by Susan Jaques
One year later, in March 1812, Napoleon declared another estate the official “palace of the King of Rome.” Located some thirty miles southwest of Paris, the Château de Rambouillet was built in 1784 by Louis XVI as a government meeting place. An avid hunter, Louis had admired the estate with its game-rich grounds and beautiful gardens. In late 1783, he bought the medieval château from his cousin, the duke of Penthièvre, for sixteen million French livres. When his wife Marie Antoinette first saw the new royal residence, she reportedly called it a “gothic swamp.” Louis redid a luxe apartment for her, richly furnished and decorated with the latest styles.53
Deserted after the Revolution, Rambouillet fell into disrepair. In 1804, Napoleon visited for the first time and added the estate to the civil imperial list. Napoleon loved Rambouillet’s informality; he would spend about sixty days here during his reign, ranging from a few hours to several days per visit. In August 1806, Napoleon hired architect Auguste Famin to renovate the building. A winner of the Prix de Rome, Famin had studied the Academie Française in Rome from 1801 to 1806.
Famin knocked down one wing of the main building, giving the château a unique appearance. He redesigned the entrance with a new staircase leading to the empress’s apartments on one side and the emperor’s on the other. The rooms were redecorated in sumptuous Empire style, including Marie Antoinette’s small courtyard-side apartment. A luxurious bathroom was installed in Napoleon’s apartment. Godard’s neoclassical décor featured ancient motifs like Glories, Apollo’s lyre, a frieze of triglyphs and metopes, cornucopias, and various mythological creatures. Symbols of the Empire were also thrown in, from an N and an eagle surrounded by a laurel wreath to bees and the cross of the Legion of Honor.54
Originally the bathroom sported medallions with portraits of the imperial family. Deeming this inappropriate, Napoleon had Jean Vasserot change the design. The artist replaced the portrait medallions with painted views of places, châteaux, and monuments associated with particular family members.55
TWO
IN MEMORIUM
The Eaglet’s birth heightened the importance of a dynastic imperial crypt. Five years earlier, in February 1806, Napoleon had decreed that France’s former royal necropolis, Saint Denis, would be the final resting place for himself and his descendants.
According to nineteenth-century architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Napoleon chose Saint Denis for its royal pedigree. “At Saint Denis he intended to restore the representations of the principal personages of the dynasties before his own. His orders were in accordance with this desire; in the curious archives of Saint Denis, there are still plans dating from 1811 on which are marked indications such as these: Chapel of the Merovingians, Pillar of Charlemagne, Altar of the Dynasties, Chapels of the Valois Charles, etc.”1
Napoleon’s concern for an imperial crypt was very much in the tradition of Rome’s first- and second-century emperors. Between 28 B.C.E. and 193 C.E., seven of Rome’s eighteen emperors built funerary monuments while others were interred in dynastic sepulchers. Others had their bodies mutilated and thrown into the Tiber by decree of the Senate. According to Penelope Davies, the stakes were high for Rome’s imperial families. “For the ruling family . . . the future of the living was dependent, to a large degree, upon the honors (or lack thereof) bestowed upon the dead.”2
In choosing the locations for their mausoleums, Rome’s emperors sought high-impact real estate, explains David Rollason. For his final resting place, Augustus selected the Field of Mars, the city’s high-traffic entry where triumphs began and military exercises took place.3 Augustus broke ground on his mausoleum early in his reign, completing it over two decades before his death in 14 C.E. A “great mound near the river on a lofty foundation of white marble” is how Greek geographer Strabo described the structure that featured five concentric walls surrounding a soaring rectangular travertine pillar. Augustus’s nephew Marcellus was the first to be buried in the vast mausoleum in 23 B.C.E. Other relatives who predeceased Augustus were also buried in the mausoleum, along with his Julio-Claudian successors Tiberius and Claudius (probably), and the first Flavian emperor, Vespasian.4
Inscribed on pillars outside the entrance to the mausoleum was a copy of Augustus’s Res Gestae (Things Achieved) listing his honors, victories, and personal spending for the public good. Flanking the pillars was a pair of small red granite obelisks.5 The mausoleum was part of a complex in the Campus Martius that also included the Ara Pacis Augustae and Solarium. Augustus’s message, writes Rollason, “. . . was first and foremost that of the majesty and grandeur of the emperor—and also of his family, members of which were also to be buried there. . . .”6
A century later, during a building spree that included the Pantheon and his villa at Tivoli, Hadrian began constructing his mausoleum on the west bank of the Tiber. The enviable location was made even more striking by the addition of its own bridge.7 Dedicated in 139, a year after Hadrian’s death, the massive mausoleum was crowned with a bronze statue of the triumphant Hadrian driving a quadriga. Known as the Antinoeion, it became the resting place for Antonines and Severans.8 By the sixth century, Hadrian’s mausoleum was incorporated into the city’s defenses. In the thirteenth century, the popes turned the funerary monument into a fortress, Castel Sant’Angelo, connecting it to the Vatican with a corridor.
