The figure of Napoleon puts us in a quandary from the very outset: not just for the légende and for his excessive fame, of a kind that is entirely new and no longer Plutarchan, but because at a certain point we are compelled to recognize that, in the drama that is taking shape, he is indeed the historical incarnation of the principle of will, of the grand illusion that everything can be built up from zero. That zero point is the Revolution, and the Will is the Subject who speaks after it. Talleyrand is the other pole: from the very beginning he had recognized the mechanism of the unprecedented historical moment as something that was acting by itself. He concealed himself within it, content to tighten or loosen a screw here or there. Small “finishing touches” in which he recognized the last kind of action that was still possible. Chateaubriand, convinced that he was being highly critical, wrote of Talleyrand: “He put his signature to events, he wasn’t doing them.”⁹⁵ This urge to “do,” which is part of the more bombastic legacy of the nineteenth century, is something that Chateaubriand shares with his detested Napoleon. As for Talleyrand, it is certainly true that he claimed at most that he was “putting his signature” to events, but this didn’t make him feel any inferior to someone else who was supposedly “doing them.” Nor did he adapt to that role out of pride, or through calculation, but for reasons of ceremonial expedience, since he was by unquestionable vocation the Grand Chamberlain of history. But that signature, which was indeed a small “finishing touch,” had no lesser weight than other more clamorous deeds, if we view the dusty cloud of events from a certain distance.

Napoleonic pomp, that imperial geometry that sought to divide the land into administrative quadrangles, has a subtle weakness from the very beginning: it is tainted by ghosts of the past. In a painting by Anne-Louis Girodet, the empty spaces of the sky begin to fill with psychic substances that have the face of death; their feet no longer rest on the ground but on the arms and fingers of dismembered souls. This to celebrate The Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for Their Country During the War for Freedom, painted in 1802 (at a cost of 12,000 francs) to decorate the Salon Doré at Malmaison. But François Gérard evoked the same milky, opalescent substances with Ossian’s harp, which ended up once again in the Salon Doré at Malmaison. And Jean-Pierre Franque let the pyramids exude a mist from which once again the ghosts of wide-eyed maidens emerged, barely able to carry the weight of their allegorical duty.