Napoleon's Library with Louis Sarkozy

Gary: Today's special episode is an interview with author Louis Sarkozy. Sarkozy has published extensively in French and American media outlets on religion, politics, philosophy, and history. A graduate of the International Relations master's program at the American University in Washington, D.C. Sarkozy previously graduated from Valley Forge Military Academy and New York University with a double major in history and philosophy. He is currently applying to the United States Army's Officer Candidate School, where he hopes to start a career as an Army officer. His father, Nicolas Sarkozy, is an author and the former president of the French Republic. Today we are discussing his book Napoleon's Library: The Emperor, His Books and Their Influence on the Napoleonic Era, which is all about Napoleon's little known love of books.

Thank you so much for being on the show, Louis Sarkozy, it is a true honor to have you on to discuss your book, Napoleon's Library: The Emperor, His Books and Their Influence on the Napoleonic Era. There have been so many books about Napoleon focusing on his political life, his military exploits, but you chose to focus on something unique, his obsession with reading and how that made him. What led you to write about Napoleon's love affair with books?

Louis: Well, thank you for having me on. It's a great pleasure and honor to speak with you this morning. And yes, you're right, it's a somewhat unknown aspect of his character. He is universally known and recognized, I mean, the silhouette, the hat, the names of some, some of the battles, you know, the sticking, the hand and the waistcoat. He's one of those figures that dominates or historical consciousness, whether you're in Europe or in the Americas or in Africa. He's universally known. But unfortunately, most of that knowledge is superficial. Uh, people remember that he was an alleged war monger, a conqueror, that he was a short guy.  Not many people know just how in love he was with literature and history and philosophy and music.  Not many people know the authors who had such a profound influence on him. Because when one delves into the topic of his readings, one realizes that very few aspects of his life is not touched or influenced by the many, many, many readings he did as a young man and throughout his life. So it was an image of him that I really wanted to show a little more profoundly. And it was also just a very fun thing to discover for myself. I had read and many of the biographies that he read a lot, but I hadn't really known until I delved into some of the archives and the sources or the books that deal directly with that subject. Just how how prevalent of a reader he was, how extensive of a reader he was. So it was a very fun thing to to be able to delve into. And I hope it was a fun thing to be able to read about as well.

Gary: Yes, it certainly was. It was both, very, prolific in your study of what he had read. And also it, was very well written itself. I feel that,  this almost felt like a love letter to the literature of the time itself. So to move on with Napoleon and actually set this stage, one fascinating aspect of the book is on Napoleon's early life, from his childhood right up until he started making a name for himself in the military. He despised France and considered himself a proud Corsican.  At the same time, he had a generally positive view of the English.  Tell us a bit about his early life and what books led him to adopt these views.

Louis: Yeah, you highlight a very interesting aspect of his life.  So he is born in Corsica, just a year after the tiny island is sold by the Genoese crown to the French crown. So he's born a French subject a year after the annexation of his island. If he had been born a year earlier, you know, who knows what the Bonaparte name might resonate with today? So, his early life and in fact, when his mother is pregnant with him, is dominated by the recent conquest. And since his parents are of the low nobility of the island, they originally align themselves with Pascal Paoli, who is sort of the hero of Corsican independence. He's the guy who fought against the Genoese, but unfortunately Paoli is defeated by the French, and so, along with some other of Paoli’s lieutenants, Bonaparte's parents rally to the French cause sort of realize, listen, there's more to be gained by reconciling ourselves with the French crown. So they become quite close to the island's governor, the Comte de Marbeuf. And it's through him and his sponsorship that Napoleon is able to attend first the college at Eton and then the Royal Military Academy of Brianne, where he was to become French. But you're right in pointing out, throughout all those early years, he detests the French. We know this through many sources, most notably, some drawings that survive of him, being caricatured by his fellow aristocratic buddies at Brienne. So he's in those classes with other young aristocrats who come from much higher or better aristocracy than him.  And they make fun of him for being a Corsican. He spoke with a very thick accent. He obviously revered Paoli. And so he is sort of bullied and and and he finds books, I think I argue, as a way to retreat from that bullying. It sort of provides him with his first safe haven. And then when he gets a little older, he starts to read about his island and starts to read some of the philosophy of the time. He reads people like Voltaire, and people like Rousseau. Rousseau, by the way, who had argued for a Corsican constitution, and of Corsican independence. So he sort of finds in his teenage readings what he originally believed. He was a Corsican patriot. And he reads some of these great philosophers and they reinforce him in his Corsican patriotism. He also reads Boswell, who talks about Corsica. He even tries to find books on the history of Corsica. So it's the first third, I would say probably none of his life, a little less than a third, I would say the first 15 or 16 or 17 years of his life. It's really turned towards Corsica. He wants to learn more about the island. He even tries to write a history of his island, which is aborted, and he he never ends up finishing it, but he really wants to reinforce that Corsican identity. He writes among other things, the short story also called New Corsica, which is a very bizarre tale. It's sort of a revenge fantasy. It's fiction. It's a novella about a Corsican father, whose daughter is raped by French soldiers and goes on this killing spree, murdering French soldiers, even murdering French children on a ship in the story. So it's a very, very weird, violent, gory story. And it's incredibly revealing because it shows just how much Napoleon was hating the French at that time and how much he revered his home island. And then it's all the more amazing because he was on his way to becoming a French soldier, a French lieutenant. So these are the writings and readings could even be considered seditious. I mean, they're not odd. They were borderline treason. So very, very weird upbringing. And with the constant tension between his home of Corsica and his future life, which which lays in France.

