In March 1800 the Consulate replaced more than 3,000 elected judges, public prosecutors and court presidents with its own appointees. Political opinions don’t seem to have been the deciding factor so much as practical expertise, as well as Napoleon’s keenness to sack elderly, corrupt or incompetent lawyers. It took seven months for the system to run smoothly again due to the backlogs, but thereafter the delivery of justice was improved.44
In his bid to end some of the more symbolic aspects of the Revolution once he had declared it to be over, Napoleon ordered that the red bonnets that had been put on church steeples and public buildings during the Revolution be taken down. Monsieur and Madame replaced citoyen and citoyenne, Christmas and Easter returned, and finally, on January 1, 1806, the revolutionary calendar was abolished. Napoleon had always been alive to the power of nomenclature and so he renamed the Place de la Révolution (formerly the Place Louis XV) as the Place de la Concorde, and demolished the giant female statue of Liberty there. ‘Concord,’ he later wrote, ‘that is what renders France invincible.’45 Other examples of his passion for renaming included rechristening his invention the Cisalpine Republic as the Italian Republic, the Army of England as the Grande Armée (in 1805), and the Place de l’Indivisibilité – the old Place Royale – as the Place des Vosges. Over the Consular period, Napoleon’s written style subtly altered, with revolutionary clichés such as inaltérable and incorruptible being replaced by the more incisive grand, sévère and sage.46
Napoleon next went about persuading the émigrés – aristocrats, property-owners, royalists and priests who had fled during the Revolution – to return to France, on the understanding that they must not expect to get their property back. He eventually restored their voting and citizenship rights.47 In October 1800 he removed 48,000 émigrés’ names from the list of 100,000 proscribed during the Revolution, and in April 1802 all but 1,000 irreconcilable royalists were removed altogether. Although much of the Ancien Régime nobility stayed aloof, several prominent members agreed to serve Napoleon, including men such as the Comte de Ségur, the Duc de Luynes, the Comte de Narbonne, the Duc de Broglie, Talleyrand and Molé. Other supporters were from non-émigré families who had been on the brink of ennoblement in 1789, such as Marmont, Rémusat, Berthier and Roederer. By May 1803, some 90 per cent of all émigrés had returned to France, reversing the huge drain of talent that had so weakened the country.48 Of the 281 prefects appointed by Napoleon between 1800 and 1814, as many as 110 (39 per cent) had been Ancien Régime nobles.49
As well as appealing to royalists abroad, Napoleon appealed to them in the Vendée, offering a general amnesty to any Chouans who laid down their weapons. He told them that the ‘unjust laws’ and ‘arbitrary acts’ of the Directory had ‘offended personal security and freedom of conscience’ and offered a ‘complete and total amnesty’ for all past events, in return for which the insurgents were asked to hand in their weapons by February 18, 1800.50 The priest Étienne-Alexandre Bernier accepted these terms, although the Chouan leaders Comte Louis de Frotté, Georges Cadoudal and Comte Louis de Bourmont fought on. (Bernier became bishop of Orleans, part of what Napoleon called his ‘sacred gendarmerie’ of loyal bishops.) Napoleon instructed General d’Hédouville to deal with the rebels robustly: ‘If you make war, employ severity and activity; it is the only means by which you make it shorter, and consequently less deplorable for humanity.’51
By early 1801 Napoleon had succeeded in decapitating the leadership of the Chouan rebellion, literally as well as metaphorically in some cases. He was criticized for deceit, but guerrilla campaigns have always invited different rules of engagement. Frotté was executed on February 18, Cadoudal came to breakfast with Napoleon on March 5 but later went into English exile, and Bourmont eventually changed sides altogether and fought for France. The Chouans had been fighting against the Republic in twelve western departments ever since 1793 and once numbered 30,000 armed rebels, but by the end of 1800 the Vendée was quiet. The Chouan activities would henceforth be largely confined to plotting against Napoleon’s own life.
