#segur

THE GRAND MASTER OF CEREMONIES Louis-Philippe de Ségur, Comte of the Empire

The comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur was Grand Master of the Ceremonies of the Imperial Household from 1804 until the fall in 1815. This Grand Officer "performs two different kinds of functions: the ceremonies and the introduction of the Ambassadors...He writes and signs the protocol [and] dictates the costumes in which those invited must appear...The day of the ceremony, [he] makes sure that all the parts of the protocol are properly adhered to; during the ceremony, he stands in front, close to H.M." The Grand Master gives orders to the masters of Ceremonies, with the help of the assistants of Ceremonies and heralds, and he also relies on a dessinateur of Ceremonies (a position entrusted to the painter Jean-Baptiste Isabey, charged with giving shape to and decorating ceremonial spaces and the costumes) and a coach of Ceremonies.

Ségur was the son of Philippe Henri, marquis de Ségur, marshal of France and minister of war under Louis XVI. From the aristocracy of the Ancien Régime, he was well acquainted with the customs of the court at Versailles. It would be wrong, however, to see him only as an old courtier, concerned soley with preserving the conventions and details of etiquette from one regime to the next. Indeed,  his fascinating career represents all of the rich intellectual and liberal identity of nobles in that generation of Frenchmen, born under Louis XV only to find themselves facing the civic and social challenges of the late eighteenth century. His presence at Napoleon's side takes on a particular importance.

A Freemason, in his youth he supported the independence of the United States and fought on American soil, returning in 1783 with the rank of colonel of dragoons. He was then sent by Louis XVI as ambassador to Russia (1784-89), where he earned the friendship of Catherine the Great. A believer in the Revolution, he was appointed ambassador to the Holy See,  but the pope refused him entry into the Papal States. He received the same treatment by the king of Prussia, to whom a discredited France had sent him in January 1792. Returning to France, he retired to his estates in Chatenay, where he prudently remained during the most dangerous years of the Revolution. Bonaparte's rise to power won him over. A member of the Legislative Corps in 1801, and then a member of the Council of State, he was appointed Grand Master of Ceremonies with the advent of the Empire. Created a comte of the Empire in 1808, he joined the Senate in 1813. Ségur sided with Louis XVIII in 1814, and then went back to Napoleon during the Hundred Days, even offering to follow him into exile after Waterloo. In the end, he stayed in France. He fell from grace during the early years of the Restoration, but regained his seat in the Senate in 1819. He died in 1830, a few weeks after the liberal revolution to the July Monarchy.

Excited by the new ideas of his age, Ségur was a born historian who loved philosophy and literature and frequented the salons of Mme Du Deffand and Mme Geoffrin, meeting La Hapre, Marmontel and Voltaire. He produced numerous works of history and political science, as well as plays, short stories and songs, and his admirable Mémories, on the first part of his life up to the Revolution, all of which are still extant. This dense text reveals the depth of his thinking and his strong belief in the Enlightenment. He was elected to the Académie francaise in 1803. His literary output was interrupted under the Empire, but he took it up again under the Restoration, notably publishing Abrégé de l'histoire universelle in forty four volumes (1817), a Histoire de France in nine volumes (1824) and Histoire des Juifs (1827). As an enlightened historian, he was admirably suited to carry out the functions of a Grand Master of Ceremonies, for which historical research was often necessary. In order to reconstitute a coherent and relevant etiquette for the court, he delved into the archives of the royal palace and memories of the courts of Europe.

The half-length portrait of Ségur from the Chateau de Versailles is a work that requires careful study.  It is important to note that the original commissioned by the Imperial Household for the Gallery of Grand Officers, was in fact a full-length portrait. Is this a copy, a replica or actually the original cut down? The original was commissioned from Marie-Guillemine Benoist and executed during the year 1806. It was in the Tuileries, hanging in the Gallery of Diana in August 1807, and then at Compiegne, in the Salon of Ushers in May 1808. On February 13, 1814, it was sent to the Louvre, like the other paintings. Was it then, under the Restoration, given to the sitter's family, as was the case with most of the other portraits of the Grand Officers? This is probable, and would support the hypothesis that it was this canvas, as it has been kept at Versailles since 1924, given by the Ségur family.

The Grand Master is standing in front of a heavy curtain that offers a narrow glimpse of a distant horizon. He appears to be holding his ceremonial staff, which tempts us to compare the composition to the portrait of Duroc, Grand Marshal of the Palace, by Gros.

It is no great surprise that it was this portrait-of himself-that Ségur had copied by Isabey, his artist of Ceremonies, to represent the figure of a Grand Officer of the Household in the Livre du Sacre, a publication he authored. In 1810, Goubaud, in his turn, made use of it to depict Ségur carrying out his duties in Napoleon Recieving the Delegation from the Roman Senate in the Throne Room of the Tuileries.

Napoleon, The Imperial Household, Sylvain Cordier, Montreal Museum of the Arts, page 48

Ségur Portrait: Artist Unknown, possible Benoist.

Goubaud’s, Napoleon Receiving the Delegation of the Roman Senate in the Throne Room at the Tuileries

Harlow Giles Unger, Lafayette, (2002) p.22

In France at this time the age when you became economically independent was 25 years old. In December 1776 Lafayette would have been 19, Noailles 20 and Ségur 23.