Napoleon as a Book-Lover

LIKE Cæsar, like Charlemagne, his truest prototypes, Napoleon was a myriad-minded man. No less great as an administrator than as a soldier, he was a keener diplomat than any minister of the powers against him. Talleyrand alone, perhaps, surpassed him in far-sighted sagacity, penetration, intrigue. Nothing pertaining to the life of such a man can fail to be of interest, and the past twenty years have seen the appearance of works in the pages of which we get an intimate view of Napoleon, not as soldier or rider or diplomat, but as a man; not clothed with thunder, as Thiers portrayed him, but clad in the garb of his fellow-men. We know to-day as never before what his nature truly was, — his tastes, his pastimes, his friendships, his foibles; what he liked to eat and how he ate it; how few hours he slept; what he read in hours of ease. Such minutiæ are not petty in connection with the life of a man like Napoleon. Nothing can be alien to history that concerns a career so great in achievement as his.

The reading of Napoleon’s youth reflected the spirit of the age. The emotionalism, the romanticism of Rousseau captivated his imagination, as it did that of the generation in which he lived. He tried his hand in imitation of the prevalent taste, and wrote The Unmasked Prophet, an Oriental story, a Dialogue on Love, and some rather acute Reflections on the State of Nature. But the drift of the Revolution toward the stream of red republicanism made him antagonistic to it in course of time. Although he went with the current outwardly, and even joined the Jacobin Club, his reading was not the political pamphlets of the age. In 1791 we find him reading books upon travel and institutions, Herodotus and Strabo among ancient works, together with Coxe’s Travels in Switzerland, Machiavelli, Voltaire’s Essai sur Mœurs, and Dulaure’s Histoire critique de la noblesse (1790). He read such books carefully. There still “exist among his papers outlines more or less complete of all these books,” says Professor Sloane. Recently there have come to light some “Notes on English History” which he took at this time. Evidently the mechanism of public life, not romanticism and pseudo-politics, was attracting him. But life was too feverish, too fraught with excitement, until the fever of the Revolution subsided, for concerted reading of this or any other sort.

The command in Italy seems to have been Napoleon’s renaissance. As it a woke his ambition, so it stimulated his intellect. Henceforward history, institutions, biography, travel, polite literature, poetry, became a permanent interest of his mind whenever the exigencies of war and of state allowed him to read anything save dispatches, reports, and bulletins. He always remained an omnivorous, if not a deep reader. Bourrienne criticises him for not having read Montesquieu thoroughly, “That is to say, in a way to accept or decidedly reject each of the thirtyone books of the Esprit des Lois;” and he adds: “he had not thus read Bayle’s Dictionary nor the Essay on the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.” This criticism seems beside the mark. Napoleon was not a student, to sit down and compare Montesquieu’s arguments with critical analysis. But, with a natural instinct for discerning political values, an instinct grown almost unerring through experience, he could have gone to the pith of the Esprit des Lois in a second.

Yet, after all, the reports of the position of his forces on land and sea, dispatches, bulletins, laws, were his passionate interest. “My memory for an Alexandrine is not good,” he said of himself; “ but I never forget a syllable of my reports on positions.”

The library which Napoleon carried out with him to Egypt in 1798 is probably a true reflection of his mental makeup. It included thirteen volumes of arts and sciences; forty volumes of geography and travel, among which the Voyages of Captain Cook is conspicuous; one hundred and twenty-five historical works, ancient, mediæval, and modern; forty volumes of poetry, the chief among which were Homer, Vergil, Tasso, Ariosto, Ossian, and Voltaire’s Henriade; twenty volumes of the masterpieces of the French stage; the Old and New Testaments ; the Koran ; the Vedas ; some works on mythology; and, for fiction, a few novels of Voltaire, Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe’s Werther, and forty English novels in translation. Professor Sloane says that Napoleon’s sister Caroline added a copy of Bacon’s Essays, Madame de Staël’s De l ’influence des passions, which had just been published, and Mercier’s Visions philosophiques.

