Having entered as a liberator in 1796, Napoleon crowned himself King of Italy in Milan cathedral on 26 May 1805: “God gives it to me, let him beware who touches it.”

Historical context

On 15 May 1796 the twenty-six-year-old general entered Milan amid a cheering crowd. Stendhal would make it the opening of The Charterhouse of Parma: a youth discovering that life can change. The Cisalpine Republic, proclaimed the following year with Milan as capital, was the first state he created with his own hands.

Nine years later he returned as a sovereign. On 26 May 1805, in the cathedral, he took from the altar the iron crown of the Lombard kings — brought from Monza, its inner ring reputedly forged from a nail of the Cross — and placed it on his own head, pronouncing the traditional formula of the kings of Italy: God gives it to me, let him beware who touches it. Eugène de Beauharnais was appointed viceroy.

Milan became a capital. The Kingdom of Italy received a French-style administration, the Napoleonic Code, conscription and a currency; the city gained its arena, the Foro Bonaparte, the arch of Peace begun in 1807, and Brera became both academy and picture gallery, enriched with the property of suppressed convents.

The price was heavy: taxes, blockade, a hundred thousand Italian conscripts sent to Spain and Russia. In April 1814, as the kingdom collapsed, the Milanese crowd lynched the finance minister Giuseppe Prina. What remains of those years is a modern administration, cultural institutions — and the still-new idea that Italy might be a single state.