• • •
On January 17, 1800, Napoleon closed no fewer than sixty of France’s seventy-three newspapers, saying that he wouldn’t ‘allow the papers to say or do anything contrary to my interests’.52 The decree, which wasn’t subjected to parliamentary scrutiny, stated that some ‘of the newspapers which are printed in the departments of the Seine are instruments in the hands of the enemies of the Republic’, and that therefore ‘during the course of the war’ only thirteen newspapers could publish, except those ‘devoted to the sciences, arts, literature, commerce and advertisements’.53 It further warned that any newspaper that included articles ‘disrespectful’ of the social order, of the sovereignty of the people, of the glory of the armies or of friendly governments ‘will be suppressed immediately’. Napoleon also blocked the circulation of foreign newspapers within France.54 He believed that any attempt to foster national unity would be impossible if the royalist and Jacobin newspapers were permitted to foment discontent.
The word ‘newspaper’ overly dignifies several of the scandal sheets that were alleging, among many other things, that Napoleon was sleeping with his own sister Pauline, but the decree was undoubtedly a powerful blow against free speech in France. ‘Controlled by the government, a free press may become a strong ally,’ Napoleon said years later, apparently unaware of the contradiction in terms. ‘To leave it to its own devices is to sleep beside a powder keg.’55 On another occasion he declared: ‘The printing press is an arsenal; it cannot be private property.’56 He had learned the power of stage-managed proclamations in Italy and Egypt and was not now prepared to cede control over communications at home. France had no tradition of press freedom before the Revolution. Freedom of speech was declared to be a universal right in 1789, and the number of officially sanctioned journals ballooned from four to over three hundred, but the government started closing journals as early as 1792, and periodic purging on political grounds had brought the number down to seventy-three by 1799.57 Freedom of the press didn’t exist in Prussia, Russia or Austria at the time, and even in 1819 the British government passed the notorious Six Acts, which tightened the definition of sedition, and by which three editors were arraigned. That was in peacetime, whereas France in January 1800 was at war with five countries, each of which had vowed to overthrow its government. Objectionable by modern standards, Napoleon’s move was little other than standard practice for his time and circumstances.
After the decree, most journalists stayed in the profession and merely sang a more Bonapartist tune, writing for papers such as the Bertin brothers’ Journal des Débats, Amélie Suard’s Publiciste and the Journal de Paris. Royalist writers started praising Napoleon, not least for his tough law-and-order stances which they had long advocated. The numbers of papers shrank, but overall readership remained much the same.58 Napoleon also co-opted a large number of former royalist journalists into his regime, an indication of his growing conservatism. Pierre-Louis Roederer was appointed to the Conseil, Louis Fontanes to the chancellorship of the Imperial University set up in 1808, Charles de Lacretelle to the Académie Française.
The Moniteur Universel, founded in 1789, became in the words of Comte Molé, ‘nothing but the docile instrument and depository of all [Napoleon’s] desires’.59 It was a private concern but government officials wrote articles for it and the provincial press relied on it as the government’s news-sheet.60 Its ‘Interior’ column was written by the interior ministry, and Napoleon’s office wrote the ‘Paris’ column, often from his direct dictation, especially its criticisms of Britain. ‘Miscellany’ was written by other officials, including some in the police ministry. Though it was a state propaganda news-sheet, full of lies and exaggerations, it was rarely dull, with contributions about poetry, literature, theatre and the Institut de France. Napoleon took a deep personal interest in the strategic dissemination of news. ‘Spread the following reports in an official manne
r,’ he once instructed Fouché. ‘They are, however, true. Spread them first in the salons, and then put them in the papers.’61 Overall, as he told his interior minister in 1812, ‘My intention is that everything is printed, absolutely everything except obscene material and anything that might disturb the tranquillity of the State. Censorship should pay no attention to anything else.’62
• • •
Ten days after announcing the results of the plebiscite in February 1800, the Consulate passed a law (by 71 to 25 in the Tribunate and 217 to 68 in the Legislative Body) placing the administration of all eighty-three departments or regions of France, which had been created in 1790 in an effort to devolve power, under prefects who were appointed by the minister of the interior. An essential element of local democracy established by the Revolution was thus completely abolished at a stroke, and brought about a massive concentration of power into Napoleon’s hands. Each department now had a centrally appointed prefect, with sub-prefects to look after the arrondissements and mayors for communes, who were also centrally appointed if they had more than 5,000 inhabitants in their charge. To the original eighty-three departments of 1790, the Consulate added twenty more in 1800, as well as between two and six arrondissements within each department. The departément–arrondissement–commune system is still in place today.
