The day before the ceremony a delegation of the senate had formally announced the result of the plebiscite, and the Emperor not only had guaranteed the popular rights as secured by the Revolution, but had promised to transmit them unimpaired to his children. But where were the children? That same night, at the last hour, the Empress, who in the eyes of the Church had so far been only a concubine, obtained by the Pope's insistence what was the chief desire of her heart, but what had so often been refused by her husband—a secret marriage to him by ecclesiastical rite. Would this work a miracle and remove the reproach of her barrenness? In any case it removed the bar to her coronation by the Pope, of which nothing had been said in the preliminary negotiations. This act completed the preparations. The great church had been renovated and gorgeously decorated; the brilliant costumes, the imperial scepter, the jeweled crown, were all in readiness; rehearsals, too, had been held; and still further, by means of ingeniously devised puppets, every participant had been carefully taught his exact movements. It had been suggested that, like former sovereigns, Napoleon should, on the eve of his coronation, repair to the sanctuary, confess, and receive absolution; but he drew back as before a sacrilege. In the official program of the ceremonies it was also arranged that "Their Majesties" should receive the holy communion; but the article was dropped, and it was currently reported that the reason was Napoleon's fear lest the Italian prelates should poison the elements. The Holy Father was not urgent, for he feared a more serious rebuff than any he had yet received. At the outset he had inquired whether, according to immemorial custom, he was himself to set the crown in place on the head of the sovereign. "I will arrange that," had been Napoleon's reply, and the imperial decision was still unknown.
It was cold and cloudy on the morning of Sunday, December second, 1804, as the gorgeous procession passed from the Tuileries to Notre Dame. The streets were lined and the houses decorated; but the people of Paris, sated with ceremonials, were, in spite of self-interest, silent and critical. On the other hand, the presence of the German princes in the train, and the glittering costumes of the court, threw the provincial deputations, and the throngs of office-holders who had come up from all France, into a delirium of enthusiasm. The irreverent tittered when the papal chamberlain ambled by on a mule at the head of His Holiness's court, but immediately fell on their knees and received the papal blessing. Clergy and choristers intoned the hymn, "Tu es Petrus," as the Pontiff entered the majestic cathedral from the transept, and proceeded to his throne in the center of the choir to the right of the high altar. After an interval of an hour or more appeared the Emperor's attendants, Murat leading at the head of twenty squadrons of cavalry. Then followed the imperial chariot, surmounted by a crown, and drawn by eight superb and richly caparisoned steeds. Facing the Emperor and Empress sat Joseph and Louis; the other brothers were in temporary disgrace, and Madame Mère, stubbornly devoted to Lucien, was traveling with him somewhere between Milan and Paris, approaching by stages carefully calculated the capital where as yet both would have caused embarrassment by their presence. They were scarcely conspicuous by their absence when, as the artillery salvos resounded, there advanced eighteen six-horse carriages with the court, all moving to the sound of triumphal music. Passing in a burst of sunshine to the archiepiscopal palace, and entering the vestry, the Emperor donned his coronation robes and a crown of laurel leaves. Thence, with the Empress at his side, he proceeded in state to the place prepared for them in the lofty nave, facing the high altar. Joseph, Louis, Cambacérès, and Lebrun were his pages, and supported the train of his mantle, heavy with gold and embroidery. The yet empty throne had been erected in the heart of the choir. From twenty thousand throats burst the cry, "Long live the Emperor!" as the slow and stately march proceeded. There was one and only one incident, but how significant, in this short progress, when Napoleon with head half turned whispered to Joseph: "If our father could see us now." At last the entrance of the choir was reached, and the Pope, descending from his chair, began to intone, amid the deep silence of the throng, the majestic chant of "Veni, Creator."
