“Bonapartist ideas are one of the festering sores of our century.…” 1
—ALEXANDRE GLAIS BIZOIN, 1840
“The ashes of Napoléon are not yet completely extinguished,
and they are already being stirred up again.” 2
—ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, MAY 1840
“I cannot prostrate myself before the memory of [of him] … I am not a follower of this Napoleonic religion of his, of this cult of force … to deify war … [of] these symbols of theirs, of despotism and the sword,” Lamartine declared before the Assembly.3 But the vast majority strongly disagreed with him. Napoléon’s remains should be returned to France where they belonged. “It is here that he will find his apotheosis,” Le Temps declared, “for he has taught us to understand the existence of demi-gods,” and the country concurred.
* * *
“Gentlemen, the King [Louis Philippe] has commanded His Royal Highness, the Prince de Joinville [François Ferdinand d’Orléans], to take a frigate to the island of St. Helena to receive the mortal remains of the Emperor Napoléon.… They will be deposited in the [Hôtel des] Invalides.… the temple consecrated to the God of armies,” Interior Minister Charles de Rémusat informed the Chamber of Deputies in the Bourbon Palace on May 12, 1840. There was “an explosion of applause across the amphitheater,” the Journal des Débats reported.4
* * *
For an indecisive Louis Philippe d’Orléans, the idea of reintroducing the very name of “Napoléon Bonaparte” to the French people now, among whom he himself was in contrast never really popular, was not taken lightly. The possibility of bringing back “Emperor Napoléon’s” remains from St. Helena had been reintroduced and discussed seriously for the past two years. The very idea of leaving the remains of the country’s greatest hero since the times of Charlemagne on British soil, buried beneath the Union Jack, was simply anathema to the emotional nationalism of the proud French, and the Chamber of Deputies duly voted a one-million-franc budget for the return of the great man.
Jules Hardouin Mansart’s elegant, dignified, and spacious French baroque Invalides Palace was selected as Napoléon’s final resting place. One could easily envisage the funeral train proceeding up the long green esplanade leading up to the Invalides and the chapel, lined on either side with the statues of thirty-two kings and “illustrious captains” of France, ranging from Charlemagne to Joan of Arc, and Louis XIV to Napoléon and some of his famous marshals. If any place in the French capital was worthy of honoring the kingdom’s greatest soldier of all time, then clearly it was this seventeenth-century architectural treasure, the Invalides.
Back in 1838, ex-king Louis Bonaparte had suggested that his last surviving son, Louis Napoléon, should sail down to St. Helena and fetch back his famous uncle, though of course Louis Philippe could hardly have acceded to this. But now, in May 1840, it was Louis Philippe’s new prime minister–historian, Adolphe Thiers, an enthusiastic disciple of Napoléon Bonaparte,5 who pushed the hesitating king into calling for this imperial rehabilitation of this national hero. Following the easy approval of the chambers and the authorization of the British government for this project, Louis Philippe ordered his third son, François d’Orléans, Prince de Joinville, a career naval officer, to sail to St. Helena to collect those remains.
* * *
On July 7, 1840, the handsome twenty-two-year-old Joinville, as captain of the sixty-gun frigate, La Belle Poule, with her freshly painted funereal black hull, attended by the corvette La Favorite, hauled out of the French navy’s principal port of Toulon, charting the five-thousand-mile-long course for the South Atlantic that would take them to Madeira, the Canaries, Bahia, Brazil, and finally to the East India Company’s little volcanic island of St. Helena.
Ninety-three days later, the two warships reached Jamestown, St. Helena, where the British laid on full honors. Napoléon’s disinterred mahogany coffin was placed into a lead coffin and then into the elaborately carved ebony coffin just brought from Paris. A horse-drawn hearse took the coffin down the mountain to the port of Jamestown in a cortège led personally by the English governor, as guns from the forts fired continuous salutes until the enormous coffin was hoisted aboard La Belle Poule, which with La Favorite immediately set sail for the homeward voyage to France and the port of Cherbourg.
* * *
The remains of the great national hero and late emperor Napoléon Bonaparte were due to be honored by Louis Philippe himself in a state ceremony in Paris on December 15, while this same king was still recovering from the bewildering shock of this Prince Louis Napoléon’s attempt to overthrow him and his government.
* * *
How would his situation and presence affect the current political situation? One Bonaparte in prison, another on a hero’s pedestal. If Louis Philippe had judged incorrectly now, he could be swept out of office and France before Christmas Eve, a day that had narrowly proved to be Napoléon Bonaparte’s own abrupt downfall forty years earlier.
* * *
On an icy eighth of December, Prince de Joinville transferred Napoléon’s ebony casket from his black-hulled frigate to the steamer La Normandie. From Cherbourg that ship carried her historic cargo to Le Havre and the Seine. At Rouen the coffin was transferred for a final time to a much smaller iron river steamer, La Dorade, continuing the journey up the Seine. Many thousands of laborers and troops were everywhere still frantically making final arrangements to have all in readiness for the grand ceremonies on the fifteenth of December. The king wanted to turn this nightmarish page of French history as quickly as humanly possible.
* * *
Late on Monday, the fourteenth of December, La Dorade with the Prince of Joinville reached the port of Courbevoie, and the next morning the casket was carried ashore by twenty-four stout sailors preceded by the prince between lines of troops and national guardsmen, and greeted by a twenty-one-gun salute and a band playing the “Marseillaise.” The casket was hoisted onto the floor of a forty-foot-long “funeral car” resting on four six-foot-high gilt wheels. The pedestal rose another seven feet and was entirely covered with gold-and-purple cloth bearing the armorial crest of the emperor. On both sides hung two velvet imperial mantles. Above this pedestal stood fourteen gilt-colored caryatides, larger-than-life statues, supporting on their heads and hands an immense gold-gilt floor in the shape of an oval shield. A mock-up sarcophagus in turn rested on it with the scepter, the hand of justice, and the imperial jewel-studded crown.
“This gold and velvet monument was drawn by sixteen black horses, yoked by fours,” with each horse caparisoned with a full-length shimmering gold cloth. “The manes were adorned with gold tresses and [their heads with] white plumes, and valets, dressed in the [green] livery of the Emperor, led the horses,” the correspondent of the London Times reported. “This whole ensemble was veiled in a long purple crêpe screen covered with golden [Napoleonic] bees.” The back of the enormous car was made of “a trophy of flags, palms and laurels” and inscribed with the names of Napoléon’s principal victories.
* * *
The hearse set off across the Neuilly Bridge over the Seine at eleven o’clock, passing under the shadow of an enormous temporary statue of Joséphine just erected at the foot of the bridge. “The procession commenced its march amidst the roaring of artillery,” entering the long broad straight tree-lined Avenue de Neuilly filled since early morning with “400,000 or 500,000 persons,” in spite of “the piercingly cold wind,” including “a number of [Napoleonic] veterans of the old army, dressed in their original imperial uniforms.”6 Louis Philippe, taking no chances, had both sides of the next five miles lined with tens of thousands of regular army infantrymen, some reinforcements brought over from Algeria for this purpose, along with national guardsmen in their red-and-blue uniforms. Security above all was the byword in the event of a violent attempt on members of the royal family today.
The parade was in fact one enormous military display, including cavalry and infantry regiments and their bands of four battalions, a detachment of Polish lancers of the Imperial Guard, and the students of St. Cyr Military College and of the elite École Polytechnique, as thousands marched ten abreast, a spectacle the like of which had not been seen since the arrival of Wellington and the tsar in 1815.
All passed peacefully before the crowds, the only sound to be heard that of carriage wheels, the hooves of thousands of horses, and the tramp of boots, attended by rolling drums and solemn music. They were then unexpectedly joined by some two thousand angry university and law students marching eight abreast, carrying their own tricolored flag covered with black crêpe, and crying out “à bas les Anglais,” “à bas Palmerston,” “à bas le Ministre de l’Etranger [Soult],” “à bas Guizot,” “Guizot à la Tamise!” “Vive Thiers!”—down with the English, down with Palmerston, down with the foreign minister, down with Ambassador Guizot, but long live Adolphe Thiers, their booming voices then chanting “La Marseillaise,” followed by an occasional “Vive le Prince de Joinville,” or “Vive l’Empereur [Napoléon],” though not a single cry of “Vive le roi [Louis Philippe].”
“Suddenly cannon thundered from three different points on the horizon,” eyewitness and great admirer of Napoléon Victor Hugo recorded. “The emperor’s [funeral] carriage appeared.… in the distance … moving slowly through the mist and sunlight, against the gray and red background of the trees…, past tall white statues … it emerged, a sort of golden mountain.” And by the time it finally drew close enough for inspection, the thirty-eight-year-old Hugo was as delighted as a child. “It is an enormous mass, a golden glow, giving the entire ensemble an immense grandure!”7
The drums of the National Guard beat “Au Champs” as one regiment after another approached the 164-foot Arc de Triomphe, now draped in black and ringed by three dozen flagpoles streaming long silk tricolors bearing the names of Napoléon’s famous military—the Grand Army, the Army of the Rhine, the Army of Italy, the Army of Holland, etc.—“as two batteries of twenty guns roared.”