Gary: Yeah. Truly interesting how, and perhaps this is one of the major themes of your book, how his idealism gives way to the realistic happenings of the day and how he views his advancement as more in line with France than with Corsica. And moving to that theme, the major theme, one of them of your book is grandeur.  Napoleon was someone who was obsessed with great figures of the past and of recreating their legacy. Who were Napoleon's heroes, and how did his understanding of them inform who he was?

Louis: His early heroes, there are two of them. And it's, I say early because he discovers them early. He loved Charlemagne, but that comes a little later. He loves and studies Henry V, but that comes a little later. Since his early childhood, all the way through his life, he is obsessed by two men, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. And he's obsessed by these two men because he read about them in Plutarch's Lives. Plutarch's lives are a wonderful tale. They used to be a mainstay on every educated Europeans reading list. Even today they make for wonderful reading, but unfortunately they're a little less known than they were. If we were having this conversation in the late 1700s of the 1800s, most of the people we would meet from the educated classes would have read Plutarch's Lives. Plutarch is not exactly a historian. He's a wonderful chronicler. Some people have called him a moralist who was around in the first and second century AD, and he doesn't write a classic history.  He writes moral tales. He writes what he called lives. So here's a chapter on Julius Caesar and on Alexander the Great, and he tells the funny quirks, the character traits, the habits, how they were. It's not exactly the tales of stories and battles we would expect from a traditional historical account. They're much more personal. And Napoleon, who first discovers them when he was a young kid, completely drinks it up, becomes obsessed with Plutarch. In fact, the lives are a mainstay in all of his future palatial libraries and all of the war traveling libraries, and even to the end of his life on the two exiles on Elba and Saint Helena. So he discovers these two men, so many of his dictums, that he was later to issue and proclamations, or later in some of his speeches, you can find their origins in, Plutarch's Lives. So those are the two great heroes. There'll be others, notably Rousseau, who is a completely different type of hero, not the the war leader, not the warrior, not the statesman. But when he gets a little older, Napoleon moves away from that theme a little bit, and he wants to devote his life to being a writer, and he becomes a great disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But earlier and really more lasting, I would say, is Caesar and Alexander the Great.

Gary: On that note, I think that you make a very interesting point how his life could have taken a very great turn to possibly being a writer. There is a section of your book that describes how Napoleon met one of his literary heroes, Guillaume Thomas Raynal, who possibly inspired him to participate in an essay contest. You note that at this point, Napoleon wanted to become a great writer like another one of his heroes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Can you tell us all about this fork in the road that Napoleon almost went down, pursuing a life as a writer?

Louis: Yes. It's a fascinating moment of his young life. So he is a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the French Royal Army. In the artillery. In the quiet years leading up to the French Revolution, the storm has not yet arrived. And so his life at the subaltern level is very boring. He has multiple garrison duties in backwater towns and nothing much goes on. So he embarks on a very ambitious self-education program where he starts to read and catalog and write about hundreds and thousands of different authors and texts. And he becomes, as any young reader who embarks on an ambitious reading program, convinced that he himself could become a writer, that all he needs to do is to write some good things, be spotted by some public intellectuals, and then he could devote his life to the pen or the plume. Now he tries this, as you mentioned, he read,  the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes which today, unfortunately, is completely forgotten, used to be a major work of the period and considered a major work in bringing about the revolution that was soon to happen. So he meets Raynal, We don't know what they said to each other. We only know that Napoleon later on sends them some of his early writings, and possibly Raynal encourages him to enter into an essay contest. Now, what is an essay contest? Today, it still exists, but they're much less high profile than they used to be. It's an essay contest set up by public, intellectual, or university at the time. There is a prompt that's published and candidates are encouraged to sign up, propose an essay, write an essay, and then send it in for grading. It was a very good way back then to try to get famous. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as some of your listeners may remember, originally got famous, and started his very prestigious academic career by answering such a prompt and by writing such an essay. And so Napoleon, who's by this point completely enamored with Rousseau, says, “oh my God, this is my shot.” I'm going to enter this essay contest. I know Raynal, I've met him. He's the one organizing the contest. I have such an advantage. I'm going to devote my life to the plume and become a very great writer, philosopher. So the essay prompt is, what are the necessary qualities needed to be instilled in men to guarantee or maximize their happiness? So basically, what qualities do men need to be happy? And Napoleon writes takes three months to write this essay, which it fits, a famous description of Leon Tolstoy's War and Peace. It has a beginning and end and a middle, but not necessarily in that order. It's a large, loose, baggy monster, as somebody else has called it. It's it's very teenager, confused, verbose, intensely emotional document in which Napoleon plagiarized Rousseau, amongst many other authors. And you don't even really know what his answer is. So you read the whole thing. I've read it dozens of times, and at the end, what are the necessary qualities needed to install men to guarantee their happiness? You still don't know. So he submits the essay.  It's known as the essay number 15. And he does not win the prize. Now, he's not discouraged.  He writes a couple other things. He starts on his history of Corsica. He attempts to meet some other of the great intellectuals of his time. But now history is about to seize him, because the early turbulences of the French Revolution are happening. And when these first turbulences happen, when these first events occur, he's dispatched to quell some uprisings, for example. Very quickly, we don't exactly know when, but he makes a conscious decision that his life will not be one of writing and contemplation. His life will be one of action. So the essay contest is fascinating because that is right before that decision. When things are still up in the air, he could decide that the military is really not for him. But then as soon as he's exposed to the first turbulences, he must have realized, okay, there's opportunity here. I'm a soldier. I've been trained to do this at a time when aristocrats are starting to flee. He's his services are so much more in demand. And so he makes the conscious decision to stick with the military side. And I think the way I put it in the book is he sets down the plume forever and picks up the sword.

