by Susan Jaques
For the drapery of Napoleon’s statue, Lemot combined the paludamentum, a cloak worn by Roman dignitaries, and the full-length ceremonial costume of an emperor. Lemot referred to the emperor’s official iconography from François Gérard’s painting of Napoleon I in his coronation robes. Napoleon grasps the pommel of his sheathed sword, part of the “honors of Charlemagne” restored for his coronation. In his right hand, he holds the imperial scepter topped by the eagle. Together with the laurel wreath crown, they symbolized Victory in ancient Rome. The emperor also wears the chain of the Legion of Honor, composed of eagles linked with rings.
To affirm his image as a modern ruler, Napoleon ordered that the inscription for the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel be in French, not Latin: “At the Voice of the Victor of Austerlitz/The German Empire Falls/The Confederation of the Rhine Begins/The Kingdoms of Bavaria and Wuerttemberg Are Created/Venice is Reunited to the Iron Crown/Entire Italy Ranges Herself/Under the Laws of Her Liberator.”
In the end, Napoleon was disappointed in the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel’s lack of monumentality. The pink marble columns, Carrara marble, and bronze bases and capitals gave it a more delicate appearance than its ancient models in Rome. The emperor described the elegant Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel as a “pavilion” rather than a triumphal arch. A second more grandiose arch would not disappoint.
Napoleon originally wanted to locate his second triumphal arch near the former Bastille in the eastern part of Paris. The prison had been demolished and the area was in need of a makeover. But his interior minister Jean-Baptiste de Champagny appointed a committee of architects and sculptors to come up with a recommendation. In April 1806, Champagny wrote Napoleon, proposing the tollgate at Étoile at the end of the Champs-Élysées:
“This place is, in a way, part of the most beautiful district of Paris . . . It will leave the person going away from the capital a profound souvenir of its incomparable beauty. Although a long way away, he will always be in front of the Triumphant General. Your Majesty will cross it when going to Malmaison, Saint-Germain, Saint-Cloud, and even Versailles.”29
The site had been laid out in the seventeenth century by Louis XIV’s landscape architect André Le Nôtre. At that time, the Grand Cours was renamed the Champs-Élysées, French for “Elysian Fields,” the paradise for dead heroes in Greek mythology. At the top of the hill, Le Nôtre added an octagonal square planted with rows of trees, called the butte de l’Étoile.30
With its west-east orientation, the monument would be the start of a triumphal way, like Rome’s Via Sacra, replacing the royal medieval north-south axis along the rue Saint Denis (in 1671, French architect Nicolas-François Blondel created a permanent triumphal arch at Porte St.-Denis, Paris’s city gates). In direct line with the future Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, its elevated location at the west end of Paris offered a spectacular perspective along with sunset views. Napoleon personally approved the location on May 9.31
But there was disagreement over what form the monument should take. Some of Napoleon’s advisers argued for a triumphal column; others favored an obelisk. Both Champagny and his successor Crétet lobbied for an arch, as did Pierre Fontaine, provided it was monumental in scale. “In such an elevated place, it is absolutely necessary that this monument be of colossal size,” Fontaine declared.32
After initially favoring an obelisk, Napoleon changed his mind a few days later in favor of an arch. After an open contest, the submissions of Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin and Jean-Arnaud Raymond were shortlisted.33 However, the designers did not see eye to eye and wound up submitting two rival proposals to Napoleon.34 Rome-trained Chalgrin was inspired by classical antiquity; Raymond by the Italian Renaissance.
Chalgrin’s Church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule was one of Paris’s first sacred buildings in the neoclassical style. The architect’s ties to aristocratic patrons led to his imprisonment during the Revolution. In 1795, Chalgrin was appointed to the Conseil des Bâtiments; three years later he succeeded Charles de Wailly at the Institut de France. Between 1803 and 1807, Chalgrin renovated his former prison in the Palais de Luxembourg, adding a semicircular Senate Room toward the rear of the palace. Until he was succeeded by Percier and Fontaine in 1805, Jean-Arnaud Raymond had been architect to the Louvre.
