Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life

by Alan Schom

  Dubois personally began grilling the scar-faced Carbon, but he remained obdurately silent. The interrogation went on throughout the day without results. After a break, at nine o’clock that evening the prefect resumed the questioning, which continued hour after hour, until suddenly at four o’clock the next morning Carbon cracked. Not only did he admit to being the “itinerant merchant” who had bought the cart and horse, and who had kept them at 23 Rue de Paradis, but he even revealed the names of his accomplices: “Pierrot,” in reality Pierre Robinault de Saint-Réjant, and “Beaumont,” another important aristocrat by the name of Limoelan.

  Dubois could not believe his good fortune, for Saint-Réjant had been a former divisional general in the Chouan army and Limoelan, a major general serving under the infamous Cadoudal! This was a royalist plot through and through, there could be no doubt of it. Other names were also revealed, and although Saint-Réjant was soon captured, other conspirators escaped.

  As Prefect Rigotard put it later, Fouché could well savor “his own Austerlitz,” while accusing his rival Dubois (and his police) of “weakness” and “indulgence” for having permitted such a dastardly attack ever to have taken place.[473] Dubois was furious, both with Fouché and the fact that so many had escaped his dragnet. Fortunately Napoleon took a different view and strongly praised the work of the prefect of police, capping it with a generous “bonus” and a May 1802 appointment to the prestigious State Council, as a reward “for his conduct and the good order he maintained in the capital.”[474]

  This initial royalist plot to murder First Consul Bonaparte marked what was only the beginning of a long-drawn-out war between the Chouans and Napoleon Bonaparte, the origins of which were now traced back to their headquarters across the Channel.

  The plot in the Rue de Paradis was in fact finally linked to General Cadoudal himself, who, under orders from London that summer, had prepared Saint-Réjant’s original mission: to kidnap (not kill) General Bonaparte, this directly financed by the British government. “I will provide you with the means by which to reach the capital, where you will get in touch with people whose names and addresses you will be given,” Cadoudal had instructed him. “With those funds you will arrange to buy a number of horses, arms, and clothes that I shall be needing at a later stage.”[475] General Cadoudal — commissioned by Louis XVIII — would then personally take command in Paris.

  Saint-Réjant, however, desired more vigorous action than a mere kidnapping. Thus, once in France, he independently contacted his friend M. de Limoelan, a leading royalist, and with the help of an engineer fabricated the bomb eventually planted in the Rue St.-Niçaise.[476]

  The rest of course was history, for Cadoudal, still in England, though now blamed by Fouché for the attempt on the first consul’s life, in fact only learned of it afterward and was as surprised as anyone else, thinking it the work of Jacobins. But with the proof presented by Dubois, a sullen Napoleon reluctantly released some 223 persons arrested erroneously after the explosion, including Jacobins or Jacobin sympathizers, but not before executing both Carbon and Saint-Réjant.

  Time now passed, and Cadoudal, the tall, heavily built, forty-five-year-old scion of Breton peasants, was a little more subtle and intelligent than the impatient Saint-Réjant, although just as stubborn. Not about to give up his plans to overthrow the usurper Bonaparte in favor of the rightful heir, Louis XVIII, he slowly prepared yet again in 1803 for his return to France.

  Until this point Cadoudal had refrained from acting, but with the more cautious General Pichegru’s acceptance to support it, Cadoudal thought he could now proceed. What he did not realize, however, was that Pichegru was doing so now only under the mistaken assumption that General Moreau had given his full support as well. A royalist envoy had assured Pichegru of Moreau’s support, whereas in reality it had been only Moreau’s mother-in-law, Mme. Hulot — violently hostile to Bonaparte — who had encouraged the envoy to proceed to England. “If Moreau and Pichegru agree, I will soon be back in France,” the Comte d’Artois (the brother of King Louis XVIII and himself the future Charles X) announced enthusiastically, if prematurely, giving the blessing of the House of Bourbon for a major concerted attack (assassination) by the Chouans.[477]

  Cadoudal, a vigorous man despite his obesity, only too glad to get back to France to work actively, set out from London on August 21, 1803, with his coconspirators (including two from the unsuccessful Christmas Eve plot). Financed generously by Prime Minister Henry Addington’s government, they sailed to a point near Dieppe, where a Chouan officer by the name of Raoul Gaillard greeted them and arranged for their travel to Paris. (Gaillard, an ex-Oratorian, was an old friend of Minister Fouché.)

