The marriage brought her to Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden, where she was expected to represent the Napoleonic connection while fitting into a traditional German court that had little enthusiasm for French imperial imposition. Her husband was not unkind, by most accounts, but the relationship was difficult. She was far from France, far from the Bonaparte connections that had defined her social world, and embedded in a court culture that viewed her as a foreign imposition.
She gave birth to children who died — two infants before the surviving daughters who outlived her. The death of the infant prince in October 1812 was one of several griefs in a marriage that had brought her to a country that was not her own to represent interests that were not primarily hers.
After Napoleon’s defeat, her position in Baden became genuinely precarious. The Bonapartes were the enemies of the restored European order. Being Napoleon’s adopted daughter was now a liability rather than an asset. The surviving Grand Duchess managed this transition, but it required careful political navigation.
She lived until 1860, a long life that took her from the Napoleonic court’s height through its collapse and into a considerably changed Europe. She watched Baden evolve from the state her husband had ruled into a different political context. She outlived most of the figures in the Kaspar Hauser story.
The theory that she privately believed Hauser to be her son rests on accounts that describe her as visibly affected when shown his portrait or informed of his condition, and on the claims of intermediaries who said she expressed private convictions that could not be publicly acknowledged. These accounts come from sources that cannot be independently verified and that were often generated by people who already believed the theory. What can be said is that she never publicly acknowledged any such belief, and the House of Baden has consistently rejected the theory on her behalf.