by Susan Jaques
A large space in the north wing had functioned as another papal audience hall. Now it was repurposed as the Emperor’s Third Salon with decoration comparing Napoleon’s achievements with those of antiquity’s great commanders. Octagonal ceiling sections by Giani featured allegorical representations of four Virtues—Strength, Justice, Abundance, and Prudence. These alternated with en grisaille circular paintings of winged Victories riding chariots. Paul Duqueylar replaced the ceiling’s central papal coat of arms with an enormous painting, Trajan distributing the Scepters of Asia, an allegory for Napoleon distributing wreaths to his family members in Europe.
Below, Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen produced the remarkable Alexander Frieze. Three feet tall and nearly 115 feet long, the frieze depicted Alexander the Great’s triumphal entry into Babylon—an allusion to Napoleon’s upcoming triumphal entry into Rome. Thorvaldsen completed the frieze, considered among his masterpieces, in a record three months for the imperial couple’s planned visit.
Two rooms of Pope Paul V’s apartment became the Hall of the Emperor. Above the walls dedicated to Charlemagne, Ptolemy Philadelphus, and Pericles was Luigi Agricola’s ceiling painting Justinian Decrees the Pandects. A bas-relief stucco frieze, Carlo Finelli’s Triumph of Julius Caesar features carts filled with war booty, soldiers, and elephants. The frieze ended over the entrance with a sacrifice on ancient Rome’s sacred Capitoline Hill.22
The addition of two walled partitions in the Alexander VII Gallery formed three halls for Marie Louise’s apartment. Stern also bricked up thirteen courtyard-facing windows to create continuous wall space. A biblical cycle directed by Pietro da Cortona during Alexander’s pontificate was covered over by classical-themed works by Ingres and other artists.23 Marie Louise’s sitting room also boasted a series of ancient battles that included The Fight of the Thermopylae by Giacomo Conca, the Battle of the Trojans for the Body of Patroclus by David student José Madrazo, Horatius Cocles on the Bridge by Luigi Agricola, and Ingres’s frieze-like Romulus’ Victory over Acron.24
Ingres’s subject was drawn from Plutarch’s Life of Romulus. After the rape of the Sabines, several neighboring peoples attacked the Romans. Romulus killed Acron, King of the Caeninenses, and went to offer to Jupiter the arms of his enemy. In contrast to the controversial nude classical heroes of his teacher Jacques-Louis David, Ingres “turned the painting into a costume piece,” writes Susan Siegfried.25 To simulate fresco, Ingres executed the huge mythological scene in tempera. (In 1814, Ingres would paint a portrait of the Quirinale’s returning resident, Pope Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel.)
As Louis Godart describes, among the most beautiful paintings for Monte Cavallo are scenes in the empress’s apartment inspired by imagery from imperial iconography and Ovid’s Metamorphosis thought to be by Livorno artist Giuseppe Sforzi. The latter feature episodes with Mercury, Argus, Io, and Daedalus and Icarus.26 Also for the apartment, Albacini sculpted a white marble and green porphyry mantel piece with small black marble columns, and designed a floor incorporating fifteen mosaic panels with images of birds removed from Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli.27
Work proceeded at a feverish pace in anticipation of the imperial couple’s visit, rescheduled for summer 1813 when Napoleon was to stage a spectacular third coronation at St. Peter’s.28 On March 1812, lightning struck the entrance to the Quirinale. Many Romans considered this one of many omens of the impending apocalypse.29
Around this time, Antonio Canova left Rome to supervise the installation of his Venus Italica at the Uffizi Tribune in Florence. It had been nine years since he received the commission to replace the famous Medici Venus, purloined by Napoleon in 1802 from Palermo where it had been moved for safekeeping.
From the start, the project had been mired in politics. In June 1803, Louis I, king of Etruria, died. Four years later, his widow was forced to abdicate when France annexed Tuscany and Napoleon installed his sister Elisa Baciocchi as grand duchess. Not excited about paying for a public work commissioned by her predecessor, Elisa persuaded her brother to compensate Canova in 1812.
