ABSTRACT
We know how it all ends in 1815 with Napoleon’s final crushing defeat by the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. But for the present, let us momentarily push back our horizon of expectations on the inevitable end to this text, shift our gaze toward hazier vistas and focus on the indeterminate moment in the fall of 1799 when the revolutionary calendar was in full swing, the rumored failures of the Egyptian campaign shrouded in mist, and the immediate consequences of Napoleon’s landing at Fréjus still unclear. For it is in this vague political context at the end of the Directory period that Percier and Fontaine first encountered the military general and his wife Josephine, when they asked the architects to fix Malmaison, a dilapidated country château on the northwest outskirts of Paris that the couple had managed to acquire in April 1799 through a series of difficult negotiations with the rich financier Jacques-Jean Le Couteulx du Molay and his wife. Intended as a weekend country house, Malmaison was purchased on the eve of Napoleon’s military coup on 18 Brumaire, an event that catapulted him from the ranks of the army into the exalted position of First Consul. The constantly shifting political terrain surrounding Percier and Fontaine’s newly titled patron forced the architects to relinquish early plans for the construction of a well-ordered Italianate villa and rely instead on a series of intermediary repairs and renovations at the château from 1800 to 1802, provisional measures encapsulated in their adoption of the tent for the salle du conseil, or council room. Featured in plate 55 of the Recueil de décorations intérieures and among the architects’ most memorable decoration projects, Percier and Fontaine claimed to have assembled it in the astonishingly short interval of 10 days (Plate 8). Adopted at the outset as a temporary solution to the structural and economic problems faced by the architects in their first major commission for the First Consul, the tent inadvertently became a permanent fixture of the pageantry of military life in France after Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor of the French in 1804, as he continually sought to strengthen his claims to the (newly constructed) throne by staging spectacles of imperial hierarchy and military power. Yet this structure remained an ambiguous architectural form. It was neither quite a relic of the past nor a sign of the future, in its oscillating associations with the relentless dynamism of military conquest, the distant nomadism of primitive cultures, and the rituals of female seduction in the boudoir.
