This exhibition is a biopic.
But not an ode, even if the music is often present there.
The emperor explained, told, but not glorified.
Desecrated.
If the fifties and more have grown up with the image of an all-powerful Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), from cinema to television, a superhero playing little soldiers in a Europe on fire and blood, his image is tarnished by contemporary debates.
Like slavery, which the First Consul - Head of State at 30 - restored in 1802 when it had been abolished in 1794. And the loss of nearly a million of his own soldiers in fifteen years, not to mention allies, adversaries and civilians.
His exile in Saint Helena does not seem so severe compared to this river of blood.
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In any biopic, you first need rhythm, spectacle, great organs.
The exhibition is not lacking, which brings together so many iconic objects around the emperor, on loan from major institutions attached to the imperial heritage, Versailles, Fontainebleau, Malmaison, the Louvre, the Army museum at Les Invalides. , the Mobilier national or the National Archives, which entrusted two fundamental documents on the act of restoration of slavery with the signature of Bonaparte.
All worked in harmony with the two main organizers, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais and the Grande Halle de la Villette, as a sort of victorious coalition.
A blockbuster staging
The exhibition contextualizes the time, chaotic, complex, unheard of violence: before Napoleon made war, all of monarchist Europe declared war on Jacobin France at the end of the Revolution, as explained. an introductory film.
Then come the large sequences, punctuated by the paintings of Gros or David in our school books, but also a staging of a blockbuster: we follow Bonaparte in Egypt, with a naturalized dromedary in a window.
Visitors will be able to admire the emperor's throne, but also his room in Fontainebleau or the sedan of the procession of his wedding.
RMN-GP / Pascal Segrette
You almost enter her room at Fontainebleau, and her little bed is the size of her.
The desire could arise to sit on his throne, in the coronation room, all in carpets, gilding and decorations of ceremonial coats, swords, canes, jasper belts of his Marshals Lannes, Davout, Ney, Berthier or Bessières .
Hey, it's true, the "marshals" of the ring boulevards in Paris ...
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The visitor even hears the emperor's coronation mass, recreated in 1995. The sedan of the wedding procession, very imposing, no longer drives, but Versailles has lent it.
As in a film, we watch the emperor pass without joy from one empress to another, from Joséphine, repudiated for sterility, to Marie-Louise, who finally gives her the expected son.
All that for that: what an irony to discover the cradle and the brassiere of the baby heir, born in 1811, king of Rome, dismissed at four years old.
Napoleon's military campaign tent has been reconstructed for the exhibition.
RMN-GP / Hugo Cabrignac
What a gloomy association, too, of the sumptuous wedding coach and the funeral hearse of the poor, his horse-drawn carriage in Saint Helena, recycled to carry it in the ground.
His life was only a bivouac, that of his military campaigns, tent, bed and lamp exhibited next to a cannon.
Napoleon fell from his pedestal as brutally as he had climbed onto it.
In almost every room, beyond the tribute to Empire furniture, its other battle won for fashion, design and the know-how of French artisans and designers, these 18 videos in total explain, criticize, highlight its " colossal shadow share ”.
"It's his personality that is authoritarian"
He created the Civil Code, high schools, prefects, departments, modern administrative France as we still know it today, but the slavery he restored remains an indelible stain, "the first and only times in history ”that a nation is thus dedicating itself. In 1803, marriage between black and white people prohibited. Dictator? The assemblies voted in favor of the emperor. "It is his personality which is authoritarian, and not his political regime," explains a historian in one of these films that must be watched, to counterbalance the incurable romanticism which is reborn at the sight of these mannequins of pomegranates or these uniforms taken out of a film in Cinemascope.
The exhibition should have been in full swing on May 5, the anniversary of the bicentenary of his death.
She was delayed.
The virus was stronger than the Emperor.
But he keeps the ascendancy over his best enemies: the English have already booked en masse.
And in the shop, the masks - nothing can stop the derivative products - sweatshirts, hats and socks bearing his effigy show that Napoleon remains as “bankable” as a movie star.
“Napoleon”
, at the Grande Halle de la Villette (19th century Paris), from May 28 to December 19, from 10 am to 7 pm, every day, 15 or 20 euros, reservation required on
expo-napoleon.fr
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