Introduction: Opening up the Napoleonic Empire

Abstract

The four portières and imperial fantasies for as many continents were still being woven at the Gobelins manufactory in Paris when the French Empire came crashing down in 1814. Commissioned four years earlier, based on paintings by François Dubois and earlier sketches by Jacques-Louis de la Hamayde de Saint-Ange, the great curtains were meant to adorn the Galerie de Diane in the Tuileries Palace. But much like Napoleon’s other global ambitions, they came to naught and soon faded into oblivion. Although he seized control of Amsterdam and Madrid—both metropoles with a global foothold—the emperor of the French could never repeat the Spanish Catholic Monarchy’s design to rule over “the four parts of the world”. Spanish America shunned Joseph Bonaparte and Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, fell into British hands as early as August 1811. By then, the British had already taken control of French colonies in the West Indies as well as the islands of Réunion and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Napoleon’s great American plan, centred on the Gulf of Mexico and Louisiana, was but a distant memory, having been shattered in 1803 with the loss of Saint-Domingue (Figs. 1–4).