During her government in Florence, she tried to gain the support of her subjects, but her administration of Etruria was cut short by Napoleon Bonaparte, who forced her to leave with her children in December 1807.

The Spanish court was deeply divided and a month after her arrival the country was thrown into unrest when a popular uprising, known as the Mutiny of Aranjuez, forced Maria Luisa's father to abdicate in favor of her brother Ferdinand VII.

Napoleon called the remaining members of the Spanish royal family to France and at their departure on 2 May 1808, the citizens of Madrid rose up against the French occupation.

After her secret plan to escape was discovered, Maria Luisa was separated from her son and placed with her daughter as prisoners in a Roman convent.

To put forward her case she wrote a book of memoirs, but was disappointed when the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) compensated her not with Parma, but with the smaller Duchy of Lucca, which had been carved out of Tuscany.

[3] Louis, who was equally shy and reserved, preferred her younger sister, Maria Luisa, who although only twelve, was of a more cheerful disposition and somewhat better-looking.

Both infantas were favorably impressed by the Prince of Parma, a tall and handsome young man, and when he ultimately chose the younger sister, Queen Maria Luisa readily agreed to the change of bride.

[8][1] The marriage between the two different personalities turned out to be happy, though it was clouded by Louis' ill health: He was frail, suffering chest problems, and since a childhood accident when he hit his head on a marble table, had epileptic seizures.

[17] Maria Luisa was reluctant to make a trip to France, where only seven years earlier her relatives Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been executed.

On 21 April 1801 the couple and their son left Madrid, crossed the border in Bayonne and traveled incognito to France under the name of Counts of Livorno.

In her memoirs, the Duchess of Abrantes described Maria Luisa's character as a "mixture of shyness and haughtiness which at first gave restraint to her conversation and manners".

[26] Maria Luisa and Louis were both full of good intentions but they were received with hostility by the population and the nobility that missed the popular Grand Duke and saw them as just mere tools in the hands of the French.

[27] With Etruria's financial and economic difficulties, Louis' health failing and Maria Luisa in an early state of pregnancy, going abroad was clearly not expedient, but under the pressure of her father and wanted to see her family, they started the journey to her native country.

[31][26] Ill and unhappy, Louis wanted to return as soon as possible to his Italian states, but Charles IV and Maria Luisa insisted to take them to the court in Madrid.

[36] With them, Maria Luisa reorganized the tax system, created taxable manufactures like tobacco and porcelain companies and increased the size of the army.

[36] The Queen regent spent lavishly on educational projects, founding a Higher School of Science, and the Museum of Physics and Natural History of Florence.

[37] Though Maria Luisa by then had become fond of Florence, Napoleon had other plans for Italy and Spain: I am afraid the Queen is too young and her minister too old to govern the Kingdom of Etruria, he said.

[38] On 23 November 1807, while Maria Luisa was staying at Castello, her country residence, the French minister came to inform her that Spain had ceded Etruria to France and ordered her to leave Florence on the spot.

[39] Her father answered her pleas with discouragement: she yielded and hastily left the kingdom, returning to her family in Spain, leaving Florence on 10 December 1807 with her children, their future uncertain.

[41] She arrived at a court deeply divided and a country in unrest: her brother, Ferdinand, Prince of Asturias, had plotted against their father and the unpopular prime minister Manuel Godoy.

[43] Members of popular classes, soldiers and peasants assaulted Godoy's residence, captured him, and made King Charles depose the prime minister.

[49] Napoleon had forced both Charles IV and Ferdinand VII to renounce the throne of Spain and in exchange for their renunciation of all claims, were promised a large pension and residence in Compiegne and Château de Chambord.

[53] She was promised to retire to the Palace of Colorno in Parma with a substantial allowance, but once in Lyon, under the pretext of conducting her to her destination, she was escorted to Nice, where she was kept under strict vigilance.

[55] Maria Luisa was arrested on 26 July and condemned to be imprisoned in a convent in Rome, while her nine-year-old son was to remain in the care of his grandfather Charles IV.

On 18 March 1812, Maria Luisa and her children were stripped of their rights to the Spanish crown by the Cortes of Cádiz – which served as a parliamentary Regency after Ferdinand VII was deposed – because she was under Napoleon's control.

In an emotional meeting, Maria Luisa threw herself into her mother's arms, kissed her son with frenzy and her father hugged them all in a general embrace.

She hoped for the restorations of her son's estates and as the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) assembled to reorder the European map, she quickly wrote and published the Memoirs of the Queen of Etruria, originally written in Italian but translated to different languages, to put forward her case.

The Austrian Minister Metternich had decided not to restore Parma to the House of Bourbon, but to give it to Napoleon's wife, Marie Louise of Austria.

She first addressed Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who was a widower, and also her first cousin, possibly with the idea of securing her position in Lucca and gaining a foothold in Florence.

In 1820, she arranged the wedding of her twenty-year-old son's with Princess Maria Teresa of Savoy, one of the twin daughters of King Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia.