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Paris, 1840

Parisians turned out in force to hail their Emperor’s return, on a cold December day in 1840, when his body was solemnly carried on a riverboat from Courbevoie on its final journey to the Invalides. It was a moment that Paris had eagerly awaited, though when it was first announced it had met with a mixture of joy and surprise. Many feared that the British would seek to keep the Emperor’s body under their control rather than risk the new explosion of French nationalism which his memory might rekindle. They doubted that their king, Louis-Philippe, would take such a political risk at a time when his regime was under attack from republicans, legitimists and Bonapartists: was this really a way to reconcile the different political factions, they asked, or would the ceremony further undermine his own legitimacy?¹

In fact, Louis-Philippe’s political judgment was sound – at least in the immediate term – in that the Return of the Ashes redounded to the credit of the Orleanist regime; and at the same time succeeded, albeit temporarily, in eclipsing other, less glorious foreign policy issues in the national headlines. And though their Emperor’s return may have encouraged some of the electorate to indulge in nostalgic dreams of glory, most Frenchmen believed that the government was fulfilling a debt of honour in carrying out Napoleon’s final wishes. Had he not famously declared, in a codicil to his will, that he wanted his ashes to be returned to France and buried ‘by the banks of the Seine surrounded by the French people whom I have loved so dearly’ – a phrase that was sure to endear him to most of his fellow countrymen? In life Napoleon had been somewhat preoccupied by thoughts of his death and of his final resting place, and Paris was certainly one of the sites he had singled out. But there were others, most notably by the side of his ancestors in the cathedral at Ajaccio. What really alarmed him was the thought that the British might try to bury him in London and make political capital out of his death. After murdering him in Saint Helena, he declared, the least his enemies could do was to ‘return my ashes to France, the only country I have loved’.² His words would leave a powerful mark on future generations of Frenchmen.

Napoleon’s final return to his capital was minutely planned and choreographed. It required the exhumation of his body in Saint Helena, which was, of course, the property of the British crown; the despatch of a naval vessel to bring the Emperor’s ashes back to France; and a long and potentially hazardous sea voyage of several thousand miles from the South Atlantic. The plan involved diplomatic niceties as well as considerable logistical subtlety. The voyage was prepared in full consultation with the British government, with the French Prime Minister, Adolphe Thiers, taking overall charge of the mission.³

The venture did not come cheap. Louis-Philippe put aside the sum of a million francs from the 1840 budget for the transportation of Napoleon’s remains to Paris and the construction of his tomb in the traditional resting place of military heroes, the Church of theInvalides, whereupon the Chamber of Deputies, overcome with patriotic emotion, voted to double it. The choice of the Invalides was explained by the Minister of the Interior, Charles de Rémusat, in a statement to the Chamber on 12 May. Napoleon’s body, he explained, needed a ‘silent and venerable location’, which ruled out the choice of a public square in central Paris. ‘He was an Emperor and a King; he was the legitimate ruler of our country. In this regard, he could be interred at Saint-Denis.’ But, the Minister went on, an ordinary royal sepulchre was not fully appropriate for Napoleon. He must ‘still reign and command in the precincts where the soldiers of our country go to repose, and where those who are called to defend it will always go for inspiration’.⁴ His final resting place should be both a statement of his legitimacy and a reflection of his patriotism.

Other possible destinations had been considered and rejected, and the choice of resting place had been widely debated in the press. It was a matter of great public interest and caused a flurry of pamphlet and newspaper campaigns. In his report to the Chamber on 26 May, Marshal Clauzel outlined the most obvious candidates: ‘. . . the Pantheon which is home to all great men; the Madeleine, which is currently unclaimed and could justifiably be reserved for Napoleon; the Arc de Triomphe, which would provide him, as an epitaph, with the names of all his generals and a list of all his victories; the Column which was his work and his alone and, finally, the Basilica of Saint-Denis which has claims on him as a legitimate sovereign and which has stood ready for thirty years to receive him into the tomb which he himself had ordered’. But there were strong reasons for preferring the Invalides. It provided a dignified and prestigious setting that discouraged tumult and protest, and, besides, Napoleon had had a long association with the building. He had ordered that France’s great military heroes Vauban and Turenne be buried there. He had decorated the church with the flags of his victories. And he had chosen the building for the very first ceremony to confer the Legion of Honour.⁵ It was an easy decision to take.

