Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete
Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
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MEMOIRS OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE,
Complete
By LOUIS ANTOINE FAUVELET DE BOURRIENNE His Private Secretary
Edited by R. W. Phipps Colonel, Late Royal Artillery
1891
CONTENTS
PREFACE 1836 EDITION.
PREFACE 1885 EDITION.
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION.
NOTE.
VOLUME I. -- 1769-1800
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV
VOLUME II. -- 1800-1805
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXYI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
VOLUME III. -- 1805-1814
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER--XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAP XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER, XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
VOLUME IV. -- 1814-1821
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII
PREFACE 1836 EDITION.
In introducing the present edition of M. de Bourrienne's Memoirs to
the public we are bound, as Editors, to say a few Words on the subject.
Agreeing, however, with Horace Walpole that an editor should not dwell
for any length of time on the merits of his author, we shall touch but
lightly on this part of the matter. We are the more ready to abstain
since the great success in England of the former editions of these
Memoirs, and the high reputation they have acquired on the European
Continent, and in every part of the civilised world where the fame of
Bonaparte has ever reached, sufficiently establish the merits of M. de
Bourrienne as a biographer. These merits seem to us to consist chiefly
in an anxious desire to be impartial, to point out the defects as well
as the merits of a most wonderful man; and in a peculiarly graphic power
of relating facts and anecdotes. With this happy faculty Bourrienne
would have made the life of almost any active individual interesting;
but the subject of which the most favourable circumstances permitted
him to treat was full of events and of the most extraordinary facts. The
hero of his story was such a being as the world has produced only on the
rarest occasions, and the complete counterpart to whom has, probably,
never existed; for there are broad shades of difference between Napoleon
and Alexander, Caesar, and Charlemagne; neither will modern history
furnish more exact parallels, since Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick the
Great, Cromwell, Washington, or Bolivar bear but a small resemblance
to Bonaparte either in character, fortune, or extent of enterprise. For
fourteen years, to say nothing of his projects in the East, the history
of Bonaparte was the history of all Europe!
With the copious materials he possessed, M. de Bourrienne has produced
a work which, for deep interest, excitement, and amusement, can scarcely
be paralleled by any of the numerous and excellent memoirs for which the
literature of France is so justly celebrated.
M. de Bourrienne shows us the hero of Marengo and Austerlitz in his
night-gown and slippers--with a 'trait de plume' he, in a hundred
instances, places the real man before us, with all his personal habits
and peculiarities of manner, temper, and conversation.
The friendship between Bonaparte and Bourrienne began in boyhood, at the
school of Brienne, and their unreserved intimacy continued during the
most brilliant part of Napoleon's career. We have said enough, the
motives for his writing this work and his competency for the task will
be best explained in M. de Bourrienne's own words, which the reader will
find in the Introductory Chapter.
M. de Bourrienne says little of Napoleon after his first abdication and
retirement to Elba in 1814: we have endeavoured to fill up the chasm
thus left by following his hero through the remaining seven years of
his life, to the "last scenes of all" that ended his "strange, eventful
history,"--to his deathbed and alien grave at St. Helena. A completeness
will thus be given to the work which it did not before possess, and
which we hope will, with the other additions and improvements already
alluded to, tend to give it a place in every well-selected library, as
one of the most satisfactory of all the lives of Napoleon.
LONDON, 1836.
PREFACE 1885 EDITION.
The Memoirs of the time of Napoleon may be divided into two
classes--those by marshals and officers, of which Suchet's is a good
example, chiefly devoted to military movements, and those by persons
employed in the administration and in the Court, giving us not only
materials for history, but also valuable details of the personal and
inner life of the great Emperor and of his immediate surroundings.
Of this latter class the Memoirs of Bourrienne are among the most
important.
