• • •
Between his arrival in Paris and his reconciliation with Josephine, Napoleon had met Louis Gohier, a lawyer-politician who had joined the Directory in June and on the basis of its three-month revolving presidency was at its head. On October 17 he was fêted at a public meeting at which he wore an Egyptian round hat, an olive green coat and a Turkish scimitar attached by silk cords. In reply to Gohier’s eulogy, Napoleon said he would only draw his sword in defence of the Republic and its government.6 The Directory privately had to decide whether to arrest Napoleon for desertion (he had left his army in Egypt without orders) and quarantine-breaking, or to congratulate him for winning the battles of the Pyramids, Mount Tabor and Aboukir, conquering Egypt, opening up the East and establishing a vast new French colony, as his propagandists were putting out. If the Directors ever seriously considered a suggestion from Bernadotte that he be court-martialled, they quickly dropped it after hearing their own guard break out into spontaneous cheers of ‘Vive Bonaparte!’ once he was recognized outside their council chamber.7
Over the following days, the rue de la Victoire was besieged by crowds of spectators and well-wishers. General Paul Thiébault, who had fought at Rivoli, was in the Palais-Royal when he heard that Napoleon had returned:
The general commotion in Paris left no doubt as to the truth of the news. The regimental bands belonging to the garrison of the city were already promenading the streets as a sign of public cheerfulness, swarms of people and soldiers following them. At night illuminations were hastily got up in every quarter, and in all the theatres the return was announced by shouts of ‘Vive la République! Vive Bonaparte!’ It was not the return of a general; it was the return of a leader in the garb of a general . . . Only the ghost of a government remained in France. Breached by all parties, the Directory was at the mercy of the first assault.8
Yet that assault still needed to be planned. To plot to overthrow the Constitution of the Year III – which Napoleon had solemnly sworn to uphold – constituted treason, punishable by the guillotine. Moreover there were so many plots to overthrow the Directory swirling around Paris that Napoleon might not be the first to mount one. That June, only the day after the legislature had replaced Jean-Baptiste Treilhard with the ex-Jacobin Gohier, there had been a mini-coup, the so-called journée parlementaire (parliamentary day), when General Joubert, with Barras’ and Sieyès’ support, had used force to replace La Révellière and Douai as Directors with Pierre-Roger Ducos and the ex-Jacobin General Jean-François Moulin. With the exceptions of Barras, Carnot and Sieyès, none of the thirteen men who held the post of Director between 1795 and 1799 were particularly impressive politicians.
Among those visiting Napoleon over the following days were almost all the key conspirators of the coming coup. First through the door was Talleyrand, who had been forced to resign as foreign minister in July when he was caught repeatedly and insistently demanding $250,000 in ‘gratification’ from the three impeccably honourable American envoys to Paris (one of whom was the future Supreme Court justice John Marshall) before he would deign to negotiate with them over loan repayments.9 Talleyrand worried that Napoleon would hold his non-appearance in Constantinople against him, but was instantly forgiven. Another early visitor was Pierre-Louis Roederer, a malleable but highly intelligent politician who had been elected to the Estates-General in 1789 and had survived every subsequent regime; he was to become one of Napoleon’s closest advisors. Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, the former editor whom Napoleon had left to administer Malta, turned up, as did Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, a key supporter from the lower house of the legislature, the Council of the Five Hundred. Other co-conspirators during those October days included Vice-Admiral Eustache Bruix of the Brest squadron, the ‘well-bred and gentlemanlike’ bureaucrat Hugues-Bernard Maret, and a senior police official, the former Jacobin Pierre-François Réal.10
These men were all to hold key positions in Napoleon’s government after the coup; several became members of the Conseil d’État and almost all peers of France. Another crucial figure in the coup was Lucien Bonaparte, who had been elected to the Five Hundred in June 1798 aged twenty-three and was shortly to become its president, allowing the plotters their opportunity to clothe their coup with a spurious constitutionalism. ‘Tall, ill-shaped, having limbs like those of a field-spider, and a small head,’ Laure d’Abrantès described Lucien, ‘very near-sighted, which made him half shut his eyes and stoop his head.’11 As one had to be thirty to qualify for election, his birth certificate was doctored to meet the requirement.12
‘Brumaire’ means ‘season of mists and fog’, and it is appropriately hard to piece together the mechanics of what took place next because Napoleon deliberately committed nothing to paper; only two letters of his survive for the twenty-three days between his arrival in Paris on October 16 and the 18 Brumaire when the coup was launched, neither of them compromising.13 For a man who wrote an average of fifteen letters a day, this time everything was to be done by word of mouth. He had already once in his life had his correspondence ransacked for evidence with which to guillotine him, and he wasn’t going to allow it to happen again. In his public appearances he went back to wearing his uniform of the Institut de France rather than that of a general.
