In 1795, Napoleon wrote a romantic novella in the aftermath of breaking his engagement with Eugénie Désirée Clary for Joséphine de Beauharnais. He proves far less of a novelist than he was a general or a statesman, producing not a work of particular artistic merit, but one that through the distorting mirror of a romantic novella reflects an aspect of himself on his readers. Clisson et Eugénie reveals, rather uncritically once the reader has passed behind its thin veil of fiction made of name changes and literary conventions, its author as a subject of desire and his way of framing that desire’s expression socially.

The named characters in Clisson et Eugénie each correspond to the social identity of at least one person in Napoleon’s life. Simplistically, the title characters correspond to Napoleon (Clisson) and Eugénie (Eugénie); the other two named characters, Amélie, the novella’s Eugénie’s friend, and Berville, Clisson’s aide, correspond to Joséphine and Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, Napoleon’s Field Marshall and the real Eugénie’s husband. The novella’s story / plot line follows Clisson as he leaves the army and military glory (la gloire) due to social friction for integration into society and a relationship with a woman, first Amélie then Eugénie, through Clisson and Eugénie’s life together to when Berville turns Eugénie’s heart away from Clisson while he is away at war. The historical story, as can be reconstructed, has Napoleon and Eugénie get engaged after Eugénie’s sister marries Napoleon’s brother, Eugénie lose interest in Napoleon in favour of Bernadotte while Napoleon is away, and Napoleon break their engagement when she stops writing him, allowing her to marry Bernadotte.

Even such a basic summary reveals much of the disconnection between the events as they were documented and as they were fictionalized. Napoleon reframes the story around himself and his decisions: it is his fictional alter ego who chooses between two women to marry, not his beloved who decides between himself and another man; he also places the responsibility for the breakup of his relationship on Eugénie and Berville, giving himself the pure affect of an innocent victim. Not only that, Napoleon goes so far as to make Clisson, the part of him that is in love with Eugénie, consummate his relationship with la gloire by sacrificing himself in battle, choosing the superhuman glory for a wife.

To this effect, Napoleon makes heavy use of simplified medieval story types as models in Clisson et Eugénie. The novella has a simple two-part structure: the first half takes Clisson away from battle to begin as a normal adult, giving him a wife and happy life, the second returns him to battle, taking away his happiness his wife and finally his life. This type of two-part structure following the social wellbeing of the hero through a reversal is well represented in the Middle Ages, Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein follows this structure among numerous other works. He also inherits the convention of representing a man’s achievement of a stable status by his marriage to an appropriate woman and a loss of stability in his status with instability in his marriage from the Middle Ages. In the Arthurian Vulgate, King Arthur is legitimized in his kingship by his marriage to Guinevere, while his knights remain as unmarried as they are landless.

Marital instability is also associated with the death of the husband in a story that fairly closely parallels the final half of Clisson et Eugénie. Lancelot fights and kills some knights guarding a ford he needs to cross on his travels, he then continues to a nearby mansion and obtains hospitality from the lady and a promise from the lord not to harm him under his roof. Over the course of Lancelot’s stay, the lady falls in love with him, and it comes out that both the knights Lancelot killed at the ford belonged to the lord of the manor. The lord keeps his word not to harm Lancelot inside the mansion, and instead attacks him to avenge his knights after Lancelot has left the manor and the bond of hospitality was, naturally, severed; the husband loses the fight and dies. In Clisson et Eugénie, the bond between Clisson and Berville as comrades cannot be so conveniently severed to permit the men to fight each other, so the husband, Clisson, must die from his wife’s change of heart with his and his wife’s lover’s common enemy standing in for making an enemy of his wife’s lover. [this is stretched a bit]

Napoleon uses modern models for his prose style and the literary forms in Clisson et Eugénie. He writes a competently executed, if simplistic, prose narrative in what essentially is a mash of the current literary style with only his characteristic curtness to distinguish it with similarly styled epistolary sections. He also represents his modern sensibilities in how he presents Eugénie as the wife of Clisson; they choose to marry each other out of mutual love and are very carefully shown as equals in their time together as a married couple. When it comes time for Eugénie to have premonitions of grief to come before Clisson is recalled to fight, as is typical the Medieval tradition of attributing supernatural powers to strong women, they are matched by the similar premonitions experienced by Clisson after they are separated. Eugénie gets a share of masculine control in her marriage; Clisson gets a share of feminine clairvoyance.

In conclusion, through his novella Clisson et Eugénie, Napoleon Bonaparte presents an idealized version of himself both as a soldier and as a subject of desire, giving an attentive interpreter a look his cultural lenses into how he sees love. Love as a reinterpretation of conventional associations inherited from the Middle Ages in light of through the more modern sensibilities that he obtained both from the thinkers of the Enlightenment and the revolutionary ideals that followed. Almost naïvely, he gives readers of Clisson et Eugénie an intimate glance at his character.