Citizen Emperor (37 page)

A little after midday, Napoleon and Josephine proceeded down the centre of the cathedral, accompanied by the music of Le Sueur, played by 500 musicians. According to some, Napoleon looked a little grotesque in his imperial regalia, but to others he offered an imposing spectacle.
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The cardinal legate, Caprara, and the Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Belloy, ninety-five years old, along with twenty-four other bishops led the couple into the cathedral where they took their place on their respective thrones just in front of the altar.
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A mass was then said during which the bishops took an oath to obey the government, but also to reveal anything that might be organized against the state in their dioceses (they thereby became informants). Caprara had optimistically announced to Consalvi, the papal secretary of state, that Napoleon would take Holy Communion, but he did not. It had been a sticking point in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, but Caprara insisted that the Holy See bend to Napoleon’s will on this count too.
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It was a long ceremony, three hours and more. Some had been there since six o’clock, so guests had to go in and out of the cathedral, to relieve themselves, to buy food and drink. Guests brought back with them bread, brioches, sausages and chocolate and munched away; no one was the slightest bit offended.
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Others chatted, and could not have been more bored. The sermon, given by Monsignor Boisgelin, who had spoken at the coronation of Louis XVI, was a long homily. There was so much talking and laughing going on that he was drowned out.

Napoleon and Josephine sat facing the high altar. All the symbols of the Carolingian Empire on the altar were blessed individually by the pope, including a set of spurs, what was supposed to be Charlemagne’s sword, the sceptre of Charles V adorned with a statuette of Charlemagne, and a replica of Charlemagne’s crown made especially for the occasion. According to contemporary accounts, Napoleon was calm but very pale and visibly moved.
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Did he realize the enormity of what he was about to do? Surely he did, and yet he managed a yawn once or twice, possibly deliberately in order to show the republicans present that he did not really care for the ceremony but was obliged for reasons of state to go along with it.

The act of anointment was designed specifically for the ceremony; it was Napoleon who gave the order to proceed, so that he could speak of an act of ‘self-unction’. It is interesting to note that Napoleon did not, as was the tradition in coronation ceremonies, expose parts of his upper body while the anointing was being carried out. Instead, the pope anointed only his head and hands after he had stripped down to a satin tunic.
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It was only after the objects had been blessed that Napoleon received the ring, the sword, the coat of golden bees, the hand of justice and the sceptre. He then climbed the steps of the altar. The gesture that followed has since become symbolic of Napoleonic power. As the pope appeared to crown him, Napoleon took the laurel from the pope’s hands and (re)placed it on his own head. There was no gasp from the assembled dignitaries à la Hollywood’s
Désirée
. This part of the proceedings had been discussed and planned beforehand, in fact suggested by Cambacérès.
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According to one witness, this was the moment everyone had been waiting for. A profound silence reigned over the cathedral. After the crown had been placed on Napoleon’s head, everyone in the cathedral stood up spontaneously, the men waving their feathered hats.
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This was not the first time a sovereign had crowned himself.
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Napoleon’s excuse was that he did not want any arguments among the court elite about who would presume to hand him the crown in the name of the people.
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As we have seen, he had entered the cathedral with the crown of laurels already on his head, and carrying the sceptre, which he then placed on the altar before both were blessed by the pope. This gesture turned the ceremony on its head. If Napoleon was already symbolically wearing a crown and if he intended placing Charlemagne’s crown on his head in the course of the ceremony, then what was the point of having the pope come all that way?
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Of course the self-crowning was a matter of Napoleon asserting his political independence, underlining how much he owed his elevation not to the pope but to himself and himself alone. In the age-old conflict between the spiritual and the temporal, Napoleon was vigorously asserting the supremacy of the temporal. This sent not only a political but also a personal message.

Then it was Josephine’s turn. As she advanced, her train, which weighed around forty kilograms, was grudgingly carried by the five Bonaparte princesses, a duty they performed so badly that at one point Josephine was unable to move forward.
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She knelt at Napoleon’s feet – a gesture that signified her subordinance to him – and appeared, at least to some in the audience, to be praying to Napoleon rather than to God; tears ran down her cheeks on to her joined hands.
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Napoleon then took the imperial diadem and placed it, as planned, on his wife’s head, although he had trouble making it stay there. There was nothing terribly unusual about a sovereign crowning his wife: the kings of Spain traditionally did so; Frederick I of Prussia had crowned his wife in 1701; and the tsars of Russia, after placing the crown on their own head, took it off and touched their empresses’ forehead with it.
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In France, however, the coronation of a queen was a rare event – Josephine was the only queen to be crowned and anointed other than Marie de Médicis in 1610 – and this was the first time that an empress had been anointed and crowned, and the first time in French history that a queen had been crowned at the same time as her male counterpart. It raises the question why, if there was no historical precedent for both being crowned at the same time, Napoleon felt it necessary to make the gesture. One Napoleonic scholar has called it a ‘caprice’.
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Napoleon, however, insisted because Josephine thereby came to embody the aspirations of the nation.
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Then came the second phase of the ceremony. When the mass was over, Napoleon ascended the ‘grand throne’ erected on a high platform at the west end of the cathedral, with the crown still on his head. There, with one hand on the Bible, he swore an oath to ‘maintain the integrity of the territory of the Republic: to respect and to cause to be respected the laws of the Concordat and of freedom of worship, of political and civil liberty, and the sale of nationalized lands; to raise no taxes except by virtue of the law; to maintain the institution of the Legion of Honour; to govern only in view of the interests, the wellbeing and the glory of the French people’.
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This was not simply a sop to republicans; it was a social pact, a contract between the French people and their sovereign. If Napoleon broke that contract, then the people would have the right to depose him.
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It is also the political culmination of the Revolution. Power was conferred on Napoleon not by God but through a secular contract with the French people. Napoleon thus became the first among equals (
primus inter pares
).

