#Cardinal Joseph Fesch

[microcosme11]

Check, Napoleon and the Cardinal by Jehan-Georges Vibert.

At the Haggin Museum, “The Jewel of Stockton” CA.

The famous general, who wears the uniform of the Grenadier of the Foot Guard, has just been placed in check by his wily uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch.

[shannonselin]

Coronation of Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of Empress Josephine in Notre Dame Cathedral of Paris, December 2, 1804, by Jacques-Louis David and Georges Rouget, 1805-1807

Napoleon was crowned Emperor of the French on December 2, 1804 at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Things did not go smoothly.

The Pope (Pius VII) was wary of Napoleon and reluctant to go to France in the absence of some concessions for the Catholic church, which had been decimated during the French Revolution. Napoleon begged, threatened and bargained, using his uncle Cardinal Joseph Fesch as an intermediary. Pius finally agreed.

The Bonaparte family disliked Napoleon’s wife Josephine and objected to her being crowned Empress. When Napoleon told his sisters Elisa, Pauline and Caroline that he expected them to carry Josephine’s massive velvet train in the coronation ceremony, they made a scene and refused. Napoleon’s brother Joseph sided with his sisters and protested to Napoleon on their behalf. Napoleon was furious and threatened them all with loss of titles and wealth. The sisters fell into line. But they sulked during the ceremony and at one point may have pulled back on the train, preventing Josephine from moving forward.

Instead of remaining in Paris for the coronation, Napoleon’s mother Letizia headed to Rome to be with Napoleon’s brother Lucien, whom Napoleon had exiled for marrying against his wishes. Napoleon instructed Jacques-Louis David to insert her in his coronation painting anyhow.

The weather was bad, no one showed up to organize the crowd, the procession started late, the tired and hungry spectators couldn’t see the ceremony, Josephine stumbled going up the steps, etc. For details, see “The Coronation of Napoleon.”

[napoleondidthat]

The Grand Chaplain, Joseph Fesch, Cardinal and Prince of France

The Grand Chaplin Joseph Fesch, Cardinal and Prince of France

"The Grand Chaplain...is the Bishop of the Court wherever it may be. He supervises everything related to divine service. He administers the sacraments to the Emperor and to the children of the Imperial Family, and baptizes and marries them in the presence of the Emperor. He also baptizes the Emperor's prayers and at the imperial feasts, saying the blessing and grace."

Joseph Fesch was the younger half-brother of Laetitis Ramolino-Bonaparte, Napoleon's mother. The son of a Swiss officer in the service of the republic of Genoa, he was ordained in 1785 after studying at the seminary of Aix. As a priest in Ajaccio, he lived closed to his widowed half-sister and her children, whom he saw growing up. Expelled from Corsica in 1793, the Bonapartes settled in Toulon and Fesch enlisted in the armies of the republic. Appointed commissary of war, he became responsible for provisioning  the troops in Lombardy under the Directory. When Bonaparte became head of state in 1799, Fesch was able to resume his clerical vocation and thereafter rose to great prominsence.  His particpation in the negotiations for the signing of the Concordat in 1801 earned him the archbishopric of Lyon and the primacy of Gaul, the supreme head of the heiarchy of French prelates. In 1803, he was sent as ambassador to Rome, where he received his cardinal's biretta and in 1804 was entrusted with a major negotiation on behalf of his nephew the emperor: to induce Pope Pius VII to travel to Paris for Napoleon's coronation. During the early years of the Empire, Fesch appointed Grand Chamberlin in July 1804, received various honours, positions at court and diplomatic missions to Rome. As a member of the Imperial Family, he was made a prince of France in 1807.

His portrait by Meynier, commissioned in the summer of 1806, is one of a series of full-length portraits of the Grand Officers of the Imperial Household originally executed for a gallery in the Chateau de Fontainebleau and ultimately moved to the Tuileries then to Compiegne.

Here, the artist repeats the pose and compostion of the famous portrait of Bossuet by Rigaud, showing his subject as a successor to the great prelate of the court of Louis XIV. Unlike the other Grand Officers, the Grand Chaplain was not obliged to wear any prescribed dress other than the cardinal's crimson vestment: holding his biretta in one hand, he is also wearing the sashes of the Leigon of Honour and the insignia of the Golden Fleece.

Fesch wished to be depicted as an active contributor to the religious policy of the Empire. He is proudly pointing to copy of the Catholic catechism of the Empire, for which he wrote some of the articles and obtained the approval of the Holy See.  The only discreet reference to the Imperial Household may be on the table beside him; the bees embroidered on a heavy tablecloth of green velvet, the colour of the imperial livery. Meynier's painting is the most political picture of the cardinal, in contrast to other portraits, such as the one at the Chateau de Fontainbleau, in which the artist celebrates Fesch the connoisseur (the cardinal was undoubtedly one of the most important collectors of the entire nineteenth century).

