10

The Reinvention of Monarchy

One of the secrets of imperial success lay in the Janus-like quality of the Empire and of the values which Napoleon sought to nurture. He never renounced the principles of the revolutionary years; indeed, in his insistence on the rule of law and implementation of the Code, or his view of the state as an essentially secular entity free of ecclesiastical interference, he showed a determination to stick by those aspects of the First Republic which he identified with an ordered, modern society. To some, indeed, he remained a republican, albeit a republican who was wedded to ideas of order and authority. Where he rejected the revolutionary model was in its belief that Frenchmen were endowed with rights rather than obligations, that citizenship implied a necessary involvement in the processes of government.

If there were still parliamentary institutions and periodic elections under the Empire, they were but a pale reflection of the massive changes to political culture that had followed after 1789. Of the two houses, the Tribunate lasted only until 1807 before it was condemned to extinction, probably because it had failed to secure the obedience of the legislators. And the Legislative Assembly itself had a limited role, with the combined sessions of 1809 and 1810 lasting for no more than four months.¹ Local government, too, saw its autonomy reduced; it was made more answerable to the ministries in Paris, reporting up through the sub-prefect and prefect to the Minister of the Interior, while the judicial system was firmly directed by the Minister of Justice. At every level the Empire emphasised authority and obedience, the maintenance and, if necessary, the imposition, of order. The Emperor showed little interest in accountability downwards to the local community or the local electorate. For him these were practices which had become dangerously exaggerated, luxuries with which he could dispense.

Electoral accountability, which the revolutionaries had insisted on at every level of administration, was dramatically cut back. The electorate was reduced, along with the number of elected officials; and for many years the electoral process ceased to operate on a regular basis. Napoleon’s own preference, when it was necessary for the people to be consulted on an issue of constitutional importance, was for a plebiscite rather than an election. There were four plebiscites in all during the successive Napoleonic regimes, all to ratify proposed constitutional change: two were held before 1804 (on the constitution of the Consulate in 1800 and the subsequent establishment of the Life Consulate in 1802), a third in 1804 to endorse the proclamation of the Empire, then nothing till a vote on the supplementary constitution (or Acte additionnel) in 1815. On all four occasions there were no cantonal assemblies or collective votes, as there had been in the 1790s. Those taking part signed a register individually to indicate their agreement or disagreement; some added a few sentences to qualify their opinion; but, significantly, very few dared to express dissent.² As an exercise in consultation the process was clearly flawed.

Yet it allowed Napoleon to claim that he was annexing part of the revolutionary heritage by associating the people in his constitutional reforms, while ensuring that their opinions remained muted and controlled in the executive interest.³ Consultation had its place in the Empire, but only as long as it could be carefully managed. Yet Napoleon did not discard it entirely. He did nothing to remove the ambiguity about his commitment to republican ideals or to his own revolutionary past, an ambiguity that had been evident since his acceptance of the Life Consulate in 1802, and which had re-emerged amid the symbolic splendour of the imperial coronation in 1804. He was still ready to present himself as the people’s emperor when circumstances demanded it.

His progressive adoption of the trappings of monarchy was, however, obvious for all to see. He clearly enjoyed the pomp and ceremonial that came with his imperial status and was conscious of the political gains they conferred. After the creation of the Empire, Napoleonic propaganda changed subtly, no longer focusing solely on his person or his claim to public consideration, but insisting on the dignity of the imperial office and on the standing that it gave France in international affairs. Above all, he sought to establish his legitimacy in the eyes of the international community, a legitimacy that was proclaimed but still had to be put to the test. The imperial coronation ceremony, with its sumptuous costumes and carefully choreographed movement, had been intended as a moment of theatre to impress all Europe with an image of state power. The Emperor and Empress were surrounded by their retinue and by the great officers of state, and the Pope, in turn, by the bishops and archbishops of the Catholic Church. But the coronation was a French affair, where the Emperor was surrounded by the political and legal elite of France: the Senate, the Council of State, the Legislative Body, the Tribunate, the various civil and criminal courts of the land.⁴ The Pope was the only foreign leader to attend. There were no kings or queens, no heads of other European states, many of whom continued to regard the French emperor as a parvenu, an upstart who had no legitimate claim to the throne. In the years ahead Napoleon was only too conscious of their contempt, and of the need to gain their recognition. He knew that to establish his Empire on a sound footing he first had to establish his legitimacy among the crowned heads of Europe, and this he set out to achieve as a matter of the highest priority. He might hope to win the approval of the French people by appealing to his republican roots, but these would do little to win over Europe’s traditionalists. First in Paris, then later in Milan, he used the symbolism of the coronation ceremony to establish a different sort of legitimacy, that of a hereditary monarch.⁵

