The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  Arrived in Paris, he took up the matter with his Council. Some members advised harsh measures; others pointed out that the Jews of Marseilles, Bordeaux, Milan, and Amsterdam were living in peace and respect in their communities, and should not be penalized by any general revocation of the rights held by Jews in regions controlled by France. Napoleon compromised: he ruled that the claims of Jewish creditors in certain provinces should not be collected until a year had passed.66 But at the same time (May 30, 1806) he invited Jewish notables from throughout France to meet in Paris to consider the problems affecting the relations of Christians and Jews, and to suggest means of spreading the Jews more widely throughout France, and into a greater variety of occupations. The prefects of the departments were to choose the notables, but “on the whole their selection was fortunate.”67

  The rabbis and laymen most respected by their congregations gathered in Paris in July, 1806, in number in, and were given a hall in the Hôtel de Ville for their deliberations. Napoleon, or his councilors, submitted to the meeting some questions on which the Emperor solicited information: Are Jews polygamous? Do they allow the marriage of Jews with Christians? Do the rabbis claim the right to grant divorces independently of the civil authorities? Do the Jews consider usury lawful? The notables formulated answers calculated to please Napoleon: polygamy was forbidden in the Jewish communities, and divorce was allowed only when confirmed by the civil courts; intermarriage with Christians was permitted; usury was contrary to Mosaic law.68 Napoleon sent Count Louis Molé to express his satisfaction; and the Count, formerly critical, addressed the notables with spontaneous eloquence: “Who would not be astonished at the sight of this assembly of enlightened men, selected from among the descendants of the most ancient of nations? If an individual of past centuries could come to life, and if this scene met his gaze, would he not think himself transplanted within the walls of the Holy City?”69 However, he added, the Emperor desired a religious sanction and surety to be given for the principles affirmed by this predominantly lay assembly, and proposed that the notables should call to Paris, for this and other purposes, the “Great Sanhedrin”—Israel’s supreme rabbinical court—which, because of the dispersion of the Jews after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, had not met since A.D. 66. The notables were happy to cooperate. On October 6 they sent to all the leading synagogues of Europe the Emperor’s invitation to elect delegates to the great “sitting together” (Sanhedrin was from the Greek synedrion) to consider means of mitigating the difficulties between Christians and Jews, and to facilitate the entry of French Jews into all the rights and advantages of French civilization. The notables accompanied their invitation with a proud and happy proclamation:

  A great event is about to take place, one which, through a long series of centuries our fathers, and even we in our own times, did not expect to see. The 20th of October has been fixed as the date for the opening of a Great Sanhedrin in the capital of one of the most powerful Christian nations, and under the protection of the immortal prince who rules over it. Paris will show the world a remarkable scene, and this ever memorable event will open to the dispersed remnants of the descendants of Abraham a period of deliverance and prosperity.70

  The Great Sanhedrin could not live up to these enthusiastic expectations. Eight days after the invitations went out Napoleon and his troops fought the Prussians at Jena. All through that fall he remained in Germany or Poland, dismembering Prussia, creating the grand duchy of Warsaw, playing politics or war; all through the winter he remained in Poland, reorganizing his army, fighting the Russians to a draw at Eylau, overwhelming them at Friedland, and making peace with Czar Alexander at Tilsit (1807). He had little time left for the Great Sanhedrin.

  It met on February 9, 1807. Forty-five rabbis and twenty-six laymen conferred, listened to speeches, and ratified the replies given to Napoleon by the notables. They proceeded later to issue recommendations to the Jews: to end any animosity to Christians, to love their country as now their own, to accept military service in its defense, to avoid usury, and to enter more and more into agriculture, handicrafts, and the arts. In March the Sanhedrin sent its report to the distant Napoleon, and adjourned.