This ended, the personages of the court found their appointed seats, the regalia were laid on the altar, and Pius, holding out a copy of the Scriptures, demanded in the Latin tongue whether the Emperor would use all his powers to have law, justice, and peace reign supreme in the Church and among his people. The Emperor laid both his hands on the book, and "Profiteor" came the solemn answer. Pope, cardinals, archbishops, and bishops began the litany, and the sovereigns kneeled. As the closing strains sounded forth, the imperial pair advanced under priestly conduct to the steps of the high altar, and kneeled again. The Pope, pronouncing the customary but long-disused prayer, then solemnly anointed both in turn with the triple unction on head and hands. Returning to their chairs, the two chief actors seated themselves, and high mass began. Midway in its solemn course there was a pause; the Emperor stepped forward to the altar as if to be invested at the papal hands with all the insignia of power—ring, mantle, and crown. The last of the consecrated baubles to be lifted was the crown. At the pregnant instant, just as the Holy Father, doubting but hoping, lifted it aloft, the Emperor advanced two paces downward, and, firmly seizing it in his own hands, set it on his own brow. Without a movement of hesitancy he then crowned the Empress, and the two, stepping upward, seated themselves in the great throne of the Empire. The Pope recovered his self-control, if, indeed, he had momentarily lost it, and said, "May God confirm you on this throne, and may Christ give you to rule with him in his eternal kingdom." Then, giving Napoleon the kiss of peace, he cried, "Vivat imperator in æternum!" The throng shouted in antiphony with deafening acclaim. Then the ritual proceeded, and the religious ceremonial was soon ended. At its close the presidents of the great assemblages of the State advanced. The Emperor, with his hands on the Bible, said, "I swear to maintain the principles of the Revolution, the integrity of French territory, and to govern for the welfare, happiness, and glory of the French people." Other particulars, equally radical in their nature, were added according to constitutional requirement. The hierarchical clergy must have shuddered as they listened. Then the chief of the heralds' college stood forth and cried: "The thrice glorious and thrice august Emperor Napoleon is crowned and enthroned. Long live the Emperor!" At this moment the cannon outside proclaimed the consummation of the ceremony. The French nation and the Napoleonic Empire, it was believed, were wedded in the fusion of Church, State, and army, for the loyal support of what the masses were sure was now France—"one and indivisible," as the motto of the Revolution expressed it.
It was just before this pregnant event that Napoleon had freed his mind to Roederer concerning the ambitions of Joseph and his family in general. Already his brothers and sisters were organized for the enterprise of exploiting their relationship, and already they were rash in their claims. The elder brother was essentially a man of the clan epoch in the development of society, and begrudged the ascendancy of his junior. He was nevertheless clamorous for wealth and power, using his brother's ministers to secure them, to demand them as a right. To this the younger retorted: My brothers are nothing except through me, great because I made them so. The French people knows them only by what I have said. There are thousands of persons in France who have rendered greater service to the state than they. I will not abide that they be set beside me in the same row. Joseph is not destined to reign. I was born in poverty; like me, he was born in the lowest mediocrity. I have raised myself by my own deeds, he has remained exactly where he was born. From this position Napoleon never swerved: for them there must be no expectation of empire. Minor kingdoms, principalities, and duchies he was glad to distribute with lavish hand. Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice they accumulated with his connivance. Lucien married to his own liking and remained a commoner, but in the positions he held under the consulate and empire he left no source of gain untouched and lived like a prince, if he had not the title. Joseph was twice a king, unable in both cases to decide whether he should be true to his imperial brother or to his subjects, a vacillator in Spain, as for a time was Louis in Holland: the latter, however, was at least loyal to his folk if not to his superior. Jerome's career was a farce, in marriage, in statesmanship, in everything: it is relieved only by the high character of the consort Napoleon selected for him. Of the women in the family, not much can be said which indicates a sense of gratitude to their imperial brother for his prodigal favors. Caroline, the spouse of Murat, was a woman of force, and was more loyal to her benefactor than any of his blood, unless it were the giddy, light, beautiful, fascinating Pauline, who, though a child of the sixteenth rather than the nineteenth century, had a heart and showed it in great crises.
