Introduction
Writing on Napoleon I and his world in France is currently flourishing. The bicentenary decade wends its natural way towards Moscow and Waterloo, and French-language publishing on First-Empire related subjects has more than kept pace. Our own electronic Napoleonic journal, Napoleonica La Revue, founded in 2008, now has more than sixty articles (mostly in French) on varied subjects. A look at the 'Just published' pages for 2007-2009 on the Fondation Napoléon website napoleon.org reveals approximately 100 books a year on Napoleonic matters. And amongst this publishing avalanche there are several noteworthy books which are currently stimulating thought on the period, by authors such as Jean-Paul Bertaud, Emmanuel de Waresquiel, Thierry Lentz, Patrice Guéniffey, and Pierre Serna. My talk today (like that given in Huntsville in 2008) is to serve as a 'heads up' to what's going on in France and to highlight the important further developments in Napoleonic historiography in France. But it is also to designed provoke discussion – as it did in Huntsville, when there was a lively debate on the question as to why the historiographies in French and in English are largely travelling on parallel lines and do not intersect or cross-fertilise – a scan of the Consortium programme alongside the texts I have highlighted here still is ample proof of this. I don't think that my selection of this year comes anywhere near answering the question posed two years ago, but the bibliographical oddity remains as a watermark to this paper here.
J.-P. Bertaud, Les Royalistes et Napoléon, Flammarion; 2009
Bertaud's book on royalist opposition to Napoleon is a very timely reminder (for those who needed it) that the Napoleonic episode was not all a rosy picture of national harmony. This solicits a theme picked up by Thierry Lentz in his fourth volume (to be discussed later), namely, that of unpicking (to the correct degree) period propaganda. Lentz does it with the 100 days and Bertaud here covers royalist opposition. The example of a single sentence shows how frankly this book certainly nails its ideological colours to the mast (and I quote): “In a dictatorship where public opinion was moulded by journalists under orders, by the concordataire clergy and by artists and men of letters paid by the “ministry of glory”, royalists were almost alone in giving a counter-reading of political and military events”. In this strongly worded history, Bertaud runs the traditional account of royalist opposition to Napoleon, from the catastrophic British sponsored Grand Assault of 1799, through Napoleon as Monk on his return from Egypt, the infernal machine assassination attempt, Cadoudal, the Duc d'Enghien, Maret, the First and Second Restorations ending up with the Terreur Blanche and an epilogue. This book, which was awarded a Fondation Napoléon history prix in 2009, is like most of the others here in my survey in that it hovers on the boundary between academic and general public history. It has footnotes but it has no bibliography and it bears a central section of period colour illustrations. Like his book Quand les enfants parlaient de gloire, the use of memoirs and period sources is exceptional, and whilst one may not share his ideological standpoint, the account is persuasive and beautifully written.
