by Susan Jaques
Not surprisingly, rivals Dominique-Vivant Denon and Pierre Fontaine took opposing sides on the exotic-themed fountain. Denon embraced the idea. In a July 1810 letter to the new interior minister Joseph Fouché, he wrote: “Believe, I beg you, my lord, that in this operation, as in all those which His Majesty has deigned to entrust to me, I will bring the most severe economy of public money and that my care will equal my zeal so that this monument is worthy of the time.”12
Fontaine expressed his strong disapproval directly to Napoleon: “Sir, I’ve already been consulted on this project. And I’ve already criticized the idea of elevating on the pedestal a monstrous image of an elephant and to make it the subject of a fountain. I could never really visualize what effect this enormous mass will produce. A monument of an elephant will always be for the intellectuals a grand subject of criticism to which reason will have a hard time rationalizing.”13 In the end, Napoleon ignored Fontaine and proceeded with the grandiose project.
The idea for an elephant fountain first surfaced in an October 1808 note from Napoleon to his former interior minister Emmanuel Crétet requesting drawings and a cost estimate. A symbol of wisdom, strength, and longevity, the elephant was among the potential emblems proposed for the new French Empire in 1804. Napoleon’s choice of an elephant fountain was a conscious effort to further associate his rule with antiquity when elephants were “status symbols of ancient warfare.”14
In a nod to antiquity, Alexander VII commissioned Bernini’s Elephant and Obelisk for Rome’s Piazza della Minerva by the Pantheon. Unveiled shortly after the pope’s death in 1667, the monument features an elephant carrying an Egyptian obelisk from Sais (discovered in 1655). Bernini grudgingly added a support beneath the elephant, causing it to be nicknamed “Procino della Minerva,” or Minerva’s Piggy, due to its heavy appearance. As William Heckscher describes, Bernini was inspired by Francesco Colonna’s popular 1499 novel Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream in which the protagonist meets a stone elephant carrying an obelisk.15
During his 1806 occupation of Berlin, Napoleon saw an elephant motif on a clock in Frederick the Great’s cabinet. He would also have been familiar with elephant depictions at Fontainebleau. The Royal Elephant by Rosso Fiorentino is part of a fresco cycle in the François I Gallery (renamed the Emperor’s Gallery in 1805). An allegorical portrait of François, the white elephant wears a shield on its forehead adorned with the king’s emblem, a salamander. An elephant also appears woven in the Triumph of Mars tapestry in the château’s Great Salon.16
For Napoleon, who considered himself successor of Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Hannibal, the image of an elephant was especially appealing. In addition to hauling military supplies, pachyderms were the army tanks of antiquity, causing terror on the battlefield. Pliny the Elder, who penned thirteen chapters on elephants in Natural History, wrote that “male elephants when broken in serve in battle and carry castles manned with armed warriors on their backs; they are the most important factor in eastern warfare, scattering the ranks before them and trampling armed soldiers underfoot.”17
Alexander the Great assembled his own elephant corps and installed a group of elephants to guard his palace in Babylon.18 Commemorative silver decadrachms minted in Babylon portray the warrior-king in his final battle, attacking Indian king Poros on an elephant. After Alexander’s premature death, the vehicle carrying his body sported a painting featuring elephants. Ptolemy Philadelphus minted gold and silver coins depicting Alexander wearing an “elephant-scalp” headdress along with gold staters depicting a deified Alexander driving a chariot drawn by four elephants.19 Elephants were taken from India until Ptolemy discovered the smaller forest species from northern Africa. After training, the captured animals were shipped up the Red Sea to Egypt on a new fleet of “elephant carriers.”20
Around 218 B.C.E., Carthaginian general Hannibal led some three dozen elephants (along with one hundred thousand men) across the Alps into Italy where he used the animals with little success against the Romans.21 Pachyderms could be unreliable. In 202 B.C.E., when Hannibal tried breaking the Roman’s diamond-shaped formation with eighty elephants at Zama, Carthage (modern Tunisia), Scipio ordered trumpets sounded to confuse the animals. The animals abruptly turned on the Carthaginians; Scipio returned to Rome with many of his enemy’s elephants.22
