by Alan Schom
Fouché set to work increasing the number of gendarmes and police officials all along the Channel. But it was only five weeks later, on April 27, that the general commissioner of St.-Malo was finally able to report back that he had found Prigent’s initial January hiding place at St.-Servan.[486] The royalist agent’s trail still remained more than three months old. Over the next month the net continued to widen, and the police discovered that Prigent had been corresponding with the important royalist leader, the Prince de Bouillon, and had had contact with other royalist agents from the Côtes-du-Nord the previous year. What is more, one of Prigent’s lieutenants, the so-called Fauchinot, was in reality a man named Deschamps, a known Chouan agent whose mother had been found to be hiding him back in 1803 (for which she had subsequently been imprisoned for three years). They all would be tracked down. It was merely a matter of time, Fouché assured Napoleon. But would they strike first? And at what? At whom? And how — with guns, knives, bombs? Clearly time was of the essence.
Finally, early on the morning of June 7, Police Minister Fouché requested an urgent meeting with Napoleon and informed him that Prigent had been arrested two days ago at Saint-Gilles, near Rennes, along with Deschamps and Leclerc. The police had earlier captured the fourth man in the group, “Jean,” whose real name was Bouchard and who had in fact betrayed Prigent, making the arrest possible. Knowing how Napoleon relished the details of such plots, Fouché filled him in:
Disguised as a gendarme, he [Bouchard] guided the brigade [of gendarmes] commanded by Captain Gery. That same evening the three brigands were traced to a room in a granary. [When confronted] they opened fire, wounding one gendarme in the leg. Leclerc was shot twice, probably mortally. Such arc the results of the vigilant measures taken over the past seven weeks by the Commissaire general of Police of Saint-Malo.
Fouché went on to praise his work, announcing:
Prigent’s arrest may be considered an important operation, given this individual’s considerable activity and audacity in the past, and who indeed — one may say without exaggeration — has made more than two hundred [clandestine] trips to the French coast over the past fifteen years. It was he who was responsible for the principal landings of émigrés and Chouan leaders, for the supply of arms and munitions, and for maintaining the constant flow of communications.
What is more, “Prigent has confessed to being Puisaye’s agent, Puisaye who in turn has the ear of the British government [under the prime minister, the Duke of Portland], as well as that of the Bourbons, for their affairs in the West.” It turned out that other agents had also been sent out back in January, all of them with secret correspondence from London for “royalist committees in several parts of the interior...[which] confirms what our agent in London also tells us.”
Prigent had apparently broken quickly under rigorous police interrogation and was now providing them with an enormous amount of material, Fouché said, including important documents, and generally cooperating. All his papers and notes were now in the hands of the prefect of Rennes. Finally he admitted that he had been given letters for agents in Paris and had received replies from them. Although he was unable to provide the real name of the party to whom they were sent, he did have the address, which in turn resulted in the disclosure of that person, a Monsieur Mars, at 118 Rue de Miromesnil. Fouché, by now excited by these revelations, had already given orders to have Prigent transferred to the ministry in Paris for trial. “Appropriate measures have been taken to prevent his escape,” he assured the Tuileries.
Pleased with the work done by Fouché’s men in the field, and spellbound by the unraveling of these events, Napoleon asked to see everything found in Prigent’s wallet and papers. He added, “Have him write out a journal of everything he did day by day, indicating where he had been to dine and sleep. I find it difficult to believe that it is all as simple and clear as you tell me. He must make a completely frank confession, including the names of English agents in Paris and along the coast.”[487]
Four days later, on June 11, Fouché returned with the daily Bulletin and a long report with further disclosures regarding what he now referred to as “L’Affaire Prigent.” Prigent had had both general and special instructions from Puisaye, he informed Napoleon, including a coded list of twenty-six royalist leaders throughout the West — a list he had burned. These detailed instructions concerned the royalist committees to be established in Brittany, in the Imperial Navy, and throughout France.[488]
Napoleon’s initial intuitive anxiety about the report on Prigent back in March had been correct after all. If he had listened to Fouché and not pursued the investigation thoroughly, a vast underground royalist network might have been reestablished in the country. Fortunately Fouché’s men had nipped the conspiracy in the bud, for Prigent’s original efforts at sounding out members of the old royalist “Comité de 1797” had turned out to be not at all encouraging. Several people ignored him, and others dismissed his plan as foolhardy or impossible. Indeed, even the comté de Puisaye’s brother, who had been contacted at his estate in the Orne, refused to communicate with him at all. (Fouché had had the brother arrested anyway and interrogated by Desmarest’s Haute Police, though he was finally released.) As for the burned list of twenty-six other conspirators, Prigent could remember only a few of the names and addresses — which, admittedly, he did give the police — most of them in and around Rennes.
In any event Prigent was providing them with all sorts of valuable contacts in various capacities throughout the western regions of the country. If Napoleon was generally pleased with these unexpected results, he was not as satisfied as Fouché. The police had the names of at least a hundred people, many of them property owners. Napoleon ordered Fouché to “draw up a list of them and send it to the appropriate prefects and to the office of property registration, and then order the sequestration of those properties as well as those belonging to their wives, while placing their relatives under special police surveillance.”[489] Napoleon could be lenient in the case of a crazed student, but not when a full-scale conspiracy and possible revolt to topple his regime were involved. Everyone concerned — men, women, and children — was to be punished.
