The most recent major addition to the popular cultural canon of the Napoleonic period is, at the time of writing, Ridley Scott’s historical epic Napoleon (2023). Overlooking the furore generated by its sensationalist representation of the era, the film is interesting for its original narrative angle (if not its historicity). Nominally a biopic, Scott’s history really pivots on the relationship of Napoleon and his first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais. The Empress’s centrality here can be contrasted with her more modest presence in Gance’s landmark Napoléon (1927). She does not feature at all in Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1967) nor Waterloo (1970).[1] Much more can be said about the medium of film, however depictions (or omissions) of Joséphine in any popular media say something about her varying placement in cultural memory: she can be central or peripheral, active or passive, remembered or forgotten. Notwithstanding, the abiding tropes of how we remember the Napoleonic period and its actors have determined the possibilities of her representation. As the wife of the
‘central’ figure of the period, her role has been defined by this relationship, and thus by patriarchal popular conceptions of marriage, gender and power. This allows for her cultural pigeon-holing either as an aloof, sidelined figure simply present to socially and sexually gratify Napoleon, or as an ominous, withdrawn schemer who has renounced her femininity to subvert patriarchal power, to take two extremes.
Analysis of any source concerning Joséphine can suffice being grounded in the relationship between the nuances of her representation and the discourses from which they are constructed. Such an analytical methodology in isolation, however, would be a waste of a text like The History of the Empress Josephine, as it would revolve around the subject and the author while ignoring the audience – in this case the consumers of popular history in mid-nineteenth century Britain. There has been enough ‘high history’ written concerning the universe of the elite personalities of the Napoleonic period to justify better attending to non-elite groups like these. This article’s analysis is predicated on two conceptual steps to achieve this. Firstly, this article borrows from the subdiscipline of ethnographic history in working against-the-grain to access this chapbook’s audience through its text and, primarily, its context. Here, it is impossible not to note the influence of Robert Darnton, who's against-the-grain readings of popular texts in pre-Revolutionary France has been foundational to ethnographic history and pivotal in cultural history.[2] Secondly, it takes the access granted by ethnographic history and applies methods from memory studies to analyse how the chapbook’s readers and writers grappled with the memory of the Napoleonic period and its ‘ensemble personalities’ as they passed from the political now to the historical then. In doing this, we circle back to Joséphine herself, her equivocal place as a ‘great woman’ in a ‘great man history’, and the ambivalent implications of this for her popular cultural memory.
What does it mean for history, literature, music or film to be popular? Given this article’s predication on such a thing as popular culture, it is worth outrightly justifying its existence. The notion presupposes that separate social spheres have distinct cultural realms: that the domain of popular culture is the preserve of a non-elite social category, defined in contrast with an elite one. Insofar as there is a non-elite sphere, it necessarily has a cultural domain as a product of its shared experience.[3] The problem lies in drawing its borders. In the nineteenth century’s memorial field of the Napoleonic period, what constitutes the cultural repositories of these spheres is easy to conceive: ‘elites’ consumed the paintings of David, the writings of Clausewitz, Constant and Carlyle, and the music of Beethoven; ‘non-elites’ consumed Dumas and Dickens, cartoons and propaganda, and whatever other irretrievable unknowns that circulated in the translucency of the masses. But this is a dichotomy that deserves some criticism, as illustrated by the fact that several of the examples were not always in the categories we now place them in. Elite and popular culture do not exist independently, rather share a blurred and contested boundary and continuous interchange.[4] Such a conception was first articulated by Antonio Gramsci, who demonstrated how popular culture’snebulosity was a product of its state as a ‘compromise equilibrium’ between resistive and oppressive forces vying for hegemony.[5] This framework is useful for us in that it accepts the existence of such thing as a ‘popular culture’, while accommodating forthe fluidity in which historical, biographical or literary texts belong to it.
