Chapter 295: The Crown He Took

On Christmas Day in the year 800, in Saint Peter's, a pope set a crown on a kneeling king, Charlemagne, who had not asked for it, and called him Emperor of the Romans, And for a thousand years the West had an emperor, a strange, weakening thing Of electors and princes and bishops, the Holy Roman Empire, which the poems Of Voltaire mocked as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. On the second of December, 1804, in Notre-Dame in Paris, Pope Pius VII sat waiting to crown a Corsican, and the fire Of the moment: Napoleon took the crown in his own hands. The plurals Of the old story were ended in one gesture. No one gave it to him. He crowned himself, and then he crowned Joséphine, kneeling, and the painter David Put it on a canvas ten metres wide, and painted in his mother, who had stayed home, the grim Truth adjusted for the record, as records are. Two years later, the cavity Of the old empire was empty: the German princes, bribed and beaten, left it For his Confederation of the Rhine, and on the sixth of August, 1806, The last emperor, Francis II, laid the crown of Charlemagne down, and the theft Of a thousand years was over. The Holy Roman Empire ended in a few lines. The bricks Of it had been crumbling for centuries; a soldier pushed it over. Now the register, which this book follows like a river. The Revolution had taken the books of births and marriages and deaths, the cover Of the parish, from the priests in 1792, and given them to the town hall, the giver Of the record now the state. Napoleon made it a code. The *Civil Code* of 1804, One law for every Frenchman, written plain, the family, the property, the will, And wherever his armies went, the code went, and the registers, the door Of every birth opened by a clerk, not a priest: the Netherlands, the Rhineland, the Italy still Keeping those books. And the names. In the Netherlands many families had none: A man was *Jan Pieterszoon*, Peter's son, and his son *Pieter Janszoon*, the line Of the patronymic turning each generation, as in Sweden, as Linnaeus's father had done Before the linden. In 1811 the French decreed: every family shall register, by a sign Of the town hall, a fixed surname. And the Dutch, who thought the French would be gone In a year, some of them, the story goes, chose jokes: *Naaktgeboren*, born naked; *Zondervan*, without a *van*; and the French stayed long enough, and the joke went on For two hundred years on the children. In France in 1808 the Jews, who had made Their names by father's name, were ordered to take fixed surnames too. And Napoleon called a Grand Sanhedrin of rabbis, the first in eighteen centuries, And the Jews of the conquered lands were made citizens; the ghetto walls, the few Gates of Venice and Rome, opened by his soldiers. The entries Of that gift and that demand are in the same register: be free, and be written. Hold the whole man as this book holds them all. The conqueror whose wars Killed some three million, perhaps more; who brought back slavery to the smitten Colonies in 1802; who carried Ossian in his pocket; whose godson, of course, Became a king of Sweden, as an earlier chapter told; whose code is still the law Of half the world; who marched into Russia in 1812 with six hundred thousand And came back with a remnant; who lost at Waterloo, and saw The last of it from a rock in the South Atlantic, Saint Helena, the sand And the wind, dying in 1821. The crown he took: from a pope, from an empire, from the dead. He said: I found the crown of France lying on the ground, and I picked it up with my sword. What he left on the ground was the old idea that a crown is given. Instead The crown is taken, and the register is kept. The Lord Of the old empire is gone. The clerk of the town hall remains, Writing the births, the marriages, the deaths, the surnames chosen in a hurry. That is his longest legacy: not the battles, the chains, The eagles, but the book in the mairie. The genealogist does not worry About the Emperor. She thanks him for the registers that begin in 1811 in a Dutch village, For a name chosen in a year that became a family. The joke That became a surname. The surname that became a lineage. The pillage Of an empire, and a clerk with a pen. Hold both, in the smoke.