Seven Ages of Paris (33 page)

Capable of marking the degree of his fame!

read the banner on one hardware shop. That day, in Notre-Dame, Napoleon declared, with hubristic grandeur, that everything “comes from God. He has granted me great victories. I come in the premier capital of my Empire to render thanks to Providence for its gifts, and to recommend myself to your prayers and those of the clergy.” Fouché went over the top, declaring in a confidential note addressed to the Tuileries that “Today’s fête is really national. Foreigners have been able to compare the birthday of Napoleon to that of Saint Louis.”

Hubris, the device that destroyed the Greek heroes of ancient mythology—was it now to be the undoing of Napoleon? Emulating Louis XIV after the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678, the Emperor bestowed upon himself the title “le Grand.” He gazed down on an empire which stretched from the Pyrenees to the Niemen, ruled over either by puppet sovereigns or by members of his clan promoted to unimaginable heights—an empire far greater than anything achieved by Louis XIV or Charlemagne. The Peace of Tilsit seemed to give him endless options. But would he take them? Would the Peace last, any more than the Peace of Amiens had? Older Parisians wondered where it would all end. Talleyrand, foreseeing what lay ahead, soon resigned in despair.

From Tilsit Napoleon had ordered the abolition of the inefficient city administration he had inherited from the Directory, doing away with the system of incompetent elected bodies. Instead Paris was to be administered by various conseils d’administration, possessed of immense powers, and all coming under the Minister of the Interior, who in turn represented the full authority of the Emperor. Most important of all was the special bureaucracy set up to co-ordinate the efforts of administrators, architects and engineers to carry out Napoleon’s building plans. The Emperor tried to run Paris like an army, but it was not the kind of army to which he was accustomed, or which he could bend to his will.

It was characteristic of Napoleon that he had issued these orders from Tilsit. For all the bureaucracy he had created in Paris, one of the extraordinary features of the Napoleonic regime is that this highly centralized and increasingly autocratic state was in fact run from a tent or from a Polish château—or wherever Napoleon happened to be. Every day his minions in Paris would be bombarded by letters, orders and draft decrees. While he was in East Prussia preparing for the bitter Friedland campaign, an angry letter flew off to Fouché: “I understand that the city of Paris is no longer illuminated … those in charge are scoundrels.” In Tilsit, he would be fretting that the fountains in Paris weren’t working properly or that the Ourcq Canal wasn’t completed; or he would be decreeing demolition of the old houses on the Pont Saint-Michel.

REBUILDING AROUND THE LOUVRE

Napoleon’s plans for rebuilding the city which he, the Corsican, had inherited, and with which, as dictator, he was now free to do whatsoever he pleased, were no less grandiose than his ambitions for military conquest. The bomb explosion of Christmas Eve 1800 provided him with both a first incentive and a pretext such as his predecessors had lacked. He started by demolishing the forty-odd houses damaged by the blast, then went on to clear the whole area of the medieval buildings and narrow streets which cluttered up the approaches to the Louvre. The result was several elegant new streets, all named after Napoleonic triumphs, including the Rue de Castiglione, Rue des Pyramides, Rue de la Paix (changed from Rue Napoléon after the Restoration in 1814) and the Rue de Rivoli, as well as the open space of the Place du Carrousel fronting on to the Tuileries. To achieve all this he resorted to draconian measures to take over property, notably convents left ravaged by Revolution, and to drive out house-owners with little recompense.

The Rue de Rivoli, which became the second longest street in Paris (after Vaugirard) and one of the straightest, was intended to run all the way from the Place de la Bastille in the east to the Concorde. Though it represented the most imposing achievement in large-scale domestic housing since Henri IV’s Place Dauphine, the only section actually completed (and that only partially) in Napoleon’s day was the grandly arcaded stretch opposite the Louvre that one knows today, designed by the Emperor’s two favourite artists, Percier and Fontaine. The strictest conditions were imposed on the new Rivoli units once completed: residents were not to use hammers; there were to be no butchers, bakers or anybody using an oven. As a result, by 1810 so few houses had been built that Napoleon was forced to grant special tax exemptions for twenty years for developers, extended the following year to thirty. Even though the original grand design was never completed, the seemingly endless perspective of the massive arcades and the continuous line of ironwork balconies above them today still presents an effect unrivalled anywhere else in the world, an example of the true grandeur of Paris.

