by Susan Jaques
“Death is sleep without dreams, and perhaps without an awakening,” Napoleon said on St. Helena.28 Confined to bed, he dictated a lengthy statement for his son who he had never heard from. “My son should read much history and meditate upon it; it is the only true philosophy,” he dictated on April 17, 1821. “Let him read and meditate upon the wars of the great captains: it is the only way to learn the art of war. Yet no matter what you say to him, no matter what he learns, he will profit little from it if in his innermost heart he lacks that sacred flame, that love of the good which alone inspires great deeds.”29
On the evening of May 5, 1821, fifty-one-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte died, probably from stomach cancer. He was buried in the green uniform of a colonel of the Chasseurs de la garde in the Sane Valley by two willow trees. The French wanted the inscription “Napoleon. Born in Ajaccio on 15 August, 1769, died on St Helena, 5 May, 1821” inscribed on the flagstones. The British would only permit “General Buonaparte.” In the end, his gravesite went unmarked.
Emmanuel Las Cases, who had started taking notes aboard the Northumberland, continued his journal on St. Helena where he became Napoleon’s confidant. After every conversation with Napoleon, Las Cases transcribed his notes; his fifteen-year-old son, also named Emmanuel, put the notes into a legible form.30 Las Cases was expelled from St. Helena in December 1816, and his notes were confiscated by the British. In 1821, Las Cases retrieved the journal and published the first edition of Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène the following year. It was a best-seller, sending political shock waves through Europe.
Napoleon’s death on St. Helena enhanced his legend. Writers and artists portrayed his death and burial in wildly romantic terms. Napoleon became a hero of mythology. Edgar Quinet suggested immortality in his 1836 poem Napoleon: “He is not dead! He is not dead! From his slumber/The giant will emerge even stronger at his awakening.”31 Some refused to believe Napoleon had died.
Napoleon’s will, dated April 15, 1821, included this request: “It is my wish that my ashes repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have loved so well.” For two decades after Napoleon’s death, a movement grew for the British to allow him to be buried in Paris.32
With support fading for his own regime, Louis-Philippe took advantage of Napoleon’s popularity. The statue of Napoleon was put back on top of the Austerlitz Column; the Arc de Triomphe was finally finished and the original reliefs were reinstalled at the Arc du Carrousel. Now the “citizen king” began negotiating with the British to repatriate Napoleon’s remains from St. Helena.
The location of Napoleon’s tomb was a topic of intense debate. “The choosing of the location of the tomb and the competition for the construction of it were of such great importance to the French nation that any decision was not taken lightly by the government,” writes Fiona Parr. “Feelings towards Napoleon were so strong—both positive and negative—that every step of the way during the construction of his tomb there were debates and arguments.”33
Not wanting to incite unrest, the government of the July Monarchy rejected burial sites with strong Napoleonic associations like the Church of the Madeleine, Arc de Triomphe, Saint Denis, and Chaillot hill. A petition called for the reburial of Napoleon’s remains in the base of the Austerlitz Column—like the ashes of Trajan in the base of his column in Rome. The proposal was quickly defeated by the Chamber of Deputies.
Adolphe Thiers, président du conseil under Louis-Philippe, spearheaded a plan for a different site. In mid-1840, a law passed ordering construction of Napoleon’s tomb at the Church of the Invalides. The royal chapel at Invalides was built at the end of the seventeenth century by Jules Hardouin-Mansart. Reportedly given just one week to submit the chapel plan, the ambitious young architect seems to have repurposed his great-uncle François Mansart’s unrealized design for a Bourbon funerary chapel at Saint Denis, adding his own touches to the French baroque building.34 Louis XIV had ordered construction of the adjacent Hôtel des Invalides in 1670 to provide shelter and hospital care for old and wounded veterans. Napoleon paid three visits to his own soldiers here in 1808, 1813, and 1815.
A contest for the design of Napoleon’s tomb led to a major brouhaha. Over eighty submissions were exhibited to the public. Architects submitted almost half of the entries; sculptors another thirty percent. Ultimately, Louis Visconti’s design was chosen—a sarcophagus below ground level in a crypt lit from the church’s dome. The excavation of the opening for the sarcophagus directly below the dome destroyed much of the original seventeenth-century marble floor.35 The circular opening, nearly fifty feet in diameter and twenty feet deep, was adorned with neoclassical art—winged Victories and bas-reliefs of key events in Napoleon’s reign.
