The Distribution of the Eagle Standards

The scene is 5 December 1804, three days after Napoleon crowned himself emperor in Notre-Dame. On the freezing Champ de Mars in Paris he handed each regiment a new standard topped with a gilded eagle, and the massed troops swore their oath to him. David, the emperor's official painter, records the officers surging forward to receive the eagles, arms flung up. He first sketched a winged Victory scattering laurels over the crowd, but by the time he finished in 1810 that figure was gone, painted out on Napoleon's own instruction. The empress Josephine was cut too, since by 1810 Napoleon had divorced her. So the picture quietly carries its own later politics inside it. It hangs at Versailles in the Salle du Sacre, beside David's huge painting of the coronation those eagles followed.