The Caesar of Paris Read online

  The

  CAESAR

  OF PARIS

  NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, ROME, AND THE

  ARTISTIC OBSESSION THAT SHAPED AN EMPIRE

  SUSAN JAQUES

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For Doug, to another thirty-four years

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE DIRECTORY

  ONE Triumphus

  TWO The Land of the Nile

  THREE Pontifex Maximus

  PART TWO CONSULATE

  ONE The Etruscans

  TWO Caesar’s Friend

  THREE Napoleon’s Eye

  FOUR Parisii

  PART THREE IMPERIUM

  ONE Carolus Magnus

  TWO Charlemagne’s Honors

  THREE The Sacre

  FOUR King of Italy

  PART FOUR A NEW ROME

  ONE Columns of Conquest

  TWO Arches of Triumph

  THREE Temple to the Grande Armée

  FOUR Coining an Empire

  PART FIVE PRINCIPATE

  ONE Curia Regis

  TWO A Family of Kings

  THREE Venus Victrix

  FOUR Carrara

  PART SIX CAPITAL OF THE UNIVERSE

  ONE Abduction

  TWO Trophy Wife

  THREE Breakfast with Napoleon

  PART SEVEN DYNASTY

  ONE The Eaglet

  TWO In Memorium

  THREE Mars the Peacemaker

  PART EIGHT THE FALL

  ONE The Golden Prison

  TWO Retrenchment

  THREE Funeral of the Empire

  PART NINE LEGACY

  ONE A Moral Lesson

  TWO Exiles and Heroes

  THREE Res Gestae

  Postscript

  Illustrations Insert

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  “I am of the race of the Caesars, and of the best of their kind, the founders.”

  —Napoleon Bonaparte

  INTRODUCTION

  As a young boy growing up on the island of Corsica, Napoleon Buonaparte begged his older brother to switch places with him in a mock combat pitting Romans and Carthaginians. The skinny youngster couldn’t stand being on the losing side.1

  In May 1779, the nine-year-old arrived as a scholarship student at the Brienne military college in the Champagne region, speaking a Corsican dialect and bad French. Napoleon escaped his classmates’ bullying by reading, especially biographies of antiquity’s great military commanders. His fascination with antiquity continued at the Military Academy in Paris. Napoleon was so well versed in Greek and Roman history that Corsican leader Pasquale Paoli told him: “There is nothing modern in you; you are entirely out of Plutarch.”2

  Early in his career as commander of the Army of Italy, Napoleon looked to his ancient heroes for military strategy. “Caesar’s principles were Hannibal’s, and Hannibal’s were Alexander’s: keep your forces together, don’t be vulnerable on any front, strike very fast with full strength on a given point,” he told his officers during the Italian campaign.3 En route to invading Egypt in 1799, Napoleon invoked the legendary Roman army: “Roman legions that you have sometimes imitated but not yet equaled fought Carthage first on this same sea and then on the plains of Zama. . . . Soldiers, the eyes of Europe are upon you.”4 The Egypt campaign was a military failure, but Napoleon cleverly spun it into a political and cultural victory. The French army was promoted as a successor to the Roman legions; the Egyptian Revival style became the rage in decorative art and architecture.

  Antiquity exerted an equally powerful influence on Napoleon off the battlefield, where he waged a parallel campaign. After returning from Egypt, Napoleon took advantage of France’s power vacuum and staged a coup, replacing the corrupt Directory regime with the Consulate, named for a Roman institution. Just as Rome’s Caesars returned from campaigns with spoils of war, Napoleon brought wagonloads of art back to Paris from his military victories. Napoleon most prized the antiquities, many stripped from the Vatican. As Alex Potts puts it, the exhibition of Napoleonic war booty in Paris was a cruder version of the ancient Romans giving distinction to the ideal statuary of ancient Greece.5

  Tellingly, Napoleon gave the famed actor François-Joseph Talma advice on how to play Nero in Racine’s Britannicus and Julius Caesar in La Mort de Pompée. “Emperors aren’t like that,” the first consul told the star after seeing his performance as the notorious Roman emperor.6 About Talma’s portrayal of Caesar, Napoleon advised: “You use your arms too much: men in power are more restrained in their movements; they know that a gesture is an order, a look is death. So limit your gestures and looks. . . . In your first scene with Ptolemy, there’s a line whose meaning escapes you. . . . You say it with too much sincerity. . . . At that moment, Caesar is not saying which he thinks. Caesar is not a Jacobin.”7

