nevertheless, his special agent force remained in place under new Attorney General George Wickersham, who began referring to the group as the Bureau of Investigation. By 1935, the now-renamed Federal Bureau of Investigation was firmly embedded as a U.S. law-enforcement institution under Director J. Edgar Hoover, another authoritarian presence who surely would have piqued the interest of the former French emperor.
Like the FBI's founding figure, other members of the Bonaparte family tree managed to forge their own distinguished careers in the outsized shadow of the esteemed military commander. The best-known is Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, who became president of France in 1848 before taking a page from his uncle and claiming absolute power for 18 years as Emperor Napoleon III. Another nephew, Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, eschewed military glory to become a renowned expert on birds, as illustrated by his four-volume American Ornithology. More recently, René Auberjonois, a descendant of Napoleon's sister Caroline, enjoyed a long run as a successful character actor in Hollywood, highlighted by roles in Benson and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. And while it's highly unlikely the French monarchy will be restored, the current head of the once-royal family, Napoleon's great-great-great-nephew Jean-Christophe Napoleon Bonaparte, seems to be getting along just fine as the managing partner of a private equity firm.
