Guns for the King of Rome
“For the ‘great’ man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a ‘great’ man can be blamed.”
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
“I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door . . . I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side . . . and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder, known as ‘Napoleon the Great.’”
— Robert Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child
Napoleon last saw his son François in the middle of the night on Jan. 24, 1814.
It was a fraught goodbye; before dawn the emperor would leave the Château de SaintCloud to head north to join his army in engaging the invading allies of the Sixth Coalition—armies from Great Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal. The emperor knew he might never return to Paris, to his family and heir.
So maybe he decided to give François the gift he’d commissioned for the boy’s third birthday early. Poetry compels us to believe this, for otherwise it seems likely the little King of Rome never saw the adorable pair of dueling pistols his father had made for him.
They were built by Jean Le Page, gunsmith to ill-fated Bourbon King Louis XVI, but no royalist. When the Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789, Le Page had his factory hand out muskets and sabers to the working-class crowds.
Napoleon gave him a lot of work because he liked to reward his officers who performed valiantly in battle with sets of dueling pistols and tools. After Napoleon was exiled to Elba, Le Page began providing bespoke arms for new King Louis XVIII.
(As the luxury brand Fauré Le Page, a small leather goods company that produces handbags, wallets, luggage and accessories, the firm survives. Its signature product is a small clutch bag shaped like a holster, and its motto is Armé pour séduire —“armed for seduction.”)
Le Page spared no expense in crafting the ornate weapons. He fitted blued steel in walnut upon which he emblazoned a capital N, the emperor’s personal cipher. On the barrels he placed an imperial eagle; elsewhere he found space for a thunderbolt and a bee.
He inlaid in gold the Italian Iron Crown because the King of Rome—Napoleon called his son that to assert the boy’s claim, through his mother’s family, to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire— had been proclaimed a Grand Cross Knight at his birth.
Finally, in Gothic gilt lettering he branded each pistol Le Page à Paris/Arq.er de L’Empereur.
On top of the presentation box, in a mother of pearl roundel, Le Page engraved a scene in the style of Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s painting Education of Achilles, which depicted the young Greek hero being instructed in archery by the centaur Chiron.
You might wonder what good a pair of dueling pistols, customized to fit a toddler’s tiny hands (one-third scale), would do a 3-year-old boy. This is a good question. It seems that by the time the King of Rome was old enough to take offense, the pistols would be too small for him to employ.
But firearms were one of the things French rulers traditionally gave their young sons, and Napoleon’s worst fear was said to be that his son would fall into the hands of his enemies. He could only arm his child—his dynasty—symbolically.
In any case, if he had them at all, he did not have them for very long, because on April 6, 1814, Napoleon fully abdicated, renouncing not only his own rights to the French throne but also those of his descendants.
Empress Marie Louise took the King of Rome to the Château de Rambouillet outside Paris where they met with her father, Emperor Francis I of Austria, and Emperor Alexander I of Russia. They arranged safe passage for the empress and her son to Austria, where François was re-named Franz. They left most of their possessions, including the little dueling pistols, behind.
By rights, Napoleon’s property became that of restored Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII. But the new king had no desire to associate himself with Napoleonic paraphernalia, and by 1815, you could buy lots of items allegedly associated with Napoleon on the streets of Paris from the emperor’s former servants, friends and royalist supporters allowed to pick through the emperor’s possessions as the spoils of their loyalty.
English naturalist, collector and curator William Bullock likely acquired the guns in January 1816, at a sale held at one of Napoleon’s palaces, probably Château de Saint-Cloud, on a last-minute shopping trip to acquire knickknacks for an exhibition of Napoleon’s gear that Bullock presented in the Egyptian Hall museum he’d built in Piccadilly.
The show ran from January until August, with as many as 10,000 spectators a day pawing Napoleon’s stuff and climbing over his bullet-proof carriage, which had been captured by the Prussians during Napoleon’s definitive Waterloo in 1815. (Napoleon escaped exile in Elba and had to be banished by a Seventh Coalition.)
The pistols later passed into the possession of Anglo-American socialite Cora, Countess of Strafford, upon whom Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes based the character of Cora Crawley (née Levinson), Countess of Grantham, Viscountess Downton. Later the pistols became part of antique firearms connoisseur and author William Keith Neal’s collection, which at the time was the most complete in the world.
After Neal’s death that collection was dispersed, though the wee guns surfaced in 2015, when they were auctioned by Sotheby’s in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Waterloo. They sold for 965,000 pounds ($1.48 million). We can only speculate who would spend that kind of money on imperial folly.
Most of us probably put Napoleon in the same bin as all the other cartoon strongmen; he was short (not really), short-tempered and vain. In many ways, ridiculous.
It is hard for us to admit nuance, and impossible to see the man through a funhouse perspective warped by British propaganda and TV tropes. Napoleon was a tyrant, yet I’m a fan of his Code civil des Français. His constitution abolished hereditary privilege, established freedom of religion and the legal equality of all men.
Imposing an absolute dictatorship, he spread liberal ideals via imperial wars. He clawed back the rights the revolution had given women. He re-instituted slavery in French colonies.
And he gave his son some pistols that he could never shoot.