Much more important, by virtue of its protagonists, its form, and its content, was the Caesarism of Louis-Napoleon, who, to begin with, had himself made Caesar by the coup d’etat of December 2, 1851, but who, even before seizing power and mounting a throne, had defended the Idee Napoleonienne (1840). It plagiarized quite closely the Precis desguerres de Jules Cesar, but in terms that were even clearer: ‘‘the tutelary and democratic power of the plebeian hero who ensured the independence of peoples and was the true representative of our revolution.’’ But the most original feature is certainly the fact that Napoleon III as Emperor signed, wrote (whatever was said about it in 1866), and published in 1865-6 a great Histoire de Jules Cesar, of which the first two volumes stopped at the crossing of the Rubicon, but the sequel was of course intended. It was not, as Merimee, ‘‘the friend of the family,’’ believed and perhaps hoped, a question of reflections expressing the political program and philosophical credo of Louis Napoleon, but of a true work of history, complete and detailed, equipped with the apparatus of proofs and even of scholarly discussions. This book he had conceived and intended, indeed, to claim as his creation. But he needed collaborators, and he did not dream of concealing the fact. He collected, and had collected for him, a mass of dossiers (analyses of ancient texts, summaries of book or articles, etc.) with which friends and various specialists supplied him. Besides Merimee, the Inspector of Historic Monuments and, despite his society successes, a respectable historian of Rome (Essai sur la Guerre sociale), the Emperor benefited from the advice (and the material) furnished by Louis Alfred-Maury (whose interest was in geography and Ancient Gaul), by Victor Duruy, whom he appointed Minister of Public Education, and above all by the learned epigraphist Leon Renier, Librarian of the Sorbonne, member of the Institute since 1856, who since 1852 had been engaged in collecting and publishing the Latin inscriptions of Algeria. After being put in touch with the Emperor by the latter’s foster sister, Mme. Cornu, who was very familiar with academic circles, he was deputed to negotiate in Italy the purchase of the Campana collection. In 1861 Napoleon III created for Renier the first chair of Latin epigraphy in the College de France. In 1862, after meeting in Rome the architect and archaeologist Pietro Rosa, Renier suggested to the Emperor that he buy from the King of Naples the Farnese Gardens on the Palatine and there excavate ‘‘the Palace of the Caesars,’’ schemes with which he would be occupied until 1870. Renier would also be behind the creation by Duruy in 1867 of the llcole Pratique des hautes lltudes, in order to introduce into France a ‘‘training in research’’ in the German style, based on seminars. He would become the first president of the fourth section of this llcole, which was called ‘‘the section of historical and philological sciences.’’ Two other collaborators would play an essential and creative role. A young archaeologist and epigraphist from Baden, Wilhelm Froehner, was recommended by the adoptive aunt of the Emperor, Stephanie de Beauharnais. Arriving in Paris with a scholarship, he was warmly received and appointed as lecteur from 1863 to 1870 by the Emperor; he ended by being named in 1867 deputy conservationist at the Louvre. He remained faithful to the memory of the Emperor after 1870 and left to the Cabinet des Medailles his wonderful collection of small objects and ancient inscriptions. In his case, Napoleon III benefited from pure erudition. But even more important was the collaboration of Major, later Colonel, Eugene Stoffel. A graduate of the Polytechnic, this artillery officer had an interest in the questions of military history and topography that were posed by the identification of the site of Alesia. Napoleon III made him his aide-de-camp and entrusted to him in the end the coordination of the research, all of it original, that he inspired and ordered for the study of Caesar’s operations and battlefields. From 1862 to 1865, he supervised the excavations of Alesia that were directed on the spot, with care and competence, by Victor Perret. Stoffel corrected on many points the map published (prematurely) in 1861 by the ‘‘Commission for the topography of Gaul.’’ He personally extended research to the battlefields of Spain, Italy, Greece and the Balkans, Africa, and Asia. The Emperor, on his advice, had entrusted some projects to young archaeologists from the llcole d’Athenes, Leon Heuzey and Georges Perrot, who were charged, among other things, with transcribing the famous inscription of the Res Gestae of Augustus inscribed, in Latin and in Greek, on the walls of the Temple of Rome and
Augustus at Ancyra. This transcription was communicated to Mommsen and served as a basis for his first edition of 1865. This enterprise of Stoffel and the Emperor extended well beyond Gaul: into Spain, where it inspired the collection of modern ordnance survey maps (of which two plates were offered to the Emperor in 1865); into Egypt, where he obtained from the Khedive Ismael, and entrusted to Mahmoud Bey ‘‘el Falaki’’ (the astronomer), multiple soundings and the diagrams that issued, in 1872, in the celebrated map of ancient Alexandria. Military attache at Berlin from 1866 to 1870, Stoffel would analyze the causes of the Austrian defeat at Sadowa and issue warnings that proved vain. After the war, he remained faithful to the memory of Napoleon III and decided to use the documents and maps already collected for the sequel to Histoire de Jules Cesar, which appeared in two volumes in 1887.
