Daily Life In France Under Napoleon

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THOSE epochs most crowded with history are not always the best understood: much of their intimate life is lost to us. During the almost uninterrupted wars of the Consulate and the Empire the great events obscure the little ones; the soldier outshines the civilian as the epic does the chronicle of manners.

What do we find most often in the memoirs of the time? Political anecdotes or purely military recollections. We are taken at a gallop to the four corners of Europe, but with things of so much greater moment to be shown to us, we are not given a glimpse of what is going on in the houses of the Rue Saint-Denis, under the red umbrellas of the Halles or the elms of the Mall in the provinces.

Tiny matters these, no doubt, compared with the immense game being played elsewhere, but details worthy of attention none the less, since everything in history is interconnected, the infinitely small with the infinitely great, the f ormer complementing the latter, reducing it to our scale, making it seem less improbable and more human.

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