When Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France in 1804 and was looking for a suitable personal emblem, he and his advisors looked back to the very earliest days of French history for inspiration. This inspiration came from an unusual and unlikely place: the tomb of a long deceased French King who had ruled over 1300 years earlier. The objects of Napoleon’s affection would turn out to be even stranger: bees.
The King at the heart of Napoleon’s strange affection was Childeric I, one of the first in a line of kings of the Merovingian Dynasty, who ruled over the Franks in the mid 5th century. Among all the magnificent treasures of gold and silver uncovered in the tomb by construction workers in the Austrian Netherlands in 1653, from jewelry to weapons, even a crystal ball, a golden bull’s head and a horse harness, the hundreds of bees made of gold and garnet had received the least amount of attention up until Napoleon.
Bees have a long history in mythology from the Greeks to the Mayans to the Egyptians, where they were worshipped as symbols of resurrection, industriousness, and organizational efficiency, stemming from the hive mentality of the worker bees and their Queen. It is the idea of bees as symbols of resurrection in ancient Egypt that point to one of the most interesting connections between Childeric I and Napoleon: they were both forced into exile during their respective reigns, and were later able to return from it, even if only for a short duration.
Childeric I was forced into exile for seducing the wives of his countrymen, but was finally able to return after 8 years. Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba after his failed invasion of Russia and capture, but escaped and was able to return to France to rule for 100 days before being captured again and permanently exiled to the island of St. Helena off the west coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean.
Both forced into exiled and then able to return, these two leaders are also characterized by their excessive womanizing, even if in Napoleon’s case it was supposedly Josephine that committed the first infidelity.
Can you think of other interesting links between these two powerful French leaders connected across the ages?
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