The Memorial of Saint Helena

Emmanuel de Las Cases, a former émigré turned chamberlain, had followed Napoleon aboard the Northumberland. From the arrival at Longwood he recorded the Emperor's conversations daily, helped by his son who made the fair copies.

The work was brutally interrupted: at the end of 1816 Hudson Lowe had Las Cases expelled from Saint Helena and seized his papers. He would recover them later in Europe. Napoleon died in 1821; the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène appeared in 1823, in eight volumes.

The book does not merely recount the exile: it rewrites the reign. The Napoleon who speaks in it is a thwarted liberal who would have wished to crown the Empire with representative institutions; a champion of nationalities, preparing the unity of Italy and Germany; the promoter of a 'European association' of peoples, united by a common currency and common laws.

The wars become defensive, forced on him by the coalition kings and by England. The embarrassing episodes — the duc d'Enghien, Spain, the restoration of slavery — are explained, minimised or passed over. It is a plea for the defence, and remarkably well built.

The success was immense, one of the greatest of the century in the book trade. The text met a romantic generation weary of the Restoration: Béranger set it to song, Hugo, Balzac and Stendhal fed their pages on it, the half-pay officers and veterans carried it through the countryside.

Out of this golden legend came the return of the ashes in 1840 and, eight years later, the election of a nephew whom almost no one knew. A black legend answered it, from Madame de Staël to Chateaubriand and then Lanfrey; the debate on Napoleon was born with these two books and has never closed.