Napoleon Rebuilds the Place Bellecour, Lyon, Antique Madou Lithograph, 1827

An original antique lithograph from Madou's Vie de Napoléon, published at Brussels in 1827, lettered "RUINES DE LION RELEVÉES" in open capitals above the image, with the book's spelling of Lyon. Napoleon stands at the center in a bicorne among civic dignitaries, one of whom presents a small box, while a kneeling workman at the left handles tools beside cut blocks of stone. A mounted officer reins in at the right, grenadiers in tall bearskin caps line the square, spectators lean over a wooden barrier at the right and a man at the far left waves his hat. Tall houses close the square on both sides.

The caption below the image reads: "Napoléon, au milieu des acclamations de 50 mille Lyonnais, pose la première pierre d'une des façades de la place Bellecour, démolies en 1793." In English: Napoleon, amid the cheers of fifty thousand people of Lyon, lays the first stone of one of the facades of the Place Bellecour, demolished in 1793.

Vie de Napoléon was published at Brussels in 1827 by the Lithographie royale de Jobard, the press of Marcellin Jobard. Its title page describes a text written by a society of men of letters from new documents dictated and corrected by Napoleon at Saint Helena, with plates lithographed by the Belgian artist Jean-Baptiste Madou (1796 to 1877) after the first painters of the French school. This plate comes from the first volume, which runs from Brienne to the camp of Boulogne.

Lyon rose against the Convention in 1793 and was taken after a siege in October of that year. In the repression that followed, the Convention ordered the city's grand buildings destroyed, and the long facades of the Place Bellecour were pulled down. Returning from Italy after Marengo, Bonaparte passed through Lyon in late June 1800 and laid the first stone for their reconstruction, a gesture of reconciliation with the city.

The busy square, with its crowd and architecture, reads well at a distance and suits a collection of views of Lyon as well as a Napoleonic one.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.