This mobilization was designed to support a new and decisive offensive, but things did not work out that way. The young General Joubert, who was the favourite of Talleyrand and Fouché and was viewed as a future dictator should one be needed, took command of the army in Italy, only to be mortally wounded at the head of his troops at the battle of Novi on 14 August, which was lost. Shortly afterwards the British landed a force in Holland, which was then the Batavian Republic, a satellite of the French Republic, and seized the Dutch fleet. Foreign defeat stimulated a fresh wave of counter-revolution aimed at displacing republican authorities from the towns and cities they controlled. In the Alpes-Maritimes local counter-revolutionaries known as Barbets were fortified by the addition of soldiers deserting from Italy. A royalist insurrection possibly 12,000 strong, consisting of peasants, artisans, draft-dodgers and deserters led by returned émigrés and non-juring priests, tried to seize control of the Jacobin city of Toulouse on 6 August; in the fighting a hundred republicans and a thousand rebels were killed.7 The leaders of the Catholic and royal armies of the west of France, in close contact with the Bourbon court and the British, organized a series of attacks on republican towns in that area in October 1799. The Vendean leader Comte Ghaisne de Bourmont captured Le Mans on 14 October with 2,000 chouans. Georges Cadoudal, a burly peasant and chouan leader in the Morbihan, launched an assault on Vannes, while on 25 October Louis de Frotté, leader of the counter-revolution in Normandy, returned from exile in England to order a series of attacks on Norman towns. ‘In the space of two months’, reported police minister Fouché on 4 October, ‘the activity of our enemies has redoubled, and they have exploited the momentary setbacks of our armies to reopen wounds that had healed only imperfectly in the west and Midi. The scourge of a war that already has devastated too much is not enough for them; they also want the horrors of a civil war.’8
The Republic was now in serious trouble. It was under threat from counter-revolutionaries backed by the allies of the Second Coalition. It was threatened by Jacobins who wanted to bring back some version of the revolutionary government of 1793 in order to seize control from the Directory. On 13 September, indeed, General Jourdan proposed a motion of la patrie en danger in the Council of Five Hundred. ‘Our strongholds abroad have been surrendered by treachery,’ he declared, ‘and within our borders a vast royalist conspiracy holds the whole Republic in its web.’9 To declare the country in danger was to declare a state of emergency. The last time this had happened was in July 1792 when the country was invaded by Austria and Prussia and it prefigured the fall of the monarchy and the Terror. Jourdan’s motion was thus opposed by moderate republicans in the Five Hundred, led now by its president or speaker, Lucien Bonaparte, who wanted to avoid a return to revolutionary government. Accused of planning dictatorship he riposted, ‘There is none among us who would not be ready to stab the first person who dared set himself up as a dictator in France.’ Jourdan’s motion was defeated 245–171, the war minister Bernadotte promoted by the Jacobins was forced to resign and the Jacobin threat was temporarily shelved. Perhaps Lucien Bonaparte knew that his brother was on a ship somewhere between Egypt and the south of France.
Napoleon Bonaparte landed with a number of his generals at Fréjus on 9 October 1799 and arrived in Paris on 16 October. Joséphine’s house on the rue de la Victoire, where he stayed, was besieged by crowds and some sort of dénouement was keenly anticipated. The seizure of power when it came on 9–10 November (18–19 brumaire in the revolutionary calendar) was very much like previous coups since 1795: the ‘black legend’ of Napoleon’s brumaire coup was not elaborated until his nephew took power by a similar coup against the National Assembly in 1851. It was, in the first place, a conspiracy orchestrated by Bonaparte and Sieyès, who used the crisis finally to get rid of leading Director Barras and bring in a stronger constitution in order to contain the royalist and Jacobin opposition. ‘You want the power and Sieyès wants a new constitution,’ said Talleyrand, who was also part of the conspiracy. ‘Therefore join forces.’10 Sieyès had influence in the Council of Elders, who voted early on 9 November to move the assemblies away from the revolutionary-infested capital to the nearby palace of Saint-Cloud and to appoint Bonaparte commander of the troops of the Paris region. When the Council of Five Hundred opened its proceedings at Saint-Cloud, surrounded by troops, on 10 November, each deputy renewed his oath to the constitution of 1795. News arrived of the resignation of Barras and they started to debate the election of his successor. Bonaparte left his guard at the door and entered the Council, but was greeted by shouts of ‘Outlaw the dictator!’ and ‘Long live the Republic and the constitution of Year III!’ Bonaparte hurried out in a panic and Lucien, who had promised to resist would-be dictators but made an exception for his brother, was prevented from leaving too by deputies who held him down in his speaker’s chair. Napoleon’s grenadiers now intervened, removing Lucien from the chamber. In the courtyard Lucien was able to steel the nerve of his brother and the assembled troops by claiming that Jacobin deputies were armed with daggers, ready to assassinate Napoleon and relaunch the Terror. The grenadiers were ordered to drive the deputies out of the chamber at bayonet point and that night a commission of three, headed by Sièyes and Bonaparte, was set up to draft a new constitution.11
