France in eighteen hundred and two

When the French Republicans first took up arms, they protested to the world that they fought not for conquest, but to spread their beneficent doctrines of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and that wherever their victorious standards were spread, the liberty and property of nations should be respected. Their first campaigns were directed against their warlike neighbours who hovered round their frontiers; and when they succeeded in repelling the veteran troops of the continental Powers, they began a career of robbery, pillage, rapine and destruction, which has no parallel in the history of disciplined nations, nor even in that of predatory hordes of barbarians.

The principle on which the robberies of the French have been conducted has been to aggrandise France by the utter impoverishment of other countries.

After having demolished the monuments of the genius and industry of their own countrymen, they went forth to ransack other countries, and destroyed all they could not carry away with them. Whatever had been raised by the talents, the piety or the care of the lovers of science, arts and literature, became the object of their vandalism or their peculation. Their policy had no element but to divide in order to conquer, and so arrive at universal domination by universal confusion. Occupied constantly on the destruction of Europe in detail, they trampled under their feet Monarchies and Republics alike.

Every time I have paced along the galleries of the Louvre sentiments of hatred and indignation took possession of my breast. Amidst all the blaze of artistic beauty I never entered nor left without feelings of disgust.

I confess I received no gratification from all the Raphaels, Titians, and Correggios I saw there.

In their proper places I could have gazed with transport upon these masterpieces, but I cannot look with pleasure on productions thus violently torn from their lawful owners.

Of all the countries which have been undone by French havock Italy has suffered the most, and its miseries are least known to the world. The French have literally exhausted upon that country the fecundity of rapine, cheating and fury. They have rendered themselves masters of its correspondence, and all we know now of the existence of that desolated country is through the frequent eruptions of a tyranny without remorse, of a powerless despair and of the accumulations of spoil which decorates the public exhibitions of Paris. The contributions of the French were nothing less than a general sack, the encyclopædia of their thefts forms a monument of curiosity.

The barbarians who formerly overran Italy despised art, and neglected to take possession of such treasures. The fanatical Mussulman destroyed them as monuments of idolatry. But in our times Academicians, poets, orators, philosophers, members of the National Institute, have crossed the Alps to strip Italy of her talents, to force from her the labours of her children, the most sacred illustration of a people, a property which the laws of war among civilised nations has hitherto held to be inviolable until the present epoch, when a gang of savage sophists have replunged Italy into a darkness worse than any of the early ages of Europe.

Those who are ignorant of the methods by which a thief has realised an immense fortune may be forgiven for their admiration of his wealth and treasures, but the man who is acquainted with the villainy employed in such an accumulation is inexcusable should he lavish praises on objects in that thief’s possession. Therefore, with the knowledge that none of these pictures belong to France, and that they are all stolen goods acquired by fraud, injustice and murder, I could not coolly fix my eyes upon them nor repeat ecstacies of vulgar adulation.

No sooner have you entered the Gallery than you are presented with a catalogue of these paintings, in which the robbers do not blush to avow their robberies. The facetious rascals of the National Institute talk and write of the knavery with as much sangfroid as they take a pinch of snuff.

The paintings are styled “Tableaux conquis en Italie, recueillis dans la Lombardie, à Bologne, Cento, Modêne, Parme, Plaisance, Rome, Venise, Vérone, Florence, Turin.”

With this register of pillage in your hand, you enter the Gallery containing the spoils of nations, and nearly every picture bears at the bottom an inscription declaring it to be a stolen article. Scarcely a page of the catalogue but contains such proclamations of theft as these: “Ces deux tableaux viennent de la Cathédrale de Plaisance, où ils pendoient aux deux coins du Sanctuaire. Ce tableau est tiré de la galerie de Turin. Ce tableau vient du Palais Pitti. Ce tableau est tiré du Palais Pontifical de Monte Cavallo à Rome. Ce tableau vient du Cabinet du ci-devant Roi de Sardaigne à Turin. Ce tableau, un des meilleurs qu’a produit Paolo Veronese, est tiré de l’église des Réligieuses de St. Zacharin à Venise. Ce tableau vient du maître autel de l’église de San Giorgio à Venise. Ce tableau est tiré de l’église de Santa Maria del Orto à Venise. Ce précieux et magnifique tableau que les artistes regardent comme un des chefs d’œuvres de Titian, le martyre de St. Pierre, vient de l’église San Giovanni e Paolo à Venise. Ce portrait vient du Palais du Prince Breschi à Rome.”