When Venus Italica arrived in Florence on April 29, it was displayed on the plinth of the Medici Venus. Canova arrived a few days later, insisting that another pedestal be found. In a May 9 letter to Cicognara, President of Venice’s Accademia, Canova wrote that the newly installed Venus had received a reception he would never have dared to expect.30
For the Florentines and the rest of Italy, it was worth the wait. “When I saw this divine work of Canova,” wrote poet Ugo Foscolo, “I sighed with a thousand desires, for really, if the Medici Venus is a most beautiful goddess, this is a most beautiful woman.”31
Napoleon’s ambition was to fold the various territories and countries of Europe into the First Empire, like Rome did with its extensive network of provinces. “One of my first grand ideas was the consolidation, the concentration of the same geographic peoples who were dispersed and fragmented by revolutions and politics. In Europe there are thirty million French, fifteen million Spaniards, fifteen million Italians, thirty million Germans, and twenty million Poles; I want to make of each one nation,” he declared.32
A month after the Grande Armée’s June 1807 victory at Friedland, Napoleon and Alexander I signed the Treaty of Tilsit. Though Russia escaped land concessions and reparations, under the terms of the treaty it was prohibited from trading with Britain. Russia did not comply, allowing English ships in its ports. This was all the excuse Napoleon needed to begin preparing for an invasion of Russia.
This time, Napoleon’s sycophantic courtiers spoke up, voicing serious concerns. Among them were his most loyal aides Berthier and Duroc, along with Caulaincourt, Dorosnel, Turenne, and Narbonne.33 But determined to enforce his Continental blockade and crush France’s global rival, Napoleon rejected their warning.
He had already defeated the Russians twice. The Grande Armée was twice as large as the Russian army. It was to be another quick campaign. In 1812 “some thought Napoleon would not stop with Russia,” writes David Markham. They believed the emperor would follow Alexander the Great’s footsteps and continue from Russia to India.34
In late May 1812, Napoleon hosted a magnificent “court of kings” in Dresden attended by the kings of Saxony, Prussia, and Westphalia, along with Austria’s Francis I. Throughout the dinners, plays, and concerts, Napoleon’s court upstaged the others. “The ladies of the Empress of Austria felt like Cinderellas compared to the glittering duchesses attending the Empress of the French,” writes Philip Mansel.35 A minor rivalry developed between Marie Louise and her stepmother, the Austrian empress. It was here in Dresden that Marie Louise met the charming Count Adam Albert von Neipperg, her future lover and husband.
On May 29, Napoleon left Dresden to take charge of Grande Armée. By June, the army was assembled in eastern Germany. Like the Roman legions that included conscripts from its vanquished enemies, the Grande Armée’s half-million-plus soldiers included conscripts from Prussia, Austria, and other defeated territories. With magnificent fanfare, Napoleon reviewed his troops on the west bank of the Niemen River on June 22. Reminiscent of Apollodorus’s bridge over the Danube for Trajan, Napoleon’s engineers built a pontoon bridge over the Niemen.
On June 24, while the ailing Pius VII was being secretly transferred to Fontainebleau, Napoleon led the Grande Armée across the river into Russian-controlled Poland. Four days later, his forces reached Vilnius, meeting no opposition from Russian troops. Around this time, Napoleon got word that Arthur Wellesley, Marquess of Wellington, and his Anglo-Portuguese army had advanced to Madrid.
Napoleon’s economic war on Britain was intended to force the nation to sue for peace. But the European blockade had drastic consequences on Britain’s trading partners like Portugal. After Napoleon occupied the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal revolted, giving Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, an entrée. In late July, Wellesley defeated French troops near Salamanca, Spain, a major supply depot. Now Napoleon sent reinforcement
s to trap the Anglo-Portuguese. Though Wellesley’s army would retreat to Portugal, the invasion of Spain’s capital did irreparable harm to Joseph Bonaparte’s shaky rule.
