A Coronation Tiara for Empress Josephine in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

The new film covers Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power, with all of the bloody carnage involved, but of course I was mostly interested in the parts that depicted royal jewels. We were treated to a glimpse of the production’s imagining of Napoleon and Josephine’s coronation, which took place at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in December 1804. Notre Dame, currently under renovation after the 2019 fire, isn’t available at the moment even if Scott could have secured permission to film there. Instead, Lincoln Cathedral was dressed up to masquerade as Notre Dame for the film.

Lincoln Cathedral has lots of experience pretending to be other sacred coronation locations. It stood in for Westminster Abbey for the 1838 coronation of Queen Victoria in The Young Victoria, and for the 1413 coronation of King Henry V in Netflix’s Shakespeare film The King.

The best glimpse we have into the real moment of Napoleon’s coronation is the magnificent painting of the scene that he commissioned from Jacques-Louis David. The painting took several years to complete, and much of it was done from memory, but there were also several specific directions from Napoleon to depict the scene in certain ways. For example, Napoleon had David add his mother, Madame Mere, to the scene, when she didn’t attend the coronation at all.

David also originally intended for the painting to show the moment when Napoleon crowned himself, but Napoleon requested that the finished work show him crowning Josephine instead. It’s an enormous neoclassical masterpiece—perhaps my very favorite painting in the Louvre—and if it’s not a particularly realistic depiction of the moment, it’s very accurate in terms of the way Napoleon wanted his imperial coronation to be seen.

Here’s how Ridley Scott’s Napoleon Bonaparte looks as he arrives at “Notre Dame” for his coronation. His robes (though the ermine does look pretty fake) are good replicas based on Napoleon’s coronation portraits. And the gold laurel wreath—resembling that of a Roman emperor—was a real diadem worn by Napoleon.

The real gold laurel wreath was made for Napoleon by the French goldsmith Martin-Guillaume Biennais, who made all of the insignia for the 1804 coronation.

It appears in numerous state portraits depicting the emperor at his coronation. The wreath no longer exists. It was melted down, along with the rest of the coronation insignia, while Napoleon was in exile on the island of Saint Helena. One single leaf from the wreath survives, because Napoleon gave it to the painter Jean-Baptiste Isabey in 1805. It’s held in the museum at the Château de Fontainebleau.

And here’s the famous moment when Napoleon crowned himself emperor during the ceremony as depicted in Scott’s film. He really did place the crown over the laurel wreath at that pivotal moment.

(Also, it always just slays me that Napoleon had Pope Pius VII trek all the way to Paris, and then crowned himself instead of having Pius do it. As a thank you, he sent Pius a new papal tiara, but deliberately had it made too small and too heavy to be worn. Just so petty.)

The crown is a close copy of the real one made for the 1804 coronation. Napoleon called it “the Crown of Charlemagne”—he loved to reinforce his legitimacy by visually tying his image to that of magnificent rulers from history—but it was really a newly made piece with medieval design references. (Most of the French crown jewels had been destroyed during the revolution—no shock there.) Cameos, which Napoleon particularly loved for their links to antiquity, are used throughout the crown’s design. The piece survived, and it’s now on display at the Louvre.

So what about Scott’s depiction of Empress Josephine in the coronation scene? If the actress playing Josephine looks familiar, there’s a good reason: she also played Princess Margaret in The Crown.

Here’s the way that David depicted Josephine at the moment Napoleon crowned her during their coronation at Notre Dame. Her gown and robes were designed basically to match her husband’s. She’s even wearing a diamond diadem that appears to be made to look like a laurel wreath, another companion for Napoleon’s regalia. (In the fashion of the time, she’s also wearing a matching diamond hair comb.)

In François Gérard’s portrait of Josephine in her coronation robes, she’s wearing an entirely different tiara/comb combination.

Here’s a closer view of the jewels depicted by Gerard, which feature diamonds, pearls, and emeralds (or sapphires). It’s worth noting that I don’t think this is supposed to be a specific portrait of Josephine on her coronation day, but rather a portrait of her in her coronation attire.

The tiara that the Napoleon costumers chose for Vanessa Kirby isn’t a laurel wreath or an emerald, diamond, and pearl diadem. Instead, it’s a copy of a diamond floral tiara that was dubiously claimed throughout the 20th century to be Josephine’s coronation tiara.