  Napoleon soon cast himself in the real-life role. In May 1804, the Senate proclaimed the thirty-four-year-old emperor, bringing the French Republic to an end. Napoleon invited Pope Pius VII to officiate at his December coronation, then shocked everyone by crowning himself. As he famously told a confidant, “I have dethroned no one. I found the crown in the gutter. I picked it up and the people put it on my head.” Two years earlier, Napoleon’s Concordat with the newly elected Pius VII reestablished the Catholic Church in France. But the rapprochement did not last long.

  The battle for control of the Catholic Church was just one of Napoleon’s obsessions with Rome. As the repository of 2,500 years of art and architecture, Rome had become Europe’s cultural capital—a magnet for painters, sculptors, tourists, and archeologists. During his fifteen-year rule, Napoleon reshaped Paris into the new Rome, Europe’s culture capital. As Paris shined, the rest of Rome faded, first as the Roman Republic and later as a marginalized French dominion. Napoleon kept the uncooperative Pius VII under house arrest for nearly five years. During this time, he appropriated the Palazzo del Quirinale, the papal summer residence, turning it into his own lavish imperial palace.

  Antiquity inspired all aspects of Napoleon’s imperium—from his short Augustus-like haircut to his choice for the symbol of his Empire, the eagle of Jupiter. From ancient Rome, he borrowed images and symbols of power and authority, along with its powerful rituals. Yet as Diana Rowell notes, “Napoleon was not simply reinventing the Roman world; he and his entourage were simultaneously manipulating former Rome-inspired traditions to reinforce the impact of his own form of power over the past, the present, and the future.”8

  Without any hereditary claim to rule, Napoleon sought legitimacy by associating himself with antiquity’s greats and his rule with the great civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Napoleon’s heroes were many and variable, writes Matthew Zarzeczny, his “personal pantheon constantly changed with the circumstances.”9 Just before his coronation, Napoleon added Charlemagne to the group, the Frankish king and military leader who unified medieval Europe after the Roman model. To drum up support for his planned invasion of England, Napoleon promoted William the Conqueror, the man behind the Norman Conquest, with an exhibition in Paris of the famous Bayeux Tapestry.

  Travel continued to be a touchstone experience. Like his heroes Alexander, Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Charlemagne, Napoleon was rarely in his capital. Occupied on foreign campaigns, waging some sixty battles, the peripatetic ruler spent just two and a half years in Paris between 1804 and 1814. Extended visits to cities like Vienna, Berlin, Venice, and Genoa influenced Napoleon’s ambitious vision for Paris. Between battles, Napoleon dictated thousands of instructions for his projects to turn Paris into the “rendezvous of all
Europe.”

  A frequent recipient of these dispatches was Dominique-Vivant Denon, director of the Musée Napoléon, who traveled with the Grande Armée overseeing art confiscations and curating the ever-growing collection. As Napoleon’s de facto culture minister, the urbane Denon also commissioned art to enforce his patron’s heroic image. To lend authenticity to a series of monumental battlefield scenes, Denon embedded draftsmen in the army to take notes on everything from uniforms to topography. Denon’s A-list painters included Antoine-Jean Gros, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, as well as their teacher Jacques-Louis David.

  In paintings, sculpture, medals, and porcelain, Napoleon was portrayed in the guise of Roman gods and as a modern Caesar. As Christopher Lloyd writes, “his personal iconography is one of the most extensive ever created for an individual and is a perfect demonstration of the way in which art could be harnessed to political and military ambition.”10

  A far less enthusiastic propagandist was the celebrated Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. Resentful of France’s treatment of Italy, Canova had a complex relationship with Napoleon. He designed the tomb of the patriotic Italian poet Vittorio Alfieri for Santa Croce in Florence, along with a funerary monument for Napoleon’s archnemesis, British admiral Horatio Nelson, yet kept a bust of Napoleon in his bedroom until his death. Dispatched to Paris twice to model portraits of the Bonapartes, Canova doubled as papal envoy. In 1815, Pius entrusted Canova with retrieving the Papal States’s stolen art in Paris, forcing a face-off with the wily Denon.