Where Bertaud's book could be said to fall short (though perhaps it was not in his brief) is that it does not follow current trends in historical research on the Napoleonic period. The account is a firmly traditional account of opposition to Napoleon. Other approaches are possible. A recent PhD proposes a prosopographical study of royalists in the Var, and my colleague François Houdecek, project manager for the Napoleon Correspondence project, is about to publish a book on a royalist who rallies but whose relationship with the Napoleonic regime is contingential, related to time and place. There must have been many other men and women (not necessarily royalist, or titled) who had middling jobs in one of the imperial institutions and who gradually become disenchanted with the regime and who were only too ready to welcome an end to the culture of war and a dysfunctional state apparatus. As is implicit in the PhD study and Houdecek's book, only by coming to grips with actual people can you begin to draw convincing conclusions regarding ralliement/opposition. Perhaps a tighter definition of royalist might be interesting here. You could call those who support a constitutional monarchy (something some republican supporters flirted with) royalists? Did not Napoleon himself think of his reign as monarchic, that it was as if he had inherited throne from the Bourbons? As Bertaud himself points out in his chapter on ralliement (p. 210), “the ci-devants preferred to think of themselves as rallying not to Napoleon or the reigning family but to the incarnation of monarchical power”. And Napoleon himself in the Conseil d'état (according to Pelet) in 1806 noted the following: “Napoleon always expressed himself positively on the subject of the émigrés. They were, from his point of view, victims of their devotion to a principle which in fact he shared, namely, the monarchical principle. It bothered him little that this devotion was addressed to others and not him. He flattered himself that he was their heir, he no longer feared the Bourbons; above all he did not want to appear to fear them.”1 It is therefore not surprising that certain, more open-minded royalists should find themselves at home during the Empire. The hugely successful regiments of gendarmes d'ordonnance, created at the end of 1806 were designed to be a seed-bed for future ADCs and a convenient way of ensuring that royalist youth would rally permanently. Eugéne de Roussy, the subject of Houdecek's book rallies, but after 1815 happily serves Louis XVIII. Just the other side of the political middle-ground stands Marie-Joseph Chenier (to take just one figure I happened upon in my own research). Though characterised in popular Republican literature as a strong supporter of the Revolution, a closer look at him reveals a more ambivalent type of figure, more characteristic of a sort of middling type. Before the Revolution, Chenier son of a diplomat in Constantinople comes from a 'de' family, he enters the army but gives up to dedicate himself to writing – clearly not strapped for cash then… His plays on Republican themes are successful, and he himself pens the ultra-republican Chant du depart (one of Napoleon's favourite national hymns). But on losing his brother to the guillotine and becoming disenchanted with Robespierre, Chenier shows up in the Cinq Cents as a supporter of the Directory notably during 18 Fructidor (a man for the moderate status quo then). However two years later during 18-19 Brumaire he abandons the Directory and slips towards Pierre Serna's dead-centre politics under Napoleon. He sits on and then is ejected from the Tribunate, but only to be appointed Inspecteur général d'Instruction publique. He is furthermore commissioned to write a play for Napoleon's coronation. This dramatic work, Cyrus, is a flop and Chenier retires in sullen opposition to the regime. It is clear that during the Consulate and Empire Chenier is slightly left of centre, but he collaborates and hovers in that centre-ground, ending in grumpy rejection of Napoleon. There must have been many others like him, both the republican and royalist sides of the political divide. This middle France would be interesting to track down. Bertaud alas gives us none of this, preferring the traditional royalist story of coups, Vendée civil war, duc d'Enghien, etc. Indeed, the short chapter on rallying really takes us no further than Tulard's work on the noblesse d'empire. In fact, Bertaud in his anti-Napoleonic style seems to echo the ultra-royalists of the period for whom any ralliement was a sign of betrayal. A sensitive treatment of this subject in English would be nice.
E. de Waresquiel, Cent Jours, la tentation de l’impossible (mars-juillet 1815), Fayard, 2008
Emmanuel de Waresquiel has done it again. After his extraordinary book on Talleyrand, he has written an remarkable elegy on the Hundred Days and its place in the history of France. The book is set under the sign of duality – a fabulous quote from Borges covers the whole – the Hispanic author said of his characters they generally had two sides to them, adding, “the true side was always the other side”. The task of the historian when talking about the Hundred Days, so says de Waresquiel, was somewhat similar, when trying to unpick the rival legitimacies of Louis and Napoléon. As a historian whose sensitivities are more 18th than 19th century, de Waresquiel does not hesitate to lay the 'blame' for the catastrophe of the three months at Napoleon's feet. That Napoleon's return caused the 'white terror' of the final months of 1815 and in place of the 'French' Napoleon has unleashed the return of 'Jacobins', 'Royalists' and 'moderates'. De Waresquiel furthermore contends in his book that his will concentrate (unlike almost all other treatments) on Louis. Everyone else so far has seen it the episode as Napoleon's downfall. Rather like in English literature on Waterloo, the battle is not seen as Wellington's great victory but rather Napoleon epic 'chute' And this concentration on the other side of the coin, sheds some fascinating light. That the reaction of royal administrators to Napoleon's invasion was not as tardy as has been shown. Nor that France welcomed Napoleon with open arms. In Marseilles the false news of Napoleon's capture was celebrated in the streets, and prayers for the safety of the king were made in the street. The 'godly' south is set alongside the 'godless' east as de Waresquiel disputes the so-called 'fact' that France had forgotten the pre-Revolutionary regime and way of life. And this 'attempt at the impossible', is in fact France's attempt to follow the narrow way of the 'reasonable and peaceful construction of the Nation, with its imperfections, the gradual march towards democracy', which Louis and Napoleon render into a rocky, mountainous path, not completed until the beginning of the Third Republic, a regime which managed to reconcile the French with themselves. This taking of Louis XVIII seriously renders a sophisticated narrative far from the certainties of the typical 'Napoleonic' account of the Hundred Days.
