The Caesar of Paris

by Susan Jaques

  Napoleon spent a final night at the Château de Rambouillet on June 29. Hortense opened Malmaison one last time for her stepfather. Having decided to start over in America, Napoleon spent hours flipping through Alexander von Humboldt’s monumental book about the New World. Madame Mère arrived to say goodbye. Before leaving, Napoleon handed his stepdaughter a valuable diamond necklace and told her: “How beautiful Malmaison is, isn’t it, Hortense? It would be wonderful if I could stay here.”27 Hortense later wrote: “I feel sad to think how this place, which he visited at the height of his success and fame, now received him reduced to the last stage of wretchedness.”28

  From Malmaison, Napoleon traveled to Rochefort on the Atlantic Coast where he surrendered to the British and made an appeal to the Prince Regent for asylum in England. “I come like Themistocles to sit at the hearth of the British people,” he wrote the future George IV, associating himself with the ancient Greek general who served a democracy and then a Persian monarch.29 But clemency was not what the British had in mind.

  One week after Louis XVIII’s July 8 return to Paris, Napoleon left France on the English frigate HMS Bellerophon across the Channel. At Plymouth, he learned that England was not his final destination. Seventy-one days later, on October 17, the deposed emperor stood on the deck of the Northumberland at St. Helena, an island in the South Atlantic over four thousand miles from Paris. “It’s not an attractive place,” he remarked.30

  Charles Darwin described the bleak volcanic island as “rising abruptly like a huge black castle from the ocean.”31 “The island of St. Helena is the ideal place to lock away such a character. In such a place, so far away, no scheming of any kind will be possible and, far from Europe, he will be quickly forgotten,” declared British prime minister Lord Liverpool.32

  By December, Napoleon and a small staff had settled into Longwood House. The adjoining outbuildings accommodated his inner circle, including his secretary Emmanuel de Las Cases, Generals Gourgaud, Montholon, and Bertrand (Napoleon’s chief of staff), and their wives. Once the owner of some four dozen palaces, Napoleon had packed fifty boxes. Before leaving France for St. Helena, Napoleon asked Vivant Denon to compile a list of books, medals, and engravings to take with him into exile. Among the items were Denon’s own Journey in Lower and Upper Egypt and engravings of Napoleon’s battles. The furnishings included Biennais’s campaign kit and bed, along with Percier’s athénienne, the yew and silver washbasin, and ewer designed after an ancient Greek tripod. Six dozen dessert plates from the Sèvres Service des Quartiers Généraux provided a travelogue of Napoleon’s military campaigns. Isabey’s ivory miniatures were among the family portraits.

  As Matthew Zarzeczny reports, Napoleon also surrounded himself with souvenirs of his many military heroes—Roman, monarchial, and imperial.33 Las Cases describes an “Augustus and a Livia, both exceedingly rare; a Continence of Scipio and another antique of immense value given to him by the Pope; a Peter the Great, on a box; another box with Charles V; another with a Turenne; and some, which were in daily use, covered with a collection of medallions of Alexander, Sylla, Mithridates, &c.”34 Beyond the portraits to the left of the fireplace, Napoleon hung Frederick the Great’s large silver watch, “which is sort of a morning bell,” wrote Las Cases.35

  Six weeks into the exile, Napoleon swapped his military uniform for a green hunting outfit. But he retained formal court dress, requiring his servants to wear green and gold livery.36 A British officer supervised his walks. Remarking “I do not have too much of anything but time,” Napoleon passed time dictating to Las Cases.37 On a billiards table that arrived in July 1816, Napoleon spread the maps he had used in battle to dictate an account of his campaigns. A little over a year into their arrival, Las Cases was expelled from the island by the British.