The novelty of the work of Napoleon III and Stoffel consisted in the precision of the chronology, the distances, the stages, the geographical and topographical reports, as opposed to a purely philological military history written by armchair strategists. These books still deserve to be consulted for themselves. But their historiographical legacy, especially for France, is also essential. To start with, the sums dispensed by the Emperor on the civil list, essentially for excavations in France and abroad and for the reports, were estimated (in 1868) at 8 million gold francs. But to that must be added the foundation of museums (that of National Antiquities at Saint-Germain among others), and the purchase or publication of books (for example, the Oeuvres completes of Borghesi). There was also the founding of new chairs or posts. It is considerable and almost without equal.
But all that was far from being neutral, epistemologically or politically. The Caesar of Napoleon III and of Stoffel is certainly that of Napoleon I and the Idee napoleo-nienne. But with a notable twist: starting from their research on Caesar, they both encountered Vercingetorix, that is, the man who was, in their eyes, not only the preux that Mommsen glimpsed, but the true hero of the independence of a Gaul already ready to form itself into a true nation. Stoffel wanted to establish the Commentaries as the set text for all French schools. Now if, for the French of 1870, Rome was to blame for having slowed down this flowering, she had on the other hand succeeded in making the Gauls, spiritually and politically, into Latins, thereby assuring them a thousand years’ head start on the Germans.
As we have seen (p. 6-7, cf. 429,433, 438), in Europe generally the historiography of Caesar started its development with Mommsen’s History of Rome. From Rostovt-zeff and Max Weber to Zvi Yavetz or Peter Baehr, by way of Marx or Gramsci, it was principally the social problems of capitalist or socialist Europe that were expressed in this historical literature. France is a completely different case. Despite the repugnance felt by the Republicans for Bonapartism, the Cesar of Napoleon III (and of Stoffel), endorsed by the founders of the University during the years 1875-85, remained the standard work of reference. But in the twentieth century another book, magisterial yet controversial, would capture the attention of the French: the two large volumes of J. Carcopino’s Des Gracques a Sulla and his Cesar (1935). Written for a collection of ‘‘Great Manuals’’ of higher education, these books, which were constantly republished up to 1968, made use of all the techniques and all the discoveries of modern scientific history, along with the data provided by ancillary sciences such as philology, epigraphy, numismatics, and papyrology. But, unlike Napoleon III, Carcopino made of Caesar the conscious creator of the imperial monarchy, who wanted to add the title of ‘‘King’’ to that of dictator perpetuus, and who had foreseen, but not desired, the orientalization of the Empire. The senseless assassination on the Ides of March, which prolonged by twenty years the horrors of civil war, did not stop this process. Naturally, the inspiration for this vigorous portrait has been sought in Carcopino’s political ideas, as well as in the European context of the time. Yet Carcopino was an admirer neither of Mussolini nor of Hitler, not even of Maurras. He shared with most of the French bourgeoisie a contempt for parliamentary government, of which he would give, after the Liberation, a savage portrayal in the figure of Cicero. All in all, the France of the twenty-first century is the only country in Europe which has not recovered from having two Caesars as its rulers.
World History
