Napoleon Bonaparte and Fort Boyard
Today the most famous French fort in the world brings together intrepid participants ready to brave tarantulas and enigmas to steal its treasure. However, long before distributing its wealth, the construction of the fort initiated by Napoleon cost quite a fortune to prove ... perfectly useless.
Fort Boyard, an impractical project
In 1666, Colbert convinced Louis XIV of the importance of building an arsenal in the Antioche strait, a maritime boulevard facilitating the entry of enemies onto the Charente coast. Rochefort emerges from the silts with a lot of royal liquidity so well that it is designated as the “golden city” raised in record time on the marshes. Impossible for this city to exist without its harbor. However, this roadstead located opposite the wide open Antioch strait can only count on a very modest avant-garde: the island of Aix . This tiny crescent of land three kilometers long and barely 600 meters in its greatest width is charged, almost by itself, with the guard of the whole arsenal. Its strategic importance is considerable and inversely proportional to its size!
Thus, from 1689, the island of Aix and the small Madame island at the opening of the estuary became the object of slow but absolutely necessary fortifications. Vauban fortified the village in 1669 and then at the beginning of the 18th century, the forefront Sainte Catherine, in the south of the island, was equipped with the Fort de la Rade, which did not resist an English attack in 1757. There is no doubt that the island of Aix is definitely a strategic high place and it is indeed the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte who takes full measure of this delicate situation.
From 1801, Bonaparte noticed the weakness of the fortifications and the poverty of the defense system. If by chance the English made a breakthrough in the Antioch strait, nothing could firmly stop them. This vulnerability must be remedied as quickly as possible! The First Consul therefore instructs the General Inspector of Maritime Works Ferregeau to take up the idea already expressed in the 18th century of a fort along Boyard’s loins. The project is ambitious because this rope is a sandbank located halfway between the island of Aix and the island of Oléron. Already spotted by Dutch sailors who are wary of it, this bench known under the name of “banjaert” in Dutch and “boyar” in Anjou and Saintonge gives the construction both sorrows and its name.
The project is ambitious, probably too much for the means at the time. It is necessary to build on this bench an artificial reef on which will sit the foundations of a building, gigantic elliptical ring 80 meters long and 40 meters wide. The fort is based on a new defense system theorized by Montalembert who offers instead of a bastioned fort, a frontal opposition to the enemy who must take advantage of the firepower of the powerful guns. It was by banking on this remarkable progress in artillery that he saw how to go beyond Vauban’s defense systems.
In 1803, work began with the construction of Boyardville, on the island of Oléron. Workshops and materials were set up there. On May 11, 1804, the first block of stone was laid, then followed by those taken with explosives on the point of Coudepont on the island of Aix and then transported in boats and barges along Boyard. The work is exhausting, difficult and accidents regularly punctuate the rise of the artificial island which finally emerges above the water and whose first crown wall is visible in 1805. It won’t be visible for long. The winter storm that same year reduced him to nothing.
Courageously, workers return to the task. The means were reinforced in 1805 and finally, the platform which will support the future fort is visible at low tide. The first seat rises. Unfortunately, the storms of winter 1806-1807 once again erode all the efforts made for several years. The blocks so difficult to transport sink to the bottom of the sea, nothing remains of the first course placed on Boyard’s sandbank. This pharaonic project mobilizing very large sums of money is in the headlines: should the country persist in pursuing such a project in such difficult conditions? The works were immediately suspended and the local authorities await the visit of Napoleon I in the summer of 1807. He alone will be able to decide on the future of the fort. The emperor, convinced that this building would finally allow effective defense of the Antioch strait, ordered the work to continue… but in reduced dimensions: 68 meters in length, 21 meters in width and 20 meters in height at the ramparts. The walls should be more than two meters thick. Painfully, the construction site resumes.
Impatient, Napoleon I wanted results, and quickly. Since the garrison of the island of Aix and the mobilized workers were not enough, the emperor was determined to draw on the resources of a population that could be forced into labor, that of convicts from reformatories and a few prisoners of war. The construction workforce now stands at 27 ships, 186 crew members and at least 600 workers. Alas, the imperial will, however firm it may be, can do nothing against damage. A new foundation is put in place. It is feared that it will sink under its own weight which is greatly reduced. The joints are made with lime and the blocks are firmly anchored to each other by “strong iron spikes”. But, definitely, winters are not favorable and that of 1808 is no exception: the storm is raging, the base is sinking again while the wages of the workers are too sporadic to give them the heart to the work. Another year of laborious efforts punctuated by mutiny and the battle of the fireships will put an end to this expensive project for a few years.
The Battle of the Basque Roads, April 1809
From April 1, a frigate and an English brig – undoubtedly under the guise of English humor – interrupt the work on Boyard’s sandbank and scrupulously destroy the installations without worrying about the crossfire coming from the island of Aix and Boyardville. Ten days later, an explosion resounded in such a deafening crash that it was said to have been heard as far as Poitiers. The English threw frieships into the sea, old and unusable ships transformed into infernal machines because they were loaded with explosives of all kinds. Navigating with the currents, these time bombs are heading straight for the fleet of the admiral Allemand who has no other choice but to deal with the most urgent, striving to save his crews and ships from disastrous fires. The result is disastrous. Certainly, several sailors and ships were saved, but there was hardly anything left of the fort under construction. The project was abandoned and would not be relaunched until 1842.
The efforts to be deployed are just as colossal as at the beginning of the 19th century but no longer take into account the progress of artillery. And when Fort Boyard is finally completed, the result is a perfectly useless building that neither artillery nor strategy needs. Abandoned for years, it eventually became a military prison but closed again in 1913. It will have to wait until the end of the 20th century to become the celebrity we know today!
Fort Boyard and the Fortified Belt of the Antioch Strait
The Fort Boyard project was to reinforce a defense imagined to defend the bay of Rochefort and the access to the strait of Antioch. This fortified belt with impressive cross-fire power was to pass the envy of any enemy to venture further in his project. To do this, Napoleon I started the construction in 1808 of Fort de la Sommité on the highest point, north-east of the island of Aix. The bastion was renamed Fort Liédot in 1812 in homage to Colonel and military engineer François Joseph Didier Liédot (1773 – 1812), who died during the Russian campaign . It took 24 years for Fort Liédot to be completed, but its construction was remarkable in many ways. All in Crazannes stones, the fort is built on a bastioned square plan and equipped with a model tower n ° 1 type 1811, a standardized defense construction bringing together in a single building the gunpowder magazines, the food stores and the housing of the gunners. After some modifications, this model will become a redoubt-model n ° 1, the one and only copy built of this model. The whole could shelter a garrison of 600 men or… children. It is in fact the future that was finally reserved for this fort which became a place of detention before being transformed into a reception structure for summer camps. Some will see it as a link that we will not substantiate.
Instead of the fort destroyed by the English at Sainte Catherine Point in the 18th century, it was decided to take back what was left of the old construction and to build a fort regularly modernized throughout the 19th century.
A stone’s throw from the Ile d’Aix at the mouth of the Charente and accessible on foot from Fouras, the rock of Énet, accessible at low tide, had already shown its importance, evidenced by its fortification from the Middle Ages. After the Battle of the Basque Roads in April 1809, the construction project for Fort Énet was put back on the table. Its main interest lay in the possibility of crossing the fires of Énet with those of Coudepont on the island of Aix, more solidly protecting the access to the bay of Rochefort. Today, Fort Énet is admired less for its crossfire than for its elegant architectural simplicity, much appreciated by connoisseurs and lovers of fortified structures.
Despite all his will and the awareness he had of the weakness of the maritime defenses of this part of the Atlantic coast, Napoleon I never succeeded in setting up the fortified belt he had imagined to defend the Antioch strait. Ironically, the island of Aix was as much the core of a defense strategy against the English as the last stay of the emperor before surrendering to them. He was then preparing to join an island whose remoteness was the best bastion against any attempt at attack .
Napoleon and the Numbering of the Streets
Napoleon Bonaparte regularly demonstrated a very modern pragmatism. If our daily life owes him a lot, from the baccalaureate to garbage collection, let us recognize him for having succeeded in enforcing the numbering of buildings and houses, a challenge which exhausted the resources of many of his predecessors.
Numbering the Streets: a Long-Standing Initiative
If the numbering of streets as we know it today is quite recent, the idea is nevertheless old. In 1421 in Paris, the newly rebuilt Notre-Dame bridge, made of wood on stone piles, has no less than sixty houses which will savour against their will the water of the Seine during the destructive flood of 1499. On this bridge, the dwellings are numbered in Roman numerals and are the only ones to benefit from this treatment in the city. Once at the bottom of the river, these houses will be the only memory of a numerical experience that will not be repeated for several centuries. While waiting for the Age of Enlightenment, one orients himself in the cities by following approximate itineraries articulated on landmarks that are the signs of the houses or the specificities of the district. Failing to find his way quickly, the pedestrian can at least savor the poetry of picturesque mazes with names inherited from some curious legend. So it is with the rue du Chat-qui-Pêche as well as that of the Puits-de-l’Ermite or the rue Perdue.
In the eighteenth century, especially in its second half, it seems that the taste for clarity and simpler travel directions take over and house numbering becomes common in many cities. The exercise is most often used to better collect taxes or to accommodate more easily the troops of passing or occupying armies. But the foreign visitor or the lost provincial undoubtedly enjoys – even before the inhabitants – the comfort of strolling in an unknown city without fear of getting lost because the sign serving as a landmark closed without anyone being informed. Thus the numbering of dwellings appears for example in Prussia in 1737, in Madrid in 1750, in Milan in 1786 and in Paris in 1779. Vain undertaking in the French capital because it is an understatement to specify that Parisians are reluctant to face this initiative. As you number the day, the fresh paint indications disappear at night! At a time when rumors – and the facts! – are going well and recognize in the marking of houses an indisputable sign of the imminent passage of thieves, no one is comfortable with the idea of a clearly visible numbering even though it would be generalized to all homes and without distinction of neighborhoods or social rank.
