The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  Of his pupils we leave Ingres (1770–1867) to later years; we bow in passing to Gérard and Guérin for their illuminating portraits; we stay longer with Antoine-Jean Gros because of his interesting passage through the styles. We have watched him at Milan, painting, or imagining, Napoleon on the Bridge at Arcole; here, so soon, classic David’s heir is flirting with romance. Napoleon rewarded Gros’s idolatry with a military commission that enabled the young artist to see war at close view. Like Goya a few years later, he saw not so much the fighting as the suffering. In The Plague at Jaffa (1804) he showed Napoleon touching the sores of a victim, but also he showed the terror and hopelessness of men, women, and children stricken by an obscene and undiscriminating fate. In The Battle of Eylau (1808) he pictured not the battle but the field stricken with the dying and the dead. He felt the living warmth of Rubens’ colors, and poured into his paintings a flesh-and-blood vitality that raised the Romantic spirit of post-Napoleonic France. Then, feeling that he had betrayed his banished master, he tried to recapture in his work the calm of the classic style. He failed, and—lost and forgotten in an age wild with Hugo, Berlioz, Géricault and Delacroix—he succumbed to a melancholy that dried up in him the sap and love of life. On June 25, 1835, aged sixty-four, he left his home, walked out toward Meudon, and drowned himself in a tributary of the Seine.

  Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (1758–1823) advanced the Romantic surge by preferring ideal beauty to reality, goddesses to gods, and Correggio to Raphael. He recognized with David the primacy of line, but felt that without color line was dead. He was feminine except in his love of women; his meditative tenderness and amorous sensitivity could forgive all faults that came in a gracious form. As youngest of thirteen children he was harassed with poverty in Cluny, and developed hesitantly; however, the local monks saw him drawing and painting, and persuaded a bishop to finance Pierre’s art study in Dijon. He did well there, but, aged twenty, he married a goddess who was soon transformed into a rasping shrew. He won a scholarship, went to Rome without his wife, courted Raphael, then Leonardo, and finally surrendered to Correggio.

  In 1789 he rejoined his wife, moved to Paris, and soon found himself stranded in a revolutionary chaos that had no time or taste for his Cupids and Psyches; obstinately he continued to paint them—with a loving delicacy that seemed to caress the flesh with the brush. He ate by producing bill heads, miniatures, and commercial illustrations. After ten years of such servitude he won from the Directory a commission to paint a picture—Wisdom Descending to Earth—which caught the attention of General Bonaparte. Later the First Consul centered on David, and could spare only transient favors to Prud’hon; Josephine, however, sat to him for the portrait that hangs in the Louvre. Meanwhile, tortured with monogamy, he and his wife agreed to part.

  Not till 1808, when he was fifty, did he win acclaim. In that year he embodied his voluptuous dreams in The Rape of Psyche, and then balanced it with Justice and Vengeance Pursuing Crime. Impressed, Napoleon nominated him to the Legion of Honor, and gave him an apartment in the Sorbonne. In the next apartment the love-hungry painter found another artist, Constance Mayer, who became his mistress, housekeeper, and the solace of his old age. In 1821 Constance, apparently distracted with religious qualms, killed herself. The shock overwhelmed Prud’hon. In 1823 he died, almost unnoticed in the excitement of that Romantic movement which he had forwarded by going back from David to Watteau, and renewing the French worship of beauty and grace.

  IV. THE THEATER

  Napoleon was well acquainted with the classic drama of France, and only less so with the dramatic literature of ancient Greece. Corneille was his favorite because in him, far more than in Racine, he found what he felt was a just understanding of heroism and nobility. “A good tragedy,” he said, at St. Helena, “gains upon us every day. The higher kind of tragedy is the school of great men: it is the duty of sovereigns to encourage and disseminate a taste for it…. Had Corneille lived in my time I would have made him a prince.”10 The Emperor did not care for comedy; he had no need to be amused; Talleyrand pitied M. de Rémusat because, as director of entertainments at the imperial court, he was expected to arrange some amusements for “cet homme inamusable.”11 But this unamusable man lavished funds upon the Comédie-Française and its “stars”; he welcomed Talma to his table, and Mlle. George to his bed.

