Citizen Emperor (33 page)

The Legion of Honour had been established by decree in May 1802, in the face of strong opposition. Two years of bitter political battles followed before the award was realized in the form of a medal in July 1804.
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More deputies opposed the Legion of Honour than opposed the reintroduction of slavery in 1802.
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They feared Bonaparte was returning to the principles of the
ancien régime
, while others feared the creation of a class of notables, a type of (military) aristocracy, that would become exclusively loyal to him. Bonaparte had gone against the revolutionary grain by introducing this system of awards, but it reflects his personal preferences. In Italy in 1796, he had begun to invent new awards for his soldiers, usually in the form of swords of honour, in order to create an affective bond with his men.
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Moreover, the Legion was designed to reward those who had rendered services to the state – merit was the defining condition of entry – thereby creating a kind of elite that would remain loyal to the state, that is, Bonaparte, and on which he could count. It was also designed to recompense those who had fought to establish the Revolution and those who had helped bring about Brumaire.
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More than that, however, it was based on a conception of ‘social amelioration’ – people could strive to get ahead in the service of the state.
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The Legion also has to be seen as one among many attempts to rally the elite to the regime, and not only within France. It was, therefore, a form of political control, or at least of political persuasion, in which the holders of the medal were expected not only to remain loyal to the state, but in some respects to become propagandists for the regime. Along with a pension, the person received a medal with Napoleon’s image on one side, and the imperial eagle on the other, with the inscription
Honneur et Patrie
. Republican virtues and national honour were meant to inspire Frenchmen to serve the
patrie
, one of the reasons many republicans hated the idea; the concept of ‘honour’ not only smacked of the old monarchy, but was also associated with the nobility.
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Napoleon was, in some respects, creating a civil society modelled on the army, a strictly hierarchical order of merit.
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As a result of opposition to the introduction of the Legion, Bonaparte was forced to push the matter through the Council of State, but even then ten out of fourteen voted against the law. In part, their reaction was one of revenge for the defeats they had suffered in the course of 1802. It then went to the Legislative Corps where, after one of the most open and heated debates, the measure was finally endorsed, but only by 166 to 110 votes. Such a margin was unheard of before and was particularly noticeable given that its members had only recently been purged. The Tribunate saw similar scenes, but there too it passed by 56 votes to 38. Former revolutionaries were particularly vociferous; they feared the introduction of an ‘order’ (although the word was never used) that would lead to the abandonment of the principle of equality. Even those who normally supported Napoleon in the Tribunate spoke against it.
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If former revolutionaries criticized the new project, the military were not particularly keen either. The idea of being associated with a medal that would also be awarded to civilians was distasteful.
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Moreau publicly ridiculed the idea by making his cook a ‘knight of the pot’ (
chevalier de la casserole
).
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Students at the Ecole Polytechnique denigrated the Legion of Honour as a reward for charlatanism and not merit.
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And yet Bonaparte’s reaction to all this was quite moderate; he tried to get a number of generals who had resisted the idea of empire on side by promoting them to his Guard.
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And once the medal was distributed, it soon became accepted if not coveted.

Boulogne

The Legion of Honour was taken to the army. Ever since the declaration of war, Bonaparte had been gathering troops along the northern shorelines in preparation for an invasion of England. Between June 1803 and September 1805, some 170,000 men were assembled along the coast between Montreuil in the north of France and Utrecht in Holland, possibly the largest number of men in history brought together for a single campaign.
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The central point of this concentration was the port town of Boulogne.

