Some Conseil meetings lasted eight to ten hours, and Chaptal recalled that it was always Napoleon ‘who expended the most in terms of words and mental strain. After these meetings, he would convene others on different matters, and never was his mind seen to flag.’68 When members were tired during all-night sessions he would say: ‘Come, sirs, we haven’t earned our salaries yet!’69 (After they ended, sometimes at 5 a.m., he would take a bath, in the belief that ‘One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep to me.’70) Other than on the battlefield itself, it was here that Napoleon was at his most impressive. His councillors bear uniform witness – whether they later supported or abandoned him, whether they were writing contemporaneously or long after his fall – to his deliberative powers, his dynamism, the speed with which he grasped a subject, and the tenacity never to let it go until he had mastered its essentials and taken the necessary decision. ‘Still young and rather untutored in the different areas of administration,’ recalled one of them of the early days of the Consulate, ‘he brought to the discussions a clarity, a precision, a strength of reason and range of views that astonished us. A tireless worker with inexhaustible resources, he linked and co-ordinated the facts and opinions scattered throughout a large administration system with unparalleled wisdom.’71 He quickly taught himself to ask short questions that demanded direct answers. Thus Conseil member Emmanuel Crétet, the minister of public works, would be asked ‘Where are we with the Arc de Triomphe?’ and ‘Will I walk on the Jena bridge on my return?’72
The Conseil was split into sections to cover various areas of government – army, navy, finance, justice, home affairs, police and provinces. ‘The long horseshoe-shaped table with its array of men of such varied origins and opinions,’ Comte Molé recalled, ‘was simply transformed when the organizing genius appeared on a dais at the end of the horseshoe.’73 Another remembered how ‘His seat – a mahogany chair with green morocco seat and arms – was little more than an office chair, and was raised one step above the floor.’74 It took a battering, as during the discussions Napoleon would display some of the classic signs of nervous energy:
In the middle of a debate, we would see him with a knife or scraper in his hand, carving at the arms of his chair and gouging out deep cuts. We were constantly busy bringing replacement parts for this chair that we were sure he would be cutting to pieces again tomorrow. To vary the pleasures of this kind, he would seize a quill pen and cover each sheet of paper in front of him with wide bars of ink. Once they were well blackened, he crumpled them up in his hands and threw them to the ground.75
Ambitious men preferred to take junior positions as auditeurs in the Conseil to grander ones elsewhere in the civil service, because it was a good place to catch Napoleon’s eye. They formulated the proposed laws that the Conseil had agreed upon. As he grew older, if he wanted a particular auditeur to report to the Conseil he would use a lorgnette to search the window ledges on which they sat. Many people rightly saw a place in the Conseil as being a faster route to promotion that a seat in the Senate.
Sometimes Napoleon would announce in advance that he was going to attend a session, at others the councillors didn’t know he was coming until they heard the drumroll on the Tuileries staircase. He would take his seat, ask searching questions, fall into reveries, go off on monologues. ‘Do you know why I allow so much discussion at the Conseil?’ he once boasted to Roederer. ‘It is because I am the strongest debater in the whole Conseil. I let myself be attacked, because I know how to defend myself.’76 A proposed decree would be read out, then the specialist committee’s report on it, and then Napoleon urged acknowledged experts on the subject to speak. The tone was matter-of-fact, and attempts at oratorical grandstanding tended only to inspire derision.
• • •
Napoleon made little effort to conceal his role-model as a lawgiver, civil engineer and nation-builder. ‘He reformed the calendar,’ he wrote of Julius Caesar, ‘he worked on the wording of the civil, criminal and penal codes. He set up projects to beautify Rome with many fine buildings. He worked on compiling a general map of the Empire and statistics for the provinces; he charged Varro with setting up an extensive public library; he announced the project to drain the Pontine marshes.’77 Although it is too early to say whether the institutions Napoleon put in place will last as long as Caesar’s, he clearly put down what he called ‘some masses of granite as anchors in the soul of France’.
13
Plots
‘What a pity the man wasn’t lazy.’
Talleyrand on Napoleon
‘After great revolutions all sorts of events are to be expected, before things calm down.’
