The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  The greatest music-maker in the France of the Revolution was Maria Luigi Carlo Salvatore Cherubini. Born in Florence in 1760, “I began to learn music at six, and composition at nine.”48 By the age of sixteen he had composed three Masses, a Magnificat, a Te Deum, an oratorio, and three cantatas. In 1777 Leopold, the benevolent grand duke of Tuscany, granted him an allowance to study with Giuseppe Sarti at Bologna; in four years Cherubini became a master of contrapuntal composition. In 1784 he was invited to London, but he did not do well, and in 1786 he moved to Paris, which, except for short intervals, remained his home till his death in 1842. In his first opera there, Démophon (1788), he abandoned the lighthearted Neapolitan style of subordinating the story and the orchestra to arias, and followed Gluck into “grand opera,” in which the arias were kept secondary to the development of the theme, and to choral and orchestral music. His greatest successes in the Paris of the Revolution were Lodoïska (1791) and Médée (1797). With his still more famous Les Deux Journées (1800) he began a troubled career under Napoleon. We may rejoin him under that shooting star.

  There were over thirty theaters in Revolutionary Paris, and nearly all were crowded night after night, even during the Terror. Actors had been freed by the Revolution from the disabilities long since laid upon them by the Church; they could smile at excommunications, and at the exclusion of their cadavers from Christian cemeteries. But they were subjected (1790–95) to a more alert censorship: the Convention required that no comedy should contain any aristocratic hero or sentiments; the theater was made an instrument of government propaganda. Comedy sank to a low level, and new tragedies followed the revolutionary line as well as the classic unities.

  As usual the leading actors were more famous than the statesmen, and some, like François-Joseph Talma, were much more loved. His father was a valet who became a dentist, went to London, prospered, and sent his son to France for an education. After graduation François returned to serve as assistant to his father. He learned English, read Shakespeare, saw him performed, and joined a troupe of French actors playing in England. Back in France, he was admitted to the Comédie-Française, and made his debut in 1787 as Séïde in Voltaire’s Mahomet. His well-proportioned figure, his classically chiseled features, his thick black hair and brilliant black eyes, helped him to advance, but his support of the Revolution alienated most of the company, which owed its existence to the favor of the King.

  In 1785 Talma saw David’s picture The Oath of the Horatii; he was struck not only by its dramatic power but by its careful fidelity to ancient dress. He resolved to introduce the same veracity into the costumes for his stage appearances. He astonished his confreres when he appeared in tunic and sandals, and with bare arms and legs, to play Proculus in Voltaire’s Brutus.

  He became friends with David, and absorbed some of his revolutionary ardor. When he played Marie-Joseph de Chénier’s Charles IX (November 4, 1789) he put such passion into the antimonarchical passages—which pictured the young King as ordering the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve—that he shocked most of his audience, and many of his companions, who still felt some loyalty to Louis XVI. As the Revolution warmed, the conflict between the “Reds” and the “Blacks” in the company and in the audience became so violent—leading to duels—that Talma, Mme. Vestris (the leading tragedienne), and other actors broke away from the royally privileged Comédie-Française, and set up their own company in the Théâtre de la République Française near the Palais-Royal. There Talma improved his art by studying the history, character, and dress of each person and period in his repertoire. He practiced control of his features to accompany every change of feeling or thought; he reduced the declamatory tone of his speeches and the theatrical expression of emotion; eventually he became the acknowledged master of his art.

  In 1793 the older company, renamed the Théâtre de la Nation, produced L’Ami des lois, a play salted with satire and ridicule of the Revolutionary leaders. On the night of September 3–4 the whole troupe was arrested. Talma’s company accepted a rigid censorship: the plays of Racine were banned; the comedies of Molière were subjected to cuts and alterations; aristocratic titles—even Monsieur and Madame—were expunged from permitted plays; and a similar purification was demanded in all the theaters of France.49

  After the fall of Robespierre the arrested actors were released. On May 31, 1799, as the Revolution neared its end, the old company and the new were united in the Comédie-Française, and made their home in the Théâtre-Français of the Palais-Royal, where it lives and prospers today.

