The Caesar of Paris
Page 7
After descending into Aosta, Italy, Napoleon’s army captured Milan and Pavia before moving west. The decisive battle took place on June 14 south of the Po River near the village of Marengo. With his army outnumbered and on the verge of defeat, General Desaix appeared at the last moment with six thousand reinforcements. Napoleon’s counterattack was successful, but the thirty-one-year-old veteran of the Egypt campaign was killed in the battle. Also that month, General Kléber, France’s commander in Egypt, was assassinated.
Napoleon immediately ordered a monumental tomb for Desaix in the chapel of the Grand St. Bernard hospice. Napoleon renamed his new Arab stallion from Egypt “Marengo” (over the next fifteen years, this trusty light gray steed survived numerous battle wounds). With the second Italian campaign, France regained northern Italy from Austria and expanded its eastern border to the Rhine River. For maximum impact, Napoleon postponed his entry into Paris to coincide with Bastille Day on July 14.
Meanwhile Pius VII was spending his post-coronation days receiving delegations and traveling to various churches, monasteries, and convents across Venice in a gilded gondola. Francis II invited him to visit Vienna, but he declined, wary of being pressured into recognizing Austria’s rule over the papal dominions.16 Instead, Pius set sail for Pesaro on the Adriatic coast onboard the Bellona, a rickety Austrian ship. After a twelve-day voyage, the papal entourage continued by land. At Ancona, they learned of Napoleon Bonaparte’s stunning victory at Marengo.
At Fano, Pius VII celebrated Mass in the convent church where his mother was buried. On July 3, the pope entered Rome, escorted by Austrian troops. There was no triumphant possesso through the city, no commemorative coins or medals, and no appointment of a symbolic Camerlengo. One of Pius’s first decisions was to promote Ercole Consalvi, conclave secretary, to Cardinal (Deacon of Sant’Agata dei Goti) and Secretary of State. In mid-November, Pius took possession of the Lateran Basilica. The Austrians sent Ferdinand IV’s troops back to Naples.
Shortly after the conclave, Napoleon declared he would be an Attila for Venice. For centuries, the luxurious state barge, the Bucintoro, was used in a special ceremony each Ascension Day when the doge, accompanied by his court and some two hundred guests, threw a gold ring into the Adriatic to renew the symbolic marriage of the Republic and the sea. To mark his victory, Napoleon ordered the barge destroyed in January 1798.
After removing the Bucintoro’s elaborate carvings and gilded statues, French soldiers hauled the booty to San Giorgio Maggiore where it was burned. The ashes were transferred to Milan to extract the melted gold.17 Stripped of its gold leaf and decorations, the 115-foot-long ship was taken from its berth in the Arsenale and set on fire. The barge reportedly burned for three days. Only the stripped hull was saved, fitted with cannons to patrol the lagoon. The vessel was later stored at the Arsenale and demolished in 1824 (a few surviving gilded wood fragments are housed at Venice’s Correr Museum).
At the Arsenale, Napoleon built a warehouse for artillery and a dock with two small towers. San Giorgio Maggiore was suppressed; its monks dispersed. San Giorgio Maggiore remained an armory for over a century. Its library, archive, and most of its art were removed.
Before the Battle of Marengo, Napoleon told aides that he had decided to come to an agreement with the new pope. With Catholicism gaining popularity in France, Napoleon recognized that religion was his best means for social control. “The people need a religion;” he said, “this religion must be in the hands of the government.” At the same time, he declared that “The Church must be within the State, and not the State within the Church.”18
France’s alliance with the papacy dated back to its early Frankish monarchs—Clovis I, Pepin the Short, and Charlemagne. In 1516, Francis I and Pope Leo X signed the Concordat of Bologna, regulating church and state relations for over 270 years until the French Revolution. The 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, condemned by Pius VI, stripped the Catholic Church in France of its property and hierarchy, and transferred control from the Vatican to the Republic. Thousands of French priests, nuns, and monks were killed or exiled.