Yet the idea is gaining ground and the editors of almanacs and directories are not for nothing! It is easy to imagine the interest that such a numbering would be for them: addresses which would become precise and would need to be regularly updated so that the annual edition of almanacs and directories would turn into a particularly fruitful juicy affair. Moreover, it was on the initiative of one of these traders that the first Parisian numbering took place in 1799 and which ended in pitiful failure.
The Revolution, however, was not afraid to get to grips with the problem and concocted a system of such complexity that it was the source of particularly remarkable absurdities (numbers without continuation or the same number repeated several times in same street) and which miraculously made the system without numbering much clearer and simpler than the system being provided with numbers. All the same, Choderlos de Laclos (1741 – 1803), if he proposed a numbering system as twisted as the mind of the Vicomte de Valmont, imagined some ingenious systems such as that consisting in distributing even numbers to the streets perpendicular to the Seine and the odd numbers on the streets that ran parallel to it. If this is not quite the system set up by Napoleon I, we can recognize that he was inspired by it.
The Imperial Street Numbering System
On February 4th, 1805, a decree made street numbering compulsory. In Paris, the prefect Nicolas Frochot (1761 – 1828) is in charge of the application of this decree which is based on a system whose design was not a piece of cake!
Finally, the result makes it possible to see more clearly without creating complexities that are too crippling on a daily basis. Contrary to what Marin Kreenfelt de Storck, editor of the Almanac de Paris in 1779, advocated, the digital unit is now the house and no longer the door.
Then the numbering of the doors follows simple geographical rules capable of being applied to almost all the streets of the capital. A distinction is made between even numbers (to the pedestrian’s right) and odd numbers (to his left); the direction of the streets is oriented from upstream to downstream for streets parallel to the Seine, and from the banks to the north and south for streets oblique or perpendicular to the Seine.
Visually, the numbers are differentiated so as to facilitate understanding of the geographical position in which the pedestrian is. In the streets perpendicular or oblique to the river, the numbering is drawn in black on an ocher background while in the streets parallel to the Seine, the number is written in red, always on an ocher background.
The municipality of Paris took charge between June and September 1805 of the first numbering of the streets of the city but the maintenance of these numbers – so that they remain clearly visible – fell to the owners who one imagines that they were particularly enchanted by this new measure. Painting did not last long in the Parisian climate and the local authority published then generously a specification (height, location, color and material of the plate which could be glazed sheet, enamelled earthenware) leaving the owners the choice to invest in a numbering that did not require regular maintenance .
On June 28th, 1847, the application of the decree of the Prefect of the Seine initiated a regularization of street signs and numbering by opting for enameled porcelain plaques whose white numbers were inscribed on an azure blue background always currents in Paris and in the provinces.
When the new numbering system was applied, the problem of the Cité and Saint-Louis islands arose. Since the perpendicular streets as well as the parallel streets overlooked the Seine, it was decided to assimilate the Île de la Cité to the left bank while the Île Saint-Louis was similar to the right bank. By superstition, the number 13 of certain streets was replaced by the number 11 bis and sometimes, without any reason, streets were numbered backwards.
This decree of Napoleon I changed the way of conceiving the geographical space of a city. By facilitating all kinds of procedures, street numbering still makes it possible to move around quickly, without wasting time. Ironically, few streets named after Bonaparte allow the decree of February 1805 to be linked to its instigator. Rue Bonaparte in the 6th arrondissement of Paris evokes more the memory of the general than that of the emperor, while the quai Napoleon from 1804 is now divided into two parts, one called Quai aux Fleurs and the other Quai de la Corse, a modest evocation.
His native island and the island of Aix, the last one he trod before his rock of Sainte-Hélène, still have Napoleon streets like a few other French towns. In the absence of streets, let us remember the success of their numbering!
Creation of the Bank of France by Napoleon Bonaparte
In this very young XIXth century, the moribund economy post Revolution urged the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte to create the Bank of France January 18th, 1800 to promote the economic recovery of the country. The thrifty Napoleon wanted to create a stable and strong value in the heart of an institution that should not serve as a fund to the state but to promote its businesses.
A Stormy Political and Economic Context
The XVIIIth century was not beneficial to paper money. Scalded by the financial scandal of John Law (1671 – 1729) in 1720, the French had plenty of time to confirm their aversion to printed money when they were fooled a second time with brandishing revolutionary assignats that were nothing else than a lightning and spectacular inflation. Some, however, got rich. Among them, the Swiss financier Jean-Frédéric Perregaux (1744 – 1808). Precisely preceding the perpetual neutrality that will later make the pride of his native Switzerland, our Helvetian, who, before the Revolution, mixed with the world’s most popular aristocratic circles, was careful not to display too clearly his political opinions during the brutal change of regime. He preferred, as many at that time, to adapt them to the necessities of the moment. It was certainly the right move since the members of the nobility – fiercely attached to their heads – were quick to flee abroad taking care to carry with them a considerable part of the metal currency of the late Kingdom of France. A financial crisis hit the people, who – having nothing to fear for their own head – had everything to fear for their finances. In an extremely unfavorable economic climate, bankruptcies were numerous and internal trade paralyzed. The Directory was unable to remedy the problem in a sustainable way and it was not until the Brumaire coup (November 9-10th, 1799) to see the emergence of hope for a government stability essential to an economic recovery of the country. It was then that our dashing Swiss banker approached Bonaparte, the context and Napoleon smiling at him in concert.
Perregaux and a few banker friends (Le Couteulx, Mallet and Perier) first obtained the right to print bank notes for their own establishment named Caisse des Comptes Courants. They aim to collect the savings then hoarded by individuals and increase the amount of money in circulation. The Banque de France was created on 18th January 1800 by decree and quickly absorbed the Caisse des Comptes Courants. The very young Banque de France settled in the Hôtel de Toulouse, rue de la Vrillière in Paris, of course.
The first Consul wanted to be cautious and wanted to guarantee the stability and reliability of this new institution. The first issues of notes were thus guaranteed to find their equivalent in quantity of gold of the same value to any person who wished it. To proceed to the exchange, one should simply go to the Rue de la Vrillière. It was all about the reputation of the bank and its future, the first Consul was perfectly aware. The French, who enjoyed nothing less than being fooled three times in a row, were at first extremely suspicious. Then little by little, confidence returned. It must be said that Bonaparte’s personal, hard-hitting and irresistible involvement had something to do with this success. He placed some of his own funds in trust with the Bank and persuaded his family and relatives to do the same. The transaction, together with the capital contributed by wealthy shareholders, provided the institution with considerable capital, which was necessary to establish its essential importance. Soon, the Bank of France was the only bank authorized to issue monetary values hence its name “central bank”.
The main clients of the bank were ordinary banks, whose business was to lend money to individuals and businesses. The principle was therefore based on the promise of repayment made by the borrower to his banker, a promise referred to as a “bill of exchange”. At the same time, ordinary banks needed money to lend to new customers. They needed to have sufficient financial reserves to act without waiting for borrower clients to repay their debts. Ordinary banks turned to the Banque de France and bought him notes in exchange for the bills of exchange they had at their disposal. Naturally, the amount of money increased in the country and allowed to revive commerce and industry. In turn, the latter made profits that were inevitably taxed. Finally, the increasing value of taxes levied by the state allowed the country to get rich and the First Consul to finance his army (and not his campaigns).
The Franc Germinal, a Reliable Economic Value
The first notes issued by the Bank of France were of such value that they were not accessible to all. The 500-franc notes represented a little more than a year’s salary for a worker, and that of 1000 was equivalent to double the work, naturally. Not being convertible into gold elsewhere than in Paris, the notes further restricted the circle of lovers of bundles. These notes occupied so well the only high Parisian business that they had confused any merchant if a citizen would have the idea to give one of these papers to pay for a chicken (not far from becoming Marengo).
On the other hand, the memory of John Law and the revolutionary assignats remained tenacious, and the French countryside still preferred metallic values for their trade. The Revolution, by a law of August 15th, 1795 had already decided to replace the livre tournois by the “franc d’argent” but its will alone was not enough. Indeed, the fiery and first Republic had that in common with Josephine de Beauharnais (1763 – 1814) at the same time that no one had enough money – metal for one, ready for the other – to satisfy their needs. It was thus necessary to wait for the 7th germinal year XI (March 28th, 1803) to see reappear this franc which borrowed at its date of creation the name under which it will exercise until 1928 namely, the franc “germinal”.
Manufacturing and Security of Monetary Values
The first two banknotes put into circulation by the Banque de France represented considerable sums. From then on, everything had to be done to prevent as much as possible the appearance of false. The paper was first produced at the stationery of Buges in Loiret but it was quickly preferred that of the paper mill of the Marais at Jouy-sur-Morin. The addition of a watermark between the two sheets of paper constituting each note was one of the first security provisions. Then came the quality of the drawing for which Charles Percier (1764 – 1838) was called upon. This neoclassical architect who had distinguished himself in his achievements for financiers working alongside the First Consul was not long to be warmly recommended to the latter who praised his talents for a long time. The engraving of the matrix was entrusted to Jean-Bertrand Andrieu (1761 – 1822) who took as a support a steel plate to guarantee an inking always equal. Finally, the engraving typography returned to Firmin Didot (1764 – 1836) whose name is still well known today by lovers of prints and old editions. A stub was added, a dry stamp (embossing the paper obtained with a press) and a wet stamp (a technique for printing simultaneously on the front and back).
As for the symbolism of the chosen motifs, we find the strong influence of the Roman Empire (tinged with the neoclassical taste born from the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the XVIIIth century). Compass and square evoke the tools of the builders using geometry and architecture, while the rooster emblem of France rubs shoulders with the scale of Justice. The divinities represented are those that the great estates considered as constituting a strong state in the XIXth century: Vulcan for industry, Apollo for the arts, Ceres for agriculture and Poseidon for the colonial empire.
Metal coins are subject to the same concerns, both security and symbolism. The Republican motifs were replaced at the obverse of the pieces by Bonaparte’s bare-headed profile – whose engraver, General Pierre-Joseph Tiolier (1763 – 1819) painted the portrait – accompanied by a legend “Bonaparte First Consul”. The reverse was an olive crown, the face value of the coin and the legend “French Republic”. Of course, an imperial proclamation will be enough for the motives of coins and notes to be changed once more.