Creating a tomb for the Emperor that would fit seamlessly into one of Paris’s most famous churches posed major problems for the man who emerged triumphant from the public competition to select a design for the monument: Louis Visconti. The church was part of a coherent group of buildings that formed the Hôtel des Invalides, designed by the architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart to receive and care for French officers from Louis XIV’s wars, and was one of the most prestigious building projects in late seventeenth-century Paris. It was a recognised masterpiece of baroque architecture and one of the great domed spaces of Europe, to be compared with St Peter’s in Rome or Westminster Abbey in London.⁶ It was into this space that Visconti was charged in 1842 to insert a commemorative tomb to the Emperor and a dignified last resting place for his ashes – one that would testify to Napoleon’s greatness without jeopardising the dignity of the baroque building.

It was a difficult commission, especially as the popular mood in 1840 risked sinking into a jingoistic adulation of Napoleon and the military glory he had brought to France. The Emperor’s ashes were to rest under the great dome with its 1706 painting of Saint Louis, a Crusader king who had brought civilisation to heathens and infidels.⁷ In the words of the royal decree, ‘The tomb will be placed beneath the dome, which will be reserved, along with the four side chapels, for the burial place of the Emperor Napoleon.’ And it was stipulated that the area should for all time be devoted to this purpose only: no other coffin could be placed there in future.⁸ Visconti’s crypt would not be completed until 1861, eight years after his death. Napoleon was not only being brought home to Paris at state expense, but he was also being given the dignity of a state burial. There were some who argued that the choice of the Invalides was an ambivalent one which, while reflecting Napoleon’s military greatness, played down any claims to legitimacy which might have been embarrassing to Louis-Philippe. What is certain, however, is that he had been accorded a permanent place in the collective memory of the nation.

The first step had been to persuade the British government that it was in their own interest to allow the French to bring Britain’s greatest enemy home to Europe, despite the risk that the celebrations that would accompany Napoleon’s return might unleash new waves of nostalgia, and dreams of imperial glory such as had united the rest of Europe against the Emperor in his lifetime. Thiers briefed the French ambassador in London, François Guizot, himself a future prime minister, to whom he handed full responsibility for negotiations with the British. He informed Guizot that the King was committed to the plan, and that he counted on the cooperation of the British government. For, Thiers explained, Louis-Philippe could see no honourable reason to refuse France’s request, since ‘England cannot tell the world that she wants to keep a corpse prisoner’. Thiers went on, rather curiously, to expand on this view. ‘When a condemned man has been executed, his body is returned to his family. And I ask pardon of heaven for comparing the greatest of men to a criminal hanging from the scaffold.’⁹

Guizot transmitted his government’s request, emphasising the compassion due to those who had fought for Napoleon and wished to see him returned to his native soil. It was presented as a humanitarian appeal from one monarch to another. The French king, explained Guizot in his despatch to the Foreign Office, very much wished to see Napoleon’s remains returned to French soil, to ‘this land which he defended and which he rendered illustrious, and which maintains with respect the mortal remains of so many thousands of his companions in arms, both officers and soldiers, who devoted themselves at his side to the service of our country’.¹⁰ The British government agreed with only a minimum of delay. Lord Palmerston added rather mischievously that such rapid cooperation should be taken as a sign of Britain’s willingness to wipe away any lingering traces of the animosity between the two nations, which ‘during the lifetime of the Emperor had pitted the French and British nations against each other in war’.¹¹ More pertinently, it was also an olive branch through which Palmerston hoped to win French cooperation in the Levant over a current political crisis. The Pasha of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, was seeking to extend his somewhat fragile hegemony in Syria, a move that met with the support of the French government but with considerable opposition from Britain. For both the British and the French, therefore, the return of Napoleon’s ashes could serve as a useful diversion at a moment of high political tension.¹² In fact, as France would soon discover, Palmerston had no intention of allowing himself to be distracted; in the weeks that followed, Britain would pull off a diplomatic coup by getting Russia, Prussia and Austria to join her in issuing an ultimatum to Mehemet Ali and, in the process, leaving Louis-Philippe dangerously isolated.

