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Page 5
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
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.
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