Le roi de Rome

Le roi de Rome — the King of Rome — was the dynastic title Napoleon I gave to his infant son, Napoleon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, immediately after the boy's birth on March 20, 1811. The title proclaimed the child as the heir to the newly created Kingdom of Rome, a central pillar of the Napoleonic imperial system. In the world of Dostoevsky's novel, however, the phrase escapes its historical frame and becomes a verbal talisman for one of the most memorably deluded characters in Russian literature: General Ardalion Alexandrovitch Ivolgin.

The General's Napoleonic Fantasy

The general, a retired officer long sunk into alcoholism, poverty, and compulsive lying, repeatedly invokes "le roi de Rome" in his elaborate fabrications about having been a page to Napoleon during the French occupation of Moscow in 1812. In one of his most extravagant tales, he claims that Napoleon, catching sight of him as a well-dressed ten-year-old boy in the crowd, exclaimed "Voilà un garçon bien éveillé!" and, after learning the child was the son of a general who died on the battlefield, appointed him page on the spot. The general insists that he wore the dark green dress coat with gold buttons, red facings, white trousers, and silk stockings of a page, and that he followed Napoleon into the Kremlin, where he witnessed the Emperor's nightly groans and wept with him. In this fantasy, the general himself becomes a kind of surrogate "roi de Rome" — the beloved child whom Napoleon trusted and confided in, the one who dared to counsel the Emperor to seek peace with Alexander.

The Phrase as a Marker of Delusion

The phrase "le roi de Rome" surfaces most poignantly during the general's final, catastrophic breakdown. After being publicly humiliated at the Epanchin house and then cursing his own family, he wanders the streets with his son Colia, muttering disconnected fragments. "You shall have such a son yourself; le roi de Rome," he tells Colia, conflating his own imagined intimacy with Napoleon's dynasty with a blessing on his son. Moments later, as he collapses on a doorstep, he whispers to Colia, "Le roi de Rome," trembling all over, and then tries to articulate something about "Maria Petrovna Su—Su—Su......." before a stroke seizes him. The title, in this context, is no longer a coherent reference to Napoleon's son but a shard of a shattered identity — the last piece of the grand narrative the general has built to shield himself from the reality of his theft, his drunkenness, and his family's contempt.

The Ironic Structure of the Motif

The novel's treatment of "le roi de Rome" is deeply ironic. The historical King of Rome, Napoleon II, never reigned; he was taken to Austria as an infant after his father's abdication, given the title Duke of Reichstadt, and died of tuberculosis at twenty-one, a virtual prisoner in Schönbrunn Palace. The general, who has never been near Napoleon and whose military career was at most modest, appropriates the title of this unrealized emperor as the emblem of his own unrealized greatness. The phrase thus operates on two levels simultaneously: within the general's own discourse, it is a claim to glory and proximity to power; within the novel's larger structure, it is a measure of the distance between fantasy and reality, between the self one imagines and the self one has become. The general's stroke, which follows immediately upon his whispered invocation of "le roi de Rome," suggests that the fantasy has finally collapsed under its own weight, leaving only the broken man whom his son must carry home.