Now a decade later, Pius sent Ercole Consalvi to Paris to negotiate the restoration of Catholicism in France. Negotiating on behalf of France were François Cacault, French plenipotentiary minister in Rome and Cardinal Joseph Fesch, stepbrother of Napoleon’s mother. The day after his arrival, Cardinal Consalvi had his first audience at the Tuileries Palace. Talleyrand led Consalvi to an audience room filled with the three consuls, Senate members, the Tribunate, the legislative corps, generals, officers, and dignitaries. Without letting Consalvi speak, Napoleon began hounding him to sign the agreement immediately.
Despite several late-night sessions, the parties remained far apart and Napoleon threatened that he would follow the example of Henry VIII (who made Protestantism England’s official religion). In the middle of the deliberations, Napoleon told his private secretary Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, “Guess what they are holding out to me. The salvation of my soul! But as far as I’m concerned, there is no immortality but the memory that is left in the minds of men.”19
As Robin Anderson puts it, “Napoleon saw the Church as something like an army, and bishops as generals whom he could command. . . . He therefore went to any lengths to have the bishops whom he wanted, and whom he thought would be subservient to him in furthering his plans, regularly put in command by the Church’s head.”20 Pius was equally adamant about holding onto his power to ratify bishops. In the epic power struggle that ensued, this issue would remain a major point of contention.
On the evening of December 24, 1800, the consular couple and their entourage left by carriage from the Tuileries for the opera. As the first consul’s carriage pulled out of the Carrousel onto rue Sainte-Nicaise, a mounted escort noticed a wagon with a large barrel partly blocking the road. The escort stopped and ordered the wagon removed. Instead of waiting for the road to be cleared, Napoleon’s coachman maneuvered through the narrow passageway. Seconds later, a bomb exploded behind them.
Following in a second carriage, Joséphine, her daughter Hortense and sister-in-law Caroline heard the explosion just after entering the Place du Carrousel. Hortense, who suffered cuts on her arms from the window’s broken glass, wrote: “We felt a violent shock. The carriage seemed to be blown away . . . our horses, terrified at the noise, reared and dashed back with us to the Tuileries.”21
Napoleon and Joséphine were unhurt, but the bomb killed twenty-four and wounded one hundred; some fifty houses and shops were destroyed. After learning that Joséphine was unharmed, Napoleon enjoyed Haydn’s Creation from his opera box. Chouan conspirators, royalists from Brittany, designed the bomb with cases of grapeshot and barrels of gunpowder placed on a cart. Two of “the scoundrels,” as Napoleon called them, were tried and executed for the crime.
From the start of the Consulate, Napoleon enacted measures to restore social order after a decade of revolution. “There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild,” he declared. “A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself—what is it? Scattered grains of sand. . . . We must plant a few masses of granite as anchors in the soil of France.”22 “Masses of granite” referred to several of Napoleon’s new institutions.
In the face of a financial crisis, Napoleon created the Banque de France in January 1800. Bonaparte was a shareholder, and made his family members and notables shareholders. The Banque was funded with some state funds, but the majority came from private capital. By giving the central bank exclusive right to issue paper money and stabilizing the value of the currency with gold and silver, Napoleon managed to restore confidence in France’s financial system.
The same year, Napoleon replaced the elected position of Mayor of Paris with a Prefect of the Seine. The first prefect, Louis Nicolas Dubois, held the position for a decade. Each of the twelve arrondissements had its own mayor. For police prefect, Napoleon appointed Joseph Fouché who cracked down on government critics, both royalists and republ
icans. About his police chief, Napoleon wrote: “Intrigue was as necessary to Fouché as food; he intrigued all the time, everywhere, in every way and with everyone.”23
For further protection, some one hundred Mamelukes who had defected and joined the French army in Egypt were attached to Napoleon’s Household Guard. Forming the Tenth Squadron, the elite fighters dressed in exotic “Turkish” style clothes and carried curved scimitars or sabers. Unlike Julius Caesar, Napoleon would survive some thirty assassination attempts.
Voltaire observed that a traveler in France “changes his law almost as often as he changes his horses.” In addition to royal decrees and Roman and feudal laws, marriage and domestic matters were controlled by the canon law of the Catholic Church. Between 1801 and 1803, Napoleon spearheaded three dozen legal statutes to supersede Church law. In 1804, these statutes were combined into the Code Civil des Français, renamed the Code Napoléon several years later. Primogeniture, hereditary nobility, and class privilege were out; the Church lost control over civilian institutions. The dramatic reforms did not include French women who remained at the mercy of fathers and husbands in regard to property, divorce, and child custody.