Napoleon’s mausoleum choice, Saint Denis, had roots going back to Roman Paris. Located some ten miles north of the city, the abbey was named for France’s patron saint, the first bishop of Lutetia. Saint Denis became a royal necropolis under the Capetians. During the ensuing Merovingian dynasty, it was designated a basilica—an early Christian church with a three-nave floor plan like those of the civic buildings of ancient Rome. For three centuries starting with early tweflth-century Louis VI, “the Fat,” France’s kings carried the abbey’s sacred red oriflamme banner into battle. Named for aurea flamma, the banner (flamma) and the color of the lance, the oriflamme was destroyed during the Revolution.9
In the tweflth century, Abbot Suger, adviser to Louis VI and Louis VII, rebuilt the abbey in “three years, three months, three days.” With its light-flooded apse displaying the relics of saints and spectacular stained glass windows, the early Gothic-style church became a favorite pilgrimage site. Among the stained glass designs was the South Rose window, over forty-five feet in diameter, depicting God surrounded by angels, signs of the Zodiac, and agricultural tasks carried out during the year.
Thanks to Suger, the Saint Denis treasury was one of the finest of medieval Europe. A cross nearly twenty-three feet tall bearing a gilded silver Christ stood at the entrance of today’s choir. Relics and liturgical objects bequeathed by abbots and kings adorned the chapels. Among these was the pear-shaped rock crystal “Eleanor” vase, carved in the type of honeycombed pattern used in Roman glassware, gold, and silverware. A gift to Suger from Louis VII, the vase had been passed down from his wife Eleanor’s grandfather, William IX of Aquitaine. Suger also had an antique porphyry vase placed in a vermeil setting in the shape of an eagle. These along with many of Saint Denis’s other treasures, including Charlemagne’s sword used for Napoleon’s coronation, landed at the Musée Napoléon after the Revolution.
Napoleon’s plan to transform historic Saint Denis into an imperial crypt presented a major challenge. In mid-1792, to celebrate the anniversary of the overthrow of the Bourbons, France’s National Convention ordered the “tombs and mausoleums of the former kings destroyed.” Along with the trials and executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the government conducted official exhumations.
Workers opened the royal coffins at Saint Denis with pickaxes and crowbars, took out the bodies, and dumped them in two large pits in a cemetery north of the basilica. Metal objects and lead coffins were repurposed to make military arms. Henri IV’s open coffin was propped up against a pillar in the ambulatory of the crypt for two days, displaying his well-preserved remains. Louis XIV’s features were black, probably due to the gangrene that killed him at age
seventy-six. Louis XV’s linen-wrapped body reportedly dissolved in “liquid putrefaction” when lifted out of the coffin.10
Severely damaged with only the basilica left standing, the prestigious Gothic structure was turned into a warehouse. “Saint Denis is deserted,” wrote French politician and historian François-René de Chateaubriand. “Birds fly in and out, grass grows on its smashed altars and all one can hear is the dripping of water through its open roof.”11 Thanks to the Commission of Monuments, many of Saint Denis’s tombs and monuments escaped destruction. In 1795, Alexandre Lenoir displayed the funerary sculptures at the new Musée national des Monuments Français located in the nationalized convent of the Petits-Augustins in Paris.