Napoleon to Jourdan, January 1800
‘I shall blow into Paris unexpectedly,’ Napoleon wrote to Lucien from Lyons on June 29, 1800. ‘I want no triumphal arches or any such colifichets [fripperies]. I have too good an opinion of myself to care about such nonsense. The only real triumph is the satisfaction of the people.’1 Napoleon arrived at the Tuileries at 2 a.m. on July 2, and on the 14th, by now a firm date in the republican calendar, huge parades were organized on the Champ de Mars (where the Eiffel Tower stands today) featuring captured standards, as well as ceremonies at Les Invalides, the Place de la Concorde and the Place Vendôme. He told his fellow consuls he didn’t want a re-enactment of a chariot race, which ‘might have been very good in Greece, where one fought on chariots, but that doesn’t mean much chez nous’.2 The Consular Guard had arrived only that morning, so they paraded in their tattered and bloodstained uniforms. Lucie de La Tour du Pin was surprised to find the crowd quiet and shocked at the sight of the wounded; she concluded that above all they wanted an early peace.3 Although peace terms were being negotiated with Austria from as early as July, they wouldn’t be signed until Moreau inflicted a crushing defeat on Archduke Johann at Hohenlinden on December 3, capturing 8,000 prisoners, 50 guns and 85 ammunition and baggage wagons. The Austrians fought on listlessly until Christmas Day, when the Archduke Charles agreed an armistice at Steyr, only 90 miles from Vienna. ‘You surpassed yourself again in this campaign,’ Napoleon wrote to Moreau. ‘These wretched Austrians are very obstinate. They were relying upon the ice and snow; they weren’t yet acquainted with you. I salute you affectionately.’4
The end of the Quasi-War with America came on October 3, with a treaty negotiated by Joseph and signed at Mortefontaine, his chateau on the Loire. This meant that France no longer had to face the threat of a nascent American navy co-operating with the British Royal Navy. ‘The First Consul was grave,’ wrote the American envoy William Van Murray after its ratification, ‘rather thoughtful, occasionally severe – not inflated nor egotistical – very exact in all his motions which show at once an impatient heart and a methodical head . . . of a most skillful fencing master . . . He speaks with a frankness so much above fear that you think he has no reserve.’5 Four days later, France and Spain agreed to the secret Convention of San Ildefonso, which provided that when France made peace with Austria, Habsburg-owned Tuscany would be ceded to the Bourbon heir of the Duke of Parma, King Charles IV of Spain’s son-in-law Don Louis; in return Spain would cede Louisiana (then a vast territory covering land in thirteen modern-day US states from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border) to France.* Under one of the provisions of San Ildefonso, France promised not to sell Louisiana to a third power.
Meanwhile, the prospect of Malta, which had been subjected to a two-year blockade by the Royal Navy, falling to Britain led Napoleon formally to give the island to Paul I of Russia, in the Tsar’s capacity as the new grand master of the Knights of St John. Although this didn’t carry any weight with the British once they captured the island on September 5, it served to improve Franco-Russian relations, and the Tsar offered to recognize the Rhine and the Alpes-Maritimes as France’s natural borders. By the end of the year he had inaugurated the League of Armed Neutrality, by which Prussia, Sweden and Denmark joined Russia in opposing Britain’s
harsh and deeply unpopular maritime trade laws, particularly its unlimited searches of neutral shipping for French contraband. So friendly were Napoleon’s relations with Paul by early 1801 that plans were even drawn up for Masséna to enter Astrakhan with 35,000 men, join up with 35,000 Russians and 50,000 Cossacks, and then cross the Caspian Sea to take Kandahar, from where they would invade India.6 It was another of Napoleon’s far-fetched Oriental schemes, though not so fantastical as a march from Aleppo.
• • •
Just after 8 p.m. on Wednesday, December 24, 1800, Napoleon and Josephine took separate carriages to the Opéra to listen to Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. At the corner of Place du Carrousel and rue Saint-Niçaise, gunpowder had been placed in a water-barrel on a seed-merchant’s cart, drawn by a small dray horse, by Joseph Picot de Limoelan, a Chouan who had arrived from London just over a month earlier.* The fuse was lit by a former naval officer, Robinault de Saint-Régant, an accomplice of the Chouan leader Georges Cadoudal, who gave the horse’s reins to a young girl to hold as he made off. A combination of the fuse being slightly too long and the speed with which Napoleon’s coachman César was driving, swerving past the cart in the street, saved Napoleon’s life.7 ‘Napoleon escaped by a singular chance,’ recorded his aide-de-camp Jean Rapp, who was in the following coach with Josephine at the time. ‘A grenadier of the escort had unwittingly driven one of the assassins away from standing in the middle of the rue Niçaise with the flat of his sabre and the cart was turned round from its intended position.’8 Josephine’s carriage was far enough behind for all its occupants to survive the massive explosion too, although Hortense was lightly cut on her wrist by the flying glass of the carriage windows. The machine infernale, as it was dubbed, killed five people (including the young girl holding the horse) and injured twenty-six.9 It could have been far more, since no fewer than forty-six houses were damaged.
