Napoleon

The 29th Bulletin
On 17 December, 1812, just as it had done on many other occasions, the government organ, Le Moniteur, led with a Bulletin of the Grande Armée. However this time, the famous 29th Bulletin (dated 3 December) did not recount a victory but rather described, in relatively unambiguous terms, the debacle which the Grande Armée had suffered in Russia. "This army, so beautiful on the 6th [November], was very different the 14th, without cavalry, without artillery, without transports." And despite the fact that the bulletin contained glowing accounts of the victorious moments during the retreat, the penultimate paragraph was brutally clear: "Our cavalry had so few mounts that even by combining all the officers who had a horse we could only form four companies of 150 men each". These cavalrymen went on to form the “sacred battalion” that never left the emperor's side. But the mind of Napoleon (who had composed the bulletin) was already turned towards Parisian politics. Probably as a warning shot to anyone thinking of staging another coup d'etat as Malet had done a month earlier, the text concluded with the breathtaking last line - a casting down of the gauntlet: "The health of H. M. has never been better". As to the truth of His Majesty's good health, Parisian would have been able to check it themselves, since Napoleon was to reach the French capital and the Tuileries Palace the following day.

150 Years Ago

Flaubert's Salammbô
In late November 1862, Gustave Flaubert's novel Salammbô was published by Michel Lévy Frères. His previous effort, Madame Bovary, had so much stimulated critics that he was taken to court for offending public morals. As a result this second novel, though set in Carthage in the third century before Christ, and thus a million miles from the bourgeois realism of the first, was not to escape the full glare of critical attention. On December 16, Edmond Scherer remarked about Salammbô: "I do not know if Madame Bovary will remain, as novels age quickly, but I am sure that this book will take a place in the history of the modern novel". Théophile Gautier, followed Scherer a few days later, praising the book to the skies in the Moniteur: "The style of Monsieur Gustave Flaubert emerges with no apologies: it is full, robust, sonorous, completely independently original, colored when necessary, precise, simple, and manly when the story requires no ornament: to conclude, it is the style of a master." But there was also criticism, despite the real and dazzling public success. One of the most violent was expressed in the Gazette de France by Arnaud de Pontmartin. Damning the book, he said: "Ennui, thick, compacted, dense, cyclopean, monumental, square at the base, gaudy, rumbling, blazing, earthy, ‘humidian' and Numidian, ‘Punique' and unique; an ennui with the force of five thousand Carthaginians massacred by ten thousand Barbarians, or twenty thousand mercenaries crushed by three hundred elephants.” Claiming to quote a friend, de Pontmartin concluded his diatribe thus: "A gloomy blindness, and one of an entirely new genre. One which sees ugliess in cleanliness, 'MUDDY DRESSED UP AS GLAM'!" the last French words “SALE EN BEAU” being a pun on the title. Fortunately, history remembers the novel rather than the bad play on words.
Salammbô on Gallica

Wishing you an excellent "Napoleonic" week,

Peter Hicks and Andrew Miles
Historians and web editors

THE NAPOLEON.ORG BULLETIN, N0 650, 14 - 20 DECEMBER, 2012

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