The result of Fouché’s intensive interrogations was finally presented to Napoleon at the Tuileries on June 16. Outlining the general situation, Fouché explained that apparently Puisaye had decided on this new plan to revive the Chouan movement against Napoleon back in October 1807. On January 18, 1808, Prigent was duly landed on French shores from a boat from Jersey, carrying plans and instructions for the establishment of the Royalist Committee of Rennes. Fouché further informed Napoleon that Prigent was to hand over three thousand gold louis, or sixty thousand francs, as a fund for the emigre committees in Brittany and Normandy, to be used for transporting émigrés back to France for the uprising and operations against Napoleon.[490]
Although the police had apparently scotched the plot, the Bulletin de la Police announced on June 22 that it had learned that three more important royalist agents were expected to land at any moment along the Normandy coast, and thus Fouché’s police were remaining on the alert.[491] But Prigent, almost enthusiastically aiding the authorities now — in exchange for a promise of immunity from prosecution by Fouché — was drawing up suggestions of the best way to intercept enemy communications with the coast of France. Fouché acknowledged that he had never seen anything like this before. “The great detail he has provided establishes his intelligence, good faith, and strong desire to attain the purpose he had promised.” To show further good faith, Prigent disclosed the signal he used to contact the vessel now being sent to collect him and ferry him back to Jersey.[492] The work and information that Prigent contributed to this affair are “quite remarkable,” Fouché concluded.[493]
The immediate result of this top-priority police operation by hundreds of Desmarest’s Haute Police ultimately involved the arrest of sixty-three individuals, ten of whom were condemned to be executed by a firing squad, while another
twenty-nine were eventually acquitted. The first seven were duly executed at 3:00 A.M. on October 3.[494] As for Prigent and the man who had turned him in, Bouchard, Fouché had promised that they would be pardoned by Napoleon in exchange for their extraordinary cooperation. But when word of this got out, there was a great cry of public indignation and Prigent unexpectedly found himself before a firing squad on October 11,[495] a fact omitted by the Bulletin de la Police.
Napoleon was not ungrateful for the work carried out by the commanding officers of the police units in the Prigent affair. “These men have rendered me such a great service that I wish to demonstrate my gratitude to them,” he said, ordering Fouché to distribute twenty-four thousand francs in rewards (taken from money found on the captured men).[496] So ended the last serious London-directed royalist attempt against Napoleon — while of course not forgetting Malet’s unique plot several years later.
Chapter Nineteen – “The Revolution Is Over”
‘I do not wage war as a profession, no one in fact is more peaceful than I.’
From the moment Bonaparte assumed the position of head of state, as the senior of the three ruling consuls, the lives of everyone around him, especially that of his secretary, Bourrienne, became a nightmare. A thousand ideas and objectives concerning the running of a great country like France now filled Napoleon’s mind, and they all seemed to spill out at once. After announcing to the nation on November 12, 1799, that the badly contrived Constitution of the Year III was dead, and with it all the corrupt undemocratic apparatus, he immediately set out to replace every aspect of it. “Everyone talks to me about goodness, abstract justice, and the natural laws of society,” he said. “Well, the first law is that of necessity, and the first principle of justice is ensuring the public welfare.”[497] What he considered a necessity and the requirements of establishing and maintaining the public welfare, however, were not even remotely similar to those envisioned by such contemporaries as Sieyès, Lafayette, Talleyrand — or Thomas Jefferson. France was in store for a shock that would rock the very historical foundations of the land and from which it would still be reeling two centuries later.
“I listen to advice from all sides, but in the end, my head is my only counsel,” he remarked before the newly created State Council, by which he was largely to govern the country thereafter. “The art of governing,” he said, “involves nothing more than the application of common sense when dealing with important political matters.”[498] The pace he was now setting for himself and the hard-pressed Bourrienne (who began work at seven every morning and continued until eleven or later at night, seven days a week, month in, month out) was grueling. The results poured out daily in an avalanche of papers, decisions, and orders to state counselors, ministers, and institutions. “Weakness in the supreme power is the worst sort of calamity that might befall a people,” he later informed the Corps Législatif, and he was determined to avoid that now, as he seized the reins of power with an iron grip that only the combined armies of all the European powers would years later be able to force him to release. “It was in fact not simply the matter of an absolutist form of government that Bonaparte was now attempting to establish in France, but of a military dictatorship,” Bourrienne pointed out, and that was “worse yet.”[499] The truth of that observation was not long in manifesting itself.
Although the nation lay shattered and exhausted after ten years of revolutionary fratricide, internal mayhem, and willful self-destruction, Napoleon’s first thoughts, apart from orders to Finance Minister Gaudin to reorganize completely the state’s finances and to create the Banque de France, turned to the army and war. France was still at war with Austria, for instance, which had reconquered from France its former Italian provinces, and Napoleon was determined to get them back.