The coup wasn’t Napoleon’s brainchild, but that of the Abbé Sieyès, who had replaced Reubell as a Director in May 1799 but who soon concluded that the government of which he was a leading member was simply too incompetent and corrupt to deal with the issues facing France. His co-conspirators, including fellow Director and crony Ducos, the police chief Joseph Fouché and the justice minister Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, had far more political weight than Napoleon’s friends (except Talleyrand), and Sieyès regarded Napoleon as merely the ‘sword’, or muscle, necessary to see the enterprise through. Sieyès was one of those who personally detested Napoleon, a feeling that was entirely mutual. Sieyès had privately suggested that he be shot for deserting his post in Egypt, while Napoleon had said that Sieyès should lose his Directorship for having sold himself to Prussia (of which there’s no proof).14 When his first choice of ‘sword’, General Joubert, had been shot through the heart at the battle of Novi, north of Genoa (coincidentally on Napoleon’s birthday), Sieyès had little choice but to turn to Napoleon: of the other leading generals Jourdan supported the constitution, Schérer had been discredited by defeat, Jacques Macdonald (the son of a Jacobite Highlander) and Moreau seem to have refused the offer, and Pichegru was by then fighting for the enemy. As on Vendémiaire, the key role fell to Napoleon almost by process of elimination.
It was Talleyrand who finally persuaded a reluctant Sieyès to choose Napoleon on the basis of his irreproachable republican record, and the lack of alternatives.15 To Napoleon he is credited with saying, ‘You want the power and Sieyès wants the constitution, therefore join forces.’16 Napoleon’s popularity with Parisians was obviously a factor in Sieyès’ decision; at a visit to the Celestins theatre at this time Napoleon sat at the back of the box and placed Duroc at the front, but ‘the call for Bonaparte grew so violent and so unanimous’ that they were forced to swap places, as Napoleon presumably expected would happen.17
Napoleon and Sieyès only met for the first time on the afternoon of October 23. ‘I was in charge of negotiating the political conditions of an agreement,’ recalled Roederer. ‘I was forwarding to one and the other their respective views of the constitution to be established, and the position that each would take.’18 Napoleon wanted to keep his options open and was entertaining other offers, though none from a group as politically well-connected. There may have been as many as ten active plots to overthrow the Directory being secretly discussed in these months.
• • •
None of the myriad failures of the Directory over the previous four years could credibly be laid at the door of the absent Napoleon. Defeats abroad had stripped France of the territories he had won in 1796–7 and had cu
t her off from German and Italian markets. While Russia, Britain, Portugal, Turkey and Austria had joined the War of the Second Coalition against her, there was also a so-called ‘Quasi-War’ with America over the repayments of debts that the United States argued she owed the French Crown and not the French state. There had already been no fewer than four French war ministers in eight months that year, and with army pay so deeply in arrears, desertion, brigandage and highway robbery were rampant in the countryside. Royalist revolts in Provence and the Vendée had reignited. A Royal Navy blockade had wrecked overseas trade and the paper currency was next to worthless. The taxation of land, doors and windows, the seizure of suspected pro-Bourbon hostages, and the Jourdan Law of 1798 that turned the earlier emergency levées en masse into something approaching universal military conscription, were all deeply unpopular. Corruption over government contracts was even more rife than usual, and was correctly assumed to involve Directors such as Barras. Freedom of the press and association were heavily restricted. The 1798 and 1799 elections for one-third of the legislature had seen widespread fraud, and, crucially, the middle-class buyers of the biens nationaux (nationalized property) feared for the security of their acquisitions.