Local self-government, in which after 1790 about one Frenchmen in thirty was a local official of some kind, was thus replaced by one in which initiative and control were vested ultimately in the First Consul. There were local elected councils, but these functioned in a purely advisory capacity and sat for only two weeks a year. The juges de paix (magistrates), who had formerly been elected, were now named by the prefects. Although sub-prefects came from the department itself, the prefects – who lasted on average 4.3 years in office – almost always came from outside, to ensure that their ultimate loyalty was to Napoleon.63 But despite its authoritarianism, the prefectorial system turned out to be far more efficient than its ungainly predecessor.64 As First Consul Napoleon made all public officials salaried servants of the state, ensured they were properly trained, and abolished promotion through corruption and nepotism, replacing it with rewards for talent and merit. He insisted that his prefects provide him with systematic statistical data, ordering them to make extensive annual tours of their departments to glean first-hand information.65 He would later describe them as empereurs au petit pied (mini-emperors). Boniface de Castellane-Novejean, prefect of the Basses-Pyrénées, summed up the prefect’s task as to ‘make sure that the taxes are paid, that the conscription is enacted, and that law and order is preserved’. In fact he also had to impound horses for the cavalry, billet troops, guard prisoners-of-war, stimulate economic development, deliver political support for the government at plebiscites and elections, fight brigands and represent the views of the department, especially its elites, to the government.66 Only in areas in which Napoleon wasn’t interested, such as the relief of the poor and primary education, was much power left with the departments.67
• • •
With renewed fighting against Austria and her allies – though not now Russia – looming as soon as weather permitted, Napoleon needed to replenish the near-empty Treasury. He instructed Gaudin to borrow at least 12 million francs from the fifteen or so richest bankers in Paris. The best they would offer was 3 million francs, helpfully suggesting that a national lottery be established to raise the rest. Unimpressed, on January 27, 1800 Napoleon simply arrested Gabriel Ouvrard, the most powerful banker in France and the owner of the vast navy supply contract from which he was rumoured to have made a profit of 8 million francs over the previous four years.68 (It cannot have helped Ouvrard that he had refused to help finance the Brumaire coup.) Ouvrard’s experience helped loosen the purse-strings of other bankers, but Napoleon wanted to place France’s finances on a far surer footing. He could not continue, in effect, to need bankers’ and contractors’ permission before he could mobilize the army.
On February 13, Gaudin opened the doors of the Banque de France, with the First Consul as its first shareholder. Not wanting to solicit the instinctively cautious and unco-operative Parisian banking establishment for its creation, he had turned to a Rouen manufacturer, Jean-Barthélémy le Couteulx de Canteleu, and a Swiss banker, Jean Perregaux, for initial funding and guidance. They were two of the six regents who initially governed the bank. To encourage people to subscribe to the Banque de France’s start-up capital of 30 million francs, in share blocks of 1,000 francs, Napoleon decreed that it had the protection of the Consulate and ensured that his entourage, including Joseph, Hortense, Bourrienne, Clarke, Duroc and Murat all joined the subscription list.69 The bank would theoretically be independent of the government, indeed the Moniteur had to state before its official launch that it ‘had been wrongly compared to the Bank of England, as none of its capital went to the Government’, but in time this policy was quietly dropped, and the bank did indeed help finance Napoleon’s wars.
In April 1803 the bank was granted the exclusive right to issue paper money in Paris for fifteen years, notes which in 1808 became French legal tender, supported by the state rather than just the bank’s collateral. In time the confidence that Napoleon’s support gave the bank in the financial world allowed it to double the amount of cash in circulation, discount private notes and loans, open regional branches, increase revenues and the shareholder base, lend more, and in short create a classic virtuous business circle. It was also given important government business, such as managing all state annuities and pensions. Napoleon kept a tight control over so important an institution; in April 1806 he replaced the regents with a governor and two deputy governors appointed by himself. He never quite escaped the situation whereby the Treasury had to borrow from other banks, but it did alleviate the need to arrest their owners.
• • •
On February 19, 1800, Napoleon left the Luxembourg Palace and took up residence at the Tuileries. He was the first ruler to live there since Louis XVI had been taken away to the Temple prison in August 1792, an event he had witnessed as a young officer. Although Cambacérès had the right to live in the Tuileries on becoming Second Consul he shrewdly decided not to, noting that he would only have to leave it soon – that is, once Napoleon had won the plebiscite and wanted the palace to himself.
