Citizen Emperor

by Philip Dwyer

  Joseph Siffred Duplessis, Portrait officiel du roi Louis XVI, roi de France (1754–1793), en grand manteau royal (Official portrait of Louis XVI, King of France, in grand royal mantle), 1777.

  However stiff Duplessis’ painting looks, it was in fact in keeping with the convention of informality that had first been instituted by the portrait of Louis XIV in his coronation robes by Hyacinthe Rigaud. In that painting, the crown was placed on a cushion, instead of on the king’s head.74 In the portraits of all three monarchs – Louis XIV, Louis XVI and Napoleon – they can be seen leaning on their sceptres in about as relaxed a manner as a sovereign was allowed. In Duplessis’ portrait, Louis XVI is not wearing a crown. However, in Gérard’s painting, Napoleon is wearing his crown, or at least a laurel wreath. He is also carrying a sceptre that is as big as a spear.75 A degree of formality is thus introduced that not even the Bourbon monarchs either before or after Napoleon used. This is an affirmation of Napoleon’s monarchical status.

  Very different was Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ painting of Napoléon Ier sur le trône impérial, a symbol of Napoleon’s imperial power.76 The stiffly formalistic neo-classical style belies a more radical symbolism. First, Napoleon is seated, something that was rare in portraits of monarchs. He stares at the onlooker, holding in his right hand the sceptre of the Emperor Charles V, while in his left he holds the hand of justice. The face is the only exposed part of his body (the feet and hands are covered), and even then it is very stylized. What was meant to be the sword of Charlemagne, but which in fact was a contemporary fantasy, hangs by his left leg. There is even the suggestion of a halo identifying Napoleon with God.77 The Emperor is thereby transformed into a ‘terrifying deity’, in the same vein as the painting of Zeus carried out by Phidias.78 The face is like a cameo of the first Emperor of Rome, Augustus, but it was meant to be likened to Jupiter. Indeed, Ingres proposed this analogy since Napoleon’s posture is similar to Ingres’ own painting Jupiter et Thétis. The end result, however, was more imperial than even the imperial regime could stomach.79

  Baron Francois Gerard, Napoléon Ier en costume du sacre (Napoleon I in his imperial robes), 1806. Napoleon is wearing the coronation garments: the embroidered white silk tunic; the white gloves, also embroidered; and the mantle of purple velvet lined with ermine. On his head is a golden laurel wreath. In his right hand, which is wearing the emerald ring, he is carrying the sceptre. On the cushion on the stool to his right is the hand of justice and the globe. These last two were destroyed during the Restoration.

  The painting was purchased by the Legislative Corps, despite an unfavourable secret report to the minister of the interior by Jean-François-Léonor Mérimée, an adjunct secretary at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, who visited Ingres’ studio at the end of August, a couple of weeks before the opening of the 1806 Salon.80 Mérimée’s impressions of the painting – he described it as ‘Gothic’ and ‘barbarous’ – corresponded completely with the almost universal adverse public reaction that was to follow.81 Even a fellow artist, François Gérard, invited to Ingres’ studio, was supposedly shocked by what he saw.82 The portrait had a negative effect on just about everyone who saw it (including Ingres’ teacher David, who found the painting incomprehensible),83 both art critics and the crowds that streamed past to view it during the Salon. A play on words with the artist’s name dubbed the painting mal-Ingres (sickly), no doubt repeated from the types of quips that could be found in the pamphlets of the time: Vous avez fait votre empereur mal, Ingres (You have made your Emperor sickly, Ingres), or again, Vous avez fait mal Ingres, le portrait de Sa Majesté (Ingres, you have badly made the portrait of His Majesty).84

  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Napoléon Ier sur le trône impérial ou Sa Majesté l’Empereur des Français sur son trône (Napoleon I on the imperial throne), 1806.

