Bourrienne

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 22 September 1857


First published in The New American Cyclopaedia, Vol. III, 1858
Reproduced from The New American Cyclopaedia
Source : Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 18
Collection(s): New American Cyclopaedia

On Marx's work on the article "Bourrienne" see Note 95 and pp. 394-96 of this volume.

Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de, private secretary of Napoleon, born at Sens, July 9, 1769, died near Caen, Feb. 7, 1834. He entered the military school of Brienne in 1778, and was there some 6 years as Napoleon's school-fellow. From 1789 to 1792, he spent his time as attaché to the French embassy at Vienna, as a student of international law and northern languages at Leipsic, and at the court of Poniatowski, at Warsaw. After his return to Paris, he renewed his intimacy with Napoleon, then a poor and friendless officer; but the decisive turn taken by the revolutionary movement after June 20, 1792,[1] drove him back to Germany. In 1795 he again returned to Paris, and there again met Napoleon, who however treated him coldly; but toward the end of 1796, he applied again to him, and was summoned to headquarters, and installed at once as his private secretary. After the second Italian campaign,[2] Bourrienne received the title of councillor of state, was lodged at the Tuileries, and admitted to the first consul's family circle. In 1802 the house of Coulon, army contractors, whose partner Bourrienne had secretly become, and for which he had procured the lucrative business of supplying the whole cavalry equipment, failed with a deficit of 3 millions; the chief of the house disappeared, and Bourrienne was banished to Hamburg. In 1806 he was appointed to oversee at Hamburg the strict execution of Napoleon's continental system.[3] Accusations of peculation rising against him from the Hamburg senate, from which he had obtained 2,000,000 francs, and from the emperor Alexander, whose relative, the duke of Mecklenburg, he had also mulcted, Napoleon sent a commission to inquire into his conduct, and ordered him to refund 1,000,000 francs to the imperial treasury.

Thus, a disgraced and ruined man, he lived at Paris until Napoleon's downfall, in 1814, when he stepped forward, had his million paid back by the French provisional government,[4] was installed its postmaster-general, deposed from this post by Louis XVIII, and at the first rumor of Napoleon's return from Elba, made, by the same prince, prefect of the Paris police, a post he held for 8 days. As Napoleon, in his decree dated Lyons, March 13, had exempted him from the general amnesty, he followed Louis XVIII to Belgium, was thence despatched to Hamburg, and created, on his return to Paris, state councillor, subsequently minister of state. His pecuniary embarrassments forced him in 1828 to seek a refuge in Belgium, on an estate of the duchess of Brancas at Fontaine l'Eveque, not far from Charleroy. Here, with the assistance of M. de Villemarest and others, he drew up his "Memoirs" (10 vols. 8vo), which appeared in 1829, at Paris, and caused a great deal of excitement.[5] He died in a lunatic hospital.

  1. ↑ On June 20, 1792, a mass manifestation took place in Paris in front of the Legislative Assembly and the royal palace of the Tuileries. The participants demanded the cancellation of the royal veto on the decree establishing a camp of Marseilles volunteers (fédérés) near Paris, and restoration to their ministerial posts of the Girondist leaders (representatives of the moderate republican bourgeoisie) dismissed by the King. The refusal to meet these demands made the atmosphere still more tense. Subsequent events led to a popular uprising on August 10, 1792, which overthrew the monarchy and established a republic in France.
  2. ↑ A reference to Napoleon's campaign in Northern Italy in 1800, during the war against the second anti-French coalition which ended in a victory for the French at Marengo (see Note 69).
  3. ↑ The Continental System, or the Continental Blockade, proclaimed by Napoleon I in 1806, prohibited trade between the countries of the European Continent and Great Britain.
  4. ↑ See Note 73.
  5. ↑ Marx has in mind Mémoires de M. de Bourrienne, Ministre d'État, sur Napoléon, le directoire, le consulat, l'empire et la restauration (vols. I-X, Paris, 1829). Most of these memoirs are assumed to have been written by the former Napoleonic diplomat Villemarest, who specialised in fabrications of this kind.