When the Bonapartes moved in, Napoleon took Louis XVI’s first-floor rooms overlooking the gardens laid out by Catherine de Médici, and Josephine took Marie Antoinette’s suite on the ground floor. ‘I can feel the Queen’s ghost, asking what I am doing in her bed,’ she is credited with having told a chamberlain. Napoleon appears to have had no such scruples, allegedly picking Josephine up and carrying her into their bedroom with the words ‘Come on, little Creole, get into the bed of your masters.’70 They put the Tuileries to good use, throwing dinners for two hundred people every ten days. Bronzes and tapestries were brought out of storage from Versailles, and a drawing room was decorated in yellow and lilac silk. From this period can be dated Josephine’s central role in the creation of what became the Empire style, which influenced furniture, fashion, interior decoration and design. She also championed the revival of etiquette after a decade of revolution.
Soon after his arrival at the Tuileries, Napoleon collected twenty-two statues of his heroes for the grand gallery, starting, inevitably, with Alexander and Julius Caesar but also featuring Hannibal, Scipio, Cicero, Cato, Frederick the Great, George Washington, Mirabeau and the revolutionary general the Marquis de Dampierre. The Duke of Marlborough, renowned for his victory at the battle of Bleinheim, was included, as was General Dugommier, whose presence alongside such genuine military giants as Gustavus Adolphus and Marshal Saxe must have been based on his perspicacity in spotting Napoleon’s worth at Toulon. Joubert was there too, since he was now safely dead. Surrounded by these heroes, about half of whom were in togas, had its effect: it was in Jean-Auguste Ingres’ painting of him as First Consul that Napoleon is first seen
with his hand tucked inside his waistcoat.71
When the well-born Englishwoman Mary Berry was shown around the Bonapartes’ living quarters by Josephine’s Swiss tailor, Sandos, she recorded that ‘Republican simplicity might well be excused for being startled at such magnificence. I have formerly seen Versailles, and I have seen the Petit Trianon, but I never saw anything surpassing the magnificence of this.’ She described the salon as being ‘hung and furnished with blue-lilac lustring embroidered in the honeysuckle [pattern] with maron, in the best taste possible’. The second salon, ‘furnished with yellow satin and brown and sang-de-boeuf fringes’, was even more magnificent, she enthused, especially as ‘the glasses [that is, mirrors] were all drapés and not framed’; she went on to describe in loving detail the Sèvres vases, porphyry tables, ormolu mounts, chandeliers, chairs, ‘exquisite tapestry’, candelabra and so on. She was astounded to enter the Bonapartes’ bedchamber, with its blue silk upholstery with white and gold fringes, and find that ‘they actually both sleep in one bed’.72
It was characteristic of Napoleon that he wanted value for money in all this. Concerned that the upholsterers were cheating him he asked a minister how much the ivory handle at the end of a bell-rope should cost. The minister had no idea, whereupon Napoleon cut it off, called for a valet, told him to dress in ordinary clothes and inquire the price in several shops and order a dozen. When he discovered they were one-third cheaper than billed he simply struck one-third off the charges made by all the tradesmen.73
‘It was part of the First Consul’s policy’, recalled Laure d’Abrantès, ‘to make Paris the centre of pleasure it had been before the Revolution.’74 This was in part to revive the luxury trades – dressmakers, carriage-makers, silversmiths, etc. – at which the French had traditionally excelled; but Napoleon also felt that a revived social life would reflect the solidity of the new regime. A significant part of the pre-revolutionary French economy, especially in areas like Lyons, the centre of the European silk industry, had been dependent on luxury goods, and Napoleon was determined to revive it. As First Consul he habitually wore a red, gold-embroidered taffeta coat known as the habit rouge, which Josephine and the prominent silk mercer M. Levacher had persuaded him to adopt. ‘I will not deny that I have some repugnance to equip myself in this fantastic costume,’ he told d’Abrantès, ‘but for that reason my resolution will be better appreciated.’75 It attracted the attention of illustrators, one of whom entitled his drawing Buonaparte Premier Consul de la République Française dans son grand costume.76 The Consular Guard was also given new uniforms: shoes replaced clogs; grenadiers wore bearskins and royal-blue uniforms with white facings and red epaulettes.77
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