Threats were followed by double-crossing and corruption. Sieyès envisaged himself in the role of a grand elector, receiving ambassadors, signing treaties and appointing one consul for internal and one for external affairs. Bonaparte would have none of this ‘do-nothing king’ and bullied Sieyès into accepting a team of three consuls, the first of whom would have the power to appoint the Council of State (which drafted legislation) and government ministers. At the last meeting of the commission on 13 December, Bonaparte called Sieyès’ bluff by inviting him to propose the names of the three consuls. Reluctant to suggest himself, Sieyès proposed Bonaparte as first consul together with a former justice minister Cambacérès and Lebrun, former secretary of Louis XV’s reforming chancellor Maupeou. Sieyès found himself fobbed off as president of the Senate. Bonaparte now appointed his brother Lucien, to whom he was in debt for brumaire, as minister of the interior, and it was Lucien who organized the plebiscite held on 7 February 1800 to endorse the new constitution. Given massive royalist hostility in Belgium, the west and the Midi, the only possible verdict on the outcome of the vote – 3,011,007 for and 1,562 against – was that it was a fiddle.12
The strategy of Napoleon was to bring over the republican political class which had nurtured him while removing the threat from the Jacobin revolutionaries when the moment presented itself. Republican politicians dominated the three assemblies provided for under the new constitution: an appointed Senate which would choose the members of a Tribunate that could debate laws but not vote them and a Legislative Body that could vote them but not debate them, drawn from a national list of 6,000 notables. After 1802 electoral colleges were set up in each department, composed of the 600 no tables who paid the most land tax. Of the original sixty senators, then, thirty-eight had sat in a revolutionary assembly before brumaire, as had sixty-nine of the one hundred tribunes and 240 out of 300 deputies of the Legislative Body. Sieyès, as a veteran republican politician, hoped to use his influence in the assemblies to counterbalance that of Bonaparte, but having double-crossed him once Bonaparte did it again by offering him a large estate outside Versailles, which he accepted at the cost of his credibility.13
Dealing with the revolutionary threat was more difficult, for Bonaparte’s own legitimacy flowed from the Revolution and he was aware of leaders who had been carried away by trying to stop the revolutionary tide too soon. By the same token it was no longer seen as politic to guillotine revolutionaries; the preferred punishment was the ‘dry guillotine’ of deportation to some inhospitable colony. While he would have liked to deport sixty neo-Jacobins who were alleged to be carrying daggers in the chamber on 19 brumaire, including General Jourdan, along with seventy other former terrorists, immediately
after the coup, public opinion was too strongly against it. The fact that Fouché himself, carried over as minister of police, was a former architect of the Terror, also made things difficult. Bonaparte had to wait for an opportunity to blacken his enemies. This came with a bomb attempt on his life as he went to the opera on Christmas Eve 1800, which he blamed on ‘terrorists’, and had 130 of his revolutionary opponents deported without trial to Guiana, the Seychelles, or the islands of Oléron and Ré off La Rochelle.14
In fact the Christmas Eve assassination attempt was the work of royalists, who had hoped that Bonaparte was going to pave the way for the restoration of the monarchy, but were disappointed when he told the Comte de Provence (the future Louis XVIII), ‘You must give up all hope of returning to France: you would have to pass over a hundred thousand dead bodies.’15 That he blamed the attack on revolutionaries says much about Bonaparte’s strategy. He was keen to end the French civil war and to attract the support of royalists, so long as they gave up hope of a Bourbon restoration. Émigrés were allowed to return and recover their estates if they were prepared to accept the new regime. A truce was negotiated with the Vendean rebels on 18 January 1800. Talks were begun to restore the Roman Catholic religion in France, albeit under strict state control, and the Concordat between the regime and the Papacy was signed on 16 July 1801 and publicized on Easter Day, 18 April 1802. The anniversary of the death of Louis XVI, 21 February, was no longer celebrated.