Both carriages came to a halt, and through the scene of carnage Rapp got out of Josephine’s carriage to check on Napoleon. When Josephine was told that her husband was unharmed, and indeed insisted on continuing to the Opéra, she bravely followed and found ‘Napoleon was seated in his box, calm and composed, and looking at the audience through his opera-glass.’ ‘Josephine, those rascals wanted to blow me up,’ he said as she entered the box, and he asked for the oratorio’s programme.10 Napoleon’s performance was as masterly as anything they were likely to see on stage that night. When the audience learned what had happened, they cheered his escape.
Ever since Napoleon had replied to the would-be Louis XVIII explaining the impossibility of a Bourbon restoration there had been plots of differing degrees of seriousness against his life. On September 4, seventeen men had been arrested and accused of a projet d’assassination.11 Then on October 11 a conspiracy was uncovered to stab Napoleon as he left the Opéra. One of the plotters, Joseph-Antoine Aréna, was the brother of the Corsican deputy who had allegedly brandished the knife during Brumaire.12 ‘I didn’t run any real danger,’ Napoleon told the Tribunate when it congratulated him on his escape. ‘The seven or eight wretches, in spite of their desire, were unable to commit the crimes they meditated.’13 On October 24 a dozen more people were arrested for a plot which involved throwing oeufs rouges (hand grenades) into Napoleon’s carriage on his way to Malmaison.14 The pyrotechnician Alexandre Chevalier escaped the net, as did another plotter, Thomas Desforges, who had been a friend of Josephine’s before her marriage.
Two weeks after that, on November 7, the royalist Chevalier was finally arrested and a multi-firing gun was seized, along with plans for fireworks to frighten Napoleon’s horses and for iron spikes to be laid across the street to prevent the Consular Guard from coming to the rescue. A week later yet another plot, involving the blocking of a street down which Napoleon was to pass, was discovered by a hardworking Fouché. In an official report he listed no fewer than ten separate conspiracies against Napoleon’s life since he had come to power, including by accomplices of Chevalier who were still at large.15 Police reports began to indicate that the public assumed Napoleon would indeed be assassinated sooner or later.
Of all these plots, the machine infernale came closest to success. Some excellent forensic work by Fouché’s detectives reassembled the horseshoes, harness and cart, and a grain merchant identified the man to whom he had sold it.* As the net tightened, Limoelan escaped, perhaps to become a priest in America.16 Although everything pointed to the Chouan royalists, the incident was too good an opportunity for Napoleon to waste politically and he told the Conseil that he wanted to act against ‘the Terrorists’ – that is, the Jacobins who had supported the Terror and opposed Brumaire. Six years after his imprisonment in 1794 for his Jacobin loyalties Napoleon now believed them to be enemies of the state even more dangerous than the Chouan assassins, because of their ideology, familiarity with power and superior organization. ‘With one company of grenadiers I could send the whole Faubourg Saint-Germain flying,’ he said at this time of the royalist salons found there, ‘but the Jacobins are made of sterner stuff, they are not beaten so easily.’17 When Fouché ventured to blame British-backed royalists such as Cadoudal, Napoleon demurred, referring to the September Massacres of 1792: ‘They are men of September [Septembriseurs], wretches stained with blood, ever conspiring in solid phalanx against every successive government. We must find a means of prompt redress,’ and adding that ‘France will be tranquil about the existence of its Government only when it’s freed from these scroundrels.’18 So, emotionally at least, Napoleon left behind his revolutionary past.
