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Two names are carved over the arch, Marengo on the left and Austerlitz on the right. Both are still legible, and the arch now opens on sky. The fire took the ceiling and left the victories.

In the spring of 1871 Paris had just survived a Prussian siege on rats and zoo animals. It refused to hand its cannon to the government that had signed the surrender. For 72 days the city ran itself as the Commune: part municipal republic, part standoff waiting for its ending. The ending came in the last week of May, when the army entered from Versailles and took the city back barricade by barricade. The week is still called la semaine sanglante, the bloody week; the courts-martial and the wall at Père Lachaise account for a body count usually given in five figures, and argued about ever since. As the army closed in, the Commune's men put petroleum and fire to the monuments of the power they were losing. The Tuileries Palace, home of French rulers from Catherine de' Medici to Napoleon III, went up on the night of 23 May. It burned for two days into a roofless shell. Meissonier, the most expensive painter in France and no friend of the Commune, came to the wreck of the Salle des Maréchaux. He painted what the fire had left: the arches open to the sky, the marble columns burned white, the rubble field where the floor had been. Through the empty doorways, perfectly framed, is the quadriga of the Arc du Carrousel: the four-horse chariot on Napoleon's victory arch, untouched. On the fallen stone in the foreground he painted an inscription that is not there in fact, Latin of his own composing: the glory of the ancestors survives even through the flames. Above the arch, the carved names Marengo and Austerlitz still legible over the void, he had barely needed to invent anything; the building had written its own caption. The ruin then had a second career as an argument. For 12 years the gutted palace stood in the middle of Paris. Monarchists wanted it rebuilt, as a building and as a regime, and republicans preferred to keep the lesson in plain sight. The republic won, and in 1883 the shell was pulled down, leaving the Louvre's arms open around a garden and an absence. The painting went to the national collection at Compiègne, where it remains the best record of the 12-year argument. Meissonier's Latin was a royalist's sigh, but the picture outgrew the politics. It is simply what a civilization looks like the morning after it loses an argument with itself: blue sky where the ceiling was, and the old victories still spelled correctly over the door.