Before his new administration was seven weeks old, he had put the nation on a war footing, preparing depots, artillery, and troops for the Armies of the Rhine and of Italy. This included stripping the beleaguered Army of the Orient, still in Egypt, of four of its best remaining commanders (Desaix, Davout, Vial, and Lanusse) and recalling them to France, while instructing that same abandoned army to strive to maintain control of France’s splendid new province. Addressing the Armies of the Rhine and of Italy, he reminded them that they had already conquered Holland, the Rhine, and Italy and that “Victory will give you bread.”[500]
“Everyone is so fearful these days, I swear, they would let the Devil himself rule, if he promised to suppress the revolution for ever,” Roederer observed. Indeed, the last thing the people wanted was war, even on foreign soil. Napoleon quickly reassured them that this new government was quite unlike the previous ones. In effect he told a startled but largely delighted French Republic that the Revolution was over.
This had begun back on December 15, 1799, when he proclaimed that “a [new] constitution is being drawn up for you...founded on the true principles of representative government, based on the sacred rights safeguarding private property, equality and freedom...The powers instituted by it will be strong and stable, as they must be in order to guarantee the rights of our citizens and the interests of the State.”[501] All the key elements were in that message: private property, which had been sacrificed during the Revolution, would finally be secure, along with individual equality; a government with great authority would ensure the stability of the land and the interests of the state, including a prosperous commerce and agriculture. The only misleading statement was the promise that representative democratic institutions would be introduced. They would appear in name, to be sure, but they were to prove powerless illusions.
Bonaparte was perfectly sincere in stating that the disruptive Revolution was over once and for all. Effective immediately all the revolutionary holidays were to be suppressed (except for July 14, celebrating the fall of the Bastille, and 1 Vendémiaire, the festival commemorating the founding of the First French Republic).[502] What is more, the class with which Napoleon personally associated himself — that of the aristocrats, the émigrés — was no longer to be harassed. They would be permitted to return to France, their confiscated property returned. These measures were kept from the public, however, for it would take time to wean the masses from their revolutionary prejudices.[503] He ordered a proper public burial with full honors for Pope Pius VI, who had died earlier at Valence while a prisoner of the French Republic. Churches were to be reopened throughout the country and priests permitted to carry out traditional services. There must be freedom of worship in the land for Jew and Christian alike, he declared, as he prepared the way for improved relations with the Vatican (not because of personal religious reasons, but because it was necessary to gain the support of the people and to maintain stability in the country). This would soon lead to the concluding of a Concordat on July 15, 1801, normalizing relations between the Roman Catholic church and France for the first time since the beginning of the Revolution. “Religion,” Napoleon confided to Bourrienne, “is useful for the governments of every country. We must use it to control the people. In Egypt I was a Muhammadan, in France I am a Catholic.”[504]
This great political coup for Bonaparte was a disaster for the Bourbons, who had counted on the support of the Vatican as an important card in their favor. “When the leader of the [Roman Catholic] Church abandons the interests of religion and the cause of kings,” a dismayed comte de Vaudreuil wrote his mother, “upon whom can we count?” The young duc d’Enghien was equally disturbed. “It takes only a cheap action to become a great man these days, that is, when that man is Bonaparte. Nothing seems to stop him, not even God,” he lamented.[505]
At the same time, as a part of his plan to restore stability in the country, the first consul announced his intention of putting down the royalist uprising in the West. Civil war had to be crushed.[506] But at the same time Napoleon wanted a “reconciliation” with these rebels, who, with Bourbon support in London and elsewhere, had doggedly fought the Revolution. Napoleon ordered the harsh measures taken against them by t
he Directory to be revoked: no more “loans” were to be extorted from them, no more hostages were to be taken, no more villages destroyed, and all religious restrictions were to be lifted at once. “Rally round our new constitution,” he encouraged them. “The ministers of a God of peace will be the first means of achieving national reconciliation and concord...Hereafter only one sentiment must stir us all, the love of the fatherland.”
When this peace offering was rejected out of hand by the Chouans, Napoleon issued a brutal “Proclamation to the Army,” ordering French troops to crush the tens of thousands of French citizens rebelling in the western provinces. Attack them vigorously, “surprise your enemies...and exterminate those wretches,” he ordered. “Weakness now is inhumanity...Only with vigorous action can you succeed. Therefore, to arms! To arms!” On January 5, 1800, General Hedouville was ordered to march sixty thousand French troops into the West. No one turned down Napoleon with impunity.
From the beginning the first consul expected blind obedience, whether from Frenchman or foreigner. The Italians were soon to suffer the same fate as the previously conquered Dutch, Swiss, Bretons, and Vendeans. On December 18, 1799, Napoleon had instructed the people of the Ligurian Republic that he expected them to be annexed to France, whether they liked it or not. If they did not sign a treaty of annexation with France, General Masséna would be “authorised to raise a contribution [of millions of francs] from the principal merchant houses [of Genoa],” as he had already done in Switzerland and in Holland.
