The Caesar of Paris

by Susan Jaques

  On May 25, French and Italian gendarmes under General Duroc assumed their posts outside the Duomo. The next morning, cheering crowds lined the streets as Napoleon’s stepson Eugène de Beauharnais commanded the processional troops. A covered walkway running from the grand stairs of the Palazzo Reale to the entrance of the Duomo had been left open on both sides to give spectators a view of the corteges. Above the cathedral’s main doors hung the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Italy.

  Sunlight filtered through the soaring stained-glass windows as the deputations began taking their seats inside the storied cathedral. Silk and gold-fringed gauze draped the vaults, walls, and columns. At eleven, Caprara left the archbishop’s palace with cardinals, archbishops, and other ecclesiastics. Around noon, he escorted Joséphine to her seat in the tribune. France’s first lady wore a classical dress and diadem; her gold necklace featured cameos depicting the labors of Hercules. Preceding Joséphine was her sister-in-law Elisa accompanied by her equerry and chamberlains. Matrons of honor and ladies-in-waiting followed.

  To a salvo of artillery, Napoleon left the Royal Palace at midday in a magnificent green velvet costume with gold and silver embroidery. Like his Paris coronation six months earlier, Napoleon chose to surround himself with symbols of Charlemagne. The most important was the Iron Crown of the Kingdom of Italy. Several days earlier, the treasured Byzantine crown had been retrieved from nearby Monza Cathedral by the coronation’s master of ceremonies and fifty cavalry.

  En route to being crowned Holy Roman Emperors in Rome, Roman-German kings would stop in Lombardy to be crowned King of Italy with the Iron Crown. Starting with Conrad II in 1026, Milan replaced Pavia as the host city for the coronations. Similar in form to Otto I’s Crown of Charlemagne with six hinged gold plates, the bejeweled and enameled Iron Crown was both regalia and relic, writes W. Augustus Steward.3

  The Iron Crown got its name from its narrow inner ring, said to have been forged with nails used in the crucifixion (twenty-eight other places in Europe also claim a holy nail, including Paris).4 According to Milan’s patron saint Ambrose, Constantine’s mother Helen found the True Cross and the nails that had crucified Christ, one of which she placed in her son’s diadem and the other in his horse’s bridle.

  Pope Gregory gave one of Constantine’s nails to the Frankish princess Theodolina. It was Theodolina who incorporated the nail into her Iron Crown, donated to the church in Monza in 628.5 A second nail, given to Ambrose by Emperor Theodosius, had been venerated in a reliquary kept high up in the vault of the choir of Milan’s Duomo since the fifteenth century.

  Besides the Iron Crown from Monza, three more crowns featured in the Milan coronation. Napoleon entered the Duomo wearing two—the new crown of the King of Italy by Parisian jeweler Marguerite and Biennais’s gold imperial laurel crown. Biennais’s imperial crown of Charlemagne was carried in the corteges and placed on the altar, but not worn. The “honors of Charlemagne” transported from Paris were also carried into the Duomo with Napoleon.

  Seated on a throne, Napoleon was invested with the insignia of royalty by Caprara. After the archbishop blessed the Iron Crown, Napoleon took it from the altar and placed it briefly on his own head. Apparently the crown was too small for his head.6 Then, channeling the Lombard kings, Napoleon proclaimed: “God has given it to me; Let him who touches it beware!”7

  Applause filled the sanctuary and bells pealed as Eugène de Beauharnais directed an escort of thirteen imperial carriages. Accompanied by French and Italian grenadiers, the cortege traveled from the Duomo to the red brick basilica of Sant’Ambrogio for more prayers and a Te Deum. One of Milan’s oldest churches, the basilica was founded by Ambrose in the fourth century and rebuilt in the eleventh century in Romanesque style. During the Napoleonic suppression in 1797, its monastery had been converted to a military hospital.

