The Arts under Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1769, a child of the Enlightenment. In his youth, he was acquainted with a variety of current political beliefs, invariably backed by lessons from Greco-Roman history. At age thirty-three, having won immense popularity through the successes of his troops, he forged those lessons into a singular conclusion by crowning himself Emperor of the French.

In his rise to power, he marshaled support by calculating the historical sensibilities and the store of visual references held in common by his contemporaries. The people of his time were convinced alike by revolutionary theories and by the saving powers, political as well as artistic, of classical antiquity. Throughout the revolutionary period in France, the imitation of austere Roman republican models was accounted a positive virtue, in society and in design. [This book was originally published in 1978 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]