Michel De Jaeghere is director of
Figaro Hors-Série
and
Figaro Histoire
.
This editorial is taken from the new
Figaro Hors-Série
: “Napoléon.
The epic - the myth - the trial ”, 162 pages, € 12.90, available in newsstands and on the
Figaro Store
.
Chateaubriand, returning from exile, had written that Bonaparte had been
"marked from afar"
by Providence
"for the accomplishment of his prodigious designs"
.
It was 1803 and the Concordat had, in fact, boosted sales of Le
Génie du Christianisme
, the second edition of which was being published.
The writer quickly returned, comparing the Emperor to Néron in the Mercure de France from 1807 and denouncing, behind
“the deified tyrant (…), the histrion, the arsonist and the parricide”
.
He had in the meantime left the Carrière.
He no longer hoped to play a political role under the Empire and lived the perfect love with Natalie de Noailles, bewitching beauty from a royalist background where one still hoped for a rapid fall of the regime: in the form of a coup daring, the article had had something of an oath of love.
Written the day after Eylau, where the weapons had suddenly appeared contrary to French hopes, it had been published after Friedland's victory, on the eve of Tilsit's heyday.
"The act of courage became suicide,"
writes André Maurois.
The setback had earned Chateaubriand the wrath of the master, and several years of relegation to Vallée-aux-Loups.
On April 4, 1814, whereas for five days Paris had capitulated to the Allied troops, and while the tsar, victor, still hesitates on the government to which he will entrust France, Chateaubriand makes appear
De Buonaparte et des Bourbons
.
The brochure was written with urgency and fever.
The writer had, during his writing, hidden the manuscript every night under his pillow, leaving two loaded pistols by his bed.
Pleading for the return of the elder branch of the Bourbons to the throne of their fathers, it overwhelms a
“Buonaparte”
henceforth designated as a plague of Heaven with all the violence and excess of a work of combat.
The fallen Emperor had been, to read it, only a stranger without words and without laws, who had sown crime and oppression in the wake of the most finicky of police dictatorships, delivered the country to plunder in order to finance an annoying administration, pursued unnecessary conquests in the course of which he had cut the youth of France in cut, exhausting his army in the absurd war in Spain and the disastrous campaign in Russia, at the end of which he himself had abandoned his men to defeat and death.
They denounced the Ogre who had killed more than a million soldiers and demanded each year, like Moloch, his ration of fresh flesh.
The libel was not, to tell the truth, the first of its kind.
Others had, as early as 1813, begun to appear under wraps.
They denounced the Ogre who had killed more than a million soldiers and demanded each year, like Moloch, his ration of fresh flesh;
the Antichrist who had imprisoned the Pope and dethroned the kings.
From 1814 to 1821, the pamphlets multiplied.
Jean Tulard has listed more than five hundred (
L'Anti-Napoléon
, 1964).
They proposed to dispel the glorious images imprinted on the spirits by fifteen years of propaganda, at the same time as to disarm the nostalgia that the memory of the epic could give rise to, by comparison with the spectacle of a podagrous king, reigning over a France. diminished.
The euthanasia of the plague victims of Jaffa, the clandestine departure from Egypt, the anti-parliamentary violence of 19 Brumaire and the abandonment of the Grand Army during the retreat from Russia offered the themes around which a thousand and one variations were organized.
The ultras did not forgive Napoleon for having delayed a Restoration which could have taken place, without him, as early as October 1795;
which had been on the verge of being done in 1799, barely ten years after the storming of the Bastille.
The liberals reproached him for having diverted the course of the Revolution to install his personal power.
Mme de Staël and Benjamin Constant regretted that he had not followed the lessons of the Coppet salon better, and respected modern freedoms.
Half a century passes.
For his
Great Universal Dictionary of the XIXth century
, destined to become the bible of the teachers of the Third Republic, Pierre Larousse devotes in 1867 and 1874 two separate articles to Bonaparte and Napoleon (they are each the size of a book).
The first had carried
"the greatest, the most glorious, the most brilliant name in history
.
"
But he had
"died at the castle of Saint-Cloud, near Paris, on the 18th Brumaire"
.
The other was a factious general, a usurper and an upstart, a stranger to France
"by race and by ideas"
, gravedigger of a Revolution whose
principles and results
he had stifled
(...) in views of personal greatness and private interest ”
, contemptuous of a people that he appreciated only for his
“ brute strength, insofar as he could exploit it for his killings ”
.
His reign had been a
"hate reaction"
imitated from
"Byzantine Caesarism"
.
“Except for glory, except for 'art', it would probably have been better if it hadn't existed.
"
Jacques Bainville
At the other end of the political spectrum, Jacques Bainville reopened the file in 1931, with a biography which, more than an account of the life of the Emperor (that of the private man had already been detailed in the books by Frédéric Masson; that of the public figure, recounted in the
History of the Consulate and the Empire
by Adolphe Thiers), was intended to reflect on the meaning of his adventure.
His analysis was more subtle.
It was hardly less severe: Napoleon had pursued, in his eyes, an ambition for which he did not have the means.
Getting England, Austria and Prussia to accept the annexation of Belgium and French hegemony over Europe could have been the work of a dynasty.
It required centuries, continuity, stability, time which, for lack of legitimacy, Napoleon lacked.
He had endeavored to impose it on the hussar, deploying the resources of all his genius to overcome the precariousness of victories still and always to be redone.
He had come up against the inexorable laws of history, and he had ended up leaving France, bloodless, smaller than it had received.
