Walter Scott, ‘Life of Napoleon Buonaparte’ (1827)

[Continuing my read-through of Walter Scott. Previously on this blog: Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1821/22), The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1823), Quentin Durward (1823), St Ronan’s Well (1823), Redgauntlet (1824), The Betrothed (1825), The Talisman (1825) and Woodstock (1826). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]

1825 was a big year for Scott, and not in a good way. A nationwide financial crisis brought down some 60 banks and many businesses, including Scott’s London-based publisher, Constable’s, and his printers James Ballantyne and Company. Scott, as the sole financing partner in Ballantynes, found himself legally liable for enormous debts: £120,899 and more — maybe twenty million in today’s money (though it’s hard to make the conversion with any accuracy). He decided the honourable thing to do was to earn the money needed to pay off this debt the same way he had earned the large fortune of which the financial crash had just deprived him: by his pen. He came to an arrangement with his creditors, dividing his future work into two streams: on the one hand, projects the profits of which would ablate his mountain of debt, and, on the other, a few smaller works through which he would earn subsistence money for himself.

The first of the former was a big biography of Napoleon, something he had previously planned in three volumes, inspired by the success of Southey’s Life of Nelson (1813). With the collapse of his finances he launched himself energetically into actually writing this, and two years later, on 28th June 1827, The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French: With a Preliminary View of the French Revolution. By the Author of “Waverley” appeared — though in nine, rather than the projected three, volumes.

Nine! Scott’s letters during the period of composition give some sense of how exasperating it must have been being his publisher over this period. Three volumes make for a good, marketable proposition, fair dos. But almost as soon as he begins work Scott decides that he needs to preface the actual biography with a ‘preliminary a sketch of the [French] Revolution’ which will add a volume. Pretty soon [Letters 9:231; to Ballantyne, 7 Oct. 1825] this ‘preface’ has expanded to two volumes. Still, we can imagine Ballantyne thinking: five volumes is manageable, from a publishing point of view, just about. In the new year, Scott writes ‘from the materials that pour-in it cannot be comprised in less than six volumes’ [Letters 10:22; 26 April 1826]. Then a few months later ‘the work must necessarily extend to seven volumes. I cannot squeeze it into six’ [Letters 10:105; 15 Sept 1826]. Next he was airily referring to an eighth volume [Letters 10:177; 21 March 1827] and in May 1827 to a ninth [Letters 10:212].

No faulting Walt’s productivity, at any rate. Nor was this the only writing work Scott was doing during this time: he was also completing Woodstock, starting Chronicles of the Canongate and overseeing a six-volume collection of his Miscellaneous Prose Works. This would be exhausting enough, but, amazingly, Scott also resumed work on another project he’d been kicking around for a while: a new edition of Shakespeare (in the event, this didn’t come to anything).

Scott was working under the extreme pressures of both the crush of his enormous debts and the death of his wife in May 1826. Indeed, it’s hard to shake the sense that he is doing all this labour not despite the stress and grief but, precisely because of it: Scott’s reaction to his various catastrophes was both practical-minded in a financial sense and, clearly, psychopathological in an emotional one. His writing became a way of withdrawing from the hurtful world, of sealing himself away and distracting his thoughts and feelings from their pain. In his journal for April 1826, during the writing of the Napoleon biography, he described himself as ‘a perfect Automaton. Bonaparte runs in my head from 7 in the morning till ten at night without intermission’ [W E K Anderson (ed), The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (1972), 294]. Turn yourself into a robot and you need not feel; which is to say, need not undertake the painful though necessary work of processing your feelings, of grieving and so healing.

But trying to maintain the psychological self-preservation of automata existence comes with its own costs. From his journal and letters it is clear that the realities of his situation repeatedly broke in upon him, and his confidence in his own writing collapsed. In June he confided to his journal that the Napoleon book was ‘an awful screed’. He worried over inaccuracies and flubs — a reasonable worry, since the manuscript did indeed contain a great many of these: Ballantyne lamented that going over each separate page of the proofs ‘costs me 5 hours labour if it costs me five minutes’ correcting the errors, and tidying the prose. He told Scott ‘I have been reading over, critically what has been printed and I find the tautologies and inaccuracies very numerous indeed.’ Writing to his son-in-law (and future biographer) John Lockhart, Scott breathed a kind of exhausted resignation: ‘I wish it may answer your expectations. It will disappoint unreasonable people on both sides and what I care much more about it will be found I fear in some particulars less accurate than I could wish’ [Letters 10:159; to J- G. Lockhart, 15 Feb. 1827].

