Artilleryman, strategist, statesman, legislator… One of the things that sets Napoleon Bonaparte apart from other military leaders and politicians is his extraordinary ability to excel in various fields. Well, there is one more quality to add to the most famous Corsican of all time, though it is practically unknown to most: that of a writer. We are not referring to his letters and proclamations, nor to his popular aphorisms, not even to the memoirs he wrote in Saint Helena, but to creative literature: a story he wrote in 1795 titled Clisson and Eugénie.

It is a short novel of just twenty-two pages, which remained fragmented and scattered for two centuries until British historian Peter Hicks and the Director of Library Services at the University of Burgundy, Emilie Barthet, managed to gather them in 2007 after discovering the last missing section. The following year, they released a first version with an introduction by Armand Cabasson, a French writer of fantasy and historical crime novels specializing in the Napoleonic era.

Gathering all those pages was an arduous task, a genuine detective and patient endeavor. Forty of them were first published in 1920—there were more editions later—but in an incomplete form, obviously, and under the title of Manuscript of Kornik. They belonged to the collection bequeathed by Count Tytus Działyński, a Prussian-Polish military man and politician, editor of historical books, bibliophile, and patron of the arts. Being handwritten, former officials of the emperor (the Count of Montholon, Baron Fain, General Monnier, and the Duke of Bassano) were able to identify the handwriting and confirm its authenticity.

<em>Clisson and Eugénie</em> corresponding to Kornik's set
Página manuscrita de Clisson and Eugénie corresponding to Kornik’s set. Credit: Andrzej Otrebski / Wikimedia Commons

Four more pages were passed from hand to hand among British antiquarians and collectors of ancient manuscripts during the first half of the 19th century. In 1955, they were bought by Howard Samuel, a wealthy London real estate developer, member of the Labour Party, and publisher of the newspapers Tribune and New Statesman, who paid two thousand three hundred pounds for them and then donated them to the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, one of the world’s largest private collections of manuscripts and historical documents (it has a dozen locations throughout the US, and its holdings rotate among them to be exhibited to the public for free).

Another museum, the State Historical Museum of Russia, located in Moscow, preserves the originals of one more fragment that Count Grigory Vladimirovich Orlov, one of Empress Catherine the Great’s favorites, bought in 1823 during a stay in Paris, living up to his reputation for lavishly spending money on acquiring works of art and literature. The French publishing house Fayard published those pages in 2007, shortly before Peter Hicks and Emilie Barthet began to gather them.

They started that year, as we mentioned, with a fragment that had belonged to Étienne Soulange-Bodin, a famous biologist, botanist, and military man whom Napoleon decorated with the Legion of Honor and hired to take care of Josephine’s gardens at Malmaison, recommended by his previous patron, the Prince of Beauharnais. The renowned horticulturist died in 1846, but twenty-five years earlier, he had already parted with the pages in question, which a British Francophile acquired and kept until they were auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1938.

Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in Santa Barbara, California
Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in Santa Barbara, California. Credit: Peaceray / Wikimedia Commons

The buyer, for sixty-four pounds and advised by none other than writer Stefan Zweig, was Hermann Eisemann; however, he soon parted with them, selling them to Julio Lobo y Olavarría, a wealthy Cuban sugar magnate of Venezuelan descent who was exiled in New York and was so enthusiastic about the Bonapartist world that in 1961 he founded a Napoleonic Museum in Havana—where he returned, feted by the Castro regime—with original pieces that belonged to the emperor or were related to him (maps, costumes, sculptures, paintings, furniture, weapons, books…).

However, by 2005, that fragment was no longer in the museum but in the possession of the Italian Fausto Foroni, a dealer who collected autographs. It was there that Hicks and Barthet discovered it, uniting it with the other mentioned parts and with the initial page of the manuscript, which they found in the hands of a private French collector who had acquired it for twenty-four thousand euros at an auction organized by the previous owner, a compatriot, also a great dilettante of Napoleonic history and collector of objects from that era: financier André de Coppet.

