ART. VII.-1. Opinions de Napoléon sur divers sujets de Politique et d'Administration, recueillies par un Membre de son Conseil d'état; et recit de quelques evenemens de l'époque. Par le Baron Pelet (de la Lozère), Membre de la Chambre des Députés. Paris. 1833.

2. Napoleon in Council; or, Opinions delivered by Buonaparte in the Council of State. Translated from the French of Baron Pelet (de la Lozère), Member of the Chamber of Deputies, and late Minister of Public Instruction. By Captain Basil Hall, R.N. Edinburgh. 1837.

BOTH M. Pelet and his translator begin with a kind of

apology for publishing another work on a subject which they seem to think almost exhausted: but this is only the common-place modesty of authors. M. Pelet and Captain Hall know very well that enormous as is the mass of falsehood and forgery with which Buonaparte himself in the first place, his partizans in the second, and finally the mere hirelings of the Parisian press, have laboured to overlay and stifle historical truth-we are by no means overstocked with authorities possessing the double merit of good information and honest intentions. M. Pelet himself touches this topic, though very lightly, in allusion to Buonaparte's St. Helena romances; but even a slight admission from a person of M. Pelet's character and condition, becomes important evidence on such a subject. We therefore record it. M. Pelet says—

'The St. Helena Memorials, it is true, report his conversations on all sorts of subjects; but it must be recollected, that, though still alive, he had virtually become a member of posterity. He exhibited himself, therefore, as it were historically, in the manner he wished to appear in future times; and as it was clearly under this impression that he dictated his memoirs, it is impossible not to distrust the sincerity of his opinions.'-p. ii.

M. Pelet's very just idea of Buonapartean history is, we see, not that which is true, but only what Napoleon wished it to appear. The avowal is candid; and, as the French say, nous en prenons acte.

Captain Hall also, after expressing his fear that the subject may be thought well nigh worn out,' adds,

'But as there can be no doubt that many parts of it have hitherto been mystified-some by design, and some unintentionally-it occurred to me that a trustworthy statement, coming from a person who has enjoyed peculiar advantages for ascertaining the truth, might still be considered acceptable.'-p. iv.

He then proceeds to inform us of his author's claims to confidence:

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'Mons.

'Mons. Pelet's means of obtaining information arose from his having occupied high and confidential situations, first under the Consulate and the Empire, afterwards during the Restoration, and more recently under the present government of France.

Under Napoleon, the author was long a member of the Council of State, and administrator of the royal forests of the civil list; both of which situations brought him frequently in contact with the head of the government. During the Restoration, he enjoyed the title of councillor of state, and for four years was prefect of the Loire and Cher, of which department he was elected a deputy in 1827; a seat which he has occupied up to this time. Since the accession of Louis Philippe to the throne, he has been vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies, and for some time held the important office of minister of public instruction. Finally, by his marriage with the daughter of Mons. Otto (who, it may be remembered, negotiated the preliminaries of the treaty of Amiens, and afterwards filled various high diplomatic situations on the continent,) Mons. Pelet came into the possession of many valuable official documents, several of which, so far as I know, are now for the first time laid before the public.'—pp. iv. v.

In this account there are one or two inaccuracies, which, trifling as they are, we think it right to notice, because Captain Hall evidently writes under the immediate sanction of M. Pelet himself-with whom he tells us he has an intimate personal acquaintance,'-and who has even enriched the translation with notes and illustrations (distinguished by his initials), which the original does not possess. The first of these inaccuracies is the assertion that M. Pelet held a high and confidential situation under the Consulate.' This must be a mistake: the Consulate ended 20th May, 1804; and the first mention we find of M. Pelet's official life is his becoming a member of the Council of State in 1806 -being then but nineteen years old' (p. 2.),-early enough, of all conscience; and it is almost impossible that he should have held high and confidential office two years before. Nor is it quite accurate to represent him as having been a member of the Council of Stateif that ambiguous phrase is meant to convey the idea that he was a Councillor of State-Anglicè, a privy councillor—at this period. As early, indeed, as 1806, he became one of the auditors of the Council of State, and about 1812, or 1813, he was promoted to be

