Dermide Leclerc

Dermide Louis Napoléon Leclerc (20 April 1798 – 14 August 1804) was the only child of Pauline Bonaparte (later suo jure Duchess of Guastalla) and her husband, French Army general Charles Leclerc. Through his mother, Dermide was a nephew of the future Emperor Napoleon I.

In 1802, during the Haitian Revolution, Dermide arrived on the island-colony of Saint-Domingue with his parents, as part of the Saint-Domingue expedition. After his father's death of yellow fever later during the year, Dermide and Pauline were brought back to France. In 1803, Pauline remarried, this time to Italian nobleman Camillo Borghese, and she took up residence, along with her husband and son, in Rome. Always a frail child, Dermide died of a fever at the age of six, three months after his uncle became Emperor and two years before his mother's proclamation as Duchess of Guastalla.

Dermide was born on 20 April 1798, in Milan, which was then part of the Cisalpine Republic, a puppet state of the First French Republic. He was the first and only child of his parents, Maria Paola di Buonaparte (known as Pauline) and Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, a general in the French Army. Dermide's birth was a difficult one, and its effects would be visible in Pauline's health for many years. He was christened Dermide Louis Napoléon, after a character in the epic Gaelic poems of Ossian, at the request of his uncle, general Napoleon Bonaparte, who greatly admired Ossian's works.