Few blights undermine a society more comprehensively than hyperinflation, and great political prizes would go to anyone who could defeat it. (The deputies of the legislature paid themselves in an inflation-proof way, by index-linking their salaries to the value of 30,000 kg of wheat.) The Directory had abolished the Law of the Maximum, which kept prices down on staples such as bread, flour, milk and meat, so the bad 1798 harvest had led to a pound of bread reaching above 3 sols for the first time in two years, leading to hoarding, riots and genuine distress. Perhaps worst of all, people couldn’t see how anything could improve, because revisions of the constitution had to be ratified three times by both chambers at three-year intervals and then by a special assembly at the end of the nine-year process.19 This was unlikely to happen in a legislature as fluid and unstable as that of late 1799, which included covert royalists, Feuillant constitutionalists (moderates), former Girondins, neo-Jacobin ‘patriots’, but precious few supporters of the Directory. By contrast, the constitutions that Napoleon had recently imposed on the Cisalpine, Venetian, Ligurian, Lemanic, Helvetian and Roman republics, along with his administrative reforms of Malta and Egypt, made him look like a zealous, efficient republican who believed in strong executives and central control, solutions that might also work well for metropolitan France.
France was not quite a failed state in the autumn of 1799, indeed in some areas the Directory had reason to be optimistic. Some economic reforms were being undertaken, Russia had left the Second Coalition, the situation in the Vendée was improving, British forces had been expelled from Holland, and Masséna had won some victories in Switzerland that meant that France was no longer in imminent danger of invasion.20 Yet none of this was enough to dispel the overall impression among Frenchmen that the Directory had failed and, as Napoleon put it at the time, ‘the pear was ripe’.21 Nor was there a place for Napoleon within the existing political structure, as the minimum age for Directors was still forty, whereas Napoleon was thirty, and Gohier hadn’t seemed keen to alter the constitution for him.
Napoleon has been accused of killing French democracy at Brumaire, and so he did, but even the Westminster parliament was hardly a paragon of Jeffersonian ideals, containing many seats that only had a few score electors and remaining firmly in the grip of an aristocratic oligarchy until well into the second half of the nineteenth century. Although the coup has been depicted as destroying French liberty too, since the Thermidor coup that overthrew Robespierre and brought the Directory into being in July 1794 there had been the coup attempt of Vendémiaire in 1795, the purge of Fructidor in 1797 and the Prairial parliamentary day of June 1799. For all its undoubted unconstitutionality, the Brumaire coup was hardly a new departure in French politics. Napoleon had sworn to uphold the constitution and much of his popularity had been based on the belief that he was a true republican. But ‘When the house is crumbling, is it the time to busy oneself in the garden?’ Napoleon asked Marmont rhetorically. ‘A change here is indispensable.’22
• • •
At breakfast at the rue de la Victoire on October 26 Napoleon openly criticized the Directory to Thiébault, contrasting their soldiers’ esprit on the Italian campaign with the government’s lethargy. ‘A nation is always what you have the wit to make it,’ he said. ‘The triumph of faction, parties, divisions, is the fault of those in authority only . . . No people are bad under a good government, just as no troops are bad under good generals . . . These men are bringing France down to the level of their own blundering. They are degrading her, and she is beginning to repudiate them.’ Forthright opinions like those had cost lives earlier in the Revolution, but Napoleon felt secure enough to talk sedition to a comrade he was hoping to win over, ending with one of his most regular condemnations: ‘Well, what can generals expect from this government of lawyers?’23
‘There’s no-one more pusillanimous than me when I make a military plan,’ Napoleon told Roederer on the 27th. ‘I exaggerate all the possible dangers and all the possible harms in the circumstances. I get in a very tiresome agitation. This doesn’t prevent me looking very serene in front of those surrounding me. I’m like a woman who’s giving birth. And when I’m resolved, everything is forgotten except what can make it succeed.’24 Napoleon applied the same obsessive attention to the planning of the Brumaire coup. His precise actions are impossible to know because of the total dearth of contemporary written evidence, but once it was launched everyone seems to have known where to be and what to do.