  Once in the French capital, however, everything depended on the coordination of efforts by Generals Pichegru and Moreau. As for Cadoudal, his hands were tied until these two gentlemen finally met and agreed to the joint course of action. But weeks passed, and for a variety of reasons, mostly contrived, nothing was arranged between Pichegru and Moreau. After further problems they finally met secretly on January 25, 1804. It was only now that Moreau’s real feelings were disclosed, however, and he emphasized, as he had in the past, his staunch republican values — no matter how he detested Bonaparte — and that he would certainly not support the Bourbons or anyone else to the throne. Cadoudal and Pichegru were stunned. Unless they could pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat, all plans for a concerted military uprising would have to be abandoned or greatly reduced.

  It was also in late January that Police Director Real informed Napoleon that a royalist in the Abbaye Prison had just revealed that he had participated in Cadoudal’s recent landing at Dieppe. The prisoner described the plans for a vast military uprising, focusing around the kidnapping plot to remove General Bonaparte himself.

  Fouché and Dubois immediately put out a dragnet for the conspirators, in February capturing Bouvet de Lozier, a Chouan leader, who gave them the background on the “Moreau-Pichegru conspiracy.”

  Informed of this, Napoleon personally ordered the arrest of the two generals. Moreau was captured on February 15 and taken to the towering medieval dungeon in Paris known as the Temple. Five days later Pichegru, Napoleon’s former teacher at Brienne, was apprehended in the house of one M. Leblanc, who had betrayed him for a purse of silver. Under the circumstances Cadoudal decided to find a safe place for himself, selecting the house of a pro-Bourbon perfume manufacturer. Fellow conspirator Louis Léridant, with the aid of his friend Goujon, was to have a cabriolet ready to transport Cadoudal. What no one knew, however, was that the worthy royalist Goujon was in fact in the pay of the police. On March 9 a cabriolet duly arrived in the Place St.-Etienne du Mont, right on schedule, which General Cadoudal and three of his officers promptly boarded. At that same moment, however, four policemen in civilian clothes suddenly sprang forward, attempting to grab him, only to be shoved aside by Cadoudal’s friends as he escaped in the carriage. But on reaching the Place de l’Odeon, two more policemen cut him off, Cadoudal shooting one of them dead as he reached for the horses and wounding the second superficially in the hip just as he was about to strike Cadoudal with a club. As Cadoudal leaped from the cab and began to run away, the wounded officer gathered enough strength to reach Cadoudal and strike him over the head, aided by two passing civilians. Within the hour public enemy number one was in Dubois’s clutches at the prefecture.

  Beyond admitting to Dubois that he had come to Paris to seize Bonaparte and take him prisoner, Cadoudal refused to disclose anything else.

  “Where did you stay in Paris?” Dubois asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Was Pichegru one of the conspirators?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Moreau?”

  “Don’t know him, never met him.”

  “Where were you lodging when you were arrested?”

  “In a cabriolet.”

  “Are you aware that you killed a family man [the police agent]?”

  “Next ti
me send bachelors,” the prisoner grimly quipped.

  Dubois got nothing more out of him, and after days of interrogation he was dispatched to the Temple to join the others.

  At the trials of these royalists, Cadoudal was sentenced to death and Moreau given only a two-year prison term, followed by his expulsion from the country. Two other accomplices, Armand and Jules Polignac, were also sentenced. Jules Polignac (a future statesman under Charles X) received two years, while Armand was condemned to death, later reduced to life imprisonment. As for General Pichegru, he was found dead in his prison cell in the Temple, having died, according to the official police report, of “self-inflicted strangulation,” like an inordinate number of Temple prisoners. And with that ended the second serious Chouan attempt against Napoleon, one he would not easily forget.

