Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Next, hardly pausing for breath, Napoleon was striking northward into Saxony, to defeat the combined forces of Prussia (which had belatedly joined the Allies against France in the Fourth Coalition), in another smashing, decisive victory at Jena. Then he was marching in triumph through a prostrate Berlin. Following this, in pursuit of the Russians, he was plunging eastwards into Poland, to Warsaw (where he was smitten by the beautiful Marie Walewska), and then finally—1,600 kilometres from Paris—he fought the last two battles of the campaign, Eylau and Friedland, less tidy and far costlier victories than Austerlitz and Jena, but victories all the same. In July 1807, from a raft anchored midstream in the River Niemen, Napoleon received the defeated Tsar Alexander I of Russia in an elegant pavilion of striped canvas. On the 7th of that month, the Peace of Tilsit was concluded. It was Napoleon’s finest achievement, and one of the greatest in the annals of France. “One of the culminating points of modern history,” declared Napoleon’s starry-eyed schoolfriend Bourrienne: “the waters of the Niemen reflected the image of Napoleon at the height of his glory.” Pitt’s Third Coalition had been rent asunder; Pitt, the arch-enemy, himself was dead, and, surveying from the raft in the Niemen the ruins of the rival empires, Napoleon could truly proclaim himself to be Master of All Europe. Everything was possible. But history is fickle. The next time Napoleon ventured on to the Niemen, just five years later, he would be en route to his first great defeat, and the beginning of his eclipse.

  After the historic victory at Austerlitz, Napoleon was back in Paris at ten o’clock on the night of Sunday, 26 January 1806; within an hour he was issuing orders on how to resolve the bank crisis. He had been out of town for just 124 days, in which time he had smashed all his enemies—a true Blitzkrieg before its time. In the ensuing year, sixty-one days’ absence would suffice to bring Prussia to her knees; while, by the time of the destruction of the Allies’ Fourth Coalition and the conclusion of the Peace of Tilsit in July 1807, he would have been absent over the two years for a total of 306 days—the longest he would ever be away from the capital.

  To commemorate the Grande Armée’s military triumph at Austerlitz, and also as part of his “bread and circuses” strategy of distracting uneasy Parisian minds with evidence of la Gloire, Napoleon projected a huge exposition of manufactures associating the arts of peace with the triumphs of war. (In the event, there was no such exhibition until 1819.) To keep the city’s growing body of unemployed quiet, Napoleon set them to work digging a new canal—the Ourcq. Outside the Tuileries the Arc du Carrousel, a triumphal arch in the Roman style, was to be erected; in Louis XIV’s Place Vendôme, a lofty column would be wrapped with the bronze of enemy cannon captured at Austerlitz. For the Grande Armée’s heroes, a colossal banquet was offered by the city—to which Napoleon, with his extraordinary attention to detail, proposed adding “a few bullfights in the Spanish manner,” a diversion which he thought would please the warriors. A vast camp was prepared at Meudon, designed to quarter the whole Grande Armée, only for Napoleon to decide that the Imperial Guard alone should be allowed to figure in the Parisian celebrations. But by this time Napoleon was at war with Prussia, so the Grande Armée headed east again, instead of marching through Paris.

  When news of the next remarkable victory, at Jena, reached the capital, Parisians again reacted “without over-excitement, like a well-behaved child.” Frochot, the Prefect of the Seine, was actually exhorted to do whatever he could to “facilitate the explosion of [public] enthusiasm,” possibly by encouraging “dance resorts ordinarily frequented by the people on a Sunday, the bastringues, that is, to make them more attractive, better attended, gayer, more animated.” A deputation was sent by the Senate to Berlin, more to persuade Napoleon to make peace than to offer congratulations for Jena.