The creation of the Banque de France had a decisive impact on the country’s economy and its imperial expansion (although it did not finance them, the Emperor always defended it). Paper money improved, gaining security and discouraging counterfeiters. However, in 1959, the Bank of France issued a 100 franc note of Napoleon. This note made famous the forger Czesław Jan Bojarski (1912 – 2003) who made a specialty of the falsification of these “Bonaparte notes”. His mastery in this field is still unchallenged and unmatched. These fakes are now rare and expensive collectibles. An irony of history that certainly did not escape the Emperor if he had been alive to appreciate it.
The Death of Napoleon: such a big mystery?
When Napoleon died at St. Helena, the question of the causes of his death soon became a subject of debate. Cancer? Poison? These only evocations excite passions, because Bonaparte passed master in the art - beyond his death - to feed his own legend. Who would not try to imagine a romantic ending at the height of this extraordinary character?
Napoleon Bonaparte dies in St. Helena
On May 5th, 1821 at 5:49 pm, he died at the age of 51, the man who dominated most of Europe for a time. Arousing as much admiration, fear as hatred (the great authors such as Tolstoï, Germaine de Stael or Chateaubriand left us with strong memories), the exiled Emperor dies, however, after long suffering in his home in Longwood without even leaving a good word for posterity (his last words were confused and unintelligible).
Since March, Napoleon was bedridden and was less and less supportive of food, weakening rapidly. Persuaded for a long time that the evil that took away his father (a stomach cancer) would eventually defeat himself, he refused in the last month before his death most of the medications prescribed by his doctors. Nevertheless, the latter decided on May 4th to override the clear will of Napoleon I, agreeing with very poor common sense on the administration of a dose of calomel diluted in a glass of water. Only Dr. François Antommarchi (1780/89 – 1838) fiercely opposed it without winning any success. Louis-Joseph-Narcisse Marchand (1791 – 1876), faithful companion of the emperor, was charged with giving the secret remedy, mission which he acquitted painfully when Bonaparte, having drunk the contents of the glass said to him “with a tone of so affectionate reproach […]: “Are you misleading on me too?” Marchand, deeply moved, was indeed failing in his promise not to administer anything to him without his permission. The calomel certainly had an effect but probably not what we expected and so that May 5th late afternoon, Napoleon gave his last breathe. When midnight was over, the body was moved, then washed to purify it with the cologne that so he loved mixed with a little water from the Torbett Fountain.
Although the last will of the emperor was to be buried in France, the British government strongly opposed it through the governor of the island who however left free the relatives of the deceased to choose a place of burial at St. Helena.
Napoleon had discovered the Torbett fountain a few years before in the company of Henri-Gatien Bertrand (1773 – 1884) and recommended that: “if after [his] death, [his] body remains in the hands of [his] enemies, [they] should drop him off here.” The place thus imposed itself. The upholsterer Andrew Darling, who supervised the making of the coffins notes that he was told that “the coffins were to be the first in tinplate, upholstered in cotton-padded satin, with a little mattress and pillow in the back made of the same materials; the second of wood; the third lead; and finally a casket of mahogany covered with purple velvet, if it could be obtained.” Mahogany being a rare wood on the island, a table of this essence was sacrificed for the making of the last coffin.
After the autopsy of Napoleon, the heart and the stomach were placed in two vases of silver, filled with spirit of wine. These vases were hermetically sealed and placed in the coffin. The successive coffins were sealed in the same way. A lot of precautions were taken to make the tomb of Napoleon an impregnable fortress (one sank the cement in the pit before laying three heavy slabs and a gate of cast iron). The stele, however, remained silent since – without being a surprise – the English and French never agreed on the inscription, which would indicate the identity of the deceased as accurately as possible; each nation having a very firm idea of what it meant by “accurately”.
Napoleon prepares his legend
Long before he died, and even when he was at St. Helena, the emperor remained a fierce opponent of the English. The decision to isolate him in the middle of the Atlantic was therefore the least they can do and surely the British were not surprised to see the rare talent that Napoleon deployed to systematically undermine their authority. Emmanuel Las Cases (1766 – 1842) testifies in his memoirs of the treasures of inventiveness deployed by Bonaparte to give Europe the image of a dishonorable captivity, making the English revolting characters and completely devoid of humanity. Yet the reality was quite different and Napoleon was treated well despite some financial questions and etiquette that often put Bonaparte in a rage (the English in charge of his surveillance opposed him with consistency and determination the title of “general” when Bonaparte required that of “emperor” which he considered legitimate). Thus, our Corsican made for example sell his silverware on the place of Jamestown to make believe that he was at the last levels of poverty. The merchants returning from the Indies were, without them’s knowing, to play the role of gossips in Europe and to spread the infamous news. Jean Tulard, historian and specialist of Napoleon I, also recalls that Napoleon gave “an odious role to Hudson Lowe (1769 – 1844), who by the way, was not a monster of finesse”. While before embarking on Île d’Aix in July 1815, Napoleon I had refused several plans for escape, “it was better for his legend that he died, as he will say, murdered by the British government” recalls Pierre Branda, a French historian specializing in the Consulate and the First Empire.
What is Napoleon Bonaparte dead?
Unless one desecrates the tomb of the Invalides, will we ever know it with certainty? Nevertheless, the many accounts of his relatives and witnesses of his burial and his, to say the least, confrontational relations with his phlegmatic British jailers further guide the trail of the investigation to a death of pathological cause than to that of a perfidious poisoning. Of course, this last theory has something to seduce! Can a historical figure of this stature die stupidly from a failing stomach? It would seem, however, that we had to live with it.
Some people brandish the traces of arsenic detected in his hair but it is quickly forgotten that they were also found in those of Josephine and l’Aiglon. It is also unaware that in the 19th century arsenic was widespread in a role other than poison, so much so that it was often stored in the kitchen (and sometimes served as an unfortunate or criminal ingredient of an an undesirable gastronomy). It was used to make candles, cigarettes, tapestry pigments, dyes, paints and cosmetics. Many locks of hair of the imperial head were studied. It is almost systematically concluded that the doses were certainly high, but not for the 19th century. On the other hand, since the hair roots showed traces of arsenic, some people argued that this was proof that Napoleon had ingested the poison by food or wine. It had first been necessary for the poisoner to be a close relative of the emperor and to show extreme patience, for the man would certainly not die struck down by so small doses of arsenic, unless one envisages long-term poisoning. Unfortunately, the “French service” at the Longwood table (the dishes are presented on the table, people help themselves to dishes), it was necessary that the criminal also poisoned! As Jean Tulard slyly summarizes, either the poisoner was not good at it, or he still took a long time to kill him.
What about the body that was found almost intact in 1840 before his repatriation to the Invalides?
Arsenic, as well as an embalming, is famous for keeping the bodies in good condition. Once again, let us remember that Napoleon was buried, not in one, but in four hermetically sealed coffins. Most likely, a phenomenon of saponification (transformation of the flesh into adipocere) was favored by the absence of air and in this type of case, the good preservation of a body is quite often noted. Would one then enjoy to exchange the body of the sovereign by another less prestigious and bury in the Invalides a cook rather than an emperor? Again, there is no reason to believe this since the exhumation took place in the presence of many witnesses who had seen the imperial body 20 years ago. No one found fault with this, and, having passed the surprise of this astonishing preservation, they easily recognized the famous Napoleon.
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The question of the death of Napoleon I now unleashes the passions and testifies far less to the interest aroused by the emperor than his incredible talent for communicating, he who well before his death, was fully aware of the exceptional nature of his destiny. « My life, What a novel! » He said, dictating his memories to Las Cases during his exile in St. Helena. He could not have been more right: what better novels than those whose end maintains the mystery?
False Napoleon: Story of Madmen
The cliché is worn out. However, and as often, the stereotype settles on fertile and well-documented soil. Did the madmen taking themselves for Napoleon I really populate the insane asylums? Were they all mad or did they take advantage of a historic moment of confusion following Bonaparte's exile?
From the Revolution to the end of the Empire, in the throes of instability and violence
The adoption of the guillotine, recommended by Mr. Guillotin to establish equality between citizens even in the execution of the capital punishment, had consequences as incisive in the flesh as in the minds. So when on January 21st, 1793, Louis XVI was beheaded under the heartbroken eyes of Philippe Pinel (1745 – 1826), precursor of psychiatry in France, the doctor denied being a royalist but felt that if this troubled period literally caused the loss of their head for many citizens, others also lose it in a much more insidious way.
Terror not only threatens bodies, it also threatens minds. Because the daily lists of the condemned maintain, during weeks sometimes, a fear leaving no rest to the citizens likely to be led to the scaffold. Some minds do not resist such torture and sink into madness: “delirium, the subject’s bulwark against its own collapse has a lot to tell us about political violence” underlines Laure Murat, historian and author of The man who thought he was Napoleon.
The Empire does not put an end to the violence and uncertainty that are the daily life on the eve of the 19th century. The parenthesis is far from enchanted and it is almost a whole century which bears the stigmata of the Revolution. From 1789 to 1871, political regimes followed one after the other, without sustainability but always accompanied by political and social violence. The disturbances not only agitate the upper echelons, they are also expressed in the streets. How to endure such instability on a daily basis? The contemporaries of the time know too well that a political opinion for a time unanimous – and sometimes even rewarded – can turn just as quickly into condemnation at best social, at worst, to death. There is enough to lose your head there without having recourse to the terrifying “Louisette”, affectionate nickname of the guillotine in homage to one of its designers, the doctor Antoine Louis (1723 – 1792). Nevertheless, shady perspectives are opening up to the most solid … and the most disturbed minds?
