Citizen Emperor (36 page)

When it came to the coronation ceremony then, one can imagine the tensions and petty jealousies simmering under the surface of the Bonaparte family. At a meeting at Saint-Cloud on 17 November, a terrible scene occurred between Joseph and Napoleon about the ceremonial rules. Napoleon’s sisters and sisters-in-law refused to carry the Empress’s train during the ceremony, as etiquette required.
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‘Do I have to be there to swell his wife’s court?’ Pauline is supposed to have complained. ‘Oh, honourable indeed, Bonapartes in the suite of Beauharnais. Truly, my sisters make me sick with their submission.’
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Elisa, Pauline and Caroline saw in the gesture an insult for which they would never forgive Josephine. Joseph protested on their behalf. The fundamental issue really was that the Bonaparte family objected to seeing Josephine crowned empress.
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Napoleon’s reaction was predictable: he hurled abuse at his brother. When the meeting was adjourned, the argument continued between the two brothers in private and became more and more heated, to the point where Joseph offered to resign the imperial dignity and retire to Germany. Eventually, the princesses agreed to submit after the description of their role in the official proceedings was changed from ‘carrying the train’ (
porter la queue
) to ‘holding the mantle’ (
soutenir le manteau
).
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Less than a week later, Napoleon had another meeting with Joseph and gave him three choices: to resign and withdraw from public affairs; to continue to enjoy the rank of prince all the while opposing Napoleon’s ‘system’; or to unite with Napoleon and become his ‘first subject’.
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Nevertheless, the Emperor warned, if Joseph refused to come to the coronation ceremony and to fulfil the role that had been assigned to him, he would be from that moment on Napoleon’s enemy. It is a remarkable confrontation – the elder brother harangued by the younger, forcing him to toe the line. Faced with these options, Joseph rallied to his brother, although perhaps not as wholeheartedly as Napoleon would have liked. Joseph’s reaction was, however, going to stick in Napoleon’s craw. A measure of Napoleon’s hurt can be seen in the rather strange analogy he later used to describe the experience: he likened it to a man telling another that he was screwing his lover, only to tell him the next day that he had been joking. The damage had been done.

9

Citizen Emperor

The Coronation

On 1 December 1804, the day before the coronation, the Emperor received the Senate at the Tuileries, seated on his throne, as they brought him the official results of the plebiscite on the Empire. The president of the Senate, François de Neufchâteau, poet and revolutionary, gave a speech that lasted three-quarters of an hour in which Napoleon was congratulated for having ‘steered the vessel of the Republic into port’. Napoleon, like a wonder of God, had set the limits of the Revolution and had founded the first monarchy that did not control the freedom of its subjects. The Emperor replied using for the first time the expression ‘my people’. Miot de Mélito noticed that it did not go down terribly well, but that no one voiced an objection.
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It snowed all that night until about eight in the morning.
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Parisians woke to find their city covered, the noises typical of a big city dulled by a white blanket. Workers had to be quickly mobilized to shovel the snow away and to lay sand along the route the procession was going to take. If the workers had risen early, the hairstylists had not yet gone to bed. Some of them had started as early as two in the morning. Mme Campan had her hair done at 4 a.m.; Mlle Avrillon, the Empress’s lady-in-waiting, at 5.
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Once the stylists had done their job, rather than go to bed and risk messing their hair, some women preferred to sleep upright in a chair, waiting until the time had come to get dressed.
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Between the foundation of the Empire in May 1804 and the coronation ceremony six months later, a whole new courtly attire had to be designed, fabricated and adopted. It required so much work that artisans of the fashion industry had to be brought to Paris from Lyons to make all the costumes in time for the ceremony.
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If the ceremony itself was forgotten, the fashions were not; they would set the trend in Europe for decades to come.

In spite of the overcast sky and the cold weather, Parisians, ‘more curious than eager’, turned out in great numbers to witness the event,
⁶
especially in the square before Notre Dame, but also along the route the procession was to take, where soldiers in their brand-new uniforms formed a guard of honour. According to the playwright Charles Brifaut, Parisians at first ‘refused’ to take the ceremony seriously, but within a month France was on its knees before the Emperor.
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Windows and balconies along the route of the procession were rented at exorbitant prices, three to four hundred francs for a balcony that could barely hold five or six people, the equivalent of anything from a quarter- to a half-year’s wage for a worker.
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The doors of the cathedral were thrown open at six o’clock in the morning; many of the 20,000 guests, impatient or wanting to get seated early, started arriving, handing over their invitations to the master of ceremonies.
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Accommodation in Paris had to be found for the thousands of people invited to the ceremony, who often arrived with members of their family. Many of the troops brought in for the occasion had to be billeted on the people. The prefecture of police calculated that 700 carriages brought guests to their destination; they had to be parked somewhere during the ceremony and that could only be done by the police requisitioning stables and private courtyards in the surrounding streets.
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The presence of these early arrivals, however, only interfered with the workers completing their last-minute preparations.
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Pius VII’s procession, made up of ten carriages, left the Tuileries at about nine in the morning. It was delayed because the French were unaware of the custom that called for the pope to be preceded by the apostolic nuncio, in this case a man by the name of Speroni, on a mule holding a cross; they had to run about finding a suitable mount at the last minute.
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When Speroni passed down the street of Saint-Denis, in what was essentially a working-class district, the crowds laughed so much that the pope could not prevent himself from joining in.
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Speroni too was good-natured enough to laugh too.