  Napoleon weighed in on his ancient heroes, starting with Alexander the Great. He admired the Macedonian’s skill in combining Greek and Persian cultures and armies, an achievement he had tried to emulate in Europe. “What I like in Alexander the Great is not his campaigns, which we cannot understand, but his political methods,” wrote Napoleon. “At thirty-three he left an immense and firmly established empire, which his generals partitioned among themselves. He possessed the art of winning the love of the nations he defeated. . . . It was most politic of him to go to Amon [to be proclaimed a god]: it was thus he conquered Egypt.”38

  Napoleon also dictated an examination of Julius Caesar to his valet Count Marchand. At the end of each chapter of Caesar’s Wars, Napoleon added personal observations and details, at times describing where Caesar could have done better. For example, he writes that Caesar’s two campaigns in Britain were poorly planned and understaffed; his victories in Gaul were achieved thanks to a better trained army and superior technology, not superior military skills. Napoleon also criticized Caesar’s cruelty toward his enemies.

  But Napoleon concluded with a defense of Caesar’s dictatorship—by extension a defense of his own regime. “Caesar . . . had to fight courageous enemies,” wrote Napoleon. “He took great risks in the adventures into which he was pushed by his boldness; his genius got him out of his difficulties. His battles in the Civil War—that’s what I call real battles, taking into account the enemies he had to fight as well as the qualities of their generals. He was a man whose genius and boldness were equally great.”39

  Winston Churchill said that Napoleon was the greatest man of action since Caesar. Comparisons between the two strongmen were made by both Napoleon’s supporters and detractors. Both rose to power as charismatic young military leaders and secured the loyalty of their soldiers with rewards. Both were decisive leaders who ruled during turbulent times. Like Caesar, Napoleon was absent from his capital for long periods of time. Both were multitaskers.

  Marcus Cornelius Fronto reported that Caesar worked on his linguistic treatise On Analogy, “writing about the declensions of nouns in the midst of flying weapons and about the aspiration and systems of words amidst the call of the military trumpets.” According to Plutarch, Caesar could dictate letters on horseback, to more than one secretary.40 Madame de Rémusat records that Napoleon’s secretaries had to devise short hands to keep up with his dictation. Napoleon’s own handwriting was illegible both to himself and others. According to Goethe, Napoleon’s mind was the greatest the world had ever produced.41

  During his exile on St. Helena, Napoleon also reflected on his own life. He recalled his childhood on Corsica fondly. “Happy times! The native earth has invisible charms. Memory embellishes it in all its aspects; the very smell of its soil is so present to my senses that with my eyes closed I could recognize the earth I trod as a small child.”42 He seems to have come to terms with his longtime rival, telling an aide in 1816: “Pius is a real lamb, a wholly good man, a truly upright man whom I esteem, of whom I am very fond, and who, for his part, reciprocates my feeling to some extend I am sure.”43 But there was no reconciliation with his estranged family, most of whom had remained loyal. From St. Helena, he wrote Marie Louise: “Take pity on me for having such a bad family, I who showered them with riches.”

  Napoleon continued to blame his demise on the failures of his family. “My strength of character has often been praised, but I have been a soft touch, especially for my family, and they knew it well. If . . . they had each imparted a common impetus to the various masses I had entrusted them with, we would have marched to the stars. Everything would have bowed down before us, we would have changed the face of the world . . . I did not have the luck of Genghis Khan with his four sons, who were rivals only when it came to serving well.”44

  PART NINE

  LEGACY

  “Despite all the attempts made to belittle me, get rid of me or reduce me to silence, it will be difficult to make me disappear completely from public memory.”

  —Napoleon Bonaparte

  ONE

  A MORAL LESSON

  The Musée Napoléon was the crown jewel in Napoleon’s glittering capital. Ascending the grand stairw
ay to the second floor, the Salon Carré opened into the1,200-foot-long Grand Gallery. With nine bays and over 1,100 paintings, the Gallery was an embarrassment of riches. The first bay displayed 107 French paintings, including two dozen Poussins. Six hundred and six Dutch, Flemish, and German pictures filled the next four bays, among them fourteen Van Dycks, fifteen Holbeins, thirty-three Rembrandts, and fifty-four works by Rubens. Denon devoted the last four bays to the Italian schools. Among the 463 paintings were a staggering seven Leonardos, ten Tintorettos, fifteen Veroneses, two dozen Titians, and twenty-five Raphaels.