In 1840, a delegation including Napoleon’s loyal valet Louis Marchand and Generals Gourgaud and Bertrand sailed to St. Helena to bring back his body. In addition, the delegation collected fragments of wood and rocks on the island which were treated like religious relics. When Napoleon’s body was exhumed, it was practically intact and he seemed to be sleeping, like Alexander the Great, writes Paul Rapelli.36 On October 15, Napoleon’s coffin was transferred onto the French frigate La Belle Poule.
After landing at Cherbourg, France on November 30, Napoleon’s casket traveled by steamboat up the Seine. On the bitterly cold morning of December 15, his funeral procession left Courbevoie, four miles north of Paris. Accompanied by drums and trumpets, hundreds of mounted soldiers led the march followed by Grande Armée veterans in their Napoleonic uniforms. Behind a six-hundred-member choir, a grenadier led a white stallion wearing Napoleon’s saddle and draped in purple velvet. Sixteen black horses with ivory plumes pulled the towering funeral chariot accompanied by five hundred sailors.37 Napoleon’s heart lay in an urn at his feet. He requested it be sent to Marie Louise, but she refused to accept it.38
The magnificent cortege traveled south through Neuilly toward Paris where some one hundred thousand gathered to see Napoleon’s hearse. As the horses bearing the casket stopped below the 160-foot-tall Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, the music stopped. The eerie silence was shattered with a deafening roar of “Vive l’Empereur!” and a spontaneous singing by the National Guard of the patriotic anthem, “La Marseillaise.”
Napoleon hadn’t lived to see his triumphal arch finished, but it became his greatest monument. Work stopped with the fall of the Empire and resumed in 1824. After thirty years and many changes in design and architects, the arch finally opened in July 1836.
Thirty shields engraved with the names of major French victories in the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars adorned the attic. On the shorter sides of the four columns are the names of Napoleon’s thirty major victories. Allegorical figures representing characters from Roman mythology adorn the arcades. Four of the six reliefs on the façades mark Napoleonic victories: The Battle of Aboukir, The Battle of Arcole, The Fall of Alexandria, and The Battle of Austerlitz.
Napoleon wanted the names of his generals, marshals, and colonels from the campaign of 1805 represented on the monument. Instead, as Anne Muratori-Philip describes, a “battle of the inscriptions” was waged throughout the nineteenth century. By 1895, 697 names and 174 battles were inscribed on the interior of the arch.39
On the frigid winter morning of Napoleon’s funeral, his triumphal arch was finally consecrated. Underneath the soaring arch, his casket was surrounded with the names of 386 generals; those killed in battle were underlined. On the left side, facing the Champs-Élysées was Jean-Pierre Cortot’s relief, The Triumph of Napoleon celebrating the Treaty of Schönbrunn with Napoleon crowned by the goddess of Victory.40
Among the throngs that day was Victor Hugo, whose father had served under Napoleon. The novelist recalled that the sun suddenly appeared at the same time as Napoleon’s hearse. Before the funeral, he had written “The Emperor’s Return” in 1840: “Sire, you will return to your capital, Without fighting or fury, Drawn by eight black horses through the Arch Triumphal, Dressed like an
Emperor.”41 (During Hugo’s own funeral in 1885, his body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe.)
The streets were filled with red, white, and blue flags decorated with eagles and Napoleonic battles; statues representing his victories ran from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pont de la Concorde.42 From the Arc de Triomphe, the cortege continued down the icy Champs-Élysées and across the Place de la Concorde before finally arriving at Les Invalides to the roar of cannons. In the esplanade, statues of France’s heroes surrounded a huge plaster likeness of Napoleon. Over a million people braved the piercing cold in tribute to the former emperor.43
Three dozen sailors covered the coffin draped with a red cross and Napoleon’s crown. Louis-Philippe accepted Napoleon’s remains “in the name of France” and ordered Napoleon’s Austerlitz sword and signature bicorn hat from Eylau placed atop his coffin in the center of the church below the dome. Over the next two days, a quarter of a million people paid their respects. From there, Napoleon’s body was moved to the nearby chapel of Saint-Jérôme, one of the church’s four circular side chapels some fifteen feet in diameter and eighty-two feet tall.
