The hundred days

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The hundred days is the Napoleon novel by Joseph Roth , which was published by Allert de Lange in Amsterdam in 1936 .

The last days of Napoleon in France , including the Battle of Waterloo is a disaster. In addition, the life story of the Corsican laundress Angelina Pietri from Ajaccio is told. Angelina pays for her ardent adoration of the Emperor of the French with her life. Roth's novel should not be confused with the drama Napoleon or The Hundred Days by Christian Dietrich Grabbe .

time and place

The novel is set in 1815 from March to July. On March 20, 1815, Napoleon returned to Paris, coming from Elba with a blue-white-red flag . On July 15, 1815, the emperor began his last voyage - to St. Helena . From Waterloo, Napoleon reached via Laon the Malmaison castle near Paris. The emperor's journey into exile leads from Paris via Poitiers and Niort to the Île d'Aix . There Napoleon boarded the English ship Bellerophon .

First book. The homecoming of the great emperor

Napoleon, who conquered his crown and did not inherit it, is preparing from Paris for war against his enemies, the Prussians and the English . Three hundred thousand new rifles are to be manufactured. Napoleon lets the cannons thunder and not the bells. He has no time and has to reinstate the old, sometimes faithless followers. Napoleon distrusts the cheering of the people. When the emperor was inspecting troops in the Paris garrison, he spoke briefly to the little tambour Antoine Pascal Pietri, a schoolboy who served in the emperor's army. Pascal's mother is Angelina Pietri. The boy names sergeant Sosthène Levadour as his father.

Second book. The life of Angelina Pietri

After the narrator leaps back into a time when Pascal was not yet born, his “prehistory” is presented together with the life story of his mother Angelina until shortly before Waterloo. For the first time they say Fraulein to the red-haired, freckled servant, and you instead of you, when she is called to the Emperor after the day's work. Angelina becomes sleepy from the hastily drunk wine and the next morning she has the feeling that the emperor has spurned her. The reader is free to choose whether he wants to take the fat Napoleon with the short body or the sergeant Levadour as the birth father of little Pascal. In any case, the sergeant would be more likely to be a father, because Levadour repeats the intercourse with the laundress and perseveres. However, Pascal only looks like his mother. And the emperor is known to love with fleeting and shameless haste . When Pascal was seven years old, he was seized with a passion for everything military . He becomes a boys' drum and thus a soldier in the imperial army .

The Polish shoemaker Jan Wokurka from Gora Lysa, a volunteer Napoleon legionnaire - now an invalid with a wooden leg , loves Angelina dearly, does everything for her and wants to take the Corsican with him to Poland. Angelina leaves the cobbler. Pascal goes to war with the emperor's soldiers. Angelina, all alone, now only loves the great emperor.

Third book. The downfall

Napoleon loses his war at Waterloo. After the battle he wanders across the battlefield and discovers Pascal's body in the dark. In a hurry, the emperor had the small body buried and flees to Paris with the remains of the army. It is June 20, 1815. Napoleon brings Angelina the news of the death of her only son Pascal. He does n't want to be an emperor anymore . He doesn't believe the people who occasionally shout Long live the emperor! He had only believed his star. The is set . His political life is over . The Prussians are in Bourget . As a division commander, the emperor wants to stop the enemy, but sees the impossibility of the project. Ministers, generals and the people fall away from him. Napoleon goes into captivity.

Fourth book. The end of little Angelina

But there are still groups of people who continue Long live the emperor! call. Among them are Angelina and the cobbler Wokurka. In Paris the little heap gets caught up in a huge crowd, long live the king ! chanted. Angelina is killed by the pack. As they die, loyalty to the emperor tries to sing the Marseillaise on the stony banks of the Seine , and thinks that a puppet, modeled after the emperor, left lying next to her, is Napoleon in person. But he is on his way to St. Helena. Wokurka limps over to the dead woman and strokes her hair incessantly.

shape

The backward time jump mentioned at the beginning of the second book is technically perfectly executed: The reader has an aha moment when Pascal is born. Wasn't the child already a drummer in the plot shortly before? But both threads of time converge neatly towards the end of the second book and the bitter end comes chronologically.

Testimonials

  • Joseph Roth writes to René Schickele : This is the first and last time that I will do something “historical” ... It is unworthy to try to shape fixed events again .
  • The author “explains” his writing concern to his French translator Blanche Gidon: a god becomes a human again .

words and phrases

the neighing of the cows .

reception

  • According to Walter A. Berendsohn , the text failed due to a lack of unity.
  • The novel is panned in “ New Forward ”; however, Leopold Fabrizius expresses his appreciation.
  • According to Nürnberger, Joseph Roth dealt with the historical facts in an arbitrary and implausible manner .
  • Kliche praises Joseph Roth. The author brings the great emperor off his pedestal, as it were, by not telling a big story but two small ones - that of the lonely man and that of the emperor's washerwoman.
  • Why does Angelina have to die? asks Kliche and replies: Because she sticks rigidly to her Napoleon belief.
  • Steierwald notes that in his Napoleon Ballad , Joseph Roth tells of the emperor's continuous turn towards death .
  • The stars are one of Joseph Roth's leitmotifs . The depressing end of the novel about the death of Angelina can be seen as memorable evidence, who gets something comforting from such a red image: His carries the reflection of heaven away with it.
  • Although Roth speaks about the French and their emperor, Sternburg suspects that the author also thought of the Germans and their Führer when he wrote .

literature

source

  • Fritz Hackert (Ed.): Joseph Roth Works 5. Novels and Stories 1930–1936 . P. 677 to 848: The Hundred Days. Novel. 1936. With an afterword by the editor. Frankfurt am Main 1994. 815 pages. ISBN 3-7632-2988-4 .

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Nürnberger p. 117
  2. ↑ from a letter by Roth, quoted in Sternburg, p. 440, 10th Zvu
  3. ↑ Hackert p. 795
  4. ↑ quoted in Sternburg, p. 444, 20. Zvo
  5. ↑ Sternburg, p. 444, 22. Zvo
  6. ↑ Kliche p. 161
  7. ↑ Kliche p. 164
  8. ↑ Steierwald p. 151
  9. ↑ Steierwald p. 62
  10. ↑ Steierwald p. 48
  11. ↑ Hackert p. 848
  12. ↑ Sternburg, p. 443, 7th Zvu