  V. THE ARTISTS

  Art in Revolutionary France was affected by three external events: the deposition and emigration of the aristocracy; the excavations of ancient remains at Herculaneum and Pompeii (1738 ff.); and the rape of Italian art by Napoleon. The emigration removed from France most of the class with enough money and taste to buy works of art; and sometimes the artist, like Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, followed the émigrés. Fragonard, though completely dependent on the purses of the leisure class, supported the Revolution, and nearly starved. Other artists supported it because they remembered how the nobility had treated them as servants and hirelings, and how the Académie des Beaux-Arts had permitted only its own members to exhibit in its Salons. In 1791 the Legislative Assembly had opened the Académie to any qualified artist, French or foreign, to compete. The Convention abolished the Académie altogether as an essentially aristocratic institution; in 1795 the Directory replaced it with a new Académie des Beaux-Arts, and gave it headquarters in the Louvre. This had been made a public museum (1792); there the French artists were allowed to study and copy the works of Raphael, Giorgione, Correggio, Leonardo, Veronese, … even the horses of St. Mark’s; never had stolen goods been so commendably used. In 1793 the Convention renewed the government’s support of the Prix de Rome, and of the French Academy in Rome. Slowly the rising middle class replaced the nobility as buyers of art; the Salon of 1795 was crowded with spectators, overwhelmed by 535 paintings. Art prices rose.

  Strange to say, the Revolution did not bring any radical movement in the arts. On the contrary, the inspiration given to neoclassicism by the exhuming of ancient sculpture and architecture near Naples, and by the writings of Winckelmann (1755 ff.) and Lessing (1766), had stimulated a revival of the classic style, with all its aristocratic connotations, and this reaction proved strong enough to withstand the Romantic and democratic influences of the Revolution. The artists of this leveling age (Prud’hon dissenting) accepted in theory and practice all the classic and nobiliary norms of order, discipline, form, intellect, reason, and logic as guards against emotion, passion, enthusiasm, license, disorder, and sentiment. French art under Louis XIV had observed these old rules of Quintilian and Vitruvius, of Corneille and Boileau; but under Louis XV and Louis XVI it had relaxed in baroque and frolicked in rococo. With Rousseau defending feeling, and Diderot upholding sentiment, it seemed that the age of Romanticism was at hand. It was in politics and literature, but not in art.

  In 1774 Joseph-Marie Vien, excited by reports of the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, started out for Italy, taking with him his pupil Jacques-Louis David. The youngster, all set for revolution, vowed that he would never be seduced by the conservative, aristocratic art of classical antiquity.50 But there was something masterful in him that responded to the majesty of form, the logic of construction, the strength and purity of line, in the art of Greece and Rome. He resisted its masculine message for a time, gradually yielded to it, and brought it back with him to Paris. It harmonized with the Revolution’s rejection of Christianity and the idealization of the Roman Republic, of the Catos and Scipios; it even accorded with Mme. Tallien’s Greek gowns. Now it seemed due time to put aside the celestial aspirations of Gothic, the juvenile surprises of baroque, the gay frills of rococo, the rosy nudes of Boucher, the leaping petticoats of Fragonard. Now classic line and logic, cold reason, aristocratic restraint, and stoic form must be the art goals and principles of colorful, emotional, democratic
, romantic, revolutionary France.

  David, who was to dominate French art during the Revolution and the Empire, was born in Paris in 1748 of a prosperous bourgeois family which always kept him from want. He entered, at sixteen, the Académie des Beaux-Arts, studied under Vien, tried twice for the Prix de Rome, failed twice, locked himself up, and tried to starve himself to death. A neighboring poet missed him, sought him, found him, and wooed him back to food. David competed again in 1774, and won with a rococo painting, Antiochus Dying for the Love of Stratonice. In Rome he became enamored of Raphael, then put him aside as too femininely soft in mood and line; he found stronger nourishment in Leonardo, and a stately control of thought and form in Poussin. From Renaissance Madonnas he passed to ancient heroes of philosophy, myth, and war; and in the capital of Christianity he shed his Christian faith.