Gary: Yeah. That is something that really hit home for me. I think any good writer has to have the certain overly verbose, complex type of writing, which they view as highfalutin, sort of beaten out of them. I don't think I've mentioned this ever before on the show, but when I, uh, published my first academic article, it was actually, half of it was on the labor uprisings in Glasgow. So it's British, you know, English language history. And then the other half was comparing that to the similar uprisings in Paris in World War I. And I did have this very verbose style. And when I got the reviews back,  the initial reviewer said that this is a very important article. It's got a lot of good historical stuff, but clearly English isn't his first language. And for me, you know, that some might take that as a heavy insult, but I, I took it as a bit of a compliment because here this person is looking at the English and French sides and they're saying, oh, well, you know, he must be a French language, you know, person because he, you know, writing about this. So I take that as a compliment. But yeah, that's something that a writers really have to get beaten out of them. And it's good to know that Napoleon and I shared this sort of, uh, goofy style.

Louis: And, and I shared it with, with both of you. It's a very interesting. I'm not exactly sure why that is. I assume it's because teenagers are much more emotional.  And they want to laden their sentences. They want to put on the more emotion, more feeling, try to put them more color, which makes sense, but violates, as we now know, every sacred rule of writing. You know, I follow on this, a sort of mash between Orwell's recommendations and Hemingway's recommendations. You know, basically, you know, short declarative sentences, simple, easy to understand obvious words. Never, never use a complicated word when a simple one will do. And usually, always clear declarative meaning. Allusion and analogy is very useful. But as a young writer, keep them in the back pocket. Everything should be true and clear and simple.

Gary: Yeah. Well, you know the spat that Faulkner and Hemingway had.

Louis: Yes.

Gary: Where for those of our listeners who don't know where, Faulkner basically made fun of Hemingway for his very short, style of writing, use small words. And then Hemingway responded, what a sad man that Faulkner is, that he thinks that, big emotions come from big words.

Louis: Yeah, yeah. What a great line that is, by the way. And it's not to criticize Faulkner, but it's just such a different philosophy of writing. And it's also just as a young writer, the rules are not the same as an established one.  You can take on, once you're Faulkner or Hemingway and you've been writing for decades, and you sort of get the confidence and the credibility to experiment and to throw in there some more complicated grammatical structures and some more pristine vocabulary. But before then, before you're Hemingway or Faulkner, very much stick with the simple and the clear and the declarative.

Gary: Yeah. You know, it's a good thing the whole military exploits worked out for Napoleon, because perhaps he wasn't that great as a writer. Although you note in your book that there was not a contradiction between his love of the book and his love of the battle.  While Napoleon is mostly known for his work on the battlefield, you argue that his voracious appetite for books and some of his writings made him the general that he was. Can you detail a bit how his reading and writing led to his promotion through the ranks of the military, and gave him success on the battlefield?

