Of the 100 days, despite the defeat at Waterloo, Stendhal said it was “The most romantic and beautiful enterprise of modern times”. Romanesque, like this Napoleon road which stretches from Golfe-Juan (Alpes-Maritimes) to Grenoble over more than 300 kilometers of grandiose landscapes. While we celebrate in 2021 the bicentenary of the death of the emperor, this tourist route imagined in the 1930s in full boom of the car and abandoned since in favor of the highways in a straight line, perfectly fits the taste of travelers for the slowness, the laces and the small stopover villages.
1er March 1815, arriving by boat from Elba Island, Napoleon wanted to reach Paris as quickly as possible by avoiding the Rhône valley, reputed to be royalist and better defended. He therefore chooses to “cut” through the Nice hinterland, despite the relief. The villages and towns of the early 19th centurye have become 42 municipalities, grouped into four departments and two regions. Three different “countries” in reality: after the Côte d’Azur, where the influence of Nice extends to Séranon (Alpes-Maritimes), the road crosses Haute-Provence between Castellane and Sisteron (Alpes-de-Haute- Provence), before continuing in the Alps to Grenoble.
From the death mask of the emperor kept at the Massena Museum in Nice, through the mosaic plaque on the promenade of Golfe-Juan, in front of the brewery of L’Escale, which proclaims “Here Napoleon landed in 1815”, and the rue du Bivouac-Napoléon in Cannes, less than 100 meters from the Palais des Festivals, we understand from the start that the imperial prism can give visions: “it” is everywhere!
Do you want to make a futile stop in Grasse by visiting the factory-museum of the perfumer Galimard (without the second “l” of the famous publisher)? The lesson ends with the discovery of the house’s latest success: Napoleon 1815, a perfume for men created on the occasion of the bicentenary of the emperor’s passage to Grasse.
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In Saint-Vallier-de-Thiey, a column was placed at the place where Napoleon stopped ” 17 hours “. We must bow: the cult of the emperor is a tangible reality made up of stelae, commemorative plaques, statues or the names of streets, bars, hotels and restaurants. The inscriptions can be trivial: in Digne, a house indicates that there “Stayed from noon to three o’clock on March 4, 1815”, while at Volonne a pinion tells: “Here, on March 5, 1815, Napoleon passed and pissed. “ Elsewhere it is a question of knowing what he ate, here chicken, there eggs.
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