Thierry Lentz, Nouvelle histoire vol. IV, Fayard, 2010
This book is a mirror-image de Waresquiel's account of the Hundred Days, and it comes as a last, supplementary, volume not part of the original three part series. The fact is, as Thierry explains in the introduction, the three-book scheme was supposed to provide a history of the Napoleonic regime in two books and to give the nuts and bolts of the empire (the prefects, the police, the people) in the third and final volume. The hundred days were not to be included in the initial scheme as they were thought to extraneous to the Empire proper. The change of mind to add a fourth volume was spurred by what could be identified as Thierry's central theme, namely, the presence of Napoleon and the empire, not just in France but also in Europe, as a sort of watermark throughout the period. In other words, the fact that even though the Empire physically no longer existed, it was nevertheless in the back of everyone's minds (and central to 'European preoccupations and fears, despite 1814', as Thierry puts it). This imperial presence is matched by the spectre of Napoleon hovering over both the First Restoration and the opening months of the Congress of Vienna. Unlike de Waresquiel's elegiac style, Lentz is punchy and statistical with frequent tables and lists; the first half is an exceedingly detailed account of the Congress of Vienna, Louis XVIII's France, and the Elban moment (perhaps one of the fullest accounts of it written so far), and the Hundred Days fills the second half. Overarching the book would appear to be two concerns for Lentz, namely Napoleon's greatness and a perception that English-language history of the Napoleonic period tends to be too Manichean, contrasting the 'good' allies with the 'bad' Napoleon. And so whilst using the irreplaceable accounts written by Paul Kennedy, Charles Webster, Harold Nicholson, Gregor Dallas, even Henry Kissinger, he is careful to avoid any hint of complacency derived from what he terms the traditional Anglophone account. And that being said, we should not be led however into seeing this book as an apology for the Emperor, as a sort of repackaging of the golden legend. Lentz underlines that Napoleon's putative greatness can only be perceived through the complexity of history. No simple hagiography here. As for his criticism of Anglophone history of Napoleon, this boils down mostly to attacks on Paul Schroeder and his landmark book, The Transformation of European politics. Lentz's account furthermore is resolutely Realpolitik: Allied (read British) finer feelings are never seen as decision-making deciders – it is always money and geopolitical clout. What gives force to Lentz's attempts to make this book a 'nouvelle' histoire of the First Empire derives from his limiting himself to period accounts and avoiding later interpretations – though he does occasionally cite Sorel, Madelin and other later article writers. He is particularly strong when talking about international politics and notably law (one of Lentz's specialities), notably singling out the successes of the congress in creating the beginnings of 'public law' which for the first time in international relations would serve as the basis for the 'European concert' and which would guide great power relations throughout the 19th century. And his positive words on the success of the congress are perhaps aimed more at a francophone public which grew up on criticisms of the agreement. French authors, notably Jacques Bainville and Charles Bonnefon both saw the congress as the root of the all the wars of the 19th century, namely, the war for German unity, the Italian war of independence, the Franco-German war and the war of the Danish duchies. Though recent Anglophone scholarship of the left has also seen the Congress as a work of dark control, repressing the irrepressible mid-century revolutions. Lentz has an important chapter on public spirit. Here he explodes the myth of widespread popular support for the Hundred Days. And this is particularly interesting when compared to the results of Sudhir Hazareesingh's trawl in post-war French departmental archives where he found evidence for ubiquitous proto-Bonapartist and Napoleonist enthusiasm. Some of Lentz's best writing comes in his unpicking of the political actions and motivations of players such as Metternich, Gentz, Talleyrand and Fouché. His account of the post-Waterloo manoeuvres of the latter two is brilliant – he has an insider's eye of what makes French politicians tick, why they act in certain ways. And indeed, Lentz's crusade against the cut and dried and for the complexity of the problem can only bring us closer to the truth.
