THE IMAGE OF THE EMPEROR OF FRANCE, NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, IN THE MEMOIRS OF ALEKSANDER FREDRO

Abstract

The most recognizable figure of Galicia in the 19th century for Polish cultural memory remains the creator of comedies Alexander Fredro.

Already in the first quarter of the 19th century, the dramaturgy of Alexander Fredro gradually turned Galicia into a center of Polish culture. The theater was the center of cultural and social life in Lviv almost throughout the 19th century.

A. Fredro is also the author of the special memoirs “Three by Three”, which present the events of the Napoleonic Wars and the author’s own participation in them. The figure of the Emperor of France Napoleon Bonaparte in the works of Aleksander Fredro is an interesting example of the depiction of a historical figure in European literature of the 19th century. Fredro was one of Napoleon’s orderlies in 1813–1814.

These memoirs are a monument and testimony to Fredro’s worldview, rooted in the noble past, in the history of the Polish struggle for independence – as part of the French imperial army. “Three by Three” is an important source on the relationship between the Polish officer corps of the French army and the emperor himself, his attitude towards the independence of Poland.

The image of Napoleon in Fredro’s memoirs is not a historical document. It is rather an artistic image based on the playwright’s personal observations and generalizations, his subjective literary and artistic portrait.

The author of the memoirs, twenty-year-old Alexander Fredro, a captain in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Army, was one of hundreds of thousands, a small cog in this great war machine, who had to transmit orders from the headquarters of the commander-in-chief, the emperor, which launched and directed the mechanisms of military action.

Years later, Fredro would also give a bitter description of the consequences of the Poles’ participation in the Napoleonic wars, which, despite the hard military work, the blood, sweat, and victory, did not bring liberation to Poland.