Napoleon as ''Roi Thaumaturge''_Walter der

Napoleon as "Roi Thaumaturge"Author(s): Walter FriedlaenderSource: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 4, No. 3/4 (Apr., 1941 - Jul.,1942), pp. 139-141Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750411 .Accessed: 20/02/2011 22:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=warburg. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The Warburg Institute is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of theWarburg and Courtauld Institutes.

http://www.jstor.org

NAPOLEON AS "ROI THAUMATURGE"

By Walter Friedlaender

O n the 1f7 VentOse,

an VII (7th March, 1799) the soldiers of Bonaparte con- quered Jaffa in Syria, sacked the town, and massacred the inhabitants.'

A part of the garrison retreated into a hostelry where they surrendered to Beauharnais and Croisier, under the condition that their lives be spared. Bonaparte refused to ratify this agreement in spite of the protest of his generals. Two thousand four hundred men were shot or, to spare the powder, stabbed to death. Contemporary sources bluntly call this massacre a "froide barbarie."2

At about the same time the bubonic plague broke out in the French army. Attempts to quiet the rumour of the pest were unsuccessful, and the danger of a general panic in the French army became imminent. To counteract the terror among the soldiers at Jaffa, Bonaparte made an official visit to the Greek convent which had been transformed into a hospital. He walked through the different rooms, talked to the sick soldiers, and conferred with Desgenettes, the chief physician. This act of courage was glorified by Gros in his painting, Les Pestifiris de Jaffa (P1. 34b).3

Desgenettes' report4 was the source for the first sketch,5 which has the inscription ". .. Ce dessin de Gros est la veritable scene historique ou la premiere esquisse de son chef d'oeuvre. Il repr6sente le general Bonaparte relevant de son propre mouvement le cadavre d'un pestif6re, pour ranimer le moral abattu de ceux qui l'entourent. Tous semblent effrayes de son action. Lui seul est calme, comme l'exprime sa figure. Cette scene, etant plus digne de la gloire du grand homme que la substitution d'un attribut plus noble en apparence, a l'6lan d'un courage sublime."6 The drawing (P1. 34a) corre- sponds to this description. In the midst of a narrow room crowded with people ("dans une chambre etroite et tres encombrie," says Desgenettes7), Bonaparte is standing with his "petit chapeau" on his head, holding in his arms the "cadavre hideux" of a soldier whose head and arms hang down to the right. In spite of the sketchiness of the drawing, it is possible to recognize that the right leg of the man is spotted with the pus flowing from an open boil ("souill6 par 1' ouverture spontan6e d'un enorme bubon abscide").*

In the painting, as it was executed, the situation is wholly changed. Apart from the new milieu of an oriental, semi-gothic setting, and the totally different arrangement of figures (many of which are reminiscences of Gros' travels in Italy)9, the psychological moment has shifted. In the sketch, as in

'Cf. Deherain, L'Egypte Turque, I931, p. 406 ff.

2Ibid., p. 408. 3Salon of 1804. Cf. Catalogue of the

exhibition Gros, ses amis, ses 6lives, Paris, Petit Palais, 1936, No. 28. Now in the Louvre.

4R. Desgenettes, Histoire midicale de l'Arme'e d'Orient (second edition), 1830, p. 50.

5Louvre 46 I3. 6The inscription is signed H.E.

70p. cit. 8Ibid. 9Cf. W. Friedlaender, Von David bis

Delacroix, 1930, p. 70 ff. In addition, Mr. Stanley Meltzof has observed that the bearded head of the kneeling man has been taken from a figure of a fresco by Pierino del Vaga (Giove fulmina i giganti) in the Palazzo Doria, which Gros must have known from his stay in Genoa.

139

140 WALTER FRIEDLAENDER

reality, Bonaparte performs an act of bravado. When his visit to the hospital seemed to have lasted long enough, Desgenettes gave him to understand in a discreet manner that he had minimized the danger sufficiently. His outspoken purpose in exposing himself to the plague was to demonstrate that there was no basis for the fear of contagion which was making the soldiers panicky. The painting, however, shows not simply an act of personal intrepidity. An impersonal, supernatural element has been added. Instead of the daring, almost hysterical exhibitionism of the original act, we find a well-considered ceremony. Bonaparte, in a calm attitude, contrasting with the excited and frightened figures around him, raises his arm in a reserved, solemn gesture and touches the sore in the armpit of the plague-stricken man who has drawn himself up before him. By this gesture, Bonaparte imitates the behaviour of Christian saints such as S. Roch or S. Carlo Borromeo, who in Italian paint- ings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-which Gros, as a kind of official requisitionist for the "musde central," had studied thoroughly-are seen walking in the midst of the plague-stricken people, bringing them comfort and spiritual relief, but also healing miraculously by touching. It is true that in contemporary descriptions of the painting by Gros,' the gesture of Bonaparte was not explicitly interpreted as endowed with the power of healing; but on the other hand the mere sight of the picture suggests the idea that the man touched by the future emperor will not die. We know that Bonaparte liked to have himself represented as a type of saviour.2 Perhaps this is the reason why the first sketch of Gros, which gave a literal rendering of the historical event, was rejected in favour of the second version, which introduced the magical gesture. The guise of the saviour effectively covered up the "froide barbarie," the massacre of the two thousand four hundred, which had been coincident with the outbreak of the plague.

