A sketch, recently acquired by the Napoleon I Museum at the Château de Fontainebleau, offers a new look at the agreement concluded with the Catholic Church at the Tuileries on July 15, 1801.
Christophe Beyeler / general heritage curator in charge of the Napoleon I museum and the Napoleonic graphic arts cabinet at the Château de Fontainebleau.
If long-awaited after a decade of war, the peace signed in Amiens with England on March 25, 1802, was ratified without a hitch, the Concordat was strongly debated in the Tribunate, where it encountered opposition from the Ideologues, and was not promulgated. by the French Republic until April 18, 1802. Religious peace and the internal reconciliation that it allowed represented a capital issue for the consular regime anxious to take root.
A competition organized by the Minister of the Interior
By a decree of 26 Germinal Year and the law on religions", according to the terms of the "Call to all artists of the French Republic", engravers, sculptors, painters and architects. Painters must provide “a painted sketch, thirteen decimeters.” The winner will receive 12,000 pounds for the execution of a finished painting of large dimensions, no less than 5.85 m wide and 4 m high.
A considerable number of competitors entered this so-called "Year architecture.
In painting, most artists, who can choose between "the two eras of the peace of Amiens and the law on religions", treat the second theme. A visitor to the exhibition notices this clearly in his article “Glance from a Lover of fine arts”, published in the Journal of Civil Buildings, Monuments, and Arts: “All or almost all the competitors represented the triumph of religion, or its recall and reestablishment in France. But religion was neither banished nor overthrown, only its worship was no longer external. » As a critic linked to the world of the Ideologues, he puts forward the explanation of the facility: "With angels, clouds, smoke, censers, altars, one is always almost sure to produce effects, and often pleasant effects. But this is not enough, we must add thoughts.”
A work of Ossianesque spirit
The author of the recently acquired sketch tries it in his way. The task is certainly not easy. Expressing a complex statement, involving several actors of different essences requires harmoniously combining two worlds of different nature. This is a challenge faced by many contemporaries. François Gérard, who received an order in 1800 for the company salon of the Château de Malmaison from Ossian evoking ghosts to the sound of the harp on the banks of the Lora, almost square in format, stages his composition on two planes, the terrestrial one of bard, and the dreamlike “ghosts”. Jean-Pierre Franque, who presented at the Salon of 1810 an Allegory of France awaiting the return from Egypt of General Bonaparte (Louvre Museum), in horizontal format, opted for distribution in two opposite angles, corresponding to the two continents separated by the waves, Europe where France is assailed, and Africa where Bonaparte hears his call. As for Jean-Dominique Ingres, responsible for the ceiling for the Emperor's bedroom at the imperial palace of Monte Cavallo in Rome, he executed in 1813 a monumental Dream of Ossian (today kept at the Ingres museum in Montauban), in vertical format, where he distinguishes two partially interpenetrated planes, the bard dozing on a rock being surrounded by clouds supporting the dreamlike beings born from his sleep.
Like these contemporaries but by mobilizing a Christian reference, the author of the sketch, whose anonymity is difficult to discern, has purposely juxtaposed several worlds, terrestrial and celestial, to which he even adds the infernal world. at the bottom left. A large diagonal structures the composition and forms a flow of light, from the upper left corner where it radiates to the lower right corner, passing through the outstretched arm of an angel and the arm wielding the feather of the First Consul. In the foreground, the painter has placed in the middle a triangular group, composed of a figure of Justice holding scales and a hand of justice and a winged figure brandishing a sword with a flaming blade, demarcated from a Saint Michael of Judgment last. On the right side, a table, covered with a green carpet fringed with gold, supports a bouillotte lamp, a globe, books, and a document signed by the First Consul. Bonaparte, dressed in his official attire, is inspired by the angel dressed in white who shows him a superior world.
A complex iconographic encoding
This upper register, which occupies the middle plane of the work, combines numerous references. On the left appears successively a sort of celestial choir, then a first group composed of the three theological virtues: Faith crossing its arms on its chest, Charity breastfeeding two infants, and Hope holding its anchor. This first ternary group, arranged in a frieze, overlooks a second, forming a triangle: Bearded and winged Time, armed with his scythe, looks at the mirror held out to him by Truth at innocent nudity, while an inspired female figure plays the lyre.
