Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases

• 1. Introduction

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  Emmanuel de Las Cases is remembered today for Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. He compiled this record of conversations while living beside the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte on the island of Saint Helena. The book was celebrated on publication and shaped how Europeans understood Napoleon for generations. Scholars who have examined it since have found reasons to be cautious. Las Cases did not always set down what Napoleon actually said; questions about embellishment and invention have followed the book for nearly two centuries. The life he lived before reaching that island was eventful on its own terms. He produced two celebrated books in his lifetime, under very different circumstances, and both proved difficult to take entirely at face value.

• 2. The Atlas and the Pseudonym

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  In 1801, a man calling himself A. Lesage published an atlas in London. It was immediately a great success. The man behind that name was Las Cases, then living in the city as an impoverished exile and private tutor. The first French edition appeared in 1803 and 1804, carrying the full title Atlas historique, genealogique, chronologique et geographique de A. Lesage. Multiple editions and translations followed. Numerous spin-offs appeared in the years after, several of them pirated. The work continued to circulate into the 1850s, long after Las Cases had stopped depending on it. It made him rich.

  Napoleon, who had access to this atlas for years, never noticed it. He came across it only when Las Cases was already at his side on Saint Helena in 1815. By then, the former emperor had no need of maps. He needed someone to help tell his story, and Las Cases was ready.

• 3. The Quiberon Survivor

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  The castle of Las Cases, near the town of Revel in Languedoc, was where Emmanuel was born on the 21st of June 1766. He trained at the military schools of Vendôme and Paris. The navy absorbed him next, and he took part in various engagements during 1781 and 1782. Then the Revolution of 1789 changed his circumstances entirely. As a noble, he had no safe footing in the new France, and he went into exile.

  He spent years moving between Germany and England. In 1795, he joined the Quiberon expedition, a royalist attempt to land troops on the French coast and restore the old order. The expedition was a disaster. Las Cases was one of the few to survive it. He returned to London and lived in poverty, keeping himself alive as a private tutor. The door back to France was not yet open, but it would be, and Las Cases would be among the first through it when it cracked.

• 4. Rallying to Napoleon

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  The Peace of Amiens in 1802 offered French émigrés a path home. Las Cases availed himself of this amnesty, renouncing his hereditary title of marquis in the process. He returned to France during the Consulate alongside other royalists who had decided to support Napoleon. He later told the emperor that he had been won over by his glory. The government did not rush to reward him. Not until 1810 did it make him a chamberlain and create him a count of the empire.

  When Napoleon abdicated for the first time, on the 11th of April 1814, Las Cases withdrew to England. He returned to serve during the Hundred Days. When the second abdication came, he followed the fallen emperor and a small number of loyal followers to Rochefort on the Atlantic coast. After the Hundred Days, every path led away from France.

• 5. The British Gamble

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  At Rochefort, the ex-emperor's options were narrowing fast. Las Cases was the one who first proposed that Napoleon throw himself on the generosity of the British nation. He made the first overtures to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon. The reply he received was guarded. Las Cases afterwards misrepresented its nature. He and his son accompanied the ex-emperor on the voyage to Saint Helena. When they arrived, the island offered no comfort. It offered Las Cases something more valuable: proximity to a man whose words would one day be worth a great deal.

• 6. The Mémorial and Its Limits

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  On Saint Helena, Las Cases acted as Napoleon's informal secretary, taking down numerous notes of their conversations. Those notes eventually became Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. Scholars advise reading it with great caution. Las Cases did not hesitate to insert his own thoughts alongside the emperor's; he colored Napoleon's expressions to fit his own purposes. In some cases he misstated facts. In others he fabricated documents outright. Pages corrected in Napoleon's own hand are held today at the Wisbech and Fenland Museum in Wisbech, England. They are physical evidence of a record less faithful than Las Cases presented it.

  Las Cases was disliked by Montholon and others in the Saint Helena circle. He appears to have been looking for an opportunity to leave the island once he had accumulated sufficient literary material. Other observers kept more careful accounts of those years. Gaspard Gourgaud's Journal, compiled on the island at the same time, is considered far more reliable than the Mémorial. It never reached the same audience.

• 7. Expelled and Vindicated

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  Sir Hudson Lowe, the British governor of Saint Helena, expelled Las Cases from the island in November 1816. He had infringed British regulations, and Lowe acted on it. Las Cases was shipped first to the Cape of Good Hope and then returned to Europe. The government of Louis XVIII refused to let him enter France. He settled in Brussels and waited.

  Napoleon's death lifted the prohibition. Las Cases came to Paris, published the Mémorial, and made a fortune from it. In 1840, when France sent an expedition to Saint Helena to bring Napoleon's remains home, Las Cases was too ill to go. His son, who had shared the original captivity on the island, made the voyage in his place. Las Cases died on the 15th of May 1842 in Passy, at the age of 75, and is buried in Passy Cemetery. The caution that scholars have urged about the Mémorial has done nothing to diminish its readership.