During Rome’s civil war, Metellus Scipio assembled elephants to face Julius Caesar in 46 B.C.E. at Thapsus (modern Tunisia). Before the animals could charge, Caesar ordered his infantry to attack the elephants, causing them to panic and retreat through their own lines.23 Among the coins Julius Caesar issued was the silver “elephant denarius” produced in huge numbers to reward his legions. The obverse featured images of priestly symbols related to Caesar’s religious title pontifex maximus; the reverse pictured an elephant trampling a snake with the legend “Caesar.”24 According to Debra Nousek, Caesar’s choice of an elephant for his coinage may have been a politically motivated attack on his rivals who had also used this iconography.25
Because Alexander the Great was associated with the elephant, many of his successors used the animal’s image to assert their connection to the illustrious commander. Elephants decorated Hellenistic coins in a number of forms—driving a quadriga, a head in profile, and standing or walking. The elephant headdress was worn by the personification of “Africa” on the coins of some Roman emperors, including Hadrian and Septimius Severus.26
In addition to their combat role, elephants participated in Rome’s triumphal processions. Pompey even tried to ride into Rome on an elephant quadriga. This proved less than heroic when the pachyderms got stuck in the city gate. Romans made the long-lived elephant a symbol of eternity.27
To design Napoleon’s elephant fountain, Denon chose architect Jacques Cellerier. The first stone was laid on December 2, 1808, the fourth anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation. By 1810, work was proceeding on the ground works, with the vaults and underground pipes and main pool completed by 1812. But busy with the restoration of Saint Denis, Cellerier delegated the fountain project to Jean-Antoine Alavoine with whom he had worked on a new Théâtre des Variétés in 1807.
Napoleon did not like Alavoine’s early plans, deeming them too simple. He was after something grander, a monument to evoke the exoticism of Asia and the Orient. Napoleon wrote his interior minister reminding him that the elephant for the Bastille fountain should resemble the war elephants of antiquity. He also wanted the bronze elephant to bear a tower, like the elephants of antiquity who carried soldiers inside towers strapped to their backs.
Alavoine went back to the drawing board, producing a series of variations for the three-story bronze elephant. To please Napoleon, he adorned the elephant with drapery and ornaments. He experimented by topping the elephant with a tower, or howdah, and a throne. In one drawing, a Greek warrior stood atop the elephant, holding a round shield in one hand, aiming a spear with the other. Another sketch featured a turbaned dignitary offering a sword as a gift, perhaps a reference to the 1807 visit of the Shah of Persia’s ambassador who offered Napoleon the sabers of Tamerlane and Shah Thamas Kuli-Khan.28 Alavoine also sketched various mythological gods for the base, along with multiple water effects.
In Alavoine’s final model from 1812, the fountain measured about fifty-two feet in length and forty-nine feet in height (seventy-eight feet including the pedestal). The medieval crenelated tower atop the elephant’s back and the animals’ folds of drapery and harness were all to be made of gilded bronze. On its forehead, the elephant sported an ornament with a sun, symbol of the east. This detail may have been a reference to Alexander the Great, who after defeating Poror at Hydaspe, consecrated the elephant he rode to the sun.29 A stairway inside the elephant led up to an observation platform on its back.
On his return from the Russian campaign, Napoleon visited the construction site at the Place de Bastille in 1813. An estimated 177 tons of bronze was needed to cast the enormous elephant. With insufficient Spanish cannon, it would be necessar
y to supplement the material with cannons from Friedland. Almost two years behind schedule, with only the water basin finished, the project’s slow progress angered Napoleon. When the emperor complained that there were not enough workers at the site, the contractor replied that workers had all been conscripted to the army. Napoleon ordered that all available workers be hired for the project, declaring, “It is precisely the old workers who are most in need of work.”30
Alavoine recruited Pierre-Charles Bridan to create a full-size model using plaster over a wooden frame. Installed in 1814, the seventy-eight-foot-tall model was watched by a guard named Levasseur who lived in one of the elephant’s legs.
Napoleon’s defeat in Russia damaged his invincible reputation and weakened French hegemony across Europe. Emboldened by the disastrous Russia campaign, Prussia and Austria broke their tense alliances with France, joining Russia, England, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and a number of German states to form the Sixth Coalition.
