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On June 12, 1804 the new Imperial Council (essentially the old Conseil d’État) met at Saint-Cloud to decide what form Napoleon’s coronation should take. Reims (where coronations of French kings had traditionally taken place), the Champs de Mars (turned down because of the likelihood of inclement weather) and Aix-la-Chapelle (for its connections with Charlemagne) were briefly considered before Notre-Dame was decided upon. The date of December 2 was a compromise between Napoleon, who had wanted November 9, the fifth anniversary of the Brumaire coup, and the Pope, who had wanted Christmas Day, when Charlemagne had been crowned in AD 800.113 The Council then discussed heraldic insignia and the official badge of the Empire, with Crétet’s special committee unanimously recommending the cockerel, emblem of Ancient Gaul, but if that was not accepted the eagle, lion, elephant, Aegis of Minerva, oak tree and ear of corn also had their supporters. Lebrun even suggested commandeering the Bourbons’ fleur-de-lis.114 Miot rightly denounced the fleur-de-lis as ‘an imbecility’ and instead proposed an enthroned Napoleon as the badge.
‘The cock belongs to the farmyard,’ said Napoleon, ‘it is far too feeble a creature.’ The Comte de Ségur supported the lion as it supposedly vanquished leopards, and Jean Laumond supported the elephant, a royal beast that according to (incorrect) popular belief couldn’t bend its knee. Cambacérès came up with the bee, as they have a powerful chief (albeit a queen), and General Lacuée added that it could both sting and make honey. Denon suggested the eagle, but the problem with that was that Austria, Prussia, the United States and Poland were already represented by eagles. No vote was taken, but Napoleon chose the lion, and they moved on to the question of inscriptions on the new coinage, rather strangely agreeing to keep the words ‘French Republic’ on it, which remained the case until 1809. Shortly after the meeting broke up Napoleon changed his mind from the lion to an eagle with spread wings, on the basis that it ‘affirms imperial dignity and recalls Charlemagne’.115 It also recalled Ancient Rome.
Not content with having just one symbol, Napoleon also chose the bee as a personal and family emblem, which then found its way as a decorative motif onto carpets, curtains, clothes, thrones, coats of arms, batons, books and many other items of imperial paraphernalia. The symbol of immortality and regeneration, hundreds of small gold-and-garnet bees (or possibly cicada, or even mis-drawn eagles) had been found in 1653 when the tomb was opened of the fifth-century King Childeric I of France, father of Clovis, in Tournai.116 By thus appropriating Childeric’s bees, Napoleon was consciously connecting the house of Bonaparte with the ancient Merovingian dynasty that created the sovereignty of France itself.
The result of the plebiscite on the establishment of the hereditary Empire was announced on August 7.117 When the interior minister, Portalis, showed Napoleon the yes votes of the armed services – 120,032 for the army and 16,224 for the navy – he simply took out his pen and rounded the former up to 400,000 and the latter to 50,000, with nil no votes recorded.118 Even so in the final result – 3,572,329 in favour to 2,579 against – there were 80,000 fewer yes votes than in the plebiscite held over the Life Consulate.119 Although there is evidence that certain officers were cashiered for voting no, they tended to be allowed back later, and one, General Solignac, reached the post of divisional commander after he personally begged the Emperor four years later ‘to be allowed the honour of going to Spain to share the honours and dangers of the army’.120
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On July 14, 1804 the remains of the great French marshals Vauban and Turenne were transferred to Les Invalides. Napoleon chose the occasion to make the inaugural awards of a new French order, the Légion d’Honneur, to reward meritorious service to France regardless of social origin. The first medals were five-pointed crosses in plain white enamel hanging from a red ribbon, but they had financial stipends attached according to one’s ranking in the organization. The fifteen cohorts of the order comprised grand officers, commanders, officers and legionaries, and each received 200,000 francs to distribute annually to worthy recipients.