With Napoleon in Russia, Marie Louise had withdrawn to the privacy of Saint-Cloud. Napoleon instructed her to reassure the public by taking their young son for public strolls in his carriage. The empress celebrated August 15, her husband’s birthday and feast day of Saint Napoleon, by receiving the diplomatic corps at the Tuileries and attending a Te Deum at Notre Dame.36
On September 6, the day before the Battle of Borodino, Napoleon received a letter from his wife along with François Gérard’s new portrait of their son, The King of Rome sitting in his cradle. The proud emperor displayed the picture on a chair in front of his tent. As Leo Tolstoy describes in War and Peace, “He was a very pretty child with curly hair and eyes like those of Christ in the Sistine Madonna, and he had been portrayed playing cup and ball. The ball represented the earth and the stick in his other hand was meant as a sceptre.”37
The next day, the Grande Armée fought the Russians at Borodino, a village seventy miles west of Moscow. The bloodbath claimed seventy thousand lives and did not produce the decisive result Napoleon had sought. It was a Pyrrhic victory—named for Pyrrhus of Epirus whose army suffered irreplaceable losses while defeating the Romans at the Battles of Heraclea and Asculum in 280 and 279 B.C.E. Though the Russian army retreated, Napoleon’s forces like those of Pyrrhus were depleted and exhausted.
On September 14, French troops entered Moscow. Napoleon moved into the Kremlin, waiting for the civil authorities to present him with the keys to the city and Alexander to surrender. But the capital was eerily empty. By early October, Napoleon was still waiting for the tsar to sue for peace.
Pierre Duroc arranged to have a crate of artworks shipped to Paris and penned a letter to Vivant Denon, who had recently been named a Baron of the Empire. “Your presence would certainly have been necessary in Moscow to choose the historical monuments and treasures which should complete the numerous collections we possess in Paris,” wrote Duroc.38
A week later, all hell broke loose. A fire started in the Bazaar. There was no means to fight the flames, no pumps or hoses. Later that night, more fires erupted in the suburbs, believed to be the result of carelessness by soldiers. The following night fires raged across the north part of the city, spreading over the next few days. The Russians had set their capital on fire intentionally. With its numerous wood buildings, three-quarters of Moscow was destroyed.
Napoleon had placed Gérard’s portrait of his young son in his bedroom at the Kremlin. Now from the window, he watched his plans go up in flames.
Still hoping for the Russians to surrender, Napoleon wrote to Alexander. “My lord Brother. Beautiful, magical Moscow exists no more. How could you consign to destruction the loveliest city in the world, a city that has taken hundreds of years to build?” Alexander refused to negotiate, declaring that the burning of Moscow “illuminated his soul.”39
TWO
RETRENCHMENT
In mid-October, after thirty-five days at the Kremlin, Napoleon ordered his army to retreat from the capital. But the devastation continued. With winter approaching, food and supplies were running out. Freezing temperatures led to massive deaths from hypothermia and starvation. An outbreak of typhus killed 140,000 of his soldiers.
Napoleon’s adviser Armand de Caulaincourt described the epic human tragedy: “The cold was so intense that bivouacking was no longer supportable. One constantly found men who, overcome by the cold, had been forced to drop out and had fallen to the ground, too weak or too numb to stand. . . . Sleep comes inevitably, and to sleep is to die. I tried in vain to save a number of these unfortunates. The only words they uttered were to beg me, for the love of God, to go away and let them sleep.
“To hear them, one would have thought sleep was their salvation. Unhappily, it was a poor wretch’s last wish. But at least he ceased to suffer, without pain or agony. Gratitude, and even a smile, was imprinted on his discoloured lips. What I have related about the effects of extreme cold, and of this kind of death by freezing, is based on what I saw happen to thousands of individuals. The road was covered with their corpses.”1
When Napoleon reached Poland, he learned of an attempted coup d’état in his absence on October 23. After Napoleon’s accession to emperor, Brigadier General Claude François de Malet had resigned, becoming governor of Pavia, then Rome. An accusation of conspiracy by Eugène de Beauharnais led to his imprisonment. Now Malet and four other generals published a proclamation announcing Napoleon’s death in Russia and establishment of a provisional government:
“Citizens, Bonaparte is no more! The avengers of humanity have dealt a blow to the tyrant. . . . Let us work together on public regeneration, let us become imbued with this great endeavor . . . which in the eyes of Europe will cleanse the nation of the infamies committed by the tyrant.” The plot was thwarted by Paris’s military governor General Hulin. Malet and thirteen coconspirators were quickly arrested and court-martialed. By month’s end, they were executed by firing squad.2
Napoleon abandoned his dwindling army and rushed back to France, arriving in Paris on December 18. His first order of business was to rebuild his forces, decimated from battle, starvation, desertion, typhus, and suicide. The combat force had been reduced to less than ten thousand men. New conscripts included the elderly, the young, and semi-invalids, along with more soldiers from the Rhine Confederation and Italy. At the beginning of January, the Senate voted to allow sedentary troops to serve abroad, freeing up some 350,000 men.