  Almost a year later, on March 18, 1808, Napoleon issued his final decisions. They ratified the religious freedom of the Jews, and their full political rights in all of France except Alsace and Lorraine; there, for the next ten years, certain restrictions were imposed upon bankers to lessen bankruptcies and racial animosities; the debts of women, minors, and soldiers were canceled; the courts were authorized to cancel or reduce arrears in payment of interest, and to grant a moratorium for payment; no Jew was to engage in trade without a license from the prefect; and further immigration of Jews into Alsace was forbidden.71 In 1810 the Emperor added another request: that every Jew should take a family name—which he hoped would facilitate ethnic assimilation.

  It was an imperfect settlement, but perhaps some allowance must be made for a ruler who insisted on ruling everything, and therefore found himself repeatedly inundated with problems and details. The Jews of Alsace felt unjustly injured by the Emperor’s regulations; but most Jewish communities in France and elsewhere accepted them as a reasonable attempt to ease an explosive situation.72 Meanwhile, in the constitution that he drew up for Westphalia, Napoleon declared that all the Jews of that new kingdom were to enjoy all the rights of citizenship on a complete level with other citizens.73 In France the crisis passed, and the Jews entered fruitfully and creatively into French literature, science, philosophy, music, and art.

  CHAPTER XII

  Napoleon and the Arts

  I. MUSIC

  HAVING a continent to manage, Napoleon could not spare much time for music. It is hard to picture him sitting still and mute through one of the concerts at the Théâtre-Feydeau; nevertheless we hear of concerts given in the Tuileries, and we are assured that he took some pleasure in the intimate recitals arranged by Josephine in her apartments.1 In any case Sébastien Érard and Ignaz Pleyel were making fine pianos, and every home in le beau monde had one. Many a hostess arranged a private musicale, at which, said the Goncourts, her guests listened heroically,2 preferring spirited conversation. The Germans feasted on music without words; the French lived on words without music.

  Napoleon liked opera better than concerts; he had little ear or voice for song, but it was part of the royal décor that the ruler should attend the opera occasionally, to meditate and be seen. He regretted that “Paris lacked … an opera house worthy of its high claims” as the capital of civilization;3 it had to wait for his nephew and Charles Garnier to raise (1861–75) the sparkling gem that crowns the Avenue de l’Opéra. Even so, hundreds of operas were composed and produced during his rule. La Dame blanche of François-Adrien Boieldieu, master of comic opera, received a thousand performances in forty years.4 Napoleon’s Italian nature favored Italian operas, with their melodious arias and dramatic plots. Enthusiastic over Giovanni Paisiello’s compositions, he invited him to come and direct the Paris Opéra and the Conservatory of Music. Paisiello came (1802), aged sixty-five; but the only opera he composed in Paris, Proserpina (1803), suffered a lukewarm reception; he withdrew into Masses and motets, and in 1804 he returned to Italy, where he served a more congenial audience in the Naples of Joseph Bonaparte and Joachim Murat.

  Napoleon was more fortunate with Gasparo Spontini, who came in 1803, and earned the Emperor’s support by treating historical subjects in such wise as to shed glory on the new Empire. His most famous opera, La Vestale, had difficulty in finding a company to stage it; Josephine interceded; it was produced; its “bizarre” and “noisy” theatrical emphasis combined with its love story to make it one of the most enduring successes in operatic record. When Napoleon was overthrown, Spontini composed music to celebrate the Bourbon Restoration.

  Cherubini, who had dominated Parisian opera during the Revolution, continued to dominate it under Napoleon; however, the Emperor preferred lighthearted ariatic music to Cherubini’s mo
re stately presentations, and left him noticeably unrewarded. The composer accepted an invitation to Vienna (July, 1805), but Napoleon captured that city in November. Cherubini was not quite pleased when he was called upon to conduct music for the soirees given by Napoleon in the Palace of Schönbrunn. He returned to France, and found hospitality in the château of the Prince de Chimay, who had made Mme. Tallien respectable with marriage. On returning from Elba, Napoleon, amid all his distractions, took time to make Cherubini a chevalier of the Legion of Honor; but it was only under Louis XVIII that the somber Italian received due recognition and a comfortable income. From 1821 to 1841, as director of the Paris Conservatory of Music, he influenced an entire generation of French composers. He died in 1842, aged eighty-two, almost forgotten in the careless kaleidoscope of time.