Identity Theft: the Fake Napoleon I
The Restoration of 1815 is accompanied by an epidermal reaction of Louis XVIII confronted with the memories of the Empire. It is essential for the royalists to overwhelm the Napoleonic legend with all evils because the suppression of all its memories will not be enough to silence the Bonapartists. Everywhere in France, the portraits of Napoleon I, of the imperial family, the emblems and all the representations directly or indirectly touching Bonaparte are systematically destroyed, erased, scratched. The royalists’ solution is ultimately worse than the evil they are striving to boast about. Not only a trade in commemorative objects is set up (the tastiest of which is undoubtedly that of the waffle molds decorated with the imperial profile) but especially since the booksellers and hawkers are no longer authorized to disseminate the image of the general Corsican, impostors will have full latitude to play on the memory of a vague resemblance between their physiognomy and that of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Thus begins the short adventure of Jean Charnay, a former soldier in his thirties converted into a very curious activity of “teacher and peddler” that a woman recognizes in June 1817 as the fallen emperor. Poor and hungry, he does not particularly want to contradict this woman who does not budge: his face is identical to the profile of the old coins bearing the effigy of Napoleon I! It is well worth a good meal, the usurper does not deny… Charnay takes to the game of confabulation and seems convincing enough to get free food; he sometimes even obtains up to the totality of the savings of a few subjugated inhabitants. However, he does not keep everything to himself, the man is intelligent. He is keen to keep his rank because this is also the usurpation that fills his stomach daily. So here he is distributing money to the poor, a perfect disguise for the one who was still a destitute just a few weeks before. Because the masquerade lasts two months and takes the paths of Ain and Saône-et-Loire until Charnay-Napoléon was arrested on August 4 of the same summer 1817 and then imprisoned.
A previous usurper had been less successful in 1815, still in Ain, he only held out for two days. Jean-Baptiste Ravier, a former sergeant-major of the Grande Armée, also in his thirties, did not take much advantage of his imperial status before being imprisoned. We will not fail to raise the common point which unites these two characters as well in their misfortune as in the means which they employed to remedy it. Both were elders of the Grand Army. However, we know the unfortunate fate of many Grognards after the fall of the Empire. It was necessary to eat well and the confusion following the surrender of Napoleon Bonaparte was conducive to plant seed of doubt in people’s minds.
All the more so as Napoleon was not at his first coup and mastered like no one else the art of returns as dazzling as they were unexpected. The population was therefore legitimately entitled to doubt the emperor’s defeat and his exile when these characters appeared, claiming to be Napoleon I. Very clever the one who could accuse the credulity of the inhabitants of the provinces in such troubled times. On the other hand, these funny anecdotes are revealing of the powerful memory which Bonaparte left in the spirits, everywhere on the territory: no need for a perfect resemblance nor even to be of the same age as the Corsican; the evocation, the talent of orator and the bearing are often enough.
The memory of the great man is not always suggested by the impostor and recognized by the admirer. Sometimes a grain of madness comes to stop the machine and the false Napoleon is not only motivated by poverty. The example of Brother Hilarion – whose real name is Joseph-Xavier Tissot (1780-1864) – is edifying.
We are in 1823 and Napoleon Bonaparte died in Saint Helena for two years already. In 1822, Brother Hilarion, an unknown – for the moment relatively discreet – acquired a small castle in Lozère which he intended to welcome the needy and the weak of mind. No fees are charged for these patients or their families. Brother Hilarion and the few religious who accompany him take care of them and, unlike the unhealthy asylums which are the ordinary of unhappy disturbed patients, the Lozère establishment is a remarkable example of care and good treatment.
Now, Brother Hilarion is not just a Good Samaritan. His disturbing resemblance to the emperor, his charisma and his ease as a speaker disturb many inhabitants of the region who report to anyone who wants to hear them that Bonaparte is well and truly alive! He is only concealed under the monastic costume, undoubtedly to recover a peaceful life far from the risks of politics. The information is so convincing that it ends up arousing the interest of the sub-prefect Armand Marquiset. If Napoleon is back despite his announced death, Marquiset should be sure of it; this man would be quite capable of coming back from the dead!
Marquiset is quickly reassured. While he recognizes that Brother Hilarion expresses admirably and possesses the regular features reminiscent of those of Bonaparte, the sub-prefect also notes that the resurrected Napoleon sometimes seems “more disturbed than his patients”. Brother Hilarion will open several hospices and will strive to protect the weak of spirits or the insane. Despite a notoriety that will extend to several neighboring regions, Joseph-Xavier Tissot will have to give up his hospices for lack of means. Today, he is considered by some to be the forerunner of alienists, or at least an advocate of worthy psychiatric care, at a time when the idea was only just beginning to be heard.
The madmen who thought they were Napoleon: an evil that does not spare celebrities
The exile of Napoleon Bonaparte only reinforces the fascination for this character to whom nothing and no one could resist. Subjecting a large part of the European sovereigns only to his strength of character, his intelligence and his military and strategic genius above all, Bonaparte knew how to emancipate himself from the need for an aristocratic and historical ancestry to rise from a poor island nobility to the rank of emperor reigning over territories beyond the natural borders of France. Fallen for the first time, returned in a masterful tour de force and without any recourse to violence, Bonaparte is the perfect embodiment of Nietzsche’s Übermensch: freed from dynastic legitimacy, from the moral common to men and from social control. Napoleon Bonaparte is a self-made man , a charismatic and fascinating personality who inaugurates a new era where individualism is increasingly valued and encouraged.
In the troubled context of the 19th century, extraordinary historical figures are a solid anchor for those who lose their minds. Bonaparte, invulnerable and pugnacious, thus becomes a personality easily endorsed by the insane. Especially since the costume requires little investment: a frock coat, a bicorn hat and voila!
Thus, after the return of the ashes of Napoleon I in December 1840, Doctor Auguste Voisin saw about fifteen emperors enter the asylum of Bicêtre. And that does not go easy! Because like their model, each emperor is angry, capricious and authoritarian. Not supporting the contradiction, the meetings between two imperial personalities lead to inevitable fights where each one claims his legitimacy to the throne and accuses the rival of shameless imposture …
These madmen, convinced of being Napoleon I, are the occasion for Étienne Esquirol (1772 – 1840), a pupil of Voisin, to study and describe in detail this newly appeared disorder and baptized proud (or ambitious) monomania, of which the main characteristic lies in the astonishing consistency of the patients. The latter in fact retain all their intellectual capacities and their common sense, except of course their delirium of identity.
Yet it would be wrong to believe that Napoleon has a monopoly on monomaniac delirium. Although he wins with flying colours, he is battling it out with other prestigious competitors. Laure Murat thus identifies several notable personalities pleasing delusional patients: Louis XVI, Jesus or Mahomet are the most common. What do they have in common? They are out of the ordinary. Living a unique, extraordinary destiny, they extricate themselves from reality. Moreover, the insane are less raving about the person incarnate than about his title or the idea that one has of this person. Rather than embodying Napoleon Bonaparte, the madman embraces the personality of an emperor of unsuspected power.
Should we be surprised that Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), at the dawn of the delirium which will lose him in 1900, took a brief moment himself for Napoleon? In the same vein, the philosopher Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857) had already shown several signs of madness, as when leaving asylum, he signed the name of “Brutus Bonaparte Comte” in the register. Bad times for philosophers!
More recently, legend has it that the actor Albert Dieudonné (1889 – 1976), who played Napoleon for the eponymous film by Abel Gance (1889 – 1981) in 1927, was buried in the Bonaparte costume he wore on the filming. Whatever the reality, many of his colleagues at the time conceded that the actor narrowly escaped madness. Better! The director himself devoured by the personality of the emperor found himself psychic correspondences with the deceased emperor …
Even today, the stereotypical image of the madman invariably represents a man hand in the jacket, head held high and looking intractable. Napoleon Bonaparte, an icon as popular as his insane ersatz, never ceases to inspire… even the boards imagined by Hergé!
Napoleon Bonaparte in the Garden
In Saint Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte led a new campaign less military and more about gardening. In 1819, the surroundings of the house of Longwood were enriched with gardens designed and implemented by the Emperor himself. Did the memories of Joséphine's horticultural talents help the Corsican general to win this battle? No doubt, but with less grace than the famous French elegant...
Longwood Gardens in Saint Helena
After five years of exile, the daily rhythm of Napoleon Bonaparte and his little court has slowed down and no longer has the imperial rigor of its beginnings. However…
We are at work from 5 am, and you would laugh heartily to see the Emperor spade in hand.
wrote Count Charles-Tristan de Montholon (1783 – 1853) in 1819.
Because at the beginning of the year, Napoleon resolved to follow (for once) a prescription from his doctors who recommended that he exercise. He could have been content with a daily walk but this kind of activity certainly lacks ambition. Redesign the gardens of his Longwood home, that has more scope! Never in doing things by half, the Corsican therefore undertakes a new gardening career. Two French gardens had already been designed when he arrived in 1815. But in 1819, Napoleon directed himself and with a rod of iron important works of which he drew the plans. And as in the past in the campaigns, he shared the daily life of his soldiers, he was the first to seize a spade or a rake, giving his companions in exile the example of work.
First of all, the new arrangements are intended to provide some shade in the gardens where Napoleon likes to lunch and entertain. A little shade and some plant ramparts against the trade winds soon enabled him to enjoy the outdoors more and to soften his exile. The Count de Montholon, again, testifies in February 1819:
In a few days, he thus succeeded in making us erect, in tufts of bad grass, two circular walls, eleven to twelve feet in height and a diameter of ten toises, as an extension of his bedroom and the library. Sir Hudson Lowe saw there at first only shelter from the wind, and did not object. […] This work done, the Emperor bought twenty-four large trees. He had them dug up with a clod of earth of a cubic height. The artillery agreed to have them transported to Longwood with the help of several hundred Chinese. The Emperor himself directed their plantation in the aisle after the library. […] The garden of the library was enclosed at the height of the steps of the topographical cabinet, or billiard table, as one will call it, by a semi-circular construction in tuff of grass and with steps; each row of steps was planted with rosebushes. […] A semblance of a basin with a water jet [was] formed in the center of this garden by an enormous tank twelve feet in diameter and three feet deep, and into which the water was brought by means of lead pipe. All these works cost the Emperor a lot of money, but they contributed to prolong his sad existence by diverting him, for a few moments, from his painful situation.