By the end of March, Napoleon ordered the movement of some two hundred thousand troops toward the Elbe. By April, the force was concentrated in the angle formed by the Elbe and Saale, threatening Berlin and Dresden. In April, the Senate agreed to mobilize the half-trained members of the National Guard, which Napoleon had created for home defense.
In May 1813, Napoleon was visiting the 1632 battlefield at Lützen in Saxony. Part of the Thirty Years’ War, the battle was a victory for the Protestants, but took the life of Sweden’s Protestant king Gustav II Adolph. Standing near the Gustav Adolphus Monument, Napoleon was pointing out the various sites to his staff and describing the events when he heard the sound of cannon. Rallying his troops, he led his own Battle of Lützen. Leaving the leading troops to fight the combined Russian and Prussian forces, Napoleon organized a reserve force. When both sides were exhausted, he sent some one hundred guns forward and marched his reserve through the gap.
During the battle Napoleon reportedly told his troops: “Remember, gentlemen, what a Roman emperor said: ‘The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet.’” This was probably not the most propitious emperor to be quoting. The author, Vitellius, was one of Rome’s most cruel emperors, the last of Nero’s three successors. Declared emperor by his legions in Germany at the start of 69 C.E., Vitellius went on to defeat Galba and Otho before marching into Rome in April. In Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Suetonias reports: “When he [Vitellius] came to the plains where the battle was fought and some shuddered with horror at the mouldering corpses, he had the audacity to encourage them by the abominable saying, that the odour of a dead enemy was sweet and that of a fellow-citizen sweeter still.”31
According to Suetonias, the gluttonous Vitellius gouged on four feasts a day and drank so much that his cheeks were always red. On one large platter “he mingled the livers of pike, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingoes and the milt of lampreys, brought by his captains and triremes from the whole empire, from Parthia to the Spanish strait.”32 After eight months, Vitellius was murdered in especially gruesome fashion by Vespasian’s forces. With his arms tied behind back, Vitellius was dragged to the Forum, tortured and pelted with dung, dragged off with a hook, and tossed into the Tiber. In the nineteenth century, the French Academy sponsored a contest for the Prix de Rome with submissions on Vitellius’s grisly death scene.
The Peninsular War in Spain raged on. In June 1813, the armies of Great Britain, Portugal, and Spain defeated the French force led by Joseph Bonaparte at the Battle of Vitoria, south of Bilbao. With Wellington advancing toward the Pyrenees and the Franco-Spanish border, the French were forced to abandon Andalusia. By early July, Napoleon was in Dresden to negotiate for peace, with Austria mediating. When none of the parties would negotiate, Napoleon became convinced of Metternich’s duplicity.
“I saw Metternich and he seemed to me to be running many intrigues, much misrepresenting Papa Franz,” he wrote Marie Louise. “The Emperor has been deceived by Metternich, who had sold his soul to the Russians; furthermore, he is a man who thinks that politics is a question of lying.”33
Against his nature, Napoleon had to wait for the Allies’ next moves. That summer, he wrote detailed instructions to ready the Grande Armée. In addition to arms, clothing, and food, the army had an urgent need for some thirty thousand horses, saddles, and harnesses. On August 9, Austria declared war. In anticipation of large battles, the October 9 sénatus-consulte signed by the empress called up 280,000 new recruits, known as “Marie Louise men.”
Just as this was happening, the Allied armies with a combined 325,000 soldiers were converging on Leipzig, Saxony, where they hoped to trap Napoleon’s force of two hundred thousand men.34 On the eve of the Battle of Leipzig, also known as the Battle of the Nations, Napoleon said: “Between a battle lost and a battle won, the distance is immense and there stand empires.”35 The following day, Napoleon distributed eagles and colors to three battalions. As each standard was unfurled and given to the officers, Napoleon addressed the troops:
“Soldiers of the 26th regiment of light infantry, I entrust you with the French eagle. It will be your rallying point. You swear to abandon it but with life? You swear never to suffer an insult to France. You swear to prefer death to dishonor. You swear!” With their swords raised, soldiers and officers responded “We swear!”36
Napoleon’s rousing speech echoed that in Paris nine years earlier. As France’s newly crowned emperor, he had distributed eagle standards to regiments of various departments based on the Aquila of the Roman legions. There, too, his men swore to defend the standards with their lives. In The Distribution of the Eagle Standards (1810), Jacques-Louis David depicted Napoleon blessing the standards. Like the adlocutio of Rome’s emperors portrayed in ancient sculpture and coins, Napoleon is shown with his right arm raised, about to address his troops. Because of his impending divorce, Napoleon instructed David to remove Joséphine from the canvas.
