The Caesar of Paris

by Susan Jaques

  Because of Desaix’s role in the Egyptian campaign, the monument featured a number of Egyptian motifs. Installed on a twenty-foot-tall pedestal by Jean-Baptiste Lepère and decorated with Egyptian symbols, the towering sixteen-foot monument depicted Desaix in the nude, his left arm outstretched toward a small red granite obelisk from Rome’s Villa Albani. By Desaix’s foot was a sculpted head wearing a nemes, the head cloth worn by Egypt’s pharaohs.

  The work was a rare miss for Denon. After an overwhelmingly negative response to the nude general, a wooden palisade was quickly added to cover the figure. Denon proposed replacing the unpopular work and small obelisk with the obelisk from Rome’s Piazza del Popolo. This was never done. Removed from the Place des Victoires in 1814, the offending bronze was repurposed during the Restoration for an equestrian statue of Henri IV at the Pont Neuf. Denon kept a thumb from the Desaix statue. In 1822, Louis XIV would return to the Place des Victoires with an equestrian statue by François Joseph Bosio.

  Napoleon’s immortalizing of France’s fallen marshals evoked the elogia of the great men of ancient Rome. With their legitimacy and rule closely connected to their military victories, emperors depended on the heroism of their legions and commanders.

  A new ideology developed during the Augustan era, explains Ida Östenberg, transforming funerals into triumphal expressions of worldwide hegemony. The fates of young soldiers were celebrated as heroic acts, performed for the good of the Empire.22 At the funerals of Roman VIPs, family members gave speeches commemorating the achievements of the deceased. Inscriptions permanently recorded the deeds of great men.

  Roman emperors tightly controlled the installation of monuments. Leading senators were honored with statues in prestigious civic spaces. During the Principate (the first two and a half centuries C.E.), about eighty honorific public monuments of senators were raised. The majority were uiri triumphales—men who had won military victories. Most were exhibited in the Forum of Augustus and Forum of Trajan.

  The Forum of Augustus celebrated the regime’s military victories. The vast complex was organized around the massive temple of Mars Ultor with a large statue of the emperor on a quadriga. Situating his reign in the context of Roman history, Augustus set up an elogia of Rome’s great men, including a tribute to the consul and praetor Marius.23

  In his biography of Augustus, Suetonius explains the emperor’s edict about the Forum: “In addition to the immortal gods, he [Augustus] honored the memory of the generals who had raised the power of the Roman people from small beginnings to greatness. Accordingly, he restored buildings of these men with their original inscriptions, and in the two colonnades of his forum dedicated statues of all of them in triumphal dress, declaring in an edict that he had built this so that citizens would require him, as long as he lived, and leaders of later ages as well, to attain the standard set by these men.”24

  Galleries of honorific statues adorned the square. The western side was devoted to ancestors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, from Caesar to Augustus and his heirs. The eastern side featured statues of great generals and officeholders of the republic next to contemporary senators who had won victories.25 “The Forum of Augustus was a machine for making Romans into followers of Mars,” writes Greg Woolf, “and it kept running long after Augustus.”26

  Trajan elaborated on the same themes in his even larger forum. Dedicated in 112 C.E. to celebrate his conquest of Dacia, Trajan’s Forum replaced the Forum of Augustus as the primary site for honorific statues of senators. The site was dominated by a massive equestrian statue of Trajan in military dress, and its famous spiraling column frieze narrating the Dacian conquests. As John Weisweiler writes, the message was that “after a century and a half of monarchical rule, the Empire still retained its ability to defeat, humiliate, and exterminate its enemies.”27

  By advertising heroic deeds and glorifying fallen commanders, both the Forum of Augustus and the Forum of Trajan were meant to inspire future generations. “. . . memory was a tool of statecraft, which made a crucial contribution to Roman political success,” writes Weisweiler.28 Interestingly, demonstrating respect for enemy commanders was regarded as a sign of leadership and morality. In the first Punic War, Consul Lucius Cornelius buried Carthaginian Hanno with a lavish funeral. Mark Antony treated Brutus’s body respectfully, wrapping it in his own scarlet cape and sending the cremated remains to the deceased’s mother. Caesar famously did not accept the head of his rival and former son-in-law Pompey.

