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MEMOIRS OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, VOLUME 1.

by LOUIS ANTOINE FAUVELET DE BOURRIENNE

His Private Secretary

Edited by R. W. Phipps
Colonel, Late Royal Artillery

1891

CONTENTS:
Preface, Notes and Introduction
Chapter I. to Chapter IV., 1797

PREFACE

BY THE EDITORS OF THE 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
moat 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

BY THE EDITOR OF THE 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. Bonrrienne'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 be 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 be 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--lie 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 notes, at the
time of his disgrace; and in October 1802 he was called on to hand over
his office to Meneval, who retained it till invalided after the Russian
campaign.

As has been said, Bourrienne would naturally be the mark for many
accusations, but the conclusive proof of his misconduct--at least for any
one acquainted with Napoleon's objection and dislike to changes in
office, whether from his strong belief in the effects of training, or his
equally strong dislike of new faces round him--is that he was never again
employed near his old comrade; indeed he really never saw the Emperor
again at any private interview, except when granted the naval official
reception in 1805, before leaving to take up his post at Hamburg, which
he held till 1810. We know that his re-employment was urged by Josephine
and several of his former companions. Savary himself says he tried his
advocacy; but Napoleon was inexorable to those who, in his own phrase,
had sacrificed to the golden calf.

Sent, as we have said, to Hamburg in 1805, as Minister Plenipotentiary to
the Duke of Brunswick, the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and to the Hanse
towns, Bourrienne knew how to make his post an important one. He was at
one of the great seats of the commerce which suffered so fearfully from
the Continental system of the Emperor, and he was charged to watch over
the German press. How well he fulfilled this duty we learn from
Metternich, who writes in 1805: "I have sent an article to the newspaper
editors in Berlin and to M. de Hofer at Hamburg. I do not know whether
it has been accepted, for M. Bourrienne still exercises an authority so
severe over these journals that they are always submitted to him before
they appear, that he may erase or alter the articles which do not please
him."

His position at Hamburg gave him great opportunities for both financial
and political intrigues. In his Memoirs, as Meneval remarks, he or his
editor is not ashamed to boast of being thanked by Louis XVIII. at St.
Ouen for services rendered while he was the minister of Napoleon at
Hamburg. He was recalled in 1810, when the Hanse towns were united, or,
to use the phrase of the day, re-united to the Empire. He then hung
about Paris, keeping on good terms with some of the ministers--Savary,
not the most reputable of them, for example. In 1814 he was to be found
at the office of Lavallette, the head of the posts, disguising, his
enemies said, his delight at the bad news which was pouring in, by
exaggerated expressions of devotion. He is accused of a close and
suspicious connection with Talleyrand, and it is odd that when Talleyrand
became head of the Provisional Government in 1814, Bourrienne of all
persons should have been put at the head of the posts. Received in the
most flattering manner by Louis XVIII, he was as astonished as poor
Beugnot was in 1815, to find himself on 13th May suddenly ejected from
office, having, however, had time to furnish post-horses to Manbreuil for
the mysterious expedition, said to have been at least known to
Talleyrand, and intended certainly for the robbery of the Queen of
Westphalia, and probably for the murder of Napoleon.

In the extraordinary scurry before the Bourbons scuttled out of Paris in
1814, Bourrienne was made Prefet of the Police for a few days, his tenure
of that post being signalised by the abortive attempt to arrest Fouche,
the only effect of which was to drive that wily minister into the arms of
the Bonapartists.

He fled with the King, and was exempted from the amnesty proclaimed by
Napoleon. On the return from Ghent he was made a Minister of State
without portfolio, and also became one of the Council. The ruin of his
finances drove him out of France, but he eventually died in a madhouse at
Caen.

When the Memoirs first appeared in 1829 they made a great sensation.
Till then in most writings Napoleon had been treated as either a demon or
as a demi-god. The real facts of the case were not suited to the tastes
of either his enemies or his admirers. While the monarchs of Europe had
been disputing among themselves about the division of the spoils to be
obtained from France and from the unsettlement of the Continent, there
had arisen an extraordinarily clever and unscrupulous man who, by
alternately bribing and overthrowing the great monarchies, had soon made
himself master of the mainland. His admirers were unwilling to admit the
part played in his success by the jealousy of his foes of each other's
share in the booty, and they delighted to invest him with every great
quality which man could possess. His enemies were ready enough to allow
his military talents, but they wished to attribute the first success of
his not very deep policy to a marvellous duplicity, apparently considered
by them the more wicked as possessed by a parvenu emperor, and far
removed, in a moral point of view, from the statecraft so allowable in an
ancient monarchy. But for Napoleon himself and his family and Court
there was literally no limit to the really marvellous inventions of his
enemies. He might enter every capital on the Continent, but there was
some consolation in believing that he himself was a monster of
wickedness, and his Court but the scene of one long protracted orgie.