Chapbooks, a diverse and widespread form of ephemeral street literature, are a good example of a medium of popular culture in nineteenth-century Britain.[6] The History of the Empress Josephine, the Consort of Napoleon Bonaparte is a 24-page chapbook first printed in Edinburgh between 1839 and 1858.[7] It was published by James Brydone, a local printer whose corpus consists of lowbrow, predominately biographical popular histories, covering figures such as William Wallace, Columbus, and Guy Fawkes.[8] The author is ultimately unknown, however there are several indicators as to how Brydone’s account was constituted. Firstly, this chapbook relies heavily on at least one contemporary biography of Joséphine: John Smythe Memes’Memoirs of the Empress Josephine (1835). Memes, who himself was Scottish, is mentioned three times in The History of theEmpress Josephine, and there are some direct quotations from his book.[9] There are even some parts of Brydone’s which are verbatim taken from Memes’ without quotation, including an identical metaphor likening Joséphine’s effect on Napoleon to ‘the harp of David playing on the chest of the king of Israel.’[10] How involved Memes was involved in the production of thischapbook, or even if he was at all, is impossible to ascertain. It is also difficult to gauge whether any other books were used. Theoretically the Francophonic volume Mémoires sur l’Impératrice Joséphine (1828) by Georgette du Crest, or the English-translated Mémoires historiques et secrets de l'impératrice Joséphine (1820) by Marie Anne Lenormand, could have beenconsulted without quotation or plagiarism. [11] But what is clear is that Memoirs of the Empress Josephine greatly influenced The History of the Empress Josephine, so much so that the latter may simply be a condensed and streamlined version of the former. That chapbooks were often reproductions of professional publications attests to the fluidity of the relationship between elite and non-elite cultural fields.
However, the generation of popular ephemeral histories was not an arbitrary cloning process. The compilation and repackaging of historical accounts to appeal to a non-elite readership required Brydone and others like him to be attuned to the demands of customers, and creative in the ways they met these demands in a swelling, competitive market. It has been easy for historical and literary academics to sneer at popular literature whose creators did not have access to an abundance of primary and secondary sources, nor any concept of academic conduct and intellectual property. But more recent scholarship has recognised that chapbooks and similar media are valid members of their contemporary intellectual nexus, simply in an adaptedcontext.[12] If anything, Brydone and others like him were performing an important function in expanding the reach of professional history -writing beyond the horizons of aristocratic or gentrified readerships. This is not to say, however, that the dissemination of history from elite to non-elite spheres was the prerequisite for the existence of history’s popular dimension. Such a model of ‘trickle-down history’ neglects the capacity of non- elites to make organic, original contributions to the cultivation of the past. As little as we know about The History of the Empress Josephine, its archival survival hints that it was not a commercial failure, and hence that there was a historical appetite among the masses. Its very circulation, significant or not, attests to the fact that Brydone thought there was a market for a biograph of a French Empress in mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh. This fact – that makes the chapbook striking in the first place – is the entry point into the historical imaginations of the people it was written for. Its readers were not passive recipients of repackaged ‘high history’, but customers with an autonomous stake in history- writing. This stake points to an animate collective memory of the events and figures of recent Napoleonic history in this seemingly detached community.
In the late 1980s, Pierre Nora originated the term lieux de mémoire to describe things – in the most encompassing sense ofthe word – that exist at the junction of history and memory. Nora articulated lieux de mémoire as ‘material, symbolic and functional’ artefacts that preserve something of the past that would otherwise be lost, serving as containers of collective memory.[13] Innovations in France were contemporarily mirrored in Germany, where cultural historians Aleida and Jan Assmann were formulating a distinction within collective memory between what they termed ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural memory’. The former refers to memory as it is transmitted socially, most typically orally. It does not require its invokers to have a literal biological recollection of the subject, only an interpersonal connection to it. It is necessarily fleeting: Assmann and Assmann speculate that communicative memory does not last longer than a century.[14] The latter refers to memory as it is crystallised through cultural media such as texts, objects, rituals, institutions, praxes and art. Mnemonics such as these are still ‘memory’ in the sense that they, like exchanges of communicative memory, are a basis for the production of collective identity. [15] These mnemonics are lieux de mémoire in all but name. Cultural memory does not have a shelf life because it is memory that has been concreted and isolated from the remembering collective.[16] Therefore, collective memory, if it is to survive, must manifest itself sufficiently in the collective’s culture before its social communication has faded. That memory can be cultural is the reason an ethnographic approach to memory studies is viable.