Once these diplomatic exchanges had been completed, the expedition to Saint Helena could be mounted. Two vessels, the frigate Belle-Poule and a smaller corvette, La Favorite, left Toulon on 7 July for the South Atlantic. In charge of this delicate mission was Louis-Philippe’s son, the Prince de Joinville, who held the rank of ship’s captain in the French navy, and who was pulled out of active service in the Algerian campaign to head the expedition. The crew numbered around five hundred men, and the expedition included a number of those who had accompanied Napoleon during his exile, most notably two of the Emperor’s most loyal marshals, Generals Bertrand and Gourgaud; his priest, Father Coquereau; five of his former valets and personal servants; and Emmanuel de Las Cases, the son of Napoleon’s secretary on Saint Helena, who had been a boy when he had last been on the island in 1821. The two ships anchored on 8 October in the harbour at Jamestown before a substantial welcoming party of islanders, who had been informed of their arrival some days before by the crew of a passing British ship. Las Cases expressed what he felt as he looked around the island at the objects that surrounded him, scarcely daring to believe his eyes and ‘feeling what you feel when you wake up from a dream: my memories were as acute and as real as if the captivity had only ended the previous day’.¹³ On the following day de Joinville obtained the agreement of the governor that the honours due to a monarch should be extended to Napoleon’s body and that the coffin should be opened to allow official verification of the identity of the corpse.¹⁴ This contrasted sharply with the Emperor’s earlier interment in 1821, in an obscure grave shaded by two willow trees, in a little valley on Saint Helena. On that occasion, on the instructions of the British Colonial Secretary, Lord Bathurst, the only honours he was accorded were those that were routinely given to an officer of the British army.¹⁵

The real work, that of exhuming the body, then got under way, overseen by the surgeon of the Belle-Poule, Rémi-Julien Guillard, who left behind a detailed account of what happened. Digging was carried out at night when the air was coolest, and rumours that the grave might have been disturbed were soon discounted. He noted that, as the earth and stones were removed from the ground, they encountered neither foul smells nor an exhalation of gas; and when the chamber was opened, he went down inside it and found the Emperor’s coffin, intact, below. ‘The mahogany planks that formed the coffin still retained their colour and their hard texture’, he reported, ‘and there was neither solid nor liquid matter around it on the ground. The outer casing was held shut with long screws which we had to cut in order to remove the lid; underneath was a lead casket, which was closed on all sides and enveloped a mahogany casket that itself was perfectly intact; after that was a fourth casket in iron whose lid was soldered onto supports which folded down inside.’ Guillard then describes the care with which they approached the body.

‘The soldering was slowly cut open and the lid carefully removed; then I saw a whitish cloth that hid the inside of the coffin and prevented us from seeing the body; it was quilted satin and was used to decorate the inside of this casket. I lifted it by a corner, and, rolling it back from the feet to the head, exposed Napoleon’s body, which I immediately recognised as it had been so well preserved, and his face retained such a lifelike expression’.¹⁶ Such decay as had taken place was entirely consistent with the effect of nearly twenty years in the soil, the doctor confirmed, and he noted that if the uniform Napoleon was buried in had become dull and blackened during its years in the ground, his golden crown and his cross of an officer of the Legion of Honour still retained much of their glitter, while the two silver vases that had been buried with him, one of them capped with an imperial eagle, were closed and intact. Having exhumed the body and satisfied themselves that it had not been tampered with, the French secured it in six different coffins and caskets and loaded it on board the Belle-Poule for repatriation to France.¹⁷