Still, he got it written. The Napoleon book earned Scott 10,500 guineas (that is £11,025) — simultaneously a vast sum for any book and a drop in the bucket where the £121,000 he owed was concerned. It was respectfully if not enthusiastically reviewed and sold well enough for it to be reprinted several times: a new edition, disposed into five volumes, followed in 1832 (that’s the edition from which I’m quoting in this blogpost).

In 1827 as Scott’s biography emerged Napoleon had only been dead a few years, and the Battle of Waterloo was only a dozen years ago, so this was still a live issue, with the demonised tyrant Boney still a live part of the British Imaginary. Hard to imagine Britain’s bestselling author doing this after WW2, really: ‘Agatha Christie’s Life of Hitler, in nine volumes’.

More, Scott’s account isn’t a hatchet-job. In the preliminary material to the first vol Scott insists he ‘will be found no enemy to the person of Napoleon … His splendid personal qualities — his great military actions and political services to France — will not, it is hoped, be found depreciated in the narrative.’ At the same time, Scott cannot obscure that ‘the general system of Napoleon has rested upon force or fraud’. Putting it briefly, Scott’s version of Bonaparte portrays him as a divided, and sometimes tormented, ultimately doomed-by-his-own-faults genius, brilliant as a general and yet a terrible enemy of political liberty. The comparison the work reaches for is, perhaps surprisingly, Cromwell:

It must always be written down, as Buonaparte’s error as well as his guilt, that misusing the power which the 18th Brumaire threw into his hands, he totally destroyed the liberty of France, or, as we would say, more properly, the chance which that country had of attaining a free, and at the same time, a settled government. He might have been a patriot prince, he chose to be an usurping despot — he might have played the part of Washington, he preferred that of Cromwell [Scott, Life of Napoleon, 2: 291]

That Scott was completing Woodstock, with its portrait of Cromwell as a charismatic but unstable villain, perhaps coloured his perspective here.

What else? Well despite the length of Scott’s book, his analysis is not nuanced. It’s not just that he is judgmental in way modern historians tend not to be — though he is — it’s that he prefers to expatiate prolixly upon a simplified version of events, somewhere between ‘novelistic’ and ‘cartoony’. There is some, limited, attempt at portraying Bonaparte himself as comprised of both good and evil, but everybody else in this narrative wears either a black or a white hat. More, Scott’s grasp of historical process is amazingly threadbare, like a pub-bore whanging on with his unwittingly exiguous grasp of how ‘things’ work.

For example: what caused the French Revolution? The answer, as the clickbait headlines put it, may surprise you. It’s: writers. An odd thing for a professional writer to argue we might think (or perhaps not — perhaps it is an oblique way of magnifying our importance in the grand scheme of things), but a thesis Scott advances without proviso or qualification.

As the eighteenth century advanced, the men of literature rose in importance, and, aware of their own increasing power in a society which was dependent on them for intellectual gratification, they supported each other in their … fanatical violence of opinion, and a dogmatical mode of expression. [1:23]

The French aristocracy unwittingly cut their own throats: ‘susceptible of those pleasures which arise from conversation and literary discussion, [the nobles] had early called in the assistance of men of genius to enhance their relish for society … without renouncing their aristocratic superiority, — which, on the contrary, was rendered more striking by the contrast, — they permitted literary talents to be a passport into their saloons.’

Hence arose that frequent and close inquiry into the origin of ranks, that general system of impugning the existing regulations, and appealing to the original states of society in vindication of the original equality of mankind — hence those ingenious arguments, and eloquent tirades in favour of primitive and even savage independence, which the patricians of the day read and applauded with such a smile of mixed applause and pity, as they would have given to the reveries of a crazed poet, while the inferior ranks … caught the ardour of the eloquent authors, and rose from the perusal with minds prepared to act, whenever action should be necessary to realize a vision so flattering. [1:34]

Watch out for those inferior ranks, stirred up by those apparently-omnipotent authors! One thing led to another, and pretty soon it’s guillotinin’ time.

