1815. Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.
When Louis XVI. called together the States-General in 1789, which had not met since 1614, the first stone was laid of the French Republic. After the king was beheaded in 1793, the Reign of Terror followed, during which the wildest licence prevailed. Under the Directory, for four years from 1795, the country settled down until the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who took the government in his own hands with the title of Consul, and in 1804 called himself Emperor of the French.
During the Reign of Terror the ruthless fury of a nation under mob-law did not spare the most beautiful objects of art which were associated with a hated aristocracy. Furniture especially suffered, and it is a matter for wonderment that so much escaped destruction. Most of the furniture of the royal palaces was consigned to the spoliation of "the Black Committee," who trafficked in works of great price, and sold to foreign dealers the gems of French art for less than a quarter of their real value. So wanton had become the destruction of magnificent furniture that the Convention, with an eye on the possibilities of raising money in the future, ordered the furniture to be safely stored in the museums of Paris.
After so great a social upheaval, art in her turn was subjected to revolutionary notions. Men cast about to find something new. Art, more than ever, attempted to absorb the old classic spirit. The Revolution was the deathblow to Rococo ornament. With the classic influences came ideas from Egypt, and the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii provided a further source of design. A detail of a portion of a tripod table found at Pompeii shows the nature of the beautiful furniture discovered.
As early as 1763, Grimm wrote: "For some years past we are beginning to inquire for antique ornaments and forms. The interior and exterior decorations of houses, furniture, materials of dress, work of the goldsmiths, all bear alike the stamp of the Greeks. The fashion passes from architecture to millinery; our ladies have their hair dressed à la Grecque." A French translation of Winckelmann appeared in 1765, and Diderot lent his powerful aid in heralding the dawn of the revival of the antique long before the curtain went up on the events of 1789.
Paris in Revolution days assumed the atmosphere of ancient Rome. Children were given Greek and Roman names. Classical things got rather mixed. People called themselves "Romans." Others had Athenian notions. Madame Vigée-Lebrun gave soupers à la Grecque. Madame Lebrun was Aspasia, and M. l'Abbé Barthélemy, in a Greek dress with a laurel wreath on his head, recited a Greek poem.
DETAIL OF TRIPOD TABLE FOUND AT POMPEII.
(At Naples Museum.)
These, among a thousand other signs of the extraordinary spirit of classicism which possessed France, show how deep rooted had become the idea of a modern Republic that should emulate the fame of Athens and of Rome. The First Consul favoured these ideas, and his portraits represent him with a laurel wreath around his head posing as a Cæsar.