  Coronation festivities continued over the next several days with fireworks, ancient-style games, and a fête at the La Scala opera house. Napoleon and Joséphine watched as the wife of celebrated balloonist André-Jacques Garnerin ascended in a balloon, showering them with flowers. “In one day and in a single spectacle,” reported the Moniteur, “the Italians combined what to the ancients was most spectacular and what to modern science was most daring, in the presence of a hero who surpasses both the ancients and the moderns.”8

  On June 5, Napoleon created the Order of the Iron Crown, featuring grand cross knights (twenty), commander knights (one hundred), and ordinary knights (five hundred). The order’s badge featured an imperial eagle above the Iron Crown on a green and gold ribbon. On his second day in Milan, Napoleon issued a decree creating an Italian version of the French Council of State. Now he introduced Eugène de Beauharnais as the viceroy of the Kingdom of Italy. The twenty-four-year-old, who didn’t speak Italian, suddenly found himself responsible for nearly four million people across today’s Lombardy, Venetia, and Romagna.9

  For his official coronation portrait, Napoleon turned to Andrea Appiani. When Napoleon first arrived in Milan in 1796, he sat for a charcoal and chalk portrait drawing by the Milan-born artist. The twenty-seven-year-old general was so pleased with his likeness, he named Appiani “senior commissioner” responsible for selecting Lombard and Venetian art for Paris. Thanks to Napoleon, Appiani had become one of northern Italy’s best known painters. A visit to Paris in 1801 had introduced him to the austere Neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David. He painted Napoleon as first consul in 1803 and several more times as Emperor and King of Italy.

  Appiani portrayed the new King of Italy in three-quarter pose, wearing a green velvet version of the purple petit habillement he wore en route to the sacre at Notre Dame. In one of some twenty versions of the portrait, Napoleon rests a gloved hand on the crown of the King of Italy and wears the new Order of the Iron Crown.10

  In 1800, Appiani began a Napoleonic cycle for the Caryatid Hall at Milan’s Royal Palace. The Glories of Napoleon (I Fasti di Napoleone) would grow to thirty-five episodes from Napoleon’s life. Other propaganda works include the Apotheosis of Napoleon for the Caryatid, and the Triumphs of Napoleon for the Throne Room, in which the artist divinized Napoleon as Jupiter Olympic.

  In his memoirs, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi recounted the insults Pius VII experienced at the hands of Napoleon. “I do not want to speak of what he had to suffer in Paris. Nor to tell in detail of the encounter between Napoleon and the Pope at Fontainebleau when Napoleon appeared disguised as a huntsman with fifty hounds . . . nor of his having kept the Pope waiting an hour and a half at the altar, dressed in sacred garb, on the morning of the ceremony.”11

  Though Napoleon made no concessions, he ordered Pius an expensive papal tiara. Parisian jeweler Marie-Étienne Nitot and goldsmith Henri Auguste collaborated on the sumptuous gift, possibly designed by Charles Percier. To the traditional hive-shaped tiara covered with beige silk velvet, the jewelers added three crowns of chiseled gold with bas-reliefs depicting the Concordat, the restitution of the Church, and Napoleon’s sacre. Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls covered each crown; the largest of the stones was set in vine leaves.12

  On May 21, 1805, Auguste wrote Talleyrand that his colleague Nitot had been dispatched “to go to Milan [. . .] present the tiara enriched with diamonds destined for His Holiness [. . .] I dare flatter myself that this work will have the approval of S. Maj. The Emperor and your (. . .) Artists who have seen in Rome The seven tiaras which adorned the treasury of St. Peter, have decided that the Popes had never worn crowns of so remarkable a taste and wealth.”13

  Nitot delivered the tiara to the Vatican in May. The diamond cross at the top was supported by a spectacular emerald—the gem Pius VI surrendered to pay the indemnity imposed by Napoleon’s Treaty of Tolentino. Pope Gregory XIII had originally placed the emerald on Pope Julius II’s tiara around 1580; Pius VI repurposed the gem for his own tiara in 1789. The famous stone had been deposited at Paris’s Museum of Natural History. In a symbol of reconciliation, Napoleon now returned the emerald to
Rome.14

  Napoleon had another request for Pius. Two days before his Milan coronation, Napoleon wrote to Rome, demanding an annulment of his younger brother Jérôme’s marriage to American Protestant Elizabeth Patterson. Pius refused. A year later, with the help of the Archbishop of Paris, Napoleon would dissolve Jérôme’s marriage and marry him off to the Protestant daughter of the king of Westphalia. In addition to the annulment issue, Napoleon was angry with Pius for welcoming his estranged brother Lucien and his family to Rome.

