Napoleon

by Adam Zamoyski

  Several generals angrily accused Bonaparte of betraying all those who had laid down their lives in the cause of the Revolution and its rejection of ‘superstition’. He ignored them. Two days later he reconverted his bathroom in the Tuileries, which had been the private chapel of Marie de Médicis, and henceforth he would attend mass every Sunday and command his court to do the same. He dutifully went through the motions, but did not take communion, since, as he explained, he ‘was not enough of a believer for it to be of any benefit, and yet too much of one to wish to coldly commit sacrilege’.4

  Many, particularly the soldiers, hated having to attend, and would stand around chatting in the next room. ‘These masses were little more than a travesty,’ according to Thibaudeau. ‘They could hardly have been more worldly, with the actresses of the opera singing the praises of God.’ Some of the ladies nibbled chocolates as they listened. But Bonaparte had judged well, as a concurrent religious revival confirmed. Charitable and proselytising congregations sprang up around the country, and Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme, published that year, became an instant best-seller. If the Concordat caused indignation in the liberal salons, it was well received in the country at large.5

  The measure would take much effort to implement, there would be acrimonious disputes over appointments of bishops, over property and money, and many ruffled feathers would have to be smoothed. But Bonaparte had pulled off a masterstroke. He had not only satisfied the rural population’s attachment to the faith, thereby assuaging its resentment of the state and the government, he had also kicked away one of the principal supports of the Bourbon cause, as a return of the monarchy had until now seemed to be the only way of restoring the Church. Louis XVIII was quick to see the threat, and protested vigorously to ‘the criminal pope’, as his brother Artois called Pius VII. Summing up, Archbishop Boisgelin declared that the consular regime was ‘the legitimate government, both national and Catholic, and without it we would have neither the Faith nor the Fatherland’. More important as far as Bonaparte was concerned, he had achieved what Louis XIV had struggled in vain to do, namely to subject the Church entirely to the state. And to himself: his half-uncle and former archdeacon of Ajaccio Joseph Fesch became Cardinal Archbishop of Lyon and primate of the Church in France.6

  A week after the ceremony, Bonaparte pulled another strut from under the Bourbon cause. He declared an amnesty for all émigrés bar about a thousand of the actively hostile (whom he wanted to see ‘exterminated’), provided they returned to France by 23 September, the end of the year in the revolutionary calendar. Those whose property had not been sold would get it back. This measure too angered many, but Bonaparte paid little heed; it brought tens of thousands of educated and capable Frenchmen who loved their country back to serve it. Among them was his old friend Alexandre des Mazis, who came to see him and was warmly received. Napoleon gave him the position of chamberlain, which would provide him with an income. Assuming his friend to be penniless and knowing him to be too proud to accept charity, he sent an officer after him with a letter of credit for a large sum, saying it was something he must have left behind by mistake. Bonaparte did not stop at émigré nobles, and explored the possibility of the return of Paoli. He also issued a proclamation inviting all the artisans and skilled workers who had emigrated to return; he aimed to bring all Frenchmen together in a new nation, the basis for the functional modern state he envisaged.7

  One of the articles of faith of the Revolution had been the need to wrench education away from the Church and to create a new secular, rational man. Religious establishments had been closed down and education for all decreed, but, left to individual communes, this vision had failed to materialise. All children did benefit from some level of primary education, but little was available at secondary level. On 12 March 1802 Bonaparte set up a directorate within the Ministry of the Interior, with Roederer in charge. ‘Public education can and must be a very powerful motor in our political system,’ he instructed him. ‘It is by this means that the legislator will be able to revive a national spirit. The department of public education is nothing less than the direction of minds by intelligence.’8