By imitating established monarchies while adopting his own style of monarchy, Napoleon was not merely playing to his own fantasies: he was laying claim to the power that traditionally belonged to kings whom he increasingly summoned up as his ancestors in office.⁶ He could not, of course, appeal directly to the Bourbon line in France, or in any way invite comparison between his power and theirs; the last Bourbon, Louis XVI, had ended his life in defeat and humiliation, dethroned by the revolutionaries to become the most prestigious of the guillotine’s sixteen thousand victims. Napoleon was well aware that the French people could be fickle in their loyalties, not least to kings; he had watched as the Paris crowd had overturned the equestrian statues of past monarchs in their city’s squares, and he was equally well aware that in the future he might enjoy no more flattering a fate.

But some of the great European monarchs were a different proposition, especially the mighty Carolingian emperors whose power had extended beyond any one kingdom to embrace a multinational empire. In them, Napoleon found worthy points of comparison that would help to cement his own reputation. In his speeches and his correspondence he openly appealed to the memory of Charlemagne, himself adopting the insignia of the old Frankish kings and conjuring up images of a new Holy Roman Empire stretching proudly across Europe. It was with the aim of reinforcing the parallels between his reign and Charlemagne’s that he made an official visit in the first months of his Empire – in October 1804 – to Aix-la-Chapelle, now the German city of Aachen, to visit Charlemagne’s tomb and venerate the medieval emperor’s memory. It was a moment pregnant with the symbolism of power and filled with propagandist intent.⁷

If Napoleon went to Aachen to lay claim to Charlemagne’s succession, he made the point more forcefully in the following year when, just six months after his imperial coronation in Paris, he had himself crowned a second time, as King of Italy, in Milan. This was more than empty ceremonial, the presentation of Napoleon and Josephine to the Italian nation: the consequence of this coronation was to dissolve the Italian republic which the French had established and replace it with a monarchy in March 1805 – a move that followed the exclusion of Austria from Lombardy and helped clear the way for Napoleon’s major reconstruction of Italy.⁸

The Emperor did not intend to rule Italy in person. Despite the insistence of various Italian rulers that he should do so, on the grounds that he was of Italian stock and at home in the Italian language, he took care to brush such claims aside and showed little desire to concentrate his energies on Italy. He divided his time between the affairs of state in Paris and his many absences on campaign; the day-to-day business of government in Italy he gave into the hands of his viceroy in Milan, Josephine’s son, Eugène de Beauharnais. But that does not mean that the coronation ceremony lacked purpose. On the contrary, Napoleon took great care to leave a strong impression on the Italians, surrounding himself once again with symbols and artefacts that linked him in the popular imagination to the Carolingians. Once more he was laying claim to historical antecedents that provided him with popular legitimacy: the Iron Crown, kept in the treasury of the cathedral at Monza, was regarded with awe and veneration by the people of Lombardy.⁹ Napoleon would show that he was deeply conscious of the dignity that was bestowed on him, and after 1805 the official documents of the Empire would refer to him by the dual title of ‘Emperor and King’.

Yet though he took care to present himself abroad as a legitimate monarch, it is not clear how much he really respected king-ship as an institution. Kings might have heredity on their side and be bolstered by legitimate succession, but in the final analysis imperial power rested upon the army and on efficient administration, and Napoleon had by 1807 demonstrated that he was more powerful, more to be feared and obeyed, than any monarch. Across the continent, indeed, he made and unmade kings, seemingly at will. Legitimacy seemed to count for little in this chess game; pieces, including his brothers, were moved around the board at Napoleon’s will. Local rulers found themselves promoted to the royal title at the whim of the Emperor, as a reward for their reliability and loyalty or as part of his strategy for administering Central Europe. In Bavaria, for instance, Napoleon elevated Max-Joseph, who had been Elector since 1789, to King from January 1806. At the same time the elector of Württemberg, Frederick II, was also given a kingdom, and before the end of the year a similar reward was heaped on the Elector of Saxony, now crowned King Frederick Augustus I.¹⁰ Royal titles, it seemed, came cheaply; the title that really mattered was Napoleon’s alone. Kings were not supposed to wield sovereign authority, and their kingdoms would remain client states, providing supplies and conscripts for the Emperor’s army, at least until French power began to crumble around 1813 and the German rulers were presented with the challenge of the Wars of Liberation. The Bavarian king had little loyalty to the Empire, and was happy to change sides when his national and dynastic interest demanded it. Some, however, were less astute, most notably Frederick Augustus, who failed to jump ship in time and paid for his continued allegiance to Napoleon by losing three-fifths of his territory at the Congress of Vienna.¹¹