  He returned to Paris in 1780, took a rich wife, and submitted in the Académie Salons a succession of classic subjects—Belisarius, Andromache, and some portraits. In 1784 he went to Rome to paint, against a Roman background, a picture commissioned by Louis XVI—The Oath of the Horatii. When he exhibited this in Rome an old Italian painter, Pompeo Batoni, told him, “Tu ed to soli, siamo pittori; pel rimanente si puo gettarlo nel fiume” (You and I alone are painters; as for the rest, they can jump into the river).51 Back in Paris, he submitted his work, as Le Serment des Horaces, to the Salon of 1785. Here, in Livy’s legendary history,52 David found the spirit of the patriotism that had been the real religion of ancient Rome: three brothers of the Horatii family take an oath to settle the war between Rome and Alba Longa (seventh century B.C.) by a fight to the death with three brothers of the Curiatii clan. David pictured the Horatii swearing, and receiving swords from their father, while their sisters mourn; one of them was betrothed to one of the Curiatii. Frenchmen, who knew the story from Corneille’s Horace, caught the picture’s mood of intense patriotism, which counted the nation above the individual, even above the family. A King sincerely dedicated to reform, and a city already stirring with revolution, united in applauding the artist, and his rivals acknowledged the skill with which he had revealed heroic courage, paternal sacrifice, and womanly grief. The success of The Oath of the Horatii was one of the most complete and significant in the annals of art, for it meant the triumph of the classic style.

  Encouraged in his method and his choice of subjects, David turned to Greece and offered (1787) The Death of Socrates. Sir Joshua Reynolds, viewing the picture in Paris, pronounced it “the greatest endeavor in art since Michelangelo and Raphael; it would have been a credit to Athens in the time of Pericles.”53 Two years later David returned to Roman legend with The Lictors Bringing Home to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons; this was Livy’s tale of the Roman Consul (509 B.C.) who sentenced his two sons to death for conspiring to restore the monarchy. The painting had been commissioned before the fall of the Bastille, apparently with no thought of the impending revolt. The King’s Minister of Art forbade its exhibition, but public clamor secured its admission to the Salon of 1789. The crowds who came to see it hailed it as part of the Revolution, and David found himself the artistic mouthpiece of his time.

  Thereafter he gave himself to the Revolution in a rare marriage of politics and art. He accepted its principles, illustrated its incidents, organized and adorned its fetes, and commemorated its martyrs. When the radical deputy Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau was assassinated by a royalist (January 20, 1793), David set himself to commemorate the scene; within two months he presented the picture to the Convention, which hung it on the walls of its chamber. When Marat was slain (July 13, 1793) a crowd of mourners entered the Convention gallery; soon a voice from among them cried out, “Where are you, David? You have transmitted to posterity the likeness of Lepeletier dying for his country; there remains for you another picture to paint.” David rose and said, “I will do it.” He presented the completed painting to the Convention on October 11. It showed Marat half submerged in his bath, his head fallen back lifeless, one hand clasping a manuscript, an arm dropping limp to the floor. A block of wood beside the tub bore the proud inscription “To Marat David.” It was a departure from David’s characteristic style; revolutionary fervor had replaced neoclassicism with realism. Furthermore, this and the Lepeletier broke classic precedent by taking recent events as subjects; they made art a participant in the Revolution.

  By 1794 David had become so prominent politically that he was elected to the Committee of General Security. He followed Robespierre’s leadership, and arranged the procession and artistic decorations for the Feast of the Supreme Being. After Robespierre’s fall David was arrested as one of his followers; after serving three months in prison he was released on the pleas of his pupils. He retired in 1795 to the privacy of his studio, but he returned to prominence in 1799 with a masterly panorama, The Rape of the Sabines. On November 10 Napoleon seized power, and David, fifty-one years old, began a new and triumphant career.

