Du Pont de Nemours in Napoleonic France, 1802-1815

Abstract

All of Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours' biographers tend to discount the significance of the twilight years their subject spent in Napoleonic France.' While it is true that he did nothing of singular importance then,2 what should nonetheless arrest the historian's attention is the final and futile struggle Du Pont undertook to attain success and to find a comfortable place for himself and his beliefs in still another new order. That struggle, so somberly depicted in Du Pont's correspondence, is the last and most revealing episode in a personal history of frustrated ambitions. In the age of giants in which he lived, Du Pont wished to march in the forefront, in the illustrious company of men like Turgot, Necker, Jefferson, even Alexander I and Napoleon; but he was never quite able to keep up. In Napoleonic France he fell far behind, or, more correctly, he never got ahead. The resulting bitterness he expressed was that of the also-ran. Yet the beginnings of this last episode seemed auspicious enough. XWhen Du Pont returned to France in the late spring of 1802, after a sojourn of little more than two years in the United States, he brought with him his reputation as a man of letters, an enlightened politician in several French governments, and a friend of Jefferson and the new republic across the Atlantic. With certain friends and acquaintances in positions of power-not the least of whom was Talleyrand-he could entertain the hope of moving easily along the narrow corridors of