Napoleon chose Notre-Dame over Reims, summoned the pope and crowned himself. The cathedral, a temple of Reason ten years earlier, was dressed in temporary décor for the day.

Historical context

The choice of place was a complete political argument. Reims is the cathedral of kings: to be crowned there would be to declare oneself the Bourbons' heir. Notre-Dame is the cathedral of the capital, of the nation rather than the dynasty. It was moreover emerging from ten years of neglect: turned into a temple of Reason in 1793, stripped, used as a store, it had been returned to worship only after the Concordat.

Percier and Fontaine masked the state of the building. Before the west front they raised a neo-Gothic porch of timber and papier-mâché, hung the nave with velvet and galleries, and set up two thrones — one at choir level, the other at the end of the nave atop a staircase of twenty-four steps, for the final apotheosis. The medieval cathedral served as a shell for neoclassical décor.

Pius VII had made the journey, something no pope had granted a king of France for centuries; yet he would only anoint and bless. Napoleon took the crown himself and set it on his head, then crowned Joséphine kneeling before him — the gesture on which David built his whole painting, finished in 1807, where he added Letizia, who was not at the ceremony.

The cathedral would serve again: the King of Rome was baptised there on 9 June 1811. But the Empire did not restore it. It took Victor Hugo's novel in 1831, then Viollet-le-Duc's works from 1844, to save the building. The Empire used Notre-Dame as a set, and left it as it had found it.