Napoleon: A Biography

Napoleon's ambition to make Paris a cultural capital suffered from the
obvious drawback that his censorship policies and general philistinism
did not encourage the arts to prosper, although it is true that his impact
in this area has been overdrawn; after all, no one was executed in the
Imperial period for services to literature, as Andre Chenier was during
the Revolution. Only Madame de Stad and Chateaubriand, both
opposition figures, are first-rank literary figures from this period, though
we should remember that Balzac, Hugo, Musset and Vigny received their
'formation' during the Empire. The Napoleonic period was not a good
one for literature: the Emperor himself ruefully remarked: 'The minor
works of literature are for me and the great are against me.' The oft-cited
vast increase in readership during the Empire is a red herring, unless we
are to take seriously the idea of a 'trickle down effect'. There was a huge
appetite among the literate for Gothic novels and tales of the
supernatural, though whether readers of the translated versions of Horace
Walpole, Ann Radcliffe or Monk Lewis were thereby led on to sample
Rousseau or the Abbe Prevost is more doubtful.
It was in the visual arts that the Napoleonic period made its mark. All
great dictators recognize the importance of visual media as propaganda:
Lenin was among the first to spot the potential of the cinema. Similarly,
Napoleon had a keen sense of the way an entire triumphalist imperial
culture could be inculcated through great works of art that bore a
tendentious or subliminal 'message'. He was always a propagandist of
genius, and one proof of this is the subtle way he transmogrified the
classical revival of the 1790s, originally intended to transmit Republican
values of self-sacrifice, Spartan austerity and civic virtu, into a paean to
his own achievements.
The locus classicus was the career of Jacques Louis David (r748-r8z5).
David was an arch-Jacobin who had voted for the death of Louis XVI
and narrowly escaped the guillotine after the Thermidorian counter­
revolution of I794· In his revolutionary period David took his models
from ancient history and legend. The quasi-mythical figures of Horatius
and Decimus Brutus were annexed to put across the moral that one's
commitment to the Republic should transcend even the love of siblings,
parents and children. But like many reformed Jacobins - Bernadotte is
the best-known example - David, when 'converted' to the Napoleonic
ideal, developed a huge appetite for money. He therefore took on
blatantly propagandist commissions from Napoleon, stressing the con­
tinuity between the First Consul (and later Emperor) and the great
leaders of classical antiquity. So, for example Napoleon crossing the St
Bernard explictly stresses the parallels with Hannibal. And whereas the