The gesture of touching the sore, which is not mentioned in the reports, may have been chosen for yet another reason. It would evoke the association of the so-called 'king's touch,' the touche des 6crouelles. This strange custom,3 based on the belief that the king by touching can heal scrofulous abscesses (the 'king's evil'), had been known in France since about the year Iooo and in England since about I00oo. As Louis XVI still practiced this rite with great ceremony at Versailles, the association of Bonaparte's gesture with the 'king's touch' was not very remote at the time when the Pestifirds de Jaffa was exhibited. The picture made Napoleon appear as a new "roi thau- maturge."

Another painting by Gros, Napoleon sur le champ de bataille d'Eylau (P1. 34d), four years later in date, uses a similar mode of glorification. The emperor laid great stress on a certain eloquent simplicity in his costume and attitude,

1Cf. Vivant Denon's report of the Salon of 1804 to Napoleon ("A l'Empereur A son quartier g6ndral en Allemagne"): "Vous y 6tes repr6sent6 noblement, avec la s6curit6 d'une Ame 6lev6e qui fait une chose par le sentiment de son utilit. . . Tout ce qui vous environne est si 6mu de confiance et

d'espoir, que ces sentiments 6loignent d6jl l'horreur que peut inspirer une scene ohi est represent6 tout ce que la nature a de plus affreux." J. B. Delestre, Gros, 1867, p. 94 f. 2See below.

3Cf. Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges, 1924.

a-Gros, "Les Pestif6rds de Jaffa." Drawing. Louvre (p. 139)

b-Gros, "Les Pestif6rds deJaffa." Louvre (p. I39)

c-David, Study for "Le Sacre." Versailles (p. I41)

d-Gros, The Battle of Eylau. Louvre (p. 140) e-David, "Le Sacre." Louvre (p. 141)

34

NAPOLEON AS "ROI THAUMATURGE" 141

contrasting with the splendid uniforms of his generals.' He disliked being painted as a triumphant victor with sword in hand. One cannot win a battle that way, he said to David; paint me "calme sur un cheval fougueux." In the "Battle of Eylau" he did not wish to appear as a destroyer of his enemies, a bearer of death. He rather tried to impute that role to his opponents. When he inspected the East Prussian battle field the morning after the battle and saw the awful spectacle of the dead and wounded bodies in the snow, he is said to have exclaimed: "Si tous les rois de la terre pouvaient contempler un pareil spectacle, ils seraient moins avides de guerres et de conquates."2 It is this humanitarian ambition, offsetting the glories of sheer heroism and conquest, which Gros, the faithful servant of Napoleon, tries to stress in his programme for this painting. The official text refers to the episode of a young wounded Lithuanian chasseur exclaiming, deeply moved by the 'humanity' of the victor: "Caesar, make me live (fais que je vive!) and I will serve you as faithfully as I did the emperor Alexander." The power of a 'thaumaturgos' is here attributed to Napoleon by a young Lithuanian as well as by the surrounding groups of soldiers and prisoners who look up believingly.

When painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries depicted scenes from the lives of great heroes of antiquity-Alexander or Scipio-they often refrained from choosing heroic incidents. Under the impact of the stoic tradition they stressed the humane character of the hero and glorified "The Continence of Scipio," "Alexander and the Widow of Darius," "Alexander at the Tomb of Achilles." The Napoleon legend carries on this tradition and, in paralleling his virtue with that of his antique models, depicts "The Clemency of Napoleon" or "Napoleon at the Tomb of Frederick the Great." The simplicity of costume, of which Napoleon boasts, is part of this stoic heritage and marks him, in contrast to Louis XIV and the Bourbons, as son of the Revolution. Yet this modesty does not detract from his claim to the divine rights of an emperor. Both appear as one in David's great painting of the coronation ceremony (Le Sacre), in which a significant detail had to be changed by demand of the emperor (or his advisers). An impressive sketch (P1. 34c) shows that David had originally chosen the moment when Napoleon with a proud gesture sets the crown upon his own head. The final version (P1. 34e) presents a more ceremonious scene, Napoleon quietly holding the crown above the head of the kneeling Josephine. As in the Pestifdrds de Jaffa, the haughty and spontaneous gesture of the sketch has been transformed into a "sacre." By virtue of this ceremonious rite Napoleon became a "roi thaumaturge."

1Cf. Vivant Denon's description in a letter from Berlin (2 December, I8o6) to the painter Gerard: "En tout mettez beaucoup de magnifience dans le costume des officiers qui entournent l'Empereur, attendu que cela fait contraste avec la simplicit6 qu'il

affecte, ce qui le fait tout coup distinguer parmis eux." Arch. de l'Art Fr., Vol. II, quoted from Benoit, L'Art FranGais sous la Revolution et l'Empire, 1897, p. 170.

2Delestre, op. cit., p. 29.