Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1

by H. Sutherland Edwards

This other very different translation from the same obscure original was suggested by Alexandre Dumas the elder: “Nearchus Polion, General of Augustus, dedicated this war tomb of Germanicus to the glory of the Army of Maximus, in the year 1805, with the money stolen from the vanquished, thanks to his conduct, during the space of three months.”

The sheets of bronze employed in the construction of the column would, it has been calculated, weigh 2,000,000 kilogrammes, about 4,000,000 pounds; and the metal was all obtained from the guns of the defeated armies. In 1814, the day after the entry of the allied troops into Paris, it was proposed to pull down the statue of Napoleon, costumed and crowned like a Roman emperor, from its proud position at the top of the Austerlitz Column; and with this view a cable was thrown round the Emperor’s neck, the lower part of his legs having been previously sawn through so that he might fall with ease. The statue, however, stood firm. The angle at which the engineers were operating did not enable them to pull the statue sufficiently forward; and to tug at the cable was only to hold it faster to its base.

A zealous royalist now came forward in the person of M. de Montbadon, chief of staff to the Paris garrison. Empowered by MM. Polignac and Semallé, commissaries of the Count of Artois, to take whatever measures he might think necessary, M. de Montbadon applied to Launay, who had made the castings for the column and had cast the statue itself. He who had made could also unmake, argued M. de Montbadon. But he had reckoned without Launay himself, who refused indignantly to do the work required of him. Thereupon he was taken to the headquarters, where an order was served upon him in these terms: “We command the said M. Launay, under pain of military execution, to proceed at once to the operation in question, which must be terminated by midnight on Wednesday, April 6th.” This order, according to the well-informed Larousse, is dated April 4th, and signed Rochechouard, colonel aide-de-camp of H.M. the Emperor of Russia commanding the garrison. M. Pasquier, Prefect of Police, wrote on the document, “to be executed immediately.” The National Guard was at that time on duty around the monument. Whether from a feeling of shame or of mistrust, the French National Guards were replaced by Russian troops. Launay now raised the statue by means of wedges, and let it down with pulleys. No sooner had the bronze figure touched the ground than it was replaced on the summit of the column by the white flag of the old monarchy. “Then,” says Launay in an account he has left of the affair, “cries were heard of ‘Long live the King!’ ‘ Long live Louis XVIII.!’” This was on April 8th, at six in the evening, the operation having lasted four days, at an expense to the nation of only 4,815 francs 46 centimes. Launay obtained permission to take away the statue and keep it in his workshop as security for the payment of 80,000 francs still due to him from the Government as founder of the column. On the return of Napoleon from Elba Launay was forced by the Imperial police to give up the statue; and when, after the Hundred Days, the monarchy was a second time restored, the statue, a masterpiece of Chaudet, was melted down, and the metal used by Lemot for a new equestrian statue of Henri IV.

Soon after the accession of Louis Philippe—a more popular sovereign than the legitimate King Charles X., whom, at the end of the Revolution of 1830, he succeeded—the Chambers passed a resolution for crowning the Vendôme Column once more with a statue of Napoleon. A competition was opened, and the model of a statue by M. Seurre was selected from a great number sent in. It was cast in bronze, and inaugurated with great show on the 28th of July, 1833, during the annual festivities in celebration of the Revolution of 1830. The Army and the National Guard were represented in force on this solemn occasion; and Louis Philippe, on horseback, in the midst of his staff, removed with his own hands the veil which concealed the statue from the eyes of the crowd. He then saluted, in this bronze effigy, the conqueror of Continental Europe; who, thanks in a great measure to the revived worship of Bonapartism, {157} was in less than twenty years to be succeeded by a new emperor of the same dynasty.

The Napoleon who now took his place at the top of the column was more in harmony with the details of the structure representing French generals and French soldiers than the Roman Emperor so rudely dethroned in 1814 had been. The new Napoleon was the Napoleon of real life and of Béranger’s songs, the Petit Caporal wearing his redingote grise, and standing in a characteristic attitude, with one of his hands behind his back. Instead of the laurel wreath he wore on his head the traditional petit chapeau.

It seemed, however, to Napoleon III. that his uncle’s own design ought to be respected; and in 1864 the statue of Napoleon “in his habit as he lived” was replaced by a statue after the model of the original one, representing the conqueror of Austerlitz in the conventional garb of a Roman emperor. The more realistic statue was placed in the middle of the rond-point of Courbevoie.

Under the Commune the statue and the column itself were pulled down. The eminent painter, Courbet, had formed a project for replacing the column, which was only a monument of the victories gained by France at the expense of her plundered and humiliated neighbours, by one made out of French and German cannon in honour of the Federation of Nations and the Universal Republic. Courbet is said to have invited the Prussians to join him in carrying out this idea, which could not in any respect have suited their views. No period of French history, however, has been more diversely narrated than that of the Commune. One thing is certain; that the column fell, and in its descent went to pieces. The statue, too, suffered greatly by the fall. One of the legs was broken, and the head got separated from the body. A speech in honour of the Commune’s mechanical triumph over the Imperial “idea” was pronounced by General Bergeret.

After the suppression of the Commune the Assembly of Versailles ordered the re-establishment of the Vendôme column, which was duly set up in 1875. The interior construction of stone was entirely new. So also, as regards form, was the bronze plating, the scrolls being recast from the moulds preserved since the time of the first Empire. It had been decreed that the column should be surmounted by a statue of France. But this idea was not carried out, and, in conformity with another decree, Dumont’s statue, as set up by Napoleon III. in 1864, was, after being {158} repaired, put back in its former position.

The pedestal at the top of the column has turn by turn been surmounted by the statue of Napoleon disguised as a Roman emperor; by the white flag of the ancient monarchy; by the statue of Napoleon in his ordinary military garb; by the statue of Napoleon once more costumed as a Roman Emperor; by the red flag of the Commune; and finally once again by the most recent statue in classic garb.