With the death in 1832 of Napoleon’s son, his cousin Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, son of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnais, became heir presumptive to the imperial throne. In December 1848, Napoleon’s nephew was elected president of the Second Republic. Two years later on the anniversary of his uncle’s coronation, Louis Napoleon staged a coup d’état. Exactly one year later, on December 2, 1851, he established the Second Empire with himself as Napoleon III.
The inauguration of Napoleon’s funerary monument was originally set for May 5, 1853, the thirty-first anniversary of his death. But eight more years transpired before the ceremony took place. Like his uncle, Napoleon III considered creating a family burial vault at Saint Denis near the tombs of France’s royals.
Almost forty years after his death, in an April 2, 1861, ceremony attended by his nephew, Napoleon’s body was transferred from Invalides’ Saint-Jerôme chapel to the dramatic crypt below the church dome. Bronze doors forged from enemy cannons at Austerlitz flanked by allegories of Military Force and Civil Force led to the uncovered crypt, circular in shape like the mausoleums of Roman emperors Augustus and Hadrian. Above the lintel was the inscription from Napoleon’s will: “I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine among the people of France whom I haved loved so well.”
Napoleon’s tomb was a marble res gestae. A circular gallery of austere white marble bas-reliefs illustrating Napoleon’s major achievements adorned the peristyle. Sculptor Pierre-Charles Simart, a student of Ingres, created the classically-inspired models for all ten works and executed seven. Featuring inscriptions from de Las Cases’s Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, they include the Creation of the Legion of Honor, The Civil Code, and Great Public Works.
A visitor to the crypt in 1853 described the newly installed Public Works relief: “Napoleon, who is seated and whose head is surrounded by a crown of rays, is stretching forth his two arms toward tablets bearing the names and purposes of the various monuments and works of public utility, executed during his reign and by his order. . . . Two Glories are seated on the steps of the throne to the right and to the left.”44
Encircling the sarcophagus were a dozen monumental winged Victories, each about fifteen feet tall, representing Napoleon’s military triumphs. From the entry of the crypt, the figures run chronologically from the Italian campaign to the Belgium campaign. Carved in white marble by Jean-Jacques Pradier, the female figures hold palm branches and wreaths; the two flanking the door, guardians of the tomb, hold keys.
With his taste for the monumental, Napoleon would have especially liked this contemporary description: “Each caryatis, together with the pillar against which it placed, consists of a single [marble] block. This . . . imparts an air of great magnificence to the mausoleum, and gives it that peculiar character of grandeur which is found in the gigantic constructions of Egypt and ancient Nineveh.”45
The military theme continued beneath Napoleon’s sarcophagus with a round floor mosaic featuring the names of Napoleonic battles and a border of laurel. Red quartzite from Russia was chosen for the antique-style sarcophagus because of its resemblance to porphyry, antiquity’s most prized stone.46 Roman emperors like Hadrian and their family members coveted the polished purple-red imperial variety, quarried in Egypt. Difficult to work, the prestigious stone was used for vases, columns, and sarcophagi.
Resting on a green granite pedestal, the sarcophagus measures nearly thirteen feet long and over six and a half feet wide. It contains six coffins: one made of soft iron, another of mahogany, two of lead, one of ebony (from the national funeral on December 15, 1840), and one of oak. Napoleon is dressed in his colonel’s uniform (of the cavalry of the Guard) with his sash of the Legion of Honor. His bicorn hat rests on his legs.47
A year after the tomb’s opening, Jérôme Bonaparte was buried in the chapel of Saint-Jerôme, which had housed Napoleon’s coffin for over two decades. Joseph Bonaparte was also buried at Invalides, as were two of Napoleon’s most trusted aides—Grand Marshals of the Palace General Geraud-Christophe-Michel Duroc who died at Bautzen in 1813, and General Henri Gatien Bertrand who accompanied Napoleon to Elba and St. Helena and died in 1844.