Long the intimate and personal friend of Napoleon both at school and
from the end of the Italian campaigns in 1797 till 1802--working in the
same room with him, using the same purse, the confidant of most of
his schemes, and, as his secretary, having the largest part of all
the official and private correspondence of the time passed through
his hands, Bourrienne occupied an invaluable position for storing and
recording materials for history. The Memoirs of his successor, Meneval,
are more those of an esteemed private secretary; yet, valuable and
interesting as they are, they want the peculiarity of position which
marks those of Bourrienne, who was a compound of secretary, minister,
and friend. The accounts of such men as Miot de Melito, Raederer, etc.,
are most valuable, but these writers were not in that close contact with
Napoleon enjoyed by Bourrienne. Bourrienne's position was simply unique,
and we can only regret that he did not occupy it till the end of the
Empire. Thus it is natural that his Memoirs should have been largely
used by historians, and to properly understand the history of the time,
they must be read by all students. They are indeed full of interest for
every one. But they also require to be read with great caution. When
we meet with praise of Napoleon, we may generally believe it, for, as
Thiers (Consulat., ii. 279) says, Bourrienne need be little suspected
on this side, for although he owed everything to Napoleon, he has not
seemed to remember it. But very often in passages in which blame is
thrown on Napoleon, Bourrienne speaks, partly with much of the natural
bitterness of a former and discarded friend, and partly with the curious
mixed feeling which even the brothers of Napoleon display in their
Memoirs, pride in the wonderful abilities evinced by the man with whom
he was allied, and jealousy at the way in which he was outshone by the
man he had in youth regarded as inferior to himself. Sometimes also we
may even suspect the praise. Thus when Bourrienne defends Napoleon
for giving, as he alleges, poison to the sick at Jaffa, a doubt arises
whether his object was to really defend what to most Englishmen of
this day, with remembrances of the deeds and resolutions of the Indian
Mutiny, will seem an act to be pardoned, if not approved; or whether he
was more anxious to fix the committal of the act on Napoleon at a
time when public opinion loudly blamed it. The same may be said of his
defence of the massacre of the prisoners of Jaffa.
Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne was born in 1769, that is, in the
same year as Napoleon Bonaparte, and he was the friend and companion
of the future Emperor at the military school of Brienne-le-Chateau till
1784, when Napoleon, one of the sixty pupils maintained at the expense
of the State, was passed on to the Military School of Paris. The friends
again met in 1792 and in 1795, when Napoleon was hanging about Paris,
and when Bourrienne looked on the vague dreams of his old schoolmate
as only so much folly. In 1796, as soon as Napoleon had assured his
position at the head of the army of Italy, anxious as ever to surround
himself with known faces, he sent for Bourrienne to be his secretary.
Bourrienne had been appointed in 1792 as secretary of the Legation at
Stuttgart, and had, probably wisely, disobeyed the orders given him to
return, thus escaping the dangers of the Revolution. He only came back
to Paris in 1795, having thus become an emigre. He joined Napoleon in
1797, after the Austrians had been beaten out of Italy, and at once
assumed the office of secretary which he held for so long. He had
sufficient tact to forbear treating the haughty young General with any
assumption of familiarity in public, and he was indefatigable enough
to please even the never-resting Napoleon. Talent Bourrienne had in
abundance; indeed he is careful to hint that at school if any one had
been asked to predict greatness for any pupil, it was Bourrienne, not
Napoleon, who would have been fixed on as the future star. He went with
his General to Egypt, and returned with him to France. While Napoleon
was making his formal entry into the Tuileries, Bourrienne was preparing
the cabinet he was still to share with the Consul. In this cabinet--our
cabinet, as he is careful to call it--he worked with the First Consul
till 1802.
During all this time the pair lead lived on terms of equality and
friendship creditable to both. The secretary neither asked for nor
received any salary: when he required money, he simply dipped into the
cash-box of the First Consul. As the whole power of the State gradually
passed into the hands of the Consul, the labours of the secretary became
heavier. His successor broke down under a lighter load, and had to
receive assistance; but, perhaps borne up by the absorbing interest of
the work and the great influence given by his post, Bourrienne stuck to
his place, and to all appearance might, except for himself, have come
down to us as the companion of Napoleon during his whole life. He had
enemies, and one of them--[Boulay de la Meurthe.]--has not shrunk from
describing their gratification at the disgrace of the trusted secretary.
Any one in favour, or indeed in office, under Napoleon was the sure
mark of calumny for all aspirants to place; yet Bourrienne might
have weathered any temporary storm raised by unfounded reports as
successfully as Meneval, who followed him. But Bourrienne's hands were
not clean in money matters, and that was an unpardonable sin in any one
who desired to be in real intimacy with Napoleon. He became involved in
the affairs of the House of Coulon, which failed, as will be seen in the