This year marks the bicentennial of the death of Josephine Bonaparte, but Napoleon’s empress has been having a moment for some time now. In the past two decades, she has starred in at least 20 new biographies, six museum exhibitions and six novels. Three editions of her correspondence have also appeared during this time, as have many more studies (of Napoleon and other Bonapartes) in which she features. The latest addition to this corpus is “Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte,” by Kate Williams, a biographer of Queen Victoria and Emma Hamilton. Beyond her appreciation for “flawed, vulnerable, engaging, powerful” women, Williams does not seem to have a compelling reason to tell this story. In the absence of new material or a new approach, she offers a breathless paean to the woman who, while “no great beauty,” could with “one twitch of her skirt . . . enthrall the man who terrorized Europe.”

Born in 1763 to a clan of blue-blooded French colonists on Martinique, Marie-Josèphe de Tascher de La Pagerie grew up “in a paradise of pleasure,” where she “splashed in the sea like a dolphin” and “sucked on sugarcane plucked from the fields.” In 1779, her family shipped her off to Paris to marry the self-styled Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais, a “languidly aggressive” blackguard by whom she had two children before separating from him in 1785. (Fond of alliteration, clichés and mixed metaphors, Williams indulges in all three when noting that “hotheaded Alexandre also had to eat humble pie.”)

Four years later, revolution broke out in Paris, followed by the fall of the monarchy in September 1792 and by the king’s execution in January 1793. In September 1793, militant revolutionaries instituted the Reign of Terror, rounding up suspected royalists as enemies of the state. As part of this sweep, the former Vicomtesse de Beauharnais was incarcerated in April 1794.

She was released three months later when the Terror’s architects themselves were guillotined and “those who had suffered imprisonment were immediately at the top of the social tree.” On the Parisian party circuit, Madame de Beauharnais reinvented herself as a seductress of some note, notwithstanding the toll jail may or may not have taken on her looks. (Williams writes first that “Marie-Josèphe had tried hard to conserve her beauty in prison, but it had been a hopeless quest,” and then, a few pages later, remarks that “she was still alluring, despite her travails in prison.”) In 1795, on the arm of one of her conquests, the politician Paul de Barras, she met a 26-year-old Corsican-born general called Napoleon Bonaparte.