Alexandre Walewski

Alexandre Florian Joseph, Count Colonna-Walewski (Polish: Aleksander Florian Józef Colonna-Walewski; 4 May 1810 – 27 September 1868), was a Polish and French politician and diplomat.

Walewski was widely rumoured to be the (unacknowledged) illegitimate son of Napoleon I by his mistress, Countess Marie Walewska, although her husband (Athanasius, Count Walewski) legally acknowledged him as his own son. In 2013, published scholarship comparing DNA haplotype evidence taken from Emperor Napoleon, from his brother King Jérôme Bonaparte's descendant Charles, Prince Napoléon and from Colonna-Walewski's descendant indicated Alexandre's membership in the genetic male-line of the imperial House of Bonaparte.

Walewski was born at Walewice, near Warsaw in Poland. Aged fourteen, he rebelled by refusing to join the Imperial Russian army and fled to London, thence to Paris where the French government refused Tsar Alexander I's demands for his extradition to Russia.

Upon the accession of Louis-Philippe d'Orléans to the French throne in 1830, Walewski was dispatched to Poland, later the same year being entrusted by the leaders of the Polish November Uprising of 1830 as a diplomatic envoy to the Court of St James's. After the Fall of Warsaw, he took out letters of French naturalization and joined the French army, seeing action in Algeria as a captain in the Chasseurs d'Afrique of the French Foreign Legion. In 1837 he resigned his commission to begin writing plays and for the press. He is said to have collaborated with the elder Dumas on Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle and a comedy of his, L'Ecole du monde, was produced at the Theâtre Français in 1840.

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