by Susan Jaques
That summer, Dominique-Vivant Denon supervised the plunder of the court library and the imperial art collection housed at the Belvedere Palace. The picture gallery got its start in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thanks to Archduke Ferdinand II, Emperor Rudolf II, and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. In the eighteenth century, the holdings were brought together at Vienna’s Stallburg, where they were displayed in the late baroque style.
In the mid-eighteenth century, Maria Theresa acquired the Belvedere summer palace from the heirs of Prince Eugene of Savoy. Some twenty-five years later, she and her son and coruler Joseph II transferred the imperial picture gallery from the Stallburg to the Upper Belvedere. They added to the collection by confiscating large Flemish and Italian altarpieces from disbanded cloisters and churches in the Low Countries. In 1781, the gallery opened its doors to the public.
In late 1805, with Napoleon’s army nearing Vienna, many masterworks of the Habsburg imperial gallery had been hurriedly packed up. Heinrich Füger, director of the Viennese painting gallery, supervised the evacuation of roughly half the displayed works—some 625 paintings in fifty-four crates. In mid-1809, Denon managed to pilfer over four hundred paintings from the Belvedere.31 For the journey to Paris, smaller unframed works were stacked one on top of the other; larger canvasses were rolled up. Rubens’s Assumption of the Virgin was so large, it was cut into three pieces. The newest loot included fifteen of the Belvedere’s three dozen Titians.32
From Schönbrunn, Napoleon founded a new imperial order. The Order of the Golden Fleece had arisen during the Middle Ages, inspired by the heroic story of Jason and the Argonauts. “My eagles have conquered the Golden Fleece of the kings of Spain and the Golden Fleece of the emperors of Germany,” Napoleon wrote Baron Lejeune. “I want to create for the French Empire an imperial Order of the Three Golden Fleeces. It will be my eagle, with wings outstretched; in each of its talons it will grasp one of the ancient fleeces that it has taken, and in its beak it will proudly brandish in the air the fleece that I am instituting.” Napoleon reportedly wanted to use fragments of burned grenades for the chain. A number of goldsmiths including Biennais presented designs for the new insignia. By 1813, the order joined the Legion of Honor.33
Napoleon considered dethroning the Habsburgs, but decided instead to demand real estate. Despite losing his capital, Francis I held out, refusing to sign a peace treaty. On October 12, with negotiations dragging on, Napoleon was inspecting his troops on the steps of Schönbrunn’s parade court when a young Austrian approached him with a dagger. After admitting he had intended to kill the emperor, the seventeen-year-old was quickly tried and executed.
The foiled attack spooked Napoleon. Two days later, he signed the Treaty of Vienna. Austria ceded Salzburg and parts of Upper Austria to Bavaria. Trieste, Carniola, and Croatia were incorporated into the French Empire as the Illyrian Provinces. Napoleon gained three million subjects (out of Austria’s sixteen million). In addition, the Austrian army was limited to fifty thousand men until a peace treaty with Britain was signed. Napoleon instructed Eugène de Beauharnais to invade the Tyrol region in the south and end a long-running insurrection.
Napoleon arrived back in Paris in late October, around the same time as sixty-plus wooden crates of Belvedere paintings. Most of the art went to the Musée Napoléon; Denon dispersed some fifty of the pictures to provincial museums (Caen, Dijon, Lyon, Toulouse, Grenoble, and Brussels), the palaces of Strasbourg and Compiègne, and a handful of Parisian churches.
Napoleon’s return coincided with what turned out to be the publishing event of the century. In 1802, the same year Denon published his best-selling Egyptian travelogue, Napoleon authorized the publication of the findings of the French Commission on the Sciences and Arts of Egypt, founded in Alexandria in 1798. The commission’s members, some 150 civilian savants, had been recruited to build Napoleon’s military infrastructure including roads, canals, and bridges.
