Abstract

The phenomenon of Napoleon and Napoleonism that Tolstoy attacks in War and Peace is not only—arguably, not even primarily—a textual phenomenon. The cult of Napoleon was to a great extent a phenomenon created by the visual arts; portraits of Napoleon and of key moments in his career played a central role in promoting him as a “Great Man.” War and Peace contains numerous direct and indirect references to these images, and Tolstoy uses them to build his narrative. This paper analyzes two key pairs of scenes in which Tolstoy explicitly invokes Napoleonic visual images and undercuts them by juxtaposing them to Russian icons.

Highlights

  • The cult of Napoleon was to a great extent a phenomenon created by the visual arts; portraits of Napoleon and of key moments in his career played a central role in promoting him as a “Great Man.”

  • A second juxtaposition of French and Russian images occurs on the eve of the Battle of Borodino when the Russian army’s veneration of the icon of the Smolensk Mother of God is set against François Gérard’s portrait of Napoleon’s son, the so-called “King of Rome” which is simultaneously displayed before Napoleon’s troops

  • Like Natasha, a woman who has lost her virtue but not her chastity, Moscow (Russia) is taken but not violated, and the evil principle is overcome.[36]. Both French memoirists and Tolstoy juxtapose the veneration of the Smolensk Mother of God to Napoleon and his army’s veneration of another painted image on the eve of Borodino: François Gérard’s Portrait of Napoleon II as an Infant, known as Napoleon-François, King of Rome (1812)

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Summary

Introduction

The cult of Napoleon was to a great extent a phenomenon created by the visual arts; portraits of Napoleon and of key moments in his career played a central role in promoting him as a “Great Man.” War and Peace contains numerous direct and indirect references to these images, and Tolstoy uses them to build his narrative.

Results
Conclusion

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