Some royalists were indeed won over. François-René de Chateaubriand had fought in the émigré army of the Prince de Condé in 1792, had lost his brother, mother and sister as a result of the Terror and had been in exile in London and America. He returned in the spring of 1800 and, through the good offices of foreign minister Talleyrand, was appointed in 1803 first secretary at the embassy in Rome, re-established after the Concordat.16 The Duc de Richelieu, great-great-great-nephew of the cardinal, on the other hand, who had served in the army of Catherine the Great after 1792, returned to France early in 1802 in order to recover his estates, but was unwilling to serve the new regime and went back to serve Tsar Alexander in 1803 as governor of Odessa.17 The fate of royalist rebels who refused to lay down their arms against the Republic was more violent. Louis de Frotté, the leader of the Norman rebels, was captured, court-martialled and shot on 18 February 1800.18 Georges Cadoudal, the chouan leader, obtained an interview with Bonaparte in March 1800, but they did not agree terms and he now flitted between France and England, organizing conspiracies, with the police snapping at his heels.19
The profile of those who supported Napoleon and those who opposed him changed as he sought to perpetuate his power. The Senate ruled that he could serve as consul for life in 1802, and this was ratified by popular plebiscite, with 3.2 million in favour, and only 7,200 against.20 Republicans of a liberal persuasion saw this move as a threat first to liberty, then to the Republic. Benjamin Constant, who enjoyed the patronage of Sieyès and the favours of Madame de Staël, declared in his maiden speech to the Tribunate in January 1800 that ‘a constitution is in itself an act of defiance, as it sets limits to authority’. Such defiance led to his removal from the Tribunate in 1802, and Madame de Staël, accused of using her salon and her writings to rally liberal opposition, in September 1803 was ordered to reside 40 leagues from Paris. In fact she went to Weimar and Berlin and began to write the famous work that Napoleon took to be an indirect criticism of his regime, On Germany. Meanwhile the salon of her friend and rival Madame Récamier became a meeting point of Bonaparte’s brothers in arms, Generals Moreau and Bernadotte, equally successful generals in the republican army who were envious of the way in which Bonaparte was setting himself above them. Bernadotte remained cautious, but Moreau became entangled in a plot to kidnap Bonaparte planned by General Pichegru, his former commander. Pichegru had been deported to Cayenne as a royalist plotter after the 1797 coup but escaped and linked up with the tireless Georges Cadoudal and other prominent royalists. In the event Moreau was not won over by the royalists, as he would not compromise the Republic, although he was arrested with the other conspirators early in 1804 and sent for trial with them. Pichegru died in prison – whether strangled or committing suicide was unclear. Moreau used the trial in May 1804 to preach the virtues of a republican soldier without ambition and to observe, ‘many were republicans then who are now no longer’; he was given a two-year sentence which he was able to swap for exile in the United States.21 Cadoudal was executed with eleven other chouans, while death sentences against Armand and Jules Polignac, sons of Marie-Antoinette’s former confidante and close to the Comte d’Artois (the future Charles X), were commuted to prison terms.
During the trial an even more dramatic event occurred. The Duc d’Enghien, thirty-one-year-old son of the Prince de Condé and a likely Bourbon pretender, was seized in Germany on Napoleon’s orders and brought to the fort of Vincennes outside Paris, where he was summarily tried by a nocturnal court martial and shot. Fouché remarked that this was worse than a crime: it was a mistake. Chateaubriand recalled that this event ‘changed my life, as it changed that of Napoleon’.22 Seeing the blood of a regicide on Napoleon’s hands he resigned his diplomatic post and broke with the regime. Napoleon, however, took the view that the Bourbon threat was so serious that only becoming an emperor or republican king himself would ensure the security of his position. To become hereditary emperor shut the door on Bourbon restoration, but also alienated many of the republican brotherhood. Lazare Carnot, who had served as war minister in 1800, declared in the Tribunate that while a temporary dictatorship had been necessary to save the Republic, a hereditary empire was a threat both to liberty and to equality, for it would usher in a new nobility.23 In spite of this the Senate offered Napoleon a hereditary imperial title on 18 May 1804, a constitutional change that was endorsed by plebiscite, with 2.5 millions voting in favour and a mere 1,400 against.