P. Guéniffey, Le dix-huit Brumaire : l’éplogue de la Révolution française, Gallimard, 2008
The 18 Brumaire has been a key battleground for French historians since the death of Napoleon and the publication of the St Helena literature in the early 1820s. Did Napoleon kill off the Revolution and the Republic or was he doing something else? What was this coup d'état with no deaths, indeed hardly any violence at all? Gueniffey's book is the last in a ten-year series dating largely from the bicentenary of the 18 Brumaire coup in 1999. Thierry Lentz's prize-winning work on the subject was published in 1997, closely followed by Tulard (1999), Bertaud (2000) and Jacques-Olivier Boudon (2001) (the edited proceedings of conference which took place in 1999). Naturally Lentz and Tulard come at the problem from a Napoleono-centric point of view, underlining the birth of the modern republic in the Consulate, in the great debate that is French history, fighting their corner against the supposedly 'militarily dictatorial' consul and later despotic emperor dear to historians of the left such as Bertaud (true to his intellectual and republican education) who saw the issue from the side of the Revolution, following Godechot, Soboul and Lefevre. For Bertaud the 18-19 Brumaire was indeed the murder of the republic (to quote Bertaud's subtitle). Guéniffey as director Ecoles des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, could indeed be said to be from the same intellectual stable as Bertaud, and yet his approach is more holistic, combining the Republican with the Napoleonic. It's also beautifully written. I think the series in which the book stands (“The days that made France”) has directed Guéniffey's approach The timeline at the end, the detailed storytelling with a smattering of historiography is very similar to Lentz's volume IV. There is a definite concern to reach the general public and not just the professional historian. Like Lentz, Guéniffey also has a tendency to stay with the period sources and to 'go beyond' the historians' take. And so he only quotes Lentz's prize-winning book for his sources, not his commentary. I found Guénnifey's concentration on the moderates beyond the Brumarians (Constant, de Stael and some others) a useful change of angle. And some of his conclusions are most interesting, namely, that the political bankruptcy of the Directory was not just later Napoleonic spin but largely agreed upon at the time, and that this 'regime change' in Brumaire was not therefore the assassination of the state, but rather a session in intensive care. Another fascinating point is the historiographical bombshell that out that for most of the 19th century 18 Brumaire was not even called a coup d'état. We have a very few Republican historians (notably de Toqueville and Curzio Malaparte) to thank for the change of terminology, most others preferring the title 'revolution'. In the final pages of Guéniffey's book there is a comparison of 18/19 Brumaire with Charles de Gaulle in 1958, another successful and splendidly bloodless coup, so giving the book a full two hundred years of context. More than a history of the Revolution or of Napoleon, it's the history of France.
