624 Chapter XXVI
On 9 Thermidor of the Year VI, or July 27, 1798, a long procession in Paris paid
honor to Liberty. A troop of cavalry was followed by professors and students from
the newly reorganized Museum of Natural History, marching beside triumphal
cars bearing exotic plants and minerals and accompanied by a bear from the zoo at
Bern, lions from Africa, and camels from Egypt. Next came delegates from the
printers and public libraries of the city, and professors from the new Polytechnique
and the old College de France. Prize pupils carried manuscripts and rare books.
Artists walked beside works of art which had been captured in Italy, and which, it
was believed, could be better appreciated and cared for in the capital of the civi-
lized world than in a land of superstition—paintings by Titian and Raphael, and
ancient sculpture including the Discus Thrower and the Apollo Belvidere. Also
included were the famous Corinthian bronze horses, which the Byzantines had
long ago taken from Corinth, and the Venetians from Constantinople. The French
now brought them from Venice to Paris, “to rest at last upon free soil.” Of various
inscriptions carried in the procession one was a quotation from Seneca: “To live
ignorant is to be dead.”^32 It was indeed a great moment for French science; La-
place, Lamarck, and Cuvier could all have been working in Paris on that day; and
Frenchmen then disembarking with Bonaparte at Alexandria were about to be-
come the founders of Egyptology.
A few weeks later an industrial exposition was put on in the Champ de Mars. It
was the first of a kind which the Crystal Palace of 1851 was to make more famous.
The Minister of the Interior, François de Neufchateau, opened it with a speech.
Our French manufacturers, he said in effect, will abundantly demonstrate the su-
periority of a free people in matters economic; genius and ingenuity are now liber-
ated from gilds and monopolies and from ancient regulations and routines; the day
foreseen in the Encyclopédie, the day of systematic and public sponsorship of the
practical arts, has at last arrived. While the wonders of science were displayed by
the illumination of the exhibition halls at night, and by a balloon from which a fire
was ignited on the ground, the main business was the viewing and judging of ex-
hibits submitted by 110 French manufacturers and artistes. A prize was awarded to
one of the Didot family for book design. (Even typography was revolutionized in
these years, since the type- face still called “modern” was introduced by Didot and
his Italian contemporary Bodoni.) Another prize went to Nicolas Conté for the
invention of the lead pencil. A better symbol of a middle- class and “enlightened”
world would be hard to find.^33
In the French view of the new republican order, as conceived under the Direc-
tory, the French were definitely to be dominant. There was little thought of equal-
ity or mutuality between the French Republic and its satellites, none of which had
more than an eighth of the population of France within its old frontiers. It seemed
natural to the French—as indeed to many eighteenth- century Europeans—that
the learned and artistic worlds should converge upon Paris. It seemed natural that
the allied republics should accept the lead of French foreign policy, and contribute
32 Moniteur, 9 and 11 Thermidor, VI; other newspaper reports reprinted by A. Aulard, Paris pen-
dant la réaction thermidorienne et sous le Directoire, 5 vols. (Paris, 1898 1902), Vv, 6–9.
33 Moniteur, 5 and 12 Vendémiaire, VII; G. Gérault, Les expositions universelles au point de vue
economique (Paris, 1901), 24–25.