  But Napoleon got his way on another religious matter. August 15, his birthday, had been declared a national feast day—just as Augustus’s birthday along with anniversaries of his victories had been celebrated in ancient Rome. To create an anniversary for his new Empire, Napoleon forced Pius to canonize a Roman warrior-martyr, Neopolis. This probably fictitious figure was believed to have been martyred for refusing allegiance to Emperor Maximilian.15

  By inventing Saint Napoleon and elevating himself to saintly or demigod status, Napoleon was drawing on the Caesarian tradition. “As Julius Caesar counted divine members among his ancestry and the Caesars at times demanded, and received, worship as gods, the propagandistic value and the meaning of comparing Napoleon to Julius Caesar, Trajan, or a Roman-style demi-god were indistinguishable . . .” writes Oliver Benjamin Hemmerle.16

  Starting in 1806, the Church had to share one of its holiest days, the feast of the Assumption, with Napoleon’s new patron saint of warriors. For the inaugural festivities, a religious ceremony at Notre Dame was accompanied by hoisting an illuminated star thirty feet in diameter over the cathedral’s towers. Saint-Napoleon day effectively became a national holiday honoring the emperor. When Napoleon introduced a new imperial catechism that positioned his rule as anointed by God, Pius refused his approval.17

  After his Milan coronation, while Joséphine took the waters in the Lake District, Napoleon stopped in Brescia. “I have received your letter, my good little Joséphine, and I learn with pleasure that bathing is doing you good,” he wrote from Brescia. “I advised you to do this a week ago. Lake Como will be good for you. The weather here is very warm. . . . Tomorrow I shall have 40,000 troops on the battlefield of Castiglione. I shall be at Verona on Saturday and at Mantua on Monday. Adieu, my dear. Be sensible, gay, and happy. Such is my will.”18

  At the end of June, the couple reunited in Genoa, newly annexed to France. Napoleon justified the annexation on the grounds he was protecting the city from English attacks. Napoleon’s own ancestors were minor Italian nobility from the area near Genoa. Until Genoa ceded its rights to his native Corsica to the king of France in May 1768, a year before Napoleon’s birth, the Mediterranean island had been part of the Republic of Genoa.

  In 1797, Napoleon replaced the nearly eight-century-old Republic with the Ligurian Republic under the protection of France. In a foreshadowing of things to come, the young general wrote the provisional government that June after learning that the statue of Genoa’s great naval hero Andrea Doria had been toppled. Through a series of naval victories, Doria had liberated Genoa from the French. Calling him a “great sailor and statesman,” Napoleon suggested that a new statue be erected. “Aristocracy was liberty in his day. The whole of Europe envies your city the honour of having produced that celebrated man. You will, I doubt not, take pains to rear his statue again: I pray you to let me bear a part of the expense which that will entail.”19

  Napoleon admired the larger-than-life, self-made hero who, like himself, came from an aristocratic family that had fallen on hard times. Orphaned young, Doria rose from condottiero, or mercenary, to admiral of Charles V’s Habsburg fleet and ruler of the city-state of Genoa. And like Napoleon, he had gained power and wealth through his stunning military victories, seizing spoils from his enemies along the way. Andrea Doria served France’s François I in the 1520s before switching allegiance to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

  In 1528, Andrea began building the Palazzo del Principe west of Genoa’s ancient walls, in a strategic location overlooking the harbor’s western entrance. At this combination stronghold and country retreat, the admiral moored his six-ship fleet in a small harbor at the end of the garden. Perino del Vaga was hired to decorate the grand new home that resembled a Hellenistic-Roman porticoed villa. The Florentine-born artist, who had worked under Raphael in Rome, proceeded to adorn the palazzo with tapestries, furniture, flags, and embroideries of his own design.20

  It was Perino who introduced a comparison of his patron with Neptune, Roman god of the sea, explains Ilaria Bernocchi. In a series of tapestries, now lost, Perino created an allegorical program around Doria’s rule of the sea. The same heroic guise was adopted by other artists—medals by engraver Leoni, a painting by Agnolo Bronzino (Pinacoteca di Brera), and an unfinished Carrara marble sculpture by Baccio Bandinelli (Piazza del Duomo, Carrara).21

  Thanks to Andrea’s interest in tapestries and the strong relationship between Genoa and the tapestry center of Flanders, his villa boasted a collection of some two hundred pieces.22 Charles V gave Andrea two of the best—the Stories of Alexander the Great. Woven in the mid-fifteenth century in Tournai, Burgundy, of gold and silver yarns with silk and wool, the large detailed panels depicted historical and legendary events in the life of the Macedonian king.

