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Authors: Daniel Meyerson
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“usurper, the Corsican upstart,” calling him “brother.” The young and beautiful queen of Prussia—décolleté and shameless—outrageously flirts with him, trying to win favors for her defeated land. Princes and kings hang anxiously on his every word.
He has fulfilled his boast: the challenge he threw to the world at his coronation. At the height of the ceremony, Napoleon seizes the crown from the pope’s hands and, in an act of self-creation, places it on his own head.
The moment is captured by the great artist of the revolution, Jacques-Louis David—a man who had been so devoted to Robespierre that he had vowed to “drink hemlock with him” rather than let him die alone. Still alive and sketching furiously, David stands in a recess of Notre Dame. Now it is with Napoleon that he vows to “drink hemlock” if the need should arise.
David quickly produces a bold drawing, a work of genius. In its few strong lines, all that is inessential falls away. It captures Napoleon’s inhuman strength of will. One can almost hear the emperor as he holds the crown over his head and proclaims, “God and my sword!”—a soldier’s, a knight’s credo that interrupts the chanted prayers with a trace of menace.
Afterward, David repeats this sketch a second time while preparing for his epic painting,
Le Sacre.
In the end, though, David is forced to paint a softer, sentimental moment not to offend Catholic France: Napoleon crowns the kneeling Josephine, her head bowed, her hands clasped in prayer.
But before this compromise is made, David draws another sketch of the self-coronation. In this version, the sword is strapped to a naked torso, for Napoleon is nude. There is no crown, just the naked gesture of reaching upward. There are no royal robes, just the muscular soldier’s body that has endured years of hard campaigns. It is this nude sketch which sums up the truth of what Napoleon has achieved. With only his own will on which to rely, out of nothing he has raised himself above popes and kings.
BUT IF THE world is dazzled by Napoleon, a certain unhappy, ridiculous, sublime—and vulnerable, very vulnerable—eleven-year-old schoolboy in Grenoble is not. Just the opposite: Jean François hates the military spirit sweeping France. He suffers from it. It oppresses him and makes him withdraw into himself, for it permeates every aspect of what he calls his “prison,” the
lycée
with its endless army-style parades and its Napoleon-worship.
Everyone in the
lycée
must conform—that is axiomatic in military life. Obedience and inflexible discipline dictate every detail, from how many jacket buttons must be done up and how many left undone, to the 526 books which make up Napoleon’s fiat on the curriculum:
these and no others!
It is a restraint terrible to a mind used to ranging where it likes. During Jean François’ first weeks he is discovered criminally hiding away a 527th—and a 528th—and a 529th. When the mattresses are restuffed with fresh straw, Persian and Arabic books come tumbling out, Latin poems, a list of Egyptian kings compiled by Manetho in Greek.
Word spreads like wildfire. The incident gives rise to laughter. The new boy is punished, not for hiding away the kind of books usually hidden in the straw—one of the very popular, scurrilous, and illustrated accounts of Marie Antoinette’s love life, for example; or a scandalous, lurid novel such as Diderot’s
The Nun,
the illicit writing of the day. No, Jean François is made to stand at attention all afternoon for an Arabic grammar and a Persian dictionary and a list of old kings!
For his difference, Jean François will have to endure a ridicule that he never forgets. And though he will later come up against mockery often enough, these early, childish griefs stay with him forever. Years later though occupied with his great work, he will sometimes recall them in letters. He recounts them in detail to his nephew, who leaves them out of his worshipful
He has fulfilled his boast: the challenge he threw to the world at his coronation. At the height of the ceremony, Napoleon seizes the crown from the pope’s hands and, in an act of self-creation, places it on his own head.
The moment is captured by the great artist of the revolution, Jacques-Louis David—a man who had been so devoted to Robespierre that he had vowed to “drink hemlock with him” rather than let him die alone. Still alive and sketching furiously, David stands in a recess of Notre Dame. Now it is with Napoleon that he vows to “drink hemlock” if the need should arise.
David quickly produces a bold drawing, a work of genius. In its few strong lines, all that is inessential falls away. It captures Napoleon’s inhuman strength of will. One can almost hear the emperor as he holds the crown over his head and proclaims, “God and my sword!”—a soldier’s, a knight’s credo that interrupts the chanted prayers with a trace of menace.
Afterward, David repeats this sketch a second time while preparing for his epic painting,
Le Sacre.
In the end, though, David is forced to paint a softer, sentimental moment not to offend Catholic France: Napoleon crowns the kneeling Josephine, her head bowed, her hands clasped in prayer.
But before this compromise is made, David draws another sketch of the self-coronation. In this version, the sword is strapped to a naked torso, for Napoleon is nude. There is no crown, just the naked gesture of reaching upward. There are no royal robes, just the muscular soldier’s body that has endured years of hard campaigns. It is this nude sketch which sums up the truth of what Napoleon has achieved. With only his own will on which to rely, out of nothing he has raised himself above popes and kings.
BUT IF THE world is dazzled by Napoleon, a certain unhappy, ridiculous, sublime—and vulnerable, very vulnerable—eleven-year-old schoolboy in Grenoble is not. Just the opposite: Jean François hates the military spirit sweeping France. He suffers from it. It oppresses him and makes him withdraw into himself, for it permeates every aspect of what he calls his “prison,” the
lycée
with its endless army-style parades and its Napoleon-worship.
Everyone in the
lycée
must conform—that is axiomatic in military life. Obedience and inflexible discipline dictate every detail, from how many jacket buttons must be done up and how many left undone, to the 526 books which make up Napoleon’s fiat on the curriculum:
these and no others!
It is a restraint terrible to a mind used to ranging where it likes. During Jean François’ first weeks he is discovered criminally hiding away a 527th—and a 528th—and a 529th. When the mattresses are restuffed with fresh straw, Persian and Arabic books come tumbling out, Latin poems, a list of Egyptian kings compiled by Manetho in Greek.
Word spreads like wildfire. The incident gives rise to laughter. The new boy is punished, not for hiding away the kind of books usually hidden in the straw—one of the very popular, scurrilous, and illustrated accounts of Marie Antoinette’s love life, for example; or a scandalous, lurid novel such as Diderot’s
The Nun,
the illicit writing of the day. No, Jean François is made to stand at attention all afternoon for an Arabic grammar and a Persian dictionary and a list of old kings!
For his difference, Jean François will have to endure a ridicule that he never forgets. And though he will later come up against mockery often enough, these early, childish griefs stay with him forever. Years later though occupied with his great work, he will sometimes recall them in letters. He recounts them in detail to his nephew, who leaves them out of his worshipful
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