Napoleon Wrote the Best Political Memoir
This week the world will mark the bicentenary of the mother of all battles, Waterloo. On June 18, 1815, the destiny of Europe, and much of the rest of the world, was hashed out. The monarchies of Europe, stretching from London to Moscow, had combined forces to defeat France, whose leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, had returned to power following a brief exile on the island of Elba. The battle spelled the ultimate defeat of Napoleon and quashed the prospect of a continent under French dominion. But the blood spilled that day—nearly 60,000 soldiers died—also guaranteed the survival of the revolutionary ideals that Napoleon either channeled—such as equality—or dammed up, like liberty. In a chapter of Les Misèrables that Russell Crowe never got to croon, Victor Hugo rightly noted that Waterloo “was the hinge of the nineteenth century. A great man had to disappear in order that a great century be born.”
That great man also had to disappear so that the mother of all political memoirs could be born: The Memorial of Saint Helena. Thanks to Napoleon’s brilliant effort at reinvention, the book transformed a man who had been reviled as a bloody minded despot who had buried the French Revolution and enslaved Europe into a fair-minded constitutionalist who had saved the Revolution and liberated Europe’s peoples. Published in 1823, the Memorial rocketed to the top of the century’s list of bestsellers. In fact, “bestseller” hardly does justice to the impact of a book containing the exiled emperor’s final reflections and souvenirs. Rather like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings a century before, the Memorial shaped the worldview of several generations of readers. The Napoleonic legend haunts the 19th century novels of Stendhal, whose hero Julien Sorel lives his life according to Napoleon’s maxims, and Balzac, on whose desk sat a bust of the emperor, the base emblazoned with the words “All that he did with a sword, I will accomplish with a pen.” It also hovers over Charles de Gaulle in the 20th century, whose political accomplishments were conceived by both his admirers and antagonists as thoroughly Bonapartist.
No less a fan of Napoleon than Friedrich Nietzsche described the Memorial as a book “whose branches will reach beyond this century as trees that do not have their roots in it.” Our own age, overrun by a weed-like rash of political memoirs, would benefit from a walk around the massive trunk of the Memorial. In particular, political has-beens who have yet to rewrite their pasts with their eyes firmly on the future might take away a few lessons before they set fingers to their keyboards.
1. Find a suitable place to write your memoir, preferably an isolated lump of volcanic rock in the South Atlantic.
Saint Helena, for example. Unlike a California mansion equipped with a garage elevator, a rat and termite infested bungalow continuously wrapped in mist will not only give you time to reflect, as well as arthritis, but will also give you a world that will eventually turns its eyes to you. (Napoleon’s residence on the island, Longwood, eventually collapsed from termite activity, while a rat once startled him by leaping out of his hat as he put it on.) The British rationale for carting Napoleon off to Saint Helena was, well, too British. As the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, harrumphed: “At such a place and such a distance, all intrigue would be impossible; and, being so far from the European world, Napoleon would soon be forgotten.”
Rarely have sillier words ever been spoken. Britain, which brought Napoleon to his knees not by flair and finesse, but instead by phlegm and foreign allies, failed to see they had created the perfect stage for Napoleon’s martyrdom. I have worn many crowns, he told a visitor in 1817, but the most glorious is the “crown of thorns England has given me.” A bit overwrought, perhaps, but thanks to his memoir, pretty much accurate. Napoleon’s new destiny, as one of his followers declared, began with his exile: “The gaze of the world would now be upon us.” And it was true: Nothing could match the romance of the banished, but unbowed emperor. Just think if he had accepted his brother Joseph’s offer, following his retreat from Waterloo, to exchange identities. (The two brothers bore a slight physical resemblance.) Rather than ending up on Saint Helena, he would finished his days, as did his brother, in that most un-Nietzschean of places: Bordentown, New Jersey.
2. Find a ghostwriter who wishes to be paid in the coin of glory.
As a glance at most political memoirs makes painfully clear, most ghostwriters are hired guns with little skin or conviction in the game. Triangulation and bloviation might make electoral sense, but they are toxic to storytelling. Think of it this way: While Hillary’s “book team” for Hard Choices was no doubt happy to meet with her in order to hash out the text, would they have volunteered to spend the rest of their lives in exile with her in Westchester County?
Yet this is precisely what Emmanuel de Las Cases did in 1815. Though born a French aristocrat who had served under the Bourbons, Las Cases offered his services to Napoleon after the emperor’s stunning victory at Austerlitz in 1805. How could he not? “I was vanquished by glory. I admired, I recognized, I loved Napoleon, and at that moment I became fanatically French.” As a result, when Napoleon surrendered to the British, Las Cases volunteered to join him at Saint Helena. (For the record, he also volunteered his 13-year old son.) During the year he spent on the island with the former emperor, Las Cases persuaded Napoleon that writing his life was, like war, politics by other means. With Napoleon’s agreement, Las Cases (with his son’s help) jotted down their conversations, which Napoleon would reread and annotate. (Like another warrior, statesman and memoirist, Winston Churchill, Napoleon sometimes dictated from the bathtub, where he could spend hours.)