Naturally, work of such magnitude carried out wholeheartedly was not brought down by the sole will of Bonaparte and the joint efforts of his small court. To help the former general, it was necessary to call on cheap but burdensome workers, which was surprisingly in large numbers on Saint Helena. A large Chinese community indeed occupied the island, regularly augmented by new Confucianist colonists who landed in the harbor of Jamestown after having conveniently borrowed the ships of the East India Company from Canton or Shanghai.
In Longwood, as soon as Bonaparte arrives, several Chinese provided discreet and regular help in the smooth running of the house. Their role will be more and more important and without them, the gardens of Napoleon would probably not have emerged so quickly. Not to mention the small Chinese pavilion that was built and installed on the Longwood property!
The understanding between these obstinate workers and the irascible Bonaparte was not always set fair (who has ever been able to claim a good and permanent understanding with the Emperor?) But undoubtedly a mutual respect was established. This Frenchman, unknown to the Chinese of the time, whom they were assured that he had once ruled the world must, in the garden, clash with the idea that nationals of the Middle Kingdom had of an emperor … Napoleon, in a nanking jacket and trousers, wearing a large straw hat, one day aroused an irrepressible laugh among the workers, so much so that Bonaparte, understanding that they were laughing at his clothes, did not take offense, on the contrary . Speaking to his doctor François Antommarchi (1780 – 1838):
This is my costume! It is indeed quite pleasant. But they must not be burnt by the heat while laughing; I want each of them to also have their little straw hat, it’s a little gift that I give them.
The image that Napoleon Bonaparte awakened in the garden was not only astonishing to Eastern eyes. It joined the intellectual and philosophical sphere in European political discussions. Was it all that he had to exile at the ends of the earth, on an inhospitable island, so that this general, elevated to the rank of emperor, was no longer a threat to the European powers? Now that he was watched night and day, that ships permanently guarded Saint Helena in fear of a flight as sudden as dazzling, now Napoleon Bonaparte became a gardener!
Avid reader of Rousseau in his youth, Bonaparte gave his contemporaries the image of a happy and peaceful reconciliation with ideal nature. This general whom his enemies claimed to be bloodthirsty, could be seen immortalized leaning on a spade, wearing a humble straw hat instead of his legendary cocked hat. The Emperor’s aura was further enriched by it. To the image of a martyr was added that of a great man who, withdrawn from the highest positions of power, easily found the simplicity of “growing his garden”. The effect was striking in Europe, although the reality off Africa was quite different…
This retreat from the world, in a garden – which we then imagined to be almost original – dug a deep ditch with that which had lastingly marked the spirits of the Empire, the garden of Joséphine at Malmaison. Because if the latter was intended as the reconstitution of a luxuriant and exotic nature, it was also an emblem of the rarity and the luxury which opposed it in every way to that of Napoleon on Saint Helena.
Joséphine and the gardens of Malmaison
Probably the nostalgic memories of her Creole childhood led Josephine to develop a sincere interest in botany. His passion for flowers and plants gradually transformed the Malmaison garden into a garden as ideal as it was experimental, a unique and spectacular experience which allowed more than 200 plants to flower for the first time in France. These varieties, true rarities delicately scented and colored, were at the time an ephemeral luxury requiring a care as meticulous as expensive.
Joséphine’s passion for roses is undoubtedly the best known since the Empress achieved the feat of bringing together between 500 and 600 species, both varieties cultivated in beds and other horticultural, distant and fragile, from central Asia, Europe or America and kept in a heated greenhouse.
This immense greenhouse, destroyed in 1827, was the largest of its time. 50 meters long, it was heated by charcoal stoves and could shelter shrubs 5 meters high. Inside, André Thouin (1747 – 1824), then principal gardener of the National Museum of Natural History, was in charge of the species brought back by botanical explorers, themselves sponsored by Joséphine. The collection was incomparable: dahlia, tree peony, hibiscus and camellia flourished for the first time in France among hundreds of other exotic species.
In a letter addressed to Antoine-Claire Thibaudeau (1765 – 1854) in thanks for a “magnificent collection” of seeds that he had sent her, Joséphine de Beauharnais confided to the prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône:
It is an inexpressible joy for me to see the proliferation of foreign plants in my gardens. I want Malmaison to soon offer a model of good culture and to become a source of wealth for the departments. It is in this view that I have raised there an innumerable quantity of trees and shrubs of the southern lands and of North America. I want each department ten years from now to have a collection of valuable plants from my nurseries.
The gardens of Malmaison were for Joséphine an immense pride and, as noted by Madame de Chastenay (1771 – 1855), “botany owes her in part the extension which she acquired around this time in France. Josephine, who was perfectly aware of it, never failed to remind Tout-Paris. Evidenced by this luxurious herbarium composed of superb watercolors by the painter Pierre-Joseph Redouté and descriptions by the botanist Étienne-Pierre Ventenat. Entitled Malmaison Garden, it is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful flower books ever produced, only 200 copies printed and only offered to Joséphine’s prestigious visitors.
In the foreword Ventenat, addressing the Empress directly, stressed that she had realized “the sweetest memory of the conquests of[son] illustrious husband ”.
In fifteen years, the gardens of Malmaison were not enriched by only hundreds of plant species but also gained in space until reaching an area of 726 hectares. In addition to the greenhouse, an orangery designed by architects Percier and Fontaine in 1800 housed the orange trees in winter that made up the two rows bordering the main avenue of the castle.
Modeling the gardens and its arrangements according to her tastes and desires, Joséphine finally gave way to the vogue for the English garden, the composition of which she entrusted to Louis-Martin Berthault (1770 – 1823), a landscape architect. He designed a park that he punctuated with factories, of which a Temple of Love and a basin surmounted by a statue of Neptune are among the most beautiful. He cleared a bed to install a winding river and a small navigable lake.
The whole reached heights of beauty and elegance in which one detects, as inside the Malmaison, the imperious need of the hostess to accumulate beautiful things.
In 1819, almost five years had passed since Josephine’s death. In Saint Helena, the gardens that Napoleon undertook are surely imbued with the memory of those of Malmaison. But when one was ruled by botany and rarities, the other seemed only to work at recapturing the peaceful memory of a distant stillness. His companions at the time affirm it, Bonaparte spent in his gardens of Saint Helena some of the most pleasant moments of his exile.
Napoleon Bonaparte and the Louvre
The Louvre that we know today owes a lot to Napoleon. More for its arrangements than for works looted from foreign nations during negotiations conducted under the Directory and the Empire. Contrary to what one might think, Napoleon Bonaparte was not the inventor of this new way of enriching the victorious country.
The Louvre Museum: An Old Project
Louis XIV abandoning the city palace for the pleasant attire of the near Parisian suburbs, the Louvre became from the second half of the 17th century a huge space of possibilities. It is first and foremost a repository for works of art belonging to the crown and accommodates the king’s artists in several apartments and workshops. Then regularly in the eighteenth century, the idea returns to make this palace a real museum. Diderot in the Encyclopédie makes a display of his talents as an interior designer:
We would like, for example, that all the ground floors of this building were cleaned and restored to porticoes. They would serve these porticos, to store the most beautiful statues of the kingdom, to collect these kinds of precious works, scattered in the gardens where one does not walk any more, & where the air, the weather & the seasons, lose them & the ruin. In the part located to the south, one could place all the king’s paintings, which are presently piled up & confused together in storage units where no one enjoys them. We would put the gallery of plans to the north, if there were no obstacles there. We also transported to other places of this palace, the cabinets of Natural History, and that of the medals.
In the 18th century, the Museum project really took shape and the Louvre hosted the Salon in 1725, which became biennial in 1751. We know the Salon obtuse because it only presents in its beginnings the paintings of the members of the Academy of Painting; however, it will eventually gain in flexibility in the 19th century. The Revolution suspended the progress of the project before the revolutionaries seized it, transforming the Louvre into the Central Museum of the Arts of the Republic. The funds of the new institution are generously supplied by the Crown artworks as well as those confiscated from the clergy and emigrants.
Freed in the blood of the monarchy and its tyrannical power, France now claims to be the pure and marmoreal generation of ancient and democratic regimes. Argument largely sufficient in its Republican eyes to consider itself legitimate to monopolize the masterpieces of Antiquity and the High Renaissance. The machine is launched and the orchestrated and systematic looting of neighboring countries at war against the Nation is initiated by a clever novelty: the war indemnities of the vanquished are now largely paid in the form of works of art. The Directory (1795 – 1799) does not deny this heritage and even encourages this cunning practice.
In 1796, written orders from the Directory encourage the young General Bonaparte not to skimp on spoliations:
The Executive Directory is convinced that you will regard the glory of the Fine Arts as attached to that of the Army which you command. Italy owes them much of its wealth and fame: but the time has come when their reign must pass in France to strengthen and embellish that of Liberty.
And it goes without saying that Bonaparte is doing it. It will even push the legitimization of these spoliations (modestly designated as “confiscations”) by treaties signed with the vanquished. And if “Napoleon flies like thunderbolt and strikes like lightning”, the cities in the process of being bled dry also feel his arrival. Thus in Florence in October 1800, everyone knows the Napoleonic troops approaching, which is why people are busy at the Uffizi. The director Tommaso Puccini (1749 – 1811) organizes the flight of the most famous artworks of Tuscany. The ones he can save anyway. Because Tommaso knows the gargantuan spoliations carried out in Venice and Rome. He also knows that once they reach Paris, the works will perhaps be presented on floats parading as on July 27th and 28th, 1798. The most beautiful treasures of Italy as prisoners of war before joining the Louvre and the gazettes titling:
Greece ceded them, Rome lost them. Their fate changed twice, it will not change.
These Dantesque visions give Tommaso the energy of despair and the director of the Offices to redouble his efforts. Carefully packaged in 75 cases, the artworks are loaded onto boats moored on the banks of the Arno; one of the most extraordinary convoys in history goes discreetly to Livorno where a British frigate awaits it. Once loaded, the ship sets sail for Sicily, protecting some of the greatest Italian masterpieces from Napoleonic appetites. Yet the Venus Medici discreetly installed in Palermo was finally summoned – under diplomatic pressure – to join Paris in 1803. It did not find Florence again until 1815. The looting was so traumatic in Italy that it gave birth to a proverb:
Non tutti i francesi sono ladri, ma Buonaparte sì.