Throughout Napoleon's reign, there were frequent periods of friction in the relationship between uncle and nephew, caused by the Grand Chaplain's refusal to condone the Emperor's treatment of Pope Pius VII after 1808. The image painted by Meynier in 1806, showing Fesch as of Napoleon's inner circle in terms of policy, hides what was in fact increasingly open hostility. Fesch even lost his position for some months in 1809, and although he agreed to perform the marriage of Napoleon and Marie-Louise (April 2, 1810) and the baptism of the King of Rome (June 9, 1811) he refused the archbishopric of Paris. By this time, the Emperor was in open conflict with the pope, who had been arrested in 1809 when the Papal States were annexed to the Empire. Appointed to preside over the national council of France in 1811, which was convoked to find a solution to the institutional crisis caused be the arrest of the pope, Fesch defended the pointiff. The relationship between the Emperor and his uncle is a fascinating subject: it seems to have been impossible to reconcile the viewpoints of an authoritarian sovereign and an increasingly ultramontane prelate, as well as the emotional strain within a complex family clan. In March 1812, Napoleon exiled the archbishop to his diocese in Lyon. After the fall of the Empire, Fesch made his way to Rome, where the pope welcomed him warmly, and with him other members of the Bonaparte family, most notably Madame Mere. It was Fesch who in May 1821 first learned of Napoleon's death and informed his half-sister. He died in 1839, a recipient of many honours and surrounded by his immense collection of art.

Napoleon The Imperial Household, Montreal Museum of the Arts, page 45.

Meyiner:

Anonymous: Chateau de Fontainbleau painting:

[handfuloftime]

In 1806, Vivant Denon, the director of the Louvre, commissioned two series of portraits of state officials to be displayed in the imperial palaces. One set, intended for Fontainebleau, depicted the six grand officers of the Maison impériale in court dress. 

Grand chambellan: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, Prince de Bénévent - Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, 1807 (Musée Carnavalet)

Grand veneur: Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Prince de Neufchâtel et Wagram, maréchal de France - Jacques Augustin Catherine Pijou, 1808 (Palais de Versailles)

Grand écuyer: Armand de Caulaincourt, duc de VIcence, en habit de Grand écuyer - Féréol Bonnemaison, 1806 (private collection)

Grand maréchal: Maréchal Duroc, duc de Frioul, Grand Maréchal du palais de S.M. l’Empéreur Napoléon Ier - Antoine-Jean Gros, 1805 (Musée de beaux-arts de Nancy)

Grand aumonier: Joseph Fesch, cardinal - Charles Meynier, 1806 (Palais de Versailles)

Grand maître des cérémonies: Louis-Philippe de Ségur - Artist Unknown (Palais de Versailles) [Denon commissioned the official portrait of Ségur from Marie-Guillemine Benoist, but I can’t find it online anywhere (maybe it’s in a private collection?), so here’s another portrait of Ségur instead.]

[josefavomjaaga]

Metternich on Napoleon’s family

This is taken from “Mémoires, documents et écrits divers”, Vol. 1:

Napoleon had a great weakness for his family. There is no doubt that many of the sovereign' s moves were due to the desires of his brothers and sisters.

Not all members of this too large family were equally ambitious, however. Napoleon's mother loved only money. Neither her mind nor her tastes led her towards social advancement. She had an immense income, and, without her son's precise orders, she would have thought only of investing her funds. When her children took the liberty of ridiculing her extreme thriftiness, she said to them: "You don't know what you are doing; the world does not always go in the same direction, and if you all fall on my hands again, you will be grateful for what I am doing today.

In 1814 Madame Lætitia had amassed a large sum of cash, which she had buried in a hiding place covered by the portrait of her late husband. The fact, and the place where the treasure was deposited, were denounced to Napoleon, who went to his mother and had the money removed. She may have taken with her from France a fortune of about six million francs.

I never knew either Joseph or Lucien Bonaparte personally, so I cannot express an opinion on their behalf. Napoleon had a favourable opinion of Lucien's mind, but he never ceased to accuse him of excessive and misguided ambition.

In an interview which Lucien had with his brother in Milan, he offered as a token of reconciliation a declaration by his wife giving, of her own free will, the assurance that she did not wish to impede her husband's fortune. The Emperor, on leaving one of their conferences, said to the people gathered in his anteroom: "Lucien does not want to give up his little rascality; he wants to prove to me that he has a hard head, I will prove to him that I have a harder head than he has. - And there was no further question of mending fences from then on. It is indeed known that in consenting to leave his wife he insisted on the recognition of his children. His conduct in 1815 provided the true measure of the severity of his republican principles.