Pius VII was a disenchanted man. He claimed that the Emperor had broken an express promise in seizing the crown, and was silent only because the official journal called no attention to the incident. For several months he remained a suppliant in Paris. One demand after another was perforce abandoned. He had hoped to destroy the last vestige of Gallican liberties, and to see the Roman Church recognized, not as a privileged sect, but as the national ecclesiastical organism. His temporary secretary, Cardinal Antonelli, found in Napoleon's minister of public worship, Portalis, an adversary as learned in ecclesiastical matters, as polished, adroit, and unctuous, as himself, and spent his diplomatic arts in vain. Two small concessions were indeed made. The statesman promised to restore the Gregorian calendar, and the Emperor, with a half-ironical, half-superstitious feeling, dated the course of the Empire after January first, 1806, not by the Revolutionary reckoning, but by the Christian. It was likewise ordered that the bishops and priests who had sworn to the civil constitution should take the ecclesiastical oath, and thus return to the fold. In the field of temporal negotiations the Roman prince was quite as unsuccessful as in the spiritual. It was in vain that he pleaded the gift of Charles the Great, which made him a sovereign prince. Talleyrand replied that what God had given to the Emperor the Emperor must keep, but an opportunity might offer to increase the States of the Church. The successor to St. Peter left Paris wounded and disillusioned, considering, says his memorialist Consalvi, that the Emperor must have intended, by the poverty of his gifts, to show the light estimate he put on the papal services. Weakened in dignity and general esteem, outwitted at every point, the Pope returned to Rome, a bitter and secret enemy of the Empire he had sanctioned.
When the legislature assembled, two days after Christmas, and the Emperor opened its session with a state proportionate to his new dignity, his speech from the throne was not merely an enumeration of what France owed to the new dispensation,—the civil and other codes, prizes for the encouragement of letters, industry, and the arts, the achievement of splendid public works,—it was also a presage of war. He declared that Italy, like France, needed a definite organization; that Austria was recuperating her strength; that the King of Prussia was the friend of France. Turkey, however, he said, was pursuing with vacillation and timidity a policy foreign to her interests, and he dragged in an expression of his desire that the spirit of Catherine the Great should guide the councils of the Czar Alexander. "He will remember," said the Emperor, "that the friendship of France is a necessary counterpoise for him in the European balance.... Set far from her, he can neither touch her interests nor trouble her repose." These were clearly words of warning. They meant that Russia must abandon her new Oriental policy, forget the anxiety she felt about French control in Italy and Naples, and forbear to chafe under the limitations of her trade with England, necessitated by the closing of all harbors in western Europe to English commerce.
The feeling arose, and at once became general, not only in France, but in Europe, that these words of the Emperor meant an appeal to force. The Revolution had claimed to have a world-wide mission in protecting the oppressed and establishing justice. The nations had felt a solemn awe when they saw this task intrusted to the greatest general of his day. But now in a twinkling all was changed; here was a new kind of monarch; not a king, but a king of kings; and headstrong, wilful, and selfish, just as kings were, with no more respect than they for the rights of man. The greatest general of Europe was now its most ambitious and ruthless sovereign. It was a powerful argument for the royalists of the Continent that their old kings, whom they knew, were better than this novel, unknown tyrant.
It is a trite remark that, however rapidly events may move, no gulf or cleft separates two epochs either of national life or of general history. The germs of that national uprising which later overwhelmed Napoleon can be observed as early as 1805. The tide of his success was still to flow high before the turn, but his alliance with a great idea began to dissolve before he struck the first blow for his dynasty. It was with a light heart and a new enthusiasm that Europe went to war in 1805. Even the Russian peasants, peering into the misty diplomacy which strove to conceal the Czar's Oriental ambitions and dynastic pride under complaints about the Duc d'Enghien, and demands for indemnity to Piedmont, a kingdom almost extinct, saw dimly that the principles of eternal justice and right were no longer on the side of France, but on theirs. If France was to live henceforth under monarchical rule, her ruler must be made to keep his place in the former political equipoise and abide by the old rules of international law. This fact constituted the moral strength of Russia's position when she somewhat hastily dismissed the French envoy from St. Petersburg. Even then men began dimly to apprehend that, for the triumph of the rights of man which the republic had so loudly proclaimed, the nations must now rise against Napoleon and rally to their dynasties.
