His capture after the Battle of Waterloo had raised the question of what to do with him. He would always be a focus for trouble if he stayed in Europe. For a while he hoped that he could escape to or would be sent to America but, just like his application for asylum in the UK, this came to nothing.
Napoleon had to come to terms with living in exile in a very inhospitable place and find ways to pass the time.
I was surprised to learn recently that one thing he did was to take English lessons. There is information available online about this episode in the former French Emperor’s life; I have selected aspects that I find particularly interesting and amusing, including some examples of his writing.
Napoleon put a lot of effort into learning English in the early days of his exile on St. Helena. He would have done this for several reasons.
Reasons for learning English
It gave Napoleon something to do, especially when he was unable to sleep.
He might have needed something to distract him from painful thoughts of what might have been and the difference between his former and current lifestyle.
Reading material was in short supply and some that he managed to get his hands on was in English. He would have wanted to know what his old enemies were saying about him in the newspapers.
For me, the most obvious reason is that he was preparing for the time when he would be brought back to England.
His plan was to acquire some knowledge of the language in readiness for his future life. He may even have had some ideas about returning to power in France. In the past, he had relied on and paid a lot of money to interpreters and translators; it may have seemed a good idea to learn English so that he could cut out the middlemen in the future.
In the previously-quoted letter to the Prince Regent, Napoleon compared himself to the great Greek statesman Themistocles. When he threw himself on the mercy and generosity of the Persian king Artaxerxes, Themistocles was received very hospitably. He asked for - and got - one year’s grace in which to learn the customs and language. Napoleon may have identified with the tragic Greek hero and decided that he too would learn a new language in preparation for the new life to come.
The French English tutor
Napoleon’s tutor was the historian Count Emmanuel de Las Cases, envoy, secretary and loyal supporter, who had been allowed to accompany Napoleon to St. Helena. He wrote a memoir of his time as imperial language teacher.
Surely an Englishmen would have been better for the job, but maybe there was no one around who was both willing and able to take on the difficult task of teaching English to such a pupil.
The pupil starts his lessons
In Las Cases’ words:
“Today the Emperor took his first English lesson. Since my main aim was to make him able to read the newspapers without difficulty, this first lesson consisted only in making him acquainted with an English gazette, getting him to study the form and the way it was organised, showing him that the position of the different sorts of content was always the same, helping him to distinguish between the advertisements and the town gossip and the politics, and teaching him how, with the latter, to judge what was authentic and what was simply an unsubstantiated rumour.
I set myself the goal that he would, in a month, be able to read the newspapers without the assistance of any of us – if the Emperor could bear the irritation of such lessons every day.”
Starting with English newspapers and showing Napoleon what to look for in them seems an inspired approach. The goal was very ambitious indeed though.
Heavy going
Daily lessons were a burden for both tutor and pupil.
In Las Cases’ words:
“It would have been impossible without huge effort on the part of the pupil and real skill on the part of the teacher. He often asked me if he deserved the cane, suspecting that it had a good effect in schools. He would have got on much faster, he used to say laughingly, if he had had a cane to fear. He complained that he had not made any progress – but the progress he did make would have been enormous for anyone.”
So Napoleon had a sense of humour!
Napoleon did not enjoy his lessons. Las Cases said that if something happened to disrupt the regular schedule, it was difficult to get his pupil going again:
“’I need to be pushed’, he said to me privately, during one of these temporary interruptions. ‘Only the pleasure of moving forward keeps me going. For, my dear man, and I’m sure you agree with me, nothing in all this is pleasurable. There is not one single happy word in our entire existence.’”
I too have learned a foreign language in the hope that I would be able to use it in a new life, but I would never have done it if I found no enjoyment in the learning. I didn’t need to be pushed; I found the subject fascinating and did a lot of work of my own accord.
Making progress
Napoleon studied English every afternoon for three months. He was said to be very intelligent but to have a bad memory, which meant that he picked up the grammatical rules very quickly but had trouble with vocabulary. I was surprised to learn that he had trouble remembering words - I would have expected him to have an extremely good memory.
Napoleon was better at reading and writing English than he was at speaking it; he had his own ideas about pronunciation, and he would always use ‘j’ (as in the French ‘je’) instead of the English ‘I’. This arrogance or stubbornness made it difficult to understand what he was saying. He would have had trouble making himself understood if had gone to live in England!
After six weeks of lessons
Here is part of a letter Napoleon wrote to his tutor:
“Since sixt week j learn the Englich and j do not any progress. Six week do fourty and two day. If might have learn fivity word four day I could know it two thusands and two hundred. It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand; even he could must twinty bout much of tems for know it our hundred and twenty week, which do more two yars. After this you shall agrée that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged.”
This transcription takes some decoding! He is saying that if he had learned fifty words every day for forty-two days, he would know over two thousand words. However, as there are over forty thousand words in the dictionary, it would take over two years to learn them all.
The letter itself:
Napoleon plays a joke
Las Cases last mentions Napoleon’s English on April 15, 1816, when he had been studying the language for three months.
His confidence had improved to the point where over dinner he felt comfortable giving an impromptu summary, in English, of a story he said had read in an illicitly-obtained French newspaper, “full of curious, remarkable, romantic details, which greatly aroused our interest.”
When he saw his audience’s reaction, Napoleon started to laugh. The joke was that he had not read his story in any newspaper: he had invented it himself so as to show off his progress!
It is sad to think that Napoleon could use his hard-earned knowledge of the English language only for talking to people on St. Helena and reading the newspapers.
For anyone who wants to learn more, this is a good starting point:
https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/articles/napoleons-english-lessons/
A fragment of Napoleon’s English exercises:
