Divorce Papers and Sauce-Stained Sleeves Reveal the Personal Side of Napoleon’s Rise and Fall
More than 100 objects connected to the French emperor just sold at auction. The collection sheds light on the man and the myth in stunningly intimate detail
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A trove of objects that portray Napoleon Bonaparte at his most powerful—and his most personal—sold for a whopping total of nearly $10 million at auction.
An iconic portrait of the French emperor at his opulent coronation and documents relating to his marriage and divorce from Joséphine de Beauharnais are among the more than 100 objects sold at Sotheby’s Paris from the collection of Pierre-Jean Chalençon, a devoted collector who describes himself as “Napoleon’s press officer” and reportedly went into debt to finance his purchases, per the London Times’ Adam Sage.
“From majestic emblems of imperial power to deeply personal mementos, this collection brings to life the extraordinary complexity of Napoleon’s legacy—his vision, his ambition and his enduring mystique,” Marine de Cenival, the head of the sale at Sotheby’s, says in a statement. “Few collections have succeeded so well in capturing both the myth and the man.”
Quick fact: Napoleon at auction
Just last month, an ornately decorated sword commissioned by Napoleon in 1802 sold at the auction house Hôtel Drouot for more than $5 million.
Observers, fans and critics of Napoleon have long tried to reconcile a larger-than-life figure with his complex personal life. Ridley Scott’s 2023 film Napoleon tracks the emperor’s rise and fall through his relationship to his first wife. A Napoleon-idolizing character in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace meets his hero while laid up in the hospital, only to discover that “at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature,” nothing like the imperial genius he’d once imagined.
Chalençon’s collection offered a range of perspectives on Napoleon. The most expensive object in the sale—which sold for around $1 million, 20 times its estimate, per Artnet’s Min Chen—was Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps at the Great St. Bernard Pass, modeled after Jacques-Louis David’s iconic 1801 painting. This Napoleon is headstrong, defiant and victorious.
A much different Napoleon is on view in a portrait of a fallen emperor, or in a codicil to his first will. Napoleon addressed the document to Henri-Gatien Bertrand, a loyal general who followed the emperor to his final exile on the island of St. Helena. “You will keep my silverware, my arms, my porcelain, my books with my coat of arms brought here for my son and anything else you may think will be useful to him one day,” he wrote, signing it with a simple “Nap.” It sold for around $565,000.
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“These are not just museum pieces,” Louis-Xavier Joseph, a senior director at Sotheby’s, tells the Associated Press’ Thomas Adamson and Jeffrey Schaeffer. “They’re fragments of a life that changed history. You can literally hold a piece of Napoleon’s world in your hand.”
Successful bidders have earned the privilege of holding a gold and ebony seal that was allegedly looted from Napoleon’s abandoned carriage following defeat at the Battle of Waterloo; a cotton scarf the exiled emperor tied around his head, as seen in a painting of Napoleon dictating his memoirs; a battered bicorne hat; or a sleeve from his First Consul’s coat, removed and kept by a tailor after a servant spilled sauce on it.
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Prior to the auction, highlights went on display in an exhibition created by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, a designer known for his collaborations with Madonna and Pope John Paul II. The staging was “an immersive experience designed to engage all the visitor’s senses,” per Sotheby’s.
It included a gilded imperial eagle, a porcelain bust of Napoleon wearing a gold laurel crown and the sword used during his coronation, complete with a red velvet and gold scabbard.
“I wanted to electrify history,” Castelbajac tells the AP. “This isn’t a mausoleum. It’s a pop culture installation. Today’s collectors buy a Napoleon artifact the way they’d buy a guitar from Jimi Hendrix. They want a cabinet of curiosities.”