Pierre Serna, La République des Girouettes – 1795-1815 et au delà / une anomalie politique : la France de l’extrême centre, Cham Vallon, 2005
Perhaps the most stimulating of all the books mentioned here is Pierre Serna's on the Girouettes and the “extrême centre”. Here again, as with de Waresquiel and Guéniffey, it is a re-discovery of the political centre ground. And the stimulation is all the more intense given the different sensibilities of English-language and French-language historians. Pierre's book is a study of the Girouette, the French political weathervane or a Vicar of Bray, the celebrated 16th- or 18th-century (according to who you believe) clergyman who managed to stay in his parish regardless of the religious changes going on around him. What particularly excites Serna is the idea of an ideologically inconsistent figure, who manages always to keep the highest profile and best paid jobs despite going directly against his previous oaths and declarations – and Serna appears to consider the figure (rather surprisingly) an “exception française”. Obviously the period particularly in question is 1814-1815. He also however discusses the “ideologically inconceivable” (his words) Directory and its obligation to squat in the dead centre of politics. Serna then interprets this adoption of centre-ground politics, avoiding the twin perils of the Terreur and the Restoration, as the precursor of Napoleon, who adopts what Serna calls the extreme centre, a position which is to dominate French politics for the subsequent two hundred years. The third issue of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française in 2009 (in fact edited by Serna) is thematic and entitled, Radicalités et moderations en révolution. It includes seven articles on the same subject. One by Robert Howell Griffiths of the Université de Savoie is on moderation and political centricity in England 1660-1800. He interestingly points to the preface to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer of 1662, coming as it did on the restoration of Charles II. This hymn to moderation, he notes, hides an extreme quality, whereby the heresy of the previous twenty years was proscribed, the censor reinstated and Puritans and Presbyterians excluded from any form of civilian government. Matthias Lok in the following essay asks himself the question whether the idea of the 'extreme centre' or aggressive or obligatory moderation is not specifically French but rather exportable, and he proceeds to identify it in Holland in the 1814-1820 period. There is however a fundamental concern in all this (as noted by Howell Griffiths, notably Anglophone though here writing in French) that any attempt to put much weight on, or to give a systematic definition of, moderation and extreme centricity soon ends up in aporias or “étonnantes banalités”. And this brings me back to my initially point of the apparent incompatibility and oil-and-water nature of French- and English-language historiographies. A reader of my persuasion looks at this sort of ideological concern for political weathervanes and their position within moderate politics as almost comical. The words 'common sense' come to mind, an expression and concept which (perhaps significantly) do not easily translate into French. Now I am not making a cheap racist jibe here. It is certainly a truism that in France theory systematically (I use the term in its technical sense) comes before practice and so ideology-free practicality seems incomprehensible. Hence the nearly 600 pages of Serna's book are an attempt to understand theoretically how successive regimes may employ the same man (as Napoleon does with Talleyrand and Bernadotte, and indeed Carnot and Constant) or how the same man may swear contradictory oaths, first to one ruler and then to another. Serna cannot simply accept the practical fact that these men might remain in place simply because they are clearly the men for the job. Talleyrand imposes himself across all three regimes not simply because of his outstanding ability to be a 'player' but also because of his outstanding ability 'tout court'. This may be a red 'anglosaxon' rag to a francophone bull, but I wonder if, post-post-modern as we are, such attempts at theoretical discourse are destined to languish un-read…
Catalogue/Database of the Fondation Napoléon library and Napoleonica La Revue
Two recent developments at the Fondation Napoléon are the library catalogue and the online review, Napoleonica La Revue. You may be surprised that I should single out a library catalogue, but to parody the words Star Trek's Mr Spock never said, “It's a catalogue Jim, but not as we know it”. The key difference (and one of the reasons we prefer to call it a database) is that it includes the titles of all the articles in the periodicals we posses. Some well known, such the Proceedings of this Consortium, others less (notably the Revue des Etudes napoléoniennes, the Sabretache). What this means that a simple search for the word 'royaliste', for example, brings remarkable within its 29 results an article by Driault in the Revue des Etudes napoléoniennes published in 1926, and another on royalist agitation in Turin from a 1954 issue of the Revue de l'Institut Napoléon. Add to this the newly improved digital library on the the Fondation's website napoleon.org which now provides access to more than five thousand digitised 'Napoleonic' (First and Third) texts not including the thirty-six full-text searchable texts and the five doctoral theses digitised by the Fondation Napoléon – the theses are by recipients of Fondation Napoléon research grants. The database is as a result a key weapon in a researcher's armoury.
