The Legend of Napoleon

Abstract

HISTORICAL reality is often wilfully sacrificed in the cultural processes which form a national identity. In particular, the subject of how the French people collectively remembered Napoleon after the years of his political rule (1799–1815) has fascinated writers from the earliest days. While Sudhir Hazareesingh refers to that collective memory as the ‘legend of Napoleon’, he recognises that it was only one of a much more complex set of factors at work. There is, for example, the actual record of Napoleon's military and political achievements at the time, as later historians have tried to establish and interpret them. There are also the myths about them which Napoleon was the first to embroider so lavishly before and after 1815. Among the most familiar variants here is ‘the myth of the saviour’, who, in almost providential fulfilment, rescued France from the chaos of the Revolution. It was integral to what became the cult of Napoleon after his death on St Helena in May 1821. Finally, too, we have the question of his real historical legacy to France and to Europe, which as it happens is a very fashionable area in current Napoleonic studies.