555
pages, Charles Scribner’s Sons, ISBN-13: 978-0025178106
Napoleon
and Josephine, the self-crowned emperor and empress of France, exerts a certain
timeless fascination. Married two years after both had been imprisoned in the
upheaval of 1794 – she as an aristocrat, he as a Robespierren – they rose to
the well-known dizzying heights. Carried on frequently by letter, their
marriage was accentuated by volatile swings of endearment and hate. In Napoleon and Josephine: An Improbable
Marriage, Evangeline Bruce attempts to delve into Josephine and Napoleon’s
lesser-known private relations. Alas, if you are seeking a disinterested
chronicle of a most interesting couple you must look elsewhere, as Bruce’s book
could have been written during the Bourbon Restoration, being, as it is, a
compendium of all kinds of Royalist gossip and slander ever written against
Napoleon and his Italian family, whereas Josephine and her French family are
always treated fairly and sympathetically.
Bruce
sees Napoleon as a natural born monster: cynical, unscrupulous, ambitious,
calculating, tyrannical and a bloodthirsty warmonger – in short, the Corsican
Ogre, that famous boogeyman invented by French and English Royalists to
extinguish all trace of the Revolution which, according to them, was embodied
by that single man. She denies him any patriotism, idealism, or real merit,
attributing his military successes to his marshals and his political ones to
his “incredible luck”. Josephine, on the other hand, is the destitute brave
mother of two children who survived the Revolution’s Terror, caught the eye of
the Ogre and, thanks to her sweetness, delicacy and femininity that only a lady
of noble stock can provide, succeeded to make something of a human being of
that Ogre, but ended up as martyr when he put her aside to marry another woman
(and a foreign one at that).
There
is hardly one paragraph in this whole lampoon without some unpleasant remark on
any of Napoleon’s acts. Everything he does is distorted by a maligned bias. No
word he ever utters is sincere. Even his most generous attitudes are not to be
trusted. For Bruce, it seems, everything Napoleon’s enemies tell is true, like when
Talleyrand – you know, whom Napoleon said was “shit in a silk stocking” – says
that that the Emperor was “fascinated by himself”, or when Metternich declared
that Napoleon said that he would “drag down the whole of society in his fall”. All
the guilty ones of betrayal towards him are acquitted, like treacherous
Bernadotte, depicted by Bruce as opposing his benefactor out of true republican
feeling and as “elected” for the Swedish throne, although even the rocks in
Sweden know that this French marshal owed that throne exclusively to Napoleon.
It
is far from surprising the author’s deliberate omission of everything that
could account for Napoleon’s well-deserved fame of administrative genius as
well as a military one. Considering him nothing but an usurper, out of sheer
intellectual dishonesty Bruce simply omits the fact that the immense majority
of the French elected Napoleon their Consul, as well as their Emperor through a
referendum, which made him, in the democratic sense, the only legitimate
monarch of his time in all Europe. Bruce doesn't mention that First Consul
Bonaparte found the country bankrupt by the Directory and that he put finances
in order. She wouldn’t dream on mentioning his improvements in the education system,
his protection of the labor classes, or that salaries in France were high as
never before, limit. Bruce ignores Napoleon’s sane and balanced financial policy
to say, rather deliriously, “War became France’s almost sole industry”. And, of
course, she blames him for all the wars, although the whole world knows that
the English government, which ultimately benefited from them, pushed for war
relentlessly.
Bruce does describe in a lively manner a few
aspects of Revolutionary France, as well as some picturesque episodes concerning
French salons, people’s clothes and house decorations. But for that she seldom
quotes her sources, and, given her general untrustworthiness and incredible
prejudices against the main character and his family, there’s no way to know if
any description comes from historical fact or her own fanciful imagination.
Even when she does indicate her sources at the end of the book, she won't give
the chapter, making it difficult for us to go check the quotations for
ourselves. There is only one recommendable thing in this whole 555 page book,
which are its 32 pages of black and white pictures, untouched by the author’s
fantasy and prejudices. That’s not saying much.
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