With Napoleon’s body on board, the Belle-Poule headed directly back to Europe, completing the voyage in around six weeks before docking at Cherbourg, where the Emperor’s coffin lay on board for a week before being transferred to a river-steamer, theNormandie, for its journey up the Seine. In Cherbourg, more than a hundred thousand people came to kneel by the catafalque, which the city council had voted to adorn with a golden crown.¹⁸ From Cherbourg, river boats took over, and the voyage began to resemble a festival parade as they escorted the coffin by planned stages towards Paris. At every staging-point, crowds gathered to join in the celebrations; flags were flown, and programmes of patriotic celebrations were organised. The Normandie carried the coffin from Cherbourg to Le Havre on 8 December and, on the following day, to Val de la Haye where it gave way to a flotilla of river boats with a shallower draught for the last stages upstream through Vernon, Mantes and MaisonsLaffitte, arriving in Courbevoie on 14 December. Throughout the journey huge crowds lined the river banks and bridges were turned into triumphal arches; salvos were fired, units of national guardsmen paraded, and military bands played martial music. The seven-day journey had the joyous atmosphere of a public festival, and those towns where there was no scheduled stop – notably Rouen – protested loudly at what they saw as a cruel and deliberate slight.¹⁹ Their Emperor was coming home to France, and everyone, it seemed, wanted part of the action.

Prominent among those who took part in these celebrations were Napoleon’s former soldiers, their enthusiasm for their old leader seemingly undimmed after a quarter of a century. Along the route they crammed on to landing-stages and lined up on bridges; many of them felt that this was their day, a time to celebrate their victories and sacrifices and to draw them to the attention of the civilian population. But it was primarily a moment to pay tribute to their Emperor and to remember the glory and drama of the long years they had spent criss-crossing Europe in his service. At Courbevoie, freezing in ten degrees of frost, Louis-Philippe’s new Prime Minister knelt before the coffin, deep in thought and reminiscence: Jean de Dieu Soult who, in an earlier life, had been promoted by Napoleon to be Marshal of France, who was at his right hand at Austerlitz, and a major-general at Waterloo.²⁰ Progress on this last stage of the Emperor’s journey had visibly slowed, in large measure to allow the architects and an army of tradesmen time to complete their work so that Napoleon’s body could be received with due pomp and dignity. But it also allowed ordinary citizens and local authorities along the route a chance to pay their own respects and to produce celebrations worthy of an emperor.

In Paris, as news arrived of the approach of the flotilla, excitement spread, not least among survivors of the Grande Armée. Among those veterans who were housed in the Invalides, it was reported that ‘joy spilt over into lunacy: it seemed that they were being taken back to the battles and glory they had been involved in before. The poor old wounded soldiers forgot their pain and their suffering; they sang, laughed, brushed their uniforms and polished their swords as though they were about to be reviewed by their great commander’.²¹

By the end of the week, when the flotilla had docked in Courbevoie, all eyes turned to Paris. The day assigned for the final cortege and the burial of Napoleon’s ashes, 15 December, would be one of huge pomp and celebration as the funeral procession passed through the city. Contemporary reports are unanimous in describing the popular enthusiasm across Paris and the joy and pride that were reflected in the faces of the crowds. As the cortege moved through the streets of the capital, this enthusiasm at times risked becoming politicised, with some of the crowd bursting into prolonged chants of ‘Vive l’Empereur’ as a way of expressing their displeasure with the grey world they had come to associate with the monarchy. But most Parisians did not dwell on the political significance of the event, preferring to treat it as an additional holiday and revel in the colour, the music, and the artillery fire. They saw the moment as one to celebrate, as a popular festival in which they had a part to play. Some went further, seeing it as a moment of national reconciliation, a milestone in forging France’s collective memory and establishing the identity of the post-revolutionary nation. The republican and left-wing press reflected the generally popular enthusiasm and patriotism and praised Napoleon both as a military commander and as the heir to France’s revolutionary traditions. Only the monarchist Right had reason to quibble, reminding their readers that the return of the ashes did nothing to give Napoleon legitimacy, and that for them he would always remain a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘usurper’ of the Bourbon throne.²²