On Napoleon’s orders, the Ministry of Interior made emergency repairs to the basilica in 1806. These included a roof repair, new floor, and clearing the crypts and vaults. Following these renovations, religious service was reestablished. The following June, while meeting Russia’s Alexander I in Tilsit, Napoleon learned that his four-year-old nephew Napoleon Charles Bonaparte had died of croup at The Hague. The eldest son of Holland’s Louis I and Hortense de Beauharnais, the young boy was his putative heir. The emperor wrote to arch-chancellor Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès to speed up work at Saint Denis. Until the imperial vault could be finished, his nephew’s body was placed in a chapel in Notre Dame.
Napoleon’s restoration of Saint Denis required an understanding of the Gothic architecture and a revival of forgotten techniques in sculpture, mural painting, stained glass, and ceramics.12 Jacques Legrand was the first in a series of architects to work on the restoration. After Legrand’s death in 1807, neoclassical architect Jacques Cellerier took over. Cellerier, whose prior experience including work on the gothic Saint-Médard Church in Tremblay-en-France, installed a series of pillars, raised the floor of the structure, and tiled the sanctuary and choir with colored marble. Cellerier also changed the crypt entrance, making the vaults accessible through the transept. He started building a small neoclassical chapel, or sacristy, on the southern side of the nave known as the canons’ choir.
To decorate Cellerier’s sacristy, Vivant Denon commissioned a series of ten paintings by ten artists. Napoleon now found it politically advantageous to tie himself to two of France’s greatest kings, François I and Henri IV. The subjects in the series celebrated the early history of Saint Denis and great moments of the French monarchy since Dagobert, the first king of France buried at Saint Denis.13 By focusing on France’s early dynasties, the goal was to erase the memory of the recent vandalism and the deposed Bourbons.14
For the prestigious commission, Denon chose several of Jacques-Louis David’s favorite students—Antoine-Jean Gros, Rome-born François Gérard, and Anne-Louis Girodet. Gros’s Francis I Receiving Charles V at Saint Denis (1810, now in the Louvre) depicts Charles V and the French king inside Saint Denis flanked by the Dauphin Henri and his younger brother Charles d’Orleans, along with courtiers dressed in grand style like that of Napoleon’s court. In late 1539, François made peace with the Habsburg emperor by inviting him into his kingdom to crush an uprising in Ghent. Gros’s painting, explains David O’Brien, was a clear allusion to Napoleon’s reconciliation with his father-in-law, Habsburg emperor Francis II, and likened him to the founder of France’s Valois dynasty.15 The detailed painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1812 before being hung at Saint Denis.
To mark Saint Denis’ rededication, Napoleon had the names of France’s kings engraved on bronze tables at the abbey in 1811. But he did not reinstall their funerary monuments or move their remains from the mass graves.
During the desecration of the royal necropolis at Saint Denis, only one corpse escaped the mass graves. Marshal General Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne, served Louis XIV for five decades. In line with his motto “Few sieges and many combats,” Turenne defeated a series of enemies, including the prince of Condé, the Spanish, Dutch, and Holy Roman Empire. Fatally wounded by a cannonball in 1675, the beloved commander was buried in a small crypt at Saint Denis near the Bourbon kings.
“It is very rare under a monarchy where men pursue only their selfish interest,” wrote Voltaire, “that those who served the fatherland die mourned by the public; nonetheless, soldiers and the people mourned Turenne.”16 A British biographer compared Turenne’s modest comportment to “a hero of antient [sic] Rome who never distinguished himself by outward pomp.”17
Rather than dumped with the French royals into the mass grave at Saint Denis in 1793, Turenne’s well-preserved body was displayed in the small sacristy before being moved to the Jardin des Plantes’s Museum of Natural History. But the setting was widely seen as disrespectful for the body of a French national hero. In 1799, Turenne’s remains were moved to Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français. One of Napoleon’s early acts as first consul in 1800 was to reunite the military hero’s remains with his monumental tomb beneath the dome of the Church of Invalides, renamed the Temple of Mars.
In acknowledgement of Turenne’s heroism and service, Louis XIV had ordered his general buried at Saint Denis among France’s kings. Louis also commissioned a grandiose funerary monument for Turenne in the Church of Invalides, part of his vast Hôtel des Invalides built to house and care for France’s wounded war veterans. Like the façades of its buildings, the domed soldier’s church had a military appearance. The three-nave, nine-bay baroque chapel was decorated to glorify the Sun King and his army.