The formation of the Egyptian library was entrusted by Say to a very remarkable man. Charles Pougens (1775-1833) was a natural son of the Prince de Conti. He lost his eyesight when twenty-four years of age, through an attack of smallpox, yet lived to become a prominent man of letters. Impoverished by the Revolution, he opened a printing-office, to which he added a bookshop. Napoleon had learned to know him in his own dark days, and never forgot him. Pougens was the author of the Trésor des origines : dictionnaire raisonnée de la langue française; (1819) and L’archéologie françaiseou vocabulaire des mots anciens tombés en désuétude (1824).

I do not know if the books taken out in 1798 survived the battles of the Nile and the Pyramids and the frightful Syrian expedition. But a certain reminiscence of the Egyptian library is to be found in the appointment of Ripault, librarian of the Institut d’Egypte, early in the course of the consulate, to be Napoleon’s private librarian. The office was not one for a man of purely literary tastes and inclinations, however. Supervision of the immense amount of periodical literature, especially that of a political nature, was a necessity to Napoleon. In consequence it became Ripault’s duty to make systematic abstracts of this material and regularly to present them to Napoleon for examination. Napoleon had a thorough understanding of the influence of public opinion, and he proposed to bend it as he wished it to be.

In course of time the duties of Ripault became so onerous that in 1804 the Abbé Denina was appointed as assistant librarian. But ere long this quasi-censorship proved ineffective, and in 1806 the censorship was attached to the office of Minister of Police. It was in one of the reports so submitted to him that Napoleon discovered that the price of the classics was too dear, and promptly took measures for the amelioration of the condition of classical literature in France. There was probably a political intention in this interest, to a certain degree, for the reading of Homer and Vergil was, from any point of view, better for him than the probable perusal of the vast mass of opposition literature circulated in the country in spite of the efforts to suppress it. And still, we may easily do him injustice. Genuine literature Napoleon not only welcomed, but stimulated. The indignant letter he wrote from Munich on January 15, 1806, the year of Prussia’s humiliation at Jena and Auerstädt, to Fouché, the zealous and traitorous minister of police, illustrates this point, and shows his interest in keeping alive a healthy intellectual activity. This is what was written: —

“I will not suffer a clerk to tyrannize talent and to mutilate genius.”

For Greek literature, except philosophy, Napoleon seems to have had a very real liking. He was a man of direct, incisive speech. It is not without significance that most of the literary illustrations or allusions in his writings are from classical mythology and history. At two famous crises in his life, when his emotion must have been great, the fate of young Astyanax and the spectacle of Themistocles in exile at the court of Persia rose before his mind. The first occasion was in March, 1814, before the downfall. Anxious over the fate of his son, Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph,

“Do not abandon my son, and remember that I would sooner know him in the Seine than in the hands of the enemies of France. The fate of Astyanax, prisoner among the Greeks, has always appeared to me as the most unfortunate in history.”

The second instance was after Waterloo, when the prospect of throwing himself upon the magnanimity of the English nation was before him as the only recourse. Then he wrote to George III:

“I come, like Themistocles, to seat myself at the hearth of the British people.”

In the more æsthetic forms of intellectual activity Napoleon also had interest. During the first Italian campaign he took care to have the great musical productions of Italy copied, and the copies sent to the Conservatoire. “Of all the fine arts,” he wrote at this season, “ music is that which exercises the most influence on the passions, and is that which the legislator should most encourage. A piece of moral music, composed by a master, never fails to touch the feelings, and has more influence than a good philosophic work, which convinces the understanding without exercising any effect on our habits.” ¹ Napoleon was proud of the fact that Laplace dedicated his Mé- canique Céleste to him, and wrote with mingled appreciation and affectation, bewailing the force of circumstances which had diverted him into a career so far removed from the sciences. He knew the practical value of even abstruse and recondite studies. Modern governments have discovered that the chemist and the biologist are useful servants of the state. Napoleon was speaking truthfully to the great astronomer in 1812, when he wrote, in acknowledgment of Laplace’s work upon the Calculation of Probabilities, “The advancement and perfection of mathematics is intimately connected with the prosperity of the state.”

In 1807 Napoleon ordered the library of the Council of State to be transferred to Fontainebleau. A portion of the works on jurisprudence and political economy, however, remained in Paris, and was consolidated with the library of the Tribunate upon the suppression of that institution.