The procession took about an hour and a half to make the journey to the cathedral. There had already been some discussion about how the pope was to enter Notre Dame. He should have been carried into the cathedral on his portable throne, the
sedia gestatoria
, but we now know that Napoleon had opposed the traditional entry for fear that it would look more grandiose than his own. Other, more practical reasons were given though: the gallery through which the throne had to pass was too narrow; a similar gesture had been made during the Revolution when the radical journalist and politician Jean-Paul Marat had had himself carried into Notre Dame on a chair.
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The chamberlain of the palace, Auxonne de Thiard, has left us with a description of Napoleon barefoot, half-clad, wearing a dressing gown, less than an hour before he was due to leave.
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The imperial couple left the Tuileries between ten and eleven o’clock and travelled through the streets to the cathedral in a procession made up of twenty-five carriages, drawn by 152 horses, escorted by six cavalry regiments. The order of the procession said a good deal about where real power in the Empire lay: the twenty-two ‘grand officers’ of the Legion of Honour, all generals, were at the head of the parade, closely followed by the commanders of the military divisions and the generals of division.
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Only then did the civilian authorities follow – judges, court officials, civic and religious leaders.

Mass attendance at public festivities is not necessarily the same thing as public acceptance of the existing (or in this case new) social and political order.
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As it turned out, the crowd waiting for the procession was a good deal more reserved than had been hoped, despite the massive and costly build-up over the two months leading up to the ceremony. But then people had to wait around all day in a cold that was bound to dampen the spirits of even the most ardent supporters. Descriptions of the mood of the crowd depend on the political leanings of the author, their position along the path of the procession and the time of day. Jean-Nicolas-August Noël, lined up with his detachment along the route, believed that ‘little enthusiasm was shown’, despite what was written in the official reports, and that only a few of the public and the urchins who ran alongside the procession cried out ‘Vive l’Empereur’.
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Noël was a republican at heart who disliked the whole affair, but others agreed with him. One onlooker, no great admirer of Napoleon, wrote to tell his sister that he saw the procession drive past while he was standing on the corner of the Place du Carrousel: ‘There was a small crowd, extremely calm.’
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Miot de Mélito asserted that acclamations were rare and uttered without enthusiasm.
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Other reports were less categorical. Hortense de Beauharnais spoke of the large crowds but described their applause as the ‘customary cheering’ – that is, they applauded because that was the thing to do.
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‘Acclamations did not lack along the route,’ wrote one of Josephine’s ladies-in-waiting, Claire Elisabeth de Rémusat. She gives the impression, however, that the crowds were there out of curiosity more than anything else and that they ‘did not have that enthusiastic elan that a sovereign jealous of receiving the testimony of love for these subjects might have desired, but they could not satisfy the vanity of a master proud and not in the least sensitive’.
²²

The only people in fact to claim that the crowds were enthusiastic were the police and some of the troops present. The police reports ring overly positive, praising the good mood of the people and the ‘concert of praise and blessings’. The report written by the prefect of police, Dubois, smacks of the toadying that inevitably accompanies power.
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As for the troops, they were specifically chosen for the occasion.
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Elie Krettly, a fervent supporter of the imperial regime, remarked on the ‘universal joy’ among the crowds that lined the route, although this was after the ceremony.
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(The return procession through the popular quarters, like the rue Saint-Martin, was much more enthusiastic.
²⁶
An indication that the people of Paris were willing participants lies in the number of houses illuminated along the return route of the procession. By the time the imperial couple reached the Tuileries two hours later, through an alley that had been illuminated by 500 torches, it was already half past six in the evening.)
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Enthusiastic or not, Paris was obliged to put on its best face for the occasion. A fountain thirteen metres high had been constructed on the Esplanade des Invalides; three bridges had been built over the River Seine to facilitate the traffic, one of which, the Pont des Arts, had only recently been inaugurated; houses had been destroyed to help circulation, especially around the cathedral on the Île de la Cité; the rue de Rivoli, the Place du Carrousel and the Quai Bonaparte were completely paved (a rare thing in Paris); and footpaths had been installed in as many of the principal streets as possible, a first in France.
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In fact, the coronation marks the beginning of the modernization of the city of Paris.
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Workers had been active day and night, seven days a week, in order to complete everything in time.

The weather nevertheless threatened to spoil the event, but, as the faithful reported, the skies cleared to reveal a blue sky as Napoleon’s carriage, drawn by eight white horses, drew up in front of the cathedral, or more precisely in front of the huge, round, tent-like vestibule that been especially constructed by Percier and Fontaine. There, the imperial couple donned the robes they were to wear for the coronation, mantles of crimson velvet, embroidered with gold bees and eagles. Napoleon entered the cathedral wearing a laurel of gold oak and olive leaves that were meant to represent victory, peace and civic virtue. The painter Jean-Baptiste Isabey had done Josephine’s make-up.
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They entered the cathedral to the acclamations of the assembled spectators. ‘In my whole life,’ declared one witness, ‘I have never seen or heard anything like it.’
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