Louis: Of course.  So what do I mean by ‘made him by?’ So two things. First, everybody knows the famous siege of Toulon. He was put in charge of the artillery there. He first shown he's clearly labeled by his contemporaries from that point on as a very acute military mind. How does he get to Toulon? Is another story. Before then, he had very unremarkable military posts. Well, this is right at the fork of the road we had just talked about, when he still deciding whether he's a reader, he's a writer, and he decides to weaponize his writing to further his military career. He publishes a small political tract called Le souper de Beaucaire, in which a very young artillery lieutenant, very badly disguised as Napoleon himself, scolds and argues with 3 or 4 other tenants in a bar, basically, in a brasserie, where he tells them that the revolution is here to stay, the revolution is righteous and that they should become revolutionaries. And in a wonderful turn of speech, he manages to convince them. He publishes this and of course, he's a professional military officer. It's exactly what the new revolutionary government is looking for a loyal military officer. I'll remind your audience that over the past a couple of months or even year, all of the professional French officers who had been mostly aristocrats had fled the country. So a young, loyal revolutionary officer is exactly what the government needs at that moment. So the track is spotted by the brother of Mr. Robespierre and is printed. And so that gets him into the good graces of the revolutionary government. And he finally secures the post of the artillerist, the head artillerist at Toulon. So quite direct way in which his writing secures him that spot. And then and this is my second point, all throughout his life, from that point on, he will use his readings to further his military strategy and his military performance. So first he reads the at the Académie Militaire of Paris a couple of years earlier than our story here. He reads the Traité Stratégique de Jacques Antoine de Guibert, again, completely forgotten today. Back then, it was a huge and massive publication about military strategy, logistics and tactics. And what you can find in (Guibert) if you actually bothered to read him, is a lot of the precepts that would later characterize Napoleonic warfare and the Napoleonic court system. So things like having smaller armies that favor speed rather than numbers, having spread out, and more efficient logistics, but even the rudimentary of the drill and fire and what's necessary to be able to train troops properly. And even the emphasis written in Guibert, decades before the French Revolution of not relying on aristocratic officers and mercenaries, but on creating a national army, of course, what Napoleon was about to institute by the various draft measures. He didn't start them of course. They started with the revolutionary governments, but he would take the draft measures to new heights. So you read he reads Guibert and he puts into practice so many of these of the academic theories that had been very successful in books, but that have never been really tried on a massive scale on the battlefield. And in this little story, is exactly Napoleon, right? He takes the great ideas that exist in books, but he puts him into practice, and he does this again and again and again. And then, if I might add, there's a third point in which his readings made him a general. A great general, I should say, is that now he's laden with, he got his first opportunity with the track he wrote, he read Guibert and is putting into practice, or will put into practice all the things he learned in Guibert. But throughout his life, whether we're talking about the early campaigns of the consulates or the campaigns of the Empire, he compiles dozens and hundreds and thousands of books before every campaign relating to the relevant campaign, the relevant theaters campaign. So before he campaigns in Prussia, he gets books on Prussian geography, Prussian topography, German rivers, population statistics, agricultural outputs. He reads books about previous generals and kings who have fought there. He reads books about the organization of the Prussian Army and The Prussian taxation system himself. He doesn't have them read. He reads them himself. So he acquires a mass of knowledge about the relevant theaters, geography and about the opposing army and populations, logistics, tax infrastructure, everything that his opponent simply did not have. Today, all of that information in modern armies would be considered vital intelligence, whole intelligence corps are devoted to acquiring this information. But he didn't have an intelligence corps. They had spies. But sometimes you get the numbers or the location. But he has much more. He acquires decades worth of knowledge. And he arrived at the battlefield incredibly richer than his opponents. So it's quite interesting to study, for example, the acquisition of those volumes before the campaign. So before the campaign of Spain is set to be launched a year before you see an uptick in imperial orders for books on Spain. Right. So, a clever spy who was at court or who swam amongst the currents of the bibliographies or the librarians of Paris, noticing an uptick on the books concerning Spain, essentially knew where French armies were headed to next. So this was a very, very important subject. That in my view, not enough, known especially in American literature. So his readings had a very profound impact on his war making.  Of course, it goes back to what we were talking about before recording, but it forever puts to rest the sort of dichotomy that's often presented, between the men of action and the men of reading, the men of contemplation, when in fact the greatest men of action, such as he was not only read a lot, but depended on reading. And I think people, modern generals like General Petraeus, exemplify this better than than anybody.

Gary: Although if Hollywood has their way, that dichotomy will exist in people's minds. But, shying away a bit from the, new Napoleon movie. When reading your book, it is fascinating to discover which authors Napoleon liked and those he didn't.  Shockingly, he was not a big fan of Moliere, who is often considered the greatest French playwright of all time, and he had a love hate relationship with Voltaire's works. Can you tell us about the writers the Emperor did not appreciate and why.