  At his December 1804 coronation at Notre Dame, Napoleon remarked: “The candles that are lit in full daylight today once lit up the catacombs.”29 From the Latin catacumbas for recesses or holes, catacombs were built by early Roman Jews and Christians. With burial within the city walls forbidden, catacombs were dug in the soft volcanic tufa bedrock beneath Rome’s outskirts. During religious persecutions of the second century, the subterranean burials were conducted secretly. There are forty known underground catacombs in Rome, six of which are Jewish.30 Reaching up to sixty-five feet deep, these structures contain frescoes, inscriptions, and murals on the architectural supports.

  As Christianity grew in popularity, catacombs expanded with areas of the tunnels turned into shrines for martyrs. There may have originally been sixty to ninety miles of these underground passages with some three quarters of a million bodies housed in niched chambers.31 After Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 C.E., funerals moved above ground. By the fifth century, catacombs had become sacred sites for pilgrims.

  In the early ninth century, Rome’s catacombs were pillaged by Germanic invaders. As a result, relics of Christian martyrs and saints were moved from the catacombs to churches in the city center. Eventually, the underground burial tunnels were abandoned to be rediscovered during excavations in the seventeenth century. In 1634, antiquarian Antonio Bosio wrote about the ancient structures in Roma Sotterranea, or Underground Rome.

  In the time of Augustus, Romans developed an efficient tomb. There were large communal burial chambers for the freedmen of large households and of the imperial house. Usually subterranean rooms built in series, their walls featured hundreds of semicircular niches housing cinerary urns, sometimes portrait busts. Many were decorated with precious materials and a short inscription with the deceased’s name. Communal sepulchers became common, usually as tombs for a whole family or members of collegia. A Roman patronus was morally obligated to provide a burial space for his slaves and often for his freedmen. A burial chamber was reserved for his family; freedmen and slaves had simple graves in the antechamber or garden surrounding the mausoleum.32

  Around the second century, inhumation replaced cremation in Rome, leading to the creation of miles of underground cemeteries. Early Christians called these burial places coemeteria, or places of repose. Luxurious marble sarcophagi with carved reliefs often featured mythical scenes to evoke the virtues of the dead. Biographical sarcophagi depicted battles and important stages of a military commander’s life. Burial chamber walls were lavishly painted, ceilings stuccoed, and floors laid with mosaics. Reflecting the wealth of deceased, mausolea were adorned with statues and large tomb gardens. In contrast, the graves of the poor were marked with plain stele. The very poor were buried without markers or in mass graves in ground between the mausolea of the wealthy.33

  As Anthony Grafton describes, the term catacomb first appeared in 354 C.E. in reference to a coemeterium ad catacumbas, identified as the cemetery of St. Sebastian on the Via Appia Antica, two miles outside Rome’s Aurelian Wall. From this site, associated with the worship of saints Peter and Paul since the mid-third century, catacomb gradually came to refer to all underground cemeteries since the ninth century. Even after Constantine officially recognized Christianity, catacombs continued to be used. Their use declined in the fifth century; by the eighth century they had achieved cult status. Barbarian invaders of Rome raided the catacombs; their entrances became overgrown with vegetation during the Middle Ages34 (today, Rome’s catacombs are under Vatican control)
.

  Like Rome, Paris experienced dramatic changes in burial practice. In the late eighteenth century, a dangerous public health issue arose. Parisians had been buried inside parish churches and adjacent or nearby burial grounds. At Paris’s largest cemetery, Saints Innocents (today’s Forum Les Halles), decomposing human remains had pushed through the basement wall of a local restaurant. During the plague of 1418, some fifty thousand bodies were added to the cemetery. The risk of contagion and disease forced Louis XVI to close Saints Innocents.

  In 1786, bones from the city’s overcrowded cemeteries were transferred to the old Tombe-Issoire quarries on the left bank, and deposited in a new three-acre ossuary. In the first century C.E., the Gallo-Romans had built Lutetia with high quality limestone, known as “pierre de Paris” or Parisian stone. From the thirteenth century, open quarries along the Bièvre river were replaced by underground workings to supply vast quantities of stone for Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the city ramparts.35

  The quarry was named for Saracen giant Isouard who had threatened Paris during the Crusades. Now by torchlight, nightly processions of priests chanting the service for the dead accompanied the horse-drawn carts filled with bones, and covered with black veils. The remains included residents of ancient Lutetia, nuns from convent graves, lepers, and Protestant victims of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre and their Catholic assailants.