(All the French are not thieves but a good part (Buonaparte – Bonaparte), yes.)
The Napoleon Museum
Once brought to power, Napoleon made the Musée central des arts de la République into the Musée Napoléon. A more concise name – and a little more narcissistic too – for a collection which has grown handsomely in a few years. The ambition to make the Louvre a universal museum borrows as much from the Enlightenment as from Bonaparte’s ambition to make Paris a new Rome. Fashion has been antique since the second half of the 18th century. The Revolution and the establishment of the Republic reinforced this feeling. The Empire wants to be like the consecration of this idealized impulse towards a rediscovered political and aesthetic purity.
However, we do not know anything about Napoleon Bonaparte’s training in the arts. No doubt he was initiated in Brienne, no doubt he read a lot on the subject , as was his habit. Did he have a penchant for the arts or simply a perfect awareness of their capital importance in establishing political and dynastic legitimacy? Again, we ignore it. Far too busy in negotiations, he was not one of those who selected the masterpieces to be moved. To help him, he was accompanied by specialized commissions formed by intellectuals and specialists in the history of art who identified, selected and located the works that were to leave for Paris. All these spoliations were perfectly organized and on an unprecedented scale.
Italy is not the only one to suffer from this looting. Prussia, Austria, Egypt, Spain and Belgium were combed through. Egyptian cargoes have an unexpected fate, confiscated by the English who transport them to London. Today, several of these antique artworks are still visible in the British Museum; including the famous Rosetta Stone.
The Napoleon Museum is thus the new setting for artworks, each more extraordinary than the last. Among them, works of painting by Correggio, Mantegna, Raphael, Lorenzo Lotto, Memling, van Eyck, Guercino, Carrache, Reni, Perugino, Botticelli or Vinci. Sculptures flock at the same rate : the Apollo of the Belvedere, the Laocoon group, the Boy with Thorn or the horses of Saint Mark’s Basilica. However, all these spoliations do not find refuge in the Louvre. Many of them are redirected towards provincial museums.
At the same time, the Louvre was redesigned for different reasons. His physiognomy changes to the one we know today. Artists formerly housed in the palace are expelled. The architects Charles Percier (1764 – 1838) and Pierre Fontaine (1762 – 1853) erected a wing along the rue de Rivoli and part of the Louvre was maintained as a palatial residence (for prestigious guests in particular) and several of its spaces (the Salon carré, the Galerie d’Apollon and the Grande Galerie) are used for ceremonies.
Artworks are exhibited in the waterfront gallery – on the Seine side – then Pierre Fontaine rearranged Anne of Austria’s winter apartments and extended this part of the museum between 1806 and 1817 in the south wing of the Square courtyard. From 1812, the room of the Caryatides accommodates the Borghese collection.
Regularly and despite the arrangements, people complain about the lack of light to fully appreciate the collections. Zenith openings are pierced, mirrors are added to reflect the light, but you still have to choose your hours to visit and appreciate the treasures of the Napoleon Museum. Anyone can access it. The museum is open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays, but foreign visitors can enter it on other days of the week by simply showing their passport. The English do not fail to do so following the Peace of Amiens and – if Europe is offended and scandalized by the spoliations carried out by the French – it is clear that the ambition of a universal museum makes the Louvre during the reign of Napoleon I, the most beautiful museum in the world.
Pascal Torres, curator in the Graphic Arts department of the current Louvre museum readily admits:
The Napoleon Museum, at the fall of the Empire, had become the largest museum in the universe, which no museum will ever be able to match in human history, not even the Louvre today.
But as the saying goes, ill-gotten gains never prosper. And the dream once embodied of making the Napoleon museum the largest museum in the world collapsed at the same time as the Empire. After Waterloo in June 1815, there was no longer any question for France of keeping the wealth that it had stolen for nearly 20 long years. The owners rightly demand the return of their precious treasures. In July 1815, diplomats and politicians from different countries engaged against France were in Paris to organize the return of national artworks.
The Paradox of Restitution
Numerous correspondence testifies to the fascination that the Napoleon Museum arouses in all visitors, such as this Englishman who affirms that “the mere visit of this museum rewards you for a trip to Paris. Because everyone admits it, it is convenient and pleasant to be able to admire in one placeso many masterpieces and that without being rushed by a guide as is the case in most European galleries.
Guillaume de Humboldt (1767 – 1835) is not the last to let it be known. This former Prussian Ambassador in Rome was sent to Paris in July 1815 to organize the repatriation of Prussian artworks; he is full of praise for the museum. To his wife he wrote:
I have already written to you, I believe, that every day as much as possible I go to the museum. Until now, I have only taken care of the statues. There is really a lot that I had never seen, especially coming from Villa Albani.
Or :
It is endless pleasure and my only pleasure so to speak here.
Better! The diplomat entangled in heated negotiations with the French – let us not forget that Dominique Vivant-Denon (1747 – 1825), director of the Napoleon Museum, then fought tooth and nail to keep as many foreign artworks as possible in this museum which he loved so much – the Prussian diplomat, whose mission is to repatriate Prussian artworks, tells his wife that at the same time he is pacing up and down the galleries of the museum, “there is a room here which is being prepared for the Pallas de Velletri and it is the most beautiful room in the museum.” What an irony! One of those who must empty the museum of part of its collections admires the Louvre in the making!
There is absolutely no doubt about the admiration and aesthetic emotion that the Musée Napoléon aroused in visitors until 1815. The gathering of so many masterpieces moves and transports absolutely all those who bear witness to them. The model of this museum is beautiful, it is obvious. But the price to pay to achieve this is decidedly too high.
If bringing together such a collection in Paris requires depriving so many other places of their arts, then it is better to give up this pharaonic project. In 1815, the most recurring arguments advanced that Italians and Germans love art so much that depriving them of it would be criminal. Conversely, the French are criticized for having no sensitivity in this area – proof of this is that we do not see any, it is claimed, visiting the museum and that they only like to own what all Europe agrees to consider exceptional. Nothing is spared to these arrogant French people who are more satisfied with the vanity they derive from their museum than with the beauty they should be moved by. Severe criticism relayed everywhere.
Yet this centralization of so many European masterpieces in the same place, unique in history, suddenly upsets the awareness that countries have of their own heritage. The European countries looted by the French repatriate their cherished artworks and ask themselves: should we return to their exact location the artworks that disappeared for a time? Should we not try, as at the Louvre, to centralize the most beautiful pieces in a few large cities of the country so that the greatest number can see them?
This spectacular impression of universalism which was the golden age of the Louvre so marked the spirits that it inaugurated a new way of preserving, exhibiting and admiring the arts in the various European countries. Little by little, the idea of large museums with a universalist ideal grows and opens the way to the creation of those we know today. If the Napoleon Museum is in no way the instigator of this ancient craze for the collection of works of art, it was spectacular and traumatic enough for the stolen countries to put the enhancement and protection of their heritage at the center of their cultural concerns.
We who have missed – for nearly 200 years – this unique experience in Paris, we still have the chance today to be able to visit with delight the incredible collections of the Louvre , recognized by all as one of the most beautiful museums in the world. An inestimable luxury that no one should deprive themselves of.
The Bicentenary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte
The bicentenary year of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte has not yet been inaugurated as the controversy is already raging. What do we reproach the Emperor Napoleon I? Between black and golden legend, Bonaparte is a complex character, a historical object that it would be wrong to judge in the light of the present.
Are we aware of the influence Napoleon exerted on french lives on a daily basis? The Civil Code is undoubtedly the most immediate example, but the baccalaureate, the Legion of Honor and the Louvre as we know it today are Napoleonic works. The glory that this famous French figure – during his lifetime – on a world scale was so great that we still find it difficult to imagine it. It is undoubtedly this glory which is worth moreover to Napoleon so many criticisms: close enough to us and documented so that we can dare the comparison with our contemporary time but sufficiently distant so that it is tempting not to see anything other than the aura of the man who created his own myth. Napoleon Bonaparte did not have the glorious comforts of ancient heroes.
Napoleon Bonaparte and the restoration of slavery
The rise of Bonaparte is not the work of a single man. Neither did his rise to power. The coup d’état of 18 Brumaire Year VIII (November, 9th 1799) drew on the finances of businessmen as well-off as they were worried about the country’s political instability. Their support does not know philanthropy and naturally implies that they gain a voice in the decisions that will be taken subsequently. Once Napoleon Bonaparte appointed First Consul (20 Brumaire), requests for the reestablishment of slavery abolished in 1794 in the French colonies became regular and insistent. Until 1802, Bonaparte did not give in:
We must not take freedom from the men to whom we have given it.
Alas, he will end up going back on his words. Following the peace of Amiens in March 1802, France recovers its colonies of Martinique, Tobago and Saint Lucia. However, the abolitionist law of 1794 had not been applied either in Reunion – which had hampered its application – or in Martinique where a royalist insurrection had led to an agreement of submission to the English royalty before the latter conquered the island. .
The law of May 20th, 1802 concerns the territories which had not applied the abolitionist law of 1794. Thus, the territories recovered during the peace of Amiens were in theory not concerned by this law. Nevertheless, slavery was reestablished in Guadeloupe by a decree of July 16th, 1802 – the original of which, discovered in 2007 at the French National Archives, was presented on the occasion of an exhibition commemorating the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon I in 2021. The presentation of this document to the public for the first time is an important position taken to refine an often distorted or poorly understood dimension of Bonaparte’s reign and its consequences on human rights throughout the 19th century. In Guyana, slavery was reestablished in April 1803. General François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743 – 1803), will participate in the independence of part of Santo Domingo which will become Haiti on January 1st, 1804.
The massacres perpetrated by French troops on black insurgents in Guadeloupe and Martinique to regain control are among the bloodiest acts of Bonaparte’s reign. Let us add that the abolition of slavery in France will have to wait until 1848 before being final. The beginnings of the reign of the future emperor thus make France the only country to have re-established slavery. A French cultural exception whose history would have gone well.
Napoleon Bonaparte, the misogynist?
