This drawing in the Archives Nationales, Paris (F21-735) is inscribed "Dessin de piédestal
donné par M. Marochetti le 10 juin 1844, Visconti". This presumably
indicates that, having approved the design of the monument as a whole, the
architect, Visconti, was now giving his approval to the pedestal represented in
the drawing. It shows Napoleon in coronation robes, most of his body covered by
a cloak ornamented with bees, his head crowned with laurels and his raised
right hand holding a sceptre. In lieu of a saddle, the horse's back is draped
with a lion skin. The horse itself is static, all four hoofs on the ground, its
substantial tail held in place by an ornamentred crupper, its head reined
tightly in. This equestrian group corresponds closely to the equestrian group
which Marochetti had proposed in his second project for the tomb of th Emperor
for the interior of the Dôme des invalides. The pedestal takes the form of an
antique lidded chest or sarcophagus, the lid and base having ogee or double
curved profiles, ornamented with continuous reticulating tile patterns, and their
corners decorated with curling acanthus motifs. On the side of the pedestal
shown in the drawing is a relief panel in which a pedestrian cortège, carrying
a draped coffin, containing the Emperor's ashes, is greeted by King Louis
Philippe..
In an arrêté from the Ministryof the Interior of 19
September 1843, Marochetti, who, in March 1842 had been commissioned by the
same ministry to create an equestrian statue of the Emperor for the courtyard
of the Invalides, was now asked to create one for the considerably more open
spaces of the Esplanade between the Invalides and the river Seine. This new
site called for a much enhanced scale for the statue, though no decision
was immediately taken, either on this, or the precise spot on the Esplanade where
it should be sited.
An article in Le Constitutionnel of 16 February 1846,
describes a trial of cardboard mock-ups at two diffferent intersections of the
Grande Chaussé of the Esplanade. This was not, the journalist pointed out, the
first of such trials, several of which had already taken place. One of these
simulacra was on the intersection with the rue Saint Dominique, the other on
the intersection with the rue de l'Unversité. At each spot the model was
different. The description given of the one at the intersection with the rue de
Université appears to correspond with the group as shown in this drawing. The
other was on a tall pedestal, with a three-stepped base. The Emperor was shown
in this in Roman attire, with sceptre and laurel wreath, a small cloak over his
shoulders, mounted on a walking horse, only two of whose hoofs were resting on
the ground.
Marochetti had invited the committee for the monument, the
Ministers of the Interior and of Public Works, the Director of Fine Arts (Cavé),
the Director of Civil Building (Vatout) and the architect Visconti, to view his
models and choose between them. The model chosen was the one with the static horse.
This caused the satirical journal, Le Charivari (19 Feb. 1846) to comment that "our
young nephews, in fifty years time, will go to the Esplanade of the Invalides
to get an accurate picture of Napoleon, and will see a Roman Emperor on a sleeping
horse".
There does not seem to be anything in the documentation on
this commission to indicate what size the group was to be, but a revealing
description of it given later by an English writer, almost certainly repeating what
Marochetti had told him, gives the height of the equestrian group alone as
"thirty feet...... from the head of the Emperor to the hoofs of the
horse". (M.D. Wyatt, The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century at
the Great Exhibition MDCCCLI, Vol.I, London 1851, text accompanyng plate
XXXIII) This was, therefore to have been a gigantic statue.
Between 1846 and the start of 1848 Marochetti completed the model
for this enormous equestrian group. In 1848 it was evidently at his home, the
Château de Vaux, at Vaux-sur-seine, though from 1851 put into storage in a
government depot on the Ile des Cygnes in Paris. From 1847 a pall of scandal
began to descend on the entire project when Marochetti's founder, Soyer, was
charged with having sold off canon given to him to cast the statue. The trial,
at which Marochetti was called on to give evidence, was reported in detail in
the Gazette des Tribunaux of the 4th, 18th and 19th September 1847. The
verdict went against Soyer, and he and his business partner, Durdan, were
both sent to gaol for a year.
After the Revolution of February 1848, which toppled the
July Monarchy, a commission was appointed by the Minister of the Interior of
the new Republican government, Auguste Ledru-Rollin, to look into the works
connected with the tomb and equestrian
statue of Napoleon. On 7 May 1848, the commissioners, who included the sculptor, David
d'Angers, known to be an adversary of Marochetti, went to Vaux to inspect the
model for the statue. Their report was extremely unfavourable. The statue, in
their opinion, did not have "the requisite monumental character. The style
lacks elevation, force; the head of Napoleon expresses neither the courage of
the warrior, nor the thoughtfulness of the legislator: the rider is not firmly
in his seat on his mount; the lion skin thrown over the horse breaks the
profile of the statue in an unfortunate manner". They thought that Marochetti
had failed to learn from the antique statue of Marcus Aurelius, and concluded
"the colossal proportion of the statue makes these defects which we have
pointed out still more striking". (A draft of the Report is included in F21-735
in the Archives Nationales). The commission sent its report in to Adrien Recurt,
who had by this time succeeded Ledru-Rollin as Minister of the Interior.
According to Matthew Digby Wyatt, it was this interference with the realisation
of his project which caused Marochetti to "seek tranquillity in Britain".
The commission was not annulled at this point, and
Marochetti would continue to write letters of grievance to the various regimes
which ensued. After the coup d'état of December 1851, which brought Louis
Napoleon to power as Emperor, he would have had every reason to suppose that
the project would be revived, and in a long letter addressed on 11 July 1853 to
Charles Baudin, the first secretary at the French Embassy in London, he pleaded
to have the matter personally attended to by the Emperor (This letter is given
in full in Stanislas Lami's Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l'école française
au XIXe siècle). The project for the statue was only finally annulled on 10
December 1853 (M.P. Driskel, As Befits a Legend. Building a Tomb for
Napoleon 1840-1861, p.166).
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