If you follow me on any other platform, you know I recently finished Napoleon by Andrew Roberts. I’m an avowed Ridley Scott epic period drama fan and I thought of picking up a biography of the Emperor in anticipation of his film coming out in November.
The book moved like a rocket, buttressed by robust primary source research and my own ignorance of early 19th century geopolitical relations that compelled me to keep reading. Roberts has a clear angle in his coverage of Napoleon—the politically conservative, Cambridge grad comes close to hero-worship of Napoleon, attempting to provide “of his time” context to many of Napoleon’s worst traits. But I found it easy enough to draw my own conclusions about Napoleon, especially as reading anything about him sent me on little side quests of research about aspects of his life or his time, reading beyond Roberts’ glorifying view. One of those side quests was exploring just how often Napoleon intersects with the history of romance.
In my Mike Leigh historical setting letter, I said that Napoleon haunts British-set historical romance. Waterloo disables heroes, the Corn Laws are a way for a bluestocking to show off progressive values, the vague threat of war can increase the stakes for landed characters in a Regency. But Napoleon is not all that present. He literally shows up in Stormfire by Christine Monson and it is jarring! An immediate goal of mine now is to seek out more romances where Napoleon is a character or books set in France during the Napoleonic wars.1
A big biography with a keen focus on military campaigns felt like a break from historical romance, but I find romance touches everything, at least everything I’d be compelled by and the first emperor of France is no exception. Napoleon wrote a romance, wrote romantically, was the subject of a best selling historical novel that focused his earliest romance and then is the catalyst for so many conflicts in modern era historical romance.2 In this part, I’m looking at the first two subjects: Napoleon as romance and romantic writer.
Napoleon’s romance
As an interlude while reading the 800 page biography of Napoleon, I read Clisson and Eugénie, the tragic romance that Napoleon wrote as a soldier. The book got some news coverage in 2009 when it was translated into English as a whole work for the first time. The linked Guardian article manages to duplicate some of the sexism (“Napoleon turned to literature, or at least an early precursor of chick-lit…”) that Napoleon had against novels, even just a few years after he wrote Clisson and Eugénie.
“He later discovered from his librarian that his senior officers were mostly reading novels. (They had started out gambling, until ‘everyone’s money soon found itself in a few pockets, never to come out again’.) He pronounced that novels were ‘for ladies’ maids’ and ordered the librarian, ‘Only give them history books. Men should read nothing else.’ He was apparently overlooking the forty novels, including English ones in French translation, he himself had brought out.
Napoleon, Andrew Roberts
Clisson and Eugénie had to be constructed from a manuscript scattered after Napoleon’s death, so the experience of reading even the unified story in translation is disjointed.3 The romance happens quickly and suddenly, without much explanation of changes in characters’ feelings or dispositions. Written apparently in late 1795, between the ending of his “engagement” to Désirée Clary and prior to his affair to Josephine Beauharnais and at a moment when Napoleon’s military precociousness did not guarantee military greatness, it is also hard not to read an autobiographical tilt to the plot.
The story itself is not particularly compelling, though the fragmented sensation of reading something reconstituted doesn’t help. Clisson is a precocious young soldier, who meets Eugenie and her cousin Amelia at a spa. He is first taken with more outgoing Amelia, but then something awakes in him after Eugénie interrupts someone to ask a question about Clisson.4 Which feels like a very Napoleonic reason to fall in love with someone.
They settle into domestic bliss, have children, until precocious military wunderkind Clisson is needed by France again. He is taken away from Eugénie for years, and she writes to him of her nightmares of their relationship’s downfall. In his anxiety over her distress, Clisson sends a friend, Breville, to check on his wife and children. The loving letters from Eugenie stop (a prescient parallel to Josephine’s method of distance just a few years later) and the friend’s letters become perfunctory. Breville and Eugenie have fallen in love themselves. Clisson sees the writing on the wall, sends a suicide note to Eugenie, and throws himself to the front lines, committing suicide by battalion.
While there isn’t much there there to the plot, which takes place over all of seventeen printed pages, Napoleon’s prose is at times arresting. This may just be me being impressed with the 18th century language of any writer, but my favorite parts of Roberts’ biography were when he quoted Napoleon’s letters at length, so I’m not surprised that I was occasionally moved by his turns of phrase even in a hacky romance.
“Clisson was surprised to find himself enchanted by the sights he saw. The birth and the close of day, the course of the evening star as it cast its silvery light over copse and field, the changing seasons, the varying vistas, the concerts of birdsong, the murmuring waters — everything struck him as if he were seeing it for the first time. And yet he was looking at things he had seen a thousand times before without ever having been affected in this way. How miserable he had been in his previous life.”
I also laughed at the details Napoleon chooses to include, particularly of his leading man attempting to flirt and socialize: “A man of his fervent imagination, with his blazing heart, his uncompromising intellect and his cool head, was bound to be irritated by the affected conversation of coquettes, the games of seduction, the logic of the tables and the hurling of witty insults. He could not see the point in scheming and did not appreciate wordplay.” This description of our hero was particularly funny given the number of times that Roberts relates Napoleon’s “attempts” as puns in the biography.
