The Trouble with Memoirs

Ah, memoirs. So tempting. So flawed. Last week, Mary wrote about some of her research hurdles. My snake in the garden—always offering apples which never quite convey the knowledge they promise—are contemporary memoirs. They always seem like such a great idea. You hear the actual historical figures speaking in their own actual voices! (Assuming that we’re not dealing with the eighteenth or nineteenth century equivalent of ghostwriters). They were there! They experienced the events you want to know about!

Er, yes. But do they remember them twenty years after?

Right now, I’m brushing up on my Bonapartes for a book to be set in Paris in 1804. Fouche, the dreaded Napoleonic Minister of Police, plays a large role in the book, so I happily dusted off my copy of his memoirs along with those of Josephine’s lady in waiting, Mme de Remusat; Napoleon’s secretary, Bourrienne; and Josephine’s daughter, Hortense. The Napoleonic period is particularly rich in memoirs.

Unfortunately, there’s a reason for that. Everyone wanted to justify his own actions twenty years later, with a Bourbon King back on the throne. Everyone wanted to make himself look better—or, in the case of the big-hearted Hortense, make her mother look better. Many of these memoirs are short on details, but long on self-justification. Fouche begins his memoirs with a lengthy apologia in which he disingenuously describes himself as one who “never wielded [power] but to calm the passions, disunite factions, and prevent conspiracies; me, who was never ceasingly employed in moderating and tempering power, in conciliating and amalgamating the jarring elements and conflicting interests which divided France”. To coin a phrase, yeah, right.

Even when they do recount detailed descriptions of events and conversations, how much can one rely on them? Leaving aside the question of deliberate fraud (and there was plenty of that going on—including the made-up story of how Napoleon met Josephine that both her children vigorously perpetuated), memory is faulty. We re-remember things over time, highlighting and embroidering as we see fit, melding memory to fit new circumstances. Mme de Remusat frankly admits that her task is an elusive one, “[going] back in search of a number of impressions which were strong and vivid when [she] received them, but which now, like ruined buildings devastated by fire, have no longer any connection with one another”.

What one does receive, though, aside from the myths people wish to perpetuate in retrospect, is a sense of voice. Sometimes it backfires on the author. The more pious Fouche attempted to sound, the more I disbelieved him and a stronger a sense I received of the crafty opportunist he had been. And I would still be friends with Hortense de Beauharnais tomorrow, even if she did fudge her memoirs to protect her mother—or maybe because she fudged her memoirs to protect her mother.

Sadly, no historical document is ever a hundred per cent without its pitfalls. One letter from Cromwell threw off some crucial dating for ages until people realized it was dated old style (with the calendar year beginning/ending in April) rather than new style (January). Hortense and Eugene Beauharnais edited their mother’s and stepfather’s correspondence, changing dates on letters to try to sanitize the early days of their love affair. But I still find memoirs particularly troublesome—because there is always that hope that the character can tell the story in his or her own voice and it will be true, the historian’s task made simple.

It never does work that way, though.

What are your research bugbears?