In 1808 Napoleon formed the idea of having a traveling library, in order to make his hours of intellectual recreation independent of the exigencies of a campaign or the delays of a courier. Obviously such a collection of books would have to be selected with great care, that the library might be a portable one; and consequently the minute instructions as to its care are, as it were, a picture of his mind. This resolution of the Emperor was conveyed in a communication, bearing date July 17, addressed to Barbier, who had displaced Ripault the year before, and written from Bayonne, when he was on the verge of the Spanish campaign.

The proposed library was to form about a thousand volumes. The books were to be of small duodecimo size, printed in good type, and without margins in order to save space. They were to be found in morocco, with flexible covers and limp backs. The boxes for their conveyance were to be covered with leather and lined with green velvet, and were to average sixty volumes apiece, in two rows, like the shelves in a library. A catalogue was to accompany them, so arranged that the Emperor could readily find any desired volume. The distribution of subjects was as follows: forty volumes on religion; folly of epic poetry; forty of the drama; sixty volumes of other poetry; sixty volumes of history; and one hundred novels. “In order to complete the quota,” ran the instructions, “the balance shall be made up of historical memoirs.” Among the religious works were the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, works on church history, including some upon the Lutheran and the Calvinist movement. The epics included Homer, Lucan, Tasso, the Henriade, and so forth; the drama, selected tragedies of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire. Comedy Napoleon could not endure; “not a word of Molière,” he says. The history included some good chronological works, standard histories of France, like that of Mably, Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, some of Voltaire’s historical writing, Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, and a French translation of Gibbon. Among the novels were the Nouvelle Héloïse, Le Sage’s Contes, and French versions of Richardson’s and Fielding’s works. Indeed, of English fiction Napoleon was very fond.

Napoleon seems to have looked forward with expectation to the use of this traveling library while in the field; and when he was preparing for the great campaign which culminated at Wagram, he wrote somewhat impatiently from Malmaison, March 20, 1809, through Méneval, his private secretary, —

“The Emperor wants to know if his traveling library is ready. I advised M. Barbier to choose it with care, and to put some excellent books in it.” Then the secretary adds: “His Majesty wishes to have something very distinguished, and has a preference for books characterized by the beauty of the printed page and by elegance of binding.” Finally comes the admonition, “If you have not found the epics, do not lose a moment of time in getting them.”

Of course it goes without saying that Napoleon kept up with the current literature. In Méneval’s Mémoires we get a glimpse of the Emperor reading during the winter months of 1808-09. “There are many hours of the day,” Meneval writes, “which his Majesty could employ in reading when his headquarters are to be found in the villages. I protest as much as possible to his Majesty about the barrenness of novels and almanacs.” Generally during the hour after dinner, unless that had been a state affair, Napoleon used to glance over new books, throwing those which did not interest him upon the floor or into the fire. Méneval writes to Barbier on one occasion: “The novels sent are detestable, and were thrown from the courier’s valise into the chimney-place.” When on the road, it was the Emperor’s usual practice to pitch such ephemeral literature, and books which did not please him, out of the windows of his carriage.1 This explains why not infrequently books bearing his arms are to be found advertised in sale-catalogues.

But experience showed that the library was too large to be portable, and that it was also badly organized, so that ere long there was a wholesale elimination of books which lumbered it up. Madame de Sévigne’s familiar eleven volumes were reduced to a selection; La Rochefoucauld went completely; a fourdecker Æneid, a three-decker Milton, a two-decker Iliad, and a two-decker edition of Camoëns were exchanged for single-volume copies; the Æneid and Milton were to be in prose translations. Of new books demanded, the most notable are French editions of Tacitus and Gibbon. Napoleon must have read with vivid interest the sombre and terrible pages of Tacitus’s History, — those pages in which the great historian has depicted the Emperor Tiberius, like a sullen eagle, sitting on Capri’s isle, or Domitian, the vain, suspicious, crafty, shameless son of Vespasian, — and reveled in their invective. For there was a strain of melancholy in Napoleon, — not a passive depression, but an active interest in dark problems of the mind and heart. Problems of human mystery, the night and storm of the soul, the element of chance in great issues, powerfully appealed to his imagination. There may be some lingering trace of Corsican superstition in his belief in his star; but he spoke with conviction, and neither in superstition nor in vaunting, when he alluded to himself as a man of destiny. He never willingly gave battle unless he calculated that he had seventy chances of winning; yet he knew that something had to be left to chance, and sometimes trusted that fortune might bandage the eyes of his enemies. He won Marengo by sheer luck. Opportunity, he felt, was a moral bestowal, but nevertheless a fortuitous combination of circumstances to a certain degree. And what issues were at stake in this gigantic game of politics! Is it any wonder that Bonaparte’s conception of things took a fatalistic turn ?