In the center of the composition appears another group, represented with a slight difference in scale. These four seated figures are drawn from the repertoire of the Holy Scriptures, both Old and New Testament. Bearded Moses holds the tables of the Law with his right arm and extends his left index finger towards the lower register. A bearded prophet holds a text in his left hand, points to Heaven with his right index finger, and beyond the apostle Paul, recognizable by his baldness, exchanges a look with Saint John who is holding the Apocalypse. Accommodated by an eagle and dressed in red and blue, Saint John extends his right arm towards an angel dressed in white. This angel, with his right arm showing the celestial court and his left hand placed on the shoulder of Bonaparte signing the Concordat, creates the link between the two worlds.
In the background of these sharply colored figures, two complementary, more evanescent groups are massed. On the left, warriors are holding out their arms, some in armor (referring to earlier times, perhaps to the crusaders of the Gesta Dei per Francos), others in contemporary uniform, enhanced with a tricolor plume, in a spirit close to the generals painted by Anne-Louis Girodet in her Apotheosis of the French heroes who died for the fatherland during the War of Liberty, work commissioned by the architect Fontaine in 1800 for the company salon of the Château de Malmaison and exhibited at the Salon de l year X (1802). On the right, men dressed in ancient togas are frozen, probably Christian martyrs, serious and static.
Apart from any aesthetic question, this work, saturated with Christian references and portraying a sort of vision of Bonaparte signing the Concordat under the influence of inspiration, uniting History in the process of being written with an almost eschatological vision, has therefore unlikely to attract the favorable attention of the jury, largely from the world of Enlightenment.
The prizes are not ultimately awarded to the artists (except for the art of the medal, where the engraver Rambert Dumarest is distinguished), but article VI of the competition regulations is applied, which provides that “a sum of 25 000 pounds will be distributed, as an incentive, among those competitors who, without obtaining a prize, will have demonstrated their talents. Johann-Friedrich Reichardt, a perceptive Prussian observer well known in Parisian intellectual circles, noted in a letter dated February 8, 1803: "Against general expectation, the government has just distributed prizes of one hundred to fifty louis to a few artists who took part in the open competition for memorials to the Concordat and the Peace of Amiens. The projects exhibited at the Museum, in the drawing room, were more than mediocre; no renowned artist had entered the ranks; the slowness of the administration in paying the prices awarded in previous exhibitions must have made them hesitate. The government also appears to concentrate its resources on civil and military services. »
Bibliography
Bruno Foucart, “The iconographies of the Concordat, laboratory of a new image policy”, The Concordat and the return of religious peace, under the direction of Jacques-Olivier Boudon, proceedings of the conference organized by the Institut Napoléon and the Marmottan library on October 13, 2001, Paris, SPM, 2008, pp. 151-167.
Christophe Beyeler, “Competition between Rome and Paris. Rival depictions of the Concordat”, Pius VII facing Napoleon. The tiara is in the Eagle’s claws. Rome-Paris-Fontainebleau, 1796-1814, exhibition catalog under the direction of Christophe Beyeler, Château de Fontainebleau and Réunion des musées nationaux, 2015, pp. 53-57.
At the heart of the museum journey
This sketch was acquired with the help of a couple of refined collectors, Guy and Hélena Motais from Narbonne, in memory of Professor Bruno Foucart (1938-2018), a specialist in 19th-century religious painting, scientific director of the Marmottan library and secretary general of the Institut Napoléon. Of cardinal importance, it provides the concordatory key to the “Napoleon as the New Constantine” room of the future large Napoleon I museum. This thematic room, whose name takes up a comparison popular among contemporaries, will deal with Bonaparte's desire to restore a religious framework to the country, with the two key figures who were Pope Pius VII and Cardinal Fesch, of the Grand Chaplaincy under the House of the Emperor, and more broadly of the theme of the State and religions.
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