  In 1807 Napoleon restricted the number of Paris theaters to nine, and reinstituted the Théâtre-Français—the then and present home of the Comédie-Française—in almost exclusive right to perform the classic drama. On October 15, 1812, amid the ruins of burned Moscow, he found time to draw up for the Théâtre-Français an elaborate code of regulations which still govern it today.12 So encouraged, the Comédie-Française staged, during the Empire, the finest productions of classic drama in French history. To supplement these activities the Théâtre de l’Odéon, built in 1779 and destroyed by fire in 1799, was rebuilt in 1808 on classic lines by Chalgrin. A court theater was set up in the Tuileries, and private theatricals of considerable excellence were staged in many rich homes.

  Talma, after playing his parts in the Revolution, reached his zenith under Napoleon. His own character was so proud, distinctive, and intense that he must have found difficulty in shedding it for any assumed role. He mastered the subtle art by learning to control and coordinate all the movements of his limbs, all the muscles and features of his face, every inflection of his voice, to fit and convey any sensation, feeling, or idea, any wonder, doubt, or intention, in the personality he portrayed. Some playgoers went repeatedly to see him in the same role to relish and study the finesse of his art. He had discarded the oratorical style of the theater in the Old Regime; he spoke the alexandrine verses as if they were unmetered prose; he rejected any unnatural expression or sentiment; yet he could be as tender as any lover, as passionate as any criminal. Mme. de Staël, moved almost to terror by Talma’s portrayal of Othello,13 wrote to him, in 1807: “You are, in your career, unique in all the world, and no one, before you, has reached that degree of perfection where art unites with inspiration, reflection with spontaneity, and reason with genius.”14

  Napoleon too was enamored of the tragedian. He gave him substantial sums, paid his debts, and frequently invited him to breakfast; then the Emperor could so lose himself in discourse on the drama that he kept diplomats and generals waiting while he explained historical details that should determine the presentation of a character. On the morning after seeing La Mort de Pompée he told Talma, “I am not entirely satisfied. You use your arms too much. Monarchs are less prodigal of gestures; they know that a motion is an order, and that a look is death; so they are sparing of motions and looks.” Talma, we are assured, profited from this counsel.15 In any case he remained to the end of his life the ruler of the French stage.

  It had its queens too, as Napoleon observed. Mlle. Duchesnois was plain of face but perfect in form. Accordingly, as Dumas père reported, “she was particularly fond of the part of Alzire, in which she could display her form almost naked.” But also “she had a voice containing notes of such profound tenderness, such melodious sorrow, that to this day most people who have seen her in Maria Stuart prefer her to Mlle. Rachel.”16 Her forte was tragedy, in which she almost rivaled Talma; it was usually she who was chosen to play opposite to him. Mlle. George was a frailer beauty, whom the Comédie must have hesitated to cast in such demanding roles as Clytemnestra in Racine’s Iphigénie. Her voice and figure charmed the First Consul; and like a feudal lord with the droit de seigneur, he called upon her for a command performance now and then.17 Though this liaison ended after a year, she, like Talma, remained devoted to Napoleon through all his glory and defeats; consequently she lost her place at the Théâtre-Français when Napoleon fell; but she returned later to share in the excitement of the Romantic stage.

  Napoleon believed, with some reason, that the Comédie-Française had in his reign raised the French stage to a higher excellence than ever before. Several times, to display its quality and his sp
lendor, he bade the company, at the state’s expense, come to Mainz, Compiègne, or Fontainebleau, and perform for the court, or, as at Erfurt and Dresden, to play devant un parterre de rois—”before an audience of kings.”18 Not even the Grand Monarque had shone in such theatrical glory.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Literature versus Napoleon

  I. THE CENSOR

  NAPOLEON was more interested in the stage than in literature. He noted carefully the programs of the Théâtre-Français, expressed his judgment on them, and was largely responsible for their discarding Voltaire and reviving Corneille and Racine. His taste in literature was not so respectable. He read fiction eagerly, and took many novels—mostly romantic—with him on his campaigns. His table talk at St. Helena contained some good literary criticism, showing knowledge of Homer, Virgil, Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Mme. de Sévigné, Voltaire, Richardson, and Rousseau; but he was quite dead to Shakespeare. “It is impossible to finish any of his plays; they are pitiful. There is nothing in them that comes anywhere near Corneille or Racine.”1 (French translations of Shakespeare were pitifully inadequate.)