Some on the Left complained that the reintroduction of honours fundamentally violated the revolutionary concept of social equality.Moreau had sneered at a previous attempt by Napoleon to reintrodeuce honours, awarding his cook ‘the order of the saucepan’. In the army, however, the Légion was an instant success. It’s impossible to say how many acts of valour were undertaken at least in part in the hope of being awarded ‘the cross’, as it was universally known. Napoleon chose ‘Honneur et Patrie’ as its motto, the words embroidered on all French standards.121 Soldiers prized the medals, promotions, pensions and recognition that came directly from Napoleon far above the previous revolutionary concepts of self-sacrifice for the common good that the Jacobins had tried to inculcate into the army of the ‘Republic of Virtue’ in the 1790s.122
The inclusion of civilians in the Légion was deliberate; the rest of society could also attain honour if it copied the military virtues, especially those of loyalty and obedience. Napoleon became grand master but he turned down General Matthieu Dumas, who had helped create the order, as its grand chancellor, ‘in order to do away with very notion of preference for the military’. Instead the naturalist, senator and vice-president of the Institut, Bernard Lacépède, was chosen to run it.123 Out of the 38,000 people who received the rubans rouges (red ribbons) under Napoleon, 34,000 (or 89 per cent) were soldiers or sailors, but savants like Laplace, Monge, Berthollet and Chaptal got them too, as did prefects and several of the jurists who had helped write the Code. Napoleon also set up the Maison d’Éducation de la Légion d’Honneur at Saint-Denis, an excellent boarding school providing free education for the daughters of recipients of the medal who had been killed on active service, which still exists today, as does a Légion lycée in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
At one of the Conseil meetings in May 1802, when the foundation of the Légion was under discussion, the lawyer Théophile Berlier sneered at the whole concept, to which Napoleon replied:
You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led. I would not say this in public, but in an assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don’t think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See how the crowd is awed by the medals and orders worn by foreign diplomats. We must recreate these distinctions. There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild. A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself – what is it? Scattered grains of sand.124
In order to alter that, Napoleon said, ‘We must plant a few masses of granite as anchors in the soil of France.’ All too often his phrase ‘it is with such baubles that men are led’ has been quoted wildly out of context to imply that he was being cynical, whereas fuller quotation shows that he was in fact commending the ‘baubles’ as the physical manifestations of honour. At that meeting, ten of the twenty-four councillors present voted against the institution of the Légion, because of the way it reintroduced class distinctions; nine of them subsequently accepted either the cross or the title of count.125 (Berlier himself took both.)
A magnificent ceremony was held at the Boulogne camp on Thursday, August 16, 1804, at which Napoleon distributed the first crosses of the Légion d’Honneur to the army. The medals were presented resting on the armour of Bertrand du Guesclin, a military commander during the Hundred Years War, and alongside the helmet of the sixteenth-century personification of French chivalry, the Chevalier de Bayard. Announced by the guns of Boulogne, Antwerp and Cherbourg, 2,000 members were decorated by Napoleon in front of 60,000 soldiers and 20,000 spectators. More than a thousand drummers played the ‘Aux Champs’ martial a
ir, with cannon-fire reverberating in time to the music. One of the spectators recorded that two hundred standards taken from France’s enemies, ‘tattered by cannonballs and stained with blood, formed a canopy appropriate to the occasion’.126 The next month Napoleon used the phrase ‘my people’ for the first time, in a letter to the Pope.127 He also started calling Josephine ‘Madame and dear wife’ in the way Henri IV had used to address Marie de Médici.128
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On October 2, Sir Sidney Smith made an ineffective attack on the Boulogne flotilla, worrying Napoleon about the effect of fireships in the harbour. As ever he was also thinking about other things, great and small, and he ordered Fouché four days later to lift the ban on Piedmontese theatregoers from whistling at dancers’ performances they didn’t like.129 Three days after Smith’s abortive attack the Royal Navy had much more success when four frigates attacked the Spanish bullion fleet without a declaration of war, sinking one vessel and capturing the other three, with £900,000 worth of Spanish silver dollars and gold ingots on board. It was a blatant act of piracy, but Britain suspected that Spain – which had been allied to France since the Treaty of San Ildefonso – was planning to declare war as soon as the treasure had been safely unloaded at Cadiz.