  One critic suggested that Ingres had single-handedly retrogressed art four centuries since it was nothing less than gothic, a term that had not often been used till then.85 The criticisms were aesthetic, but also in part political.86 A former Jacobin by the name of Chaussard who had, like many other Jacobins, accepted Napoleon largely because he had portrayed himself as a simple man of the people, objected to Ingres’ work precisely because it was too lavish, too elaborate and too retrograde. It somehow did not sit well with the image of the young, victorious and largely republican military hero that Bonaparte had cultivated in the past. Royalist critics, on the other hand, were not impressed by this blatant attempt to legitimize the Empire through a return to monarchical symbols.87 Criticism came not only from those hostile to the regime but from those, on the contrary, who supported it, outraged that Ingres seemed to herald a return to Bourbon traditions. The painting somehow took away the heroic from Napoleon’s character.88 Ingres was hurt by the reaction. He had had every reason to believe that his painting would be a success.

  The Distribution of the Eagles

  Three days after the coronation, the Distribution of the Eagles took place on the Champ de Mars in front of the Ecole Militaire where Napoleon graduated in 1785. At eleven o’clock in the morning, the imperial couple and their respective households, accompanied by detachments of chasseurs, Mamelukes, grenadiers and gendarmes, proceeded to the Ecole Militaire, which had been transformed for the occasion by Percier and Fontaine into a covered gallery which one approached by climbing forty steps. The event was in some respects a tribute to the importance of the army in the new imperial regime.89 The entire edifice was covered in velvet.

  Regimental commanders from both the regular army and the National Guard, in the pouring rain – Fontaine speaks of ‘the most disastrous day of the whole winter’90 – with few or no spectators, took an oath of loyalty to the Emperor to defend their standards to the death. Josephine and most of the court ladies retired to warmer spots. Only Caroline remained with her brother and followed the ceremony to the end. ‘Soldiers,’ Napoleon shouted, ‘here are your standards, these eagles will always be your rallying point; they will go everywhere the Emperor deems it necessary for the defence of his throne and his people. Do you swear to sacrifice your lives in their defence and to maintain them constantly on the road to victory? Do you swear it?’ Those present are supposed to have shouted out as one voice, ‘We swear it.’ Several salvoes of artillery were then fired, and the troops marched past.

  Jean-Baptiste Isabey, from Le livre du sacre. The Livre du sacre was a sort of official record book of designs and prints of highlights of both the coronation and the ceremonies that followed, as well as the uniforms worn. Although begun in 1804, it was not completed and published until 1815, during the Hundred Days.91 Here we see the facade of the Ecole Militaire, looking on to the Champ de Mars, redecorated for the occasion.

  This was the first time that troops had been obliged to swear an oath to defend their eagles, which were in deliberate imitation of the standards employed by Roman legions, and which had replaced the flags and standards used during the revolutionary wars.92 The eagles, made of wood and gold and mounted on poles, became associated with the Empire. Just as importantly, the troops were also given the tricolour, thus marrying two symbols, one representing the Empire, the other the Republic. Though the ceremony did not make that much of an impression on those gathered, we know how highly prized the eagles became in the regiments. Any number of accounts of the extremes to which soldiers went to protect them in the course of battle are testimony to the value placed on them by the men assigned to protect them.93 A great deal of splendour was on display in these ceremonies to encourage the bonding of the officers of the army to its commander-in-chief. In later years, the ceremony for newly promoted officers would take place in the Salle du Trône at the Tuileries (when Napoleon was in Paris), while Hugues-Bernard Maret, director of Napoleon’s cabinet, read out the oath.94 Napoleon had done this kind of thing before, but on a smaller scale, almost as dress rehearsals for what took place on the Champ de Mars. During the festivals of 14 July, in 1797, 1801 and again in 1802, for example, he had distrib
uted flags to different units and had them swear an oath: ‘You will always need to rally to this flag; swear that it will never fall into the hands of the enemies of the republic, and that you will all perish, if necessary, to defend it.’95 On this occasion, the ceremony was over in a very short time, and the whole thing ended in utter confusion. Soldiers milled about in the middle of the plain, which had turned to mud, their uniforms soaked through, their hats deformed by the rain, all of them freezing cold and none of them sure what to do next.96 The only incident of any note was the appearance of a young man who approached the steps to the throne shouting, ‘No Emperor! Liberty or death!’ He was immediately arrested. A medical student by the name of Faure, he was incarcerated in Charenton, a hospital for the insane, where he was to stay until he was ‘cured’.