Louis: Of course. Well, you mentioned to Voltaire. He loves some stuff. Hates others. Moliere he doesn't like. Napoleon was the great fan of the theater. He goes to the theater and he reads plays on himself.  I think he attends, over his 15 year reign one theater performance a week, every week for 15 years. So incredible attendance record. He doesn't like Moliere because he doesn't like comedies. And of course, Moliere is very famous for amongst other things, for his comedies. Napoleon only enjoys high tragedies, and he enjoys particularly high tragedies which deal with the political.  This was a man who was completely passionate by politics and by war, and by what he called the affairs of state. He didn't really care about love stories, at least later on. Originally, of course, he was very much enthused by the birth of the romantic movement. But later on, especially in plays, he's looking for the high tragedy, for the fate tragedies that we used to call for the political tragedies. So Moliere is sort of starts at a disadvantage with Napoleon. Voltaire, it's a bit different. He likes some of Voltaire. He likes the political, the philosophical writings. He has more trouble with some of the plays. One particular play that Napoleon hated was Voltaire's play Muhammad, also called Fanaticism. And this is a play on, of course, the founder of the Islamic religion, Muhammad. And it's a very negative play. It's a play where Voltaire portrays Mohammed as sort of a schemer who convinces his followers to follow him, and then sort of poison some of them, a very, very negative portrayal of Mohammed. Napoleon detested that play because he, as always, obsessed with the great men and the great achievers and the great leaders and warriors, thought Muhammad was a great man, he says, who knew of the Arabs before Muhammad? He takes them, this unknown, backward people, and he pushes them to new heights. He carved for them an empire. He is elevated by the masses. He carved a mighty polity. And this is exactly how Napoleon in a way, saw himself. And of course, it's very interesting to see that with the modern accusations, and Napoleon was a racist, or Napoleon was a colonialist, and yet, he despised a play written by one of the greatest French playwrights of all time that was criticizing Mohammed. So a very, very ambivalent, ambivalent portrayal of Napoleon. So, he doesn't like Voltaire that much. He doesn't like, Molière that much. There's other works that he comes back to. Sometimes he criticized them, sometimes he says he loves them. There's a bit of a lack of coherence Bernardin de Saint-Pierre who wrote Paul et Virginie for example, one of those great love stories written in the 18th century. He originally at least says that the book is amazing, that it has fire, that it speaks to him. And then on Saint Helena he says, it's not that good. And there's a controversy because he says, it's not that good. So we must not always look for perfect coherence in his taste. But certainly, some of them are very revealing.

Gary: Now let's move from the man to the Empire. How did Napoleon spread his love of learning to France and beyond?

Louis: Well, this is a paradoxical question, because some of your listeners may know Napoleon Institute's one of the most draconian regimes of censorship in the history of France. And this is very weird, because this is a man who was absolutely obsessed with books, who wanted to become himself a writer when he was younger. A man who considers them essential for every aspect of his life. And yet he manages to alienate all the great authors of his age. Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Chateaubriand, makes enemies out of them, and sometimes needlessly, when very clearly he could have wooed them over, if not to his cause, at least to sort of a placid indifference. But he makes enemies out of them. And also he institutes this regime of censorship, where by the end of the Empire, it's almost like satire. No play is allowed to be released without endless recitation of the regime's propaganda. No article is published without dedication to the Emperor. Everything is read and sifted through to make sure it is not even remotely seditious. So what are we to make of this? Well, I think and I would argue that although he loved literature, although he loved reading his main obsession was politics. Everything was to be subordinated to politics. And as a child of the revolution, who saw the dangers of the press and the appel au meurtre, and what a completely free and unbridled press could result in. He is forever afraid of that. Some say wrongly, some say rightly. You know, you pick. But he constantly goes back to that argument that a free press is absolutely dangerous for society. And he also considers his own regime rather fragile. The quest for legitimacy is a constant thing with Napoleon. He says The Bourbons, they have a thousand years, the Habsburgs, they have a thousand years. That's their legitimacy. I don't have a thousand years. So he constantly seeks to reinforce his legitimacy. He doesn't think his regime can survive a few bad articles, or a few bad proclamations, or a few bad books or plays. So he constantly seeks to crack down on France's literary output. So it's a very, very sorry thing to research, obviously, because and I think this is the opinion of most historians. In the beginning of the reign, the censorship is there, but it's much less draconian. It's much more justified. We have just left the revolution. But by the 1810’s, that argument falls away. There's less and less risk of a revolution, and draconian gets, the censorship gets even worse. So it's a very, very ambivalent,  relationship that he has to at least the public production of literature. But we must say nonetheless, he created among his palaces vast palatial libraries. So there's two libraries he creates. We call them the great libraries or the little libraries is for him and his direct family only. They jealously hoarded books, the great libraries, you know, therefore, the ministers and the diplomats, but even the servants, on many occasions he sort of scolds a maid or guard that he sees reading, but he never forbids them to read. He encourages them to rent books. He creates a library at the barracks of the Imperial Guard.  Quote so that they don't become agents of disorder, end quote. So he encourages his entourage and his court and his government to read. And of course, he knows how important reading is to his counsellors of state, to his ministers. This is a time when, you know, we they don't have Wikipedia, they don't have the internet. So all they need throughout their duties is to be found in books. So he very well knows that there are levers of power, these books that are very important for the administration, and the logistical organization and the legal side and the financial side of his reign and his armies. So he sets them up. They're come to encompass over 60,000 volumes of the absolutely enormous libraries. He plans to build some everywhere. He even plans to have, a library for the future princes of his dynasties. And he even plans to collect a copy of every book published in Europe, Swedish books, Danish books, Spanish, Italian, English, German, Russian, every book published. He wants to copy of them. So his literary ambitions were absolutely huge. I mean, people think his military ambitions were bad. He wanted a copy of every book published in Europe.

