More historical fiction from Gallic
CLISSON AND
EUGÉNIE
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
Translated from the French by Peter Hicks
CONTENTS
Title page
Introduction by Armand Cabasson
Afterword by Armand Cabasson
Interpretation by Peter Hicks and Émilie Barthet
Brief History of the Manuscript
Not To Readers
Further Reading
About the Author
Copyright
I was delighted to be asked to write this introduction to the Gallic Books edition of Clisson and Eugénie because I believe the text to be key to the understanding of Napoleon the man.
Clisson and Eugénie is a novel written by Napoleon Bonaparte. Of course everyone has heard of Napoleon I and his innumerable military triumphs, but fewer people are aware of his prowess as an author.
The novel has already been published several times in France, accompanied by explanatory documents, postscripts, notes and commentaries. The challenge for me, therefore, was to see if I could find something new to say about it. As well as being passionately interested in the Napoleonic period (and it is the period that has hitherto interested me more than the character of the man himself, which I regard somewhat critically), I am also a psychiatrist and an author, many of whose books are set in the Napoleonic era. Since most of the commentaries so far have been written by historians, I was keen to discover what my perspective as author and psychiatrist could add to the reading of the work.
There exists what I like to call ‘the Trial of Napoleon’. Everyone is on the jury, since everyone has an opinion about the great man. Even two centuries after he died, it is true to say that few people are indifferent to Napoleon. The various opinions of him differ widely. Was he a plague on humanity or simply the whipping boy of a troubled era? The saviour of Revolutionary ideals who ultimately failed, or a classic military dictator of the type that history throws up from time to time? Some call him an atypical dictator, many a military genius. Was he a victorious general who, like Alexander the Great, showed himself incapable of renouncing military action? Or a lucky general adept at taking credit for the successes of his excellent officers? A tyrannical over-protective father? The perfect illustration of the corruption of power, which turned a sincere republican general into a tyrant? A pathological risk-taker (witness the 1812 Russian campaign, which was nothing more than a giant toss of the coin, demonstrating an incapacity to say: that’s enough, I’ll stop here)? A misunderstood visionary reformer? The ‘republican’ and ‘imperial’ variant of a king crowned as a result of a military coup? And the list of interpretations goes on …
Napoleon is still an enigma even after more than fifty thousand books written about the era, and by and about the man himself.
Of those fifty thousand books, Clisson and Eugénie is one of the most revealing.
Napoleon wrote some works (including several short stories) when he was still Bonaparte. But Clisson and Eugénie, written in the autumn of 1795, remains his most successful and important work of fiction. His other noted work of fiction is The Memorial of St Helena, dictated, or perhaps merely recounted in an informal manner, to Emmanuel, Comte de Las Cases, during the years of captivity on St Helena. It might seem odd to refer to The Memorial of St Helena as fiction rather than a memoir, but in fact it has long been recognised that rather than dictating his life story, Napoleon was constructing his legend, transforming his life into myth. The Memorial of St Helena is a sort of autobiography, but fictionalised and embellished for posterity. And it was more successful in creating the legend than Napoleon could ever have imagined. Still today, a number of ideas about what Napoleon was like are based more on the narrative of The Memorial of St Helena than on reality. This is not a new phenomenon. In England, Richard III will for ever be known as a bloody machiavellian dictator because that’s the way Shakespeare depicted him. Even if historians and writers produce solid arguments to show that he was probably not the odious murderer of his brother Edward IV’s two young children, we continue to believe he was their murderer in spite of everything. Shakespeare says so! (Readers interested in the question of Richard’s innocence or otherwise will enjoy reading Josephine Tey’s excellent novel The Daughter of Time.) It is said that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’; alas, this is not always true, but the pen is in any case mightier than reality …
So Napoleon’s life is marked by two key pieces of creative writing, one written in 1795 before his rise to power, and the other written from 1815–1816 after his reign was over. They form significant signposts to his life.
The style of Clisson and Eugénie is very striking. The sentences are frequently short, concise and trenchant. It is exactly the same style that Napoleon continued to use once he became emperor, for giving orders, for dictating the famous Grande Armée bulletins that informed the world of the outstanding feats of his troops (and in which truth and propaganda featured in equal measure) or for crucifying someone with one of his famous insults. A celebrated example of such an affront came at the end of an interview with Talleyrand, whom he rightly suspected of being a traitor. Napoleon drew the meeting to a close with the words, ‘You are nothing but shit in silk stockings.’
There are two things to point out about the story’s abbreviated style. The first is that it is not easy to write in such a way. It is no easier to compose concise sentences than long ones and it takes as much skill to write sparely as to create prose that is liberally laced with metaphors. So a terse pared-down style requires as much talent as the ornate flowery style espoused by many contemporary French writers.
It is quite obvious that Clisson and Eugénie has been worked and reworked many times. Napoleon spent hours and hours on the story, take it from me, another writer. So the book is not just the hasty scrawl of a general, bored in his barracks; it is a work that haunted the man, that exhausted him, that tormented him until he had the correct sentences down on paper. One should not be misled by the unfinished appearance of the story. True, there appear to be little things missing, and certainly the work was not fully finished. But there is enough evidence from the versions left to posterity that Napoleon worked at and polished the writing several times, and that the opening at least was very close to the final version, had Napoleon been able to finish it.
The second point to note is the astonishing contrast between the brief, rapid, precise style, and the passages that suddenly soar into lyricism. Some passages are firmly anchored in reality; they talk about concrete things in a narrative without embellishment. Sometimes, however, Napoleon’s imagination carries him off into the lyrical. The result is a story that is bittersweet, combining two flavours that it seems to me were not normally linked at that time.
As Peter Hicks and Émilie Barthet have shown here in the interpretation, the novel is impregnated with Romanticism (using the term in the sense of the emotional and artistic movement that flourished in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which is still alive and well today and continuing to inspire and draw forth excellent works). Napoleon romantic? Who would have thought that those two words would go together? Not me, at any rate! And yet that’s the conclusion