Paris was sumptuously decked out for the funeral procession on a morning when the barometer recorded fifteen degrees of frost. Even some of the soldiers assigned to the ceremony found their resilience sapped by the cold. Yet the freezing temperatures did notdeter the crowds, who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to watch the Emperor parade in the midst of his people. This was the traditional role of royal funerals of the sort France had become accustomed to witness during the Restoration, and which customarily had a religious as well as a political character, linking the recent death of a monarch or his martyrdom during the Revolution to the promise of salvation in another world. Under the two Bourbon kings they had been called to celebrate members of the Royal family lost to the Terror: the transfer of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to Saint-Denis, the state funerals for Louis XVI and the Duc de Berry.²³

In Napoleon’s case, of course, the promise of eternity may not have been the message that the authorities most wished to convey, but this was the meaning that was usually encoded in the ceremonial of these royal occasions, and would certainly have reflected what the onlookers read into it. There was another difference, though, in that the Emperor had long been dead, and that there was no cause for lamentation. This was not a funeral in the strict sense of the term, but a reburial on French soil; onlookers were entitled to treat it as a source of celebration and jubilation rather than of more traditional mourning.

Napoleon’s ashes were carried in their casket on a funeral barge, before being transferred to a huge golden coach drawn by sixteen horses and draped in purple cloth decorated with Imperial bees, with the figures of fourteen armed Victories, and with Imperial eagles in submissive pose. It was over thirty feet high and weighed thirteen tons, and was, depending on the taste of the individual spectator, either dazzlingly magnificent or overly heavy and cumbersome. It certainly had the disadvantage of hiding from view what most had come to see – Napoleon’s coffin.²⁴ But the coach surely impressed the crowds as it rumbled across the cobblestones past the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Elysées before crossing the Seine on its way to the Invalides. The streets were thick with onlookers, all hoping for a final glimpse of the Emperor as the long and colourful funeral cortege passed by. Appropriately, perhaps, in the light of Napoleon’s achievements, the procession was overwhelmingly composed of soldiers, whose bright uniforms and martial music added to the sense of spectacle and to public enjoyment of the occasion.

The decoration of the streets matched the celebratory mood. In the symbolism and imagery of the decor, prominence was given to Napoleon’s victories and to his acknowledged status as a military hero, the image of the Emperor that lived on in the Napoleonic legend and in the popular imagination. This was the hero of Marengo and Austerlitz rather than the originator of the University and the Code Napoléon. The streets along the route and the bridges over the Seine were lavishly decorated with symbolic statuary and triumphal arches that reflected the mood of the occasion. On each side of the Champs-Elysées, eighteen winged statues of Victory alternated with columns bearing an Imperial eagle. The Pont de la Concorde was decorated with four triumphal columns and eight statues representing the achievements of the French people – Wisdom, Strength, Justice and War on one side, Agriculture, the Arts, Rhetoric and Trade on the other – before the cortege reached the Left bank of the river where it was met by a huge statue representing Immortality. In front of the Invalides, as the procession approached from the Seine, it passed a bronze statue of the Emperor himself, while along the Esplanade thirty-two hastily created plaster statues of past French heroes gazed down approvingly.

