Notre-Dame de Paris

A general who became an emperor

In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte was 35 years old and had been First Consul of France for less than five years.

He had taken power in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799), ending the directly republican phase of the French Revolution. He had then spent five years consolidating control — winning military victories at Marengo and Hohenlinden, signing the Peace of Amiens with Britain (1802), drafting the Code Napoléon (1804) that remains the foundation of modern French law, and rebuilding the Catholic Church's role in French public life through the Concordat of 1801.

The Senate had declared him Emperor of the French — Empereur des Français — on 18 May 1804, six months earlier. The coronation in Notre-Dame on 2 December was the ceremonial confirmation.

Why the Pope came to Paris

Napoleon needed the Pope's blessing for political legitimacy. He did not need the Pope's actual coronation.

Pope Pius VII, age 62, travelled the 1 600 kilometres from Rome to Paris by carriage in November 1804 in the genuine belief that he would personally crown Napoleon, as Pope Leo III had personally crowned Charlemagne in Rome on Christmas Day 800. The two events would mirror each other across a millennium, restoring the medieval idea of the Holy Roman Emperor with the Pope as the kingmaker.

This was not Napoleon's plan.

At the critical moment in the ceremony, after the Pope had blessed the crown, Napoleon took the gold laurel wreath from the Pope's hands and raised it to his own head. He crowned himself. Then he turned and crowned his wife Joséphine.

The Pope, watching from his throne, made no protest in the moment. He later wrote that Napoleon had "stolen the gesture".

A painting that wasn't quite the moment

The most famous record of the coronation is the enormous canvas by Jacques-Louis David — 6.21 metres tall, 9.79 metres wide — that hangs today in the Louvre.

David was officially commissioned and present at the ceremony, with a specially built sketching box on the south wall of the cathedral. He spent three years painting the canvas (1805–1807).

But David — Napoleon's chief artistic propagandist — chose not to depict the moment of Napoleon's self-coronation. Instead he painted the moment a second later, when Napoleon was already crowned and was crowning Joséphine. In David's version, the controversial self-crowning gesture has been removed entirely.

The Pope, who in real life had been a passive observer, is shown in the painting raising his right hand in a gesture of blessing — a gesture he did not actually make. Napoleon personally instructed David to add it.

There are several other deliberate alterations. Napoleon's mother Maria Letizia Ramolino, who had refused to attend the ceremony out of dislike for Joséphine, is nevertheless depicted seated prominently in the gallery — Napoleon ordered her presence painted in.

Twelve years on the throne

Napoleon ruled France as Emperor for twelve years before his first abdication on 6 April 1814 after the Allied capture of Paris.

His Hundred Days return from exile in Elba (March to June 1815) ended at the Battle of Waterloo. He was then exiled to Saint Helena in the south Atlantic, where he died on 5 May 1821, age 51, probably of stomach cancer.

The coronation regalia survived. The Carolingian-style gold laurel wreath is in the Musée du Louvre. The grand manteau impérial with the embroidered gold bees is at the Château de Fontainebleau. The crown of Joséphine was broken up by her son-in-law Louis-Napoleon (later Napoleon III) and the diamonds remounted.

The political legacy of the coronation is much larger. By taking the crown from the Pope's hands, Napoleon broke a thousand-year European tradition that earthly power required papal blessing. No European monarch since has been crowned by a Pope. The modern doctrine that secular and religious authority are separate has many roots, but Notre-Dame on 2 December 1804 is one of them.