During the ensuing three years, the civilian army of scientists and artists crisscrossed the country, sketching and measuring the monuments, flora and fauna, and the people of Egypt. One of the most prolific artists was Nicolas-Jacques Conté, a portrait painter and inventor of the graphite and clay Conté crayon. With supplies cut off by Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet, Conté came up with tools and machines to manufacture arms, surveying devices, and surgical instruments.34
In Cairo, Napoleon also founded the Institut d’Égypte, after the prestigious Institut de France. Back in Paris, a team of researchers directed by Institut members and top military authorities translated the expedition findings into the sumptuous imperial edition of the Description de l’Égypte. Some four hundred engravers and two thousand artists collaborated on 855 engraved plates, a forty-seven sheet topographic map, and a three-sheet geographic map. Eleven volumes of text covered everything from archeology and botany to urban mapping and zoology.35
Many of the engravings of Egypt’s temples were populated with figures of ancient Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks. “The reader, imagining him or herself to be gazing upon the ruins of ancient Egypt, is suddenly catapulted back in time to witness a procession or to gaze upon ancient scholars in Thebes . . .” writes Anne Godlewska.36 The connection between contemporary France and ancient Egypt was also expressed by the Description’s frontispiece, made to look like a monumental Egyptian doorway. Designed by Cecile and engraved by Girardet and Sellier, the frontispiece is a masterpiece of triumphant propaganda, describing a French conquest of Egypt that never occurred.
In the foreground, famous monuments like Pompey’s Column, Cleopatra’s Needle, and the Sphinx at Giza are shown alongside seized treasures like the Rosetta Stone and zodiac of Dendera. A river winds its way back through a fantasy landscape, flanked by Egypt’s major monuments. At the top of the doorway, below an Egyptian sun disk, Napoleon or a Roman general is shown riding a quadriga, following the imperial eagle and fleeing Mamelukes. At the bottom, Egyptians admire an N topped with the imperial crown encircled with a snake eating its tail. The vertical borders are decorated with trophies and insignia inscribed with the names of the campaign’s victories and defeats. Adorning the border’s two lower corners is Napoleon’s personal symbol, the bee, in a pharaonic cartouche.37
Like Diderot’s eighteenth-century Encyclopédie, the Description de l’Égypte had a profound impact, helping fuel the Egyptian revival in decorative arts and architecture. In 1828, nineteen years after Napoleon received his imperial edition, the Description de l’Égypte was finally finished. Six years earlier, savant Jean-François Champollion deciphered the mystery of hieroglyphics. Champollion made the groundbreaking linguistic discovery using a copy of the Rosetta Stone’s royal decree, inscribed with two forms of Egyptian language and Greek. Along with sculptures, steles, and sarcophagi, the Rosetta Stone was among the Egyptian booty ceded by the French to Britain.
One of the main goals of the Napoleonic expedition and Description de l’Égypte was to associate France with the extraordinary civilization of ancient Egypt. But the stakes were even bigger. “Behind this association,” writes Anne Godlewska, “was the suggestion that cultural superiority, which gave France the rights of conquest, was derived from a sort of passage of reason and science . . . from its birthplace in Egypt, to the Greco-Romans, to its full realization in Europe and it return to its birthplace by France.” 38
With the annexation of Rome and abduction of the pope, Napoleon’s dream of turning Paris into Europe’s cultural and political capital was coming closer to reality. Stripped of its leader and artistic treasures, Rome was reduced to the second imperial city of the French Empire. The relative status of the two cities was clear. “I wanted this capital to be splendid that it would dwarf all the capitals in the universe,” Napoleon would later declare. “I did everything, and wanted to do everything, for Paris.”
TWO
TROPHY WIFE
Napoleon’s thirteen-year marriage to Joséphine had weathered a number of storms, from his family’s hostility and lon
g separations to numerous extramarital affairs on both sides. But there was one deal breaker. Napoleon was desperate for a male heir and Joséphine had been unable to conceive. Her childbearing years appeared over.
Napoleon had been contemplating divorce for some time. When he left Paris in 1806 for the Prussian campaign, his young mistress Eléonore Denuelle de la Plaigne was pregnant. Intensely jealous of her sister-in-law Joséphine, Caroline Murat had introduced her brother to Denuelle, who gave birth to his first child in December. Charles Léon’s birth convinced Napoleon that Joséphine’s failure to conceive was her fault. In May 1807, four-year-old imperial heir Napoleon Charles, eldest son of Joséphine’s daughter Hortense and Napoleon’s brother Louis, died suddenly of croup at The Hague. Napoleon refused to name the boy’s younger brother, Louis-Napoleon (the future Napoleon III) as his new heir.
