Il Neigeait. L'pre Hiver Fondait En Avalanche.

Il neigeait. L'âpre hiver fondait en avalanche.

Après la plaine blanche une autre plaine blanche.

On ne connaissait plus les chefs ni le drapeau.

Hier la grande armée, et maintenant troupeau... ❄️

A drawing I made for a good friend of mine depicting Armand de Caulaincourt and emperor Napoleon during the tragic retreat of the Grande armée from Russia in the year 1812. 🇫🇷💔

The Shopping Arcade des Panoramas in Paris, 1807 by Philibert Louis Debucourt

Late decoration of a Christmas tree accompanied by that one film about the Congress of Vienna which gets even worse after every single rewatch… However, I enjoy it a lot anyway. X)

Peculiar choice of a favourite holiday film, for sure, but who am I to judge myself… Especially for Conrad Veidt!

On this cheerful note I’d love to wish everyone in the Napoleonic community Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Hope that despite all odds common interests are going to unite people all over the world forever and ever. 🎄⭐️

“Ars (Britannica) Longa”, cartoon from Punch, 1903

Paris, Hôtel des Invalides,1840. London, St. Paul’s, Nineteen hundred and ?

Wellington’s ghost: “Begad, sir, here’s news! They’re going to finish my memorial at St. Paul’s!” Napoleon’s ghost: “ Déjà?”

chuckling giggling hehing cause these two separately and unconnectedly drawn pictures look like:

"you're just a little hater"

"and?"

put together

Maria Theresa’s contemporaries already praised (...) her “manliness of soul,” her virilità d’anima. Some even called her a “Grand-Homme”; “in the attractive body of a queen” she was “fully a king, in the most glorious, all-encompassing sense of the word.” Later historians reprised the theme, describing her as a “man filled with insight and vigor.” That a masculine soul could reside in a female body had long been a commonplace, albeit one used less to elevate women than to cast shame on men. Praising a woman for her manly bravery or resolution, her masculine courage or spirit, served above all as an indirect criticism of men (…) When a woman is said to be the better man, this casts a devastating judgment on all her male peers. The key point is that calling an exceptional woman like Maria Theresa a “real man” consolidates the sexual hierarchy rather than calling it into question. Such praise assumes that masculinity is a compliment and that the male sex is and remains superior.

For the eighteenth century, a period when the dynastic principle still largely held sway throughout Europe, there was nothing especially unusual about a female head of state. While a woman on the throne was perceived even then as less desirable, she was not yet a contradiction; the spheres of the public and the private, politics and the family were not yet categorically distinct. Maria Theresa’s contemporaries already found it remarkable that a representative of the lesser sex could wield such power. But they did not regard her rule as entirely anomalous: she was “a woman, and a mother to her country, just as a prince can be a man and father to his country.” Her rule proved that “the greatest of all the arts, that of governing kingdoms, is not beyond the soul of a lady.” What was extraordinary, in the eighteenth-century context, was less the fact that a woman held the scepter of power than that a monarch, whether male or female, took the task of government so seriously. Princes came in many forms—patrons of the arts, skirt-chasers, war heroes, family fathers, scholars, philosophers—and each prince could shape his everyday life as he saw fit. Very few approached the task of rule with the single-minded dedication of a Maria Theresa. She met the criteria of a conscientious ruler to a remarkable degree, far more than most other sovereigns of the time.

Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara (2020). Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in her Time (translation by Robert Savage)