Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

Reunited with Bonaparte in Paris, they enjoyed bachelor life together, and among other incidents of that exciting time were horrified witnessing the rabble mobbing the royal family in the Tuileries (June 20) and the massacre of the Swiss Guards at the same spot (August 10).

The spectacularly victorious general urgently summoned Bourrienne to Italy for the long negotiations with Austria (May–October 1797), where his knowledge of law and diplomacy was useful in drafting the terms of the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 7).

Bourrienne recognized that his friend was likely to become a major historical figure, so he began making notes and filing copies of pertinent documents.

Later Bourrienne strongly defended the controversial decisions at Jaffa to euthanize the French plague victims and to bayonet the Turkish prisoners who had violated parole.

[3] He was supposed to enforce the measures for the commercial war against England, known as the Continental System, but was convinced that cutting off trade hurt Europe more than Britain.

In the early spring of 1807, when directed to provide a large number of military cloaks for the army in East Prussia, he procured them secretly and expeditiously from England.

His book gives a vivid, intimate, detailed account of his interactions with Napoleon and his mother, brothers and sisters; with his first wife Joséphine de Beauharnais and her children; with notable French politicians; and with the marshals, he was especially friendly with Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, the future King of Sweden, when they both were in Northern Germany.

Naturally his narration is colored by his complicated relationship with his subject: close friendship, working together intimately for years, followed by dismissal and humiliating rejection.

He tries to be balanced and gives many examples of Napoleon's brilliance, his skill at governance, and his deft political maneuvers, while deploring his inexorable grabs for personal and familial power and wealth, his willingness to sacrifice French lives, and his abhorrence of a free press.

One of his bombshells is the claim that the Grand Army based at Boulogne was never meant to invade England, too chancy an enterprise: it was a diversion to keep British forces at home.

[5] His book is not a source in which to check particular facts, but as Goethe wrote: "All of the nimbus, all of the illusions, with which journalists and historians have surrounded Napoleon, vanishes before the awe-inspiring realisms of this book…".