There was enough against the Emperor in the Memoirs to make them
comfortable reading for his opponents, though very many of the old
calumnies were disposed of in them. They contained indeed the nearest
approximation to the truth which had yet appeared. Metternich, who must
have been a good judge, as no man was better acquainted with what he
himself calls the "age of Napoleon," says of the Memoirs: "If you want
something to read, both interesting and amusing, get the M6moires de
Bourrienne. These are the only authentic Memoirs of Napoleon which have
yet appeared. The style is not brilliant, but that only makes them the
mere trustworthy." Indeed, Metternich himself in his own Memoirs often
follows a good deal in the line of Bourrienne: among many formal attacks,
every now and then he lapses into half involuntary and indirect praise of
his great antagonist, especially where he compares the men he had to deal
with in aftertimes with his former rapid and talented interlocutor. To
some even among the Bonapartists, Bourrienne was not altogether
distasteful. Lucien Bonaparte, remarking that the time in which
Bourrienne treated with Napoleon as equal with equal did not last long
enough for the secretary, says he has taken a little revenge in his
Memoirs, just as a lover, after a break with his mistress, reveals all
her defects. But Lucien considers that Bourrienne gives us a good enough
idea of the young officer of the artillery, of the great General, and of
the First Consul. Of the Emperor, says Lucien, he was too much in
retirement to be able to judge equally well. But Lucien was not a fair
representative of the Bonapartists; indeed he had never really thought
well of his brother or of his actions since Lucien, the former "Brutus"
Bonaparte, had ceased to be the adviser of the Consul. It was well for
Lucien himself to amass a fortune from the presents of a corrupt court,
and to be made a Prince and Duke by the Pope, but he was too sincere a
republican not to disapprove of the imperial system. The real
Bonapartists were naturally and inevitably furious with the Memoirs.
They were not true, they were not the work of Bourrienne, Bourrienne
himself was a traitor, a purloiner of manuscripts, his memory was as bad
as his principles, he was not even entitled to the de before his name.
If the Memoirs were at all to be pardoned, it was because his share was
only really a few notes wrung from him by large pecuniary offers at a
time when he was pursued by his creditors, and when his brain was already
affected.

The Bonapartist attack on the Memoirs was delivered in full form, in two
volumes, 'Bourrienne et ses Erreurs, Volontaires et Involontaires'
(Paris, Heideloff, 1830), edited by the Comte d'Aure, the Ordonnateur en
Chef of the Egyptian expedition, and containing communications from
Joseph Bonaparte, Gourgaud, Stein, etc.'

--[In the notes in this present edition these volumes are referred
to in brief 'Erreurs'.]--

Part of the system of attack was to call in question the authenticity of
the Memoirs, and this was the more easy as Bourrienne, losing his
fortune, died in 1834 in a state of imbecility. But this plan is not
systematically followed, and the very reproaches addressed to the writer
of the Memoirs often show that it was believed they were really written
by Bourrienne. They undoubtedly contain plenty of faults. The editor
(Villemarest, it is said) probably had a large share in the work, and
Bourrienne must have forgotten or misplaced many dates and occurrences.
In such a work, undertaken so many years after the events, it was
inevitable that many errors should be made, and that many statements
should be at least debatable. But on close investigation the work stands
the attack in a way that would be impossible unless it had really been
written by a person in the peculiar position occupied by Bourrienne. He
has assuredly not exaggerated that position: he really, says Lucien
Bonaparte, treated as equal with equal with Napoleon during a part of his
career, and he certainly was the nearest friend and confidant that
Napoleon ever had in his life.

Where he fails, or where the Bonapartist fire is most telling, is in the
account of the Egyptian expedition. It may seem odd that he should have
forgotten, even in some thirty years, details such as the way in which
the sick were removed; but such matters were not in his province; and it
would be easy to match similar omissions in other works, such as the
accounts of the Crimea, and still more of the Peninsula. It is with his
personal relations with Napoleon that we are most concerned, and it is in
them that his account receives most corroboration.

