The ‘Louis-Napoleon’ La Pérouse

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XVII, Issue 2, 1 October 1984, Page 106

The ‘Louis-Napoleon’ La Pérouse

J. DUNMORE

The Turnbull Library’s copy of the Voyage de La Perouse autour du monde, edited by Milet-Mureau and published by the Imprimerie de la Republique in 1797, 4 volumes and atlas, bears on the flyleaf of the first volume the words:

Au Colonel Bouffet de Montauban, souvenir d’amitie, Louis Napoleon ’4B

and, in a different handwriting, ‘Londres, 15 aout’.* In September 1848 Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte left London for France to take up a seat in Parliament, and eventually to become President, and in 1851 Emperor as Napoleon 111. Francois Hypolitte Bouffet (the Mountauban is a later addition) had joined the army in 1806 at the age of thirteen. From the 23rd Infantry regiment, he transferred to the cavalry, was a sublieutenant at the age of fifteen, and went to Italy with General de Beauharnais. Wounded, he was well enough to fight at Wagram and join the Grand Army on its march into, and its retreat from, Russia. He was now a lieutenant-major. He distinguished himself at the Battle of Dresden in August 1813 and was given the Legion of Honour; but a rash pursuit of the fleeing Austrians led to the defeat of Kulm, and to his being taken prisoner. The Austrians sent him to Milan, to recuperate from his wounds; he was repatriated in September 1814 as an officer on half-pay. As soon as he learnt of the Emperor’s return from Elba, he dashed to join him at Grenoble, went with him to Paris, and then on to Waterloo. With the second restoration of the Bourbons, officers with his record were subjected to petty persecutions, forcing him to resign his commission in 1816 and emigrate to Belgium and soon after to the Americas. In 1819 he emerged as the colonel of a regiment of lancers in Colombia. In due course, the French authorities were to recognise his rank; but in 1823, back in Europe with enough money to live on, he was still in exile, residing in the Rhineland. The fall of Charles X in 1830 enabled him to return to Paris, as ‘deputy for the French residents of Belgium and the

Rhineland’. The new king, Louis-Philippe, briefly appointed him brigadier-general of the so-called ‘Division des Volontaires de Paris’, a middle-class militia that was soon disbanded. For a while, Bouffet earned his living as a theatre manager, but in 1833 the death of Napoleon I’s only son passed the Bonapartist mantle on to Louis-Napoleon. Bouffet soon threw his lot in with the new pretender, moved to London and became, with Persigny (later Napoleon Ill’s Minister of the Interior, and Ambassador to London) one of his two aides-de-camp.

He travelled with Louis-Napoleon to Germany, to Switzerland, and throughout Britain. They plotted together the landing at Boulogne, a pale copy of Napoleon I’s landing from Elba; it was a dismal failure: Louis-Napoleon was sent to the fortress at Ham, Persigny got twenty years, Bouffet got five. Released in 1845, he went to London, still acting as the Prince’s agent and welcoming him the following year after his escape from Ham. The next two years were spent in endless political intrigues, in the knowledge that the reign of Louis-Philippe could not last much longer.

Bouffet did not return to France with Louis-Napoleon. A fortnight before the latter sailed from London, he gave his old friend his Voyage de La Perouse as a parting gift. It came from his personal collection (the Turnbull copy bears his coat of arms). We can assume that Bouffet, now in his fifties, worn by campaigns and adventures, had no future in the new life he had helped to create for the Prince; but Louis-Napoleon would have selected from his collection a book which he considered of particular value as a gift for a trusted follower and friend; something he had read and reread, and which both prized.

I have found no record of the place or date ofßouffet’s death. The fact that Alexander Turnbull bought the book relatively early in his career as collector (the accession number is 612) suggests that Bouffet remained in England and that his possessions were sold locally, eventually reaching the dealer from whom Turnbull purchased it.

* This unusual dedication was noticed while the author was comparing the text of the MS of the La Perouse Journals with the later printed account.