The diamond tiara features floral and anthemion designs, as well as a widow’s peak base. (It’s reminiscent of several tiaras worn by royal women in Iran in the middle of the last century.) In the 1940s, Van Cleef & Arpels acquired the tiara and began promoting it as “the Empress Josephine’s diamond tiara, gift of Napoleon I.” The tiara is featured above on an advertisement for the jewelry firm.

VC&A also lent the tiara out, notably to Princess Grace of Monaco. She wore it for the Century Ball, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Monte-Carlo, in May 1966. Rose Kennedy (mother of President John F. Kennedy) also borrowed the tiara, as did Princess Isabelle, Countess of Paris.

In 1969, the Arpels family lent the tiara to a major exhibition about Napoleon staged at the Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition was one of several held to mark the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s birth.

In a review of the 1969 exhibition, a correspondent from the Telegraph wrote about the tiara’s surprise inclusion: “There is an intriguing little mystery behind the reappearance in Paris this week of a magnificent silver diadem, studded with 1,040 diamonds weighing over 250 carats, which was presented by Napoleon to Josephine at his coronation. It is to be exhibited for six months in the Grand Palais as part of the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s birth. In Louis XVI’s time the diadem was part of the Crown Jewels.

“After the repudiation of Josephine, it disappeared, but it reappeared later on the head of the Empress Eugenie. Apparently Josephine left it to her daughter Hortense, Queen of Holland, from whom it was inherited by Napoleon III. Eugenie took it with her into exile in Britain and, being short of funds, sold it to an English aristocrat. In 1948 it was bought by the American jewellers, Van Cleef & Arpels, from ‘the wife of a British peer.’ They firmly decline to reveal the name of the British peeress who sold it to them. In view of the historic significance of the diadem, it seems odd that this should remain a mystery.”

Odd indeed. The entire story seemed a little squishy, as did the visual connection between the tiara’s design (especially its base) and other jewels from the Napoleonic era. Bernard Morel, an expert on the French crown jewels, publicly questioned the provenance of the tiara. Van Cleef & Arpels distanced themselves from the claim and eventually the tiara left their collection entirely.

Jewelry historian Vincent Meylan has written about the tiara in recent years. He writes that the piece does possibly have a connection to Empress Josephine. The enormous tiara is a pastiche, consisting of two different sections married together to form one diadem. One of those sections may indeed have come from Josephine’s collection, as her jewelry inventory on her death included a large tiara with missing pieces. (That tiara, though, included briolette-cut diamonds, and this one does not. Could they be these briolettes, possibly removed from that partially-dismantled tiara and definitely inherited by the Leuchtenbergs?) 

The same description, Meylan writes—a large tiara with missing sections—largely matches a tiara sold at Christie’s in 1872 by Empress Eugenie. Meylan notes that Eugenie’s tiara was purchased by Angela Burdett-Coutts, one of the richest women of the time, and that its transformation from partial to complete diadem took place during her ownership. After her passing, the tiara was acquired by the “mystery” aristocrat mentioned by the Telegraph: the British chemist and archaeologist Sir Robert Mond. (The possible claim to Napoleon is surely what sold him, as Mond had a collection of model soldiers representing all of Napoleon’s army regiments.) Van Cleef & Arpels purchased it from his widow, Marie-Louise, in 1948, the year before she died.

Really, the Napoleon team probably should have just made a laurel wreath for their “Josephine” and called it a day. I am also looking forward, though, to seeing the invented tiaras placed on the heads of Josephine’s attendants.

Here’s how David depicted some of the women who followed Josephine in the procession. Napoleon’s sisters loathed Josephine, but Napoleon made them serve as her attendants at the coronation anyway. Though they’re standing to the side here, they carried Josephine’s train, and one anecdote suggests that they pulled and tugged on it to unbalance the empress. (The painting shows two ladies-in-waiting, Adélaïde de La Rochefoucauld and Émilie de Lavalette, handling the empress’s robes.)

From left to right here, in this detail from the David painting, are Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon’s younger brother and Josephine’s son-in-law, later King of Holland); Caroline Bonaparte Murat (later Queen of Naples); Pauline Bonaparte Borghese (later Princess of Guastalla); Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi (later Grand Duchess of Tuscany); Hortense de Beauharnais Bonaparte (Josephine’s daughter, later Queen of Holland) with her son, Napoléon-Charles; and Julie Clary Bonaparte (sister of Desiree, wife of Joseph Bonaparte, later Queen of Naples and Queen of Spain).

The glimpses here don’t give me the most confidence in the rest of these tiaras.

But another scene from the trailer does show Josephine wearing pearls and cameos—which we definitely know she had!—so perhaps there’s hope after all?