The History of the Empress Josephine is a lieu de mémoire and an object of cultural memory in that it is a product of the crystallisation of collective memory. It was published between 1839 and 1858, while Joséphine lived from 1763 to 1814, meaning that the displacement between the memorial subject and objectified mnemonic is between 25 and 95 years (discounting however long the chapbook circulated after publication). The chapbook’s material ‘life’ thereby coincides with the decay of the communicative memory of the Napoleonic period. Like other Europeans of the generation, Edinburghians would have been highly familiar with the wars of 1793-1815 thanks to the unprecedented extent they subsumed society across the continent. When George Steiner wrote in 1971 that ‘it is the events of 1789 to 1815 that interpenetrate common, private existence with the perception of historical process’, he meant that perceiving oneself as an external spectator to history was becoming impossible from the turn of the nineteenth century.[17] Steiner’s assertion is an articulation of the Napoleonic Wars as the first ‘total war’ before the term was applied. [18] Many mid-nineteenth-century Britons had experienced war more acutely than any people ostensibly removed from it had ever before, which, coupled with improving literacy and better access to literary resources, created a cultural climate conducive to the proliferation of lieux de mémoire like The History of the Empress Josephine.[19]
But the ‘total’ political immersion of the Napoleonic period itself was never going to last into the atmosphere of relative nonbelligerency that followed 1815. Edward A. Freeman’s adage ‘history is politics past; politics is history present’ is helpful for imagining the postwar demobilisation of Europe’s popular politics. In wartime, British street literature was populated by cartoons, caricatures and propaganda; in peacetime, they were more-or-less replaced with a diversity of somewhat new forms, including literary-historical and biographical ones.[20] Representations passed from the political into the historical. This is demonstrated in The History of the Empress Josephine, where the subject is presented in a mostly neutral, if not broadly positive light. Stylistically, the chapbook could, in parts, pass for a favourable modern biography. Here, Joséphine is a ‘distinguished lady’ and a ‘gentle spirit’; she is an avid reader, a talented dancer, musician and knitter, not to mention an expert botanist; and is even imbued with prophetic powers![21] More importantly, Joséphine’s character is constructed with self-standing agency. She is not merely the passive centre around which the narrative arc is scaffolded, rather she is a dynamic actor in its unfolding: she is able to evaluate and decide on Napoleon’s qualities as a husband, to boldly claim that she ‘will yet be Queen of France’, and to have the ‘masculine spirit’ of Lady Macbeth.[22] The chapbook’s presentation of Joséphine in this way can be contrasted with the ways her character was constructed in wartime. One cartoon from 1804 shows Joséphine’s life in a series of vignettes, including as ‘A Prisoner’, as ‘[Paul] Barras’s Mistress’ and ‘A Loose Fish’ – a euphemism for a promiscuous woman.[23] Another from 1805 depicts her dancing naked before Barras, while an 1806 etching shows the Emperor and Empress being shuttled to hell by a host of demons.[24] The catalogue of Joséphine’s representations as unladylike, licentious and outright evil is expansive, which begs the question why and how did these transmute to the more neutral, even commendatory representations espoused by the likes of The History of the Empress Josephine? Put another way, how did the political now become the historical then?
The answer lies in Assmann and Assmann’s equation of communicative and cultural memory. It is significant that Joséphine had divorced Napoleon in 1810 and died in 1814. Each of these events went some way to distance her from the kaleidoscopic political theatre of wartime Europe, reflected in her subsequent disappearance from propagandistic representations on all sides. Joséphine without Napoleon had lost political currency either side of the Channel; her stock position – with all the possibilities of representation it entailed – was passed on to the next Empress, Marie Louise. In the popular domain there was no reason to culturally retain the undermined construct ofJoséphine’s personality, and she hence became a representational blank canvas as soon as her communicative memory died. This death was doubtless expedited by the lasting peace of 1815, which meant that the social collective in Edinburgh or anywhere else could move on from wartime discourse.