Now then, Clisson and Eugénie was still incomplete; four pages were missing, and there was no trace or reference to them. A complete mystery that ultimately turned out not to be so much: they had simply detached from the Orlov collection at the Moscow museum without anyone noticing. Hicks and Barthet already had the full story and could see that some pages were repeated or rewritten, which led them to deduce that the author was not satisfied with the first version and tried up to five more drafts. Therefore, they had to do some editorial synthesis work to produce a definitive version.

Headquarters of the Napoleonic Museum in Havana
Headquarters of the Napoleonic Museum in Havana. Credit: Christian Pirkl / Wikimedia Commons

At that time, he had free time for it, you could say. In 1793, Napoleon was twenty-four years old and had just arrived in continental France with his family, who were fleeing Corsica because they had fallen out with the revolutionary leader Pasquale Paoli, who advocated for the island’s secession, while the Bonapartes were in favor of a pro-French republic. It was then that he changed his surname from Buonaparte to Bonaparte, was appointed artillery commander in Toulon, and began writing with a political pamphlet titled Le souper de Beaucaire, in which a soldier talks to four merchants and listens to their opinions and fears about the country’s current situation.

Le souper de Beaucaire, based on events he had experienced himself, caught the attention of Robespierre, who supported him in his military career. The transfer of personal experience to paper can also be extended to Clisson and Eugénie, as the plot of this short work bears some resemblance to the unstable love life he was leading at the time. First, with Désirée Clary, the younger sister of his sister-in-law Julia (the wife of Joseph, the future king of Spain); he had met her shortly before, in 1794, becoming engaged to her in April 1795.

But that same year, another woman appeared in his life: Josephine, a Creole from Martinique who had separated from her unfaithful husband, Prince Alexandre de Beauharnais, and became a widow shortly afterward when he was executed for being anti-revolutionary. She narrowly escaped the guillotine, and although she was six years older than Napoleon, the two began a romantic relationship, breaking the marriage promise to Désirée. And as we were saying, such a sentimental whirlwind is similar to what is narrated in Clisson and Eugénie, whose plot we summarize below.

Artistic recreation of the dinner Napoleon had with some merchants that inspired his pamphlet Le souper de Beaucaire. Work by Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ
Artistic recreation of the dinner Napoleon had with some merchants that inspired his pamphlet Le souper de Beaucaire. Work by Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Clisson, a French army officer weary of war, decides to take a break at a spa in central France, where he meets two young women, Amélie and Eugénie. Madly in love with the latter, he marries her, and they retire to the countryside, where they have several children.

However, Clisson has to return to the front and is wounded, so he sends a comrade-in-arms named Berville to reassure his wife. Instead, Berville seduces her, causing Eugénie to stop writing to her husband, who sends them a final letter before heading to battle again in search of death, which comes to him in a cavalry charge.

Aside from the personal experience, it must be said that to name his protagonist, Napoleon turned to Olivier V de Clisson, Constable of France who fought alongside Bertrand du Guesclin against the English during the Hundred Years’ War (and perhaps for this reason had his admiration); he was the son of Jeanne de Belleville. Now, according to experts, Bonaparte was also influenced by other works of the time. Two well-known ones are most often cited.

Cover of an English edition of Napoleon's work
Cover of an English edition of Napoleon’s work.

One is Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (“The Sorrows of Young Werther”) by Goethe, in which the protagonist, a sensitive and passionate young man, falls in love with a woman already engaged to another who does not love him, although he manages to form a good friendship with her. The other is Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (“Julie or the New Heloise”) by Rousseau, in which a young noblewoman and her humble tutor fall in love but, belonging to different social classes, must keep their relationship secret.

Apart from the theme of impossible or tragic love, typical of Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, what all these works have in common, including Napoleon’s, is the importance of correspondence (Rousseau’s work, in fact, is written in the form of an epistolary exchange).

In this sense, Napoleon is one of the historical figures who wrote the most letters in his life, with the advantage that most of them are preserved: about forty-two thousand, which have sometimes been published in fifteen volumes. It is clear he was not afraid of a blank sheet of paper either.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on October 10, 2023: ‘Clisson y Eugénie’, la novela romántica escrita por Napoleón Bonaparte

SOURCES

Napoleón Bonaparte, Clisson et Eugénie

BookHuger, A brief history of the manuscript

Philip Dwyer, Napoleon. The path to power, 1769-1799

Wikipedia, Clisson et Eugénie

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