In September 1808, Napoleon left for Erfurt, Germany, to discuss an alliance with Russian tsar Alexander I. Before sending reinforcements to Spain, he wanted Russia’s help shoring up France’s eastern frontier against Austria. Napoleon also wanted something else from Alexander—his teenage sister Anna Pavlovna’s hand in marriage. From Erfurt, Napoleon raised the issue of divorce with foreign minister Talleyrand:
“My destiny demands it and France’s tranquility demands it also,” he wrote. “I have no successor. Joseph is nothing, and he has only daughters. It is I who must found a dynasty; I cannot found one except by allying myself to a princess who belongs to one of the great ruling houses of Europe. The Emperor Alexander has sisters; there is one whose age suits me. Speak of it to Romanzoff: tell him that once the affair in Spain is finished, I shall consider his views regarding the partition of Turkey. Nor will you lack for other arguments; I know that you are in favour of divorce, and, I should warn you, the Empress knows it too.”1 Napoleon did not know at the time that the sly Talleyrand favored his marriage to a Habsburg, and leaked information about Napoleon to Alexander’s court.
Napoleon also took up the subject with his grand equerry Caulaincourt. “It is to be seen whether Alexander is really a friend of mine, if he is really interested in France’s happiness; for I love Joséphine, and never shall I be happier. But we shall know, through this, the feelings of the rulers regarding this act, which will be for me a sacrifice. My family, Talleyrand, Fouché, all my ministers, demand this of me in France’s name. A son would offer you far more stability than my brothers, who are disliked and incapable. Perhaps you would prefer Eugène [de Beauharnais]? It is the wish of certain people, because he is a made-man, he has married a Bavarian princess and he has children. But that does not serve your argument. Adoptions do not found new dynasties. I have other projects for him.”2
“All being said,” Napoleon later wrote, “I like only those people who are useful to me, and only so long as they are useful.” On November 30, after dinner at the Tuileries Palace, Napoleon let Joséphine know that she was no longer useful. The next day, Napoleon broke the news to his stepdaughter and sister-in-law Hortense: “My decision is made. It is irreversible. The whole of France wants the divorce: they cry out for it. I cannot ignore their wishes. Nothing will bring me back, not tears, not prayers.” When Hortense replied that she and her brother would leave Paris with their mother, Napoleon replied angrily:
“What! You will all leave me, you will abandon me! You no longer love me, is that it? If it were simply for my happiness, I would sacrifice it, but it is for France. You should be consoling me for being forced to give up the dearest of my affections. . . . After me, anarchy will return and the prize for so much effort will be lost for France. Instead, in leaving a son raised in my image, a son which France will be prepared to regard as my successor, [France] will profit from the good that I have left her as the very least of the fruits of my labour. I will have suffered, but others will profit from it.”3
Joséphine’s days as France’s empress were numbered. At Fontainebleau, Napoleon walled off the passageway between his topographical office and the Joséphine’s study in their private apartments.4 On December 4, Jérôme Bonaparte, not Joséphine, accompanied Napoleon to Notre Dame Cathedral to mark the fifth anniversary of his coronation. There was no place of honor for her at the lavish reception thrown by the City of Paris to mark both the anniversary and the peace treaty with Austria.
A week and a half later, on December 15, the imperial couple announced the dissolution of their civil marriage in the Tuileries throne room. Members of the Bonaparte and Beauharnais families were present, along with Napoleon’s aides. Among them was the person who had helped orchestrate the divorce, Napoleon’s éminence grise Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély. A lawyer by training who had followed Napoleon from Italy to Egypt, Regnaud was entrusted with the imperial family’s private matters and government relations with the Senate. For Regnaud’s loyalty, Napoleon named him count of the Empire in 1808.
Now Napoleon told those gathered: “God knows what such a decision has cost to my heart! But there is no sacrifice that is beyond my courage if it is shown to be for the good of France. I must add that, far from having any reason for reproach, I have nothing but praise for the attachment and the affection of my beloved wife: she has graced fifteen years of my life; the memory of them will remain engraved in my heart. She was crowned by my hand; I desire that she retain the rank and title of crowned empress, but more than this, that she never doubt my feelings and that she value me as her best and dearest friend.”
Joséphine had difficulty getting through her prepared speech. “With our most august and dear husband’s permission, I must declare that no longer holding out any hope for a child that could satisfy both his political needs and the good of France, I give to him the greatest proof of attachment and devotion that has ever been given on this earth. Everything I have comes from his greatness; it is his hand that crowned me, and up on this throne, I have received evidence of nothing but affection and love from the French people.