  What continued to be much more immediately preoccupying to Parisians, during this period of astonishing events in faraway countries, was news in the autumn of 1805 of the collapse of the Banque Récamier, which had suspended withdrawals, thereby provoking a sequence of bankruptcies and bringing whole industries to a standstill. Anarchy imported by the zealots of the Revolution had caused capital to flee the city, and had destroyed the basis of commercial prosperity in Paris. This was being slowly rebuilt under the Consulate, but when the peace ended in 1803, and with it the tourist boom, Paris had experienced a tremendous inflation of prices, especially in luxuries; a woman’s coiffure for a single evening, for instance, cost three times the tariff of a few years before. The Banque Récamier had been a rock-like institution—the elderly Jacques Récamier a pillar of respectability, his wife, Juliette, renowned for her salon and her sofa, a paragon of virtue (until she met Chateaubriand). Yet when Récamier pleaded for a modest government loan to bail out the bank, Napoleon was unmoved, writing from Austerlitz within days of his triumph there, “Is it at a time like this that I must be obliged to make advances to men who got themselves involved in bad businesses?” and, more brutally, “I am not the lover of Madame Récamier, not I, and I am not going to come to the help of négociants who keep up a house costing 600,000 francs a year.”

  The Récamiers would survive—indeed recoup their fortune—but for a while it looked as if the whole of France was facing bankruptcy. As a result of the breakdown of commerce with England, businesses collapsed right and left, and Parisians tightened their belts. Unhelpfully, Napoleon told them to break their habit of colonial foodstuffs: “Let your women take Swiss tea, it is just as good as the tea of the caravane, and chicory coffee is as healthy as Arabian coffee … !” And he warned the writer Mme. de Staël and her coterie, “Beware that I don’t spot them wearing dresses of English material!” It was almost certainly only by the success of Napoleon’s triumphs on distant battlefields like Austerlitz and Jena that serious disorder was averted in Paris.

  THE PEACE OF TILSIT

  The winter of 1806–7 continued just as difficult and dreary, with the English blockade affecting not only Paris but cities as far away as Lyons. In Paris, hardship was complicated by the prolonged absence on campaign of the court, aggravated by the knowledge that the Grande Armée was bogged down in the mud of Poland. Josephine, suffering pangs of jealousy when rumours reached her of Marie Walewska, thought of joining Napoleon in Warsaw, but he would have none of it. She had to stay in Paris. “I want you to be gay and bring a little life into the capital,” he told her. But the spring of 1807 brought a renewal of confidence in Paris. The economy seemed to be turning the corner; and in Tilsit the Napoleonic apparatus went into top gear to ensure that the Emperor’s victorious return to his capital would this time remain fixed in Parisian memories. There was in any case now little doubt about the genuineness of the warmth now being displayed by Parisians.

  On 27 July 1807, cannon thundering out from the Invalides announced that the Emperor had returned from the eastern front. Heralds clad in medieval costume and illuminated by torchlight proclaimed the treaty he had just concluded. The whole of Paris and Saint-Cloud, where he spent his first nights, were lit up with spontaneous illuminations. (Typically, one of Napoleon’s first actions on reaching Saint-Cloud was to summon his architect to pursue his grandiose plans for a Temple de la Gloire at the Madeleine.) Official deputations flooded in from all over France and Europe. Military bands and spectators jammed the broad avenues, as the magnificent Imperial Guard made its triumphal entry. There were endless parades, balls and fêtes. In November, Paris laid on the celebrations for the Imperial Guard which had been called off the previous year. At the head of a glittering cavalcade, Marshal Bessières, hero of Austerlitz, magnificent on his charger, led the Guard into Paris via the Porte de la Villette and onward through the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, still hidden in scaffolding. That night a vast banquet was offered to all the soldiers of the Guard the length of the Champs-Elysées. The following day another grandiose fête was thrown by the Senate at the Luxembourg; alas—possibly an augury of the gods—icy rain and snow turned the occasion into a rout.

  Perhaps the most brill
iant of all Paris’s celebrations of Tilsit was that marking the Emperor’s birthday on 15 August. An extraordinary gaiety pervaded the streets, never to be seen again in Napoleon’s day. Houses were hung with metres of calico inscribed with flowery and obsequious eulogies, and even vendors of thermometers turned poets for the occasion:

  I know not what genius will venture

  To sing a hero guided by victory.