In the cleared area opposite the Rivoli arcades, Napoleon laid down the stately north wing of the Louvre—though, like so much else, that too had to await completion at the hands of his nephew, Napoleon III. In preserving intact the old sections of the building and resisting the impulses of his architects to tear them down, Napoleon showed remarkably good architectural sense, explaining, “One must leave to each of the sections the character of its century, while adopting for the new work a more economic style.” Most important was the establishment in the Louvre, from 1803 onwards, of Europe’s biggest art gallery, to provide a permanent home for the many works of art he had stolen from the countries he had conquered and occupied.

To run this new Musée Napoléon for him, the Emperor found one of those extraordinary geniuses thrown up by an extraordinary epoch—Vivant Denon. Fifty-five years old, a former diplomat, chargé d’affaires in Naples, Denon was something of a roué (which appealed to Napoleon) and a considerable artist in his own right. Travelling with Napoleon on the abortive Egyptian expedition, he had returned with a remarkable portfolio of sketches, and thereafter accompanied Napoleon on almost all his campaigns, becoming famed as “l’oeil de l’armée.” The notion of a gallery open to the public stemmed from the historically much maligned Louis XVI; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the royal collections had been kept for the private delectation of the court and of privileged visitors, and only in the middle of the eighteenth century had Marigny, brother of
Mme.
de Pompadour, put forward the idea of opening the royal galleries. It was Louis XVI himself who suggested reuniting everything that the Crown possessed of “beauty in painting and sculpture” under the name of “museum” (a concept borrowed from England). Explained Denon, “The French Republic, by its force, the superiority of its light and its artists, is the only country in the world which could provide an inviolable asylum to these masterpieces.”

Napoleon took a great interest—amounting to interference—in the museum named after him. On his return from Jena in September 1806, he was already complaining about the queues on a Saturday afternoon—with the result that opening hours on Saturday and Sunday were extended. He was also horrified to see the galleries with smoking stoves, to keep the gardiens warm: “Get them out … they will end up by burning my conquests!” Equally shocking was the lack of public lavatories, leading to the misuse of the galleries by the unhappy gardiens, who were paid a menial wage, one-tenth of what Denon received. It was hardly surprising that in 1810 thieves broke in to make off with some priceless tapestries.

In September 1802, the Medici Venus—“The glory of Florence”—arrived at the Louvre after a journey of ten months. Rumbling across Europe, the heavy pieces of looted sculpture required special carriages drawn by up to fifteen pairs of oxen. The following March came the first convoy of loot from Naples. Napoleon’s greed seems to have known no bounds; in 1810 he declared to a deeply embarrassed Canova, the great Florentine sculptor, “Here are the principal works of art; only missing is the Farnese Hercules, but we shall have that also.” Deeply shocked, Canova replied, “Let your Majesty at least leave something in Italy!” It was perhaps amazing that not more was ruined on the journey; describing in 1809 the looting of twenty masterpieces from Spain, Denon reported ominously, “There has been more damage, due to negligence in the packing, of the first despatch of Italian primitives.” The arrivals from Italy continued until the end of the Empire; the last consignment, in December 1813, in fact never left Italy.

THE ARCS DE TRIOMPHE

Just about the only two embellissements that were planned and actually completed during the Empire were monuments to Napoleon’s famous victory at Austerlitz: the Vendôme Column and the Arc du Carrousel. In imitation of Trajan’s victory column in Rome and originally designed to bear a statue of Charlemagne, the new Vendôme Column was solemnly unveiled on 15 August 1810, marking the end of the most brilliant period of the whole reign. For many years it was to provide an illustrious symbol for old soldiers to rally at its base.

In the space gained by his demolitions round the Place du Carrousel, Napoleon planted his triumphal arch to commemorate Austerlitz. The pièce de résistance of the Carrousel comprised the famous horses looted from Venice by Napoleon during the first Italian campaign—originally made for a temple in ancient Corinth. Remarkably, the Carrousel had its first stone laid only eight months after the Battle of Austerlitz; it then remained clad in scaffolding for the next two years. Furious about the delay, Napoleon demanded of the Intendant-Général when the scaffolding was finally to be removed. The answer came, “We are only waiting for the statue of your Majesty.” Napoleon flew into a terrifying rage: “What statue are you talking about?—I never asked for one; nor did I order that my statue should be the principal subject of a monument raised by me, and at my expense, for the glory of the army which I had the honour to command.” He insisted that the chariot drawn by the four Venetian horses should remain empty. And so it did until Waterloo, when the horses were returned to Venice, and an allegorical figure representing the Restoration filled the empty chariot, as it does today. But Napoleon could not hide his disappointment. Compared with Louis XIV’s triumphal arch at the Porte Saint-Denis, he thought the Carrousel was altogether too “mesquin” (mean, or mediocre); he felt humiliated at not being able to rival the monument consecrated to the martial triumphs of his great predecessor and rival in la Gloire.