  VI. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

  Revolutions do not favor pure science, but they stimulate applied science to meet the needs of a society fighting for its liberty. So Lavoisier, the chemist-financier, helped the American and French Revolutions by improving the quality and production of gunpowder; Berthollet and other chemists, spurred by the English blockade, found substitutes for imported sugar, soda, and indigo. Lavoisier was guillotined as a profiteer (1794),54 but, a year later, the Revolutionary government repudiated this act, and honored his memory. The Convention protected the scientists on its committees, and accepted their plans for a metric system; the Directory gave scientists high status in the new Institut de France; Lagrange, Laplace, Adrien-Marie Legendre, Delambre, Berthollet, Lamarck, Cuvier—names still shining in the history of science—were among its earliest members. Science for a time replaced religion as the staple of French education; the return of the Bourbons interrupted this movement, but their fall (1830) was accompanied by the exaltation of science in the “positive philosophy” of Auguste Comte.

  Lagrange and Legendre left their lasting marks on mathematics. Lagrange formulated the “calculus of variations,” whose equations are still part of the science of mechanics. Legendre worked on elliptic integrals from 1786 to 1827, when he published his results in a Traité des fonctions. Gaspard Monge, son of a peddler, invented descriptive geometry—a method of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane; he organized the national reclamation of copper and tin, wrote a famous text on the gentle art of manufacturing cannon, and served the Revolutionary government and Napoleon through a long career as mathematician and administrator. Laplace aroused the intelligentsia of Europe with his Exposition du système du monde (1796), which formulated a nebular hypothesis and tried to explain the universe as pure mechanism; when Napoleon asked him “Who made all this” machinery, Laplace replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Lavoisier, founder of modern chemistry, served as chairman of the commission that formulated the metric system (1790). Berthollet advanced both theoretical and practical chemistry, helped Lavoisier establish a new chemical nomenclature, and helped his embattled country by his method of converting ore into iron and iron into steel. Xavier Bichat pioneered in histology by his microscopic studies of tissues. In 1797 he began a famous series of lectures on physiology and surgery; he summarized his findings in Anatomie générale (1801). In 1799, aged twenty-eight, he was appointed physician at the Hôtel-Dieu. He was embarking upon a study of organic changes produced by disease when a fall put an end to his life (1802) at the age of thirty-one.

  Pierre Cabanis may serve as a transition to philosophy, for though his time knew him chiefly as a physician, posterity came to think of him as a philosopher. In 1791 he attended the last illness of the dying Mirabeau. He lectured at the École de Médecine on hygiene, legal medicine, and the history of medicine; for a time he was head of all the hospitals of Paris. He was one of the many distinguished men who discreetly loved the ever lovable widow of the philosophe Helvétius. At her gatherings he met Diderot,
d’Alembert, d’Holbach, Condorcet, Condillac, Franklin, and Jefferson. As a student of medicine he was especially attracted to Condillac, who was then dominating the French philosophical scene with his doctrine that all knowledge comes from sensations. The materialistic implications of this sensationism appealed to Cabanis; they accorded well with the correlations that he had found between mental and bodily operations. He shocked even the advanced thinkers of his time by saying: “To form a correct idea of the operations whose result is thought, it is necessary to regard the brain as a special organ whose particular function is to produce thought, just as the stomach and the intestines have the special function of carrying on the work of digestion, the liver that of filtering the bile, etc.”55

  Nevertheless Cabanis modified Condillac’s analysis by maintaining (as Kant had recently done in his Critique of Pure Reason) that a sensation enters an organism which is already half formed at birth, is molded thereafter by every experience, and carries its past in its cells and memories to form part of a changing personality, including internal sensations, reflexes, instincts, feelings, and desires. The psychophysical totality so produced molds to its structure and purpose every sensation that it receives. In this sense Cabanis agreed with Kant that the mind is not a helpless tabula rasa upon which sensations are impressed; it is an organization for transforming sensations into perceptions, thoughts, and actions. However (Cabanis insisted), the mind that Kant so revered is not an entity separable from the physiological apparatus of tissues and nerves.