Ultimately, Chalgrin prevailed. By imperial decree in the fall of 1808, the Paris-born, Grand Prix–winning architect became sole designer of the Arc de Triomphe.35 Fontaine, who Napoleon consulted on the project, believed that columns would be lost in the distant view of the Arch. Of the nearly forty surviving ancient Roman arches, Fontaine suggested the column-less fourth-century Janus Arch as a model. Janus, the Roman god of gates and passages, carried protective associations. Chalgrin instead chose the Arch of Titus, one of Rome’s best known landmarks. Chalgrin’s plan was adopted by imperial decree on March 27, 1809.
In contrast with Percier and Fontaine’s Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, Chalgrin emphasized monumentality. Keeping the Arch of Titus’s exact proportions, he supersized the ancient monument and abandoned columns for smooth pillar surfaces. Measuring 167 feet high and 148 feet wide, the Arc de Triumphe would nearly double the Arch of Titus. Like the view from the Arch of Septimius Severus at the lower end of the Forum to the Arch of Titus, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel would offer a magnificent view to the Arc de Triumphe.
During the Middle Ages, the Arch of Titus had been incorporated into the Frangipani stronghold in the Forum; its single passage used as a gate. Thanks to this, the arch was not dismantled as spolia. But the ancient decoration was damaged by the gate brackets; the arch itself suffered during fighting in the tweflth and thirteenth centuries. In the early nineteenth century, architects Raffaele Stern and Giuseppe Valadier restored the famous monument, demolishing the flanking houses, dismantling and reassembling the arch, and restoring missing pieces in travertine.36
The eldest son of Flavian emperor Vespasian, Titus seized power following civil chaos in 69 C.E., the bloody “Year of the Four Emperors.” After the civil war, the Flavians needed a foreign victory to gain legitimacy. In the summer of 71, Vespasian and Titus crushed a revolt in Judea and the honor of the triumph was conferred jointly. The procession of spoils from the Second Temple of Jerusalem rivaled anything Rome had ever seen.
Jerusalem-born historian Josephus who served as Titus’s translator during the Roman siege of the city, described the Temple sanctuary: “This structure was ninety feet high, ninety feet long, and thirty feet wide. Its length, however, was divided into two parts. The first hall was sixty feet long, and contained three of the world’s most incredible and famous works of art: the lampstand, the table, and the incense altar. The lampstand, which branched into seven lamps, symbolized the seven planets; the twelve loaves of bread on the table represented the circle of the Zodiac and the year; the altar of incense is kept replenished with thirteen aromatic incenses collected from both land and sea, and from places both inhabited and deserted, thus symbolizing that all creation is of God and for God.”37 In 71, Josephus traveled to Rome where he became a citizen and wrote his works under the name Flavius Titus Josephus, after his patrons.
Following the sack of Jerusalem, Titus began an affair with Berenice, daughter of Herod Agrippa I, whose family ruled Rome’s Judaea Province. When Berenice and her brother Agrippa traveled to Rome in 75, she and Titus lived together. But four years later, when Titus succeeded his father Vespasian as emperor, public pressure forced him to break up with his unpopular lover, some eleven years his senior. Titus rebuilt cities in Campania destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 and opened the Coliseum with one hundred days of festivities. In 81 C.E., after just two years in power, Titus died of the plague.
Too young to take part in the Judean war, Domitian exploited his older brother’s popularity with a posthumous triumphal arch. Located at the highest point of the Sacred Way, the Arch of Titus symbolically linked the Flavian’s monumental Colosseum with the Roman Forum. Rabirius, Emperor Domitian’s talented architect, may
have helped design the fifty-one-foot-tall arch constructed of marble from Greece’s Penteliko Mountains.
The top panel featured a Latin inscription in large capital letters gilded with bronze: “The Senate and the Roman people to the deified Titus Vespasian Augustus the son of the deified Vespasian.” To placate members of the Senate unhappy with his attempt to divinize the Flavians, Domitian placed the word “senatus” first in even larger letters. Flanking each side of the arch on square pedestals are engaged and fluted columns with rare Composite style capitals.
Inside its barrel vault are two deeply carved reliefs, among Rome’s most famous. On one panel, Romans soldiers are shown in the triumphal procession of 71 C.E. carrying the treasures taken from the Temple in Jerusalem on wooden stretchers. The booty includes a seven-branched Menorah, silver trumpets, and the gold shewbread table that held twelves loaves of bread representing the twelve tribes of Israel. The actual treasures were placed in the new Temple of Peace in Vespasian’s Forum.