  Like most men of affairs he had no respect for writers on economics or government; he considered them phrasemongers with little corrective sense of reality, or of the nature and limits of man. He was sure that he knew better than they what the French people wanted and should have: efficiency and integrity in government, moderation in taxes, freedom of enterprise in business, regularity of provisions, security of remunerative employment in industry, peasant ownership, and a proud place for France in the parade of states; if this were given them the people would not insist on determining measures, or filling offices, by a count of noses after a contest of words. In his laborious pursuit of those ends—and of his own power or glory—he would not long tolerate interference by lords of the rostrum or the pen. If these gentry could be quieted by prizes, pensions, or political plums, such sedatives would be provided; otherwise disturbers of the consular or imperial peace should be barred from publication, or from Paris or France. “Unlimited freedom of the press,” Napoleon wrote in 1802, “would very soon reestablish anarchy in a country where all the elements for such a condition are already present.”2

  To watch public opinion, Napoleon—following Directory precedents—ordered postmasters to open private mail, make note of hostile passages, reseal the envelopes, and send copies of the excerpts to himself or to the “Black Cabinet” in the General Post Office at Paris.3 He instructed his personal librarian to make and bring to him, “daily between five and six o’clock,” summaries of political material in current periodicals; “to submit to me, every ten days, an analysis of the brochures or books published within the previous ten days”; to report on the content and political tendencies of each play performed, within forty-eight hours after its premiere; and “every first and sixth day [of the ten-day week] between five and six o’clock, he will submit to me a bulletin on the posters, placards, or advertisements that may be worthy of attention; he will also report on whatever has come to his knowledge, and has been done or said, in the various lycées, literary assemblies, sermons,… that might be of interest from the point of view of politics and morals.”4

  On January 17, 1800—again continuing Directory custom—Napoleon ordered the suppression of sixty of the seventy-three newspapers then published in France. By the end of the year only nine survived, none of them radically critical. “Three hostile newspapers,” he said, “are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”5 Le Moniteur universel regularly defended Napoleon’s policies; sometimes he composed articles—even book reviews—for it, unsigned, but betraying their origin by their authoritative style. A wit renamed this government organ Le Menteur [liar] Universel.6

  I want you to write to the editor of Le Journal des débats, Le Publiciste, and La Gazette de France—these, I think, are the newspapers most widely read—in order to declare to them that… the Revolutionary times are over, and that there is but one single party in France; that I shall never tolerate newspapers that say or do anything against my interests; that they may publish a few little articles with just a little poison in them, but that one fine morning somebody will shut their mouths.7

  On April 5, 1800, censorship was extended to the drama. The government argued that opinions individually and privately expressed might do little harm, but that the same opinions when put into the mouth of a famous historical character, and proclaimed from the stage with the force and eloquence of a popular actor, would have an influence explosively multiplied by the mutual reverberation of feelings—and by the irresponsibility of individuals—in a theatrical audience.8 The censorship excluded from public performances any criticism of monarchy, and any praise of democracy. La Mort de César was banished from the boards because the audience applauded the speeches of Brutus against dictatorship.9

  Finally the state took control of all printing. “It is very important that only those be allowed to print who have the confidence of the government. A man who addresses the public in print is like the man who speaks in public in an assembly”;10 he can scatter inflammatory material, and should be watched as a potential arsonist. Hence every printer must submit to a censor every accepted manuscript, either before or while he prints it, and, to secure the state’s imprimatur, he must agree to delete objectionable matter, or accept substitutions proposed by the government. Even after the censor has given his consent, and the work has been printed, the minister of police is authorized to confiscate, and even to completely destroy, the published edition, no matter at what loss to the author or the publisher.11

  It was in this prison of the mind that literature struggled to survive under Napoleon. The most heroic effort was made by a woman.