During Rome’s battles, it was sometimes necessary to conceal the eagle standards. A standard-bearer in Julius Caesar’s legions recorded that in times of danger, he pulled off the eagle and hid it in the folds of his girdle. A wounded or dying standard-bearer was supposed to get the standard to his general. Rome went to great lengths to reclaim its standards. The central relief on the cuirass of the famous statue of Augustus of Prima Porta shows the return of the eagles lost to the Parthians decades earlier. Securing their return was among Augustus’s greatest diplomatic feats.
After three days of combat, Napoleon gave the order to retreat on October 19. Some 47,000 men were lost and another 38,000 captured, making Leipzig statistically the worst defeat of Napoleon’s career.37 During the 1813 campaign, thirty-three generals, as well as Marshals Bessières and Poniatowski, were also killed.38
Between September 27 and October 14, Napoleon hosted a summit with Alexander I and various German sovereigns at Erfurt in central Germany. Intense negotiations took place during daily meetings between Napoleon and Alexander. Arriving a day before Napoleon, Talleyrand told the tsar, “Sire, what have you come to do here? It is up to you to save Europe and you will only succeed by standing up to Napoleon. The French people is civilised, its ruler is not; the ruler of Russia is civilised, his people is not. It is thus up to the Russian ruler to be the ally of the French people.”39 At Erfurt, Joachim Murat also betrayed his brother-in-law, making a secret deal with the Allies in exchange for a guarantee of his Naples throne.
Back in Paris, Napoleon issued an emergency levy to muster 120,000 recruits. With the treasury depleted, there was a real concern about the war ministry continuing to function. Toward this end, Napoleon doubled the taxes on tobacco, postage, and salt, and suspended payment of pensions and salaries.40 Without sufficient forces in Spain, Napoleon was forced to release Ferdinand VII and restore him to the Spanish throne. He held Joseph responsible. “All the nonsense that takes place in Spain comes from my misguided complacency for the King who is not only incapable of commanding an army, but does not even know how to deliver just
ice and leave the command to the military,” he wrote General Henri Jacques Guillaume Clarke on July 1, 1813.
Along with his exiled court and sister-in-law Catherine of Westphalia, Joseph was now under house arrest at Mortefontaine in Oise, northern France. In happier days, the castle had hosted the weddings of Caroline and Joachim Murat and Camillo Borghese and Pauline Bonaparte. Ever the matchmaker, Napoleon proposed that Ferdinand VII marry Joseph’s thirteen-year-old daughter Zénaïde to repair French and Spanish relations. Zénaïde instead would marry her ornithologist cousin, Lucien’s son Charles Lucien Bonaparte.
Napoleon also denounced Jérôme for abandoning Westphalia. “In general, I feel humiliated by the ridiculous role played by this prince who has neither administrative qualities nor common sense,” Napoleon wrote Cambacérès. “If he had remained in Cassel, his troops would not have been overwhelmed and he would have retained control of his kingdom. If he had had the first notions of common sense, he would have had around 8 to 10 thousand French, Swiss, and Italians around him . . .”
Already deposed from the throne of Holland, Louis volunteered his services after the evacuation of Amsterdam. Napoleon responded by threatening to have him arrested. In a letter to Cambacérès, Napoleon wrote:
“It is my destiny to see myself constantly betrayed by the dreadful ingratitude of men to whom I have shown the most generosity, especially by this one, for whose own education I deprived myself of everything, even necessities, at the age of twenty. You know that the libelous words he published against me were printed with emphasis by Austria, after the declaration of war, as if to blacken my character and increase the animosity that was erupting on all sides.”