The opposite panel depicts Titus driving a triumphal quadriga as the helmeted goddess Roma leads the horses and Victory crowns the emperor with laurels. A young man, representing the Roman people, and an older man, symbolizing the Senate, follow. The coffered vaulting, or soffit, features sculptured rosettes; a central relief depicts the apotheosis, or divinization, of Titus with the emperor carried to heaven on the back of an eagle. The arch possibly served as Titus’s tomb. Inside the attic is a spiral staircase and chamber that may have contained an urn with his remains.
Domitian went on a building spree, replacing the public buildings of Vespasian and Titus with palatial architecture. Rabirius’s masterpiece was the Domus Augustana, a palace for his patron on top of the Palatine Hill. He also designed the Alban Villa on the shore of Lake Albanus (now enclosed in the papal gardens at Castel Gandolfo), renovated the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline, and rebuilt the temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Julius Caesar, damaged in a fire during Titus’s reign.
Megalomaniacal, Domitian insisted on being addressed as lord and god and dramatically reduced the power of the Senate. After fifteen years in power, he was assassinated in 96 C.E., bringing an end to the Flavian dynasty. The Flavians were succeeded briefly by the elderly Nerva followed by Trajan.
Unlike Domitian’s Arch of Titus, Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe was plagued by setbacks. After the first stone was laid on the emperor’s birthday, August 15, 1806, another two years went by just to lay the foundation because of the site’s highly porous, chalky soil. To support the weight of the colossal monument, a large underground platform had to be constructed. In a symbolic move, Napoleon insisted that the structure honoring his Grande Armée be made of French stone. Work slowed when the original white stone of L’Isle-Adam was replaced with a harder stone from Château-Landon near Nemours where a new quarry had to be opened. Political and financial problems, along with Chalgrin’s death in 1811, further slowed progress.
Napoleon would not live to see the Arc de Triomphe. After three decades and a succession of regimes and architects, his arch was finally finished in 1836 under King Louis Philippe. Dedicated to the military victories of the French Revolution and the First Empire, the Arc de Triomphe surpassed its ancient model in both scale and splendor. Like Titus, Napoleon was glorified along with dozens of his greatest battles and hundreds of his generals.
Soon after its completion, Victor Hugo wrote a poem about the new monument, “À l’Arc de Triomphe”: Three thousand years from now, when people will talk about Napoleon in the same way as they now do of Cyrus, when the Seine will be choked with stones, and all Paris except Notre Dame, the Vendôme column, and the Arc de Triomphe has fallen into ruin, a man resting on a hill at dusk when the mists have begun to fall will be lost in wonder at the scene and then the monument will truly at last have what it now lacks.”38
THREE
TEMPLE TO THE GRANDE ARMÉE
In the summer of 1806, Napoleon organized a group of sixteen south and west German states into a defensive buffer known as the Confederation of the Rhine. As a signing bonus to would-be members, Napoleon promoted the electors of Württemberg and Bavaria to kings and the electors of the smaller Baden to grand dukes. For added insurance, Napoleon married off his brother Jérôme to Catherine de Württemberg, daughter of the new king Frederick I of Württemberg. Similarly, Napoleon arranged for his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais to wed Princess Amalia of Bavaria, eldest daughter of Maximilian I, the first king of Bavaria.
On August 1, the new Confederation of the Rhine declared it was no longer part of the Holy Roman Empire. Austria’s Francis II had no choice but abandon his title of Holy Roman Emperor and settle for a diminished role as Francis I, Emperor of Austria. After a millennium, Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist. At a Diet in Erfurt in 1808, four kings and thirty-four princes of the Confederation of the Rhine paid tribute to Napoleon as Europe’s de facto ruler.
Refusing to participate, Francis received a threatening letter from Napoleon: “It was in my power to destroy the Austrian monarchy. What your Majesty is, is by virtue of our will.”1 Prussia’s Frederick William III considered the Confederation a threat and joined a renewed coalition against Napoleon. “The idea that Prussia could take the field against me by herself seems so ridiculous that it does not merit discussion,” declared Napoleon.
