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    Clisson and Eugénie
    Clisson and Eugénie
    Clisson and Eugénie
    Ebook69 pages52 minutes

    Clisson and Eugénie

    By Napoleon Bonaparte and Peter Hicks

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The tragic story of Clisson and Eugenie reveals one of history's great leaders to also be an accomplished writer of fiction.Written in an eloquently Romantic style true to its period, the story offers the reader a fascinating insight into how the young Napoleon viewed love, women and military life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGallic Books
    Release dateOct 14, 2009
    ISBN9781906040611
    Clisson and Eugénie

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    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      A very surprising, but welcome novel by someone who was the last person I would have expected to write fiction.An accomplished, well written story set in the time Bonaparte would have known so well.Truly a very romantic author.I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Gallic via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.

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    Book preview

    Clisson and Eugénie - Napoleon Bonaparte

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    More historical fiction from Gallic

    CLISSON AND

    EUGÉNIE

    NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

    Translated from the French by Peter Hicks

    CONTENTS

    Title page

    Introduction by Armand Cabasson

    Text of Clisson and Eugénie

    Afterword by Armand Cabasson

    Interpretation by Peter Hicks and Émilie Barthet

    Brief History of the Manuscript

    Not To Readers

    Further Reading

    About the Author

    Copyright

    INTRODUCTION

    I was delighted to be asked to write this introduction to the Gallic Books edition of Clisson and Eugénie because I believe the text to be key to the understanding of Napoleon the man.

    Clisson and Eugénie is a novel written by Napoleon Bonaparte. Of course everyone has heard of Napoleon I and his innumerable military triumphs, but fewer people are aware of his prowess as an author.

    The novel has already been published several times in France, accompanied by explanatory documents, postscripts, notes and commentaries. The challenge for me, therefore, was to see if I could find something new to say about it. As well as being passionately interested in the Napoleonic period (and it is the period that has hitherto interested me more than the character of the man himself, which I regard somewhat critically), I am also a psychiatrist and an author, many of whose books are set in the Napoleonic era. Since most of the commentaries so far have been written by historians, I was keen to discover what my perspective as author and psychiatrist could add to the reading of the work.

    There exists what I like to call ‘the Trial of Napoleon’. Everyone is on the jury, since everyone has an opinion about the great man. Even two centuries after he died, it is true to say that few people are indifferent to Napoleon. The various opinions of him differ widely. Was he a plague on humanity or simply the whipping boy of a troubled era? The saviour of Revolutionary ideals who ultimately failed, or a classic military dictator of the type that history throws up from time to time? Some call him an atypical dictator, many a military genius. Was he a victorious general who, like Alexander the Great, showed himself incapable of renouncing military action? Or a lucky general adept at taking credit for the successes of his excellent officers? A tyrannical over-protective father? The perfect illustration of the corruption of power, which turned a sincere republican general into a tyrant? A pathological risk-taker (witness the 1812 Russian campaign, which was nothing more than a giant toss of the coin, demonstrating an incapacity to say: that’s enough, I’ll stop here)? A misunderstood visionary reformer? The ‘republican’ and ‘imperial’ variant of a king crowned as a result of a military coup? And the list of interpretations goes on …

    Napoleon is still an enigma even after more than fifty thousand books written about the era, and by and about the man himself.

    Of those fifty thousand books, Clisson and Eugénie is one of the most revealing.

    Napoleon wrote some works (including several short stories) when he was still Bonaparte. But Clisson and Eugénie, written in the autumn of 1795, remains his most successful and important work of fiction. His other noted work of fiction is The Memorial of St Helena, dictated, or perhaps merely recounted in an informal manner, to Emmanuel, Comte de Las Cases, during the years of captivity on St Helena. It might seem odd to refer to The Memorial of St Helena as fiction rather than a memoir, but in fact it has long been recognised that rather than dictating his life story, Napoleon was constructing his legend, transforming his life into myth. The Memorial of St Helena is a sort of autobiography, but fictionalised and embellished for posterity. And it was more successful in creating the legend than Napoleon could ever have imagined. Still today, a number of ideas about what Napoleon was like are based more on the narrative of The Memorial of St Helena than on reality. This is not a new phenomenon. In England, Richard III will for ever be known as a bloody machiavellian dictator because that’s the way Shakespeare depicted him. Even if historians and writers produce solid arguments to show that he was probably not the odious murderer of his brother Edward IV’s two young children, we continue to believe he was their murderer in spite of everything. Shakespeare says so! (Readers interested in the question of Richard’s innocence or otherwise will enjoy reading Josephine Tey’s excellent novel The Daughter of Time.) It is said that ‘the pen is mightier than

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