For the Emperor – as for all the royal courts of Europe – gaining legitimacy meant also maintaining a lifestyle that he equated with monarchy: a level of grandeur to impress the other crowned rulers and their retinues. Though Napoleon himself, unavoidably, spent much of his time on campaign, he and Josephine nevertheless lavished considerable attention on their various imperial residences – at the Tuileries in Paris; at Saint-Cloud, an elegant chateau overlooking the Seine which Napoleon had used as his consular residence and on which he had spent some three million francs between 1801 and 1803,¹² later at Fontainebleau, which Napoleon sought to convert into a second country home; and at Malmaison to the west of the capital, which the couple had bought jointly in the late 1790s and which Josephine came to regard as her home. Compared to Versailles, of course, these properties may seem modest, but modesty was not Napoleon’s style. In 1804 it was already being observed that at Saint-Cloud ‘everything was assuming the appearance of a sovereign court’: the lavish music, the public mass on Sundays, the audiences which Napoleon granted in the gallery after the service – all ‘recalled the vanities of Versailles’.¹³

The houses were used to stage elaborate state ceremonials, dinners and receptions that grew more lavish with the years. And across Europe were dotted the many palaces reserved for members of the Bonaparte family. From his experience of the Austrian and Bavarian courts, Napoleon learned the importance of pomp and luxury, and he aimed to create in Paris a court of his own that would outshine all others. Nothing was left to chance. The Emperor employed a huge staff to ensure that everything ran like clockwork, and the rules governing etiquette were of exemplary precision, especially the etiquette surrounding formal meals, since eating was at the very heart of court life. ‘When their Majesties eat in public, the Grand Chamberlain proffers a basin for the Emperor to wash his hands; the Grand Equerry offers him his armchair; the Grand Master of the Palace takes a napkin and presents it to His Majesty. The Empress’s First Prefect, the First Equerry and the First Chamberlain perform the same functions for Her Majesty. The Grand Almoner goes to the front of the table, blesses the meal, and retires.’¹⁴ It all seems a world away from the puritanical, rather Spartan mores of the Jacobin Republic.

In the organisation of court life the Empress Josephine was a key figure, the two coronation ceremonies having pressed her into the spotlight and given her a taste for public life. She longed to assume an even more central role, feeling mortified to be left behind in France when her husband went on campaign, and several times pleaded with him in vain to be allowed to accompany the army. From time to time, we are told, he would relent and agree to her accompanying him on the first stage of his journey, where she would hold an informal court in cities like Mainz or Munich. But beyond that it was made clear that she was not welcome: the war zone, in Napoleon’s eyes, was a man’s world where she had no place, and so she returned to her domestic stage. On the way, of course, she was caught up in an unavoidable round of official receptions in the towns and cities that she passed through; she could never return wholly to the life of a private citizen. But with Napoleon away, she did have time on her hands; and during the long months of war she filled her days adorning and embellishing her palace at Malmaison and interesting herself in the lives of her family – Hortense, married to Napoleon’s brother Louis, and her son Eugene, now ensconced in Milan.¹⁵ At times she seemed lonely, bored, and even slightly disaffected.

The war consumed long periods of Napoleon’s life as he crisscrossed Europe, and Josephine was left behind for months on end, sometimes in garrison towns behind the war zone, but more often in the private space of Malmaison. When she was away from Paris she at least had a role to play, and she continued to play it. In Strasbourg, for instance, she hosted a busy round of receptions, balls, concerts and operas, where the various German princes could pay homage to the power of imperial France. Here, as elsewhere in France, she was received as Empress in her own right, with full military honours: officers presented arms and the artillery fired welcoming salvos. According to one biographer, she enjoyed the bustle of court life in such cities, surrounding herself with courtiers and equerries, and spending freely on ‘plants for her garden at Malmaison, animals for her zoo, art objects and bric-a-brac’.¹⁶ The menagerie was her special creation, and its fame spread to the point where ships returning from exotic lands would bring a present for the Empress: thus the cargoes of two ships arriving in Le Havre in June 1803 included ‘an antelope, a gnu, a zebra, a falcon, five parrots, various other tropical birds, and seventeen assorted tortoises’.¹⁷

