First distribution of the Legion of Honor at the Eglise des Invalides (1812)

Jean-Baptiste Debret: First distribution of the Legion of Honor 

at the Eglise des Invalides, by the Emperor, 14 July 1804

The Legion d'Honneur celebrated with great ceremony those soldiers who had distinguished themselves in battle. The generation of boys represented by the children's battallions at the Fête de la Fédération in 1790 had grown up to serve in Napoleon's armies and aspire to the nation's highest honors, like those distributed at the first Legion of Honor ceremony in 1804. While these younger men were decorated by Napoleon at the Invalides, the elderly and disabled veterans who lived there benefited little from this imperial pomp. As Jean-Baptiste Debret dramatizes in his painting, these Invalides veterans merely looked on from the shadows, relegated to the background of imperial and ceremonial priorities. [Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy & Sexuality in Nineteenth Century France, Brian Joseph Martin, University Press of New England, 2011, p. 155]