After Las Cases was bundled off the island—he proved to be a royal pain in the ass to his jailors—he spent the next several years wandering the continent and writing up his material, transforming Napoleon from the tyrant who drained France of its blood and resources into the liberator who sacrificed his freedom and life on behalf of the French nation “he loved so much.” Cast at times in dialogue form, the book is a true collaboration. In fact, had it not been for Las Cases’ prodding, Napoleon might well have spent his last years cursing his captors and growing fat—both of which he did, anyway.
3. Brush up on your Roman and Greek epics.
As a child, Napoleon devoured the works of Roman historians and moralists like Plutarch, Livy, Sallust, and committed to memory long passages from Virgil’s Aeneid. As an exile, his nighttime reading was Homer’s Odyssey. There was also the usual run of French classics like Corneille and Racine, All of these works—from the ancient to the contemporary—had but one theme: the heroic pursuit of glory. Napoleon’s greatness is founded not only on the fact that he made all men (though not women) equal before the law, but that he made all men think they were capable of achieving glory. For those who aspire to political office today, they might keep in mind Napoleon’s scorn for an aristocracy based on wealth: “I do not see in wealth any entitlement to consideration or political distinction … wealth is today the fruit of theft.”
When he remarked that men are ruled by baubles, Napoleon nailed not the triteness of human nature, but instead its potential grandeur: We thirst for grandeur, he believed, not a grab-bag of toys. In Napoleon’s case, this is even truer when the material for greatness is nowhere to be found. The Memorial commemorates not just his victories on the fields of war such as Austerlitz and Marengo and halls of power like his Concordat and Civil Code, but also his triumphs on the grounds of his Longwood residence over his jailor Sir Hudson Lowe. Napoleon transforms a series of skirmishes with the petty and mean-spirited Lowe over trivial matters into a struggle of epic proportions. Arguments over the quality of butter he could order, or the official title he should expect—Napoleon held fast to “emperor,” while Lowe refused to go any higher than “general”—spurred Napoleon’s imagination to heroic heights. “Dignity in misfortune and submission to necessity,” Napoleon told Las Cases, “have their glory too; it is that of great men felled by the ills of fortune.”
4. See your life as a novel.
One day soon after their arrival on Saint Helena, Napoleon and Las Cases were discussing European politics. Resting his head on one hand, the former emperor paused, then exclaimed: “What a novel my life has been.” He was right, but also wrong. Yes, the epic nature of his life still overwhelms us. Rising from obscure Corsican origins to mastery of most of Europe by the time he turned 35, Napoleon left an indelible mark on the political institutions and ideologies, as well as the literary and moral imagination of Europe.
Yet, if his life was a novel, it is because he saw and shaped it as such. Oscar Wilde’s quip—“Any one can make history, only a great man can write it”—applies even to Boney. His life provided the stuff for a remarkable novel, but it still had to be heaved into a narrative. As Napoleon told a subordinate: “The historian like the orator must persuade, he must convince.” The grounding in the classics, rather than the grinding of focus group data like politicians do today, was essential. The mythic beginnings of U.S. leaders tend to be log cabins. Napoleon’s beginnings are no less rustic, but of a different order. As he told Las Cases, his mother was on her way to mass when she rushed back home to give birth. Unable to reach the bedroom in time, “she gave birth to the child on one of those antique carpets depicting great figures, heroes of fables or the Iliad: c’était Napoleon.” It was Napoleon, indeed.
In My Life, Bill Clinton seems to understand the literary sense of beginnings in his vivid depiction of his birth and his father’s death in a roadside ditch outside of Hope, Arkansas. C’était Bill, in effect. Sarah Palin offered a different riff on mythic origins. In Going Rogue, she begins, like Homer, in media res: We see the governor, smack in the middle of the Alaska State Fair grounds, carrying Trig in one arm, greeting her fellow Alaskans with the other. Not unlike Odysseus returning to ancient Ithaca, if you set aside the Hummers and NRA booths, and ignore the reminder that, as Napoleon observed in his memoir, there is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
5. History is written by the losers, too.
While the phrase “History is written by the victors” is sometimes attributed to Napoleon, his fall from power and exile to Saint Helena also proves the opposite. No doubt many of our own ex-leaders will find comfort in this, but let them beware. If history, as Napoleon told Las Cases, is nothing more than an agreed-upon myth, even myths, particularly in our own era of social media, require a core of truth. Come June 18, we might recall that though many of Memorial’s claims give revisionism a bad name—Napoleon’s insistence, for example, that he planned to become a constitutional monarch—the memoir rightly dwells on its author’s remarkable accomplishments: He rescued what was best from the French Revolution—the principles of equality before the law, religious toleration, individual merit and recognition of merit—and thus prepared the ground for many of the hallmarks of modern democracy. No less important, at least for those who seek power, Napoleon showed, through his Memorial, how to rescue one’s image. As Las Cases wrote about his subject’s birth, so too can we say about his life and his afterlife: It was Napoleon.