  On the ground floor, a dozen high-ceilinged rooms lined with dark-colored marble housed over four hundred antique statues. Flanked by red granite sphinxes, the Apollo Belvedere stood in a niche with ornamental rails in front. Venus de Medici had her own room to the left of the Laocoön. The Dying Gladiator faced the Torso; the Borghese Gladiator stood near the Meleager.1

  The 1814 Treaty of Paris left in place the looted riches at the Musée Napoléon, now renamed the Musée Royale. The goal was to restore the Bourbon monarchy and not humiliate France. But as Katherine Eustace writes, Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the Battle of Waterloo left the Allies in a far less generous mood.2

  Declaring Napoleon “an Enemy and Disturber of the Tranquility of the World” at the Congress of Vienna, the Allies reduced France to its 1789 pre-Revolution boundaries under the Second Treaty of Paris.3 Napoleon’s young son was sent to live with his Habsburg relatives in Vienna. The Congress of Vienna also addressed the political issue of art repatriation from Paris. As Jonah Siegel writes, “The allies were keenly aware of the cultural force of the museum.”4

  Leading the repatriation drive was the Duke of Wellington. In a letter penned in Paris to Lord Castlereagh on September 23, 1815, Wellington wrote about France’s war trophies: “The Allies then, having the contents of the museum justly in their power, could not do otherwise than restore them to the countries from which, contrary to the practice of civilized warfare, they had been torn during the disastrous period of the French revolution and the tyranny of Bonaparte.”

  “The same feelings which induce the people of France to wish to retain the pictures and statues of other nations would naturally induce other nations to wish, now that success is on their side, that the property should be returned to their rightful owners, and the Allied Sovereigns must feel a desire to gratify them . . .” Wellington concluded. “Not only, then, would it, in my opinion, be unjust in the Sovereigns to gratify the people of France on this matter, at the expense of their own people, but the sacrifice they would make would be impolitic, as it would deprive them of the opportunity of giving the people of France a great moral lesson.”5

  The French resisted repatriation, holding up Napoleon’s various treaties as legal proof of permanent ownership. Despite his fierce opposition to Napoleon, Louis XVIII maintained that France was legally entitled to retain the confiscated art and would not cede works now housed at the Louvre or the Tuileries Palace. In his first official speech in 1814, the restored Bourbon king declared: “The masterpieces of the arts belong to us forevermore, by rights more stable and sacred than those of conquest.”6

  On July 10, 1815, Prussian troops arrived at the Musée Royale to retrieve the country’s art, including Correggio’s Leda and the Swan, one of Frederick the Great’s favorites. In August, the Austrians formally requested that the French government return their art as well. With the art restitution underway in Paris, Pius VII dispatched Antonio Canova to recover the paintings and antiquities seized in Rome nearly two decades earlier. For the mild-mannered sculptor, the diplomatic mission represented the challenge of a lifetime—pitting him against Louis XVIII, the wily Talleyrand, and Tsar Alexander I. The day after Canova accepted the assignment from the pope at the Quirinale Palace, he made out his will.

  On Monday, August 28, Canova arrived in Paris with his stepbrother and personal secretary Giovanni Battista Sartori, armed with little more than letters from the pope. After settling into 23 rue Basse du Remparts, the sculptor delivered a letter from Pius to Prussia’s minister Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt.7 Canova’s hope was that Prussia, having already removed its pictures from the Louvre, would be sympathetic to the Italian mission.

  Two days later, Canova delivered a similar letter to British foreign secretary Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh. It was Castlereagh’s under-secretary of state William Richard Hamilton who proved instrumental, helping the sculptor frame the case for the return of Rome’s art. Their central argument was that the Treaty of Tolentino should be annulled on the grounds that Pius VI had signed it under extreme duress. “To respect the treaty,” Canova argued, “would be to respect that which the wolf dictated to the lamb.”