The Greeks imagined that behind the gods of Olympus stood Destiny. In the mighty drama of history of which he was the central figure Napoleon perceived a persistent principle working itself out. This principle was political necessity, the inevitability of history. Through the movement of the actors, captains, diplomats, kings, the tramp of legions and the blare of martial brass, he discerned this principle and its action. General Ségur relates that on the eve of the battle of Austerlitz, — the place above all others where Napoleon believed in his star, — he became engaged in a literary discussion with Junot. And what did he say? “Politics ought to be the great resort of modem tragedy. Politics should supplant the ancient idea of Fate in our theatre, — that Fate which made Œdipus a criminal without his being guilty.” And he added, “Every coup d’état, every political crime, might be made a subject of tragedy in which, the horror being tempered by necessity, a new and sustained interest would be developed.” Did Mr. J. Holland Rose have these words in mind when he wrote of Napoleon in 1814, “It is a story instinct with an irony like that of the fascination of King Œdipus in the pages of Sophocles ” ? To Napoleon, under protean forms,—revolution, coup d’état, conquest, — the working of political destiny was the plot. History to him was not merely dramatic at times; it was dramatic all the time; it was drama. The Greek conception of destiny was replaced by political necessity. This conception not only colored history for him; it colored the literature he read; it determined his choice of books.

1 The Emperor used to read a great deal while on the march. By means of a lamp placed in the back of his carriage he was able to work or to read with convenience. (Méneval, iii, 37).

Dramatic literature appealed to him intensely. Taine says that his insight into it was that of a most sagacious critic, and quotes with approval the comment on Voltaire’s Mahomet, that he was “neither a prophet nor an Arab; only an impostor graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique.” Racine was his favorite dramatist, and he used to read again and again the more beautiful parts of Iphigenie, Mithridate, and Bajazet. And yet they did not please him. “After dinner,” records the Mémoires de Ste. Hélène, “the emperor took up Racine. ‘Although Racine has written masterpieces in themselves,’ he said when concluding, ‘they are nevertheless filled with perpetual insipidity and an eternal love; a mawkish sentimentality and a court tiresomely fastidious; but this is not entirely his fault, it is the vice and manner of the time. Love at that time, and later yet, was the whole end of life to many. This is always the lot of idle societies. As for us, we have been brutally torn away from that manner of life by the Revolution and its great affairs.’”

Considering whose judgment this is, in the light of his own dramatic life, it is small wonder that Napoleon regarded Racine and Corneille as flat, stale, and unprofitable. “There is no empire,” once said Talleyrand, “not founded on the marvelous, and here the marvelous is true.” Verily, the man whose genius had reached beyond the power of human analysis to comprehend may be pardoned for finding other men’s productions shallow.

Not the least of Barbier’s duties was looking up answers to the questions of an historical or literary nature with which his master bombarded him. Now, it was to translate certain paragraphs or pages, or see that a whole book was translated in the shortest space of lime; again, it was to look up the origin and history of Gallican liberties; the question whether there were examples of emperors who had suspended or deposed popes; the history of Charles VII’s Pragmatic Sanction; and so forth. When he was dreaming of the East, Napoleon demanded “a synopsis of the history of the campaigns which had taken place in the valley of the Euphrates and against the Parthians, from that of Crassus down to the eighth century, including in it those of Antony, Trajan, and Julian,” with maps showing the route which each army followed, the ancient names and the new names of the countries and chief cities, and an account of the geography of the country and of the historical records of each expedition, all to be drawn from the original sources. At another time he demanded information about a Persian history of Alexander the Great. This inquiry was suggested by a conversation the emperor had with Mirza-Rizza-Khan, the Persian ambassador, who had arrived at Warsaw in March, 1807. One day, while the two were walking in the gardens of Finkenstein, the conversation turned on the history of Alexander the Great, and the ambassador said that the true history of the Macedonian conqueror was to be found in Persia.