The choice of those honoured as heroes was instructive, if somewhat eclectic. Monarchs were well represented, going as far back as Clovis, Hugh Capet and Charles Martel, though there was none more recent than Louis XIV. Military leaders of the past took their places beside them in the roll of honour: Joan of Arc was there, of course, along with Duguesclin and Bayard, Condé and Turenne. The great specialist in siege warfare, Vauban, was there too, as was Napoleon’s greatest rival in the French revolutionary armies, Lazare Hoche. But so, more significantly, were seven of Napoleon’s marshals, the generals who had served him in his great campaigns in Italy and Germany, Spain and Russia. They, too, appeared as heroes to be compared to the great soldiers of the past. Kellermann, Jourdan, Lannes, Masséna, Mortier and Macdonald were all included in the guard of honour, as, more surprisingly, was Ney, executed for treason for supporting Napoleon during the Hundred Days, but now rehabilitated for the occasion by Louis-Philippe.²⁵ In all, the manufacture of the decorations and sculptures had employed fifty of France’s leading artists of the day.²⁶

The ceremony continued inside the church with the solemn handing over of the ashes by the Prince de Joinville and their acceptance by Louis-Philippe ‘in the name of France’. By this gesture Napoleon was accepted back into the nation, an act which, his supporters argued, gave him a new legitimacy in the turbulent history of French political regimes. On the coffin were placed, with an almost religious dedication, three objects sacred to his memory: a cross of the Legion of Honour, the famous hat he had worn at Eylau, and the golden sword he had brandished at Austerlitz. Then, once the coffin had been placed in the catafalque, the funeral service could begin, to the music of Mozart’s mass for the dead, performed by six hundred musicians, singers and choristers.²⁷ It had been an eventful day. What had begun as a memorable effusion of popular joy ended in a mood of almost religious solemnity.

The Return of the Ashes offers eloquent proof of the French people’s continuing fascination with the Emperor, and many in the crowd made no secret of their admiration for what Napoleon had achieved or their nostalgic memories of the Grand Empire. The celebrations were etched sharply on the public memory, and they were passed on to future generations in paintings, lithographs, poems and popular songs. Paris theatres offered operas which exalted the style and glory of the Empire, and they played to packed houses. More than a hundred poems were written and published to mark the ceremony, the most famous by Victor Hugo, and the vast majority singing the unquestioning praises of France’s dead hero.²⁸ Painters vied with one another to depict the scene at Napoleon’s graveside on Saint Helena, the arrival of the Belle-Poule in Cherbourg, and the colour and pageantry of the final procession across Paris. Some emphasised the beauty of the landscape and the dignity of the ceremonial to add lustre to the occasion. Others turned to allegory to give a more explicitly political interpretation of events, often mixing real and fictional characters or presenting the martyred Napoleon as a new saint in the Christian pantheon.²⁹ Artists such as François Trichot and Horace Vernet suggested that Napoleon even possessed divine attributes: they present him rising from the dead, resurrected like a new Christ to return to his people, or drawn in a chariot by an eagle towards an eternal paradise.³⁰ Caricaturists profited from the moment to recall the glorious victories of the Grand Army or to contrast the achievements and ambitions of the Emperor with those, far more modest, of the current regime.

The ready availability of prints and lithographs meant that within hours of the events in Paris, images of them were being distributed in all parts of the country, thus involving the people of provincial towns and rural hamlets in a moment of Napoleonic fantasy from which many felt they had been unfairly excluded. The exploits of the Emperor had long been a favoured theme of the popular prints produced by Charles Pellerin in Epinal and distributed throughout peasant France at fairs and markets. Pellerin used the opportunity to depict to his fellow countrymen the full wonder of the ceremonial, the size and opulence of the funeral carriage, and the huge and enthusiastic crowds that had lined the streets and blocked off central Paris. No detail was omitted, ensuring that the Return of the Ashes became one of the best-known and best-loved scenes in nineteenth-century French history, one that helped keep the Napoleonic legend alive for future generations.³¹

The legend had gained renewed popularity following Napoleon’s death in 1821. It was constructed around his illustrious and multi-faceted life as soldier and statesman, a revolutionary general who had gone on to conquer Europe, a man of talent who rose from the ranks of the army to become the unchallenged leader of his country after the division and factionalism of the revolutionary decade.

That life began in 1769, on the island of Corsica.