  II. VARIA

  Napoleon closely rivaled Louis XIV in patronage of art, for, like him, he wished to proclaim the glory and grandeur of France, and he hoped that the artists would keep him fresh in human memory. His own taste was not of the best, as became one bred and bound to soldiering, but he did what he could to provide the artists of France with historic originals and personal stimulus. He pilfered masterpieces not only as negotiable wealth (as they are bought today), and as trophies and testimonials of victories, but as models for students in the museums of France; so the Venus de’ Medici came from the Vatican, Correggio’s lissome saints from Parma, Vermeer’s Marriage of Cana from Venice, Rubens’ Descent from the Cross from Antwerp, Murillo’s Assumption of the Virgin from Madrid …; even the bronze horses of St. Mark’s made their perilous way to Paris. Altogether, between 1796 and 1814, Napoleon sent 506 works of art from Italy to France; of these, 249 were returned after his fall, 248 remained, 9 were lost.5 Through such pillage Paris replaced Rome as the art capital of the Western world. As conquests multiplied, the spoils overflowed into the provinces; and to receive them Napoleon created museums in Nancy, Lille, Toulouse, Nantes, Rouen, Lyons, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Geneva, Brussels, Montpellier, Grenoble, Amiens … Over all these collections, and particularly over the Louvre, Napoleon appointed Dominique Denon, who had served him in many lands, and who never forgot that the Emperor himself had gone to drag him to safety from a plateau swept by enemy fire during the battle of Eylau.

  Napoleon established competitions and substantial prizes in several fields of art. He renewed the Prix de Rome, and restored the French Academy at Rome. He invited artists to his table, and played art critic, even during campaigns. He valued most those painters who could most effectively commemorate his deeds, and those architects who could help him make Paris the most beautiful of cities, and his reign the apex of its history. He commissioned sculptors to adorn fifteen new fountains for its squares.

  Just as his taste in painting ran to the classical, so in architecture he admired the monumental style of ancient Rome, and aimed at strength and sublimity rather than at grace of relief or charm of detail. So he commissioned Barthélemy Vignon to design a Temple of Glory in honor of the Grande Armée; he bade its builders use nothing but marble, iron, and gold in its construction. The task proved so costly and difficult that, begun in 1809, it remained unfinished when Napoleon fell. His successors completed it (1842) as a church dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalen—La Madeleine. France has never taken to it; neither the piety nor the gaiety of Paris accords with that forbidding façade, whose columns might better-express an advancing army than a tender sinner so penitent of her favors and so lavish in her love. —Monumental too is the Palais de la Bourse, or Stock Exchange, which Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart began in 1808, and which Étienne de La Barre continued in 1813; never elsewhere has Mammon been so majestically housed.

  The preferred architects of the reign were Charles Percier and his usual associate, Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine. Together they labored to unite the Louvre with the Tuileries, despite the unevenness in their structural lines; so they built the north wing (Cour Carrée) of the Louvre (1806). They repaired and renovated the exterior, and connected the floors with massive stairways. They designed the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (1806–08) in the style and proportions of the Arch of Septimius Severus in Rome. The more stately Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, at the farther end of the Champs Élysées, was begun (1806) by Jean-François Chalgrin, but had merely emerged from its foundations when Napoleon fell; it was not completed till 1837, three years before his ashes passed under it in their triumphant procession to his tomb in the Hôtel des Invalides. Frankly imitating the Arch of Constantine in Rome, it surpassed it—and any Roman arch—in beauty, partly because of its marble bas-reliefs. At the left Jean-Pierre Cortot carved The Crowning of Napoleon; at the right François Rudé, in The Marseillais (1833–36), caught the martial ecstasy of the Revolution. This is one of the high moments of nineteenth-century sculpture.