Napoleon considered religion a valuable tool for maintaining social order. On July 15, 1801, the first consul and Pius VII signed the Concordat. The agreement legalized public Catholic worship in France while giving Napoleon political and financial gains. Pius recognized the French Republic and accepted its laws on civil status, marriage, and divorce. Bishops nominated by Napoleon were required to pledge allegiance to the state before being consecrated by the pope. Church property confiscated after 1790 would not be returned.24
The Concordat became official on Easter 1802 with a Te Deum at Notre Dame Cathedral. Masses resumed in churches across France and priests donned ecclesiastical clothing. But no sooner had the ink dried, France added an addendum. The so-called Organic Articles gave the French Republic control over most church matters. The pope, who felt double-crossed, immediately wrote Napoleon in protest. Despite Napoleon’s promise to investigate, no remedies were made.
The battle between Napoleon and Pius VII had begun.
PART TWO
CONSULATE
“I will be the Brutus of kings and the Caesar of the Republic.”
—Napoleon Bonaparte
ONE
THE ETRUSCANS
In early October, 1795, General Paul Barras, head of the Army of the Interior, called on twenty-six-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte to suppress an insurrection of thirty thousand National Guard soldiers and royalists in Paris. On October 5, in the pouring rain, the young artillery officer fired forty canons at the crowd. In less than an hour, the revolt was over. Over three hundred lay dead by the Church of Saint-Roch.
As a reward, Napoleon was made a full general, head of the Army of the Interior, Governor of Paris, and head of the local police. The promotion included a raise, a coach with four horses, and lodging in the rue des Capucines. Meanwhile General Barras became the most important member of the Directory, France’s new government.
Following the insurrection, residents of Paris’s royalist neighborhoods were required to surrender their weapons. When Napoleon allowed young Eugène de Beauharnais to keep his deceased father’s sword, his mother called on him to express her thanks. Napoleon was smitten. “Everyone knows [her] extraordinary grace . . . her irresistibly sweet, attractive manners,” he wrote. “The acquaintance soon became intimate and tender . . . I was not insensible to women’s charms, but I was shy with them. [She] was the first to give me confidence.”1
Born in 1763 at Port Royal in the French colony of Martinique, Marie-Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie was sent to Paris at age sixteen to live with a relative. Within a year, she married Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais with whom she had a son and daughter. During the Terror in 1794, Joséphine’s estranged husband was guillotined; she barely escaped the same fate. Released from the Carmelites prison after the fall of Robespierre, Joséphine struggled to make ends meet. She became one of several mistresses of Paul Barras, Napoleon’s mentor.
Joséphine did not share Napoleon’s passion, but marriage offered the thirty-two-year-old an escape from her financial worries. She had always been known as Rose or Marie, but disliking these names, Napoleon called her Joséphine. On the evening of March 9, 1796, the couple wed in a civil service. For the marriage certificate, the bride lessened their six-year age gap by making herself four years younger; the groom added eighteen months. As a wedding gift, Napoleon gave Joséphine a gold enamel medallion inscribed “To Destiny.”
Two days later, the groom left Paris to lead the Army of Italy in a military campaign against Austria. Between a series of stunning victories, he penned a flurry of romantic letters. “Not a day goes by without my loving you, not a night without holding you in my arms,” he wrote Joséphine. “Never has a woman been loved with more devotion, fire and tenderness.”2
Meanwhile Napoleon’s soulmate was having an affair with the handsome, young lieutenant Hippolyte Charles, ignoring her husband’s invitation to join him in Italy. After weeks of pleading letters, Joséphine reluctantly left for Milan where Napoleon filled the elegant Serbelloni Palace with flowers. The following spring, the couple settled into the palace at Mombello, outside Milan. There Joséphine received Napoleon’s disapproving mother and sisters. They would never warm up to Joséphine, referring to her as “that Beauharnais woman.”