“I acknowledge these feelings in agreeing to the dissolution of this marriage, which from this moment on is an obstruction to the well-being of France, depriving it from the joy of one day being governed by the descendants of a great man clearly chosen by Providence to eradicate the evils of a terrible revolution and re-establish the altar, the throne and social order. Nevertheless, the dissolution of my marriage will change nothing of the feelings in my heart: the Emperor will have in me always his greatest friend. I know how much this act, called for by politics and greater interests, has pained his heart; but glorious is the sacrifice that he and I make for the good of our nation.”5
Joséphine and Napoleon signed a record of the proceedings formally annulling their civil marriage. The next day, Joséphine left Tuileries for Malmaison in the pouring rain with Hortense, her ladies-in-waiting, parrot, dogs, and multiple pieces of luggage. As a reward for going quietly, her settlement included Malmaison, a generous allowance, and the title Empress Dowager. Napoleon was apparently not too broken up. He departed for a rendezvous at Versailles with Pauline’s Piedmontese lady-in-waiting, Madame de Mathis.6 In early January 1810, in front of the court, Joséphine and Napoleon signed the official documents annulling their 1804 religious marriage on the grounds that the civil marriage had been conducted illegally.
In his dynastic obsession, Napoleon recalled Augustus. In bad health, the emperor’s concern for his own mortality led to a fixation about an heir. In order to shape Rome’s future, Augustus chose his successor. He married his only daughter Julia to his sister’s promising son Marcellus, but he died after just two years of marriage. Next, Augustus made his boyhood friend Marcus Agrippa divorce his wife of ten years to marry Julia. They had two sons, Gaius and Lucius Caesar. But the deaths of all three dashed his plan, leading Augustus to adopt Tiberius, son of his wife Livia by her first husband.7 Interestingly, Augustus supported the institution of marriage by making adultery a crime punishable by exile and confiscation of property.
The Romans were more liberal in their divorce practices tha
n was Napoleonic Paris. One or both parties to a Roman marriage simply had to consider themselves no longer married. At first, Roman husbands could divorce their wives for adultery or drinking wine. Later, men could divorce if their wives failed to produce children. Since the wife was not regarded as being at fault, the husband was required to return her dowry. By the first century B.C.E., either spouse could divorce the other or they could mutually agree to divorce. As Susan Treggiari writes, Roman society looked at divorce as a sad necessity.8
In 62 B.C.E., Julius Caesar divorced Pompeia for a scandal she had nothing to do with. With the Vestal Virgins, Pompeia co-hosted a women-only party for a religious festival. Plotting to seduce Pompeia, a young politician Publius Clodius Pulcher crashed the party dressed as a woman. Though Publius did not succeed, Caesar divorced Pompeia, famously pronouncing “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.”
In his search for a new spouse, Napoleon drew up a list of seventeen candidates. Besides Alexander I’s sister, Napoleon considered Maria Augusta of Saxony. But with fertility the main criteria, the twenty-seven-year-old princess was thought to be past her prime. Emerging as a top contender was eighteen-year-old Habsburg archduchess Marie Louise, eldest daughter of Napoleon’s nemesis Francis II.
As the great-granddaughter of Empress Maria Theresa and great-niece of Marie Antoinette (through both her father and her late mother Maria Teresa of Naples), Marie Louise was considered outstanding bride material. A union with Europe’s oldest reigning imperial family greatly appealed to Napoleon, along with Austria’s ambitious chancellor Clemens von Metternich. Not only would the match head off a dangerous alliance between France and Russia, Marie Louise could subdue the “Corsican usurper” and soften the punishing treaty he had just imposed on Austria.
Metternich’s plan was missing just one thing—the buy-in of the archduchess. Born in Vienna in December 1791, Marie Louise had grown up at war with France. When Napoleon defeated Austrian and Russian forces at Austerlitz, Austria was reduced to a quarter of its size and forced to pay a forty-million-franc indemnity. A year later, the mass exodus of princes from the German Imperial Confederation led to her father’s abdication as Holy Roman emperor. Austria’s latest rout at the hands of Napoleon forced Marie Louise and her family to flee Vienna for a second time.