Letters of Napoleon

Summary

Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items. The English reader usually meets them in selections, such as J. M. Thompson's (1934), that follow his life chronologically and let the letters stand in for a biography. The selections typically open with the young Corsican officer's letters to his family and to Paolist and Jacobin patrons, full of debts, ambitions and resentment of French rule over his island. In March 1796, two days after marrying Joséphine de Beauharnais, he left to command the Army of Italy, and the letters he sent her during that campaign are the most famous in the collection: feverish, possessive, sensual, by turns adoring and furious at her silence and her lingering in Paris. Alongside them run the dispatches to the Directory that announce victories at Lodi, Arcole and Rivoli, and the proclamations to soldiers that promised them the riches of Italy. From Egypt in 1798 he wrote to his brother Joseph of his discovery of Joséphine's infidelity and of his disgust with human nature. The Egyptian and Syrian letters also record plague in the army, the massacre of prisoners at Jaffa, and the retreat from Acre. Once in power as First Consul and then emperor, the letters become instruments of government. Napoleon writes to Fouché on police, to Cambacérès on the Civil Code, to the minister of war on boots, bread and conscripts, and to his brothers Joseph, Louis and Jérôme, whom he made kings of Naples and Spain, Holland and Westphalia, scolding them for extravagance, weakness or independence. Letters to Pope Pius VII move from concordat to confrontation and the pope's arrest. After the divorce from Joséphine in 1809 and marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria in 1810, he writes to his young wife with a gruff tenderness and constant concern for their son, the King of Rome. The Russian campaign of 1812 appears in curt bulletins and letters that minimise catastrophe; the letters of 1813–1814 show him fighting on several fronts, then abdicating at Fontainebleau. The collection usually ends with Elba, the Hundred Days, the appeal to the Prince Regent after Waterloo for asylum like Themistocles, and the restricted correspondence of St Helena. Read together, the letters show a mind of extraordinary range and appetite for detail, and the way a single will could steer a continent through paper.

Top Lessons

• Command as correspondence

  Napoleon governed an empire largely through dictated letters that specified quantities, dates and names. The collection shows how power in the age before the telegraph depended on a ruler's capacity to process and issue information at speed.

• The lover and the conqueror in one voice

  The 1796 letters to Joséphine share their urgency and possessiveness with the military dispatches written the same week. Reading them together raises the question of how private passion and public ambition fed each other.

• Family as an instrument of empire

  Napoleon placed siblings on thrones and then treated them as subordinate officials, demanding obedience over local loyalty. The letters to Louis and Joseph show dynasty and bureaucracy colliding.

• What the bulletins leave out

  Letters from Jaffa, Spain and Russia minimise losses, disease and atrocity. Comparing them with soldiers' memoirs teaches how official correspondence manages catastrophe.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The correspondence touches military medicine and epidemic disease at several points. During the Syrian campaign of 1799 bubonic plague struck the army; Napoleon's visit to the plague hospital at Jaffa was later celebrated in Gros's painting, while the allegation that he ordered opium given to plague-stricken soldiers left behind at Jaffa, reportedly resisted by the chief physician René-Nicolas Desgenettes, remains disputed and is a classic case in the history of medical ethics. Typhus, dysentery, cold and starvation destroyed the Grande Armée in Russia far more than battle did, and the letters' near silence on this is itself evidence. Napoleon relied on surgeons such as Dominique-Jean Larrey, pioneer of the flying ambulance and field triage. His last illness on St Helena (diagnosed at autopsy as a stomach lesion, generally interpreted as gastric cancer, with arsenic-poisoning theories now largely discounted) and his reported scepticism about medicine belong to the St Helena record. The jealous intensity of the 1796 letters has invited psychological readings; these are interpretive.

• Letters to Joséphine, Italian campaign (spring–autumn 1796)

  Repeated complaints of sleeplessness, fevered longing and jealousy as he campaigns; Joséphine's illness and delay in joining him.

• Letters and orders from Egypt and Syria (1798–1799)

  Plague in the Army of the Orient, quarantine measures, and the siege of Acre; context for the disputed Jaffa opium episode.

• Imperial correspondence on conscription and supply (1805–1809)

  Orders on bread, boots, hospitals and conscripts that treat the army's health as a matter of administration.

• Russian campaign letters and bulletins (1812)

  Reports from Moscow and the retreat that understate losses to cold, hunger and disease.

• St Helena correspondence and will (1815–1821)

  Complaints about climate and confinement, failing health, and the will's request that his body be examined after death.