  On 1 May 1802 a new law came into force, establishing 23,000 primary schools for children between the ages of seven and eleven to be administered by the communes. The communes could also open secondary schools, and private institutions were permitted if licensed by the local prefect. But the backbone of the new system were the forty-five lycées which were to teach the classics, rhetoric, logic, morality and the elements of mathematics and physics. Although their pupils wore uniform, underwent some military training and answered to the sound of the drum rather than the bell, they were not strict and there was no corporal punishment – which Bonaparte strongly opposed. They were intended to turn out young men with the same morality and the same sense of service to society and the state – a new class of functionaries and soldiers beholden to it. Bonaparte maintained that this was the only way to instil a unity of purpose similar to that he imagined had existed in ancient Athens and Sparta; as Roederer frankly admitted, the new system was ‘a political institution’.9

  The seeds of another profoundly political institution were sown on 19 May, with the announcement of the creation of a ‘legion of honour’, a body of men, both military and civilian, who had distinguished themselves in the service of the state. It was to be made up of fifteen ‘cohorts’ of 250 each, but there were to be no insignia or other outward distinctions – among the first things to be thrown on the bonfire of vanities in the first stage of the Revolution had been the crosses and sashes of the royal orders of chivalry. Even so, the announcement aroused the ire of republicans, who denounced it as an assault on the principle of equality. They could hardly have imagined what was to come.

  ‘People think me ambitious,’ Bonaparte exclaimed one evening at the Tuileries. ‘Ambitious! – for what? Ambitious, me? Listen to me, gentlemen, what I am about to say I authorise you to repeat. In three years, I shall retire from public affairs. I will have an income of fifty thousand livres, and with my tastes that is more than I need. I will have a country estate, because Madame Bonaparte likes the country.’ He added that he would also like to be a justice of the peace. Whether or how much he meant it one cannot say, but he would not relinquish power before he had finished building his political edifice, and in order to do that, he believed he had to reinforce his position.10

  Since the Brumaire coup, Berthier had been methodically purging the army of Jacobin officers and those hostile to Bonaparte – in the course of two years he had retired seventy-two colonels, 150 majors and thousands of junior officers. But the army had preserved its revolutionary ethos, and Bonaparte was still not popular in those units he had not commanded himself. The Concordat and the amnesty for émigrés had revived residual hostility to him, and those generals who envied his rise to power sensed a new opportunity. Moreau, Brune, Masséna, Augereau, Gouvion Saint-Cyr and Lecourbe were among many who felt varying degrees of outrage at the way things were going. Bonaparte either undercut them, as when he dissolved the Army of Batavia, thereby denying Augereau his command, or he sent them on distant missions: Gouvion to Madrid, Brune to Constantinople, others to the colonies where they could do no harm. That did not put a stop to the grumbling.11

  From Italy, Murat reported revolutionary sentiment and shouts of ‘Vive Robespierre!’ On 14 July troops stationed at Bologna refused to toast Bonaparte. At a dinner given by Moreau in June 1802, a chef de brigade felt he could spew out his hatred of the first consul in company which included Marmont and Berthier. Similar feelings were reflected in a number of conspiracies over the summer and early autumn of that year. One, connected to General Oudinot, never got off the ground. Another, more serious as it meant to assassinate rather than just depose the first consul, which a Captain Donnadieu vowed to do, was unusual in that it involved mostly non-commissioned and junior officers. But most of the plots, like an inept one involving Bernadotte, commander of the Army of t
he West, had more to do with the hurt pride of Bonaparte’s former comrades than any serious purpose. ‘As there is not one of them who does not believe himself to be his equal and to possess the same title as him to the first place,’ reported Louis XVIII’s agent in Paris, Antoine Royer-Collard, ‘so there is not one of them who does not see his elevation as a wrong done to himself personally.’12

  These plots were easily uncovered by Fouché’s police, and did not present a serious threat, but they did testify to a lingering sense of uncertainty as to the durability of the consular regime. Bonaparte felt he could not, for family reasons, make an example of Bernadotte by punishing him. Fouché advised against it, on the grounds that it was impolitic for the public to know that there was dissension at the heart of his entourage. Bernadotte was offered a command in Louisiana and an embassy to the United States, both of which he refused. The best Bonaparte could do was to gradually marginalise him. He was also growing wary of Fouché, whom he suspected of shielding his former Jacobin comrade. In September 1802 he abolished the Ministry of Police and gave Fouché a seat in the Senate. His former duties were split up and transferred to the Ministries of Justice and the Interior.13

