Louis Bourrienne - Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete

The Bonapartist attack on the Memoirs was delivered in full form, in two volumes, 'Bourrienne et ses Erreurs, Volontaires et Involontaires' (Paris, Heideloff, 1830), edited by the Comte d'Aure, the Ordonnateur en Chef of the Egyptian expedition, and containing communications from Joseph Bonaparte, Gourgaud, Stein, etc.'

—[In the notes in this present edition these volumes are referred to in brief 'Erreurs'.]—

Part of the system of attack was to call in question the authenticity of the Memoirs, and this was the more easy as Bourrienne, losing his fortune, died in 1834 in a state of imbecility. But this plan is not systematically followed, and the very reproaches addressed to the writer of the Memoirs often show that it was believed they were really written by Bourrienne. They undoubtedly contain plenty of faults. The editor (Villemarest, it is said) probably had a large share in the work, and Bourrienne must have forgotten or misplaced many dates and occurrences. In such a work, undertaken so many years after the events, it was inevitable that many errors should be made, and that many statements should be at least debatable. But on close investigation the work stands the attack in a way that would be impossible unless it had really been written by a person in the peculiar position occupied by Bourrienne. He has assuredly not exaggerated that position: he really, says Lucien Bonaparte, treated as equal with equal with Napoleon during a part of his career, and he certainly was the nearest friend and confidant that Napoleon ever had in his life.

Where he fails, or where the Bonapartist fire is most telling, is in the account of the Egyptian expedition. It may seem odd that he should have forgotten, even in some thirty years, details such as the way in which the sick were removed; but such matters were not in his province; and it would be easy to match similar omissions in other works, such as the accounts of the Crimea, and still more of the Peninsula. It is with his personal relations with Napoleon that we are most concerned, and it is in them that his account receives most corroboration.

It may be interesting to see what has been said of the Memoirs by other writers. We have quoted Metternich, and Lucien Bonaparte; let us hear Meneval, his successor, who remained faithful to his master to the end: "Absolute confidence cannot be given to statements contained in Memoirs published under the name of a man who has not composed them. It is known that the editor of these Memoirs offered to M. de Bourrienne, who had then taken refuge in Holstein from his creditors, a sum said to be thirty thousand francs to obtain his signature to them, with some notes and addenda. M. de Bourrienne was already attacked by the disease from which he died a few years latter in a maison de sante at Caen. Many literary men co-operated in the preparation of his Memoirs. In 1825 I met M. de Bourrienne in Paris. He told me it had been suggested to him to write against the Emperor. 'Notwithstanding the harm he has done me,' said he, 'I would never do so. Sooner may my hand be withered.' If M. de Bourrienne had prepared his Memoirs himself, he would not have stated that while he was the Emperor's minister at Hamburg he worked with the agents of the Comte de Lille (Louis XVIII.) at the preparation of proclamations in favour of that Prince, and that in 1814 he accepted the thanks of the King, Louis XVIII., for doing so; he would not have said that Napoleon had confided to him in 1805 that he had never conceived the idea of an expedition into England, and that the plan of a landing, the preparations for which he gave such publicity to, was only a snare to amuse fools. The Emperor well knew that never was there a plan more seriously conceived or more positively settled. M. de Bourrienne would not have spoken of his private interviews with Napoleon, nor of the alleged confidences entrusted to him, while really Napoleon had no longer received him after the 20th October 1802. When the Emperor, in 1805, forgetting his faults, named him Minister Plenipotentiary at Hamburg, he granted him the customary audience, but to this favour he did not add the return of his former friendship. Both before and afterwards he constantly refused to receive him, and he did not correspond with him." (Meneval, ii. 378-79). And in another passage Meneval says: "Besides, it would be wrong to regard these Memoirs as the work of the man whose name they bear. The bitter resentment M. de Bourrienne had nourished for his disgrace, the enfeeblement of his faculties, and the poverty he was reduced to, rendered him accessible to the pecuniary offers made to him. He consented to give the authority of his name to Memoirs in whose composition he had only co-operated by incomplete, confused, and often inexact notes, materials which an editor was employed to put in order." And Meneval (iii. 29-30) goes on to quote what he himself had written in the Spectateur Militaire, in which he makes much the same assertions, and especially objects to the account of conversations with the Emperor after 1802, except always the one audience on taking leave for Hamburg. Meneval also says that Napoleon, when he wished to obtain intelligence from Hamburg, did not correspond with Bourrienne, but deputed him, Meneval, to ask Bourrienne for what was wanted. But he corroborates Bourrienne on the subject of the efforts made, among others by Josephine, for his reappointment.

Such are the statements of the Bonapartists pure; and the reader, as has been said, can judge for himself how far the attack is good. Bourrienne, or his editor, may well have confused the date of his interviews, but he will not be found much astray on many points. His account of the conversation of Josephine after the death of the Duc d'Enghien may be compared with what we know from Madame de Rémusat, who, by the way, would have been horrified if she had known that he considered her to resemble the Empress Josephine in character.

We now come to the views of Savary, the Duc de Rovigo, who avowedly remained on good terms with Bourrienne after his disgrace, though the friendship of Savary was not exactly a thing that most men would have much prided themselves on. "Bourrienne had a prodigious memory; he spoke and wrote in several languages, and his pen ran as quickly as one could speak. Nor were these the only advantages he possessed. He knew the routine of public business and public law. His activity and devotion made him indispensable to the First Consul. I knew the qualities which won for him the unlimited confidence of his chief, but I cannot speak with the same assurance of the faults which made him lose it. Bourrienne had many enemies, both on account of his character and of his place" (Savary, i. 418-19).

Marmont ought to be an impartial critic of the Memoirs. He says, "Bourrienne . . . had a very great capacity, but he is a striking example of the great truth that our passions are always bad counsellors. By inspiring us with an immoderate ardour to reach a fixed end, they often make us miss it. Bourrienne had an immoderate love of money. With his talents and his position near Bonaparte at the first dawn of greatness, with the confidence and real good-will which Bonaparte felt for him, in a few years he would have gained everything in fortune and in social position. But his eager impatience mined his career at the moment when it might have developed and increased" (Marmont, i. 64). The criticism appears just. As to the Memoirs, Marmont says (ii. 224), "In general, these Memoirs are of great veracity and powerful interest so long as they treat of what the author has seen and heard; but when he speaks of others, his work is only an assemblage of gratuitous suppositions and of false facts put forward for special purposes."

The Comte Alexandre de Puymaigre, who arrived at Hamburgh soon after Bourrienne had left it in 1810, says (page 135) of the part of the Memoirs which relates to Hamburg, "I must acknowledge that generally his assertions are well founded. This former companion of Napoleon has only forgotten to speak of the opinion that they had of him in this town.