5 comments about Napoleon and Josephine: An Improbable Marriage (Classic Books on Cassettes Collection).

1. Mention the word 'Napoleon,' and what may come to mind is a short fellow with his hand stuck in his vest, a breed of cat that has abnormally short legs, or a rich pastry with thin layers and lots of sweet cream in a high stack. The origin of this term actually comes from a historical figure, who was the subject of fear, loathing and satire, who managed to conquer most of Europe in the early nineteenth century, and who fell in love with a woman.
   
   Author Evangline Bruce -- this was the only work that she published -- takes a long look at the self-proclaimed Emperor of the French, Napoleon, and his wife, the American born Josephine. Both of them came from unlikely backgrounds, both survived the Terror that came after the Revolution, and both were to play vital roles in history.
   
   It's an amazing look at one of history's more famous 'power couples.' The courtship of the pair was intense, with Napoleon firing off passionate letters, and Josephine maintaining a cool, rather remote presence. The more she refused to give in, the more he pressed her to accept his offer of marriage. His family were all firmly against his choice of a wife, and would gleefully repeat damaging gossip and would openly refer to her as la putana or that woman. Finally, he wore Josephine down -- or was it the fact that he was on the fast track to fame, and especially fortune? -- and she wed him in a quick, civil ceremony. Many of the witnesses noted that she looked rather unhappy and fatigued, and after a honeymoon of only two days, Napoleon was marching with his armies to Italy. By 1804, he had conquered Italy, conducted his Egyptian campaign, and had consolidated enough power to crown himself Emperor of the French, and Josephine was his Empress.
   
   But the relationship would flounder within six years, with a separation that was painful to them both. Napoleon was a jealous man, and tended to use and discard women as he pleased -- the author continually refers to him as a misogynist -- and when a woman ceased to be useful to him, he merely kicked her to the curb and moved on. Unable to give him the male child that he craved, Josephine agreed to a divorce, and retired from Paris to her beloved estate of Malmaison. Napoleon immediately took a young, blonde Austrian Archduchess as his second wife and was rewarded almost immediately with a son. But Europe was rebelling against his rule, and the final years of his reign as Emperor were plagued with a disasterous war in Spain, a France that was bled of men and money, and a retreat from Russia in the dead of winter that was the final blow. When the triumphant armies of the English, Prussians and Russians marched into Paris, Napoleon was well on the way to Elba, Waterloo and a final exile to a desolate island in the south Atlantic, St. Helena.
   
   As for Josephine, a day after meeting the charismatic Tsar of Russia, she caught a fever and died soon after. Her popularity with the people that she met never wavered, and she was genuinely mourned. It is a curious twist that she would become the ancestress of most of today's European royalty through her son, Eugene de Beauharnais.
   
   Another touch that Bruce added that made the story interesting is that of the Clarys, a family of wealthy merchants from Marseilles that had one daughter, Julie, become Napoleon's sister in law, and another that was his fiancee for a time, before he jilted her to marry Josephine. Desiree, as she was known, would go on to marry one of Napoleon's generals, and became in time, Queen of Sweden. Other mistresses of Napoleon get equal time, including the Polish born Maria Walenska.
   
   The narrative tends to stall a bit when it isn't being focused on Napoleon or Josephine's letters and private lives. The descriptions of wars and battles are mercifully short and sadly, rather tedious. Instead, Bruce keeps her focus on the psychological relationship, and shows both the good and the bad that was between this couple. It does make for compelling reading in spots, and don't be surprised if it keeps you up late at night.
   
   Several inserts of black and white reproductions of paintings, drawings and sketches are included. Notes, bibliography and an index are included as well. This was Evangline Bruce's only published work. History fans will have a fine time with this, and I happily recommend it.



2. Evangeline Bruce beautifully combines historical fact with the dance of fiction. A must-read for anyone who's ever wanted to understand the machinations of the French Revolution and the fate of those who lived through it.



3. Anybody with a slight interest in Napoleon I or his age, the period of French history known as First Empire, is aware that after his fall power in France was regained by the Bourbon dynasty that had been replaced first by the Revolution, then by Napoleon's Consulate and Empire. Even during his life, after his abdication, he was violently vilified by Royalist propaganda, as never a dethroned sovereign was in all History. Besides the obvious political reasons for that hatred, there was the xenophobic one: not only Bonaparte, the former Emperor of the French, was not of French noble birth, but also he wasn't French at all. Josephine, on the other hand, who was always a representative of the Ancien Régime, regardless of her being Napoleon's wife for 13 years, was beloved by the Royalists, she, who was of French, though doubtful, noble birth.