  Jacques-Louis David, Serment de l’armée fait à l’Empereur après la distribution des Aigles au Champ de Mars (Oath of the army made to the Emperor after the Distribution of the Eagles on the Champ de Mars), 1810. Napoleonic theatre at its best, even though it reaches absurd proportions. Note the general in the front of the group, inspired by Giovanni da Bologna’s figure of Mercury, standing on tiptoe on one leg. The viewer is floating in mid-air so to speak, at the top of the extraordinary, temporary flight of stairs constructed for the occasion by Percier and Fontaine, all the better to see the action and read the banners.97

  David’s painting of the Distribution des Aigles, a kind of Napoleonic version of his Serment des Horaces (Oath of the Horatii), was not completed until 1810. The artist had to overcome a number of difficulties, including the fact that Josephine was no longer Napoleon’s wife, so she, along with her ladies-in-waiting, had to be painted out of the original picture.98 We are used to that kind of thing happening in modern dictatorships, but this is the first time that history had been deliberately altered by a modern European head of state. One can see where Josephine should have been; the space is emphasized by Eugène de Beauharnais’ out-thrust leg. One art historian has suggested a subversive element to the painting: Napoleon is lost in the crowd of courtiers, confronting an unruly army over which he has no control.99 It is a sign that, by the time the painting was completed, people had tired of the man and his regime, perhaps no better illustrated than by a detail, another subversive element, in the painting that is generally overlooked.100 In the bottom right-hand corner a soldier, with his back to the onlooker, is walking away with a folded flag marked ‘La République’.

  The theme of patriotic sacrifice that was at the core of this ceremony was hardly new. The difference now was that those who were prepared to lay down their lives did so for the sake of one man rather than for an ideal. Napoleon was confounding, perhaps deliberately, the type of patriotic self-sacrifice people had become accustomed to during the Revolution with sacrifice to his person, as he now came to represent the nation, the patrie, dressed in imperial gold and velvet. It was a perception that troops would sometimes have and even admit to – that is, ‘we confused the love we had for the sovereign with that which we had for the patrie’.101

  In Napoleon’s own mind, the Empire, the nation and his person eventually became one. ‘The throne of France was vacant,’ he is supposed to have told the Austrian ambassador to Paris, Klemens von Metternich, ‘the king overthrown . . . The old throne of France is buried under its rubble; I had to found a new one . . . I am like the Empire; there is therefore a perfect homogeneity between myself and the Empire.’102 During the ancien régime, the king’s body was considered sacred, containing within it a ‘corporeal mystique’. The execution of the king in 1792 had symbolically brought that mystique to an end, and in effect transferred it to another abstract concept – the nation. The nation then had replaced the idea of the sovereign.103 Part of the desacralization, the desecration, of the monarchy was the accompanying vandalism that destroyed its images and symbols – anything from the fleur de lys to statues of past kings had to disappear. A political culture emerged that defined the new state and its members – now called citizens, not subjects – and situated every individual’s place in the nation. The king, the monarchy and its heroes were no longer celebrated but rather the Republic, the nation and its heroes were. In some respects, then, the ceremonies held to celebrate the foundation of the Empire were about writing a new national narrative.

  Eventually it would appear that the idea of the nation was displaced on to the person of the Emperor and that, as the kings of France before him represented paternal authority, so now Napoleon represented a father figure. Just as the kings of France had embodied the nation, so did the Emperor. From May 1804, the revolutionary term ‘citizen’ was replaced by the terms ‘monsieur’ and ‘subject’, without the outcry that accompanied the use of the latter word in 1801 (see p. 87).104 Service to Napoleon was embodied in the notion of service to the state. This should be seen as the end result of a long political struggle to personify a particular vision of the national community, which had raged since 1789. One could easily apply the adage of the seventeenth-century theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, ‘The whole state is in the person of the prince.’105 It also meant that increasingly the state revolved around the will of one man so that he could appoint and dismiss at will, as well as ignore the law. Here Napoleon’s character merged with the political rhetoric that he had adopted at the beginning of his reign to justify the coup and his hold on power, namely, that he was above factions, although gradually he interpreted this to mean that he was above the law.