Another similarly digital resource is the Fondation's scholarly peer-review e-periodical, Napoleonica La Revue. Founded in 2008, the Napoleonica now has nine issues and it benefits from all the advantages of an independent private institution and the facilities provided by the digital. The independence of the institution means that all sorts of scholarly approaches are acceptable and that the review can be offered free of charge. The digitality is important in the sense that it allows for the publication of much longer texts that would be permitted in a paper review – to date more than 1,300 pages have been published. Another significant advantage is bi-lingual editorial policy. Highlights include an exhaustive 46-page bibliography on French colonial policy during the Napoleonic period, previously unpublished French military memoirs of the Russian campaign written in 1813, extracts from an unpublished draft of a contemporary biography of Joseph Bonaparte held at Yale University, not to mention archival research and statistical analysis of French prisoners of war held in Britain during the Empire period and a ground-breaking two-part, hundred-page article on the Banque de France and it comptoirs. There no other specifically first- and second-empire periodical in existence. And the statistics show that the readership is steadily growing.
Conclusion
So here I've brought you an ideological debate on moderation in politics, greater emphasis on Napoleon's own moderation and his appeal to moderates during the Brumaire revolution, a passionate sketch of royalist opposition to Napoleon, a more red-blooded vision of allied politics (notably British) during the Hundred Days, and an elegiac view of the Hundred Days and the tragic ill-fated role played by Louis XVIII in the unfinished business which dragged on throughout the 19th century. To cap it all, I've described some new digital developments at the Fondation Napoléon, all designed to help you over the pond. Come on in, the water's lovely…
Appendix: Source texts
Napoléon I, Correspondance générale de Napoléon Bonaparte. Tome 6 : 1806 – Vers le Grand Empire, with introduction from M. Kerautret and G. Madec
The beautifully orchestrated meeting between Napoleon and Alexander at Tilsit proved to be the turning point in 1807. Indeed, the year can be quite neatly divided into two clear and distinct halves: pre- and post-Tilsit. The first semester, cold and uncertain, followed on naturally from the war-torn December of 1806, with a long and difficult campaign conducted far beyond France's borders, a period softened only by the idyllic moments spent by the commander in chief in the company of Marie Walewska. On the other hand, the second half – post-Tilsit – seemed destined to usher in an era of lasting peace. This respite was to prove brief however: with no end in sight to the Franco-British war, the two sides continued to develop new plans for intervention further afield. The British were to shoot first at Copenhagen; the French prepared to return fire in Portugal. Elsewhere, operations in Sweden and in Naples continued apace, whilst relations between Napoleon and the Papacy worsened.
This seventh volume of the General Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte covers the year of 1807 and includes 3,020 letters (an increase in excess of 37% on the edition published during the Second Empire), fully annotated by specialists of the period.
Lentz, Thierry (ed.), Quand Napoléon inventait la France : Dictionnaire des institutions administratives et de cour du Consulat et de l'Empire
Prefects, Council of State, Legion of Honour, Garde champêtres, Public Treasury, National Stud (Dépôt d'étalons), Palmes académiques (Academic palms), Grand Maréchal du Palais… Napoleon modernised some institutions and administrative structures and created other from scratch, changing the face of the country and paving the way for modern France.
Whilst there are many dictionaries on the Empire, this is the first which is exclusively dedicated to the institutions of the Napoleonic empire and also the first to describe in detail the political and administrative bodies of the court.
The dictionary (with its entries written by Pierre Branda, Pierre-François Pinaud and Clémence Zacharie and coordinated by Thierry Lentz) comprises 800 accessible and straight-forward articles designed to help historians and those interested in the period understand the institutions which formed the bedrock of Napoleonic power. The entries are constructed around three fundamental questions: Why was the structure created? What was its role? How was it organised? The appendices contain nine constitutional texts, maps and tables.”