  The number of transferred skeletons was estimated to be ten times greater than the population of Paris.36 In memory of ancient Rome, supervisor Charles-Axel Guillaumot called his Paris ossuary the Catacombs. During the French Revolution, victims were buried directly in the Catacombs—from the Swiss Guards killed in the storming of the Tuileries and guillotined aristocrats to Robespierre, mastermind of the Terror. After being released from prison in 1794, Guillaumot continued as inspector of quarries and director of the Gobelins tapestry factory until his death in 1807. His own bones were later moved to his ossuary.37

  Quarries Inspector Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury succeeded Guillaumot. In addition to structural and ventilation improvements, the engineer dreamed up an imposing setting inspired by antiquity and the English Gothic novel. He carefully arranged long bones and skulls to form a back wall behind which other bones were piled.38 Bones were arranged in columns and courses, with walls of tibias, femurs, and skulls. In the middle of the area called the Crypt of the Passion, or the tibia rotunda, a supporting pillar was hidden by skulls and tibias sculpted into the shape of a barrel.39

  The Catacombs opened to the public on July 1, 1809. After descending a staircase some sixty-five feet, visitors were met at the tomb’s entrance with the Alexandrine verse: “Stop, this is death’s empire!” Grave inscriptions indicated the geographical origin of the remains; others featured moral maxims. Reminiscent of antiquity, white geometric shapes on a black background adorned stone masonry pillars.

  “I believed it was necessary to take special care in the conservation of this monument, considering the intimate rapport that will surely exist between the Catacombs and the events of the French Revolution; as a result of this work [the Catacombs] were repaired, their interior was restored, the ventilation system was improved, [and] bones were arranged with as much art as skill. Nothing was spared to make this monument worthy of public veneration,” wrote Héricart de Thury.40

  In 1810, to give the ossuary a more hopeful ambiance, de Thury added inspirational maxims. A devout Catholic, he flanked ancient texts with inscriptions confirming a Christian afterlife. The result, writes Erin-Marie Legacey, was a collection of reflections on death taken from the Bible, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca, and various French poets.41 That year, Alexis-François Artaud de Montor’s Voyage dans les catacombes de Rome created great enthusiasm for the Roman Catacombs in France.42 In 1815, Héricart de Thury published his own Description of the Paris catacombs. In addition to engravings, his book included “a historical record of the catacombs of all peoples of the old and new continents.”

  Early on, Napoleon looked to Roman precedents for a hygienic city. In June 1804, a month after being named emperor, he prohibited burial in churches, convents, and cemeteries within the walls of Paris. Like the Greeks and Romans, he ordered four necropolises on the outer edges of Paris: one to the north (Montmartre), one to the south (Montparnasse), one to the east on the Charonne hill (Père Lachaise), and one to the west (Passy). Construction of the small Passy Cemetery (in today’s 16th arrondissement near the Eiffel Tower) came later.

  Seine prefect Nicolas Frochot hired architect Alexandre-Theodore Brongniart to design the park-like Père Lachaise Cemetery. The chosen site, some thirty-four acres, was a former Jesuit property, the refuge of Louis XIV’s confessor Père François d’Aix de La Chaise.43 Brongniart’s plan included two long alleys of lime trees on the hillside and access to the realm of the dead symbolized by an Egyptian-style pyramid, an architectural form Napoleon especially liked.

  Père Lachaise Cemetery was a dramatic contrast to the macabre Paris Catacombs. Following the site’s natural contours, Brongniart added plantings and created paved walkways between graves. To protect the graves, he conceived an ambitious plan for a covered gallery preceded by a courtyard. The proposal was so impressive, the government reserved space for France’s national heroes. But the uniformity imposed for the tomb design was deemed unsuitable, and the administration returned to concessions.

  The first burial at Père Lachaise took place in May 1804, for a five-year-old girl. But Parisians were skeptical at first about being buried on a hill outside Paris. To build acceptance for the new cemetery, Napoleon had the remains of two prestigious figures transferred to Père Lachaise—Louise de Lorraine, widow of Henri III in 1806, followed by his naval commander Admiral Eustache Bruix, a recipient of the Grand Eagle of the Legion of Honor. Frochot convinced authorities to rebury Molière, La Fontaine, and the famous tweflth-century lovers Abélard and Héloïse at the cemetery in 1817.