The cry of these blood-thirsty bacchanals, such as they had that night shown themselves, was, it seems, considered as the voice of the people, and as such …Thus they rushed along, howling their songs of triumph. The harbingers of the march bore the two bloody heads of the murdered gardes du corps, paraded on pikes, at the head of the column, as the emblems of their prowess and success. … These wretches, stained with the blood in which they had bathed themselves, were now singing songs. [1:97–98]

Scott’s goodies-and-baddies historical frame drives the analysis. He is, for instance, hyperbolic in his praise for Marie Antoinette. Not for him a foolish, vain and disengaged ‘let them eat cake’ queen (that anecdote isn’t in the book) she is rather a woman of ‘noble presence, and graceful firmness of demeanour’ [2:113] ‘whose excellent qualities’ often ‘thwarted or bore down the more candid intentions of her husband’ [1:53]; ‘magnanimous in the highest degree’ [1:174]. That there were voices raised against her Scott reluctantly concedes, although he refuses to go into specifics: ‘vile tongues are never wanting to supply infamous reports … no individual suffered more than Marie Antoinette from this species of slander.’ What species of slander is that, you ask? ‘The terms of her accusation,’ says Scott, ‘were too basely depraved to be even hinted at here’ [1:256].

Well, alright then!

As against this portrait of aristocratic female virtue Scott really leans heavily into a gendered portrait of womanly wickedness. His female revolutionaries are worse even than the men — ‘amazons’, a ‘deputation of mad women’:

The Amazons then crowded into the Assembly, mixed themselves with the members, occupied the seat of the president, of the secretaries, produced or procured victuals and wine, drank, sung, swore, scolded, screamed, — abused some of the members, and loaded others with their loathsome caresses. [1:231]

Loathsome, eh? One wonders. Not that Scott lets the men off lightly, of course. Here is ‘the atrocious Marat’ a man ‘not five feet high, whose countenance was equally ferocious and hideous, and his head monstrous in size’ [1:323]. Robespierre ‘cuts off the head that is brought to him, no matter whose … How did he sleep, after receiving the last words, the last looks of all these severed heads?’ [1:355]. They’ll all monsters: ‘the dissolute Mirabeau, a moral monster’ [1:63], Danton a ‘mortal monster’ and so on — although Scott is prepared to concede that Danton wasn’t quite so bad as the monstrous others:

[Danton’s] vices of wrath, luxury, love of spoil, dreadful as they were, are attributes of mortal men; — the envy of Robespierre, and the instinctive blood-thirstiness of Marat, were the properties of fiends. Danton, like the huge serpent called the boa, might be approached with a degree of safety when gorged with prey — but the appetite of Marat for blood was like the horse-leech, which says, “Not enough” — and the slaughterous envy of Robespierre was like the gnawing worm that dieth not, and yields no interval of repose. [1:227]

This, clearly, is not a history that pretends any disinterested objectivity. In putting an end to all this monstrous revolutionary monstrosity, Scott thinks, Napoleon deserves at least some praise: the chief of ‘a race of generals whom the world scarce ever saw equalled’, presiding over his military staff like King Arthur: ‘Marshals and Generals who were to share his better fortunes, and cluster around his future throne as the British and Armorican champions begirt the Round Table of Uther’s fabled son’ [1:369]

The middle volumes detail all Napoleon’s early military campaigns in rather exhausting detail. With a romancier’s need for goodies and baddies, and now that Queen Marie has been decapitated, Scott shifts his praise to a different heroine: ‘Josephine’s tact and address in political business had at all times the art of mitigating [Napoleon’s] temper, and turning aside the hasty determinations of his angry moments, not by directly opposing, but by gradually parrying and disarming them. It must be added, to her great praise, that she was always a willing, and often a successful advocate, in the cause of humanity’.

Though Scott concedes Napoleon’s military skill he often downplays the big-name victories: ‘the Battle of Austerlitz, fought against an enemy of great valour but slender experience, was not of a very complicated character’ [2:102]; the Battle of Jena was less won by Napoleon and more lost by ‘the mismanagement of the Prussian generals in these calamitous battles, and in all the manœuvres which preceded them, amounted to infatuation’ [3:154] and so on.

As for the Russian campaign: ‘the causes of this total and calamitous failure lay in [Napoleon’s] miscalculations, both moral and physical, which were involved in the first concoction of the enterprise and began to operate from its very commencement.’ [4:239] Scott adds: ‘we are aware that this is, with the idolaters of Napoleon, an unpalatable view of the case’, going on to critique the French assault with the absolute, unclouded confidence of a man who has (a) never commanded an army and (b) never invaded Russia in the winter months. How can it be, he scoffs, that ‘a mere fall of snow’ could ‘infer the extent of misfortune here attributed to its agency?’ Not only is Scott certain that a few flakes of snow can’t explain why Napoleon got destroyed in Russia — ‘a snow, accompanied with hard frost, is not necessarily destructive to a retreating army’ — he actually asserts that a proper cold snap must be actively advantageous to military manoeuvre: ‘in the snow, hard frozen upon the surface, as it is in Russia and Canada, the whole face of the country becomes a road; and an army, lightly equipped, and having sledges instead of wains, may move in as many parallel columns as they will.’ Right you are, Walter. The snow had nothing to do with it; Napoleon just frittered away his entire army for nothing.