At Saint-Cloud, Napoleon planned his next move—defeating Prussia before Russian reinforcements arrived. On September 25, 1806, he left Paris to join the Grande Armée, arriving in Mainz three days later. Within a week, Frederick William delivered an ultimatum to Talleyrand to dissolve the Confederation and withdraw the Grande Armée.
It took Napoleon just three weeks to crush the Prussian army. On October 14, the twin battles of Jena and Auerstädt west of the Saale River left an estimated 38,000 Prussians and 12,000 French dead or wounded. A week later, Napoleon confiscated the Prussians territories in between the Rhine and the Elbe, the states belonging to the Duke of Brunswick, Hanover, and the territory around Osnabrück.
Napoleon and the Grande Armée reached Potsdam on October 25. Despite his easy defeat of Prussia, Napoleon appears to have been moved by the memory of Frederick William’s great uncle, Frederick the Great. Just before becoming emperor, Napoleon stated that Frederick was the man whose history he most wanted to read because he understood his “business in every sort of way.” A “great statesman . . . is a completely eccentric personage, who stands always alone . . .” wrote Napoleon.2
The eccentric Frederick II put Prussia on the map, taking on the rest of Europe in the Seven Years’ War. Like Napoleon, Prussia’s king was an avid reader of history, adopting military strategies from ancient battles. An ardent Francophile, Frederick spoke French and collected eighteenth-century French art.3
When Julius Caesar visited Alexandria, he famously paid his respects to the tomb of Alexander the Great. The Roman poet Lucan derided Caesar’s visit as a stunt, “one demented despot paying homage to another.” Now on the night of his arrival in Potsdam, Napoleon visited Frederick the Great’s tomb in the large, dimly lit crypt of the Garrison Church. After the seventy-four-year-old’s death in 1786, Frederick William II ignored his uncle’s wish to be buried near the terraced vineyards of his Potsdam retreat Sanssouci by his beloved greyhounds. Instead, the new king had his uncle entombed in the same church as his ruthless father, Frederick William I.
On entering the crypt, Napoleon reportedly told his generals: “Hats off, gentlemen! If he were alive, we would not be here.” Napoleon then stood silently before Frederick’s tomb. About the visit, a member of his entourage recalled: “He [Napoleon] walked rather hurriedly at first, but as he drew near the church, he moderated his pace, which became slower still and more measured as he approached the remains of the great king to whom he had come to pay homage. The door of the monument was open; and he stopped at the entrance in a grave and meditative attitude. His glances seemed to penetrate the gloom which reigned around these august
ashes, and he remained there nearly ten minutes, motionless and silent, as if absorbed in profound thought.”4
About Frederick, Napoleon later wrote: “The battle of Leuthen is a masterpiece of operations, maneuvers, and resolution. By itself it would be enough to immortalize Frederick and place him among the greatest generals.” To this he added, “What distinguishes Frederick most is not the cleverness of his moves but his boldness.”5 Napoleon’s esteem for the Prussian king did not prevent him from turning two of Potsdam’s churches into horse stables.
On the afternoon of October 28, to the strains of “The Marseillaise,” Napoleon paraded through Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Following Napoleon were twenty thousand grenadiers, an honor guard of cuirassiers (cavalrymen wearing a breastplate called a cuirass), and foot and horse-guards. Though some curious Berliners turned out to witness the triumphal entry, the streets of the Prussian capital were largely empty. Thousands had fled, including Frederick William and his court, which retreated to the Baltic seaport of Memel.
Napoleon’s army was dressed to kill, so to speak. Embroidery and lace, plumes, towering helmets, breastplates, dolmans, and bear and tiger skins adorned the military uniforms.6 The Grande Armée’s impressive costumes had an ancient precedent. Julius Caesar reportedly equipped his soldiers richly, including weapons inlaid with silver and gold. “Roman soldiers, like most of their kind before and since, undoubtedly found pleasure in parade and display,” writes H. Russell Robinson, “and both legionaries and auxiliaries would have strutted around in their glistening finery . . . their gilded, silvered and tinned belt fittings, inlaid daggers, decorated swords and shield bosses, and tinned and enameled helmet fittings all add up to a very brilliant ensemble.”7