  For my part, I could not make a thermometer

  Capable of marking the degree of his fame!

  read the banner on one hardware shop. That day, in Notre-Dame, Napoleon declared, with hubristic grandeur, that everything “comes from God. He has granted me great victories. I come in the premier capital of my Empire to render thanks to Providence for its gifts, and to recommend myself to your prayers and those of the clergy.” Fouché went over the top, declaring in a confidential note addressed to the Tuileries that “Today’s fête is really national. Foreigners have been able to compare the birthday of Napoleon to that of Saint Louis.”

  Hubris, the device that destroyed the Greek heroes of ancient mythology—was it now to be the undoing of Napoleon? Emulating Louis XIV after the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678, the Emperor bestowed upon himself the title “le Grand.” He gazed down on an empire which stretched from the Pyrenees to the Niemen, ruled over either by puppet sovereigns or by members of his clan promoted to unimaginable heights—an empire far greater than anything achieved by Louis XIV or Charlemagne. The Peace of Tilsit seemed to give him endless options. But would he take them? Would the Peace last, any more than the Peace of Amiens had? Older Parisians wondered where it would all end. Talleyrand, foreseeing what lay ahead, soon resigned in despair.

  From Tilsit Napoleon had ordered the abolition of the inefficient city administration he had inherited from the Directory, doing away with the system of incompetent elected bodies. Instead Paris was to be administered by various conseils d’administration, possessed of immense powers, and all coming under the Minister of the Interior, who in turn represented the full authority of the Emperor. Most important of all was the special bureaucracy set up to co-ordinate the efforts of administrators, architects and engineers to carry out Napoleon’s building plans. The Emperor tried to run Paris like an army, but it was not the kind of army to which he was accustomed, or which he could bend to his will.

  It was characteristic of Napoleon that he had issued these orders from Tilsit. For all the bureaucracy he had created in Paris, one of the extraordinary features of the Napoleonic regime is that this highly centralized and increasingly autocratic state was in fact run from a tent or from a Polish château—or wherever Napoleon happened to be. Every day his minions in Paris would be bombarded by letters, orders and draft decrees. While he was in East Prussia preparing for the bitter Friedland campaign, an angry letter flew off to Fouché: “I understand that the city of Paris is no longer illuminated … those in charge are scoundrels.” In Tilsit, he would be fretting that the fountains in Paris weren’t working properly or that the Ourcq Canal wasn’t completed; or he would be decreeing demolition of the old houses on the Pont Saint-Michel.

  REBUILDING AROUND THE LOUVRE

  Napoleon’s plans for rebuilding the city which he, the Corsican, had inherited, and with which, as dictator, he was now free to do whatsoever he pleased, were no less grandiose than his ambitions for military conquest. The bomb explosion of Christmas Eve 1800 provided him with both a first incentive and a pretext such as his predecessors had lacked. He started by demolishing the forty-odd houses damaged by the blast, then went on to clear the whole area of the medieval buildings and narrow streets which cluttered up the approaches to the Louvre. The result was several elegant new streets, all named after Napoleonic triumphs, including the Rue de Castiglione, Rue des Pyramides, Rue de la Paix (changed from Rue Napoléon after the Restoration in 1814) and the Rue de Rivoli, as well as the open space of the Place du Carrousel fronting on to the Tuileries. To achieve all this he resorted to draconian measures to take over property, notably convents left ravaged by Revolution, and to drive out house-owners with little recompense.

  The Rue de Rivoli, which became the second longest street in Paris (after Vaugirard) and one of the straightest, was intended to run all the way from the Place de la Bastille in the east to the Concorde. Though it represented the most imposing achievement in large-scale domestic housing since Henri IV’s Place Dauphine, the only section actually completed (and that only partially) in Napoleon’s day was the grandly arcaded stretch opposite the Louvre that one knows today, designed by the Emperor’s two favourite artists, Percier and Fontaine. The strictest conditions were imposed on the new Rivoli units once completed: residents were not to use hammers; there were to be no butchers, bakers or anybody using an oven. As a result, by 1810 so few houses had been built that Napoleon was forced to grant special tax exemptions for twenty years for developers, extended the following year to thirty. Even though the original grand design was never completed, the seemingly endless perspective of the massive arcades and the continuous line of ironwork balconies above them today still presents an effect unrivalled anywhere else in the world, an example of the true grandeur of Paris.