  Alexandre Brongniart died in 1813 before he could finish the pyramid; fittingly he was buried at Père Lachaise. The cemetery soon became the final resting place for the Empire’s generals and marshals, politicians, scientists, artists, architects, and musicians. Not to mention Napoleon’s mistresses—Mesdemoiselles Bourgoin, Duchesnois, Georges, Mars, Madame Saqui (the tightrope walker), Pauline Fourès, Eléonore de la Plaigne, mother of his son the Comte Léon, and Marie Walewska, and mother of his second son Alexandre Walewski.44

  THREE

  MARS THE PEACEMAKER

  In April 1811, Napoleon hurried to the Musée Napoléon. After nine years, his highly anticipated sculpture had finally arrived from Rome. During his recent visit to Paris, Canova had chosen a spot for the statue alongside the museum’s most famous antiquities.1

  Art theorist Quatremère de Quincy commented on the dramatic shift in Napoleon’s attitude toward public monuments. “It is indeed curious to see the same man who, a few years before, had refused the honor of an honorary monument (because, he said, men owed it only to men after their death) to be sculpted in Rome as a colossal statue for Paris.”2

  The marble’s shipment unfolded like a covert military operation. To avoid being spotted by British spies in Rome, the crate containing the thirteen-ton statue was removed from Canova’s studio late at night the previous July. After traveling by barge along the Tiber to Ostia, the cargo continued by ship to Genoa, then on to Toulon, Lyon, and Paris. The sea route had its own risks. As a precaution against the statue being captured by the British fleet, Napoleon ordered the large crate positioned on the ship for easy jettison.3

  Napoleon had discussed the commission with Canova during his sittings at Saint-Cloud in 1802. While the sculptor molded his terra-cotta bust, the first consul had expressed his strong preference to be portrayed in his military uniform. But Canova insisted the figure be nude, believing it elevated the work from portraiture to what he considered the nobler genres of history and mythology.

  To neoclassicists like Canova the ideal body also represented spiritu
al perfection.4 Nudity, “when it is pure and adorned with exquisite beauty,” could appear “like a spiritual and intellectual thing” and raise “the spirit to the contemplation of the divine,” Canova wrote.5 He would also have been familiar with the many nude marbles of Roman emperors, including one of Augustus holding an orb and scepter.6

  Both Dominique-Vivant Denon and Ennio Quirinio Visconti had agreed with Canova, arguing that both the Greeks and Romans had produced timeless marbles of their heroes in the nude.7 A generation earlier, in the name of artistic freedom, an elderly Voltaire deferred to sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, who portrayed him in the nude. The resulting sculpture caused a scandal and great embarrassment for the philosopher. Despite his better judgment, Napoleon respected the renowned sculptor and his art advisors, reportedly saying: “No rule can be imposed on Genius.”8

  On January 1, 1803, Canova signed the contract for sixty thousand francs. At the time of the commission, Quatremère de Quincy weighed in, suggesting that his friend depict Napoleon as an equestrian Roman emperor in bronze—after Rome’s renowned Marcus Aurelius. But after exchanging ideas, Canova chose the mythological guise of Mars the peacemaker. It seemed an appropriate allegory at the time. After nine years of fighting, France and Britain had negotiated the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802. Napoleon and Pius had finally come to terms on the Concordat.

  There were many precedents for presenting Napoleon as Mars. In Roman antiquity, it was common to represent humans in the guise of divinities. The tradition continued during the Renaissance when, for example, Bronzino painted Andrea Doria as Neptune and Cosimo I de Medici as Orpheus, both in the nude.9 During Louis XIV’s reign, the same held true in paintings of the king and the French aristocracy.10

  According to Christopher Johns, “disguising” controversial subjects like Napoleon in mythological guises appealed to Canova both personally and professionally. It allowed him to avoid becoming “the cultural propagandist for any particular ideology.”11 Canova’s idea of depicting Napoleon in the guise of Mars may in fact go back to 1801 when Count Giovanni Battista Sommariva, art collector and president of the Cisalpine Republic, spoke with him about a sculpture of the “Man of Destiny” for a Bonaparte Forum in Milan.12 Shortly after, Napoleon invited Canova to Paris to sculpt his portrait bust.