Designed by Charles Le Brun and sculpted by Jean-Baptiste Tuby and Gaspard Marsy, Turenne’s monument took four years to complete. In the central scene, the general’s antique-style effigy lies in the arms of Glory, with a pyramid of immortality behind. Female personifications of Religion/Liberality and Valor/Wisdom flank the sarcophagus decorated with a bronze relief of the general’s victory at the battle of Turckheim in Alsace.18
Napoleon staged an elaborate funeral for Turenne, turning the Invalides into a military pantheon. Turenne’s sarcophagus was topped by his sword and fatal cannonball. The monument would be the touchstone for warriors of all generations, declared War Minister Lazare Carnot. In his speech, Lucien Bonaparte focused on France’s destiny: “Might one say that the two centuries meet at the moment and join hands over this august tomb? . . . He who was great then is so today, the living heroes and illustrious dead unite in the same place to celebrate the great day when France changed laws without interrupting the course of its great destiny.”19
Also scattered during the Revolution were the remains of another marshal of France. The foremost military engineer during Louis XIV’s reign, Vauban designed fortifications and made France’s borders more defensible. When Vauban’s heart was discovered in 1808, Napoleon ordered it moved to a mausoleum opposite Turenne’s monument at Invalides.
Throughout his career, Napoleon sought to fashion his image after Turenne—that of a commander beloved by his soldiers. Declaring that Turenne’s genius grew bolder as it grew older, Napoleon recommended his soldiers “read and reread” the general’s campaigns. Like Augustus, Napoleon had to tread carefully between republicanism and monarchy. Having just fought a revolution to overthrow its monarchs, the French did not want another king. As self-proclaimed emperor, Napoleon needed to keep up the appearance of continuing France’s hard-won republican ideals. Much like the Roman emperors, Napoleon exploited his image as France’s great military leader, entrusting command to men of bravery.
In an echo of Louis XIV’s tribute to Turenne, Napoleon honored his loyal commander Desaix with a tomb and commemorative monuments. Napoleon referred to Desaix as his Hephaestion, Alexander the Great’s best friend. In 323 B.C.E., Alexander honored Hephaestion with a costly cremation, adding gold ingots, jewels, rare spices, and ivory to the pyre. On June 14, 1800, thirty-one-year-old Desaix was leading a counterattack against the Austrians at Marengo when he was shot in the heart.
Vivant Denon had followed Desaix and his troops as they chased Mameluke leader Mourad Bey through Upper Egyp
t. Now Napoleon put Denon in charge of identifying Desaix’s corpse in the sacristy of the convent San-Angelo in Milan and arranging his funeral. Desaix was buried in 1805 in the presence of Berthier. Napoleon ordered a tomb for the Church of the Hospice of the Great Saint Bernard Pass. Designed by Jean-Guillaume Moitte and installed in 1806, the memorial featured Desaix’s heroic death scene and allegories. As Suzanne Glover Lindsay observes, Napoleon directed the tomb from start to finish, marking the “first consul as the fledgling sovereign that he was becoming, intent on extending and advertising his powers.”20
After a juried competition, a Paris fountain in Desaix’s honor was sculpted by Augustin Félix Fortin after a design by Charles Percier. Erected in 1801 on Place Dauphine, the fountain featured a circular basin below a bust of the general being handed a sword and crowned with a laurel wreath by an allegorical warrior (in 1872, the square was enlarged and the fountain later transferred to the Place Desaix in Riom, near his birthplace).
A few months after Desaix’s death, Napoleon also laid the foundation stone at the Place des Victoires in Paris for an Egyptian temple to honor Desaix, known as the “Just Sultan” from the Egyptian campaign, and General Jean-Baptiste Kléber who was killed around the same time in Cairo. The monument replaced a bronze statue of Louis XIV by Martin Desjardins, destroyed during the Revolution. But the proposed monument overwhelmed the square and was never executed.
As first consul, Napoleon decided to build a monument in the same location, but this time dedicated only to Desaix. In June 1806, Napoleon greenlighted the statue, approving the following year twenty thousand kilograms of bronze melted down from mortars captured during the recent Prussian campaign.21 Denon chose Claude Dejoux for the commission that debuted on August 15, 1810, the feast day of Saint Napoleon.