  Like Rome’s emperors, Napoleon adorned his capital with heroic, monumental architecture inspired by surviving masterworks of ancient Rome. Declaring that “Men are only as great as the monuments they leave,” he ordered the construction of icons like the Vendôme Column, the Arc de Triomphe, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, and Temple to the Glory of the Grande Armée, today’s Madeleine Church. Augustus boasted of building his Forum from the spoils of war; Napoleon too financed his building spree with indemnities from his many conquests.

  In the same way that Rome’s emperors represented the Empire and its wealth with aqueducts, forums, and temples throughout the provinces, Napoleon left his mark on the places he conquered. Anxious to demonstrate loyalty to the emperor, officials designed grandiose projects for the cities of Milan, Vienna, and Venice. Like the Caesars in Rome, Napoleon modernized Paris’s infrastructure with new roads, canals, bridges, sewers, and quays. To improve public health and hygiene, he ordered a series of fountains fed by the canals to bring fresh drinking water to Paris. A vast Roman-style catacomb and cemeteries on the outskirts of Paris replaced overflowing church graveyards.

  Napoleon’s favorite architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine conceived a bold, assertive spin on classicism known as the Empire style. Furniture, silver, textiles, and porcelain combined imperial Roman motifs such as laurel wreaths, trophies, and sphinxes with First Empire symbols such as N, eagles, and bees. As Bette Oliver writes, “The empire style applied to everything from architecture and the decorative arts to clothing and hairstyles, helped promote cultural unity and to lend an air of legitimacy and grandeur.”11

  Desperate for an heir, Napoleon divorced Joséphine, his wife of thirteen years, and married the teenage Habsburg archduchess Marie Louise in 1810. His dynastic ambition was realized with the birth of their son, the King of Rome. The “Eaglet” inspired a barrage of dynastic imagery drawing on Roman mythology and imperial art. By 1811, Napoleon ruled over eighty million people. Controlling most of continental Europe, the French Empire was a world power, rivalling that of ancient Rome. Napoleon planned a triumphant entry into Rome and a spectacular third coronation at St. Peter’s Basilica.

  But he never got there. Napoleon’s catastrophic invasion of Russia in late 1812 and final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 put an end to the First Empire. When the Allies led by the Duke of Wellington arrived in Paris to claim their plundered artworks at the Louvre, the antiquities gallery brimmed with some four hundred statues; over eleven hundred paintings lined the Grand Gallery from floor to ceiling.

  The British shipped Napoleon off to the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena where he surrounded himself with reminders of his ancient heroes. Napoleon dictated accounts of his campaigns and weighed in on Caesar and Alexander the Great. Meanwhile, the restored Bourbon kings Louis XVIII and Charles X launched a campaign to erase public memory of Napoleon, like the Roman damnatio memoriae. In spite of this, Napoleon’s legend continued to grow.

  Toward the end of his life, the exiled Caesar of Paris saw himself as a mythological hero. After his death in 1821, a torn scrap of paper was discovered in his handwriting: “A new Prometheus, I am nailed to a rock to be gnawed by a vulture. Yes, I have stolen the fire of Heaven and made a gift of it to France. The fire has returned to its source, and I am here!”12

  PART ONE

  DIRECTORY

  “If I were master of France, I would make Paris not only the most beautiful city which has existed, but the most beautiful that could exist . . . to combine all the admirable aspects of Athens, Rome, Babylon, and Memphis.”

  —Napoleon Bonaparte en route to Egypt, 1798

  ONE

  TRIUMPHUS

  Preparations began in the early hours, northwest of Rome’s city walls in the swampy Campus Martius, the mosquito-ridden military camp named for the war god Mars. In April, 46 B.C.E., after years of fighting abroad, Julius Caesar returned to Rome and unprecedented power.

