When I first heard of the title I thought immediately of the oft-quoted monologue in As You Like it:
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts,
Napoleon certainly played many parts in his life. This is an account of his final role, proud captive of the mighty British state, and performing on his final stage, Longwood House, the decrepit rat infested house which to the very end he resisted leaving, aptly referred to as the Wuthering Heights of the Tropics by Jean Paul Kauffmann (1).
On this stage he was accompanied by a motley crew, jealous of each other, threatening to leave, and unlike him free to do so, trying to to meet his needs, each with their own interests, noting down for posterity much of what he did and said, but failing to penetrate the front he presented to them and to the world, when he had given up all hope of being allowed to return to Europe,
Michel Dancoisne Martineau is uniquely placed to write the history of Napoleon's final years. For fifteen years he lived in Longwood house and with that experience and an artist's eye he is able to provide the reader with an almost microscopic description of Napoleon's physical environment. A trained horticulturalist he was able to recreate the gardens that were so important in the final agonising phase of Napoleon's life, and their construction is uniquely covered in this book.(2)
Before writing he read every book that Napoleon read in his final two years, in identical editions. Finally, in addition to all the archival research and the renovation at Longwood and the other French properties on St Helena, this book is the product of almost a lifetime's reflection on the island.
It is a deeply human story, a post mortem on Napoleon's psyche, through the various stages of his mental adjustment to permanent exile. Without family, lacking any meaningful occupation or intellectual stimulus, in his eyes everything he tried ended in failure.
His attempts to influence opinion in Europe were totally ignored by the major powers at the Congress of Aix La Chapelle.
His efforts to win over a number of the most cultivated British officials he met on the island were ultimatelty fruitless, they all left.
His attempt at his memoirs left no significant writings for posterity. He was unable to compete with European authors who were publishing far better researched accounts of his years in power. As the author bleakly puts it, Napoleon could no longer tell the story of Napoleon.
So Napoleon read a great deal and ultimately, in search of a meaningful existence, followed the advice given in Candide by Voltaire: Il faut cultiver notre jardin. With the aid of reluctant French compatriots, English soldiers and Chinese servants he created a remarkable garden, reflecting his long standing love of shade and water, so there were fish ponds and water tanks, a central stream, a grotto and an enclosed walkway.
Unfortunately the fish started to die, and Napoleon lamented
You can see that there is a curse on me. Everything I love, everything that is attached to me, is immediately struck down.
But he was never one to give up. He moved the surviving fish to uncontaminated water in a wooden tank, and continued to visit them as long as his failing health permitted.
The author builds up a powerful picture of the torment Napoleon must have felt as his hopes of ever again being free were dashed. To avoid over-use of the word Napoleon he effectively employs a multiplicity of designations:
the vanquished of St Helena, the unknown of St Helena, the hero-prisoner, the prisoner of Europe, the prisoner of nations, the imperial prisoner, the prisoner of the South Atlantic, the banished of nations, the disrupter of nations, the banished man of Europe, the modern conqueror, the man of the century
But Napoleon was not only dealing with adversity, during his exile he observed and encouraged the development of an image of himself as the persecuted "champion of Jacobinism". He had been sent to this remote, almost unknown island in the hope that he would be totally forgotten and that the ideas of the French Revolution that he had come to embody should be be buried with him. In fact, although a mere dot on the map and no more than a footnote in global history, St Helena actually created the Napoleonic legend. As I may have said before, without St Helena Napoleon would not have been Napoleon.
Early in the book the author refers to the building of the legend amongst the liberal intelligentsia in Europe, particularly in Britain.
St Helena, tiny rock in the middle of an immense ocean, a reef conducive to the imagination, could only enhance the poetic twist - to use Germaine de Staël's phrase - of Napoleon's existence. For if one could without too much effort physically confine a man, the great adventure full of action and twists and turns that was his life could not remain inert in the popular imagination. Inevitably, it would attract people as a magnet attracts steel filings.
This theme is discussed at length in the final chapter entitled Napoleon: the enchained Promethian which begins with a quote from Anthony Burgess What Myth? What hero? Aaaaah - Prometheus, and delves into the creation of the legend which took both Promethean and Christian martyrdom symbols to describe Napoleon's fate at the hands of Britain. (3) The author, who came to St Helena via his interest in Lord Byron, one of the key though ambiguous figures in the building of that legend, is dismissive of these interpretations, although very aware of their power in the past. (4)
The image of the last Napoleon is what each one wants or doesn't want to see... St Helena has generated around the representation of the banished man of Europe a fog as dense as that which most of the time covers the Longwood plateau. A drizzle capable of misleading minds.
The author himself is neither pro- nor anti- Napoleon, a position which many scholars fail to take. Napoleon was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable figures to stride on the world stage in the past 1000 years, but although he created much that lasted, he was out of time, the last of the Enlightened despots perhaps. The author sums it up perfectly
Napoleon, the Romantic figure of Promethean and Christian [mythology], in turn insurgent and victim, guilty and innocent, reprobate and redeemer, lived at the crossroads between the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution.
His ambitions for France were not dashed on the playing fields of Eton, but in the factories of Manchester and other industrial towns which were transforming the world and which gave the UK the economic strength to subsidise the allies who largely fought the long wars against Napoleon on its behalf. Paradoxically the liberal ideas, of which Napoleon at the last affected to be the champion, found their strength in those same industrial cities, and in those same cities Napoleon in his final stage found much support.
A Personal Postscript
In my first ever post on this blog I singled out Jean Paul Kauffmann as the only author who had even tried to explore what was going on in Napoleon's mind as he tried to come to terms with his fate, although The Dark Room at Longwood based on a very short visit to the island, could only scratch the surface.
After four visits to the island, and nearing what must surely be the end of this personal journey, it is very pleasing that I am now able to review the book I was looking for over eighteen years ago. It also seems appropriate that its author is none other than the man we met on our very first day on the fondly remembered RMS St Helena, without whom this blog would never have begun.
My only regret is that there will probably be no English edition of Le dernier Napoléon, but the author is in the process of producing Vols 5 and 6 of the bilingual, illustrated Collectors Series which will fully cover Napoleon's final years. These will be available at Longwood House, which I know is a long way to go to buy a couple of books.
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1.Jean Paul Kauffmann The Dark Room at Longwood (London 1999)
2. Kauffmann in his visit to Longwood some thirty years ago produced a perceptive portrait of the author in his youth and commented, “in the case of the present consul the gardens are his life’s work".
3. Anthony Burgess Napoleon Symphony (London 1974)
4. See review of I am the Keeper of the Empty Tomb.