  The popular visual representations of Napoleon as emperor – paintings, engravings, cheap woodprints, busts and medallions106 – reinforce the message of Napoleon as father of the nation. Anointed by the Church, he was not only to be venerated, he was to set an example by his clemency and goodwill towards the less fortunate. He did so on the occasion of the coronation, as he had done at the very beginning of the Consulate, by freeing ‘a great number of prisoners’ from the Temple and the Abbey Saint-Germain.107 Louis XVI had done the same thing shortly before his coronation at Rheims in 1775.

  The People’s Empire

  For two weeks after the coronation, Paris and the Empire celebrated the foundation of the new dynasty in a series of festivities, receptions, banquets, balls, fireworks and solemn audiences either at the Tuileries or at the Hôtel de Ville. During that time, no dignitary was allowed to appear at court dressed in anything but the costume worn on the day of the coronation. It was customary for the municipality of Paris to offer a sumptuous reception to new sovereigns. This had been done in 1514 on the occasion of the marriage of Mary of England to Louis XII, in 1687 for the marriage of Louis XIV, in 1739 and 1745 when Louis XV’s children were married, and of course for the marriage of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.108

  Some of the events were quite unexpected; for example, a balloon constructed by the famous aeronaut André-Jacques Garnerin was to lift into the air a crown twenty times larger than life. The crown, made of coloured glass in imitation of the actual crown, actually succeeded in taking off . . . and floating away. It landed almost two days later in Lake Bracciano near Rome. Napoleon wrote to the pope the following extraordinary missive: ‘The balloon which has so providentially arrived in Rome . . . should, it seems to me, be devotedly conserved in memory of this extraordinary event [the coronation]. I wish that Your Holiness should have it put in a particular place where foreigners can see it in passing with an inscription that states that, in so many hours, it arrived in Rome.’109

  More spectacular were the fireworks. The principal display took place on the banks of the River Seine between the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville, but it was the signal for twelve other displays to be set off in Paris. Things did not quite work out the way they were supposed to, however. Instead of lasting fifty-five minutes, the fireworks lasted only fifteen.110 The centrepiece of the display was Napoleon’s crossing of the Saint-Bernard. It was almost a symbol of the trajectory that the Emperor had taken to reach the summit that was the coronation, the symbol of the ‘radiance of thei
r victories [those of Napoleon and his men]’.111 Fireworks were traditionally considered a symbol of transformation, perhaps signifying an end to the wars that had led to the Empire combined with the fires of regeneration.

  Dance halls were erected on the Place de la Concorde, the Place de la Bastille, the Place Vendôme and the Place des Vosges, locations emblematic of the city but also sites of the Revolution; Montgolfier balloons were used to transport and drop off eagles throughout the city. For the people, wine literally flowed from the city’s fountains.112 Similar celebrations were held in cities throughout the Empire.113 Towns were illuminated to show their approval of the proceedings (except in Angoulême where a certain General Malet, whom we shall come across again, refused to celebrate the event. He was relieved of his command). The festivities put the city of Paris in debt for many years to come.114

  The Jacobin Emperor

  Large crowds do not bonds of loyalty make. Whether Napoleon actually succeeded in the objective of the public festivities is another question. Nor did the role of the pope lend as much prestige as the Emperor had hoped. Anti-clerical republicans among the people of Paris, still quite numerous, were appalled to see the return of the Church in force. Though they had accepted the Concordat as a necessary evil, though they could see the advantages of having the pope in Paris to lend a certain amount of prestige, they were unhappy with the warm reception the faithful had reserved for the holy pontiff. There were consequently numerous pamphlets and protests against the ceremony based on those reasons alone, and quite a number of jokes about Napoleon.115 Not all of them came from republicans. The English had a field day with the coronation; caricaturists like James Gillray made fun of the imperial procession, in images that were confiscated as soon as they reached French territory.116 Like all political satires directed at Napoleon, they were designed to contest the political system he had constructed, and to undermine his authority by questioning his legitimacy.