Books: NAPOLEON’S MEMOIRS

Man of Logic

NAPOLEON’S MEMOIRS [605 pp.) —Edited by Somerset de Chair—Harper ($7.50).

“I have been severely scolded today over my laziness,” said the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte to his companions one dinnertime at St. Helena. “I am therefore going to start work again [dictating my memoirs].”

Thereafter, for close on five years, Napoleon dictated. The final but still incomplete result was seven unorganized volumes about everything under the sun (including nine chapters on Frederick the Great). It was no wonder that the only English translation went out of print after 1823, and that until 1950 no U.S. edition was ever published.

“Protection” for Parma. Britain’s Somerset de Chair, onetime M.P. and officer in the Royal Horse Guards, has edited and organized the Napoleonic hodgepodge. Pruned of its grossest irrelevancies and chronologically reassembled, the Memoirs now sweep the reader in a hedgehopping rush from Author Napoleon’s small start in Corsica to his triumph at Marengo (1800), then make a 15-year leap to his return from Elba and his downfall at Waterloo. Still lacking (because Napoleon never lived to write them) are accounts of his imperial heyday, his victories at Jena and Austerlitz, the disastrous Russian campaign.

There is fascination and topical interest in Napoleon’s hodgepodge. Back of every chapter lies the self-portrait of a dictator who, like his successors of the present century, made the so-called “logic” of a situation his only criterion of right & wrong. His smug account of an episode during his conquest of Italy:

“On entering the states of Parma, I.received . . . envoys . . . requesting peace and my protection. The Duke of Parma was of no political importance; the seizure of his states could be of no advantage. I left him in possession of the government, imposing on him … all the sacrifices of which his states were capable … It was on this occasion that I imposed a contribution of works of art for the Museum at Paris; being the first instance of the kind that occurs in modern history. Parma furnished twenty pictures chosen by the French Commissioners, amongst which was the famous Saint Jerome [by Correggio]. The duke offered two millions to be allowed to keep this picture.” But Napoleon ruled that it would be “ornamental” to his capital.*

“Blundering” British. In Napoleon’s view, of course, it was the “logic” of France’s condition, not his own ambition, that made him a dictator. “Lamentable weakness” on the part of their rulers had filled Frenchmen with such profound “uneasiness” that they inevitably picked him as the man who could “save [society] from destruction.” The best chapter in the Memoirs is devoted to the cunning, diplomacy and brute force employed by Napoleon in making quite sure that the inevitable occurred.

Napoleon remained a logician, in his fashion, to the bitter end. Searching the past from St. Helena, he found a marvelously neat reason for his defeat at Waterloo. He attributed it largely to the stupidity of the Duke of Wellington, who selected a battlefield from which it was impossible to effect a retreat. Hence, Wellington & Co. had no option but to go on holding the field even after they had lost it. “Oh, strange irony of human affairs!” murmurs the exiled logician as he looks back on the blundering British.

*Six years later, in 1802, Napoleon decided to provide Paris with another ornament: a colossal statue of himself done in classical style. Paris, as it turned out, had only a relatively short time to admire it. After Waterloo, the statue caught the sardonic eye of the Duke of Wellington. Presently the statue was installed in Apsley House, London residence of the duke, where it stands to this day.