   Evangeline Bruce's book could have been written during the Bourbon Restoration, between 1815 and 1830, being, as it is, a compendium of all kinds of Royalist gossip and slander ever written against Napoleon and his Italian family, whereas Josephine and her French family are always treated fairly and sympathetically. Bruce sees Napoleon as a natural born monster: cynical, unscrupulous, ambitious, calculating, tyrannical and a bloodthirsty warmonger, in a word, the Corsican Ogre, that famous boogeyman invented by French and English Royalists to extinguish all trace of the Revolution which, according to them, was embodied by that single man.

   She denies him any patriotism or idealism. She denies him any merit, attributing his military successes to his marshals and his political ones to his "incredible luck." Josephine, on the other hand, is the destitute brave mother of two children who survived the Revolution's Terror, caught the eye of the Ogre and, thanks to her sweetness, delicacy and femininity that only a noble stock can provide, succeeded to make something of a human being of that Ogre, but ended up as martyr when he put her aside to marry another woman (and a foreign one at that). In sum, Mrs. Bruce's book is sheer Royalist propaganda mixed up with "beauty and the beast" fairy tale, nothing more.

   There's hardly one paragraph in this whole lampoon without some unpleasant remark on any of Napoleon's acts. Everything he does is distorted by a maligned bias. No word he ever utters is sincere. Even his most generous attitudes are not to be trusted. On page 414 (of the British edition) we read: "He made even less effort than usual to hide his contempt for all around him; the few signs of affection, and these quite unreliable, were reserved only for Josephine and Hortense." Bruce supports this incredible nonsense not by quoting these "all around him," but bloodsucking Talleyrand on saying that the Emperor was "fascinated by himself." For Bruce, in fact, everything Napoleon's enemies tell is true, like viperous Metternich's unbelievable words put in Napoleon's mouth that he would "drag down the whole of society in his fall." All the guilty ones of betrayal towards him are acquitted, like treacherous Bernadotte, depicted by Bruce as opposing his benefactor out of true republican feeling and as "elected" for the Swedish throne, although even the rocks in Sweden know that this French marshal owed that throne exclusively to the Emperor.

   It is far from surprising the author's deliberate omission of everything that could account for Napoleon's well-deserved fame of administrative genius as well as a military one. Considering him nothing but an usurper, out of sheer intellectual dishonesty Bruce simply omits the fact that the immense majority of the French elected Napoleon their Consul, as well as their Emperor through a referendum, which made him, in the democratic sense, the only legitimate monarch of his time in all Europe. Bruce doesn't mention that First Consul Bonaparte found the country bankrupt by the Directory and that he put finances in order. She wouldn't dream on mentioning his improvements in the education system, his protection of the labor classes, or that salaries in France were high as never before, limiting herself to point out that he surrounded his court by pomp and had 44 palaces, as if his military conquests had not increased the revenue considerably. Bruce ignores Napoleon's sane and balanced financial policy to say, rather deliriously: "War became France's almost sole industry." And, of course, she blames him for all the wars, although the whole world knows that the English government, which ultimately benefited from them, pushed for war relentlessly.

   But the most striking proof that no story is absurd enough for Bruce to help her paint her unoriginal "Corsican Ogre" portrait is in the opening of the 23rd chapter, when we are confronted with the astonishing statement that Napoleon, and not England, caused the abrogation of the peace treaty of Amiens, by insulting a British ambassador. The reason presented by Bruce for such undiplomatic attitude is even more astounding: "Bonaparte disliked tall men."

   Bruce does describe in a lively manner a few aspects of Revolutionary France, as well as some picturesque episodes concerning French salons, people's clothes and house decorations. But for that she seldom quotes her sources, and, given her general untrustworthiness and incredible prejudices against the main character and his family, there's no way to know if any description comes from historical fact or her own fanciful imagination. Even when she does indicate her sources at the end of the book, she won't give the chapter, making it difficult for us to go check the quotations for ourselves. There is only one recommendable thing in this whole 555 page book, which are its 32 pages of black and white pictures, untouched by the author's fantasy and prejudices. It's very little.




4. I didn't think I would be able to get through such a lengthy biography of Napoleon and Josephine, thinking myself already very familiar with their story. But I was wrong, this book is utterly fascinating, there isn't a dull sentence in it, I had no difficulty getting through it and wouldn't have minded if it had been even longer. If you have never read a book about Napoleon and Josephine, I would recommend this one, and even if you have read others, this one is probably the best there is. This extraordinary love story has never been better told. The only thing that dissapointed me about this book was to read that it was the only one Evangeline Bruce ever wrote, she died not long after it was published, but at least she lived to see this superb work in print.



5. Ms. Bruce does an excellent job of portraying both Napoleon and Josephine with all of their human foibles and thus allows us to see them as people rather than just historical figures. The bibliography is a great reference tool and cites sources from both sides of the debate on 'Napoleon the monster/Napoleon the saint'. All in all an even handed account of one of the most noted marriages of the modern era.

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