Citizen Emperor (40 page)

The theme of patriotic sacrifice that was at the core of this ceremony was hardly new. The difference now was that those who were prepared to lay down their lives did so for the sake of one man rather than for an ideal. Napoleon was confounding, perhaps deliberately, the type of patriotic self-sacrifice people had become accustomed to during the Revolution with sacrifice to his person, as he now came to represent the nation, the
patrie
, dressed in imperial gold and velvet. It was a perception that troops would sometimes have and even admit to – that is, ‘we confused the love we had for the sovereign with that which we had for the
patrie
’.
¹⁰¹

In Napoleon’s own mind, the Empire, the nation and his person eventually became one. ‘The throne of France was vacant,’ he is supposed to have told the Austrian ambassador to Paris, Klemens von Metternich, ‘the king overthrown . . . The old throne of France is buried under its rubble; I had to found a new one . . . I am like the Empire; there is therefore a perfect homogeneity between myself and the Empire.’
¹⁰²
During the
ancien régime
, the king’s body was considered sacred, containing within it a ‘corporeal mystique’. The execution of the king in 1792 had symbolically brought that mystique to an end, and in effect transferred it to another abstract concept – the nation. The nation then had replaced the idea of the sovereign.
¹⁰³
Part of the desacralization, the desecration, of the monarchy was the accompanying vandalism that destroyed its images and symbols – anything from the fleur de lys to statues of past kings had to disappear. A political culture emerged that defined the new state and its members – now called citizens, not subjects – and situated every individual’s place in the nation. The king, the monarchy and its heroes were no longer celebrated but rather the Republic, the nation and its heroes were. In some respects, then, the ceremonies held to celebrate the foundation of the Empire were about writing a new national narrative.

Eventually it would appear that the idea of the nation was displaced on to the person of the Emperor and that, as the kings of France before him represented paternal authority, so now Napoleon represented a father figure. Just as the kings of France had embodied the nation, so did the Emperor. From May 1804, the revolutionary term ‘citizen’ was replaced by the terms ‘monsieur’ and ‘subject’, without the outcry that accompanied the use of the latter word in 1801 (see p. 87).
¹⁰⁴
Service to Napoleon was embodied in the notion of service to the state. This should be seen as the end result of a long political struggle to personify a particular vision of the national community, which had raged since 1789. One could easily apply the adage of the seventeenth-century theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, ‘The whole state is in the person of the prince.’
¹⁰⁵
It also meant that increasingly the state revolved around the will of one man so that he could appoint and dismiss at will, as well as ignore the law. Here Napoleon’s character merged with the political rhetoric that he had adopted at the beginning of his reign to justify the coup and his hold on power, namely, that he was above factions, although gradually he interpreted this to mean that he was above the law.

The popular visual representations of Napoleon as emperor – paintings, engravings, cheap woodprints, busts and medallions
¹⁰⁶
– reinforce the message of Napoleon as father of the nation. Anointed by the Church, he was not only to be venerated, he was to set an example by his clemency and goodwill towards the less fortunate. He did so on the occasion of the coronation, as he had done at the very beginning of the Consulate, by freeing ‘a great number of prisoners’ from the Temple and the Abbey Saint-Germain.
¹⁰⁷
Louis XVI had done the same thing shortly before his coronation at Rheims in 1775.

The People’s Empire

For two weeks after the coronation, Paris and the Empire celebrated the foundation of the new dynasty in a series of festivities, receptions, banquets, balls, fireworks and solemn audiences either at the Tuileries or at the Hôtel de Ville. During that time, no dignitary was allowed to appear at court dressed in anything but the costume worn on the day of the coronation. It was customary for the municipality of Paris to offer a sumptuous reception to new sovereigns. This had been done in 1514 on the occasion of the marriage of Mary of England to Louis XII, in 1687 for the marriage of Louis XIV, in 1739 and 1745 when Louis XV’s children were married, and of course for the marriage of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.
¹⁰⁸