  In the cleared area opposite the Rivoli arcades, Napoleon laid down the stately north wing of the Louvre—though, like so much else, that too had to await completion at the hands of his nephew, Napoleon III. In preserving intact the old sections of the building and resisting the impulses of his architects to tear them down, Napoleon showed remarkably good architectural sense, explaining, “One must leave to each of the sections the character of its century, while adopting for the new work a more economic style.” Most important was the establishment in the Louvre, from 1803 onwards, of Europe’s biggest art gallery, to provide a permanent home for the many works of art he had stolen from the countries he had conquered and occupied.

  To run this new Musée Napoléon for him, the Emperor found one of those extraordinary geniuses thrown up by an extraordinary epoch—Vivant Denon. Fifty-five years old, a former diplomat, chargé d’affaires in Naples, Denon was something of a roué (which appealed to Napoleon) and a considerable artist in his own right. Travelling with Napoleon on the abortive Egyptian expedition, he had returned with a remarkable portfolio of sketches, and thereafter accompanied Napoleon on almost all his campaigns, becoming famed as “l’oeil de l’armée.” The notion of a gallery open to the public stemmed from the historically much maligned Louis XVI; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the royal collections had been kept for the private delectation of the court and of privileged visitors, and only in the middle of the eighteenth century had Marigny, brother of Mme. de Pompadour, put forward the idea of opening the royal galleries. It was Louis XVI himself who suggested reuniting everything that the Crown possessed of “beauty in painting and sculpture” under the name of “museum” (a concept borrowed from England). Explained Denon, “The French Republic, by its force, the superiority of its light and its artists, is the only country in the world which could provide an inviolable asylum to these masterpieces.”

  Napoleon took a great interest—amounting to interference—in the museum named after him. On his return from Jena in September 1806, he was already complaining about the queues on a Saturday afternoon—with the result that opening hours on Saturday and Sunday were extended. He was also horrified to see the galleries with smoking stoves, to keep the gardiens warm: “Get them out … they will end up by burning my conquests!” Equally shocking was the lack of public lavatories, leading to the misuse of the galleries by the unhappy gardiens, who were paid a menial wage, one-tenth of what Denon received. It was hardly surprising that in 1810 thieves broke in to make off with some priceless tapestries.

  In September 1802, the Medici Venus—“The glory of Florence”—arrived at the Louvre after a journey of ten months. Rumbling across Europe, the heavy pieces of looted sculpture required special carriages drawn by up to fifteen pairs of oxen. The following March came the first convoy of l
oot from Naples. Napoleon’s greed seems to have known no bounds; in 1810 he declared to a deeply embarrassed Canova, the great Florentine sculptor, “Here are the principal works of art; only missing is the Farnese Hercules, but we shall have that also.” Deeply shocked, Canova replied, “Let your Majesty at least leave something in Italy!” It was perhaps amazing that not more was ruined on the journey; describing in 1809 the looting of twenty masterpieces from Spain, Denon reported ominously, “There has been more damage, due to negligence in the packing, of the first despatch of Italian primitives.” The arrivals from Italy continued until the end of the Empire; the last consignment, in December 1813, in fact never left Italy.

  THE ARCS DE TRIOMPHE

  Just about the only two embellissements that were planned and actually completed during the Empire were monuments to Napoleon’s famous victory at Austerlitz: the Vendôme Column and the Arc du Carrousel. In imitation of Trajan’s victory column in Rome and originally designed to bear a statue of Charlemagne, the new Vendôme Column was solemnly unveiled on 15 August 1810, marking the end of the most brilliant period of the whole reign. For many years it was to provide an illustrious symbol for old soldiers to rally at its base.