The Publication of the General Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte |
 The General Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte
In 2002, the Fondation Napoléon launched its project to publish the General Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was jointly initiated by Baron Gourgaud, then president of the Fondation Napoléon, Thierry Lentz, director of the Fondation Napoléon, and the Fondation’s board of directors, and the first volume was published in 2004.
The project is being managed by a publishing committee for the General Correspondence of Napoleon, led by the president of the Fondation Napoléon, Victor André Masséna, Prince d’Essling. The vice-presidents are Mme Martine de Boisdeffre, senior member of the Council of State and director of the Archives de France, and professors and members of the Institut de France Jean-Claude Casanova and Jean Tulard.
The board of directors of the Fondation Napoléon comprises a steering committee, along with another committee responsible for the academic and editorial work, the historical committee, led by Professor Jean-Claude Casanova, member of the Institut de France.
The Fondation Napolééon is being sponsored for this project by Archives de France,the Fondation La Poste and the Service Historique de la Défense
The need for a new edition
Since the end of the French Empire, there have been numerous collections of Napoleon’s letters, which has made any study of them a lengthy and tedious process.
The Correspondence published during the Second Empire, owing to its political and hagiographical nature, was in fact only a very partial synthesis, and of a corpus which was itself already very scattered. Furthermore, the selection of letters and interference with the texts by the Commission Historique rendered this a biased work, provoking a considerable volume of criticism from the moment it was published.
From the 1880s onwards and throughout the 20th century, historians and archivists have laboured to complete and correct the work published during the Second Empire.
Objectives
The publishing committee for the General Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte has set itself several objectives:
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- to give historians and enthusiasts a single series of volumes regrouping all of Napoleon’s letters arranged in chronological order, both private and public alike, in an attempt to be as exhaustive as possible;
- to return to source documents so as to publish texts as close to the originals (dispatch) as possible, and to restore the integrity of the texts already published;
- to publish the first annotated correspondence of Napoleon’s letters;
- to revive Napoleonic studies by modernising the research tool.
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Working methods and resources for an ”industrial” project
Centralising Napoleon’s thousands of letters scattered throughout France and abroad made it essential to establish a rigorous and methodical working system.
National and local archive centres in some forty countries were contacted, along with museums and associations, making nearly 200 institutions which have taken part in the project. Private collectors were also targeted in a big campaign to raise awareness of the project. Furthermore, the committee has gone through more than 350 monographs and journals, as well as the collection of sales catalogues of the French National Archives (AB XXXVIII).
The scale of this work made it essential to appeal for voluntary help. Almost 200 individuals have assisted the Fondation since the beginning of the project, and nearly 90 volunteers are currently involved in the project.
Letters are processed by some fifty voluntary "corresponding members" all passionately interested in history and Napoleonic history in particular. They come to the Fondation to work on enriching the database developed by Télécom Étude. Each letter is broken down into about twenty keywords to make it easier to manage the Correspondence. The database entries, a real pedigree of the letters, centralise all the data known about the documents: type, source, sale, publication etc., and make sure that they can be traced.
The annotation is, for its part, taken care of by former scholarship holders of the Fondation, students, historians etc. These are supervised by the volume editors who are responsible for finalising the annotations and generating the index.
Coordination of this work at the Fondation Napoléon is the task of François Houdecek, assisted by Élodie Lerner, who are in turn supported by the entire body of staff at the Fondation Napoléon.
Each volume of the General Correspondence is designed to be a tool. The corpus of letters is supplemented by studies which clarify sets of themes developed in Napoleon’s correspondence. A series of appendices (maps, conversion tables, chronological tables) and three indexes (biographical, index of institutions, index of places of publication) complete each volume.
Production schedule
Since 2004, 6 volumes have been published by Editions Fayard, i.e. 13,922 letters dated between 1784 and 1806, 40 % of which were not included in the Correspondence published under the Second Empire and 33 % of which may be considered as hitherto unpublished.
Volume I: « Les apprentissages, 1784-1797 » Thierry Lentz (ed.), working with Gabriel Madec, assisted by Emilie Barthet and François Houdecek, preface by Baron Gourgaud, President of the Fondation Napoléon, Editions Fayard 2004.
Volume II: « La campagne d’Égypte et l’avènement, 1798-1799 », Thierry Lentz (ed.), working with Gabriel Madec, assisted by Emilie Barthet and François Houdecek, preface by Henry Laurens, Professor at the Collège de France, Fayard 2005.
Volume III: « Pacifications, 1800-1802 »,
Thierry Lentz (ed.), working with Gabriel Madec, assisted by d’Emilie Barthet, Irène Delage and François Houdecek, preface by Jean Tulard, of the Institut, Editions Fayard 2006.
Volume IV: « Ruptures et fondation, 1803-1804 », François Houdecek (ed.), working with Gabriel Madec, assisted by Irène Delage and Elodie Lerner, along with Patrick Le Carvèse and Michèle Masson, preface by Thierry Lentz, Editions Fayard 2007.
Volume V: « Boulogne, Trafalgar, Austerlitz 1805 », Michel Kerautret and Gabriel Madec (eds.), working with François Houdecek, Elodie Lerner and Irène Delage, preface by Martine de Boisdeffre, Director of the Archives de France, Editions Fayard 2008.
Volume VI: « 1806 - Vers le Grand Empire », Michel Kerautret (ed.), working with François Houdecek, Elodie Lerner and Irène Delage, preface by Jean-Claude Casanova, Editions Fayard 2009.
Between now and 2012, another 7 volumes (making a grand total of 13 volumes) are planned, which will make public more than 36,000 letters. Eventually, the Fondation is planning to publish a digital version.
Volume |
Date limits |
Editor |
Volume 7 |
1807 |
Michel Kerautret |
Volume 8 |
1808 |
Gabriel Madec |
Volume 9 |
1809 |
Patrice Gueniffey |
Volume 10 |
1810 - May 1811 |
Annie Jourdan |
Volume 11 |
June 1811 - 1812 |
Thierry Lentz |
Volume 12 |
January- October 1813 |
André Palluel-Guillard |
Volume 13 |
November 1813 - 1821 |
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Project reports from year to year
See also
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