But she remained discontented. Her letters make it clear how much she missed her husband, how much she wanted to travel with him and resented what she saw as her enforced isolation. In reply, Napoleon proved a regular correspondent, sending her a succession of letters outlining the progress of his military campaigns and avowing his love for her. By 1806, as the war dragged on, Josephine remained dissatisfied, and became more and more insistent that she wanted to accompany him on campaign. But Napoleon was having none of it: the army quarters were miserable, he was constantly on the move, and the towns in the lee of the army were unsuitable places to receive her. ‘I received your letters in a miserable barn’, he wrote from Pultusk on 31 December 1806, ‘amid mud and high winds, and with straw for bedding. Tomorrow I shall be in Warsaw. I think everything is over for this year. The army will go into its winter quarters.’ He then discouraged her from going to Cassel, where the ruler had just been deposed, and urged her to try Darmstadt instead.¹⁸ A few days later he virtually ordered her to return to Paris. ‘Go to the Tuileries,’ he commanded her on 7 January, ‘hold receptions and carry on the same life to which you were accustomed when I was there; such is my will.’¹⁹ On the following day, responding to yet another plea from Josephine, he spelt out his wishes. ‘I had begged you to return to Paris. The season is too inclement, the roads unsafe and detestable, the distances too great for me to permit you to come hither, where my affairs detain me. It would take you at least a month to come. You would arrive ill; by that time it might perhaps be necessary to start back again; it would therefore be folly.’²⁰ His tone was businesslike, at moments even peremptory. Though he continually declared his love for his wife, he preferred to keep her at arm’s length in wartime, so that he could pursue the war and concentrate on military strategy.

It was soon evident that Napoleon had other good reasons for keeping Josephine at bay, and that the love he professed for her, and which was surely genuine and often passionate in the first years of their marriage, was beginning to fade. Back in the 1790s, indeed, it had been Napoleon who continually avowed his love while Josephine’s capricious ways and easy morals had attracted a whiff of scandal. There were, of course, many women in his life, too, including a series of passing affairs that had begun in Egypt, and may in part be explained as a protest at the stories he heard of Josephine’s repeated infidelity back in Paris. However, conjecture is perhaps of little help here. Already in 1799 their marriage had seemed precarious. That it lasted another ten years spoke volumes about their desire to persevere in a union that remained stubbornly childless, and showed that Josephine was prepared to reform her somewhat profligate lifestyle. With the Consulate came the need for greater restraint, and Josephine duly obliged. As Emperor and Empress they would be even more in the public eye, and even more careful to appease opinion. Their original marriage, in true revolutionary style, had been a secular affair, conducted in front of the mayor; now a hastily devised religious marriage ceremony took place in 1804 in the private chapel at the Tuileries, which established the legality of their union in the eyes of Rome and of Catholic Europe.

But the marriage was now facing new problems, exacerbated by Napoleon’s lengthy absences and the stream of rumours assailing Josephine about the new women in her husband’s life. Most were no more than passing affairs, with little long-term consequence, though a fleeting dalliance with Eléanore de la Plaigne presented the Emperor with a son late in 1806. But in Poland, at a state ball thrown by the French Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, something more significant happened: Napoleon met a woman with whom he fell passionately in love, the beautiful and sensitive Polish countess, Maria Walewska. This would not be something that would last a mere matter of a few hours or a few days: indeed, theirs would become one of the most famous romances of the century, a love story made for Hollywood and duly filmed in 1937 as Marie Walewska (also known as Conquest), starring Greta Garbo and Charles Boyer. Maria Walewska, escorted by her brother and with the full knowledge and connivance of her husband, drove out of Warsaw on a snowy April morning in 1807 to join Napoleon at his winter quarters in Osterode in East Prussia.²¹

The Countess’s brother would later claim that she saw this as a patriotic mission, her duty as a Polish aristocrat, and we can only assume that her husband agreed, though it is more probable that she was dazzled by the Emperor and his record of military glory. Whatever the explanation, Maria would never return to her husband, and she later had a son by Napoleon, Alexander Walewski, who would go on to have a highly distinguished military and political career. In 1851 he was appointed French ambassador to London, and in that capacity would represent his country at the Duke of Wellington’s funeral; he would also, not without a certain irony, present the Court of St James with the credentials of France’s new regime, the Second Empire.²² Nor did Maria disappear fromNapoleon’s life. She was accepted into the Bonaparte clan, and in 1815 she would sail to Elba to visit him in exile.²³