*

This, though the statement of M. Pelet himself, we suspect to be also erroneous. We know that Buonaparte-particularly at first-bribed the old revolutionists by every species of favouritism; but we scarcely think that he would have done so indecent a job for the old conventionalist Pelet, as to place his son in a prominent office at the age of nineteen, unless-as in our celebrated whig case of Sir John Key-the youth's age was falsified to excuse the patron; but we find in several biographical works, that Pelet, junior, was born in 1785; therefore he must have been above twenty, and might have been, and probably was, of the legal age of twenty-one, when he was appointed. These little matters are not unimportant when we are weighing the testimony of a witness.

a master

a master of requests;-but it is not till 1829 that we find him on the list of even honorary privy councillors. The auditors were a kind of apprentices in the art of administration, to whom was entrusted the first preparatory arrangement of the materials on which the Privy Council were afterwards to decide. A few of the auditors were distinguished by the peculiar privilege of attending at the meetings of the Council when the Emperor was present-but we do not find M. Pelet's name in even that list. All this is in some degree important—in the first place, because accuracy is always valuable; but in the next, because-M. Pelet professing to give us a view of Buonaparte in his Council of State-it is obviously one thing to have been a constituent member of the board, and another to be an inferior officer, admitted occasionally to the sittings when the business on which he had been previously employed happened to be brought forward for discussion. distinction is clearly made by M. Pelet himself, in his chapter on the Council of State.

This

'At the time I speak of (1806), the number of auditors was so great, that he could not express himself freely before such a number of young men of all the different classes in society. In his decree, therefore, he made a distinction between the old and the new auditors; of whom only the old could attend the meetings when he was himself in the chair.'— pp. 221, 222.

M. Pelet himself was one of those new auditors. We are sorry that he was not an actual councillor of state, for we are so well pleased with what he reports of the proceedings, that we wish he had more to tell us.

There is another observation, which it may not be a useless preliminary to make: this gentleman calls himself Le Baron Pelet de la Lozère-an adjunct to which he has no more right than the son of any ex-member of our House of Commons would have to assume as a title of honour the name of the county for which his father might have sat forty years ago. This little assumption of a high-sounding name is so characteristic of the republican school of equality, that it is worth while to explain it a little. It happened that the citizen Jean Pelet was elected in 1792, to the National Convention, by the department of the Lozère, and another Pelé (the same name in pronunciation) was elected for that of the Loiret. To distinguish these citizens in the appel nominal, one was called* Pelet de la Lozère, and the other Pelé du

* Jean Pelet was luckily obscure enough to attract little notice in the Convention. From the king's trial he was absent on commission; but from his subsequent conduct, when we find him classed with those respectable men, Boissy d'Anglas and Lanjuinais, there is little doubt that he would have voted in favour of Louis. His conduct, indeed, was always moderate, and he went through the revolution unsullied by its excesses. Buonaparte made him a councillor of state, and subsequently a count, and the son a baron.

Loiret. But this could give Pelet no claim to affix permanently the title of La Lozère to his name-and still less his son-who never, we believe, had any public connexion with that department. We notice this as another contradiction to that absurd notion which has been lately promulgated, that the strong political passion of France is for equality. We have before said, and we confidently repeat, that there is nothing more untrue; and that the whole French people is, beyond any nation upon earth, devoured with a rage for personal distinctions.* Madame Delphine Gay de Girardin has, we are glad to see, had the courage, in a recently published poem, to tell her countrymen this disagreeable truth, and to confess that they have

trop vanté

Ce rêve d'envieux, qu'on nomme égalité.'