One day after Napoleon’s thirty-fifth birthday, on 16 August 1804, a grand ceremony took place near Boulogne, on the cliffs overlooking the English Channel, with the French fleet sailing off the coast, in what has been described as one of the ‘most elaborate military festivals of the Napoleonic period’.
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Over 100,000 men were drawn up in a semicircle around a raised platform, forming a sort of natural amphitheatre, on top of which was the bronze throne of Dagobert, the Merovingian king who helped unify the Franks in the seventh century.
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A salvo of artillery and 2,000 beating drums announced the arrival of Napoleon, easily recognizable on his grey horse and by the clothes he wore. He dismounted, walked up the steps to the enormous stage, to the music of Jean-François Le Sueur, composed for the occasion, keeping the rhythm of the music in his step. The music would be used again during the coronation. The Emperor took his place on the throne. Behind him were over 200 captured enemy flags. To the left was a helmet supposed to have belonged to Bertrand du Guesclin, Constable of France during the Hundred Years’ War. To the right, a breastplate of the Chevalier Bayard, hero of the Italian Wars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the shield of the French Renaissance king Francis I, who conducted a series of wars in Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth century; two further shields contained the 2,000 medals of the Legion of Honour that were about to be distributed.
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Very few people would have appreciated the significance of these artefacts – not even, it would appear, the artist Philippe-August Hennequin, who accompanied Vivant Denon to Boulogne. In his memoirs, he was more concerned with describing how the weather seems to have been subject to Napoleon’s will. There had been an overcast stormy sky, he wrote, until the moment Napoleon sat on the throne, when ‘the clouds divided and let a ray of light escape that fell on the trophy behind the emperor’.
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Nevertheless, the fact that ancient symbols of royal power were used as a central prop during a ceremony to celebrate the distribution of the controversial Legion meant that notions of royalism, republicanism and even imperialism were combined on stage for the first time.
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Detail from Philippe Auguste Hennequin,
Napoléon Ier distribue les croix de la légion d’honneur au camp de Boulogne le 16 août 1804
(Napoleon distributing the Cross of the Legion of Honour at the camp of Boulogne on 16 August 1804), 1806. The painting appeared in the Salon of 1806. Today, an obelisk marks the spot where the throne of Dagobert was placed for the ceremony.

Once on stage, the grand chancellor of the Legion of Honour, Bernard-Germain de Lacépède, asked Napoleon to swear the oath of the Legion of Honour. Not many people would have heard him in the wind but, on cue, hundreds of thousands of voices rang out with ‘Vivat!’ when the oath was taken. Napoleon also asked the troops to swear an oath of loyalty to him. ‘And you, soldiers, do you swear to defend, at the peril of your life, the honour of the French name, your
patrie
and your Emperor?’
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This ceremony, which harks back to the ancient Roman tradition of the troops swearing an oath of loyalty to the emperor, was one means used by Napoleon to invest the Empire with princely forms of traditional obedience, as well as legitimating the transformation of the Republic into an empire. According to one eyewitness, those present were ‘electrified’, although whether this was the case for everyone is questionable.
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The ceremony was, in any event, a blatant attempt to seduce the army and to garner support for Napoleon, especially in the context of the recent trial of General Moreau. That, along with the Concordat and the proclamation of the Empire, had disaffected a good number of republicans among the military.

Charlemagne, Not Caesar (or Alexander)

Legitimating what contemporaries began to call the ‘fourth dynasty’ took place on another level as well.
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In order to be accepted as a sovereign by the other European monarchs, and in order to impose his dynasty, Napoleon had to invent a past, or rather legitimate the transformation of power by making a link between his own regime and those of the past.
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He therefore actively encouraged the comparison not only with Charlemagne but also with Alexander, Caesar and Hannibal, as well as with a number of other historical figures, in the press as well as in paintings, engravings and medals. Caesar was an obvious reference point since he was not only the head of a dictatorship of public safety, so to speak, but sought to legitimate and perpetuate his power through a hereditary succession.
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Many of the institutions created during the early years of Napoleon’s reign were modelled, very loosely, on this period of Roman history: the consuls held executive power; the tribunes shared legislative power with the senators, and so on. The French Republic was thus subtly assimilated with the Roman Republic. The proclamation of the Empire in 1804 seemed, in many respects, the logical outcome of these Roman Republican institutions. It was important though that Napoleon was associated not only with a French but also with a European heritage.
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Central to that heritage was the Emperor Charlemagne (742–814), who ruled over much of western Europe, and who is regarded as the founder of both the French and German monarchies.
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Napoleon and his propagandists never tired of making the comparison.
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For example, an item in the
Journal de Paris
states that there is only one hand in all of Europe capable of wearing the sword of Charlemagne, that of ‘Bonaparte the Great’.
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It is no coincidence, therefore, to see in the painting by David of Bonaparte crossing the Alps the names of Hannibal, ‘Karolus Magnus’ (Charlemagne) and Bonaparte carved into the rock in the bottom left-hand corner (see p. 39). Napoleon understood the extraordinary potential of the myth of Charlemagne, a myth moreover that had been reworked and revamped in the years preceding the outbreak of Revolution in France, and which had become closely linked to debates throughout the eighteenth century on absolutism and the nature of the monarchy. Charlemagne came to represent the human face of absolutism, a legislator who had redressed the nation and had established a constitution. This is why he represented such an ideal historical type for the regime; like Charlemagne, Napoleon wanted to unite the nation around his person. Moreover, contemporaries looked on Charlemagne as a king who had restored order after a period of chaos, and who had occupied a throne left morally vacant by the previous Merovingian dynasty.