  II. MME. DE STAËL: 1799–1817

  1. Napoleon’s Nemesis

  The Committee of Public Safety had banished her from France; the Directory had reduced this to exclusion from Paris; the day after its fall she hurried back to the capital (November 12, 1799), and took an apartment in the Rue de Grenelle in the fashionable Faubourg St.-Germain. The new consular government—i.e., Napoleon—made no protest against her return.

  Soon she had opened a new salon, partly because “conversing in Paris… has always been to me the most fascinating of all pleasures,”12 partly because she was determined to play a part in the direction of events. She did not admit that such a role was unbecoming a woman; it seemed to her quite becoming if the woman (like her) had both money and brains; and particularly becoming to the heiress of Jacques Necker, whom she considered the unappreciated hero of the Revolution. Incidentally the government still owed him the twenty million francs he had loaned it in 1789; part of her resolve was to regain that sum for her father and her patrimony. Her ideal (like his) was a constitutional monarchy allowing freedom of press, worship, and speech, and protecting the property of the rich against the envy of the poor. In this sense she felt that she was faithful to the Revolution as defined by the National Assembly of 1789–91. She scorned the regicides, and welcomed to her salon her titled neighbors of the Faubourg, who daily prayed for a Bourbon restoration. Nevertheless she centered her gatherings around Benjamin Constant, who was all for a republic, and who, as a member of the Tribunate, opposed every move of Napoleon from consular to imperial power. She welcomed also the brothers of the First Consul, for they too were uncomfortable under his growing authority.

  Indeed, most of the men of standing in the political and intellectual world of Paris in 1800 found their way to her soirees, eager to learn the latest political gossip, or to hear Madame sail off in such conversation as Paris had not heard from a woman since Mme. du Deffand. Mme. de Tessé declared: “If I were queen, I would order Mme. de Staël to talk to me all the time.”13 Germaine herself wrote that “the necessity of conversation is felt by all classes in France; speech is not there, as elsewhere, merely a means of communication; … it is an instrument on which they are fond of playing.”14

  She did not at once oppose Napoleon;
indeed, if we may believe Bourrienne, she wrote him some flattering letters in the early Consulate, even to offering herself to his service.15 But his resolute ignoring of her advances, his expanding censorship, his scorn of intellectuals in politics, his conception of women as breeders and charming toys not to be trusted with a thought, stung her to reply in kind. When he called her guests ideologues she called him an ideophobe; and as her ire warmed she described him as “Robespierre on horseback,”16 or as the bourgeois gentilhomme on the throne.17

  On May 7, 1800, she moved her household, and a small retinue of devotees, to Coppet for the summer. Napoleon had left Paris the day before to cross the Alps and meet the Austrians at Marengo. Germaine later confessed: “I could not help wishing that Bonaparte might be defeated, as that seemed the only means of stopping the progress of his tyranny.”18 In the fall of the year, bored with Coppet and Mont Blanc, she returned to the capital, for she lived on conversation, and “French conversation exists nowhere but in Paris.”19 Soon she gathered a bevy of geniuses in her salon, and their predominating topic was Napoleon’s dictatorship. “She carries a quiver full of arrows,” he complained. “They pretend that she speaks neither of politics nor of me; but how, then, does it come to pass that all who see her like me less?”20 “Her home,” he said at St. Helena, “became quite an arsenal against me. People went there to be dubbed knights in her crusade.”21 Yet he admitted: “That woman teaches people to think who never took to it before, or have forgotten how.”22

  He felt that as a man seeking to pull France out of chaos by giving her an efficient administration, and meanwhile leading her armies to victory against hostile coalitions, he had the right to expect, and, if necessary, enforce, some unity of morale in the public, some coordination of the national spirit with the national will to defend France’s new republic and its “natural” frontiers; but this woman gathered and united against him both the royalists and the Jacobins, and comforted his enemies. Germaine’s father here agreed with Napoleon; he reprimanded her for her persistent attacks upon the young dictator; some dictatorship, he told her, was necessary in time of crisis or war.23 She replied that freedom was more important than victory. She encouraged Bernadotte in his opposition to Napoleon; she wrote some of the speeches that Constant made in the Tribunate against Napoleon’s encroachment upon the powers of the legislature. She and Bonaparte were expanding and inflammable egoists, and France was not large enough to house them both and keep them free.