Historical literature about the French marshal J.-B. Bernadotte, Prince of Ponte Corvo, and later King of Sweden and Norway, Charles XIV Johan, is practically absent from Russia. Meanwhile, the name of this man, starting in 1810 and ending with the date of his death in 1844, is most closely connected with the foreign policy and history of Russia, and acquaintance with his life and activities is of undoubted interest for the Russian reader. A foreigner who arrived in Sweden at a very respectable age, not familiar with the traditions of the Swedes or their language, a republican by his former convictions, became at the end of his life an exemplary monarch and the actual father of the Swedish nation. This is instructive in our age of “developed democracy” and “universal human values.”