Maria could provide the Emperor with a son, but her position meant that she could not provide him with an heir – the heir he needed if he was to prepare a dynastic succession, which by 1806 had become a major issue for Napoleon and his advisers. At the age of thirty-seven he still lacked a legitimate heir, had little reason to put trust in his brothers, and was no longer attracted by the notion of an ‘adoptive succession’ which he had contemplated at the time of his coronation. His close advisers made it clear that they, too, felt there was a pressing need for an heir if the regime was to be established on solid foundations. Nor should that heir be a mere commoner; that would do nothing to impress or appease the crowned heads of Europe. What Napoleon needed was a family connection with one of the great European dynastic families. If he was to be treated as their equal, he had to behave like them, and in their world marriage was not about love and spontaneity; it was closely planned to form powerful political and family alliances. That, in the opinion of such ministers as Fouché and Talleyrand, could mean only one thing: that Napoleon must seek the hand of a royal princess, preferably from either Russia or Austria, in order to secure his throne. Failure to do so would endanger the future of the Empire. Or, as Fouché indiscreetly expressed it to Josephine in 1807, the welfare of France demanded that she should seek a divorce. It was not a question of emotions; it was an issue of politics, of Realpolitik.

As rumours circulated about the Emperor’s intentions – the Austrian ambassador, Metternich, passed these on to Vienna, and tongues wagged across Europe – Josephine felt depressed and resentful at what she imagined to be the machinations of Napoleon’sbrothers, whom she had long seen as her enemies. Yet months passed without the situation being in any way clarified, and the marriage was not finally annulled until January 1810. Josephine had little choice but to agree; she was forty-six, and accepted that she could no longer have children. She was compensated by being allowed to keep the title of Empress-Queen, and was given Malmaison in full ownership and the Elysée Palace as her Paris residence. The government also voted her an annual pension of two million francs, to which Napoleon added a third million to support her lifestyle and help pay off her considerable debts.²⁴

With the embarrassment of Josephine conveniently removed – the Catholic authorities in Paris had obligingly confirmed the annulment in record time – Napoleon was free to weigh up the diplomatic advantages of a marriage alliance with either Russia or Austria. In fact, his mind was already made up, and both his advisers and his family declared that their preference lay with Austria, in the person of eighteen-year-old Marie Louise, daughter of the Austrian Emperor Francis I. In March 1810 they were married by proxy in the Augustine Church in Vienna without Napoleon even meeting his bride. She then left for Paris, where, after an initial meeting in the Forest of Compiègne, they married for a second time on 2 April, in a religious service following a civil ceremony the previous day. Again, the Catholic Church proved astonishingly cooperative, with Fesch, a fellow Corsican and close collaborator of Napoleon’s, there to officiate. Within three months the Emperor had obtained a divorce and found a new bride from the oldest monarchy in Europe. It was a symbolic moment, one that defined the transformation of the regime from a republic founded on revolution and regicide into an empire legitimised by heredity and dynastic succession. Or, as one historian has elegantly expressed it, it was the moment when the enfants de la patrie of the 1790s mingled their blood with that of the oldest monarchy in Europe and believed that they could ‘transform themselves from being regicides to fathering kings’.²⁵ A son of the Revolution agreed to marry the niece of Marie-Antoinette, and, perhaps even more astonishingly, he was accepted, however reluctantly, into the royal family of Austria.²⁶ If Napoleon had intended to stupefy Europe, he surely succeeded. And within a year he had fulfilled another ambition: in March 1811, Marie Louise provided Napoleon with a son and heir.

The marriage ceremony and the formal celebrations that framed it show just how far Napoleon had moved away from his republican roots. The civil ceremony was held in the Gallery of Apollo at Saint-Cloud, the palace beautifully illuminated for the occasion, before the imperial party left for Paris. The religious service then followed in the Chapel of the Tuileries, copying in every detail the wording used for the last royal marriage held in France, between Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette back in 1770.²⁷ It was a lavish and dignified affair: the imperial procession swept into Paris amidst a vast crowd, entering the Tuileries gardens through a specially erected triumphal arch and a temporary colonnade, and after the marriage they received the delegations that came to congratulate them in the throne room of the palace.