The imperial party then returned to the Tuileries by a circuitous route so that the people of Paris could catch a glimpse of their new Emperor. That evening, the imperial couple dined alone, with a skeleton staff. In order to respect the tradition that the symbol of royal power had to be maintained for the whole day, Josephine was required to keep the crown on.
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The coronation ceremony was an important step on the path to legitimizing the Empire. On 27 December, at the opening of the Legislative Corps, the minister of the interior, Jean-Baptiste de Nompère de Champagny, explained the legitimacy of the new Empire: it had been called into existence by a
senatus consultum
and a plebiscite. It was from that moment that Napoleon received the title ‘Emperor of the French’. No other act was necessary to consecrate his authority. The pomp surrounding the ceremony was subsidiary. What mattered most was the ‘immutable oath that ensures the integrity of the Empire, the stability of property, the perpetuity of institutions, respect for the law and the happiness of the nation’.
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Champagny’s speech demonstrates the complexity of the question surrounding Napoleon’s legitimacy. Was he emperor simply because he was a victorious general? Did he represent the people or the nation? Was his a monarchy by divine right? Napoleon’s rule was based on a number of inherent contradictions, as can be seen in his official title – ‘Emperor of the Republic’— as well as in the official coinage that would now circulate throughout the Empire. On the one side were the words ‘Napoleon Empereur’, and on the other was ‘République française’. The word ‘Republic’ would not disappear until September 1807, even if the coins would remain in circulation for some time.

And yet, in spite of the acceptance of the notion of popular sovereignty, the coronation ceremony harked back to
ancien régime
traditions in which the Church imbued the new sovereign with divine power. Napoleon, although it was never explicitly stated, was using the traditions of the French monarchy to acquire the sacred power that was the foundation of his kingship. The invitations to the coronation pointed out that ‘divine providence’ had called Napoleon to the throne, a sentiment that can also be found in the media of the day, although in somewhat subtler terms. In short, the idea of divine right is curiously mixed with the notion that Napoleon had been called upon by the French people to adopt the title ‘emperor’. The traditional notion of divine right and the revolutionary notion of the sovereignty of the people were thus in precarious balance, and it is perhaps why Napoleon received the appellation of ‘Citizen Emperor’ at the beginning of his reign.
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Representing the Empire

Jacques-Louis David was a witness to the coronation, although he got to the box originally reserved for him only after a punch-up with the grand master of ceremonies, Louis Philippe, Comte de Ségur.
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Ségur did not have much respect for David the regicide – as a member of the Convention the artist had voted for the death of the king in 1792 – but he was probably also under a great deal of strain, responsible as he was for the smooth running of the ceremony. David was present because he had been given a commission for four official paintings to celebrate the new dynasty.
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Only two were ever completed:
Sacre de l’empereur Napoléon et couronnement de l’impératrice Joséphine
(The consecration of Napoleon and the coronation of Josephine), a commentary on the power of Napoleon, and the
Serment de l’armée fait à l’empereur après la Distribution des Aigles au Champ de Mars
(The Distribution of the Eagles). The
Arrivée de Napoléon Ier à l’Hôtel de Ville
(The arrival at the Hôtel de Ville) never got beyond the drawing stage, while the misleadingly entitled
L’intronisation
(The enthronement), which was meant to portray Napoleon swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution before the representatives of the Senate, the Legislative Corps and the Tribunate, did not even get that far. The commission was intended to represent the four ceremonies that took place over a four-day period and that were meant to celebrate the four components upon which the regime was founded – the sacred, the civic, the municipal and the military.
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Detail of David’s painting,
Sacre de l’empereur Napoléon et couronnement de l’impératrice Joséphine
(The consecration of Napoleon and the coronation of Josephine), 1807. The size of the painting was monumental, even by the standards of the day. At the bottom of the painting were the words
Napoleonis, Francorum Imperatoris, primarus pictor
(Napoleon, Emperor of France, by the first painter), taken off during the Restoration. The painting, in other words, was meant to be more than a historical document. The spectator understood that it was full of political meaning.