Napoleon's Letters to Josephine, 1796-1812. Emperor of the French Napoleon I
prosperity and his reverses are in every mouth; history has recounted what he has done, but it has not always known his designs: it has not had the secret of so many admirable combinations that have been the spoil of fortune (que la fortune a dejouées), and so many grand projects for the execution of which time alone was wanting. The traces of Napoleon's thoughts were scattered; it was necessary to reunite them and to give them to the light.
"Such is the task which your Majesty confided to us, and of which we were far from suspecting the extent. The thousands of letters which were received from all parts have allowed us to follow, in spite of a few regrettable lacunæ, the thoughts of Napoleon day by day, and to assist, so to say, at the birth of his projects, at the ceaseless workings of his mind, which knew no other rest than change of occupation. But what is perhaps most surprising in the reading of a correspondence so varied, is the power of that universal intelligence from which nothing escaped, which in turn raised itself without an effort to the most sublime conceptions, and which descends with the same facility to the smallest details. … Nothing seems to him unworthy of his attention that has to do with the realisation of his designs; and it is not sufficient for him to give the most precise orders, but he superintends himself the execution of them with an indefatigable perseverance.
"The letters of Napoleon can add nothing to his glory, but they better enable us to comprehend his prodigious destiny, the prestige that he exercised over his contemporaries—'le culte universel dont sa mémoire est l'objet, enfin, l'entraînement irrésistible par lequel la France a replacé sa dynastie au sommet de l'édifice qu'il avait construit.'
"These letters also contain the most fruitful sources of information … for peoples as for governments; for soldiers and for statesmen no less than for historians. Perhaps some persons, greedy of knowing the least details concerning the intimate life of great men, will regret that we have not reproduced those letters which, published elsewhere for the most part, have only dealt with family affairs and domestic relations. Collected together by us as well as the others, they have not found a place in the plan of which your Majesty has fixed for us the limits.
"Let us haste to declare that, in conformity with the express intentions of your Majesty, we have scrupulously avoided, in the reproduction of the letters of the Emperor, any alteration, curtailment, or modification of the text. Sometimes, thinking of the legitimate sorrow which blame from so high a quarter may cause, we have regretted not to be able to soften the vigorous judgment of Napoleon on many of his contemporaries, but it was not our province to discuss them, still less to explain them; but if, better informed or calmer, the Emperor has rendered justice to those of his servants that he had for a moment misunderstood, we have been glad to indicate that these severe words have been followed by reparation.
"We have found it necessary to have the spelling of names of places and of persons frequently altered, but we have allowed to remain slight incorrectnesses of language which denote the impetuosity of composition, and which often could not be rectified without weakening the originality of an energetic style running right to its object, brief and precise as the words of command. Some concise notes necessary for clearing up obscure passages are the sole conditions which we have allowed ourselves. …
"The Commission has decided in favour of chronological order throughout. It is, moreover, the only one which can reproduce faithfully the sequence of the Emperor's thoughts. It is also the best for putting in relief his universal aptitude and his marvellous fecundity.
"Napoleon wrote little with his own hand; nearly all the items of his correspondence were dictated to his secretaries, to his aides-de-camp and his chief of staff, or to his ministers. Thus the Commission has not hesitated to comprise in this collection a great number of items which, although bearing another signature, evidently emanate from Napoleon. …
"By declaring that his public life dated from the siege of Toulon, Napoleon has himself determined the point of departure which the Commission should choose. It is from this immortal date that commences the present publication.
"(Signed) The Members of the Commission.
"Paris, January 20, 1858."
Contemporary Sources.—It is a commonplace that the history of Napoleon has yet to be written. His contemporaries were stunned or overwhelmed by the whirlwind of his glory; the next generation was blinded by meteoric fragments of his "system," which glowed with impotent heat as they fell through an alien atmosphere into oblivion. Such were the Bourriennes, the Jominis, the Talleyrands, and other traitors of that ilk. But
"The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart;"
and now, when all the lesser tumults and lesser men have passed away, each new century will, as Lockhart foretold, "inscribe one mighty era with the majestic name of Napoleon." And yet the writings of no contemporary can be ignored; neither Alison nor Scott, certainly not Bignon, Montgaillard, Pelet, Mathieu Dumas, and Pasquier. Constant, Bausset, Méneval, Rovigo, and D'Abrantès are full of interest for their personal details, and D'Avrillon, Las Cases, Marmont, Marbot, and Lejeune only a degree less so. Jung's Memoirs of Lucien are invaluable, and those of Joseph and Louis Bonaparte useful. But the Correspondence is worth everything else, including Panckouke (1796–99), where, in spite of shocking arrangement, print, and paper, we get the replies as well as the letters. The Biographie Universelle Michaud is hostile, except the interesting footnotes of Bégin. It must, however, be read. The article in the Encyclopædia Britannica was the work of an avowed enemy of the Napoleonic system, the editor of the Life and Times of Stein.
For the Diary, the Revue Chronologique de l'Histoire de France or Montgaillard (1823) has been heavily drawn upon, especially for the later years, but wherever practicable the dates have been verified from the Correspondence and bulletins of the day. On the whole, the records of respective losses in the battles are slightly favourable to the French, as their figures have been usually taken; always, however, the maximum French loss and the minimum of the allies is recorded, when unverified from other sources.
The late Professor Seeley, in his monograph, asserts that Napoleon, tried by his plan, is a failure—that even before death his words and actions merited no monument. We must seek, however, for the mightiest heritage of Napoleon in his brainchildren of the second generation, the Genii of the Code.
The Code Napoleon claims to-day its two hundred million subjects. "The Law should be clean, precise, uniform; to interpret is to corrupt it." So ruled the Emperor; and now, a century later, Archbishop Temple (born in one distant island the year Napoleon died in another) bears testimony to the beneficent sway of Napoleon's Word-Empire. Criticising English legal phraseology, the Archbishop of Canterbury said, "The French Code is always welcome in every country where it has been introduced; and where people have once got hold of it, they are unwilling to have it changed for any other, because it is a marvel of clearness." Surely if ever Style is the Man, it is Napoleon, otherwise the inspection of over seven million words, as marshalled forth in his Correspondence, would not only confuse but confound. As it is, its "hum of armies, gathering rank on rank," has left behind what Bacon calls a conflation of sound, from which, however, as from Kipling's steel-sinewed symphony,
"The clanging chorus goes—
Law, Order, Duty and Restraint, Obedience, Discipline."
NAPOLEON'S LETTERS
SERIES A
(1796)
"Only those who knew Napoleon in the intercourse of private life can render justice to his character. For my own part, I know him, as it were, by heart; and in proportion as time separates us, he appears to me like a beautiful dream. And would you believe that, in my recollections of Napoleon, that which seems to me to approach most nearly to ideal excellence is not the hero, filling the world with his gigantic fame, but the man, viewed in the relations of private life?"—Recollections of Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza, vol.