  First Consul Bonaparte had acted quickly, accusing men of crimes before even knowing who was involved in the Christmas Eve plot, because of an earlier attempt on his life at the Opéra by some knife-wielding “republicans,” mostly Corsican inspired (as were so many of Bonaparte’s enemies). On the night of October 10, 1800, Police Prefect Dubois’s men had lain in wait for Arena, Ceracchi, Topino-Lebrun, and Demerville as they assembled to assassinate the first consul, who, although he attended, had been warned of the situation. They were duly captured, tried, and executed, but Napoleon had been shaken by the incident.[478]

  Prior to that an ambush had been set for him on the road to Malmaison, from which he had narrowly escaped.

  These threats and attempts on his life from the outset of his regime had clearly affected the first consul. Despite his obviously dictatorial means for laying down the organization of his new government under the Consulate, behind it all had been an innate, if diluted, idealism of sorts. He genuinely wanted good things for France, hoping to bring law, order, stability, and prosperity to the country. He wanted all traces of the fear of the Revolution and its terroristic wake to be removed once and for all, forgotten, and dismissed. He had great dreams for France, but with the first concerted attack by so-called republicans, something happened to him, causing him to retrench psychologically, gradually leading him away from some of the ideals he had been so seriously contemplating. The Rue du Paradis conspiracy reinforced that, causing him to clamp down severely on dissident groups and suspected dissidents, whether royalist, republican, or Jacobin. Censorship — written and spoken — had to be tightened. Even the vaguest hints of treason had to be suppressed. Newspapers had to disappear. Even the renowned François Joseph Talma of the Théâtre Français had to submit and read before Napoleon personally every new play he planned to produce in public.

  Attendant on this was Bonaparte’s great drive to crush the Chouans in the West. He had begun this vigorous campaign immediately after 18 Brumaire in November 1799, and continued his efforts strenuously after Christmas 1800, personally ordering the seizure of Chouan leaders, Cadoudal in particular. “Take that wretched Georges dead or alive. Once you take him, have him shot within twenty-four hours.” His Chouan supporters were to be shown no mercy: “Act vigorously against the rebels,” he instructed. “Burn their villages if necessary.” But what Napoleon could not forgive himself for now was his own gullibility, for back on March 5, 1800, he had actually met with this same Cadoudal in Paris, face to face, hoping to win the Chouan leader to his side.

  Bonaparte was never one to lose sleep over missed opportunities or past mistakes, however. Meanwhile, so successful were Fouché’s police in their surveillance of royalist activities in the country that only one more serious royalist plot was launched, at least in part. Though it occurred years later, it was the final stage of what Cadoudal and the others had begun back at the beginning of the Consulate. By then Emperor Napoleon would sometimes dismiss alleged threats reported by Fouché or Dubois, on occasion even calling them “chimeras.” In any event, that was their problem, what they were paid to deal with. “Very well, then, see to it,” he once said, dismissing Fouché, who had just revealed a new plot. “That’s your affair. You are the police; take whatever measures are required.”[479] He had inured himself by then, through some sort of philosophical assurance: “Having submitted to every type of danger for years,” he was to say in 1808, “We have acquired the right to think no man will make an attempt on Our life until Providence so wills it.”[480] He had not only survived various assassination attempts, including at least four in the first year of the Consulate alone, but battle after battle, leaving behind him hundreds of thousands of maimed and dead, including several of his closest colleagues, aides-de-camp, staff members, and favorite generals, to find himself years later still unscathed. Unlike the tormented Junot, Napoleon’s sleep was not even disturbed.

  In addition to conspiracies to kill him, there had been and would be numerous one-man suicide missions, including a student who had come from Germany with a trunkload of pistols, intent on avenging the French occupation of German territory. The police of the Paris prefecture intervened, however, before he could attack. Nevertheless, on Napoleon’s personal orders, he was not executed but merely imprisoned. “The young man’s age is clearly the reason for his actions,” Napoleon argued. “After all, one does not become a hardened criminal so early in life...Give him good books to read, have him write to his family and talk it over with the Archchancellor [Cambacérès], who always has good advice to offer.” Released by the Allies in 1814 on Napoleon’s reappearance in Paris during the One Hundred Days, the hapless young student likewise rematerialized, this time with a homemade bomb under his arm, which, alas, exploded when he tripped and fell from the steps of a Parisian cab. Again imprisoned by Napoleon, after several weeks in a hospital, he was released by Louis XVIII a second time in 1815, only to end his own life in the murky waters of the Seine. With the disappearance of Napoleon he had lost his own raison d’être.