Just months before meeting Napoleon, Joséphine had leased a modest residence on rue de Chantereine. Before her trip to Milan, she began redecorating the home, hiring the fashionable Jacob brothers. In honor of Napoleon’s victories in Italy, rue de Chantereine was renamed rue de la Victoire in December 1797. The following March, Napoleon bought the property for 52,400 livres. It was the only house he privately owned in Paris.
Napoleon would later complain about his wife’s exorbitant decorating: “Imagine my surprise, my indignation, my ill-humor when they presented me with the furniture of the drawing-room, which did not seem to me very extraordinary, and which nevertheless rose to the level of 120 to 130,000 francs. In vain I defended myself, shouted, and had to pay.”3
In April 1799, with Napoleon on campaign in Egypt, Joséphine purchased a new home, a seventeenth-century fixer-upper on one hundred fifty acres northwest of Paris. Short of cash for the deposit, she borrowed fifteen thousand francs from the seller, prominent financier Jean-Jacques Le Couteulx du Molay, a cousin of Napoleon’s banker. When Napoleon returned to Paris that fall, he finalized the deal for Château de Malmaison.
Around this time, society portraitist Jean-Baptiste Isabey, a student of Jacques-Louis David, introduced Joséphine to designers Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine. In November 1799, Fontaine made the one-hour carriage ride from Paris to inspect her new property. “She [Joséphine] wants me to make this estate a place of delight,” he told David. “The gardens are beautiful. The site is very beautiful. The house, as well as all of its dependent buildings, is awful.”4
A few days later, Percier and Fontaine met Napoleon in Paris where he was discussing with David where to display the recently confiscated art from Italy. When David informed him that the sculptures were already at the Louvre, Napoleon asked why they weren’t at the military church of the Invalides. Fontaine responded frankly: “What can these masterpieces of art from Italy have in common with the army that made the conquest? What kind of effect would be achieved by placing the Apollo, the Venus and the Laocoön under the vaults and the dome of the Invalides?”
Napoleon rewarded Fontaine’s honesty with the Malmaison project. “I forgot completely the hero,” wrote Fontaine. “I saw no more than the little man in the gray redingote.”5
Like their powerful patron, Percier and Fontaine had come of age during the French Revolution and hailed from modest, non-aristocratic backgrounds. Percier’s father worked as a gatekeeper at the bridge between the Place Louis XV and the Tuileries Garden; his mother did laundry for Marie
Antoinette. Fontaine’s father was a provincial contractor and plumber.
After meeting as architecture students in Paris, Percier and Fontaine left for Rome in the mid-1780s to study the art and architecture of antiquity at the French Academy. Percier won the highest accolade—a five-year Grand Prix de Rome scholarship for architecture. Fontaine, who had finished second, secured the resources to continue his studies in Rome. Their Rome sojourn coincided with the final years of the ancien régime.
As Europe’s “academy,” Rome was a mecca for international artists and architects. The city had its own academy system that included the Accademia di San Luca, the Capitoline Accademia del Nudo, the Concorsi Clementini, and numerous studios. In 1666, over two decades into his seventy-two year reign, Louis XIV founded the French Academy in Rome under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Charles Le Brun, and celebrated Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The prestigious Prix de Rome gave France’s top painters and sculptors scholarships to study antique and Renaissance masterpieces.
The students, called pensioners, were required to send their works back to Paris to embellish the Louvre, Tuileries, and Versailles. During its first century, the Academy enrolled such talents as Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and Jean-Antoine Houdon. In 1720, French architects joined painters and sculptors at the Academy. As Helen Jacobsen puts it, during pre-Revolutionary Paris “the fashion for architecture in the neoclassical manner reigned supreme. Architects and designers looked to the ruins of Rome and Athens to provide them with inspiration . . .”6 Elegant neoclassical architectural motifs were incorporated into the decorative arts in gilt bronze furnishings, porcelain, and marble.
The French Academy began in a modest house near Sant’Onofrio Sardinia before moving to the Caffarelli and Capranica palaces. In 1725, the Academy relocated to the Palazzo Mancini on the Corso, just north of Piazza Venezia. Conceived by French Prime Minister Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the Palazzo was built a few decades later in the late seventeenth century by his nephew, Philippe Jules Mancini, Duke of Nevers.