Ruth Scurr - Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows
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- Book:Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows
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Marking the 200th anniversary of his death, Napoleon is an unprecedented portrait of the emperor told through his engagement with the natural world.
How should one envisage this subject? With a great pomp of words, or with simplicity? Charlotte Bront, The Death of NapoleonThe most celebrated general in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (17691821) has for centuries attracted eminent male writers. Since Thomas Carlyle first christened him our last Great Man, regiments of biographers have marched across the same territory, weighing campaigns and conflicts, military tactics and power politics. Yet in all this time, no definitive portrait of Napoleon has endured, and a mere handful of women have written his biographya fact that surely would have pleased him.
With Napoleon, Ruth Scurr, one of our most eloquent and original historians, emphatically rejects the shibboleth of the Great Man theory of history, instead following the dramatic trajectory of Napoleons life through gardens, parks, and forests. As Scurr reveals, gardening was the first and last love of Napoleon, offering him a retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Gardens were, at the same time, a mirror image to the battlefields on which he fought, discrete settings in which terrain and weather were as important as they were in combat, but for creative rather than destructive purposes.
Drawing on a wealth of contemporary and historical scholarship, and taking us from his early days at the military school in Brienne-le-Chteau through his canny seizure of power and eventual exile, Napoleon frames the generals story through the green spaces he cultivated. Amid Corsican olive groves, ornate menageries in Paris, and lone garden plots on the island of Saint Helena, Scurr introduces a diverse cast of scientists, architects, family members, and gardeners, all of whom stood in the shadows of Napoleons meteoric rise and fall. Building a cumulative panorama, she offers indelible portraits of Augustin Bon Joseph de Robespierre, the younger brother of Maximilien Robespierre, who used his position to advance Napoleons career; Marianne Peusol, the fourteen-year-old girl manipulated into a Christmas-Eve assassination attempt on Napoleon that resulted in her death; and Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases, the atlas maker to whom Napoleon dictated his memoirs. As Scurr contends, Napoleons dealings with these people offer unusual and unguarded opportunities to see how he grafted a new empire onto the remnants of the ancien rgime and the French Revolution.
Epic in scale and novelistic in its detail, Napoleon, with stunning illustrations, is a work of revelatory range and depth, revealing the contours of the generals personality and power as no conventional biography can.
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Ruth Scurr is an historian, biographer and literary critic. She teaches history and politics at Cambridge University, where she is a Lecturer and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College. Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times. She reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution
John Aubrey: My Own Life
To my daughters, Polly and Rosalind
What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleons devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely?
Paul Valry, Mauvaises Penses et Autres (1941)
Epigraph to Simon Leyss The Death of Napoleon (1991)
all agree that it [the art of painting] originated in tracing lines round the human shadow.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History (c.77)
Storming of the Tuileries in Paris, 10 August 1792 ( Htel Carnavalet, Paris / akg-images / De Agostini Picture library)
Jardin du Roy by Jean-Baptiste Hilaire, 1794 ( Bibliothque nationale de France)
The gardens of the institute in Egypt by Andr Dutertre, 17981809 ( Bibliothque nationale de France)
The interior of the institute in Egypt by Jean Constantin Protain, 17981809 ( Bibliothque nationale de France)
Porcelain plates, clockwise from top left: dromedaries from the Svres Egyptian Service, 18101812 ( Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
French scientists measuring the Sphynx from the Svres Egyptian Service, 18101812 ( Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
Mesembryanthemum carinatum from the Svres Exotic Plants Service, 18021805 ( RMN-Grand Palais (muse des chteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-Prau) / Franck Raux)
Iris Susiana from the Svres Liliaces Service, 18021805 ( RMN-Grand Palais (muse des chteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-Prau) / Grard Blot)