  The permanence of the new regime concerned not only Bonaparte. Cambacérès and Lebrun, Talleyrand, Roederer and, for reasons of their own, his brothers Joseph and Lucien had for some time been canvassing for a formal upgrade in Bonaparte’s status, and many others had become resigned to what appeared to be inevitable. ‘Power was encroaching with large strides behind the words order and stability,’ as Thibaudeau put it. By the end of March 1802 a majority in the Tribunate had accepted the need to extend the first consul’s tenure by another ten years.14

  Among the opponents of this was Josephine, who understood that a man who rises to eminence and amasses an inheritance will sooner or later want an heir – the one thing she could not give him. With every step along a path that was beginning to look as though it would lead to a throne, her position grew more precarious. Bonaparte’s family had been urging him to divorce her for years, and their case was growing stronger. She found an ally in Fouché, whose Jacobin instincts were reinforced by his recent loss of power and his hatred of Bonaparte’s brothers. In an effort to deflect the Tribunate’s expression of gratitude from extending Bonaparte’s power, he proposed the erection of a monument. Others suggested a triumphal arch and the renaming of squares. Humble as ever, Bonaparte refused such honours. He showed the same modesty when a delegation of the Tribunate brought him the offer of an extension of his office for another ten years as a token of the gratitude of the French nation; he refused, saying that the love of the people was sufficient reward.

  He nevertheless let his displeasure be known; he wanted an extension not for ten years but for life. Pretending to take his feigned modesty at face value, Fouché, Sieyès, Grégoire and others persuaded the Senate to pass a senatus-consulte on 8 May extending his post for another ten years. The following day an irritated Bonaparte graciously thanked the Senate for its trust, but observed that as he had been invested with power by the will of the people, given voice in the plebiscite of February 1800, he would only accept its prolongation by a similar plebiscite. Outmanoeuvred, the Senate could only express its admiration for his reticence and its respect for the will of the people. Bonaparte then left for Malmaison.15

  The following day, 10 May, at an extraordinary session which Bonaparte demurely refrained from attending, the Council of State under the guidance of Cambacérès agreed that a plebiscite should be held, and since the will of the people could hardly be circumscribed by the imposition of a time limit, that the question to be put must be: ‘Should Napoleon Bonaparte be consul for life?’ Significantly, this was the first time his first name appeared in an official public document. Lucien (who saw himself as such) added a second question to be put to the nation: ‘Should he have the right to designate his successor?’16

  When the project was communicated to Bonaparte, he struck out the second question. ‘The testament of Louis XIV was not respected, so why should mine be?’ he said to Cambacérès. ‘A dead man has nothing to say.’ Only hereditary succession was possible, he asserted. What he did not say but probably anticipated was that while the answer to the first question was bound to be a resounding ‘yes’, the second would provoke debate in every village.17

  Josephine spent most of June taking the waters at Plombières in a desperate effort to enhance her fertility. ‘I am all sorrow, my dear Hortense: I am parted from you and my heart as well as my whole being suffer from it,’ she wrote to her daughter on 19 June. ‘I feel that I was not created for so much grandeur, my child …’ In her absence, Hortense acted as lady of the house at Malmaison, where Bonaparte spent most of that summer, with occasional visits to Paris to preside over the Council of State. She was heavily pregnant, but Louis was not with her. He had become obsessed with his health and developed a number of neuroses which contributed to estrange him completely from his wife. Combined with Bonaparte’s evident affection for Hortense, this provided malicious tongues with material for gossip that Bonaparte was her lover and the father of her child.18

