From exile to asylum, Napoleon’s fools

By Marie-Béatrice Baudet

Posted today at 03:19

No one can resist Napoleon’s madness, not even the very rigorous Army Museum. In the official catalog of the exhibition “Napoleon is no longer”, offered until October 31, at the Invalides, to honor the bicentenary of the Emperor’s death on Saint Helena on May 5, 1821, it is a rather unusual, even irreverent postcard. Created by Bébert Plonk & Replonk, two Swiss artists virtuosos of the absurd, the image presents His Majesty in a frock coat, haughty eyes and his hand in the waistcoat, insolently wearing a funnel.

A provocation? No, ” An evidence “, assumes Emilie Robbe, chief heritage curator and member of the imperial exhibition commission. “The memorial journey that we have designed is interested in imaginary representations of Bonaparte after his disappearance. Only the English spontaneously think of the “Corsican ogre”. On the other hand, who has never heard that all crazy people think they are Napoleon? This archetype has survived the ages. “ The Emperor does better than Jesus, Joan of Arc or Louis XIV: “He is by far the most popular delirious figure”, confirms historian Laure Murat, author of The man who thought he was Napoleon (Gallimard, 2011, Femina essay prize).

Read also “The Man who took himself for Napoleon”, by Laure Murat: History in delirium

Hergé was not mistaken, who also inscribes the hallucinated doubles of the prestigious conqueror in the pantheon of the eccentric. In Pharaoh’s Cigars, published in 1955, Tintin accompanies the explorer Philemon Siclone who went in search of the burial place of the illustrious Kih-Oskh. Catastrophe! The tomb serves as a den for dangerous drug traffickers. Poisoned with the juice of rajaïdjah which drives mad, Siclone is interned in an asylum where he crosses a boarder, cocked hat on the head and hand in the waistcoat, astride an Egyptian sporting a flowerpot as a hat.

“Think first about your silhouette”

Morris and Goscinny also gave in to temptation. In 1976, the designer and the screenwriter published a delicious “Lucky Luke” entitled Emperor Smith. Breeder in Grass Town, a town in the Old West where strangers are hung ” at any time “, Dean Smith got so rich that he lost his mind. Self-proclaimed Smith Ier, Emperor of the United States, the plump little man calls himself “sire” and takes pleasure in seeing his grunts, former cowboys who prefer to be drafted into the Grand Army rather than chase cows all their lives. . Blown away by the marksmanship of Lucky Luke, Smith Ier will make him Grand Officer of the Order of the Golden Bison, Marshal of the Empire, Prince of Rio Grande and Duke of Dallas. Obviously, Goscinny had a great time.

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