During his triumphant tour of Paris in June 1940, Adolf Hitler visited Napoleon’s tomb. As a tribute to the French emperor who he admired, Hitler ordered the remains of Napoleon’s son transferred from Vienna to the Invalides crypt that December. In 1969, the king of Rome was reinterred under a marble slab near his father’s sarcophagus. Looming over the tombstone is Simart’s marble statue of Napoleon as a Roman emperor. The Caesar of Paris is shown wearing a Roman laurel wreath and holding an orb and scepter topped with Jupiter’s eagle.
POSTSCRIPT
After Napoleon’s fall, France continued to experience revolts, revolutions, and wars. In the course of the ensuing violence, the Tuileries Palace and Château de Saint-Cloud were destroyed. Napoleon’s emblematic Austerlitz Column was toppled and rebuilt; the original statue on top melted down and remade twice, first with Napoleon in his bicorn and frock coat, later as a Roman emperor again. The giant plaster elephant at the Place de la Bastille was joined by a column honoring those killed in the 1830 Revolution.
Other Napoleonic buildings and monuments were repurposed, including the Temple to the Glory of the Grande Armée, the supersized version of the Roman temple in Nîmes, Maison-Carrée. Louis XVIII turned Napoleon’s military shrine into the Church of the Madeleine, consecrated to the memory of his family members guillotined in the nearby Place de la Concorde.
The Madeleine’s imposing neoclassical exterior was a stark contrast to its gilded interior. Lit by oculi in the center of three coffered domes, the church was adorned with paintings, mosaics, and sculptures, including Carlo Marochetti’s theatrical statue Magdalene exalted by Angels behind the altar.
In October 1849, Frédéric Chopin’s funeral was held at the Madeleine. To the strains of Chopin’s own haunting Funeral March on the pipe organ, pallbearers including Eugène Delacroix carried the composer’s casket down the long nave. At the north end of the church, they placed his casket by the high altar. Overhead, mourners saw the cupola of the apse filled with a colorful semicircular fresco.
King Louis-Philippe himself had presided at the mural’s unveiling in July 1838, the anniversary of his monarchy. One of France’s largest mural paintings, The History of Christianity by Jules-Claude Ziegler covers nearly three hundred square yards. Three angels bear Mary Magdalene up toward the figure of Christ at the top of a pyramid while popes, saints, martyrs, and artists form an enormous semicircle. A bishop holds a scroll marked “Concordat” while cardinals look on.
Standing front and center in an ermine-trimmed red velvet coronation robe is Napoleon receiving a crown from Pius VII. Behind him, a large imperial eagle perches menacingly in the clouds.
Depicting Napoleon as a friend of the Church was a deliberate ga
mbit by Louis-Philippe and Adolphe Thiers, his interior minister. In Ziegler’s colorful revision of history, Napoleon saves the Church and by association France’s Catholic monarchy.1
A decade after the mural’s installation, in February 1848, Louis-Philippe abdicated and fled to England. Another revolution had begun.
ILLUSTRATIONS INSERT
FIG. 1: Vase depicting Napoleon in front of Italian works of art being delivered to Louvre, 1810–13, porcelain, Sèvres manufacture, Ile-de-France. France, nineteenth century.
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FIG. 2: Laocoön and his sons, marble, early first century B.C.E., copy after a Hellenistic original from ca. 200 B.C.E. Vatican Museums.
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FIG. 3: Apollo Belvedere, second century C.E., marble, Vatican Museums.
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FIG. 4: Venus de’ Medici, first century C.E., marble, Uffizi, Florence.
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FIG. 5: Alexander the Great, marble, Hellenistic Greek, second to first century B.C.E., said to be from Alexandria, Egypt, British Museum.
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FIG. 6: Frontispiece to Volume 1 of the “Description of Egypt,” engraved by Girardet and Sellier, and published under the orders of Napoleon, 1822 (aquatint), Cecile.
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FIG. 7: Portrait of Gaius Julius Caesar, the Green Caesar. 1–50 C.E., greywacke, Altes Museum, Antikensammlung, Berlin.
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FIG. 8: Unknown, Portrait Head of Augustus, 25–1 B.C.E., marble (15 ⅜ × 8 ¼ × 9 in.), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.