The Ancien Régime aristocracy – the highest in particular – stood out in the 18th century as one of the few circles in which misogyny had little or no influence. The revolutionaries held it against them and the accusations wept. The reproaches were all found and the aristocrats to have effeminated, to have become weak as one imagined then the natural inclination of the women. Revolution in opposition to the Ancien Régime therefore wanted to be virile. Bonaparte, like all the men of his time, had no other idea of the masculine ideal: solid, strong and determined, adjectives deliberately removed from the feminine sphere too superficial and fragile to interfere with serious subjects. The exuberances of Les Merveilleuses at the end of the 18th century sound the death knell for a feminine presence accepted and admired outside the domestic space, a last jolt before a 19th century of feminism that appalling in the eyes of our young 21st century.
Once the Directory and even more the Empire were established, the nineteenth century pushed revolutionary virility further by drawing fairly firmly into male and female genders which, even at the beginning of the twentieth century, we had all the trouble in the world to get rid of.
The Civil Code, a famous work of the Napoleonic reign, then stands out in our eyes as the assumed and satisfied contemptor with the condition of women and contemporary opprobrium. And for good reason, the text does not have a feminist soul. Yet it would be perfectly anachronistic to imagine that the man of the beginning of the 19th century allowed Bonaparte to impose an idea of woman. Misogyny is neither pervasive nor new.
If a few very rare feminists made their voices heard during the French Revolution, it is perfectly unthinkable to imagine giving a woman the responsibilities of a politician. In this sense, Napoleon Bonaparte is no more misogynistic than his male contemporaries (but is undoubtedly more so than his female contemporaries). In drawing up the Civil Code, Bonaparte kept in mind his primary concern: to protect the family unit, the model of which was necessarily patriarchal. A delicious irony when you know the central and authoritarian place of Letizia (1750 – 1836) in the clan of the famous Corsican.
Man must therefore be at the center of the family, he is its central pillar. He is required to be respected and to protect women and children. The failings of the head of the family are legally reprehensible, but those of women are even more so. The Civil Code confines the woman in the place of a minor individual placed under the tutelage of her husband: “The husband owes protection to his wife, the woman obedience to her husband. The woman is considered “weak and dependent”, like a child. This is why the rights of women, if they are considered sacred, cannot be entrusted to her because her very nature does not allow a woman to exercise them reasonably. Jacques de Maleville (1741-1824), one of the drafters of the Civil Code, likes to remind women of the “feeling of their inferiority” and “the submission they owe to the man who will become the arbiter of their destiny. However, sad reassurance, a man cannot divorce a woman over the age of 45. A precaution that stems from the duties of the husband who are required to ensure the protection of his wife. There is no question therefore of abandoning the latter if by chance the desire took you to find the titillating sensations of youth.
Once again, let us note the irony which forces Napoleon I to circumvent his own law to marry Marie-Louise of Austria (1791 – 1847). The protection of children is also a concern which is important to Bonaparte and we have always inherited many of its provisions today.
For a man who judged the break-up of the family unit as a disorder harmful to the good running of society, his private life was the perfect counterexample, a total fiasco which is surprising and which reveals a large part of the ambivalence of the Napoleonic myth.
Married to a widow mother of two, he finally manages to divorce while Joséphine is 46 years old. His second wife Marie-Louise gave him a son who barely knew his father and who was left with terrible loneliness until his death at the age of 21. Two other children of Napoleon will live without ever being recognized by their father, then Bonaparte will die in Saint Helena, alone and without any member of his family by his side. The break-up of the family unit he feared so much could not be more complete.
So the Civil Code is, without doubt, severe with the female condition; but it is not an ideology personal to Napoleon Bonaparte. Because the fall of the Emperor does not announce improvements for women whose lower status is maintained under the Restoration.
Of course, some female voices contemporary with the Napoleonic work speak out against such considerations, but they are rare and require a certain social status to be heard. The rare women journalists, those “blue stocking” that men despise, try to make themselves heard in a journalistic and literary world entirely in the hands of men. The task is difficult and painful to say the least. Only the figure full of panache and the dazzling fame of Madame de Staël (1766 – 1817) is offended openly about what is inflicted on women. Her character and intelligence dissuaded even Napoleon from replying, he who said of her:
I have four enemies, Prussia, Russia, England and Madame de Staël.
May 5th, 2021 inaugurates the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, who died in Saint Helena on May 5th, 1821. If criticism is raised everywhere as to the celebration or not of the death of this character and the commemoration of his influence in the history of France, divisive opinions still carry the debate to the confines of an absurdity which sometimes comes under artistic performance.
To commemorate does not mean blindly praising or shooting on sight. The virtue of the debates between historians and specialists in Napoleonic history with argued, documented and posed speeches are undoubtedly the best answers to bring in this year of commemoration. Everyone should be able to form an informed opinion on the historical reality of Napoleon Bonaparte, his reign and his influence still today in our lives. The numerous debates, works and exhibitions planned for this occasion will be the occasion, we hope, to initiate a true reflection on this character whose myth sometimes crushes the necessary nuance.
The Napoleonic soldiers: a badly shod army
"Speed, speed, speed". These words of Napoleon Bonaparte could succinctly summarize the essence of his strategic genius. The Napoleonic army moved twice as fast as its adversaries. An asset as much as a feat, both supported by an accessory showing itself (almost) always failing: the soldiers' shoes.
Doubtless no campaign was exhausting like the Napoleonic campaigns. That a good physical condition is essential to make a good soldier, no one will doubt it, but more than for any other, the conscripts of the Napoleonic wars had to have an iron health. Probably, no one imagined the harshness and endurance required that soldiers would have to display to face the forced marches on often bad and chaotic terrain.
Conscription then concerned young people aged 20 to 25, in good health naturally. Drawn by lot, the conscripts designated by Fortune – whose good intentions can legitimately be questioned – had to be trained quickly to integrate regiments made up of young and old experienced soldiers. At the cost of intensive and severe military training, it took three months of service to make a recruit into an effective infantryman. However, the very first teaching provided often consisted in differentiating his right foot from his left foot, a rudimentary exercise but essential for the good soldier to walk correctly in step. For these young people, mostly uneducated and more versed in the art of working the land than moving around it in an orderly and synchronous manner, the instructors found a trick that put at the center of the future soldier’s life an accessory that would focus their attention steadily until they return, perhaps one day, to civilian life: the shoes. In the left shoe (or the hoof for those who were not yet perfectly equipped) we placed straw while the right shoe was stuffed with hay. Thus, the soldier went at a walk without being mistaken at the chanted cry of his superior “Straw – Hay!” Straw – Hay! “. The attested anecdote has something to smile about if the problem of shoes in the Napoleonic armies had not become a permanent concern for the General Staff.
The Napoleonic marches
The Napoleonic campaigns to be dazzling must be led by enduring soldiers, without injury and therefore well equipped. Because the steps are terribly long. Linking one city to another, one battlefield to another, often involves traveling tens of kilometers a day in a very short time at a sustained pace. The feat of the troops of General Friant (1758 – 1829) compelled admiration in this sense when his troops rallied the battlefield of Austerlitz by covering more than one hundred kilometers in 44 hours. On average, the troops traveled 50 kilometers daily in often difficult conditions (terrain, climate). We therefore understand the capital importance for soldiers to be well shod.
The shoes distributed by the Army were made of turned cowhide and weighed 611 grams (only, one might add). They were of three sizes ranging from small (between 20 and 23 cm) to large (over 27 cm) through a medium size (between 23 and 27 cm). The last sole was in tanned cowhide leather then reinforced with shoemaker’s nails: there were between 36 and 40 depending on the size. The soldier tied them firmly with a leather lace passing through two holes without eyelets; wear was to come to an end very quickly. Like almost all shoes from this era, the toe was square. A peculiarity all the same specific to the military shoe: there was neither right nor left foot. The two perfectly identical shoes were shaped by the foot of their wearer according to the grueling steps he took. Thus, each new recruit was given a uniform, a weapon and of course a pair of shoes normally designed to travel a thousand kilometers.
But the latter were worn out so quickly that numerous testimonies report that at the end of the fighting, the soldiers hastened to remove the shoes of the dead when they did not make their own shoes with the means at hand. During the Spanish Civil War, spare shoes did not arrive, the soldiers became shoemakers in addition to their usual duties. In his Briefs , David Victor Belly de Bussy (1768 – 1848) reports that men made boots for themselves by rolling cowhide around each leg and foot, taking care to leave the animal’s hair out.
Thus, despite the importance that Napoleon Bonaparte always attached to the good equipment of his troops, the stewardship took under the Empire such an extent that the financiers struggling to win military contracts had no qualms about providing poor quality equipment. for the bulk of the troops. Not to mention the problems associated with supplies, soldiers’ shoes were a constant concern and a recurring subject in Napoleon’s correspondence.
The unscrupulous suppliers of the Napoleonic army
The contracts signed with the army were juicy for those who had the means to pay the advances and to come to an understanding in unofficial politics. Corruption and the friendships of a close circle of power were absolutely necessary for anyone aspiring to do business.
For the Italian campaign, it was the Coulon brothers, friends of Bourienne (1769 – 1834) who won the market for soldiers’ shoes, but their bankruptcy put an end to this contract. Before the Battle of Marengo, a treaty was signed with Étienne Perrier and his counterpart Louis Cerf, both shoemaker and bootmaker. These two Parisian artisans were responsible for supplying Hungarian-style shoes and boots to the Army corps. But it was undoubtedly Arman-Jean-François Seguin (1767 – 1835) who won the biggest contract. This chemist had succeeded in developing a rapid tanning process that required only three weeks instead of the traditional six months. Naturally, this innovation attracted the attention of the State, which granted Seguin the market for “all the tanned, wrought and honed leathers necessary for the footwear and the equipment of all the troops on foot and on horseback” for a duration of 9 years from year VI (1796).
These markets with insubstantial economic benefits were not, however, inspected as one might expect from a state order. The financiers therefore made a point of reducing the quality of the products in order to make more profit. The case of the cardboard shoes seems to start off as a joke, but it is not.
