Napoleon Bonaparte, teenage blogger

Yesterday I shared a post about Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon: A Life on Instagram. Coincidentally, when looking back at Goodreads to see how long it took me to read it, I discovered that I finished it eight years ago today, which I’m taking as an excuse to share a line that has amused me ever since.

Writing of the young Corsican’s submission for a French literary prize, Roberts relates:

Napoleon would later claim that he had withdrawn the essay before it was judged, but that is not in fact true. The Academy’s examiners gave it low marks for its excessively inflated style. One judge described it as ‘of too little interest, too ill-ordered, too disparate, too rambling, and too badly written to hold the reader’s attention’. Years later, Talleyrand obtained the original from the Academy’s archives and presented it to Napoleon.

Napoleon’s reaction speaks for all of us who started a blog during college:

“I found its author deserved to be whipped. What ridiculous things I said, and how annoyed I would be if they were preserved!”

One sympathizes.

Napoleon then—like anyone who has at some point deleted some ancient, teenage musings—burned the essay, “push[ing] it down with the tongs” to make sure it was good and gone. After all, “It might have exposed me to ridicule.”