Napoleon has often depicted Joseph to me as a gentle man of character and spirit, but incapable of undertaking a career which would require vigour.

Louis was placed in the family like an outsider. Injustice alone could have found fault with his moral character.

Jerome was gifted with a lot of spirit. The depravity of his morals, an exalted vanity and his mania for imitating his brother in every way, covered him with ridicule.

Two of Napoleon's sisters were remarkable for their wit, the third for her great beauty. Elisa, the eldest of the sisters and at the same time older than Napoleon, had a male spirit, and in character as well as in figure a great resemblance to her brother. Ambition was her dominant passion, and had not the low extraction of her husband, Baciocchi, and the latter's complete lack of intellectual faculties been an obstacle to it, there can be no doubt that this branch of the family would have risen to a high fortune. Of the three sisters, this was nevertheless the one who had the least power over Napoleon, who feared her and knew how to resist her.

Caroline combined a lovely appearance with an uncommon spirit. She had studied her brother's character thoroughly and was under no illusion as to any of his faults, nor as to the risks which his fortune ran as a result of his excessive ambition and domineering spirit; she also knew perfectly well the weak sides of her husband, and she would have led him, if he could have been led.

Aww, Clemens. Still fuming over 1814/5, are we?

Murat was only a soldier, but a soldier of the Revolution and endowed with a certain instinct for domination which I have always seen as the prerogative of the Jacobins. Caroline had great power over her brother's mind, and it was she who held the family together. Her ambition was to create for herself and her family an existence placed as far as possible beyond the reach of Napoleon, and even beyond the chances of his fortune, a fortune which she judged to be compromised by every excess arising from his insatiable lust.

Pauline was as beautiful as it is possible to be; she was in love with herself, and her sole occupation was pleasure. Of an affable character, gifted with an extreme benevolence, Napoleon devoted to her a feeling different from that which he bore to his other parents. He cited her as a unique example in the family. Pauline," he often told me, "never asks me for anything. The Princess Borghese, for her part, used to say, "I do not like crowns; if I had wanted them, I would have had them; but I have given up the taste for them to my relatives." She had a veneration for Napoleon which approached worship.

Josephine had exercised a long reign over Napoleon; she was gifted with a benevolent character and a peculiar social touch. Her mind was not great, but it followed a good direction. Her excessive taste for spending often led to painful explanations between her and her husband. It would be unfair to put any of the failings caused by Napoleon's ambition on her shoulders. If she had been able to do so, she would undoubtedly have stopped the wagon onto which, however, she had contributed directly, in the beginning of his fortune, to place the future Emperor.

Gifted with more wit and a far greater measure of ambition, his daughter Hortense never ceased to play a part in Napoleon's career. He loved her, and his condescensions for her were the cause of perpetual and active jealousies between her and her sisters-in-law. More than one friction in Napoleon's personal situation and even in the course of business was due to this cause.

Cardinal Fesch was a singular compound of bigotry and ambition. A devotee in good faith, he was not far from seeing in Napoleon an instrument of heaven and an almost supernatural being. He believed his reign to be written in the book of fate and regarded his deviations as decrees of God.

Napoleon knew all the individualities of his family, and he did not conceal from himself the fault he had committed in abandoning himself to the spirit of domination and the insatiable greed of some of them.

He said to me one day, in 1810, on the occasion of a long interview in which he had just told me the story of his life: "I have obscured and hindered my career by having placed my relatives on thrones. One learns by walking, and I see today how wise and necessary is the fundamental principle of the ancient monarchies, to keep the princes of the ruling house in great and perpetual dependence on the throne. My relatives have done me much more harm than I have done them good, and if I had to do it all over again, my brothers and sisters would have palaces in Paris and a few millions to spend in idleness. The fine arts and charity would have been their domain, and not kingdoms, which some do not know how to run, and in which others compromise me by parodying me.

Napoleon was careful to place a man of confidence with each of his brothers and relatives. The fortune of M. Decazes dated from the position he held as secretary of the commands of Madame Laetitia.

There’s so much I would love to answer to that, dear Metternich ... But mostly I find it rather funny to hear Napoleon go all judgemental over other people’s ambitions. Particularly as he had to coerce both Joseph and Louis to even accept their crowns, and as he did not even succeed with Lucien.

Also of note: Both of Napoleon’s adopted children, Eugène among them, are not even listed as “family” here.

@joachimnapoleon: I think the first two volumes of Metternich’s published papers might be of real interest to you!

Clemens Wenzel Lothar Prince de Metternich: “Mémoires, documents et écrits divers”

Volume 1

Volume 2

[jacquemard]

Cardinal Joseph Fesch

[napoleondidthat]

Famille Napoléon-Bonaparte

[josefavomjaaga]

Helfert, Joachim Murat, Chapter 3, Part 3

A brief passage, wrapping up chapter 3 with some more sad personal stuff between Murat and Caroline.