As the bier approached them “everyone fell abruptly silent,” an excited reporter for La Nation wrote. “We saw tears everywhere and heard many a stifled sob. It seemed as if we were being transported into some other realm.”8 “It was hypnotic, we were positively riveted,” Madame Delphine Gay Girardin wrote.9
“It would be almost impossible to calculate the number of persons assembled to witness this imposing ceremony,” gathered at this point from early morning and including “numerous urchins who had climbed the trees lining the grand avenue, they affording much amusement to the spectators,” despite the ice under foot. The crowd’s “enthusiasm for Napoléon’s memory [was gradually] cooling however as a result of the sharp northeast wind,” and a temperature that had earlier plummeted to “22½ degrees [Fahrenheit] below zero.” Only a Napoléon Bonaparte could have brought out hundreds of thousands of people in such weather.
Icy weather or no, passing beneath the Arc de Triomphe, the procession now entered the Champs-Élysées. Continuing into the spacious Place de la Concorde, it turned right, with the snow-covered Tuileries gardens to the left lined with thousands of armed infantry troops, cavalry, national guards, and municipal guardsmen, which did not prevent spectators who had paid two hundred francs or more for their perches from peering from the windows and balconies of the surrounding buildings. The crowds here, diminished to only about 50,000, were well outnumbered by the estimated 84,000 troops either in the procession or lining the streets. Ironically, the only enemy to be feared at this moment were fanatical Bonapartists, possibly wanting to avenge the imprisonment of Napoléon’s nephew, Prince Louis Napoléon.
* * *
The funeral procession reached the grounds of the Invalides at a quarter past one that afternoon. Meanwhile, the cannon at the nearby École Militaire continued to be fired every quarter of an hour as it had been for more than six hours now.
Turning left into the long esplanade, the funeral cortège proceeded through the principal entrance of the Invalides proper. That in turn opened into the immense rectangular courtyard, the Cour Royale, leading to the entrance of the church, the Dôme des Invalides. It was here, directly under that 351-foot high French baroque dome, that a temporary catafalque had been prepared on which to place the ebony casket from St. Helena.
* * *
Entry was by ticket that day, which in no way appeared to intimidate the crowds, including the highest nobility and civil and military officials of the kingdom.
Despite the distracting, hastily erected draped black cloth, the London Times correspondent was taken aback by “the splendid vista of the chapel.” The great altar having been removed “from the entrance to the other extremity of the dome, the view was uninterrupted. The space under the dome, arranged as a chapelle ardente, was filled with a blaze of light from the thousands and tens of thousands of wax lights that hung in lustres or lined the walls, until … the chapel looked like one great wall of fire. In its midst was erected the catafalque upon which the coffin was to be placed.” To each side tiers of stands “hung with black drapery” rose to accommodate the hundreds of members of the two chambers, of the government and the royal family. But “the real sight worth seeing after all … was the crowd itself in mourning dress that filled the chapel, first along the archways in the nave, then in the tribunes of the dome”—the government ministers in elaborate gold-braided navy-blue court uniforms, the marshals and the superior officers of the army, the high-court judges in their crimson gowns, and high-state officials. Notably absent, however, was the entire diplomatic corps, they to a man boycotting any ceremony honoring the man who had invaded, looted, and devastated their countries and economies for fifteen long years.
“The Archbishop and his magnificent train of clergy … [advanced] to meet the coffin and perform the rites of absolution at the entrance of the church.… as the funeral procession entered … headed by the priests.” The Prince de Joinville, who had walked with the hearse all the way from Neuilly, now stopped before his father, the king, then, drawing and lowering his sword to the ground, he said: “Sire, I present to you the body of the Emperor Napoléon.”
“I receive it in the name of France,” Louis Philippe replied in a firm voice as General Louis Atthalin, a veteran of the Grande Armée, stepped forward with a cushion on which to lay the sword Napoléon had worn at Austerlitz in 1805. The king stepped back, turning to General Henri Bertrand, Napoléon’s companion at St. Helena. “General, I charge you with placing the Emperor’s glorious sword upon his coffin.” But Bertrand froze, and General Gaspard Gourgaud quickly stepped forward, taking the sword from Bertrand’s hands and placing it on the casket.10
The coffin was then slowly carried up the stone steps from the nave and placed on the catafalque directly under the center of the dome. Right on cue, outside the cannon again roared. “The mortal remains of Napoléon now reposed where he had requested … in the heart of his own country, in the place worthy of France’s greatest general—under the dome of the Invalides.
“The crowd lingered and turned again and again to look back at the burning wax-lights, at the chapelle ardente and the illuminated catafalque.” So ended the funeral of an emperor, the first since Charlemagne, and the last ever to be held on French soil. “This entire ceremony had something strangely phantasmagoric about it,” Victor Hugo ruminated as he left the Invalides, where Louis Philippe had remained lost in silence.11
“The government appears to be fearful of the very phantom it is now evoking,” Hugo felt, while many miles away in a northern prison the very nephew of that phantom was already preparing the next stage … “it is not just his ashes,” Louis Napoléon said, “it’s the Emperor’s plans [for France] that we must now bring back.”12