Some of the events were quite unexpected; for example, a balloon constructed by the famous aeronaut André-Jacques Garnerin was to lift into the air a crown twenty times larger than life. The crown, made of coloured glass in imitation of the actual crown, actually succeeded in taking off . . . and floating away. It landed almost two days later in Lake Bracciano near Rome. Napoleon wrote to the pope the following extraordinary missive: ‘The balloon which has so providentially arrived in Rome . . . should, it seems to me, be devotedly conserved in memory of this extraordinary event [the coronation]. I wish that Your Holiness should have it put in a particular place where foreigners can see it in passing with an inscription that states that, in so many hours, it arrived in Rome.’
¹⁰⁹

More spectacular were the fireworks. The principal display took place on the banks of the River Seine between the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville, but it was the signal for twelve other displays to be set off in Paris. Things did not quite work out the way they were supposed to, however. Instead of lasting fifty-five minutes, the fireworks lasted only fifteen.
¹¹⁰
The centrepiece of the display was Napoleon’s crossing of the Saint-Bernard. It was almost a symbol of the trajectory that the Emperor had taken to reach the summit that was the coronation, the symbol of the ‘radiance of their victories [those of Napoleon and his men]’.
¹¹¹
Fireworks were traditionally considered a symbol of transformation, perhaps signifying an end to the wars that had led to the Empire combined with the fires of regeneration.

Dance halls were erected on the Place de la Concorde, the Place de la Bastille, the Place Vendôme and the Place des Vosges, locations emblematic of the city but also sites of the Revolution; Montgolfier balloons were used to transport and drop off eagles throughout the city. For the people, wine literally flowed from the city’s fountains.
¹¹²
Similar celebrations were held in cities throughout the Empire.
¹¹³
Towns were illuminated to show their approval of the proceedings (except in Angoulême where a certain General Malet, whom we shall come across again, refused to celebrate the event. He was relieved of his command). The festivities put the city of Paris in debt for many years to come.
¹¹⁴

The Jacobin Emperor

Large crowds do not bonds of loyalty make. Whether Napoleon actually succeeded in the objective of the public festivities is another question. Nor did the role of the pope lend as much prestige as the Emperor had hoped. Anti-clerical republicans among the people of Paris, still quite numerous, were appalled to see the return of the Church in force. Though they had accepted the Concordat as a necessary evil, though they could see the advantages of having the pope in Paris to lend a certain amount of prestige, they were unhappy with the warm reception the faithful had reserved for the holy pontiff. There were consequently numerous pamphlets and protests against the ceremony based on those reasons alone, and quite a number of jokes about Napoleon.
¹¹⁵
Not all of them came from republicans. The English had a field day with the coronation; caricaturists like James Gillray made fun of the imperial procession, in images that were confiscated as soon as they reached French territory.
¹¹⁶
Like all political satires directed at Napoleon, they were designed to contest the political system he had constructed, and to undermine his authority by questioning his legitimacy.

Napoleon was aware that different sections of the French elite were unhappy with the proclamation of the Empire. The ceremony itself was supposed to have taken the various political and religious tendencies into consideration, but it was so complex as to remain unintelligible to the vast majority of onlookers. Republicans disliked the presence of the pope and the return to a ceremony used during the
ancien régime
. The Catholic faithful reproached Napoleon for his treatment of Pius VII, for not having taken Holy Communion and for having crowned himself. Royalists rejected the coronation outright. Throughout France over the coming months, anti-Napoleonic placards were posted on the walls of towns as important as Paris and as far away as the Corrèze, a department in the south of France, where one could read, ‘Long Live Louis XVIII! Down with Napoleon and his whole clique!’
¹¹⁷
Napoleon represented everything royalists despised, especially the principle of meritocracy. The participation of the pope at the coronation, and in particular the anointment, was nothing short of a scandalous farce, a second death for Louis XVI, an insult to the memory of those who had died defending the monarchy.
¹¹⁸