On January 19, 1813, the issue of Pius VII came to a head. On their way back from hunting at Grosbois, Napoleon and Marie Louise stopped at Fontainebleau. Since the previous June, Pius had been held in the former Queen Mother’s apartment at the château. Napoleon saw an opportunity to break the isolated pontiff who had been without his advisers since his abduction on July 1809.
For six days, Napoleon coaxed and pressured the pope. On January 25, an exhausted Pius finally relented, signing a concordat entirely favorable to France. Pius ceded his temporal powers and condemned cardinals who had refused to acknowledge Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise. Napoleon also gained the authority to name all bishops in the empire except in Rome’s immediate vicinity.3 Pius thought the agreement was a draft for future discussion, but it was presented to the public as the “concordat of Fontainebleau” and published by the Moniteur officiel as the “law of the Empire.”4
Shortly after the signing of the agreement, Pius’s adviser Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca was released from the Fenestrelle fortress. In his memoirs, Pacca describes how he arrived at Fontainebleau to discover Pius seriously ill and so upset that he thought the pontiff would lose his mind. According to Pacca, Napoleon had grabbed the buttons on the pope’s soutane, like he did with officers who annoyed him. Pius told Pacca that the negotiations with Napoleon had begun as a comedy and would end as a tragedy.
“I knew the modest and easy character of the pope, who was brought down by the sufferings of a long captivity;” wrote Pacca. “I knew he was surrounded by people beholden to the Emperor, timid people and courtiers; I understood then that the fight between Gregoire Barnabé Chiaramonti and Napoleon Bonaparte would be unequal, and I foresaw which side would be the victor.”5
The concordat of Fontainebleau proved short-lived. On March 24, Pius, still in captivity, revoked his approval, repudiating the agreement.6
In addition to rebuilding the army, Napoleon busied himself with other projects—mining iron deposits, extracting salt from marshes, and road building. But frustration soon set in. Like Rome’s emperors, Napoleon paid for his public works from the spoils of war. As Tom Stammers writes, “The beautification of his capital was to be paid for not from state coffers, but from the indemnities extracted from defeated foreign powers, and so construction happened in fits and starts.”7 Of course, the calamitous invasion of Russia did not produce the anticipated spoils
. Napoleon found himself with no alternative but to abandon several pet projects.
Work stopped at his mega-palace for the king of Rome. Conceived as Napoleon’s most grandiose statement, the palace’s final proposal by Percier and Fontaine never went beyond sketches. By 1815, the palatial complex had shrunk to a garden pavilion.8 Like the Arc de Triomphe, work on Napoleon’s Temple to the Glory of the Grande Armée was also proceeding at a snail’s pace. In 1813, with only the foundations visible, Napoleon gave up on his original idea and downscaled the project to a church.
Despite his financial straits, Napoleon asked Fontaine and engineer Louis Bruyère to survey the public projects across Paris. Their 1813 status report, “Rapports sur les édifices publics de Paris faits par l’ordre de l’Empereur,” was divided by type: “abattoirs,” “barrières,” “bibliothèques,” and “boulevards” to “rues,” “théâtres,” and “temples.”9
Napoleon clung to one last monument. By imperial decree on February 9, 1810, he had ordered construction of a colossal fountain for eastern Paris at the Place de la Bastille, formerly occupied by the demolished fortress. The fountain was to take “. . . the form of an elephant in bronze from the melted canons of the Spanish insurgents; this elephant will carry a tower like those of the ancients; water will spring from its trunk. Measures will be taken so that this elephant will be finished and opened by December 2, 1811 at the latest,” (the anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation).10
Napoleon was not in Paris for the historic storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Though the ensuing Revolution and its aftermath would lead to his meteoric rise to power, Napoleon remained wary of mass protests and mobs. Simon Schama writes that the colossal elephant fountain on the historic site represented “the superiority of imperial conquest over chaotic insurrection.”11