  In 1529, Andrea ordered temporary triumphal arches for Charles V’s entry into Genoa. Four years later, on his way back to Barcelona following his defense of Vienna against the Turks, Charles V made another triumphal entry into Genoa. As part of the celebrations, Charles proceeded from a temporary arch to the just finished Villa Doria where he was a guest. It was during such official visits that Doria persuaded Charles V to grant Genoa its independence. Andrea’s heir, Giovanni Andrea I, continued embellishing the villa with art, including a tapestry series of the 1571 Battle of Lepanto where he commanded a fleet.

  For Napoleon’s stay at Palazzo del Principe, restorations had quickly been made to some of Perino’s antiquity-inspired décor.23 According to Bourrienne, Napoleon made sure to sleep “in the Doria Palace, in the bed where Charles V had lain.”24 As Matthew Zarzeczny explains, Napoleon admired Charles V’s handling of the papacy, which included Clement VII’s incarceration after the 1527 sack of Rome.25

  In 1806, Napoleon invoked the Holy Roman emperor in a letter to Joseph. “The court of Rome . . . think[s] that I cannot reconcile a great respect for the spiritual authority of the Pope with the repression of his pretensions to temporal dominion. . . . They forget that St. Louis, whose piety was undoubted, was almost always at war with the Pope, and that Charles V, who was an eminently Christian prince, long besieged Rome, and ended by taking possession of both the city and the States of the Church.”26 Napoleon would soon use Charles V’s action to justify his own treatment of Pius VII.

  Obsessed with his self-made dynasty, Napoleon could not help but be impressed with the Doria Villa’s Loggia of the Heroes. Originally open to the sea, the five arches of the Loggia were now enclosed by sheet glass. The frescoes depicted a dozen members of the Doria family as ancient Roman warriors. The Latin inscription on the shields read: “The great men of the illustrious family, supreme leaders, performed excellent deeds for their homeland.”27

  From the Villa’s terraced garden facing the sea, Napoleon and Joséphine descended the same steps where Andrea Doria returned from his numerous voyages. Before an enormous crowd at the harbor, the imperial couple embarked a barge decorated like a floating temple. In the middle of the bay, four huge rafts, covered with trees, flowers, statuary, and fountains flanked their barge. Fireworks over the flotilla of boats illuminated the city.

  After a week in Genoa, Napoleon left for Turin. It’s there he received word of an impending military threat. To stop Napoleon from further land grabs, Great Britain, Russia, and Austria had formed a new coalition. Traveling incognito, the new Emperor of the French and King of Italy crossed the Mont Cenis Pass and rushed back to Fontainebleau.

  When the Treaty of Amiens fell apart, Napole
on began training his forces for an invasion of England. He organized his army at a large military camp at the port of Boulogne on the Channel. Docks, roads, and barracks were built for some two hundred thousand soldiers, the heart of the future Grande Armée. In early August 1805, Napoleon left Paris for Boulogne, poised to lead his forces across the English Channel. He told Joséphine: “I will take you to London. I intend the wife of the modern Caesar to be crowned in Westminster.”

  In 56 B.C.E., Julius Caesar launched back-to-back expeditions to Britain. For the first reconnaissance mission, he took just two of his eight legions. He thought it would be valuable “if he simply visited the island and observed the kind of people and investigated the localities, the harbors and the approaches.” When Caesar returned to Britain the following year with five legions, his ambition was conquest. But the results were mixed, with Caesar securing only the promise of a tribute payment.28

  To drum up support for the offensive, Napoleon organized a public relations campaign around a more successful invader. William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, had vanquished England in the eleventh century. About a decade after his 1066 invasion, the Bayeux Tapestry was produced to glorify the Norman Conquest. Handstitched with wool threads, 224 feet in length, and nearly twenty inches tall, the embroidered linen scroll depicts the decisive battle of Hastings in southern England. Thousands died in the hilltop conflict, including the newly crowned King Harold II from a French arrow to the eye. After six hundred years of Anglo-Saxon rule, William became England’s first Norman king. The Norman Conquest transformed England’s laws, customs, and architecture. French became the language of the court; Norman nobility became the new English aristocracy.