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Napoleon’s dexterity in governance is well illustrated by the twenty-two letters he wrote on a single day in October 1804. These covered, among much else, the re-establishment of the Jesuits in Spain (‘I will never tolerate this happening in France’), the number of Britons in Paris (‘Have all those found there been sent away?’), a letter to his naval minister Decrès asking, ‘What exactly is the purpose of leaving admirals in Paris?’, the desirability of uniting forty Parisian convents for female education, the introduction of British-style hunting laws, and a denunciation of the legal profession (‘this heap of chatterboxes and revolution-fomenters who are inspired only by crime and corruption’).130 His constant harrying of Decrès was interspersed with occasional flashes of charm. ‘I’m sorry you are angry with me,’ he wrote to him in December, saying of his own rages that ‘finally, when the anger has passed, nothing remains, so I hope you will not harbour any grudge against me’.131
Displaying the same disregard for international law as the Royal Navy had recently, on the night of October 24 the French kidnapped the British diplomat Sir George Rumbold at his country house near Hamburg, a free Hanseatic League city under Prussian protection, and took him to the Temple prison. He was involved, like Francis Drake in Munich and Spencer Smith in Stuttgart, in supporting émigré plots; he was released after forty-eight hours and returned to Britain. The King of Prussia complained in a measured way about the French violation of Hamburg’s sovereignty. Napoleon’s view was that an ambassador was supposed to be ‘a minister of reconciliation, his duty is always a sacred one, based on morality’, but the British government had used Rumbold as ‘an instrument of war, who has the right to do anything’. He ordered Talleyrand to ask of the British: ‘Does it take the sovereigns of Europe to be no more than a lot of Indian nabobs?’132
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Preparations for the coronation were under way. ‘There’s tardiness in making the costumes,’ Cambacérès warned Napoleon. ‘However, mine’s already done.’133 The Pope left Rome for Paris on November 2, though he made it known that he had wept over d’Enghien, ‘that great and innocent victim’.134 On the 25th Napoleon met him between Nemours and Fontainebleau and they entered Paris together three days later. Napoleon ordered his officials to treat the pontiff as though he had 200,000 troops at his back, just about his greatest compliment.135 To ensure the Pope’s officiation at the coronation he had promised to marry Josephine according to the rites of the Church, rather than continue to rely on the state ceremony they had held in 1796, so on the night of December 1 Cardinal Fesch performed the religious nuptials at the Tuileries in the presence of Talleyrand, Berthier and Duroc.136 Josephine sent the wedding certificate to Eugène for safe-keeping, in case Napoleon ever denied it had happened.
The latent hostilities between the Bonaparte and Beauharnais families were brought to the fore by the coronation. Joseph argued against Josephine being crowned because it would mean that Hortense and Louis’ children would be the grandchildren of an empress whereas his were only the grandchildren of a bourgeois.137 All three of Napoleon’s sisters resisted carrying Josephine’s train, Lucien refused to attend the ceremony at all, and Madame Mère supported him and decided to stay with him in Rome, despite Napoleon having given her a large house in Paris.138 ‘There are thousands of people in France who have given greater service to the State than them,’ an infuriated Napoleon said to Roederer of his own brothers, ‘yourself among them.’139 By contrast, he adored Eugène and Hortense. ‘I love those children, because they’re always in a rush to please me.’140 Eugène’s wounding in Egypt raised him high in the Emperor’s estimation: ‘If there’s a cannon-shot it’s Eugène who sees what’s happening; if there’s a ditch to cross, it’s him who gives me a hand.’ Of his siblings’ sniping, Napoleon shrugged: ‘They say my wife is false and that the over-zealousness of her children is studied. Well, I want them to treat me as an old uncle; this makes a sweetness of my life; I’m becoming old . . . I want some rest.’141 He was thirty-five, but the point stands, as did his support for Josephine: ‘My wife’s a good woman who doesn’t harm them. She satisfies herself . . . with having diamonds, nice dresses and the misfortunes of her ageing. I have never loved her blindly. If I make her empress, it’s an act of justice. I am above all a fair man.’142 He insisted when she took the waters at Aix in July that a canopy be placed over her in church services and she was given a throne on the right of the altar.143 Her visits to towns were henceforth to be accompanied by cannon-fire salutes.