All Paris was bedecked with flags and public buildings floodlit to mark the occasion; and with an eye to popular reaction, care was taken that this should also be a popular festival, which ordinary Parisians could join in and admire. There were fireworks along the banks of the Seine, displays of horsemanship, games and dancing on the Champs-Elysées, a military procession and military music. On the Champ de Mars a hot-air balloon carrying Madame Blanchard rose into the sky against the backdrop of the École Militaire. Napoleon, as was his wont, aimed not just to impress onlookers with the solemnity of the occasion, but also to provide spectacle and amusement. Indeed, it was a characteristic of Napoleonic festivals that they deliberately incorporated elements of the spectacular and fantastic, and understood the propaganda value of fun. In this they stood in stark contrast to the more prosaic, staidly educative festivals that had been staged by the revolutionaries; there was a modern, flamboyant element in them that aimed to set the public pulse racing. The Emperor’s advisers and designers made sure that the day of his marriage to Marie Louise was one that all Paris would remember with pleasure; and the detail of the celebrations was lovingly recorded by the artist Louis-Pierre Baltard.²⁸

Festivals were part of an armoury of propagandist devices to which Napoleon turned to project both his own image and that of his Empire. He used what he knew of the history of past regimes, from Ancient Rome to the court of Louis XIV, to see how others before him had exploited pomp and symbolism to burnish their image and impose their authority. If the public persona of Louis XIV was a ‘fabrication’, the result of a deliberate campaign of exposure and self-advertisement,²⁹ so, too, was that of the Emperor; and the increasing grandeur of his court and the public glorification of his victories in battle were intended to add both to his own reputation and to the lustre of his regime. In his earlier life he had sought to present himself as a hero, to captivate the imagination of the French people through his valour and his military exploits; now the emphasis changed to stress his serious devotion to the cause of the Empire and his role as saviour of his people. He assumed the traditional monarchical role of law-giver and dispenser of justice, who had helped preserve the hard-won rights of the people while bringing stability and security to the whole of Europe. Sometimes, perhaps, he took the process too far, as when, in 1806, a new saint, Saint Napoleon, was introduced into the Catholic calendar, his saint’s day, 15 August, conveniently timed to coincide with both the Emperor’s birthday and the festival of Assumption, a major holiday in the Christian year. The aim was clear enough: to draw attention to Napoleon’s achievements – and it is no accident that he was presented as a warrior-saint, the victor of Jena and Austerlitz – and to mark the return of Catholic worship to lands secularised by the Jacobin Republic. But the festival was given a muted reception. Most Catholics seem to have remained unimpressed, finding the whole notion of Saint Napoleon mildly ridiculous, and continued to mark Assumption traditionally, as the feast of the Virgin.³⁰

For Napoleon himself the image appeared anything but ridiculous; indeed, in his proclamations and his use of language he cemented the idea that he was all-powerful, omniscient, a man capable of seeing clearly where others got lost in a fog of confusion. The magnificence of public festivals and the love of sumptuous parades all served a single purpose, that of reinforcing his authority. There was something godly about the way in which he was spoken of and represented, an aloofness that isolated him and kept him apart from his people.³¹

This image was reinforced by the statesmanlike portraits and classical busts produced by the leading artists of the day, all of which served to identify the Emperor as someone with special abilities and unchallenged power, presenting him in turn as a military hero, a far-sighted law-giver, and a patron of the arts. Image, it seemed, was everything, an aspect of his reign in which Napoleon, like the Sun King before him, took a personal interest. As he had in the 1790s, he visited the Paris salons and took an active part in choosing prize themes for the Academy. He was a patron of artists and sculptors, and turned to the leading portraitists and history painters of the day to present his image and hence further to legitimate his power. Gros, Ingres, David and Géricault were among those he commissioned to paint canvases in his honour, whether triumphal battlefield scenes of Jena and Austerlitz, images of care and compassion like Gros’ famous 1804 picture showing him tending the plague victims in Jaffa, or those wholly imagined scenes that appealed to the romantic imagination, like that by David showing him as First Consul crossing the Alps on a romantic white charger. Was this propaganda? As David O’Brien points out, the government did make some attempt to gauge public opinion, but this ‘does not alter the basic fact that under the new regime official painting sought to shape, rather than respond to, popular sentiments’. Under the Bourbons, official art had increasingly tried to respond to the art criticism generated by the Salon, whereas Napoleon was less interested in interaction, and a strict regime of censorship severely limited the influence of popular sentiment.³² Artists struggled to fulfil commissions while still maintaining a degree of autonomy from the state; they knew that history painting that appeared too deferential attracted little critical interest. Some admitted to feeling frustrated that their talent was being undermined. As the painter Girodet wrote, ‘We are all enlisted now, even if we don’t wear the uniform.’³³