While this change of sentiment, elemental in the history of the time, was gradually taking place outside of France, that nation was interested in itself as rarely before. Commerce and industry were rising and developing under a sense of security. Trade and engineering had received a mighty impulse by the inception of those splendid public works which still make the First Empire illustrious,—the superb highways of the Simplon, Mt. Cenis, and Mt. Genèvre, the great canals of St. Quentin, Arles, Aigues-Mortes, in France proper, with those of even higher importance in Belgium,—and by the improvement of every land and water route which made intercommunication easy. Where the Emperor's interest made it seem best, public buildings rose like magic. Labor was abundant, and prosperity almost commonplace; the spell of Napoleon's name and dynasty fascinated men to an ever-growing degree. There were shadows: the budget for 1805 was alarming, for the last harvest had been bad; the American payment was spent, Spain could not be asked for a further subsidy when arming herself for French support, and the prohibition of English trade diminished the customs revenues. The price of French bonds fell for a time at a tremendous rate. But the ingenuity of the Emperor was still fecund. A new tariff, a new syndicate of bankers to scale the public debt, a new tax laid on litigants: such were his expedients, and they temporarily succeeded. When the senate adjourned in March, the members of that high assembly were requested to report how the new machinery was working in their respective homes. It appeared to be working very well.
At the same time the imperial masquerade was further continued in a proclamation which it pleased the imperial writer to date from Aachen, the capital of Charles the Great. Rome reëstablished in France, the land of science, literature, and art, the glories of the coming century should eclipse those of the past. To this end were founded prizes, some of ten thousand, some of five thousand francs, which once in ten years, on the eighteenth of Brumaire, the Emperor with his own gracious hand would distribute in state to successful competitors in the race for scientific, artistic, and literary honors. The best book in each of the physical, mathematical, and historical sciences respectively would then be crowned; so, too, the best play, the best poem, the best opera, the best mechanical invention, the best painting, the best statue. Unfortunately the brightest spirits of the nation were in exile. The inspiration of those who worked under fear was but a scanty rill, and the French intellectual life of the Napoleonic age was feeble and uncertain. Not that the output was meager, for it was not; but the censorship was applied to newspapers and books with ever-increasing rigor, and what did appear in books or on the stage was in general utterly colorless and vague. The only exceptions were those pieces which summoned historical allusions to bolster the existing government. The censors smiled approval on the story of "William the Conqueror" as told by Duval, on the tale of "Peter the Great" in the words of Carrion-Nisas, on M. J. Chénier's "Cyrus," or Raynouard's "Templars," on any thing which, in the Emperor's own words, set forth the "passage from the first to the second race," provided only the theme was from days sufficiently distant. The career of Henry IV, founder of the Bourbon line, who became king by the victories of the Protestants and by the consent of the people, was not to Napoleon's liking, even though he traced in that career a resemblance to his own. The daily papers could publish no news except such as redounded to the credit of France, and dared not discuss religious matters at all. In the whole country there was but one unfettered genius, that of the painter Prud'hon, and he was free because he moved in the orbit of antiquity, within limits which did not intersect the public life of his day. Gros might perhaps rank near him, but David's talent and Chénier's muse were alike enthralled in fetters light but strong. Some high authorities have but lately claimed immortality for Sénancour and the subtle abstractions of "Obermann"; but they are caviare not merely to the multitude, but to many of the initiated.