The Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides in Paris has a new exhibition that I believe to be the best and most extensive on the Emperor in three decades. Anyone interested in Napoleon Bonaparte, early 19th-century military history and strategy, the Grande Armée’s campaigns from 1796 to 1815, monumental battle paintings, First Empire beaux-arts, uniforms, weaponry or cartography, has only until 22 July to visit the truly breathtaking Napoleon: Strategist.
On entering, you walk past the large busts of six of the seven great captains of history that Napoleon said he admired and wished to emulate: Alexander, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Marshal de Saxe and Frederick the Great. For some reason the seventh, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, is missing, though not for reasons of French chauvinism as this is a very even-handed exhibition, despite being held in the Valhalla of the French army, only yards away from the Emperor’s tomb. (There is even Louis Philippe Crépin’s enor vast and magnificent 1805 painting ‘Battle of Trafalgar’.)
The exhibition seeks to explain how, after seizing power in 1799, Napoleon melded his three roles of head of state, commander-in-chief and senior battlefield commander, and organised his armies both in peacetime and on campaign. There are huge contemporary maps, the highly advanced card-filing system pioneered by his chief of staff Marshal Alexandre Berthier, the coloured pins that were used to plot the movement of individual demi-brigades (regiments), and video reconstructions of campaigns such as that at Austerlitz in 1805, which together explain cogently the way Napoleon approached strategy-making.
Many of the exhibits, of course, come from the Musée de l’Armée’s permanent collection — I counted four of Napoleon’s bicorn hats, as well as the general’s uniform he wore in his first Italian campaign, the sword he wore at Austerlitz, his telescope, his pen, the desk he used as a subaltern in Auxonne, and so on — but there is also much rarely seen material from private collections, as well as superb artefacts from museums in Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Britain, and no fewer than 24 galleries and museums around France, such as Versailles, Malmaison, Sèvres, the Fondation Napoléon, the Archives Nationales, and the Louvre.
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