As cares of state increased, Napoleon’s reading became less and less of a literary kind and more and more of a practical nature. He fondly called his precious army lists and the reports of his military and administrative officers his real library.²

Méneval tells us that Napoleon “ used sometimes to spend whole days without doing any work, yet without leaving the palace or even his workroom. . . . Napoleon appeared embarrassed how to spend his time. He would go and spend an hour with the empress; then he would return, and, sitting down on the settee, would sleep, or appear to sleep, for a few minutes. . . . He would glance through the titles of his books, saying a word of praise or blame on the authors, and would linger with preference over the tragedies of Corneille, or Voltaire’s Zaïre or La Mort de César. He would read tirades from these tragedies aloud, then would shut up the book and walk up and down reciting verses.” Such conduct usually concealed an increase of cerebral activity. It was the quiet prevailing before a storm.

If Napoleon’s enemies could have looked into his boxes of books, especially after 1809, or seen the instructions he sent to his librarian, they might have anticipated the future more accurately. He always “read up,” for a coming campaign, the history, geography, institutions of the country and people with whom he was going to come in contact. It is exceedingly interesting to see this projection of his thought into the future, as indicated by his reading. This is particularly true of the Russian campaign. From December, 1811, Napoleon’s book-orders have the importance of state secrets. In that month we find him ordering works giving information concerning the topography of Russia, especially Lithuania, under the head of rivers, roads, forests, marshes, and so forth; a detailed account in French of the campaigns of Charles XII in Poland and Russia; a history of Courland; and anything which could be found of an historical, geographical, and topographical nature, about Riga, Livonia, and the other Baltic provinces of Russia; the work of the English Colonel Wilson on the Russian army, translated from the English, a manuscript copy of which he remembers to have seen either in the Bibliothèque Impériale or in the cabinet of the Emperor at the Tuileries; the account of the Russian army by De Plotho. Yet he is not too absorbed in the midst of these instructions to see that Montaigne’s Essays are put in the box.

This historical material displaced most of the novels and the poems in the campaign of 1812. But in the hot summer days of that year, while the army waited long in Poland, the Emperor sometimes found that moments of leisure went by on leaden wings, and prayed for more diverting literature. The faithful Méneval hastily dispatched an order for “some good new novels, or old ones that he is not familiar with, or some memoirs that would make agreeable reading.”

The fate of this traveling library was the fate of the entire army of 1812: it was lost. The books of the Emperor probably went to boil the tea of some Cossack soldier, even as Junot’s veterans plundered Spanish libraries to find material for their campfires.³ One interesting detail of its fate has been preserved: on the road to Russia the emperor borrowed certain books from the Royal Library in Dresden. In the retreat from Moscow these also were lost. The effort the Emperor made to repair this loss entitles him to a place in the ancient and honorable company of book-lovers. The man who had lost an army of 480,000 men, who saw Europe marching against him from the Ural to the Bay of Biscay, took time and thought enough, on February 7, 1813, upon his return to Paris, to give express orders to procure duplicates of these volumes at any price, and see that they were sent to Dresden.