  Bonaparte did philander, giving Josephine grounds not so much for jealousy as for anxiety, but not with her daughter. He wrote affectionately to Josephine, asking about her health, what she was doing and whom she was seeing (whenever she travelled without him, he would dictate a strict schedule which included travel arrangements, where she could stay, or even pause, and whom she could meet). He also sent news of what he was doing, telling her he had wounded his finger while shooting a boar at Marly, and reporting on a performance of The Barber of Seville, with Hortense playing Rosina, and Lauriston, Bourrienne, Eugène and Savary among the other actors. He missed her and wrote that her forthcoming return ‘will make the little man who is bored all on his own very happy’, adding, ‘It’s all very sad here without you.’19

  On 3 August he was at the Tuileries to receive a delegation of senators who called to present the results of the plebiscite. There had been 3,568,885 ‘yes’ votes and only 8,374 against, with a turnout of close to 60 per cent, which was a triumph considering that the three plebiscites held during the Revolution had never produced a turnout higher than 34 per cent, and in one case below 20. Unlike in 1800, there is no real evidence of manipulation.20

  There was much disapproval among liberals and ideologues. Lafayette, who had voiced his protest in the Senate, wrote to Bonaparte saying that while his ‘restorative dictatorship’ had yielded great benefits, a greater good now would be the restoration of liberty, and that he could not believe Bonaparte really wished to see the return of an arbitrary regime. Plenty of others voiced their fears of the encroaching tyranny, and even old comrades such as Junot felt they could no longer say what they thought, aware as they were of the tightening security net around Bonaparte – he was naturally suspicious, and his experiences had taught him to trust nobody, so he had everyone watched, even those closest to him.21

  He had built up an extensive intelligence network stretching far wider and deeper than the ostensible ones: Fouché’s efficient police, Réal’s Paris police, Duroc’s palace security network, Savary’s Gendarmerie d’élite which supervised the army, and the Gendarmerie itself, a nationwide paramilitary police which not only maintained order but also reported on the political mood in every department. Bonaparte could also rely on the confidential reports of the prefects, and he had a web of correspondents, individuals scattered across the country who wrote to him directly, often anonymously (only he knew who they were), telling him what was being said in the provinces about what he did in Paris.

  His increasing workload required an expansion of his secretariat. Bourrienne had not been able to resist exploiting his proximity to the first consul in blatant ways, and in the autumn of 1802 he had gone too far; fearing his venality would reflect on his own person, Bonaparte dismissed him. He was replaced by the mild-mannered twenty-four-year-old Claude-François Méneval, formerly a secretary to
Joseph, who was presented to Bonaparte one evening and after a short conversation was instructed to come back at seven the following morning. When he did, he was told to sit down and start taking dictation. He was given quarters in the Tuileries and appointed as one of Bonaparte’s aides-de-camp, but he never wore any kind of uniform, and many in the first consul’s entourage never knew he existed, as he was rarely seen outside his private study. With time, he was joined by Agathon Fain and three others to deal with specific areas, but Méneval remained Bonaparte’s right hand and constant companion, woken at all hours of the night to take dictation.

  ‘The government is that of a military despotism, in most respects wisely, but not mildly administered,’ was how Cornwallis described the governance of France. He was wrong. Bonaparte did not rule through the army, but through theoretically democratic institutions. Although he did manipulate them shamelessly, he had no intention of abolishing them. He meant rather to turn them into facilitators of his rule and preservers of his political edifice, by filling them with people dedicated to the good of France, as he saw it, and making them more pliable.22

  The Directory had curtailed the unbridled democracy introduced by the Revolution, restricting the vote to property owners, but while this had introduced an element of stability it had created the conditions for an unprincipled struggle for power and wealth which did little for the public good. The Constitution of Year III, inspired by Sieyès and edited by Bonaparte, had created something more efficient only in that it gave him the power to act decisively. What he now wanted was to create a class of people who would by instinct and interest work for the public good through the existing institutions. As they were nominated, not elected, they were not in a position to build an opposition by claiming to represent the people; they were to be a managerial class.