Napoleon was almost as generous to his sisters as he was to his brothers: Elisa was the first to get a principality, that of Lucca, though it didn’t stop her from complaining. Pauline, who wasn’t politically ambitious, became the ruling Duchess of Guastalla and Caroline the Grand Duchess of Berg in March 1806. None seemed grateful. At least Madame Mère, who would probably have made a better ruler than any of her daughters but had no appetite for power, thanked Napoleon when he gave her the Château de Pont near Brienne in June 1805 – ‘You have there some of the most beautiful countryside in France,’ he told her – along with 160,000 francs for its renovation and upkeep.144 Over the years she built up a fortune estimated at 40 million francs.145 At the same time that he was heaping titles and riches upon his family, Napoleon continued to worry more mundanely about the quality of bread his men were receiving, complaining to Berthier that poor grain was being bought by the army and ordering ‘instead of white beans, use yellow beans continually’.146
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Napoleon and Josephine’s coronation at Notre-Dame on Sunday, December 2, 1804 was a magnificent spectacle, despite the somewhat last-minute organization. It was snowing when the first guests started to arrive at 6 a.m., and they entered under a wooden and stucco neo-Gothic awning designed to mask the destructive iconoclasm wrought during the Revolution. This had been blown about by a storm four nights before, breaking its fastenings and timber supports, and the final hammer strokes died away only as the pontifical procession approached at 10.30 a.m.147 Representatives from the legislature, Court of Cassation (in flame-coloured togas), departments, Légion d’Honneur, Procurator-General, war commissariat, colonies, chambers of commerce, the National Guard, the Institut de France, ministries, the Agricultural Society and many other institutions – especially the army, from brigadiers upwards – handed their invitations to the ninety-two ticket collectors. Once inside they wandered around over the stands, chatting and hindering the workmen and generally creating disorder. At 7 a.m. 460 musicians and choristers began to congregate in the transepts, including the entire orchestras of the imperial chapel, the Conservatoire, the Feydeau theatre, the Opéra and the Grenadiers and Chasseurs of the Guard.* One
of the chief organizers of the ceremony, Louis Fontanes, finally had to instruct soldiers to order everyone to sit down.148
At 9 a.m. most of the Diplomatic Corps arrived, although the coronation came too soon after d’Enghien’s death for the ambassadors of Russia and Sweden to attend. Over at the Tuileries, fifty-seven cartloads of Seine river sand had been spread over the muddy patches of the courtyard, the workmen being paid the unheard-of rate of 4 francs each for the night’s work. That morning, the new chamberlain, Théodore de Thiard, had walked into Napoleon’s dressing room to find him ‘already wearing his white velvet trousers, sprinkled in golden bees, his lace Henri IV-like ruff, and over the top his chasseurs à cheval uniform’.149 ‘Had it not been a solemn moment,’ Thiard recorded, he ‘would have burst out laughing at the incongruity of the sight.’ Napoleon took off his military uniform before leaving for Notre-Dame.
At 10 a.m. artillery salvoes announced the departure of Napoleon and Josephine from the Tuileries. ‘The Coronation carriage is very grand,’ wrote a courtier, ‘with glass and without panels . . . When their Majesties entered, they mistook the side, and placed themselves in the front; but in an instant perceiving their error, they threw themselves, laughing, into the back.’150 The procession was so large that it had to stop at several points along the route as bottlenecks were negotiated. Murat, as governor of Paris, was at its head, then came his staff, four squadrons of carabiniers, then cuirassiers, horse chasseurs of the Guard, and a squadron of Mamluks in the brightest uniforms of all. Afterwards there came the heralds-at-arms on horseback, wearing violet velvet tabards embroidered with eagles and carrying staves adorned with bees.
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