EXHIBITION Napoleon, hero of literature

31 OCTOBER 2021 - 9 JANUARY 2022

MUSÉE MASSÉNA

Exhibition plan
1. The literature of St. Helena: the testimonies
2. Napoleon, hero of literature: memoirs and fiction
3. Napoleon, model of literature: the nobility of ambition

Throughout the nineteenth century, literature was inspired by the life of Napoleon to imagine a new hero, whose ambition and recklessness were no longer, as under the Ancien Régime, defects specific to arrivistes, but qualities. This, of course, amounted to an apology for a republican or at least liberal regime. A striking example of this phenomenon is The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), whose incipit is a flamboyant praise of the egalitarianism of the Revolution, which is, according to Stendhal, embodied by Napoleon Bonaparte. This is how Napoleon made literature his Trojan horse. If not all writers were so republican and/or Bonapartist as Stendhal, few resisted the seduction of the imperial legend, many made it the more or less voluntary setting of their books. Balzac, who was a conservative, considered instructing a collection of the emperor's thoughts and maxims, instead of which he threw Bonaparte powder into twelve volumes of the Comédie humaine.
Napoleon's unexpected return to grace, enabled by literature, is the story that this exhibition proposes to tell.

Information about http://www.nice.fr/fr/culture/musees-et-galeries/...