This article has established that ‘popular culture’ can exist, however permeable it might be, and superficially employed the concept through terms like ‘non-elites’, ‘the popular domain’, ‘the masses’, ‘the people’, ‘Edinburghians’ and ‘Britons’. But these terms deserve further interrogation in the context of The History of the Empress Josephine. In short: who was reading our chapbook? We know that chapbooks were a fundamental element of the booming street literature industry in Edinburgh throughout the nineteenth century.[25] This, and the survival of much of Bryone’s oeuvre despite its ephemerality, has underpinned the assumption of this article that this chapbook was, to some degree, popular. Street literature’s commercial base, thanks to its inexpensiveness, was in the lower socioeconomic strata of urban Britain, so our chapbook’s readership was the same. [26] Beyond these limited conclusions, only against-the-grain reading can access the readership further. Further research is needed into the gendered dynamics of street literature consumption, and The History would be an interesting source to this end. Being a biograph of a woman it is rare among contemporary chapbooks, while it is seemingly unique in Brydone’s catalogue of publications. For these reasons, it is possible that this chapbook was written and printed with a female audience in mind. It is arguable that, despite her undeniable imbuement with masculine qualities at points within the narrative, the account never fails to return to Joséphine’s quintessential femininity. She is, ultimately, ‘gentle and elegant’, full of ‘gratitude and tenderness’, and of ‘feeble character’. [27] Whether such patriarchal representations appeal to nineteenth-century British women is, unsatisfyingly, a question simultaneously more specific and expansive than the scope of this article. Indeed, it might be the case that Joséphine’s masculinities are written with the female readership in mind. Or even, and perhaps most compellingly, what might have appealed to women was the fusion of requisite placidity with subversive masculinity in a formula customised by overarching discourses of power and gender. In any case, how far re-reading The History with a gendered lens can reveal anything about how many women read it, or whether this extrapolation is against-the-grain taken too far, is debatable. A concluding hint on this point can be taken from outside the popular domain. In the mid-nineteenth century, Joséphine was a common character in media consumed by upper-class women. One magazine from 1841 bears an uncanny resemblance to our contemporary chapbook, in that it is a biograph of Joséphine with similar structure, themes and events.[28] Given it could owe its account to overlapping sources with The History, its attestation that there was an elite female interest in Joséphine’slife might be extendable to non-elites. Such conclusions are as exciting as they are speculative.
As far as there is a memory of the Napoleonic period in Britain today, it is typified by a particular kind of militaristic, testosteronal and teleological conception of generals, soldiers, battles and campaigns. As Étienne François writes, the era ‘has come to be seen as an inexhaustible fund of adventure, military glory... heroism and tragedy.’[29] The nature of this memory is best explained by its incubation period of the long nineteenth century. The historiography of the Napoleonic period in this time – aside from a type of technical, inflexible military history which has been since rendered anachronistic – was dominated by personalities. This is epitomised by the eponymous personality of the period, who was a major inspiration in thedevelopment of a kind of history which used major individuals as both the frames and units of its analysis.30 Joséphine was certainly a major personality of the period, however she does not easily conform into ‘great man history’ for obviousreasons. Though much of The History of the Empress Josephine is reminiscent of a Carlylean biography, it ultimately embodies her ambivalent cultural memory. Joséphine was formerly a political foe but is now a historical artefact: a representational blank canvas for popular culture to paint over. The History reveals the possibilities available in doing so.
Joshua Redden is currently in his 2nd year of a BA in History at Warwick University.
Notes:
[1] Of course, Joséphine’s omission in War and Peace is a decision on the part of Tolstoy, rather than Bondarchuk. Moreover, some might argue that it would be inappropriate for Joséphine to feature in Waterloo, given she died before the events depicted. However, her complete absence (in physicality or name) from Bondarchuk’s constructed universe is an artistic decision.
[2] Robert Darnton The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1984); RobertDarnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1982).
[3] John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, An Introduction (New York, NY: Pearson, 1997), p. 5.
[4] Ibid., p. 10.
[5] Antonio Gramsci, ‘Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State’ in John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Harlow: Pearson, 2009), p. 161.
[6] Adam Fox, ‘“Little Story Books” and “Small Pamphlets” in Edinburgh, 1680 -1760: The Making of the Scottish Chapbook’, The ScottishHistorical Review, 235 (2013), p. 207.
[7] The History of the Empress Josephine, the Consort of Napoleon Bonaparte , published by J. Brydone, 1839-58, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
[8] The History of the Scottish Patriot, Sir Wm. Wallace: Knight of Ellerslie ; The History of Columbus, Discoverer of America; Guy Fawkes, orthe History of the Gunpowder Plot, published by J. Brydone, 1839- 1858, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
[9] The History of the Empress Josephine, p. 3, p. 11, p. 22
[10] Ibid., p. 4; John Smythe Memes, Memoirs of the Empress Josephine (New York, NY: Harper & Bros., 1835), p. 19.
[11] Stéphanie Félicité (Georgette) du Crest, Mémoires sur l’Impératrice Joséphine, ses Contemporaires, La Cour de Navarre et de laMalmaison, volume 1 (Paris: Ladvocat, 1828); Marie Anne Lenormand, Mémoires historiques et secrets de l'impératrice Joséphine, Marie-RoseTascher-de-la-Pagerie, première épouse de Napoléon Bonaparte, trans. Jacob M. Howard (Paris: 1820).
[12] Roy Bearden-White, ‘A History of Guilty Pleasure: Chapbooks and the Lemoines’, The Papers of the Biographical Society of America, 103(2009), p. 286.
[13] Pierre Nora, ‘Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, trans. Marc Roudebush, 26 (1989), pp. 18-9.
[14] Jan & Aleida Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique, trans. John Czaplicka, 65 (1995), pp. 126-7.
[15] Ibid., p. 128.
[16] Ibid., p. 129.
[17] George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), p. 19.
[18] David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), pp. 7-9.
[19] Philip Dwyer & Matilda Greig, ‘Memoirs and the Communication of Memory’ in Alan Forrest & Peter Hicks (ed.) The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars (London: Cambridge University Press, 2022),
p. 244.
[20] Pascal Dupuy, ‘The Napoleonic Wars in Caricature’ in Forrest & Hicks,The Cambridge History, pp. 378 -9.
[21] The History of the Empress Josephine, p. 2, p. 24, pp. 3-4, pp. 4-5.
[22] Ibid., p. 8, p. 7, p. 11.
[23] G. M. Woodward, The Progress of the Empress Josephine, 1804, colour etching, 24.6 × 34.9 cm, etched C. Williams, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.
[24] James Gillray, Ci-Devant Occupations – or –: Madame Talian and the Empress Josephine Dancing Naked Before Barrass in the Winter of1797. – A Fact!, 1805, colour etching, 31.6 × 45.7 cm, etched James Gillray, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford; (?) Roberts, Needs Must, When theDevil Drives, colour etching, 24.9 × 33.0 cm, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.
[25] Fox, ‘Little Story Books’, p. 229.
[26] Bearden-White, ‘Guilty Pleasure’, p. 285.
[27] The History of the Empress Josephine, p. 9, p. 13, p. 8.
[28] ‘Memoir of the Empress Josephine, First Wife of Napoleon Bonaparte’, Court and Lady’s Magazine, Monthly Critic and Museum, 19(1841), London.
[29] Étienne François, ‘The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as a Shared and Entangled European lieu de mémoire’ in Alan Forrest,Étienne François & Karen Hagemann (eds.), War Memories: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Modern European Culture(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 400.
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