It may be interesting to see what has been said of the Memoirs by other
writers. We have quoted Metternich, and Lucien Bonaparte; let us hear
Meneval, his successor, who remained faithful to his master to the end:
"Absolute confidence cannot be given to statements contained in Memoirs
published under the name of a man who has not composed them. It is known
that the editor of these Memoirs offered to M. de Bourrienne, who had
then taken refuge in Holstein from his creditors, a sum said to be thirty
thousand francs to obtain his signature to them, with some notes and
addenda. M. de Bourrienne was already attacked by the disease from which
he died a few years latter in a maison de sante at Caen. Many literary
men co-operated in the preparation of his Memoirs. In 1825 I met M. de
Bourrienne in Paris. He told me it had been suggested to him to write
against the Emperor. 'Notwithstanding the harm he has done me,' said he,
'I would never do so. Sooner may my hand be withered.' If M. de
Bourrienne had prepared his Memoirs himself, he would not have stated
that while he was the Emperor's minister at Hamburg he worked with the
agents of the Comte de Lille (Louis XVIII.) at the preparation of
proclamations in favour of that Prince, and that in 1814 he accepted the
thanks of the King, Louis XVIII., for doing so; he would not have said
that Napoleon had confided to him in 1805 that he had never conceived the
idea of an expedition into England, and that the plan of a landing, the
preparations for which he gave such publicity to, was only a snare to
amuse fools. The Emperor well knew that never was there a plan more
seriously conceived or more positively settled. M. de Bourrienne would
not have spoken of his private interviews with Napoleon, nor of the
alleged confidences entrusted to him, while really Napoleon had no longer
received him after the 20th October 1802. When the Emperor, in 1805,
forgetting his faults, named him Minister Plenipotentiary at Hamburg, he
granted him the customary audience, but to this favour he did not add the
return of his former friendship. Both before and afterwards he
constantly refused to receive him, and he did not correspond with him
"(Meneval, ii. 378-79). And in another passage Meneval says: "Besides,
it would be wrong to regard these Memoirs as the work of the man whose
name they bear. The bitter resentment M. de Bourrienne had nourished for
his disgrace, the enfeeblement of his faculties, and the poverty he was
reduced to, rendered him accessible to the pecuniary offers made to him.
He consented to give the authority of his name to Memoirs in whose
composition he had only co-operated by incomplete, confused, and often
inexact notes, materials which an editor was employed to put in order."
And Meneval (iii. 29-30) goes on to quote what he himself had written in
the Spectateur Militaire, in which he makes much the same assertions, and
especially objects to the account of conversations with the Emperor after
1802, except always the one audience on taking leave for Hamburg.
Meneval also says that Napoleon, when he wished to obtain intelligence
from Hamburg, did not correspond with Bourrienne, but deputed him,
Meneval, to ask Bourrienne for what was wanted. But he corroborates
Bourrienne on the subject of the efforts made, among others by Josephine,
for his reappointment.

Such are the statements of the Bonaparists pure; and the reader, as has
been said, can judge for himself how far the attack is good. Bourrienne,
or his editor, may well have confused the date of his interviews, but he
will not be found much astray on many points. His account of the
conversation of Josephine after the death of the Due d'Eughien may be
compared with what we know from Madame de Remusat, who, by the way, would
have been horrified if she had known that he considered her to resemble
the Empress Josephine in character.

We now come to the views of Savary, the Due de Rovigo, who avowedly
remained on good terms with Bourrienne after his disgrace, though the
friendship of Savary was not exactly a thing that most men would have
much prided themselves on. "Bourrienne had a prodigious memory; he spoke
and wrote in several languages, and his pen ran as quickly as one could
speak. Nor were these the only advantages he possessed. He knew the
routine of public business and public law. His activity and devotion
made him indispensable to the First Consul. I knew the qualities which
won for him the unlimited confidence of his chief, but I cannot speak
with the same assurance of the faults which made him lose it. Bourrienne
had many enemies, both on account of his character and of his place"
(Savary, i. 418-19).

Marmont ought to be an impartial critic of the Memoirs. He says,
"Bourrienne . . . had a very great capacity, but he is a striking
example of the great truth that our passions are always bad counsellors.
By inspiring us with an immoderate ardour to reach a fixed end, they
often make us miss it. Bourrienne had an immoderate love of money. With
his talents and his position near Bonaparte at the first dawn of
greatness, with the confidence and real good-will which Bonaparte felt
for him, in a few years he would have gained everything in fortune and in
social position. But his eager impatience mined his career at the moment
when it might have developed and increased" (Marmont, i. 64). The
criticism appears just. As to the Memoirs, Marmont says (ii. 224), "In
general, these Memoirs are of great veracity and powerful interest so
long as they treat of what the author has seen and heard; but when he
speaks of others, his work is only an assemblage of gratuitous
suppositions and of false facts put forward for special purposes."

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