Many of the European monarchies were also circumspect about the coronation: the only princes to attend were from the German vassal states (Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, Hesse-Homburg, Solms-Lich, Nassau-Weilburg, Isenburg, Löwenstein, Löwenstein-Wertheim). The Austrian ambassador excused himself while the other courts of Europe (apart from England) sent either an ambassador or a minister. One should not read too much into this; it was not customary for great-power sovereigns to travel to their fellow sovereigns’ coronation ceremonies. Francis recognized the elevation of Napoleon to the imperial dignity but, as we have seen, he sugarcoated the pill by declaring himself Francis I, Emperor of Austria. Nevertheless, the French Empire was not universally accepted in Vienna and was perceived in some circles as a humiliation: Napoleon had after all crowned himself with the putative crown of Charlemagne, traditionally associated with the Habsburg monarchy, and had essentially taken Austria’s role in central Europe without consulting it.

If Napoleon had thought that by becoming a monarch he would ensure that French political institutions were ‘a little more in harmony with theirs [that is, with other monarchies]’, he was sadly mistaken. For him, it may have been a question of being able to take tea with other European monarchs on an equal footing, but other European sovereigns, monarchs by divine right, would never accept him as an equal. Napoleon himself seems to have doubted the importance of the coronation as a legitimizing ritual; the lack of public enthusiasm for the event as well as the tepid manner in which the elites responded seems to have made an impact on him.
¹¹⁹
The
Moniteur
did not even give an official account of the coronation ceremony; the festivities that followed were reported on much more.
¹²⁰
Indeed, the imperial regime was reluctant to use it as a setpiece in its political propaganda. The Abbé de Pradt, Napoleon’s chaplain, declared that ‘in various parts of France where his travels and his functions had enabled him to observe, he had found no favourable trace left by this act’.
¹²¹
The anniversary of the coronation was celebrated every year on the first Sunday of December – a perfectly normal thing for a monarch to do – but more often than not public opinion confused the date with the battle of Austerlitz.

CONQUEST, 1805–1807

10

‘The Rage of Conquest and Ambition’

King of All Italy

Napoleon seemed to possess an extraordinary ability to antagonize his European neighbours although mostly he did so inadvertently. His assumption of the title ‘King of Italy’, however, was considered one of the most provocative steps, and gave the impression that he was bent on the domination of the whole Italian peninsula.

Bonaparte had effectively ruled over northern Italy for the previous two years. After drawing up a constitution for the Italian Republic, which gave its president quasi-absolute powers, he summoned a congress – a
consulta
– of 500 Italian notables to Lyons, halfway between Milan and Paris, at the end of 1801.
¹
The congress was meant to discuss, but really simply to approve, the Constitution and choose a president (it was the first time the title had been used in monarchical Europe). Its members elected, after a somewhat circuitous route, and not surprisingly, Bonaparte. However, as soon as there was talk of transforming the French Republic into a monarchy, it was inevitable that the Italian Republic would follow suit. The only question was who was going to govern the Italian kingdom. As early as 3 March 1804, among the many letters published in the
Moniteur
urging Bonaparte to adopt the imperial crown, an Italian general by the name of Pino wrote to suggest that he should also become King of Italy.
²
On 7 May, only days before the Empire was proclaimed, Bonaparte had a conversation with the foreign minister of the Italian Republic, Ferdinando Marescalchi, about the future of Italy. The country was, suggested Bonaparte, too weak to be independent and too strong to be annexed.
³
It would be better, he went on, if it were transformed into a monarchy. Marescalchi got the message. He reported back to the vice-president of the Italian Republic, Melzi d’Eril, who immediately called a
consulta
, and voted for the transformation of the Republic into a hereditary monarchy under Napoleon and his descendants (28 May). In that way, it appeared as though the request came from the Italian Republic and not from Napoleon. There is no room here to go into the complex negotiations that took place between Napoleon and Melzi but, as ever determined to have his way, the Emperor rejected any attempt to negotiate conditions, and even threatened to annex Italy outright (a complete contradiction of his earlier statement).