Jimmy, as they say, Hill.

At the end of his mammoth volume, Scott devotes a few brief paragraphs to summing up, and deploring, Napoleon’s character: his ‘egotism’ his ‘indifference to truth’ and ‘spirit of self-deception’, the ‘horrid evils which afflicted Europe during the years of his success’: ‘some crimes he committed of a different character, which seem to have sprung, not like the general evils of war, from the execution of great and calculated plans of a political or military kind, but must have had their source in a temper naturally passionate and vindictive.’ But it wasn’t all bad. This is how Scott closes:

His system of government was false in the extreme. It comprehended the slavery of France, and aimed at the subjugation of the world. But to the former he did much to requite them for the jewel of which he robbed them. He gave them a regular government, schools, institutions, courts of justice, and a code of laws. In Italy, his rule was equally splendid and beneficial. The good effects which arose to other countries from his reign and character, begin also to be felt, though unquestionably they are not of the kind which he intended to produce. His invasions, tending to reconcile the discords which existed in many states between the governors and governed, by teaching them to unite together against a common enemy, have gone far to loosen the feudal yoke, to enlighten the mind both of prince and people, and have led to many admirable results, which will not be the less durably advantageous, that they have arisen, are arising slowly, and without contest.

In closing the Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, we are called upon to observe, that he was a man tried in the two extremities, of the most exalted power and the most ineffable calamity, and if he occasionally appeared presumptuous when supported by the armed force of half a world, or unreasonably querulous when imprisoned within the narrow limits of St. Helena, it is scarce within the capacity of those whose steps have never led them beyond the middle path of life, to estimate either the strength of the temptations to which he yielded, or the force of mind which he opposed to those which he was able to resist. [5:352]

What can we make of the Life of Napoleon as a book? Nobody is going to claim it’s the best of Scott’s many publications: its combination of prolixity, the mix of accumulated trivial detail and under-thought two-dimensional analysis — as if Scott really believes actual history is actually just a historical romance — really does not endear. There is, quite apart from anything else, nothing of the Lukacsian dynamic that Scott figures in his best novels: nothing dialectic here, just an over-reaching man who tries, and fails, to conquer the world. It would be nice to report that Scott has in some sense written his own symbolic autobiography by writing about Bonaparte. That might be interesting, but it’s not what this book is. Though Scott also, in a literary rather than a military sense, conquered the world, and then fell — and though he was conscious in himself of an admixture of genius and fallibility, touches sublimity on a ground of mediocre mundanity — Scott cannot project himself into his subject. From time to time the book gives us, I think, glimpses of why. In this passage, Scott describes Napoleon’s first exile to the Mediterranean island of Elba:

Elba, to the limits of which the mighty empire of Napoleon was now contracted, is an island opposite to the coast of Tuscany, about sixty miles in circumference. The air is healthy, excepting in the neighbourhood of the salt marshes. The country is mountainous, and, having all the florid vegetation of Italy, is, in general, of a romantic character. It produces little grain, but exports a considerable quantity of wines; and its iron ore has been famous since the days of Virgil, who describes Elba as,

Insula inexhaustis chalybum generosa metallis.

There are also other mineral productions. The island boasts two good harbours, and is liberally productive of vines, olives, fruits and maize. Perhaps, if an empire could be supposed to exist within such a brief space, Elba possesses so much both of beauty and variety, as might constitute the scene of a summer night’s dream of sovereignty. [5:72]

There, just fleetingly, we glimpse Scott’s own perfect fantasia: a miniature kingdom of his own, sunny, beautiful, productive of fine wines and solitude, a retreat from the world rather than an engagement with it. But that’s not Napoleon’s mode, and Scott can’t, fundamentally, understand what drives a man with such a global, outward, ambitious, furious alterengagement in his soul. Napoleon wanted the world, the actual world; Scott’s preference was for such a midsummer night’s dream of sovereignty.