The Black Legend of Napoleon

Few leaders have managed their reputations as successfully as Napoleon Bonaparte. So beguiling was his image that just thirty-three years after the disaster of Waterloo, his untested nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected President of the Second Republic with an overwhelming popular mandate. This success appears all the more striking given that Napoleon I led France to crushing military defeats in both 1814 and 1815. Napoleon's image is thus a phenomenon worthy of study, and the subject of several recent studies. However, the power and appeal of the Napoleonic legend cannot be explained without reference to the concomitant failure of anti-Napoleonic propaganda, the so-called 'Black Legend'. This chapter considers the early history of the anti-Napoleonic myth, with a view to explaining some of its ultimate weakness. It deploys the term 'Black Legend' in its broad sense, following the example of Jean Tulard in L'Anti-Napoleon: la legende noire de l'Empereur (Paris: Juillard, 1965). While the term has been applied more narrowly to refer to tales of Napoleonic atrocities - actions which might be labelled anachronistically as war crimes or crimes against humanity- it is also appropriate to view atrocity stories as integral parts of a broader myth designed to make Napoleon appear despicable, loathsome, contemptible and monstrous. This approach is also helpful because it recognizes that historians have often struggled to discern the veracity of Black Legend atrocity tales and that Napoleon's contemporaries lacked the specific legal or conceptual categories of 'war crime' and 'crimes against humanity'.