Napoleon was well served by his artists, some of whom, such as David, took the short step from serving the Revolution to becoming the official court painter of the Empire. His canvas Le Sacre, for example, completed in 1808, did not just impress by its size or its cast of hundreds; it exuded the glory and majesty that Napoleon was so eager to project. Military painters, too, were careful to focus the onlooker’s eye on the glamour and dash of the Emperor, always prominently deployed in his signature greatcoat andtricornehat. He was the hero who threw himself and his men into battle, the strategist who planned every detail of the engagement and out-thought the opposition. The emphasis on war and empire-building had a further consequence in that their portrayal was largely masculine, in striking contrast to the revolutionaries’ identification of the nation through a predominantly feminine symbolism. The new imagery had male military bodies at its core, bodies which defined the character of the Empire by contrasting them with those of their enemies.³⁴

While Napoleon encouraged these portrayals and expressed approval for the work of those painters who specialised in military scenes – Prud’hon and Lefèvre, for instance – there is little to suggest that he had any real appreciation of art for its own sake. What he did appreciate was the influence art could exercise, and from early in his career he saw patronage as a valuable tool to manipulate opinion and build his reputation as a leader in the cultural domain. Of course, the painters concerned made a good living from state patronage; there was an annual budget of sixty thousand francs expressly reserved for purchases of ‘new, high-quality pictures and for encouraging the art of painting’.³⁵ But they could also expect to capitalise on their fame in the market place, as the private art market revived under the Empire. The revolutionary age of austerity was at last over, and artists and craftsmen, from portrait painters to landscape gardeners and the makers of fine porcelain, saw their business revive. The return of some of the great noble families from emigration, when added to Napoleon’s own taste for luxury, meant that those artists who had suffered most grievously during the Revolution now had fresh opportunities for sales, and hence for profit. The strong bond between Napoleon and his artists was mutually beneficial.

The benefit that Napoleon could derive from art is exemplified by the flurry of paintings recording and commemorating the Egyptian Campaign. The military effort, as we have seen, was an undisputed failure, with the remnants of his army returning in tatters to France and an important part of the artistic plunder, including the Rosetta Stone, falling ignominiously into British hands before it could be brought back to Europe. Yet, even at the time, Napoleon had insisted that these engagements would provide the subject matter for dramatic history paintings; and throughout the Empire such paintings became regular highlights of Napoleonic salons. It did not concern him that the battles had been lost, or that some of the scenes depicted were more invention than historical truth. Most important was the opportunity to paint scenes that would etch themselves on France’s imagination, and appeal to the colonial ideal that had begun to dissolve with the loss of Quebec in the Seven Years War and the Peace of Paris that followed. In the paintings of Gros, Girodet and Lejeune, a new colonial idyll was developed that could appeal to the France of the early nineteenth century and to the post-revolutionary world. The paintings nodded in the direction of the current fashion for the exotic and the oriental, lingering lovingly on the vivid cloaks and glinting weapons of France’s opponents. But they were not intended only to dazzle or entertain: they invoked memories that placed the French in the direct line of other great empires, whether of Egypt or of Rome. And by contrasting the French with the Syrians or Egyptians, the paintings also played to ideas of national stereotypes, that pitted, in Todd Porterfield’s words, ‘French science, morality, masculinity and intellectual rigor against supposedly representative traits of Easterners: fanaticism, cruelty, idleness, vice, irrationality, deviance and degeneracy’.³⁶ The French encompassed the highest values of civilisation; they could admire these paintings and feel good about themselves.

Napoleon had neither the time nor the expertise to exercise artistic judgment on his own account, and understood that he needed an artistic director, someone who could develop a national policy of collections and take charge of the masterpieces. Many of these had been pillaged from Germany, Italy and elsewhere, and would be placed in the new museum Napoleon intended to found in the Louvre. The man he chose for the task was Dominique-Vivant Denon, an engraver and former royal curator in the Old Regime, who had gone with Napoleon to Egypt where, accompanying Desaix’s army, he had travelled widely in the countryside and both written about and sketched the hundreds of antiquities he came across.

