At Napoleon's coronation, André-Jacques Garnerin, then imperial aeronaut to the new monarch, launched several balloons to honour the occasion. This was also a method of announcing the event since the balloons contained news of the Emperor's crowning and would carry that information to wherever the wind took them. The largest of these balloons sailed across the Alps and landed in Italy, near Rome. Although almost certainly an apocryphal tale, the balloon reportedly descended and touched ground first at the tomb of Nero, one of Rome's most infamous emperors. The king of Italy gave the balloon as a gift to the pope, who had been present at the coronation (somewhat redundantly since infamously Napoleon placed the crown on his own head). The pope duly deposited the balloon in the Vatican with an inscription ‘which records the wonderful rapidity of the passage, and the solemn occasion on which it was launched from Paris, as well as the success of M. Garnerin, who constructed and launched it’. Nonetheless, Napoleon expressed his displeasure at the landing site of the balloon, true or not, and fired Garnerin replacing him with Marie-Madeleine-Sophie Blanchard, widow of the prolific aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard. The political uses of ballooning stretched between two emperors, one of whom clearly resented his association with the other.

Almost from the moment of their invention, balloons drew enormous crowds eager to watch launches and see for themselves how humans had conquered the heavens.