For the Russian campaign, the soldiers of the Grand Army were given faux leather shoes with cardboard soles. What would have been an annoyance in Spain turned into a frozen nightmare in Eastern Europe. Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard (1770 – 1846) one of the most important financiers of the time – a character that Bonaparte did not like but needed – was suspected of being at the origin of this dishonest and contemptuous delivery. It seems that no proof can yet formally attest to this.
Napoleon Bonaparte's boots
The soldiers were thus the worst shod. But the higher we rose in the military hierarchy, the more we favored the comfort of our feet (among other things). The highest ranks were gaiters and boots, although the quality was not always there. If necessary, the emoluments however made it possible to afford a pair made of good leather.
Napoleon I never distinguished himself on the battlefields or during the campaigns by an inappropriate luxury and naturally his taste went to simplicity. He always favored quality although he was often negligent. His shoemaker Jacques, installed rue Montmartre in Paris, said that Napoleon had the nasty habit of stoking the fire in the bivouacs with the tip of his boot, thus wearing out many pairs which, without this wicked treatment, would have lasted a long time. Bonaparte attached himself a model of high boots to the rider – supple boots with cuffs – in black morocco which he ordered in numerous copies. He wore a current size 40 and paid them 80 francs, which is 20 francs more than the famous black beaver hat (link). A tidy sum for the commoner, but almost too low for an Emperor whose taste for simple things must be recognized – at least.
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Napoleon Bonaparte, Chess Player
A strategic game par excellence, an elegant symbol of the art of war, chess has been the king of games and the game of kings since the Middle Ages. Napoleon Bonaparte could not remain indifferent to it without, however, and it is surprising, never becoming a brilliant player!
Napoleon, a Bad Sport
If Napoleon Bonaparte often arouses blissful enthusiasm or blind hatred, no one seems to question his strategic genius. Of course, such a talent would seem to find in the peaceful and regular practice of the game of chess the exaltation of this remarkable strategic mind. However, it is not. Napoleon certainly learned the rules of chess when he was a pupil at Brienne; this game was indeed one of the many qualities that good society deemed necessary for a young man. While settling in Paris, the “petit lieutenant” comes to practice “pushing wood” at the Café de la Rotonde or at the very popular Café de la Régence, haunt of the best chess players since the middle of the Eighteenth century.
The revolutionary period, tasting little of the central role accorded to the King’s play, had kept chess in the shade for a few years, reworking its form without changing its substance so that the game espoused the republican cause. But the craze – never extinguished – for the traditional form soon returned and Napoleon was not indifferent to it. Until the young lieutenant had yet dazzled France with the meteoric Italian campaign, no one pay interest to its play on the chessboard. Nonetheless, had he shown the extent of his military genius on Italian soil, it was imagined that he was just as formidable leaning on a gaming table. He was not.
First, let us note that the conception of chess at the turn of the 18th century was very different from today. The strategic theory and the preparation of the attacks were almost nil and the direction of positioning hardly considered. One wanted to shine on the chessboard with the same brilliance as the final assault of a Homeric battle. The games were aggressive and the attacks started quickly without hesitating to sacrifice pieces and pawns for a spectacular checkmate. Nevertheless, circles of amateurs and champions gradually took shape, treaties multiplied and strategy developed. François-André Danican Philidor, nicknamed “the Great” (1726 – 1795), undoubtedly the best player of his time, was also the first to shake up the intuitive and imaginative vision of chess by writing one of the very first treatises on the game.
Probably Napoleon’s way of playing was borrowed from the old and the new manner. But where the future First Consul shone and knew how to use his talent, he lost his advantage on the chessboard. Indeed, on each side of the board, the opponents face the same field and are in possession of the same squad information. In this case, it was impossible for Bonaparte to take advantage of the natural terrain, impossible to bluff on the number of soldiers per contingent. On the chessboard, the two opponents are on equal ground; the strategy and the inventiveness to be deployed are not the same as in real war. Journalist and writer Jean-Claude Kauffmann sums up the game attributed to Napoleon:
The strategist of Austerlitz and Friedland who considered the battlefield a chessboard was a poor chess player. He naively rushed at the opponent and was easily captured, which did not prevent him from brazenly cheating.
Bonaparte was cheating. It’s a well-known fact and not just in chess! We know his impatient and sometimes (often?) difficult character, it is quite easy to imagine him as a bad player. Perhaps he would have been better – at chess anyway – if he had had the opportunity to study the game better. This great reader might not have had the opportunity to look at the treatises newly published. All his life he loved this game without being a top player.
In Egypt, he played with the Comptroller of Army Expenses Jean-Baptiste-Etienne Poussielgue (1764 – 1845) and with Amédée Jaubert (1779 – 1847), member of the Commission for Science and the Arts and translator. In Poland, it was with Murat (1767 – 1815), Bourrienne (1769 – 1834), Berthier (1753 – 1815) or the Duke of Bassano (1763 – 1839) that he played chess. Like a close friend, Bourrienne testifies with sincerity to Bonaparte’s game while Hugues-Bernard Maret, Duke of Bassano goes there with a touch of flattery:
Bonaparte also played chess, but very rarely, and this because he was only a third force and he did not like to be beaten at this game. He liked to play with me because, although a little stronger than him, I was not strong enough to win him always. As soon as a game was his he would quit the game to rest on his laurels.
Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Mémoires
The Emperor did not skillfully start a game of chess. From the start, he often lost pieces and pawns, disadvantages his opponents dared not take advantage of. It wasn’t until the middle of the game that the right inspiration came. The melee of the pieces illuminated his intelligence, he saw beyond three to four moves and implemented beautiful and learned combinations.
Hugues-Bernard Maret, Duke of Bassano
Probably the Duke will have seen the Emperor’s game on a good day … Unless he was dazzled by the pomp more than the game! Because Napoleon Bonaparte was not the type, one would have suspected, to easily accept defeat. In addition, he was impatient, stamped his foot or drummed on the table when he judged his opponent too slow, which did not fail to disturb the arrangement of the pieces on the board … Whether his opponent was human or mechanical, his attitude was the same. A certainty acquired during this famous episode that we never tire of telling.
In July 1809 at Schönbrün Palace in Vienna, a historic chess game was about to take place. Setting up the chessboard and one of the two opponents is laborious; and for good reason: it is about installing an automaton. Imagined and manufactured by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734 – 1804), this mechanical “Turk” has already played games with some of the world’s greats, including Catherine the Great (1729 – 1796) or even Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790) while the automaton was at the Café de la Régence in Paris in 1783.
In 1809 however, the learned machine no longer belonged to the baron but to Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (1772 – 1838) but still aroused enthusiasm (as well as suspicion, a very natural feeling which would later be legitimized). Napoleon Bonaparte accepts the confrontation with the automaton. The game was chaotic because the automaton seemed perfectly capable of recognizing a cheater when it saw one! So the Turk would put a pawn or a piece in its place as soon as his opponent tried to cheat. A nasty twist that Bonaparte had no qualms about facing the machine. But, the annoyed automaton systematically swept the chessboard with his arm after three fraudulent attempts which, of course, did not fail to happen with the Emperor. The Mechanical Turk thus defeated Napoleon I by disqualification.
In 1834, the deception was exposed. The automaton was endowed with no mechanical intelligence. A set of mirrors and articulated arms allowed a small player to crawl under the automaton and the board and play brilliantly against all the prestigious opponents he faced. Either way, it must nevertheless be recognized that this (or these?) player, as anonymous as he was, was one of the best chess players of the time!
Napoleon at Saint Helena
In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to Saint Helena, an island as remote from Europe as the temper of the fallen Emperor. Bonaparte’s unrestrained and permanent activity contrasted with the imperturbability of this isolated rock, one may almost believe that by dint of work Napoleon would be able to make it move. Obviously, one tried to recreate a refined environment, however, the Empereur never fear the Spartan life. Days were often studious but almost every day Napoleon loved to play chess. The 19th-century grandiloquence of the gaming journal, La Palamède, reflects Napoleon’s still strong taste for the chessboard:
If the game of chess had not already attained a high nobility, it would be ennobled by giving a few moments of happy entertainment to the greatest of prisoners and exiles.
La Palamède, 1836
A poetic assertion quickly disheartened by Las Cases :
He was infinitely weak at chess.
It’s a safe bet that Napoleon did not win many games! Especially since Madame de Montholon, who attended many parties during the exile, added that:
Touch-move rule, but it was only for his opponent. For him [Napoleon] it was different and he always had a good reason why it didn’t matter, if anyone notices it, he would laugh.
At least the island air seemed to have softened his bad sport character (in chess at least)!
Upon his hasty departure from France, we know that a chess board was carried in the luggage. Nevertheless, Napoleon Bonaparte had at his disposal during his stay at least two Chinese chessboards, one of which was offered to him by… an Englishman.
On July 4, 1817, boxes from China destined for Bonaparte arrived at Saint Helena. In one, a beautiful chessboard and its ivory and cinnabar pieces was the gift to the Emperor from John Elphinstone. The man was then head of the Canton counter for the East India Company and with this elegant gift expressed his gratitude to Napoleon. The latter had indeed saved the life of Lord Elphinstone’s brother during the Belgian campaign in 1815 by demanding that this Scottish aristocrat seriously injured and taken prisoner be treated. The zealous gratitude expressed by the Lord pushed the detail so far as to stamp all the pieces of the game with the imperial monogram. A detail which flattered the emperor but which annoyed even more (because he was always on edge) his jailer Hudson Lowe who accepted reluctantly and after several days, to transmit his present to the illustrious French prisoner.
This gesture of Lord Elphinstone impressed Napoleon more than the game itself, the pieces of which were impressive. The tower in particular was a huge elephant which aroused Bonaparte’s amusement: « I should need a crane to move this tower! » (La Palamède, 1839).
Some pieces of the various chess games he owned were distributed to his companions in exile during the New Year’s Eve. It seems that Marshal Bertrand received a few in January 1817 without it being possible to say with certainty which game it was. Today a set and a few pieces are kept in French museums and in private hands, and sometimes pieces resurface from the past at auctions. Very tenuous memories of the life, character and faults of Napoleon Bonaparte, a fine strategist on the ground but an inveterate cheater on the chessboard!
