Roman Republicans, fasces and festivals: the French occupation of Rome, 1798-99, from the archives of the Museo Napoleonico

Apollo, Jan, 2004 by Eleanor Tollfree

[FIGURES 20&21 OMITTED]

The present article is based on research undertaken for my doctoral dissertation, Napoleon and the 'New Rome': Rebuilding Imperial Rome in Late Eighteenth--and Early Nineteenth-Century Paris, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bristol, 1999. I am very grateful to the British Academy, the University of Bristol GNS Architectural History Fund and the British School at Rome for funding my research. I would particularly like to thank Giulia Gorgone for her advice over certain details in this article, and for kindly allowing me to reproduce items in the collection at the Museo Napoleonico. I am grateful to Ed Lilley, Catharine Edwards, Michael Liversidge, Clare Hornsby and Frank Salmon for all their help with my research. I would also like to thank Rosalind Savill, Jeremy Warren and Peter Hughes for their recent encouragement of my work, and Carol Richardson for valiantly breaking off from her own research in Rome to take some last photographs for me.

(1) From the wealth of material on the French Revolution, see William Doyle (ed.), The Oxford History of the French Revolution, Oxford, 1989, and Francois Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1814, Oxford, 1996.

(2) In 1785, for example, they stamped their feet and blew whistles in protest at the awards made for that year's Grand Prix, since they felt that Pierre Fontaine should have been awarded the first, not the second prize. The royal minister acting as director general of the Academie threatened to close the school if there were any further disturbances (see Henry Lemonnier (ed.), Proces-versaux de l'Academie Royale d'Architecture, 1671-1793, vol. IX, Paris, 1926, pp. 165-68). Curiously Fontaine was actually refused the first prize on the grounds that his design was too well drawn (Anatole Montaiglon and Jules Guiffrey (eds.), Correspondance des Directeurs de l'Academie de France a Rome, 1666-1804, vol. XV, Paris, 1906, pp. 104-105).

(3) For a more detailed consideration of the history, of the Academies during the Revolution see David Van Zanten (ed.), Donald Drew Egbert, The Beaux-Arts Tradition in French Architecture, Princeton, 1980, pp. 28-31, and Richard Chafee, 'The Teaching of Architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts', in Arthur Drexler et al. (eds.), The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, London, 1977, pp. 65-77, which includes some useful quotations from primary sources concerning the Academies and the changes made to them during this period. On David and the arts during the Revolution, see Philippe Bordes and Regis Michael (eds.), Aux armes et aux arts! Les arts de la Revolution, Paris, 1988, and Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Revolution, Chicago and London, 1987.

(4) It is not known whether the state paid for this education, or whether Leroy and Vaudoyer met the expenses themselves until the autumn of 1795 (see Chafee, op. cit., p. 70). Certainly both Leroy and Vaudoyer provided books from their own libraries as prizes. Once Leroy was appointed Professor of the History of Architecture at the new school founded by the Convention in October 1795, he also paid for medals, most bearing a portrait of Bonaparte, as prizes (see Egbert, op. cit., pp. 37, 39).