But a new library was got together, though one which was much smaller, — only four boxes for the duodecimos and two for the 18mos. “Some time before my departure,” he commanded, before the Prussian War of Liberation began, “send me the lists of the books of this form which I have in my library, and I will designate the volumes which are to be put in the boxes. These volumes will be successively exchanged for others of my library, and the whole may be done without incurring new expenses.” This new library went with him through the Leipsic campaign. But there is no record of any correspondence between Napoleon and his librarian during these momentous days. The dogged advance of the allies drove Napoleon from the Elbe to the Rhine, from the Rhine to the Meuse, until, in Champagne, with but a vestige of the army he had once commanded, he made his last stand against the powers. No one can read the history of the campaign of 1814, as Houssaye has recorded it with minute detail, without a feeling of admiration, even of awe. He whose achievements justified the boast that he would find the Pillars of Hercules in Spain, but not the limits of his power, was at last brought to earth. His marshals implored him to yield. Caulaincourt, his former ambassador to St. Petersburg, begged for authority to treat with the enemy. Maret handed the letter to the Emperor. For answer Napoleon pointed his finger to a passage in Montesquieu’s La Grandeur et la Décadence des Romains, which he was then reading. “I know nothing,” it ran, “more magnanimous than the resolution taken by a monarch who ruled in our time, to bury himself under the ruins of the throne, rather than accept proposals which a king may not entertain. He had a soul too lofty to descend lower than his misfortunes had hurled him.” Was he reading in order to find an anodyne for a mind tortured almost beyond thought? Did he draw sympathy from the reflection that “the noblest Roman of them all,” “the greatest name in history,” was his true prototype, and that he, too, fell in his prime ? Or was it the consummate art of an actor ? One’s answer depends upon his sympathy with, or antagonism to, Bonaparte. We only know that, in this decisive hour, he was reading Montesquieu!

Napoleon once possessed a famous copy of Montesquieu. When he entered the palace of the Prussian king at Potsdam, a small 18mo volume, printed in Holland and bound in red morocco, was lying open on the table. It was Montesquieu’s work on the Roman empire, the pages of it covered with marginal comments in the handwriting of the great Frederick. This interesting volume was appropriated by the conqueror. One day Napoleon’s secretary foolishly loaned it to Talleyrand. Though frequently asked for it, the minister never returned it. Where is the book to-day?

After Marmont’s and Joseph’s cowardly surrender before Paris, the final stage was reached. The negotiations which banished Napoleon to Elba were conducted at Fontainebleau. There Napoleon found a congenial acquaintance in the British commissioner, Sir Neil Campbell, with whom he enthusiastically conversed about the poems of Ossian, whose epic quality he thought to be like that of Homer.

During the nine days which Napoleon passed at Fontainebleau he occupied himself with choosing the books he would carry with him to Elba. Among these were the Bulletin des lois, the Recueil des traités de paix by Koch and Martens, the Moniteur, the Code Napoleon, Polybius, Thucydides, Homer, Vergil, Cæsar, Sallust and Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, Ariosto, Tasso. From Elba, in Bertrand’s name, he subscribed for the leading European literary and political periodicals. When Napoleon returned from this first exile, in March, 1815, finding his former librarian still in the Tuileries, he announced his intention of bringing from Elba to Paris the books which had solaced his exile. Some of these, indeed, actually arrived at the Tuileries.

In the anguished days immediately following Waterloo, when Napoleon looked to America as a place of refuge, Barbier was instructed to form a new library from his traveling library and the books at Malmaison, and to consign it to an American house via Havre. The pride of the fallen conqueror appears in the order that the great work of the Egyptian Commission shall not fail to be included. Some new additions, pertaining to America, naturally were also made. The chamber of representatives voted the library of Trianon to Napoleon by a special act, but when Bülow learned of it the burly Prussian put seals upon the cabinets in Versailles. Sir Hudson Lowe afterwards made a formal request of Louis XVIII for the restoration of these books to his distinguished prisoner, but the Bourbon, who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, was petty enough to refuse. Thus it was that the Emperor was compelled to purchase, at his own expense, when at St. Helena, a copy of the great Déscription de l’Egypte, a work which, save for him, would never have been.

At St. Helena, Lord Rosebery truly says, “The one pleasure of the captive’s life was an arrival of books. Then he would shut himself up with them for days together, — bathing in them, revelling in them, feasting on them.” The pen of the gifted English nobleman has described with wonderful sympathy the life of the chained eagle on that rock in the Atlantic. History, drama, essays, poetry, travel, the classic literature of Greece and Rome, of France and England, were impressed into service in order to beguile the pain of a Promethean torture of the spirit.

Under the Second Empire, the English government returned some — not all — of these books from St. Helena to France. They were installed by Napoleon III in the palace of the Tuileries, and there remained until consumed, in 1871, in the burning of the palace during the Commune.