Gary: Yeah. You know, and it is funny that you talk about his censorship because here is someone who he had dreamed of being a great author and being famous for his writing. And yet in our historical understanding, he ends up making some people famous because of their writing opposition to him. I mean, particularly Germaine de Staël who was a great writer, but nowadays is mostly known because she opposed Napoleon and was one of the first.

Louis: Yes, indeed. And this is really Napoleon's fault. She was enamored with him in the beginning. I mean, she stalks him. She goes to dinners and galas to find him. She writes endless praise of him, and he manages to alienate her so quickly. Why is the subject of debate? Well, obviously, we must say, and this is entirely true. He had a sort of a constant skepticism towards educated women, especially women who wrote sort of regards them with with disdain. I mean, famously, Germaine de Stahl, who still loves him at this point, goes up to him during a gala and says,  Mr. First Consul, what qualities do you most admire in a woman? And she's probably fully expecting him to say her intellect, her writing. And he responds rather crassly, “the one that bears me the most children.” That's his view of the of the better sex. So he alienates her.  And it's a very, very big mistake because she turns out to be incredibly prolific and influential in her literary output.  He pushes her to exile. She travels all over Europe and the world because she cannot go back to France. She, of course, creates the Coppet group This sort of, it was called the Estates General of European Opinion. It's the circle of intellectuals that even Napoleon's brother Joseph frequents in Switzerland, where she collects all these, exiled ministers, all the famous diplomats, all the great writers and intellectuals and, and they participate to the birth of the romantic movement in Europe and also have a very, very strong anti Napoleonic strain. So he manages to alienate a lot of the intellectual circles that I argue he really could have had on his side in the beginning.  It's very, very strange to read and to research about this particular subject just because, I mean, this guy loved literature so much, loved the political so much, knew he needed allies. And here there was a natural ally who already loved him in the beginning, and he manages to completely bungle it up and push her away.

Gary: Yeah, that in and of itself is an interesting topic. Uh, someone who views themself as a romantic and yet his horrendously sexist. And it kind of goes to another theme of your book because you mentioned how very often because he would just read so quickly and so, pervasively, that he's going to miss a lot of the major points of what the books are trying to convey.

Louis: Yeah, he read badly, and what do I mean by that? He read very fast. So, mostly he picks up a book, he wants to get to the crux of the subject incredibly fast, sort of understand it as fast as he can, and then move on. That's how he reads. Add it to that the fact that his French was never perfect. In fact, it was rather bad. His handwriting was just unintelligible. I mean, we have cases where he writes something down, leaves the room, comes back a couple minutes later, and he himself could not decipher what he had just written. I mean, his mind is sort of working at 500 miles an hour. And so when he writes, it's it's absolutely terrible. His French, he never mastered, probably due to the educational shortcomings of the monks who taught him at Brienne and famously his brother said that the monks never, never taught him proper French. He learned Italian earlier, spoke it much better, and then loses his Italian as well. So he sort of inhabits that linguistic dead zone where he never masters any perfect language, speaks broken French with a with a terrible accent.  And doesn't particularly enjoy the long books, especially later on where he has to spend, you know, six weeks reading something. So he often misreads entire passages and misunderstands entire passages. In fact, we have this very funny moment I think he's with Arnaud, he sailing to Egypt. I think they were talking about one of Ocean's and they're debating the meaning of the poem.  Napoleon miss quotes the thing, quotes another poem when he's talking about another one Arnaud bets him something and Napoleon loses the bet and we're told he forgot to pay. Then they also debate the meaning of another poem, and Arnaud is so confused by Napoleon's explanation it made such little sense that he says, “I don't think I'll ever understand the poem again.” So clearly his reading left much to be desired, but it makes sense when you see that he was such an impatient, in all other aspects of his life. He moves so fast, he thinks and talks so fast that reading, which is a very solitary venture that necessitates a lot of slowing down, a lot of meditative approach, a lot of calmness, which he never really mastered.  It makes sense to see that he always was a relatively bad reader.

Gary: Yeah. And I think one very dramatic point you note is how he had a book on the Swedish invasion of Russia that he took with him to Russia, and he completely missed the point of how that ended in disaster. Perhaps if he had actually read it correctly, he could have avoided that.

