Joseph Fesch, cardinal, and archbishop of Lyons, born in Ajaccio, Corsica, Jan. 3, I763 died in Rome, May 13, 1839. He was the son of a Swiss officer in the Genoese service, and half brother of Letizia Ramolino, the mother of Napoleon Bonaparte. He was archdeacon of the chapter of Ajaccio when the chapters were suppressed by the revolution of 1789. In 1793 he was exiled with the Bonapartes, and being without resources laid aside his priesthood and was appointed commissary of war to the army of Italy, of which subsequently his nephew Napoleon received the command. He resumed his ecclesiastical functions when the first consul determined to reestablish in France the Catholic worship, and was active in the negotiations between Napoleon and Pius VII. which prepared for the concordat of July 15, 1801. The influence of his nephew made him archbishop of Lyons in 1802, and obtained a cardinal's hat for him in 1803. As ambassador of France at Rome in 1804, after conducting the negotiations, he accompanied Pius VII. on his way to Paris to crown the emperor. Many civil dignities and emoluments were subsequently conferred upon him, but in 1809 he declined the archbishopric of Paris, to which Napoleon, wishing to make some one of his family the head of the French clergy, nominated him.

He was president of the council which sat in Paris in 1810, and also of the national council of 1811, called to consider the disagreement between Napoleon and the holy see concerning the nomination of bishops. In this capacity he did not satisfy the emperor, and for a time he disappeared from court; and he afterward adhered to the pope, greatly to the displeasure of his nephew. Upon the fall of Napoleon he retired to Rome, but was recalled to Paris during the hundred days. After the battle of Waterloo he lived in retirement in Rome. His collection of paintings, one of the largest ever brought together by a single person, was dispersed after his death.