Kylian Roussel, Erin Milhorat

Napoleon and Josephine: A correspondence

between romance and history

We’ll talk about the correspondence from Napoleon the first to Joséphine de Beauharnais to
see another face of Napoleon as an historical character.

We choose this subject, in order to see another face of Napoleon as we know in history
books, to go beyond the political aspect of Napoleon the first and to know him like David
Chanteranne said : Napoleon “becomes, once the door closes, a passionate lover. The
eagle becomes a chick”.
How did we organize our subject ? At first, we read the correspondence of Napoleon to
Joséphine, collected by David Chanteranne. Then, we searched for Napoleon and
Joséphine’s background : Where they came from, how they met. After, we looked at the
epistolary genre, how popular it was at this period, what it created, what message it wanted
to send and the feeling it conveyed to the reader, like Les Liaisons dangereuses by
Choderlos de Laclos which is a sexual education between two persons. We are interested
by their correspondence and their link which made the reader an intimate voyeurist. At last,
we made a link between our searches and the letter’s book from Napoleon to Josephine
collected by David Chanteranne.
Our topic will first talk about who was Napoleon the first and Josephine de Beauharnais and
their relationship. In a second time we're gonna talk in one hand about Napoleon the political
man and in another and to Napoleon as a sensitive man. In a third time we’re gonna talk
about the epistolary genre, his origin and his evolution. Last but not least, we’re gonna see
with concrete examples how their correspondence was at the same time a mark of a
passionate love and a stormy relationship.
This subject may raise questions about Napoleon's personality : Is he as authoritarian as he
said in his letters or is it another mask ? But we can also be curious about Joséphine
involvement : What are her letters like ? Where does the couple converge and where do they
diverge ?
Napoleon and Joséphine’s correspondence is not fictional like Dangerous Liaisons, nor is it
intended to be. But Napoleon's writing style turned it into a real work of art, which made it
part of epistolary literature. A testimony to this era, to the lives of two great historical figures
through the epistolary genre.

To sum up, we dived into the private domain of Napoleon the first, his correspondence where
we saw a piece of literature that showed his complex relationship with Joséphine and made
us learn about epistolary literature.