Perrin, France’s leading history publisher, and the Fondation Napoléon have joined forces to create the Bibliothèque impériale, the little sister of the Bibliothèque de Sainte-Hélène, which was a great success between 2020 and 2022. Together, we have decided to publish each year a volume of primary sources essential to the study of the two French Empires. The evolution of books and new ways of reading make this a difficult exercise, even though the sources constitute the foundations of historical knowledge, as well as sometimes fascinating documents.

The first volume in this collection appeared on 13 February 2025: it is the Diary that Pierre-Louis Roederer kept throughout his Napoleonic career. He was one of the accomplices of the 18 Brumaire coup d’état, president of the Interior section of the Council of State during the Consulate, senator during the Empire, Minister of Finance of the Kingdom of Naples under Joseph Bonaparte and Secretary of State of the Grand Duchy of Berg during Napoleon’s regency. This man had a habit that is particularly useful to us today: he wrote down, often in the evening, what the First Consul and then Emperor had said to him during the day. His diary is therefore a mine of information, from which historians have extracted quotations that are constantly reused to support their work. Roederer also took part in the preparation of a large number of reforms, exchanging notes with his master with a remarkable breadth of vision. He was a friend of Joseph Bonaparte and Talleyrand, with whom he shared both political and personal information. The first volume of the Bibliothèque impériale offers a wide-ranging account of all this, a journey into the inner workings of Napoleon’s government.

 

The development of this new collection will extend over several years, with other works that are indispensable to any worthy napoleonic library including: Napoleon’s correspondence with Talleyrand, the major political texts of Napoleon III, an anthology of Napoleonic poetry and many other volumes.

Thierry Lentz, director of the collection, February 2025

Publisher’s presentation

Throughout his reign, Napoleon received Pierre-Louis Roederer, an accomplice in the Brumaire coup d’état, State Councillor and then Senator of the Empire, countless times in his study. Roederer made a habit of scrupulously noting down the content of these meetings, which were often very free, on both political and personal subjects, often that very evening. Published in the 1850s in eight large volumes that are now impossible to find, these notes are the stuff of historians’ dreams. Thierry Lentz has published a selection of these notes, which he introduces and comments on, based on work carried out at the beginning of the 20th century by the publisher Maurice Vitrac. These include the best of the conversations between Napoleon and his advisor, an incomparable ‘insider’s’ account, anecdotes from the affairs of consular and imperial power, and assessments and portraits of key contemporaries.

Throughout the text, readers may also spot some of the great napoleonic quotations so often cited, such as ‘power is as sad as greatness’, ‘I will not allow myself to be insulted like a king’, ‘a Constitution must be short and obscure’, ‘I have only one passion, only one mistress; France: I sleep with her’, “[Joseph is the eldest] for our father’s vineyard, no doubt”, not forgetting the famous tirade: ’It was by making myself Catholic that I ended the Vendée war, by making myself Muslim that I established myself in Egypt, by making myself ultramontane that I won over the spirits in Italy. If I governed a population of Jews, I would re-establish the Temple of Solomon’, pronounced at the Council of State, on 16 August 1800. And since Napoleon’s elder brother has already been mentioned, his friendship with Roederer explains his omnipresence in this volume, whether in the affairs of the Consulate, those of Naples and Spain (where Joseph was on the throne) or his downfall.

Pierre-Louis Roederer, Avec Napoléon. Journal, presentation and notes by Thierry Lentz, Paris, Perrin, 376 pages.

► See the contents of the book and how to acquire it (in French)

Page first published in French on 13 February 2025