Louis: Yeah. This is one of those moments when, as a researcher and as a not an adherent, but as a great admirer of the emperor, you bang your head on the table and you don't understand. He brought with him and had read before multiple times Voltaire's biography of Charles the 12th, who had in the early 1700s invaded Russia. The Russians facing him knew he had a powerful army. Practiced the scorched earth tactic, refused him the great battle, lured him deeper and deeper into Russia until the winter arrived. Of course, the coldest European winter in five centuries decimates his army. Finally a battle, and he's decisively defeated. That is Charles. Pretty much exactly what would happen a hundred years later to Napoleon. Napoleon has the book. Napoleon reads the book. Napoleon comments on the book. Napoleon comments on the Russian winter. Napoleon brings the book with him to Russia and presides over precisely the same disaster. Now, why that is, is anybody's guess. I would argue that by 1812 he has had nothing but tremendous military success, with some exceptions, but mostly tremendous military success. Over ten years he's fought the Russians before he beat them at Friedland. He fought the Russians in the snow before, at a Eylau and he beat them. He doesn't want to go to Moscow originally. He wants to fight a big battle by the frontier. Call it a day, make peace on favorable terms and leave. And or rather but he is completely outplayed by a very, very, very, smart Russian strategy. Pretty much the same one they applied against Charles the 12th, which is to not give him that big battle to lure him in and to let the weather and the disease progressively whittle down his forces. It's very important to note that for all we make of the winter, it's not the winter that beat Napoleon. It's typhus, which decimated his army on the way to Moscow. He lost much more soldiers on the way to Moscow than on the way back during summer. And the wonderful Russian strategy, um, and that was completely successful. So the winter is given sort of an exaggerated role in many ways to sort of excuse the Napoleonic blunder that was Russia. But yes, he had the Charles the 12 biography. He read it, he commented on it, and he completely misses the point. Perhaps he thinks, you know, he's completely immune to disaster. And on the way back from Russia, he burns some of his books because, all of Europe knew that he had traveling war libraries. He doesn't want the Russians to be able to take them as trophies. And he chucks out of his window, out of his carriage window on the retreat some books. This is a very bad habit that he had against a paradox. This great book lover often threw through books out the window, or chuck them in the fireplace. And so he throws books out the window. And some of the books were picked up by the marauding Russian Cossacks, and some are still today in Lithuanian and Russian libraries. We have a copy of Voltaire's Confessions, I believe, or Rousseau's Confessions in the Lithuanian Library to this day, it was picked up by a Russian Cossack. So that image right there, to me, encapsulates everything about the downfall of his empire. It's the downfall of the empire of books. And it's just a Cossack, you know, picking up Voltaire's Confessions on the ground in the snow,  in late 1812, early 1813. It's a wonderful and also terrifying image.

Gary: So speaking of the downfall, I think one of the most poetic and tragic parts of the book is where you talk about his life in exile. As an old defeated man, he found himself on an island with almost nothing to do but read. Can you give us an insight into the last years of Napoleon through the books he read and perhaps what he wrote?