Hence the much more imposing monument, designed by Jean Chalgrin, on top of the hill at the Etoile (so called because it was already the hub of eight different roads), for all time to remain the most enduring and dominating symbol of Paris. The history of the Arc de Triomphe was to be a turbulent one, and its completion was beyond even the all-powerful Emperor’s capacity. Although the first stone of the Arc was laid in August 1806, just before Napoleon set off for the Jena campaign, such was the immensity of its weight predicted by the engineers that foundations eight metres deep had to be dug. That year he admitted that the Arc “would be a futile work which would have no kind of significance if it wasn’t a means of encouraging architecture.” Typically, by now preoccupied with building a Louvre-sized palace for his infant son, the King of Rome (born in March 1811), Napoleon lost interest. Louis XVIII, inheriting the incomplete structure, contemplated razing it, but was persuaded to recommence work in 1823; it was finally unveiled by the last King of France, Louis-Philippe, in 1836. Even so it remains incomplete, as the discussion about what to place atop it, whether another chariot or an effigy of Napoleon standing on a pile of enemy arms or on a terrestrial globe, or a huge eagle, a statue of liberty or a gigantic star, was never resolved.

Rising up from the Champs-Elysées among open fields and vineyards, the Arc de Triomphe in Napoleon’s imagination would be set off by two enormous lakes on either side of the Champs-Elysées, complete with boats. Among other unrealized fantasies for Paris was the Emperor’s notion of a memorial at the Etoile in the shape of a monster elephant. What it represented—whether a symbol of power or Napoleon’s covetous feelings for India—no one quite seems to know. Later the plan was to transfer it instead to the Place de la Bastille, and it was to be cast there, in 1811, in bronze from cannon captured from the Spanish insurgents. But the disastrous Iberian adventure failed to supply enough captured weapons to build an elephant on that scale, so instead it was fashioned out of wood and painted plaster. Under the Parisian weather the elephant gradually disintegrated, evolving into the home of thousands of rats and somehow symbolic of the decay of Empire. Coming upon it thirty years later, Victor Hugo, who hated all Bonapartes, latched on to the decrepit mammoth for a passage in Les Misérables:

in this deserted and exposed corner of the Place, the large head of the colossus, its trunk, its tusks, its tower, its enormous rump, its four feet resembling columns, under a starlit night formed a frightening and terrible silhouette … It was sombre, enigmatic and immense. It was some kind of potent phantom, visible and upright alongside the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

WATER

Strolling with his Minister of the Interior at Malmaison, Napoleon was said to have declared (when he was still First Consul), “I want to do something really great and useful for Paris,” to which Chaptal replied instantly, “Give it water!” For a city on the brink of the industrial age, post-revolutionary Paris remained a disgrace, insofar as—even by 1807—its 600,000 inhabitants had to make do with less than nine litres per head a day. By a decree of May 1806, Napoleon ordered the digging of nineteen new wells, and prescribed that by the following year fresh water was to flow through all the fountains of Paris, night and day. This was inspired by the powerful impression the fountains of Rome had made on him; Paris was to emulate Rome. But fountains were only part of the solution; where was the water to come from? Certainly not from the filthy Seine, where as late as 1811, after a ham fair in the city, some 450 kilos of rotting meat would be chucked into the river—by no means an isolated event. So Napoleon would bring fresh water to the city all the way from the River Ourcq, by a canal one hundred kilometres long. Digging started in 1802 and was supposed to be completed by the autumn of 1805, but there were repeated delays, partly thanks to the shortage of manpower caused by the insatiable demands of the Grande Armée. Finally, on 2 December 1808—the anniversary of Austerlitz, of course—a momentous opening ceremony announced the arrival of the sweet waters of the Ourcq in the Bassin de la Villette. It would be some years, though, before any but the courtesans of the beau monde would be able to give up sharing a bath. Nevertheless, the opening of the Ourcq Canal was indeed a historic moment for Paris; Napoleon had succeeded where all previous rulers had failed. He also began constructing a modern sewer system, but here work lagged deplorably once his energetic hand was removed.