On March 16, all was prepared for the King's departure to the army. He sent Caroline a very cordial and affectionate letter, informing her of this and asking her to take up the reins of government in his absence. She replied in the negative: "her health did not permit her to engage in business; she would retire to Portici and keep away from everything". Mosbourg, the present secretary of state, was supposed to deliver the letter to the king, but he did not have the courage to do so and handed it to the Duke of Gallo, who was to bring it to Joachim. Thus the King departed on the 17th at one o'clock in the afternoon, and no provision was made for the highest administration of the affairs of state. Indeed, when the Minister of Police, the Prefect of Police of Naples, and General Manhės came to the Queen the same evening on the King's orders to report to her on the day's events and receipts, she told them she would not interfere in anything and sent them home without listening [Footnote]. As time went by, however, she must have reconsidered the matter, because too much was at stake to leave things to their own devices out of fundamental defiance, and so within a short time we find her in the position of a wise and prudent regent, as she usually was when her husband was away.

In the capital, news of the king's departure for the army caused nameless consternation. All those who were attached to his reign and depended on it saw him doomed, and his kingdom with him. The organs of government and the "Monitore delle due Sicilie" omitted nothing to maintain in the minds of the public the belief it was all done in agreement with Austria, which somewhat calmed the minds of the credulous at first. They presented the matter as if the Viennese Cabinet were on the best of terms with Napoleon, reported on the latter's victorious advance on Paris, on the supporters gathering around him and increasing in number and prestige every day; four French marshals were already in his entourage, etc. This pretended friendship between Napoleon and Napoleon was not only a sign of friendship, it was also a sign of the new order. Of course, this pretended friendship between Napoleon and Emperor Francis was not quite in keeping with the fact that Madame Mère and Princess Pauline, when they disembarked from Elba a few days after Napoleon's departure, were treated like prisoners at Viareggio in Lucchese on the orders of the Austrian military commander and placed under surveillance, until they were finally released and allowed to travel to Naples, where Cardinal Fesch soon joined them. Still other terrible omens occurred. The English, hitherto so numerous in the city and its environs, prepared themselves for an accelerated departure. All business came to a standstill; oil, grain and other products of the soil found no buyers; there was almost no more trade. Money became scarcer from one day to the next; everyone sought to hide his savings somewhere, which understandably had a highly detrimental effect on public credit. The Treasury notes, the redemption of which the Minister of Finance had to postpone until later months, sank ever lower in price. The suppliers to the government no longer gave anything in return for promises and fine words, and demanded payment in cash if anything was wanted from them. This extended to the daily needs of the court, where the payment of bills had been three months behind. The Office of the Court Marshal, which had 14 carlins in its coffers, was thus in the greatest embarrassment and knew no remedy. The public talked of new taxes, while the civil servants were told that their salaries would have to be withheld for the time being. The discontent spread so rapidly, the lower classes of the population became so familiar with the idea of Ferdinand's return that there might have been an outbreak of popular rage as early as March, had not the name of the dreadful Manhès struck terror into the limbs of all ...

Count Mier still remained in Naples during these days. It was not until the morning of April 3 that he received a hand-bill from the queen, informing him that the hostilities had begun and that she had orders to have his passports handed to him. He then officially requested them from the Duke of Carignano and resigned from his post, which he had held for more than four and a half years as Austria's representative, but at the same time as a friend, indeed in many cases as a confidant of the Murat royal couple. Mier's letter of dismissal from the Viennese State Chancellery did not arrive until two days later, on April 5, and therefore found him already on his way home; on the same day, in Vienna, Prince Cariati received his passports.

[Footnote]: Mier No. 27, PS. 1 at 27 of March 16, No. 28 of March 17, 1814. If anyone wishes to believe that the queen said: "Is not this peasant of Cahors content to sit on the most beautiful throne in Italy? No, he wants the whole peninsula!"... I can no more prevent him from doing so than I can prevent anyone who, with Colletta VII 39, wants to believe that the difference of opinion between Joachim and Caroline was a set-up between them. According to our envoy's account, Joachim left for the army without saying goodbye to his wife in person, for which a motive could only be found in the fact that he wanted to avoid her renewed representations and warnings. That would go beyond a mere game!

End of Chapter 3.

I keep making fun of our Bavarian king Max Joseph who never dared to confront the females in his family either and always resorted to sending them letters whenever he had to tell them something unpleasant. But this is not funny. And the fact Murat avoided Caroline seems to indicate that at some level, he may have known he was making a mistake.

[shannonselin]

3 January 1763: Birth in Ajaccio, Corsica of Napoleon’s art-collecting uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch

Portrait by Jules Pasqualini