There is no end to this catalogue of iniquity, it fills at present three volumes, but much more will be added. I question if the Newgate Calendar for the last 100 years contains altogether a hundredth part of the impudent dexterity in the art of filching which the rogues of the National Institute present to us in these three little syllabuses of Republican iniquity.

Englishmen, happily shut out from the view of the sack of the continent by that sea which guards our honest little island, have no adequate idea of the indignant feelings of the wretched inhabitants of the wronged countries which the French armies have plundered. I have visited this gallery of paintings in company with some Italians of distinction; I perceived in their countenances a deep and fixed look of unutterable anguish and regret. Such a look that only the artists of Italy whose expatriated portraits hung around us could delineate.

May Heaven preserve our country from ever experiencing a similar stroke of humiliation and abasement! How should we Britons feel if one day in a later catalogue we read among these: “Notices sur plusieurs précieux tableaux recueillis par les Philosophes de l’Institut pour multiplier les jouissances du public. Ce tableau peint sur toile est tiré de l’autel de l’église cathédrale de Westminster. Ce vitre vient de King’s College à Cambridge. Ce tableau est tiré du Cabinet du ci-devant Roi d’Angleterre à Windsor. Ce tableau de Shakespeare vient de la bibliothèque de la librairie à Cambridge. Ce tableau de la mort du General Wolfe est tiré du cabinet de la ci-devant Reine d’Angleterre à Buckingham House. Cette statue vient du Cabinet de Milord Lansdowne. Ce tableau peint par Claude vient du cabinet de Milord Gwydir.”

Having expressed with candour what my sentiments have ever been when I visited the gallery of paintings in the Louvre, I now proceed to fulfil the important duty of an historian.

Mrs. Cosway, whose taste and skill are well known, is now occupied in copying all the paintings in the Gallery on a small scale, intending to execute later an enlarged account of them, together with the biography of their respective masters. She has already executed several compartments; and not all the fascinations of society nor the gaieties of the capital can allure her from the daily pursuit of the labour of her choice. I tell her the Gallery of the Louvre is her drawing-room, for when she is at work all the English gather around her. However, she loses no time, for she enters in conversation and paints also, and it is difficult to affirm in which she most excels.

The object of Mrs. Cosway is to represent, by etchings, all the pictures precisely as they are fixed in the Gallery. The Hon. Mr. E—— is struck with the undertaking, and he has appropriated a particular part of his house at H—— for the display of her works.

There is one circumstance attached to all the public institutions of Paris on which I must bestow the highest commendation, they are open to the public gratis. I wish I could say the same of our excellent establishments at home. With the exception of the British Museum, I do not know of a single institution in Great Britain to which a native or a foreigner can be admitted without a fee. And these fees are generally exacted under so many circumstances of barefaced imposition that one cannot help feeling ashamed that such abuses should be tolerated, and that the officers of these establishments are permitted to exclude travellers who do not pay them gratuities for viewing these interesting and instructive collections.

The only qualification in Paris to visit museums or public institutions is to have your passport in your pocket—without it the porter at the gate will assuredly forbid your entrance.

Under the Monarchy, the Gallery of the Louvre alone was appropriated to the public, and contained a splendid collection of paintings. Now the whole palace is appropriated to National uses.

It is not only the repository of pictures, but also of antiquities; the National Institute and the Polytechnic Society designed to supply the Ancient Academy des Belles Lettres, hold their assemblies here.

The productions of living artists are exhibited here once a year, and appartements are allotted free of expense to various artists and men of science. The museum is maintained in a high state of cleanliness and propriety; and the orderly conduct of the spectators, who are all admitted free of charge and without respect of persons, is greatly to be commended.

The great Gallery of the Louvre is not well adapted for the exhibition of pictures; it is too narrow in proportion to its length, and the windows which look out towards the Seine defeat the effect of those which look towards the Place du Carrousel. A great number of the paintings thus appear to be covered with a continual mist, and others are scarcely discernible, so that the principal effect of light and shade is destroyed.

In addition to this misfortune a number of the noblest masterpieces of the Italian School have been injudiciously retouched by the French artists and been rendered quite unnatural and in many instances ridiculous. The colouring of the parts defaced has been executed in such a bungling manner as to resemble a piece of patchwork. They have likewise injured a multitude of exquisite performances with a species of varnish, by which, when I have approached them in search of the beauties of the artists, I have been mortified by a vision of my own homely features. Things are often more spoilt by overdoing than by remaining stationary, and by the neglect of this maxim the French have ruined many of the finest pictures in their stolen collection.