  Thanks to Caesar’s fearsome legions, Rome controlled most of Western Europe and Northern Africa. To celebrate, Caesar was to stage the first of four triumphs marking his victory over Gaul, roughly comprising today’s France, Belgium, and Switzerland. For six years, Caesar battled the Gallic tribes, culminating with the siege at Alesia (Burgundy). According to an ancient estimate, the campaign claimed the lives of one million Gauls with another two million taken prisoner.1

  Caesar spent the night before the Gallic triumph at the Temple of Isis in the Campus Martius. When he awoke, crowds of Romans and out-of-towners were already lining the triumphal route. As musicians played, standard-bearers with captured enemy flags led the way, crossing the pomerium, Rome’s sacred boundary, through the special gateway known as the porta triumphalis.

  Senators and magistrates followed. Perfume wafted through the air as cartloads of gold and silver rolled by, along with elephants and sacrificial animals. Elaborate floats, decorated with citrus and acanthus wood, ivory, and tortoiseshell, hauled replicas of captured buildings and statues personifying the Rhine and Rhône rivers.

  The procession continued past the Circus Flaminius and Circus Maximus before winding its way around the tony Palatine Hill along the Via Sacra (Sacred Way), the city’s oldest, most fabled street. Following the Via Sacra, the parade arrived at the ancient Roman Forum, filled with temples and markets. Half a dozen Vestal Virgins tended the city’s sacred fire at the circular Temple of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. After years of war, the gates of the small shrine of Janus, the god of beginnings, were finally closed to commemorate the new peace.

  The crowds cheered as monumental triumphal paintings rolled by, including an image of conquered Massilia, along with captured artillery from its renowned arsenal.2 But their enjoyment dimmed as canvases depicting the suicides of their fellow Romans came into view—those of Cato disemboweling himself and Lucius Scipio stabbing himself in the chest and throwing himself into the sea.3

  Next up came Caesar’s seventy-two lictors, each carrying a fasces—a bundle of rods and an axe wreathed with laurel. Behind his bodyguards was Caesar himself, in a gilded chariot drawn by four white horses. His face was painted blood red like the cult statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Dressed in a toga, a purple robe woven with gold thread, tall red boots, and a crown of gold and precious stones, Caesar held a sprig of laurel and an ivory scepter topped by the eagle, Jupiter’s bird. A slave stood behind him, balancing a gold oak leaf crown over his head and eerily repeating: “Look behind you; remember you
are mortal.”4

  Following Caesar’s quadriga were equestrian military officers and Romans rescued from slavery. Caesar’s soldiers brought up the rear, chanting “Io triumphe!” and singing bawdy songs about their commander’s legendary sexual appetite. “Romans, watch your wives,” they are thought to have chanted, “see the bald adulterer’s back home.”5 The men would soon have more to celebrate. Following the triumphal procession, each would receive a piece of the campaign booty, according to his rank. To build goodwill, Caesar also doled out tokens to spectators, which may have explained the turnout. According to Roman historian Suetonius, the crowds were so big that two senators and several spectators were trampled to death by the mob.

  At the Roman Forum, the procession made a dramatic stop. The prisoners of war were led out in chains and thrown into the nearby Tullianum, Rome’s most infamous jail. Built in the seventh century B.C.E., the prison publicly displayed the tortured corpses of its inmates on a flight of steps, the Scalae Gemoniae (Stairs of Mourning). Caesar’s star prisoner was Gaul’s king and chieftain Vercingetorix who had surrendered at the Battle of Alesia. On Caesar’s orders, the charismatic Gallic leader would be strangled in the dark, putrid underground cell.6

  Bordering the Roman Forum was Caesar’s own grandiose Forum Julium. In the colonnaded square stood a marble temple to Venus Genetrix who Caesar claimed as his divine ancestress through the Trojan prince Aeneas. Adorning the temple were numerous portraits of Caesar, a golden statue of his Egyptian lover Cleopatra as the goddess Isis, and Timomachus’s paintings of Ajax and Medea. It’s thought that Equus Caesaris was installed outside, depicting Caesar atop his favorite horse, described by Pliny and Suetonius as having almost human forefeet.7

  Somewhere between the Palatine and Capitoline Hill, the axle of Caesar’s chariot broke, nearly tossing him out onto the street. But the mishap was not going to rain on his triumphal parade. Flanked by forty elephants, each toting a torch in its trunk, Caesar climbed the steep steps to the Capitoline, the most sacred of Rome’s seven hills.