Bonaparte depicted as a crocodile in the orangery of the chateau of Saint-Cloud, 10 November 1799 ( The Trustees of the British Museum)
Napoleon and George III depicted as rival gardeners by Charles Williams, 10 February 1803 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC)
Napoleon and Josephine in the gardens at Malmaison by George Cruikshank, 1824 ( The Trustees of the British Museum)
An Allegory of Empress Josephine as Patroness of the Gardens at Malmaison by Franois Grard, c. 18056 ( The Met, New York, USA / Purchase, Guy Wildenstein Gift, 2003 / (CC0 1.0))
The frontispiece to the Voyage de Dcouverte aux Terres Australes by Franois Pron, 1807 ( RMN-Grand Palais (muse des chteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-Prau) / Grard Blot)
Napoleon crosses the Alps over the Great St Bernard Pass by Jacques-Louis David, 20 May 1800 ( Rueil-Malmaison, Muse du Chteau / akg-images / Laurent Lecat)
Meeting between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII in the Forest of Fontainebleau in 1804 by Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy, 1808 ( Chateau de Fontainebleau, Seine-et-Marne, France / Bridgeman Images)
The entry of the Emperor (Napoleon) and Empress (Marie Louise, daughter of Francis II of Austria) to the Tuileries gardens on the day of their wedding, 1810 ( Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images)
Caricature of the architects Pierre Fontaine and Charles Percier by Julien-Lopold Boilly ( RMN-Grand Palais (Institut de France) / Grard Blot)
Caricature of botanist and gardener Andr Thouin by Julien-Lopold Boilly ( RMN-Grand Palais (Institut de France) / Grard Blot)
View of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, Paris, designed by Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine ( National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Herschel Collection)
Napoleon and his son, Napolon Franois Joseph Charles Bonaparte, in the Tuileries gardens ( Muse Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / Topfoto)
Workers excavating below Trajans Column in Rome ( Roma / Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali / Museo di Roma)
Louis-Martin Berthaults plan for the Jardin du Grand Csar, 1813 ( Roma / Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali / Museo di Roma)
Madame de Stal, c. 18157 (Royal Collection Trust / Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020)
Laure Junot, Duchess of Abrants ( Fondation Napolon / Vincent Mercier / Missionning)
Sculpture of Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker by Antonio Canova, 18036 ( akg-images / Rabatti & Domingie)
Project for the palace of the King of Rome on Chaillot Hill, Paris ( Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Beaux-arts de Paris)
The pedigree of Corporal Violet by George Cruikshank, 1815 ( The Trustees of the British Museum)
The garden wall of the chateau Hougoumont on the site of the Battle of Waterloo, 1816 (Royal Collection Trust / Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020)
The chateau Hougoumont by Denis Dighton, 1815 (Royal Collection Trust / Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020)
Napoleon in his garden on St Helena ( RMN-Grand Palais (muse des chteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-Prau) / Andr Martin)
Napoleons birdcage from St Helena ( Collections Bertrand Museum of the City of Chteauroux, France)
View of Longwood House by Louis Joseph Marchand, 1 January 1820 ( RMN-Grand Palais (muse des chteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-Prau) / Grard Blot)
The gardener of St Helena, 1829 ( Bibliothque nationale de France)
Every effort has been made by the publishers to trace the holders of copyright. Any inadvertent omissions of acknowledgement or permission can be rectified in future editions.
The spelling of Napoleons name changed over his lifetime. I have used the version most fitting for each of the chronological chapters that follow.
Between 24 October 1793 and 1 January 1806, France adopted the Revolutionary calendar. Weeks became ten days long (dcades) and the days and months acquired new names inspired by the natural world. I have given both the Gregorian and Revolutionary calendar dates for events that occurred in this period.
The metric system, based on the gram, metre and litre measures derived from the natural world was first introduced into France in 1799. I have adopted it throughout the text.
The decimal franc was introduced in 1795 during the Revolution and its value was set at 1.0125 livres. In todays terms, 1 franc in 1800 was worth approximately 2.77, $3.70 or 3.11.
1769 Birth of Napoleon to Carlo and Letizia (ne Ramolino) di Buonaparte, in Ajaccio, Corsica, 15 August.
1779 Napoleon enters the military school at Brienne-le-Chteau, aged nine, 15 May.
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