Smash And Gag

Fight for your right to publish? Or accept that GEORGE ORWELL was on the money all along? It’s an increasingly tricky proposition, writes STEPHEN MCCARTY

- Stephen Mccarty

THEY’RE DANGEROUS THINGS, authors. Never writing what you want them to write, always saying the wrong thing, forever upsetting the political apple cart. Giving nations a conscience.

None of that extends to those toadying political apologists disseminating disinformation to augment malicious administrations; but rather to those who jeopardise life and liberty to – as in that latter day cliché that somehow dropped quickly out of circulation – speak truth to power.

In The Louvre, Paris, hangs a monumental neoclassical painting by Jacques-Louis David that goes by the name The Coronation of Napoleon. At roughly 10 metres wide by six high, it’s designed to overawe – which it did my impressionable, junior self more years ago than I care to count. What I didn’t appreciate until decades later was the subterfuge of a work whose true title is The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine on December 2, 1804. Because what’s really going on is not Napoleon’s coronation at all. Lazy commentaries suggest that, to show who’s boss, an impatient Napoleon has grabbed the crown from assorted dignitaries also in the frame, including Pope Pius VII, no less, and is about to plonk it on his own bonce.

But he’s already been there, done that, bought the laurel wreath and moved on, having decorated himself moments before the painting’s observed action by placing a Roman emperor’s garland on his head to match the rest of his Roman imperial clobber. In the real dynamic of David’s work, next up for crowning, by the newly self-installed emperor, is his second in command: his loyal missus. With the celebrated Josephine ensconced, Napoleon could legitimately have crowed, “Nothing’s gonna stop us now”, as Starship sang quite a few years later.