Louis: Of course. Yes. This is the ultimate crown of thorns. It's the ultimate cementing of the legacy and the legend. It is the end, the exile.  He arrives on Saint Helena in late 1815 or 1816. I don't exactly remember. And he was to spend six years on the island before his death. And what's important for our purposes is that this is the first time since his teenage years when he has trouble getting books. When he was emperor, he benefited from France's massive administrative and fiscal resources. He built, as I mentioned, great libraries with 60,000 volumes. He had a dedicated staff of bibliographies and librarians, massive funds put aside for acquisitions and updating, etc.. On Saint Helena, he has none of that. So he brings along with him about 500 books, 580 books, which to him is chronically insufficient, especially because he had read most of those already gets to the island with 580 books, immediately starts placing orders for new books, and the English government is very reluctant to honor those orders. And so he relies on the haphazard shipments of either English books, those that do go through, books given by the English government or books sent by admirers. And those are chronically insufficient, and it absolutely contributes to his gnawing and growing depression. It's also probably and by it, I mean the lack of books is also probably the greatest reason for the deterioration of the relationship with the island's governor, Sir Hudson Lowe. We have this famous ticket where Napoleon tells Lowe, “I have 1000 books here. This is not sufficient. I need 60,000 books and the resources of a great city,” which is what he had under the Empire. So he depends on these haphazard and relatively rare shipments. So much so that there's this amazing image I relay in the book, but I think it's in 1816. So still relatively early in the exile, the first shipment of books, I think it's on the HMS Newcastle that it arrives, the first shipment of books arrive and they set up the boxes to the Longwood Mansion. And Napoleon is so ecstatic. He is so excited to get these books that he pries open the boxes himself with a hammer and scissors. Now you say this today and say, oh, he was excited. He opened the box. You know who doesn't? But back then, the idea that the Emperor himself is opening the box with a hammer and scissors is is unthinkable. Yet he does just how happy he was to have new, new stuff to read. He lays out all the books on the floor like a child on Christmas morning, reads them all night, and I think it's Marchand. the next morning who enters into his apartments and finds him on his hands and knees.  This is a not an old man. He was relatively young, but a very established, an aging and obese man by that point, on his hands and knees reading books like a child. So it's a very touching scene. And of course, there is also, as you asked, the writing output, at least originally during the exile. So he gets to the exile, he very much know that this is the end. There will never be a comeback on like on Elba.  And I think it's on the ship that the Count of Las Casas, one of the one of the guys accompanying him, tells him we will write our memoirs, we will live in the past. There is much there to satisfy us. And so he sets himself the objective of writing his memoirs. Now, his memoirs, are to be differentiated from the memorial of Saint Helena. The memorial of Saint Helena is the great masterpiece. It's what cements his legend. It's one of the best sellers of the 19th century, and that's published, I think, in 1823 by the Count of Las Casas. The memoirs are different. The memoirs is what Napoleon himself wrote. And it's about the early years, 52:44 and the years of the revolution and then Waterloo and the end. He sort of says nothing about the entire reign. It's very weird as to why he didn't. One theory is that he didn't have the resources. He didn't have the correspondence, the archives necessary to be able to remember and write correctly. Probably he was also very depressed about the subject. So he stays away from the from the reign. He focuses on the beginning and the end. He also, apart from the memoirs, then the Memorial of Saint Helena writes a very short treatise on fortifications. He writes a commentary on the wars of his great hero Julius Caesar. A very, very funny thing to read. I encourage everybody to read it. I think Pen and Sword, the publisher that published, my book, also published a re-edited English translation of that little tract, where he compares the achievements of Julius Caesar's armies and his own. It's a fascinating little document to read. And as the months and years go by, he gets more depressed, more sick, and he stops writing almost altogether. This is about by late 1816, 1817, the literary output is almost gone. And then his life is pretty much only reading.  He lost everything by this point. Command over provinces, governments, regimes, states, armies, nothing remains. All there is is his great passion that was there at the beginning. His books. And he reads and reads and reads has trouble getting books. People send him books. But this very problematic thing happens. A lot of the people who send him books dedicate the books to the Emperor Napoleon, and the English government does not allow those books in any book with a problematic dedication is not allowed in. We, of course, do not refer to Napoleon as Emperor, just general.  And so anything that says emperor is stricken out and he cannot receive them. And this leads us all the way to the end, the last weeks, where he is absolutely suffering from the stomach cancer that was to kill him, he is more and more delirious. He is completely and utterly depressed and down.  He is a site of sadness and despair for his entourage, which sees him get worse and worse. One of the last things he reads is a series of his correspondence that he finally received, the letters of some of his early reign. And, he reads also the reveries of the Marshal of Saxe, which is what the marshal of Saxe dictated upon his deathbed and inspired, we are told Napoleon dictated his own reveries.  But today, unfortunately, they're lost, they're lost to history. So this is the exile. The first years he's still motivated, he's still healthy. He's still in relatively good spirits. And he writes the memoirs, the fortification tract, the the tract on Julius Caesar. And of course, he contributes to the great Memorial of Saint Helena, written by Las Casas. And as the years wore on there's less and less writing, more and more reading up until the very end where there's almost nothing left. I mean, by a few weeks he didn't even have the strength to finish a paragraph, let alone a book. So it's very much the the dusk of a reader. It's the subject that I particularly wanted to talk about, the fact that at the beginning of his life, books are what protect him from the bullying of his peers. He falls into them because he wants to get away from his sort of precarious existence. Then books sort of rise with him. Uh, they become the levers of power as he becomes the head of power, he builds the great palatial libraries. It's a great effervescence. It's a great literary golden age, at least when it comes to the imperial administration around him. And then as he loses everything, it's again the books that take him away from its predicament, he again retreats into their bosom for comfort, and consolation. And at the very end of course, he dies right in his, in his will, that his books are to be given to his son, that he should study history above all else. For it is, he tells us, the only true philosophy. And of course, the books will never reach the son, forbidden by the Austrian and the English governments. And most of them will be either handed out to private collectors, or sold by Sotheby's, during an auction in 1823. So it's a very tragic ending, but it's also a very touching one. It is very much reading and books that were, as they were with many readers, his most loyal and constant companions.

Gary: Your book is a triumph both in its depth, its breadth, and in its writing style. I thoroughly enjoyed the work and think our listeners will, as well as a final question, without giving away everything, is there anything you learned about Napoleon that shocked, surprised, or amused you that most people might not know?

Louis: Yes. and I would say that is his emphasis on reading melodramatic love stories. And this shocked his contemporaries. He could preside over a battle with tens of thousands of casualties, giving out orders, immersing himself in every detail of his armies and of the battle and the campaign, and then retreat into his tent and pick up a love story about a lowborn Tudor and his aristocratic mistress, his aristocratic lover. So it's a very weird aspect of his character, his ability to compartmentalize, to put away the war and the horror and the logistics and the nitty gritty of the campaigning. And to pick up a love story and be completely enamored by the love story. And it's something that I wish more people knew, because oftentimes we say he was a, you know, a monstrous, mass murderer. He was a warmonger. Well, I think there's something to be said that warmongers and mass murderers and people who are completely cold blooded and don't care about the lives of their fellow human beings, rarely enjoy reading melodramatic love stories, at least to the extent that he did. He was a very emotional guy. He was a very passionate guy, as his letters to Josephine make evident. And I think nowhere is this more evident than in some of his romantic readings.

Gary: The book is Napoleon's Library: The Emperor, His Books and Their Influence on the Napoleonic Era. Thank you for the interview.

Louis: Thank you for having me. It was a great pleasure.

Gary: As always, donations keep the podcast going. So if you would like to make a one time donation or become a patron, please consider doing so. Thank you very much for your continued support.