CHARLEMAGNE’S EMPIRE
Napoleon was consecrated emperor in the cathedral of Notre-Dame on 2 December 1804. He received the crown, sword and sceptre said to have belonged to Charlemagne and brought from his capital of Aix-la-Chapelle, but in fact mocked up for the occasion by local Paris jewellers. Napoleon intended to recreate the western Empire of Charlemagne and needed the sanction of the pope. Pius VII was persuaded to cross the Alps for the occasion. He said mass and blessed the regalia but was not permitted to crown Napoleon for fear of reopening the conflict between Papacy and Empire that had dogged the Middle Ages; Napoleon placed the crown on his own head and also crowned his wife Joséphine. Napoleon then swore an oath to maintain the territory of the Republic, to safeguard the Concordat with the Church, and to uphold equal rights and civil and political liberty, to the massed acclaim of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’24
The coronation of the first emperor of the fourth French dynasty after the Merovingians, Carolingians and Capetians required a royal family, a household and a military establishment. Napoleon and his brothers Joseph and Louis were pronounced princes of the blood; Lucien had been relieved of the Ministry of the Interior in 1800 and retired in high dudgeon to Rome. Napoleon’s uncle, Cardinal Fesch, archbishop of Lyon, became grand almoner, Cambacérès arch-chancellor of the Empire and Talleyrand grand chamberlain. The coronation regalia were carried by some of the nineteen military chiefs who had been promoted marshal in May 1804. They included Joachim Murat, who had married Napoleon’s sister Caroline and was now part of the family, Kellermann and Lefebvre, veterans of the republican armies of 1792–4, the victors of Valmy, Jemappes and Fleurus, and the brilliant generals of the Army of Italy of 1796 – Berthier, Masséna, Auguereau, Lannes. The Army of the Rhine, led by Moreau, a stronghold of opposition to Bonaparte’s rise, was less favoured, although generals like Ney, who had served under Moreau at Hohenlinden in 1800, but did not follow him down the route of opposition, were promoted also.
The Empire of Charlemagne now had to be created in reality. Napoleon crowned himself king of Italy with the ancient crown of the Lombards in the Du
omo of Milan on 26 May 1805. This was a kingdom of northern Italy that left the Papal States for the moment to the pope, but in March 1806 Napoleon ousted the Bourbon dynasty from Naples and entrusted this kingdom to his brother Joseph. At the other end of Europe he made his brother Louis, who had married Joséphine’s daughter Hortense, king of Holland. Meanwhile with the defeat at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 Napoleon lost control of the seas and gave up hope of invading Britain from the huge camp established at Boulogne. His Grande Armée of 200,000 men was moved swiftly via Strasbourg to Bavaria first to take on an Austrian army at Ulm and then to defeat a combined Austrian– Russian force in perhaps his most brilliant victory at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805, the anniversary of his coronation. Bavaria and Württemberg were raised to the status of kingdoms but became French client states, the heart of the Confederation of the Rhine, set up in July 1806, through which Napoleon looked to rule a Germany from which Austria and Prussia were squeezed out. On 6 August 1806 Emperor Francis of Austria dissolved the Holy Roman Empire that had lasted for a thousand years, becoming nothing but a Danu-bian prince himself and recognizing that Napoleon was now the Emperor of the West. The Confederation of the Rhine was enlarged at its northern end by the creation out of Prussian territories of the Grand Duchy of Berg, which was given to Murat. This provoked war with Prussia, but the redoubtable Prussian army was destroyed by Napoleon at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt on 14 October 1806. Napoleon occupied Berlin and removed the sword of Frederick the Great from its tomb, sending it back to the Invalides in Paris. The Russians were the next challenge and, after an indecisive bloodbath at Eylau on 7–8 February 1807, Napoleon defeated them at the battle of Friedland on 14 June 1807. Napoleon met Tsar Alexander in great pomp on a barge on the River Nieman on 7 July and concluded the Treaty of Tilsit. France and Russia joined in alliance, acknowledged their respective gains in Europe, and unceremoniously disposed of Prussia as a great power. Prussia was reduced to a shell with the invention of a kingdom of Westphalia in the west, of which Bonaparte’s brother Jérôme became king, and in the east by the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a client state that was given to the King of Saxony, both of which were incorporated into the Confederation of the Rhine.
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