"Except for glory, except for 'art'
, he concluded,
it would probably have been better if it hadn't existed."
Publishing Joan of Arc, Louis XIV and Napoleon in 1937, Charles Maurras took over the analyzes of his friend Bainville there, while trying to treat Bonaparte
"in cold blood"
.
Paying homage to the
"lightning sword"
which had brought French military art to
"incandescence"
, he reproached the sovereign for having undermined the Europe of order and balance by infusing it with the principle of nationalities, which he considered called to make nations,
"goddesses of a new world
,
"
insatiable.
Simplifying the Germanic chaos in the heart of the continent, Napoleon had also opened the dangerous path to the unity of Germany.
He could well have brought down and dismembered Prussia: awakening, by his very humiliation, German national sentiment, he had, with the Confederation of the Rhine, offered the Hohenzollerns a formidable field of expansion for the future.
His inner work had, at the same time, endorsed the revolutionary destruction of intermediate bodies in the name of an egalitarianism which now left the individual-dwarf face to face with the giant-state.
The indictment included, however, this strange codicil, which says a lot about the regret of having had, for reasoning reason, to refuse to yield to the enchantment:
"There is the man," said Marshal Lyautey!
No more moving creature is cited.
The admiration does not dry up.
Immense memory, organizational genius, dream flame, acute psychology, power of work, scope and spring of the will, the subject is inexhaustible, and were it exhausted, there would remain the charm: the romantic charm of a unique career by the abrupt savagery of the point of departure, the vertigo of the climax, the distance from the point of fall.
(…) The whole thing forces us to repeat:
“Once again, I find it great!”
"
The bicentenary of Napoleon's death is commemorated in 2021 by the organization of a splendid retrospective of his life and his work at the Grande Halle de La Villette, at the same time as by a superb exhibition on his last moments at the museum of the Army ("Napoleon is no more").
By the number of publications, colloquiums, conferences, Parisian and provincial exhibitions that the Fondation Napoléon coordinated on this occasion, we can see that, fifty-two years after the launch of the festivities which had celebrated, in 1969, the anniversary of its birth, fervor did not fall back on France.
A victim of the intersectionality of struggles, he must now respond to accusations relating to the new moral order which is making its hold felt a little more stifling every day.
This same bicentenary was however marked, in the press and in the political world, by the resumption of the trial of which Napoleon was indefatigable, and which seemed never to be concluded.
The charges have changed in nature, however.
Napoleon is no longer threatened by the crossfire of the Jacobins and the ultras, the liberals, the counter-revolutionaries and the republicans.
We no longer ask him to take account of the European balance nor of respect for individual freedoms.
Say goodbye to these old things!
A victim of the intersectionality of struggles, he must now respond to accusations relating to the new moral order which is making its hold felt a little more stifling every day.
Hadn't Napoleon treated women in the Civil Code as minors?
Hadn't he himself sometimes behaved like a trooper with some of them?
Had he not neglected to abolish slavery in Martinique, when in 1802 he had regained sovereignty over the island, where it had been maintained by the English since 1794?
Worse still, yielding to the incitement of the conservative Senate, to pressure from the planters, had he not re-established it in Guadeloupe on the pretext that its abolition had ruined the island?
Was there not in him a typical manifestation of the "systemic racism" of this West that populations around the world are trying by all means to join, even though it seems never to have to close the list of his? crimes?
Napoleon was, for better or for worse, a white man;
he was not vegan, he did not sort his waste.
It is too late to blame him (no one has yet suggested that his ashes be re-buried and that they be thrown, as a sign of execration, into the mass grave: that will perhaps come).
But it remains open to specialists in democratic harassment to try to prevent us from looking into his memory without repenting first.
We have, for twenty years, become so used to it!
It would, after all, only be one more time.
What they blame him for is ultimately having been "great"
Our response will however have something more decisive here.
We could certainly try to argue that Napoleon was a man of his time, that engaged in the political maelstrom he had agreed to compromise himself, and to make, here and there, questionable choices, errors of judgment, mistakes. , but that he had endeavored to embrace his time with unparalleled energy, and had caused flashes of genius to shine in the hubbub of a France barely emerging from the revolutionary commotion.
In a way, that would be to plead mitigating circumstances.
But these arguments would in reality be inadmissible for his opponents, and it is perhaps time to adopt against indigenism,
cancel culture
and their by-products what Jacques Vergès called
"the defense of rupture"
.
Because the animators of this campaign do not really care much about Napoleon, women and slavery.
If they intend to replace, in Rouen, the statue of Gisèle Halimi for that of the Emperor because she was an activist of the feminist cause and lawyer of the FLN, it is because the history of the Empire indifferent to them. .
What they want is to impose on us the canons of their new morality by decreeing what is or is not entitled to our admiration.
What ails them, in Napoleon, is not the real or supposed weaknesses of his reign, it is to have illustrated in a brilliant way this "world of before" of which they intend to shame us in order to disarm it in us. desire to remain what we are.
What they reproach him with is ultimately what Maurras recognized in him, despite being an opponent of his cause: to have been
"great"
, like the history and the civilization of which he was, a moment, the spokesperson and the incarnation.
The answer we will give to his accusers will therefore go beyond the framework of a scholarly controversy: it will testify to our desire to continue the adventure, or to our resignation to leave history, in confusion.
"Napoleon. The epic - the myth - the trial ”, 162 pages, € 12.90, available in newsstands and on the
Figaro Store
.