I laughed at loud this quotation, for reasons that I can barely hope to explain: “He gazed with interest at the beauty of the women and their dresses, mostly made of linen.” The image of Napoleon, disillusioned soldier, worried about his family’s mulberry farm on Corsica (a frequent source of anxiety during his early military days) drafting and redrafting this not very good romance and thinking “better let them know what the dresses are made of” just delighted me.
romantic Napoleon
Clisson and Eugénie would be considered a romance in the 18th century mode of Sir Walter Scott, despite its tragic ending. But the better known “romance” writings of Napoleon’s life are his letters to his first wife, Josephine, though there is also tragedy baked in their story as well. I’m not being dramatic when I saw reading these excerpts in the biography frequently made me want to run through a wall.
“Adieu, woman, torment, joy, hope and soul of my life, whom I love, whom I fear, who inspires in me tender feelings which summon up Nature and emotions as impetuous and volcanic as thunder”
I think the first thing I knew about Napoleon and Josephine was his distaste for her habit of addressing him as “vous,” rather than the familiar form of the second-person pronoun.5 The letter that that quote comes from is representative how just how many nuggets of romance novel hero genuflecting Napoleon does to his first wife.
I have not spent a day without loving you; I have not spent a night without clasping you in my arms; I have not drunk a cup of tea without cursing the glory and ambition which keep me from the heart of my very being.
‘Vous’ yourself! Ah! Wretched woman, how could you have written this letter? It is so cold. And then there are those four days between the 23rd and the 26th; what were you doing? Because you were not writing to your husband. … Ah, my love, that ‘Vous’ and those four days make me long for my former indifference.
The day when you say “I love you less”, will either be the end of my love or the last day of my life.
My soldiers are showing inexpressible confidence in me; you alone are a source of chagrin to me; you alone are the joy and torment of my life.
Woman!!!
This letter was written when they had not been married a month, and though Josephine had not yet met Hippolyte Charles, her long time lover who she would bring with her (!) when she did finally follow Napoleon on his northern Italian campaign, she soon would. Josephine wrote of Charles: “I think that there is no one in the world who arranges a more perfect cravat.” Her reactions to Napoleon’s devotion were famously led tepid than mine (I’m running through a wall, she’s running to toward the man with the perfect cravat. But also, I don’t have to be married to Napoleon. Boon for me.)
Much is made of the watershed moment in Napoleon and Josephine’s marriage when he chooses to forgive her for the years long affair Charles, seemingly on the condition of her total faithfulness and his apparent freedom to conduct his own affairs, given the documentation of those two realities after 1799. Napoleon, who was once the devoted romantic, looking up at Josephine on the pedestal, now has the upper hand in their marriage for the first time. This is a neat conclusion that aligns with the narrative arc of Napoleon political moves at the time. The turn of the 19th century is when Napoleon goes pivots on his path from republican soldier to imperial authoritarian.
I’m not interested in coming to a conclusion about Napoleon’s character (I’m just some guy), but I do know that he is not a romance hero. Not because he was a dictator, or because he abandoned all his republican values, and not even because he divorced his wife for dynastic purposes (you have to read Andrea Stuart’s biography of Josephine, The Rose of Martinique to get much of the pathos of this scene in their lives. Roberts is largely uninterested in the mechanics of Josephine and Napoleon’s relationship). To state the obvious, he can’t actually be a romance novel hero because he’s a real person and the long narrative arc of his life isn’t really an arc at all, it’s just a life, like anybody else’s.
Except when he was a historical romance hero, of course.
The next part in this project will look at Désirée, the historical novel by Annamarie Selinko, where the heroine and first-person narrator is Napoleon’s first love, and future Queen of Sweden, Désirée Clary.
Though my first two romances after I finished the Napoleon biography were two Mary Balogh Waterloo books with English heroes (more on Balogh’s Web trilogy to come!)
Both fictions that I am referencing are not romance novels—Napoleon’s romance is a romance as opposed to a novel in the 18th century way, and Désirée is a historical fiction that focuses on romantic plots, but clearly does not have an HEA for our romantic leads. Just covering my genre definition bases.
In the 2009 English translation, Peter Hicks (translator) connects Clisson and Eugenie to a few 18th century literary traditions: epistolary novels, reverie scenes and the pastoral. The letters between Clisson and Eugenie during their separation are quoted in the text and are important to the plot, as are Eugenie’s prophetic dreams about the downfall of the relationship. The pastoral elements set the philosophical tone of the story, though the pastoral setting is a domesticated pastoralism--Clisson’s contemplation happens while wandering around the lands of a friend who is throwing a party, and then later, while considering the outdoors in a spa town.
The literary connections reflect how well Napoleon was and his interest in imitating authors that he did read.
I do love the idea of Napoleon thinking that this is the most romantic gesture a woman can perform.
I was trying to remember where I first heard this because it feels like something I deeply, deeply always knew. And then I remembered—it was this book that I bought at a Anthropologie in 2004 in the suburbs of Philadelphia and I absolutely pored over. I need to do an investigation into how this singular book and also Teen Vogue shaped my entire theory of femininity as an early teen.
i’m tempted to read this biography if only so i’ll understand mary balogh books more
I have some exciting news for Bonaparte fanatics. Napoleon's older brother Joseph had an estate here in NJ, and it's recently been reopened to the public after almost 200 years. https://njmonthly.com/articles/news/former-bonaparte-estate-opening-to-public-after-almost-two-centuries/
I'm sure I've read a couple of romances where Napoleon made a cameo appearance, but I can't think of which ones they are right now. Plus dozens that feature the battle of Waterloo.