Days before the coup the Directory, probably suspecting what was afoot, offered Napoleon his pick of foreign commands, which he refused on health grounds. They also secretly accused him through the press of embezzlement in Italy, which he vigorously denied.25 The story is told from this period of Napoleon plotting at Talleyrand’s house when loud noises were heard in the street below. Fearing they were about to be arrested, the conspirators blew out the candles, rushed to the balcony and were hugely relieved to see the commotion had been caused by a carriage accident involving gamblers returning from the Palais-Royal.26
The gamble they were embarked upon was aided greatly on October 29 when a new law suspended the payment of pre-assigned monies to government contractors until their accounts were audited. The contractor Jean-Pierre Collot, a protégé of Cambacérès who was bankrolling the conspiracy, now felt he had less to lose.27
The moment that decided Napoleon to cross his Rubicon came the next day, when he dined with Barras at the Luxembourg Palace, where the whole Directory lived and worked. After dinner Barras proposed that General Gabriel d’Hédouville, whom Napoleon thought ‘excessively mediocre’, should become president of France to ‘save’ the Republic. Although he’d fought at Valmy, d’Hédouville had recently been forced to flee Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) by the black nationalist leader Toussaint L’Ouverture’s revolution, and certainly wasn’t presidential material. ‘As for you, General,’ Barras told Napoleon, ‘your intention is to return to the army; and I, sick, unpopular, worn out, I am good for nothing except to return to private life.’28 In one of Napoleon’s recollections of that occasion he merely stared at Barras without replying, but in another, ‘I answered with a manner calculated to convince him that I was not his dupe. He looked down and muttered a few remarks that at once decided me. From his apartment in the Luxembourg, I went down to that of Sieyès . . . I told him I had made up my mind to act with him.’29
Barras, realizing his terrible error, visited the rue de la Victoire at 8 a.m. the next morning to try to make amends, but Napoleon replied that he ‘was tired, indisposed, that he could not get used to the humidity of the atmosphere in the capital, coming from the dry climate of the sands of Arabia’, and ended the interview ‘with similar platitudes’.30 Napoleon met Sieyès secretly at Lucie
n’s house on November 1 to co-ordinate the details of the coup which by then Talleyrand and Fouché had also joined.
Joseph Fouché was no ordinary police chief. An Oratorian intending to join the Church until he was twenty-three, he became a regicide Jacobin in 1793. More interested in power than ideology, he kept up many contacts among the royalists, and he protected priests, especially Oratorians, despite being a leader of the anti-clerical party. ‘Everyone knows this personage’, wrote Napoleon’s future aide-de-camp Comte Philippe Ségur, ‘his medium stature, his tow-coloured hair, lank and scanty, his active leanness, his long, mobile face with the physiognomy of an excited ferret; one remembers his piercing keen gaze, shifty nevertheless, his little bloodshot eyes, his brief and jerky manner of speech which was in harmony with his restless, uneasy attitude.’31
Fouché recruited spies from, among many others, pedlars, butchers, hairdressers, locksmiths, wigmakers, perfumers, bartenders, Louis XVI’s former valet, an ex-Jacobin known as ‘Wooden-Leg Collin’, the Baroness Lauterbourg, and the madame of the brothel at No. 133 Palais-Royal.32 ‘One day he’ll look into my bed,’ Napoleon joked of him, ‘then next into my wallet.’33 It was welcome news for Napoleon that Fouché was supporting the coup, since he was never found on the losing side (although he also had contingency plans to arrest the ‘rebels’ should the attempt fail.34) Napoleon’s attitude towards Fouché both during the coup and thereafter was that ‘Fouché, and Fouché alone, is able to conduct the ministry of police. We cannot create such men; we must take as we find.’35
• • •
On November 6 both chambers of the legislature threw a subscription banquet of seven hundred covers in honour of Napoleon and General Moreau in the church of St-Sulpice – renamed the Temple of Victory in the Revolution – whose cavernous dimensions resemble a cathedral and whose towers were so high that they were used by the government for semaphore. With its black walls and acoustics designed to turn words into echoing incantations, it was perhaps the last place to choose for such a vast dinner on a cold November night, though the place has an undeniable majesty. Most of political France was there, but not Bernadotte, who (so Barras claimed) refused to put his name to the subscription ‘until Bonaparte has satisfactorily explained the reasons which have caused him to forsake his army’, adding: ‘I do not care to dine in the company of a plague-carrier.’36 It was said that Napoleon ‘ate nothing but eggs’ at the dinner, for fear of being poisoned by the Directory, and left early.37 In his speech he concentrated on the importance of unity between Frenchmen, a safe enough theme to which he would return repeatedly in the coming weeks and months.
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