  “It is not so easy to make me part with my hide,” Napoleon confided to Marshal Davout after one assassination attempt. “I have no fixed daily habits, no precise schedule. All my activities end at different times, and I come and go at irregular hours.” “In the midst of so much danger, and so many ambushes, it never occurred to him to take the slightest precaution, at least nothing obvious to me,” complained Secret Police Director Desmarest. “It was even necessary to conceal from him certain steps we took when he appeared at the theater, the opera, or during his hunts and journeys.” But then something happened to revive the whole royalist scare of December 1800 — something Napoleon could not so easily dismiss.

  It began at eleven o’clock in the morning on March 11, 1808, when Napoleon was perusing the Bulletin de la Police just handed him by Fouché. It concerned a minor item about another landing of royalist agents along the coast of Brittany. When Napoleon pointed out this particular item, about one Prigent, it was Police Minister Fouché’s turn for once simply to shrug his shoulders, dismissing it as a minor matter. But Napoleon, who often at critical moments lived by his instinct, sensed something more. Asking questions and still dissatisfied, he instructed Fouché to keep him informed with daily reports.[481]

  Fouché immediately put more men on the case, assigning them to St.-Malo, where the incident had first been reported. Ever since the Revolution there had been landings along this stretch of coast by the British and the Bourbons. In this case Fouché notified Napoleon that late in January 1808, a fishing smack out of Jersey had dropped off four men on a deserted stretch of Breton coast not far from Dinard. A certain Ballet reported to the police about “four peasants” who had stayed with him at St.-Servan for more than a week. Their names: Jean, Nonote, Fauchinot, and Blondel, all false of course. Their leader, the so-called Blondel, was the key to the situation. A robust man of about forty-five, he spoke with a local accent, probably from St.-Malo. When General Commissioner Réal then gave Ballet the description of one François-Noel Prigent, the son of a St.-Malo fruit merchant, he identified him at once as Blondel. It all fell into place after that, for Réal’s police had been after this elusive Prigen
t for many years. He was in fact one of the principal Bourbon agents working for Joseph, Comte de Puisaye, himself thought to be working out of London and financed directly by the British government. With this information now before him, Napoleon reiterated the urgency of finding these men and their papers, and of making them talk.

  Time after time report after report had reached Paris of sightings of British vessels signaling to the French shore and unknown agents, or attempting to land men and supplies from Ostend and Boulogne. Such sightings had been made along the Norman and Breton coasts right down to the Charente. In January a boat had been seized and taken to Calais, where a packet of mysterious papers was found and handed over to the police. Four Chouan agents were captured at Nantes, and a suspicious vessel flying the American flag had been seized at Morlaix. At Amsterdam secret correspondence between London and the firm of Henrique was unearthed. Another secret letter sent to London but intercepted by the police came from Fauche-Borel, whose “Comité de Paris” continued “to pursue...the overthrow of the [French] imperial throne.”[482]

  Meanwhile, when on February 21, 1808, a play entitled Kokoli was presented at the Théâtre du Pavilion, the police cracked down when the principal character, Kokoli, said to the king: “Recall your army...reduce taxes...make peace” — obviously aimed at Napoleon. In any event, the local commissaire générale duly informed Paris: “Long and warm applause proves that this play could affect and change public opinion [in favor of the royalists],” and he promptly closed it down.[483] Sedition and unrest were to be found everywhere, and Fouché’s police had to remain ever vigilant if they were to save France.

  Another item in the Bulletin, on March 10, sparked interest in the search for the aforesaid Prigent. An alarming secret letter, probably from the Comte de Puisaye in London, to a royalist agent in the Charente, was reported to Paris. The critical line read: “I told you about a month ago that Prigent and some Chouan subalterns had left [London] for Jersey.”[484] What worried Napoleon about this newly discovered letter was that it was dated three months earlier, which meant that the enemy agents were well on their way with their work and objective, thus tying in with the report from St.-Malo on the sighting of Prigent. “I recommend your following up this case with dispatch!” Napoleon urged the police minister.[485]