In the Red Rooms of the Louvre in Paris – part of Napoleon III’s maniacal Second Empire regeneration of the city – hangs the gargantuan Coronation of Napoleon (1807) by Jacques-Louis David. It is surrounded by paintings that chart a century of idealism: martyred gavroches, discharged muskets and patriotic oaths. It all converges on the outcome of a self-proclaimed emperor crowning himself in a ceremonial rite he had created: “casting the kingdom old into another mould”, as Andrew Marvell said of Oliver Cromwell.
“To be a king is to inherit old ideas and genealogy: I don’t want to descend from anyone,” Napoleon allegedly proclaimed, thus raising France’s guillotine once more on eight centuries of Capetian rule. In this sense, the painting is monumentally propagandist: as an imperial declaration of the republic in its new form, as well as a testament to the possibilities of despotic self-invention.
“One can walk through it!” Napoleon exclaimed on seeing his finished commission; in the most obvious sense, certainly, but the contemporary viewer was unwittingly walking into an empire by his own creation. Amid the painting’s melodrama, easily overlooked are the only two faces not fixated on the unfolding phenomenon at its centre: two anonymous, young altar servers secreted behind Pius VII’s throne, mournfully looking down at an expiring thurible by their feet.
For all the cannon fire in Ridley Scott’s recent biopic of the emperor (even David, busy at an easel, gets his cameo), le petit caporal’s interior life and religious convictions are left wholly unacknowledged – perhaps most significantly so at his coronation and finally in exile where – recalling the pious devotions of his Corsican childhood – he died in 1821, receiving the viaticum. It was by petition of Pius VIII to the British government, then presiding over St Helena, that Napoleon – “no longer a danger to anybody” – was permitted the presence of a priest at his deathbed.
Only a dying civilisation neglects its dead, it is claimed, although this did not seem to be true with the proclamation of the Napoleonic empire a month after the emperor’s coronation in Notre Dame – not long after the cathedral
had been returned to the Church from the Goddess Reason under the Napoleonic Concordat of 1801. A ceremony almost entirely of his own creation, notionally presided over by Pius VII under duress, it began a process of subjugation of the Church to Napoleon’s rule.
Despite spurning the pope’s wish to crown France’s first emperor himself, Napoleon understood that Pius’s presence was essential to sanctify his imperial legitimacy in the eyes of Catholics and the citizens of an empire that was ridding France of the long and painful memories of the Revolution. Riding on that apparently miraculous, meritocratic wave of power, he echoed Louis XIV’s assertion that “l’État, c’est moi”. He thus revived an embodiment of absolutist power which also undermined an ancient, hereditary order of rule and subsequently consolidated the new social order to which it gave birth.
Despite his various conflicts with the papacy, Napoleon did restore France to something of the Catholic supremacy of its pre-revolutionary state. The “systematic war which impious sophists had waged against religion” that Chateaubriand identified also ushered in under Robespierre the respective cults of Reason and Supreme Being – both of which were outlawed in 1802.
But long gone was the medieval idea of a centralised, European theocracy (the Holy Roman Empire), and the First French Empire is possibly the clearest testament of this. After the Revolutionary wars had imprisoned so many of France’s clergy, it had been down to the pious housewives of the provinces to keep the flame alive: secularism in its institutionalised form had succeeded before it had been formally legislated.
Delacroix, with his pictures of cherubs, Arabs and orphans, would not have cut it for the coronation of Napoleon: the emperor needed a rationalist, classical eye for the job of depicting this defining moment of French history. “We have finished the romance of the Revolution. We must now begin its history,” Napoleon proclaimed. Achieving the support of the pope on St Helena quietly parallels that of Napoleon’s reacquaintance with the Church into which he was baptised.
In the final scene of Scott’s film, Napoleon falls off his chair – an end unbefitting of both the film and its subject. After a life launched into seemingly limitless realms of self-invention, he returned, alone and with the ash of his spent brilliance swirling in the Atlantic wind, to the Gospel and the Latin syllables of his paternal Church. Chateaubriand, who was contentiously in the employ of the empire as assistant to its first Vatican envoy, observed in his memoirs that “his thoughts still wandered amongst battles [but] when he closed his eyes forever… a crucifix rested on his breast: the symbol of peace applied to Napoleon’s heart calmed the throbbing of that heart, as a ray of sunlight quiets the flood”.
After Louis XVI was executed, power had been uncoupled from a human body – a time when “they all put crowns upon themselves and evils were multiplied in the earth” (1 Maccabees 1:9). The spectacular reaction to this was the most vivid localisation of power in a single man that European history has arguably ever seen: the French had been brought out of pagan chaos and into the secular age. Bedbound and muttering his wishes to the abbé who attended him, Napoleon said, “Not all who wish can be atheists… How can you not believe in God? After all, everything proclaims his existence, and the greatest geniuses have believed so.”
(Photo: Coronation by Jacques-Louis David)
This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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