  Denon already disliked “this viper Hamilton” for seizing the famous Rosetta Stone and sarcophagus of Nectanebo II from the French at the port of Alexandria during the Egyptian campaign. Now the passionate museum director continued to dig in, penning letters to foreign diplomats and to Louis XVIII’s intendant la maison du Roi, the comte de Pradel. “What is most certain is that Mon. Hamilton has behaved in this matter like a maniac, that he has set on the entire destruction of the Museum and that he has got the support of Lord Wellington in the execution of his project.”8

  Canova’s effort was hurt by a rumor that the papacy and the British were colluding in a sale of Roman antiquities. In exchange for helping Rome, the Prince Regent and Lord Liverpool had discussed acquiring some of the repatriated works. Castlereagh put the kibosh on the suggestion, announcing that the Prince Regent would pay the cost of returning artworks to Italy.

  But the French held firm. In a dramatic face-off between Canova and Denon, the museum director drew on the Treaty of Tolentino and claimed that France had rescued the masterworks from adverse conditions. Talleyrand invoked “a right of conquest . . . [that] has been admitted by all nations in all times” and argued the French couldn’t be liable for the misdeeds of the Napoleonic government. When Canova tried visiting the Halle d’Etudes of the Academie Française, he was pelted with bread pellets by the students. He overhead one of the artists say that he would like to stick a dagger into him.

  In September, when Dutch representatives arrived in the museum’s galleries to take down the stadtholder’s pilfered pictures, they discovered that all the museum’s ladders had been removed.9 Not surprisingly, there was no French staff available to help de-install the works. Denon may have choreographed the disappearing ladders, but that is conjecture.

  The Duke of Wellington, general-in-chief of the army of the Netherlands, called on Talleyrand to intervene. Wellington declared that if the French prime minister and Denon continued to impede the restitution efforts, he would have armed escorts remove paintings belonging to the king of the Netherlands on September 20 at noon. As Judith Nowinski writes, it was only when a regiment of Grenadiers showed up at the museum pointing bayonets at Denon that he told his twenty-five museum guards to step aside.10

  The dismantling of the galleries caused a conflict of authority between Wellington and Paris’s Prussian governor, Friedrich Karl Ferdinand von Müffling. After being closed, the museum reopened with a British regiment stationed along the galleries. As a reminder of Allied strength, Wellington staged a review of the army on September 22.

  “Thanks to the personal intervention of the Duke of Wellington, a large part of the property of the House of Orange was returned to the Netherlands in the autumn of 1815,” writes Quentin Buvelot. “Some 120 paintings were returned, which now constitute the nucleus of the collection of the Mauritshuis. But sixty-eight works remained in France, some of which now hang in the Louvre. These include Hendrick Pot’s Portrait of Charles I, paintings of lute-players, and a music ensemble by Gerrit van Honthorst, and a landscape by Peter Paul Rubens. A masterpiece by Jan Davidsz de Heem, the Portrait of William III in a garland of flowers, is in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon.”11 After William I (son of stadtholder William V) gifted the returned painting
s to the state, they were incorporated into the Netherlands’ public collections in 1816. Six years later, the paintings were transferred to the Mauritshuis where they remain today.12

  Over the next six weeks, Canova worked to gain the support of Austria, Prussia, and an uncompromising Russia. The sculptor finally achieved a diplomatic breakthrough on Sunday, September 10, when Louis XVIII received him. Speaking in Italian, the king commissioned his portrait. His hard line position appeared to be softening. The following day, Louis submitted an address to the Allies’ diplomatic agents questioning the validity of Tolentino and asking that the works be returned to the people of Rome for “the usefulness and advantage of all civilized nations in Europe.”13

  At the invitation of Austrian chancellor Metternich, Canova visited the Louvre on September 28. He came prepared with a list of looted artworks delivered to him by Alessandro D’Este. Denon gave the celebrated Italian sculptor a rude reception. When Canova pointed out that this was no way to treat an ambassador, Denon replied, “Ambassador! Come on, you mean packer, surely.”14 Ironically, Denon himself had been dubbed “the packer” for his talent at confiscating art.

  Metternich sent an ultimatum to Richelieu threatening the use of force if works of the Holy See were not handed over within twenty-four hours.15 Sensing that the momentum had shifted, Italian cities like Perugia and Bologna asked Canova for help getting their own treasures back. On September 30, France formally recognized the papal claim for restitution. Canova returned to the museum the next day, escorted by a platoon of Prussian and Austrian soldiers, and began removing works.