‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person. I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.’
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He had revised his former estimation of the legitimacy of monarchs. ‘The hereditary principle could alone prevent a counter-revolution’, he added in similar vein. Afterwards, petitions started arriving from the departments begging Napoleon to take the crown. Newspapers began running articles praising monarchical institutions, and officially inspired pamphlets such as Jean Chas’s Réflexions sur l’hérédité du pouvoir souverain were published suggesting that the best way to foil the conspirators would be to found a Napoleonic dynasty.
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‘No one proposed to say King!’ noted Pelet. Instead ‘consul’, ‘prince’ and ‘emperor’ were discussed. The first two sounded too modest, but Pelet believed the Conseil thought ‘that of Emperor too ambitious’.
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By the time Napoleon was ready to declare himself emperor, many of the great republican generals who might have objected were gone: Hoche, Kléber and Joubert were dead; Dumouriez was in exile; Pichegru and Moreau were about to go on trial for treachery. Only Jourdan, Augereau, Bernadotte and Brune remained and they were about to be placated with marshals’ batons.
The explanation Napoleon gave Soult – ‘An end should be put to the hopes of the Bourbons’ – was of course not the whole reason; he also wanted to be able to address Francis of Austria and Alexander of Russia as equals, and perhaps also Augustus, Hadrian and Constantine.
France was de facto an empire by 1804, and it was only acknowledging that fact that Napoleon declared himself an emperor de jure, just as Queen Victoria would become for the British Empire in 1877.
Astonishingly few Frenchmen opposed the return to an hereditary monarchy only eleven years after the execution of Louis XVI, and those who did were promised the opportunity to vote against it in a plebiscite.
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Eight days later Napoleon was officially proclaimed emperor in a fifteen-minute ceremony at Saint-Cloud, in which Joseph was appointed Grand Elector and Louis became Constable of France. He henceforth took the somewhat convoluted and seemingly contradictory style ‘Napoleon, through the grace of God and the Constitution of the Republic, Emperor of the French’.
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Should Napoleon die without an heir it was resolved that Joseph and then Louis would inherit the crown, with Lucien and Jérôme cut out of the line of succession due to the marriages of which their brother disapproved. Napoleon was furious that while Jérôme, who was serving in the French navy, had been on shore leave in America in December 1803 and had married the beautiful Baltimore heiress Elizabeth Patterson rather than holding himself back for a European dynastic union. Napoleon did everything in his power thereafter to end the marriage, including importuning the Pope to have it annulled and ordering French officials to ‘say publicly that I do not recognize a marriage that a young man of nineteen has contracted against the laws of his country’. All of his brothers except Louis had married for love, as he himself had, which was of no use to France.
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The day after he was proclaimed emperor, Napoleon appointed four honorary and fourteen active ‘Marshals of the Empire’.
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Between 1807 and 1815 a further eight were created. The marshalate wasn’t a military rank but an honorific one intended to recognize and reward something that Napoleon later called ‘the sacred fire’, and of course to incentivize the rest of the high command. The title came with a silver and velvet baton studded with gold eagles in a box of red Moroccan leather and indicated that Napoleon considered these men to be the fourteen best military commanders in the French army. Not everyone was impressed: when his staff congratulated Masséna, he merely snorted, ‘There are fourteen of us!’ Masséna was lucky to get his baton at all, having voted against the Life Consulate and criticized the coming Moreau trial, but his military capacity was undeniable.
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Whatever their social origin, Napoleon addressed all the marshals as ‘Mon cousin’ in correspondence, as he did Cambacérès and some of the senior imperial dignitaries.*
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As well as titles and batons, Napoleon gave dotations (land presents) to his marshals, some of which were huge.
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As well as founding the marshalate, on May 18, 1804 Napoleon formally constituted the Imperial Guard, an amalgamation of the Consular Guard and the unit that guarded the Legislative Body.
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Reims (where coronations of French kings had traditionally taken place), the Champs de Mars (turned down because of the likelihood of inclement weather) and Aix-la-Chapelle (for its connections with Charlemagne) were briefly considered before Notre-Dame was decided upon. The date of December 2 was a compromise between Napoleon, who had wanted November 9, the fifth anniversary of the Brumaire coup, and the Pope, who had wanted Christmas Day, when Charlemagne had been crowned in AD 800. The Council then discussed heraldic insignia and the official badge of the Empire, with Crétet’s special committee unanimously recommending the cockerel, emblem of Ancient Gaul, but if that was not accepted the eagle, lion, elephant, Aegis of Minerva, oak tree and ear of corn also had their supporters. Lebrun even suggested commandeering the Bourbons’ fleur-de-lis. Miot rightly denounced the fleur-de-lis as ‘an imbecility’ and instead proposed an enthroned Napoleon as the badge.
‘The cock belongs to the farmyard,’ said Napoleon, ‘it is far too feeble a creature.’ The Comte de Ségur supported the lion as it supposedly vanquished leopards, and Jean Laumond supported the elephant, a royal beast that according to (incorrect) popular belief couldn’t bend its knee. Cambacérès came up with the bee, as they have a powerful chief (albeit a queen), and General Lacuée added that it could both sting and make honey. Denon suggested the eagle, but the problem with that was that Austria, Prussia, the United States and Poland were already represented by eagles. No vote was taken, but Napoleon chose the lion, and they moved on to the question of inscriptions on the new coinage, rather strangely agreeing to keep the words ‘French Republic’ on it, which remained the case until 1809. Shortly after the meeting broke up Napoleon changed his mind from the lion to an eagle with spread wings, on the basis that it ‘affirms imperial dignity and recalls Charlemagne’. It also recalled Ancient Rome.
