READING HEINRICH HEINE

184 Reading Heinrich Heine
In this period of transition, the funeral of Napoleon has special historical
significance. The Emperor represents the extension and the limitation of
the idea of popular revolution: in Nordsee III (the prose travel-picture in
the sequence) Heine identified ‘the heroic youth of France’ as a hero of epic
proportions, ‘the beautiful hero who dies young’ (B 2, 239), but the idea
that called this hero into battle has finally failed:
Napoleon . . . was not capable of opposing Europe’s surge forwards with the magic
of the idea that could produce armies out of thin air; he no longer had the strength
to break the fetters with which he himself had kept that idea in chains ...(B5,
347)
Napoleon’s appropriation of the revolutionary idea robs it of its appeal,
and others will be beneficiaries of its legacy; yet the Emperor remains
the ambiguous symbol of revolutionary power and of its imperial exhaustion.
Paris is hence the archaeological site of a power-struggle, the constant
attempt to occupy the classical memory for republican or autocratic
interests.
Reference to antecedents in antiquity was a standard manoeuvre in Bonapartist
propaganda. Heine conforms to the same pattern in Die Romantische
Schule, where Napoleon appears as ‘the great classicist, as classical as Alexander
and Caesar’ (B 3, 380). 5 In the day-to-day politics of the July Monarchy
this struggle for the past is played out between a number of different parties:
supporters of the constitutional monarch, the Bourbon legitimists, republicans,
and communists. But Heine also recognizes various attempts to lay
claim to revolutionary and imperial traditions through the subordination
and exploitation of the cultural and economic life of the city.
Heine had remarked years earlier, apropos of the fortification of Paris:
‘Hence we perhaps attain to the great movements of politics through the
medium of architecture’ (B 3, 81). In an extended meditation on the political
significance of the ways in which a city marks its history (Article
XXXVIII), he points out that the ‘communist’ threat to Napoleon’s memory,
enshrined in the Vendôme column, affects both the imperial architecture
of Napoleon’s mausoleum and the survival of epic poetry itself (B 5,
382). The national poem, typically in Virgil’s Aeneid,isachieved under the
protection of an imperial patron. Because of the ideological bond between
political formation and aesthetic form, which Heine will seek to analyse
for the case of the juste milieu, the overthrow of an empire or a throne
has direct cultural consequences. Significant political change will entail a
loss of meaning in art and even the destruction of the art forms that such
polities have appropriated.