Napoleon's Favorite Poet was Actually a Sophisticated Literary Hoax

During the journey to Egypt, Napoleon organized an intellectual literary salon that met every evening after dinner on the flagship L'Orient. This salon was attended by senior officers and scientists accompanying the expedition. Napoleon would divide the participants into two groups, pose a question, and task each group with defending or attacking the idea.

After the debate was concluded (with Napoleon picking the winning side), the general would usually recite passionately from the cycle of poems by his favorite poet, Ossian, claiming that these poems captured true historical heroism—unlike the works of classical poets like Homer, whom Napoleon regarded as a great braggart.

The first volume of poems by the legendary Celtic poet was published in 1760s London. These initial fragments introduced the world to an ancient Scottish bard who, two volumes later, would be recognized as Ossian. When the complete works of Ossian were published in 1765, readers in England—and soon after, across much of Europe—could immerse themselves in the firsthand account of a warrior-poet, the son of the legendary hero Fingal (Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish mythology) and the last survivor of his warrior society in the Scottish Highlands. According to his translator, James Macpherson, Ossian lived around the 3rd century CE, though Macpherson was not always consistent with his dating of the ancient poet's life.

In an era eager to be dazzled and influenced by new and exciting ancient sources, the words of Ossian spread across the British Isles and then to the continent, as if they were taken from a newly discovered work by Homer or Virgil. The geography may have been unfamiliar to most readers, and the heroes less known than Achilles or Aeneas (though not entirely unknown), but the tone was familiar, and the tales no less epic.

Ossian, or rather Oisín, was a figure primarily known from Irish mythology. In the newly published poems, he was transformed into a Scottish hero—a blind poet who sings of the life and battles of his father, Fingal. Seventeen-year-old Napoleon acquired his first copy of Ossian in 1786, in the first full Italian translation by Melchiore Cesarotti. Napoleon, of course, knew that the authenticity of the poems was contested, but he dismissed the matter, as he often did when he chose to believe something.

Napoleon was so enthralled by the poet that in 1800, while still consolidating his regime as the First Consul of France (a position he created after seizing power in a military coup), he commissioned two Ossianic paintings for his palace at La Malmaison. Both were prominently displayed in the reception room.

So how is it that even with such passionate "official" backing from the future emperor of France, and with Goethe, William Blake, and a host of other great literary figures of the 18th and 19th centuries comparing Ossian's works to those of the best and most beloved poets of the past—some even calling him the "Homer of the Scots"—his work is now largely forgotten? Why have most of us never even heard his name or know anything about what he wrote?

It's because Ossian was a literary hoax created by his so called translator, James Macpherson.

https://libraryofbabel2.substack.com/p/napoleons-favorite-poet-was-actually