Not content with having just one symbol, Napoleon also chose the bee as a personal and family emblem, which then found its way as a decorative motif onto carpets, curtains, clothes, thrones, coats of arms, batons, books and many other items of imperial paraphernalia. The symbol of immortality and regeneration, hundreds of small gold-and-garnet bees (or possibly cicada, or even mis-drawn eagles) had been found in 1653 when the tomb was opened of the fifth-century King Childeric I of France, father of Clovis, in Tournai.
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On July 14, 1804 the remains of the great French marshals Vauban and Turenne were transferred to Les Invalides. Napoleon chose the occasion to make the inaugural awards of a new French order, the Légion d’Honneur, to reward meritorious service to France regardless of social origin. The first medals were five-pointed crosses in plain white enamel hanging from a red ribbon, but they had financial stipends attached according to one’s ranking in the organization. The fifteen cohorts of the order comprised grand officers, commanders, officers and legionaries, and each received 200,000 francs to distribute annually to worthy recipients.
Some on the Left complained that the reintroduction of honours fundamentally violated the revolutionary concept of social equality. Moreau had sneered at a previous attempt by Napoleon to reintroduce honours, awarding his cook ‘the order of the saucepan’. In the army, however, the Légion was an instant success. It’s impossible to say how many acts of valour were undertaken at least in part in the hope of being awarded ‘the cross’, as it was universally known. Napoleon chose ‘Honneur et Patrie’ as its motto, the words embroidered on all French standards.
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The inclusion of civilians in the Légion was deliberate; the rest of society could also attain honour if it copied the military virtues, especially those of loyalty and obedience.
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Out of the 38,000 people who received the rubans rouges (red ribbons) under Napoleon, 34,000 (or 89 per cent) were soldiers or sailors, but savants like Laplace, Monge, Berthollet and Chaptal got them too, as did prefects and several of the jurists who had helped write the Code. Napoleon also set up the Maison d’Éducation de la Légion d’Honneur at Saint-Denis, an excellent boarding school providing free education for the daughters of recipients of the medal who had been killed on active service, which still exists today, as does a Légion lycée in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
At one of the Conseil meetings in May 1802, when the foundation of the Légion was under discussion, the lawyer Théophile Berlier sneered at the whole concept, to which Napoleon replied:
You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led. I would not say this in public, but in an assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don’t think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See how the crowd is awed by the medals and orders worn by foreign diplomats. We must recreate these distinctions. There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild. A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself – what is it? Scattered grains of sand.
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Napoleon and Josephine’s coronation at Notre-Dame on Sunday, December 2, 1804 was a magnificent spectacle, despite the somewhat last-minute organization. It was snowing when the first guests started to arrive at 6 a.m., and they entered under a wooden and stucco neo-Gothic awning designed to mask the destructive iconoclasm wrought during the Revolution.
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Nothing was contemporary except the grenadiers’ uniforms lining the route, otherwise everything was part classical, part Gothic and wholly extravagant.
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He wore a long satin, gold-embroidered gown that reached his ankles, over which he had an ermine-lined crimson velvet mantle with a golden bee motif bordered with olive, laurel and oak leaves, which weighed more than 80 pounds, so it took Joseph, Louis, Lebrun and Cambacérès to lift it on to him.
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Although the ceremony was based on those of the Bourbons, Napoleon broke with tradition in not making confession or taking communion.
Napoleon had two crowns during the coronation: the first was a golden laurel-wreath one that he entered the cathedral wearing which was meant to evoke the Roman Empire and which he wore throughout; the second was a replica of Charlemagne’s crown, which had to be specially made because the traditional French coronation crown had been destroyed during the Revolution and the Austrians wouldn’t lend him Charlemagne’s. Although he lifted the Charlemagne replica over his own head, as previously rehearsed with the Pope, he didn’t actually place it on top because he was already wearing the laurels. He did however crown Josephine, who knelt before him.
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When the Pope had blessed them both, embraced Napoleon and intoned ‘Vivat Imperator in aeternam’, and the Mass had finished, Napoleon pronounced his coronation oath:
I swear 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, of the irreversibility of the sale of the biens nationaux; to raise no taxes except by virtue of the law; to maintain the institution of the Légion d’Honneur; to govern only in view of the interest, the wellbeing and the glory of the French people.
Napoleon’s crowning of himself was the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, and in one way a defining moment of the Enlightenment. It was also fundamentally honest: he had indeed got there through his own efforts. It is possible that he later regretted doing it, however, because of the vaulting egoism it suggested. When the great classical painter Jacques-Louis David, who was commissioned to commemorate the coronation, wrote to Napoleon’s senior courtier Pierre Daru in August 1806 about the ‘great moment’ that had ‘astonished spectators’ (his sketch of the self-crowning is reproduced as Plate 31), he was instead ordered to paint the moment when Napoleon crowned Josephine.
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Although Madame Mère hadn’t attended the coronation, when she was congratulated on her son’s elevation to the imperial purple her reply was replete with her natural fatalism and great common sense. ‘Pourvu que ça dure,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope that it lasts.’