  That difficult art, under Napoleon, rested on the laurels it had earned before his rise. Houdon survived till 1828, and made a bust of him (now in the Museum of Dijon) which earned the artist a place in the Legion of Honor. Still remembering Roman emperors—this time the sculptured record of Trajan’s victories—Napoleon commissioned Jean-Baptiste Le Père and Jacques Gondouin to tell the story of the Austerlitz campaign in bronze reliefs to be attached, plaque by plaque, in an ascending spiral on a column that would dominate the Place Vendôme. It was so done (1806–10), and in 1808 Antoine Chaudet crowned the shaft with a statue of Napoleon made from cannon captured from the enemy. Seldom had victorious pride mounted so high.

  The minor arts—cabinetry, interior decoration, tapestry, needlepoint, pottery, porcelain, glass, jewelry, engraving, figurines—had almost died during the Revolution; they had begun recovery under the Directory; they flourished under Napoleon; Sèvres again produced fine porcelain. Furniture took on the solid, sturdy “Empire style.” The miniatures in which Isabey portrayed, with microscopic brilliance, the leading characters of the age are among the finest of their kind in history. Joseph Chinard made delectable terra-cotta busts of Josephine and Mme. Récamier; the latter is especially fine, with one breast bared as a sample and as befitted a woman who was resolved to remain half a virgin to the end.

  III. THE PAINTERS

  Painting prospered now, for the country was prospering, and patrons could pay. Napoleon paid well, for he was playing to a gallery of centuries, and hoped to prolong their attention by the blandishments of literature and art. His admiration of Augustus’ Rome and Louis XIV’s Paris inclined him to favor classic norms of art—line, order, logic, proportion, design, reason, restraint; but the keenness of his senses, the range of his imagination, and the force of his passions gave him some understanding of the Romantic movement that was rising to liberate individualism, feeling, originality, imagination, mystery, and color from the bondage of tradition, conformity, and rule. So he made classic David his court painter, but he kept a corner of his favor for the sentiment of Gérard, the idyls of Prud’hon, and the explosive colors of Gros.

  Jacques-Louis David took naturally to a patron who called himself a consul, who for a time tolerated a tribunate of popular orators, and who disguised his decrees as senatus consulta. He visited the triumphant Corsican soon after the 18th Brumaire. Napoleon won him at once by greeting him as the French Apelles, but gently reproved him for spending so much talent on ancient history; were there not memorable events in modern—even in contemporary—history? “However,” he added, “do what you please; your pencil will confer celebrity upon any subject you may select. For every historical picture you may choose to paint you shall receive 100,000 francs.”6 This was convincing. David sealed the pact with Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1801), which showed a handsome warrior with a charming leg, on a magnificent horse that appears to be galloping up a rocky mountainside—one of the most brilliant pictures of the age.

  David had voted for the execution of Louis XVI; he must have winced when Napoleon made himself emperor and restored all the pomp and power of monarchy. But he went to see his new master crowned; the fasci
nation of that scene overcame his politics; and after three years of intermittent devotion, he commemorated the event in the pictorial masterpiece of the period. Almost a hundred characters were portrayed in The Coronation of Napoleon (1807), even Madame Mère Letizia, who was not there; most of them faithfully, except for Cardinal Caprara, who complained that David had revealed him bald, without his usual wig. Everyone else was pleased. Napoleon, after examining the picture for half an hour, raised his hat to the artist, saying, “C’est bien, très bien. David, je vous salue.”7

  David was not merely the official court painter; he was the unchallenged leader of French art in his time. Everyone of account came to him to sit for a portrait—Napoleon, Pius VII, Murat, even Cardinal Caprara, bewigged.8 His pupils—especially Gérard, Gros, Isabey, Ingres—spread his influence even while deviating from his style. As late as 1814 English visitors to the Louvre were surprised to find young artists copying not the Renaissance masters, but the pictures of David.9 A year later he was banished by the restored Bourbons. He went to Brussels, where he prospered with portraits. He died in 1825, having lived fully in all his seventy-seven years.