But M. Pelet, though he has fallen into this little weakness of a parvenu, may be, and we have good authority for believing that he is, an amiable and respectable man, whose book may be read with as much confidence as it is possible to give to one who has had the misfortune of learning his political rudiments in the school of Buonaparte. But willing as we are to believe-on the authority of Captain Hall, and indeed on that of the original work-in the personal candour and integrity of M. Pelet, we cannot say that we receive an equal impression of his literary talent or his political sagacity. From one who has been even from his boyhood versed in public affairs-employed successively in high administrative functions under the Empire-the Restoration-and the late Revolution -even up to the Cabinet-we should have expected more novelty and interest in his facts, and more depth and discrimination in his judgments.

The truth is, he has given us, so far as he is concerned, a very light work on a very weighty subject. This is, however, not altogether attributable to the character of M. Pelet's mind; some allowance must be made for his position. The child, as we have seen, of the Empire, it is natural that he should feel an inclination to be its champion; stronger minds than his were dazzled with the delusion of the Emperor's omnipotence and omniscience; and since the fraudulent revolution of July has brought the Napoleonists into fashion again, M. Pelet has still stronger motives for giving a favourable

We observe another small but not insignificant proof of these aristocratical propensities. The editors of even the most liberal journals assume the feudal particle De. That the royalist editors should have done so would have been no surprise; but it is rather amusing to find that the responsible publisher of the National signs himself De La Roche; of the Courier Francais, De Lapelouze; of the Presse, De Girardin; of La France, De Feuillas, &c. &c. They may be all, for aught we know, entitled to this feudal prefix; but in the good old times of the Convention they or their fathers must have either abjured the De or lost their heads.

colour

colour to the character of Buonaparte. But he seems to be really an honest man; and we believe the weakness of his share of the book is produced by his halting between two opinions'-between an honourable impulse to tell the truth, and a prudential reserve towards the old and the new usurpations. We, of course, must wish that M. Pelet could have taken a higher, franker, more sagacious view of the subject; but there is, even in his partiality and short-sightedness, a compensating advantage. Whenever he excites an impression unfavourable to Buonaparte, it must be taken as evidence reluctant or undesigned, and in either case incontrovertible. Now, our readers will see presently that the result of the whole work is to lower the character of Buonaparte more even than any of his professed adversaries have done. In fact, the more we learn about him from those who are able and willing to tell the truth, the more is our own old opinion of him confirmed; and as M. Pelet's book is the honestest, so it is the least favourable to his character; it is, in fact, a corroborative commentary of the Abbé de Pradt's celebrated sketch in his account of his embassy to Warsaw: This man, whose only education was in the military coffee-houses, has preserved their manners and language, and can be no other than the enemy of all urbanity. His genius may be represented as a royal mantle thrown over a harlequin's jacket; and he was in fact nothing but a species of Jupiter Scapin; such as had never before been exhibited on the theatre of the world.' M. Pelet's work, though in terms very complimentary, confirms, in fact, M. de Pradt's opinion; and indeed shows that the French Jupiter had in his composition a greater proportion than even we had imagined of the Scapin.

The work consists, as our readers have seen by the title-page of the original, of two divisions-one, the opinions delivered by Buonaparte in the Council of State on various subjects of public interest; the second, M. Pelet's own narrative of some remarkable events of the period. The text of the book—we know not why -reverses this order of the subjects, and treats of the last first. We shall follow in our observations what we think the more natural order announced in the title-page.

In entering on the examination of Buonaparte's Opinions in the Council of State, there are one or two preliminary observations to be made. M. Pelet, in his enthusiastic admiration of the unrivalled genius and unbounded knowledge which, we are told, Buonaparte exhibits in these Opinions, seems to believe—or at least leaves us to suppose that the emperor generally extemporized them-pro re nata-from the depths of his own mind. Such, however, was by no means the case. No rational creature can doubt that even in his civil character Buonaparte had great aptitude, a powerful