Denon was an indefatigable traveller who, on his return to France in 1802, published his findings, and his sketches, in his Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte pendant les campagnes du Général Bonaparte, a book that brought him instant fame, as much for his descriptions of the countryside and of everyday life in Egypt as for the technical detail on the ruins.³⁷ He commented on the Egyptians’ costumes and their diet, and noted the extremes of wealth and poverty that characterised urban society in Cairo. He lived through the Cairo uprising with all its extremes of violence and cruelty, yet noted that the ringleaders were atypical of the citizenry as a whole. ‘While murder was devoutly preached from the galleries of the minarets, and while the streets were filled with death and carnage, all those in whose houses any Frenchmen were lodged were eager to save them by concealment and to supply and anticipate all their wants’.³⁸ Denon’s descriptions were rich and detailed and, like all eighteenth-century travellers, steeped in the travel literature of the age, foremost among them the writings of Volney. Passing through Alexandria, for instance, he noted that everything he saw confirmed Volney’s graphic account of the city, to the point where, on rereading him several months later, all the shapes, colours and smells came flooding back to him.³⁹ If Napoleon warmed to Denon’s writing, he also trusted his politics, for Denon was a committed disciple. Describing the Battle of the Pyramids, he had concluded, with a degree of literary licence, that ‘a handful of French, led by a hero, had just subdued a quarter of the globe’.⁴⁰ It was not true, but it was the sort of distortion that appealed to the Emperor.

Vivant Denon was appointed in 1802 as the first director of Napoleon’s grand project for an imperial art gallery to be formed out of the Louvre, and he would retain the post until after the fall of the Empire in 1815. It gave him great influence over the artistic taste of his generation in his effective management of Napoleon’s cultural policy. He built up the collections in the Louvre and at Versailles, as well as arranging salons and giving help to struggling artists. The Louvre he inherited from the Revolution was a museum which had been established with a clear republican mission: as the Girondin minister Jean-Marie Roland explained to David in 1792, ‘The museum must demonstrate the nation’s great riches. France must extend its glory through the ages and to all peoples: the national museum will embrace knowledge in all its manifold beauty and will be the admiration of the universe.’⁴¹ Under the Empire the purpose of the museum became less educational and more celebratory, a storehouse for the culture of Europe and the conquests of Napoleon’s military triumphs. Art works were sedulously pillaged from public galleries and private collections in Italy, Germany, and across Europe, and brought back to Paris where they were displayed in chronological sequence to reflect the evolution of culture, building, of course, to the great painters of Napoleon’s own day.⁴²

In the streets of Paris, too, large numbers of public buildings and monuments proclaimed the glory of the regime and acted as everyday reminders of imperial military triumphs. If Napoleon disliked statues of himself, which would have recalled too directly the reigns of long-deposed monarchs, he aimed to make Paris a city of rare beauty, a fitting capital for his Empire. The obelisk on the Place de la Concorde recalled the splendours of an empire he had overcome; the Pantheon commemorated contemporary heroes; the Trajan column in the Place Vendôme conjured up memories of classical Rome. The triumphs of his armies are proclaimed on the Arc de Triomphe, designed for the Emperor though not completed until the 1830s. In architecture, classical facades dominated in the perfectly balanced, if emotionally cold, frontages of buildings such as the Madeleine or the French parliament building, the Palais Bourbon. Napoleon was not the last French leader to dream of leaving a permanent mark on Paris – the presidents of the Fifth Republic have in turn bestowed their architectural trademark on the capital – but few have left such a range of palaces and monuments.⁴³

Napoleon jealously guarded his reputation as a patron of the arts, since generosity and patronage were part of his image as a monarch. He was determined to show that he was more than a great warrior, and that he brought peace, culture, and civilisation to the territories he ruled. His artistic interest extended beyond painting and the plastic arts. He saw himself as a patron of music, too, and through the Comte de Remusat he intervened directly in the selection of prizewinners in the annual competition at the Imperial Music Academy. Like the Bourbons before him, he showed an interest in the plays that were staged in the Paris theatre, and most particularly in the performances staged at the Paris Opera, which he attended regularly when he was in the city. He even insisted on playing a role in programme selection, which allows one recent historian to talk of Napoleon having a politique de la scène.⁴⁴ This was especially so during the years of his great victories, when operas and plays often made specific reference to his achievements but, shrewdly perhaps, he maintained tight control over the Paris stage throughout the Empire. For there can be no mistake about his intentions, or the root of his artistic interest. Like everything he did, his motive was political before it was cultural. Patronage of the arts was yet another aspect of imperial power.