Book Review: The Eagle in Splendour

The Eagle in Splendour:Inside the Court of Napoleonby Philip ManselIB. Tauris, 2015Philip Mansel's spare and abundantly insightful study The Eagle in Splendour: Inside the Court of Napoleon, was first published in 1987, when court histories were in something of a trough of disrepute in some scholarly circles, but as Mansel points out in his new Preface to this pretty re-issue from I. B. Tauris, court histories have in the meanwhile undergone a renaissance in critical respectability, with scholars mining the fanfare and frippery for the things it can tell us about the psychology of monarchy. Mansel (the editor of The Court Historian) has lightly revised his study of Napoleon Bonaparte's imperial pomp, and the result is a fascinating monograph on a subject that intrigued hundreds of onlookers two centuries ago.“The whole court together presents a very imposing spectacle and the richness of the costumes is less astonishing than the air of permanence it has acquired,” one of the shrewdest of those onlookers, Austrian Prince Metternich, observed in 1806, “the household functions as if everybody had been doing the same job for a hundred years.” And as usual with Metternich, the unsaid is every bit as important as the said – in this case, the heavy silent invocation of the reason why it should be strange that the Bonaparte court seemed so well-established: that the family – and especially the monarch – at the head of that court were provincial newcomers, intolerable carpetbaggers whose court by rights should have seem a shoddy thing.Mansel analyzes how Bonaparte and his toady courtiers spared no expense in order to buy, from artists, sculptors, musicians, and landscapers, that “air of permanence” Metternich was far from the only person to notice. And as our author occasionally points out, money could only buy so much; you can take the pudgy sociopath out of the sun-baked Corsican wattle-village, but you can't take the sun-baked Corsican wattle-village out of the pudgy sociopath:

The Emperor … thought himself superior to other monarchs, and had himself depicted as Jupiter on the ceiling of the throne room of the Royal Palace of Milan. Such grandeur and self-assertion naturally infected his courtiers: one Frenchman who met them on Elba wrote that, even there, they all behaved as if they were 'little Napoleons'. Stendhal, so quick to laugh at French pretension and artificiality, went through Italy complaining about the Emperor's Italian palaces, and planned to refurnish them with modern French furniture. The courtiers of the Empire were as brash and grandiose as its music and furniture. Restraint, modesty or understatement were rarely apparent.

In fact, Mansel's pithy observations on the aftermath of Bonaparte's court splendor are every bit as interesting as his dissection of its every ball and levee. This is hardly surprising, since the whole raison d'etre of that splendor is to leave a strong impression – to create, in effect, its own aftermath. And as Mansel points out, this very much extended to the Emperor himself:

Napoleon left France weaker and smaller than he found it. In contrast, the rival monarchies of Austria, Prussia and Russia were more powerful after the Empire than before. In addition the sea of blood and tears spread through Europe by Napoleon's armies ensured that after 1815 France did not command the respect and influence it once had. Paradoxically, however, as France grew weaker, the cult of the Emperor under whom it had once been so powerful grew stronger. People who would have found him intolerable as a living monarch praised him as an immortal hero. He was more powerful dead than alive.

The shelves have swollen with Bonaparte books in the last few years, including first-rate full-dress biographies and military histories. It's very gratifying to welcome back Mansel's meaty little study to those over-crowded ranks.