1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ducasse, Pierre Emmanuel Albert

DUCASSE, PIERRE EMMANUEL ALBERT, Baron (1813–1893), French historian, was born at Bourges on the 16th of November 1813. In 1849 he became aide-de-camp to Prince Jerome Bonaparte, ex-king of Westphalia, then governor of the Invalides, on whose commission he wrote Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la campagne de 1812 en Russie (1852). Subsequently he published Mémoires du roi Joseph (1853–1855), and, as a sequel, Histoire des négociations diplomatiques relatives aux traités de Morfontaine, de Lunéville et d’Amiens, together with the unpublished correspondence of the emperor Napoleon I. with Cardinal Fesch (1855–1856). From papers in the possession of the imperial family he compiled Mémoires du prince Eugène (1858–1860) and Réfutation des mémoires du duc de Raguse (1857), part of which was inserted by authority at the end of volume ix. of the Mémoires. He was attaché to Jerome’s son, Prince Napoleon, during the Crimean War, and wrote a Précis historique des opérations militaires en Orient, de mars 1854 à octobre 1855 (1857), which was completed many years later by a volume entitled La Crimée et Sébastopol de 1853 à 1856, documents intimes et inédits, followed by the complete list of the French officers killed or wounded in that war (1892). He was also employed by Prince Napoleon on the Correspondance of Napoleon I., and afterwards published certain letters, purposely omitted there, in the Revue historique. These documents, subsequently collected in Les Rois frères de Napoléon (1883), as well as the Journal de la reine Catherine de Westphalie (1893), were edited with little care and are not entirely trustworthy, but their publication threw much light on Napoleon I. and his entourage. His Souvenirs d’un officier du 2ᵉ Zouaves, and Les Dessous du coup d’état (1891), contain many piquant anecdotes, but at times degenerate into mere tittle-tattle. Ducasse was the author of some slight novels, and from the practice of this form of literature he acquired that levity which appears even in his most serious historical publications.