On New Year’s Day 1801, Louis Dubois, who was then a member of the central police bureau but the following month was appointed prefect of police, read a report to the Conseil about the various assassination plots, including one to infiltrate assassins into the Guard Grenadiers, another where a man called Metgen was going to try to stab Napoleon at the Comédie-Française during Racine’s Britannicus (which Napoleon hadn’t attended that particular night) and a third from a M. Gombault-Lachaise who had invented a machine containing ‘Greek Fire’ explosives that he was to have launched at Napoleon during Desaix’s obsequies, before he found that heavy decorations were in the way.19 ‘Chouannerie and the émigrés are skin diseases,’ Napoleon said at that meeting. ‘Terrorism is an internal malady.’*
On January 8, 130 Jacobins were arrested and deported – mainly to Guiana – by means of a sénatus-consulte passed three days earlier. (Although the sénatus-consulte was originally intended to be used only to alter the constitution, Napoleon found it increasingly useful as a way of bypassing the Legislative Body and Tribunate.) Guiana was nicknamed ‘the dry guillotine’ because its climate was almost as lethal as a death sentence. There was no public outcry. Even though they were innocent of plotting the machine infernale, many had been involved in judicial murders, especially those who had been in decision-making roles during the Terror. When Théophile Berlier sought to argue with Napoleon over the fates of two Jacobins called Destrem and Talon, the First Consul replied frankly that he was deporting them not because he thought they were behind the machine infernale, but ‘for their conduct during the Revolution’. Berlier countered that without the bomb going off the question of transporting Destrem and Talon would never have arisen, upon which Napoleon merely laughed and said: ‘Aha, Monsieur Lawyer, you won’t allow that you are beaten!’20*
Unusually, unless there was another agenda lost to us, Fouché’s list of deportees was idiosyncratic and slapdash; one Jacobin had been a judge in Guadaloupe for five years, another had been dead for six months, and several others had made their peace with the new regime and were even working for it. It was the last of the mass roundups that had characterized the previous twelve years of French politics. ‘From that time the spirit of the capital changed as if by the waving of a wand,’ Napoleon later reminisced.21 Simultaneously with his wholly political purge of the Jacobins, the real Chouan plotters were also rounded up, and nine, including Chevalier, were
guillotined on January 30–31, although the Comte de Bourmont was merely imprisoned (and escaped in 1804, later fighting for Napoleon in Portugal). When, in December 1804, evidence was produced that there had been yet another assassination plot similar to Cadoudal’s, Napoleon merely exiled one of its members, Jean de La Rochefoucauld-Dubreuil.22
Before the machine infernale, Napoleon had attempted to introduce draconian security laws that extended the use of extraordinary military tribunals into civilian life. The Conseil d’État thought them over-authoritarian and they had to be withdrawn on the protests of liberal and moderate legislators in the Tribunate, including Pierre Daunou, the poet Marie-Joseph Chénier (who had written the lyrics to ‘Le Chant du Départ’) and the writer Benjamin Constant.23 After the explosion they were quickly passed. Napoleon had taken an aggressive stance towards the Tribunate almost as soon as he had invented it, denouncing Constant, Daunou and Chénier as ‘Metaphysicians whom it were well to duck in water . . . You must not think that I will let myself be attacked like Louis XVI. I will not allow it.’24 In a bid to foil future plots, he never let it be publicly known where he meant to go until five minutes before his departure.25
• • •
On February 9, 1801, the Peace of Lunéville, negotiated by Joseph and Talleyrand and an eventually exhausted Count Ludwig von Cobenzl, finally ended the nine-year war between Austria and France. The treaty was loosely based on Campo Formio, securing French gains in Belgium, Italy and the Rhineland, but stripping Austria of much of the territorial compensations she had received in northern Italy in that treaty four years earlier, to which Francis would have done well to adhere. The Franco-Russian rapprochement, and the fact that Moreau was within striking distance of Vienna, gave Cobenzl little room for diplomatic manoeuvre. Austria lost Tuscany to France, which under the terms already agreed between France and Spain at the Convention of San Ildefonso then became the Kingdom of Etruria and was bestowed upon Don Louis, the ‘astonishingly stupid’ (according to Laure d’Abrantès) twenty-eight-year-old great-grandson of Louis XV who had married the Infanta María Luisa of Spain. ‘Rome will be tranquil,’ Napoleon said of the new king. ‘This one won’t cross the Rubicon.’26
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