Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Yet even if Napoleon had succeeded in getting ashore in Britain, Nelson’s return would have cut him off from resupply and reinforcement, and 100,000 men was not a large enough force with which to conquer 17 million waiting Britons, many of them under (admittedly makeshift) arms. Britain had undertaken intense preparations to repel an invasion from 1803 onwards: southern towns were garrisoned, fire beacons prepared; provisions stockpiled in depots located at places such as Fulham, Brentford and Staines, and every landing place was itemized from Cornwall to Scotland. Seventy-three small ‘Martello’ beacon towers were built along the south coast between 1805 and 1808, defensive breastworks were dug around south London, and some 600,000 men (between 11 and 14 per cent of the adult male population) were enlisted in the British army and Royal Navy by the end of 1804, with a further 85,000 in the militia.32

  In the early hours of August 23, 1803, a Royal Navy intelligence officer, Captain John Wesley Wright, secretly landed Georges Cadoudal, a Dr Querelle and a small number of other Chouans at Biville in Normandy.* Wright had fought alongside the Chouans in the 1790s and been imprisoned and had subsequently escaped from the Temple prison; he had spied on the French disguised as an Arab during the Syrian campaign and had run a number of similar clandestine operations.33

  Fouché and Napoleon – who insisted on seeing all the raw secret service intelligence, so as not to be dependent on others for its interpretation – discovered the presence of Querelle and an accomplice named Troche. ‘Either I’m very wrong,’ Napoleon said of Querelle, ‘or this one knows something.’34 When a plotter named Danouville was captured at one of Wright’s landing-places he hanged himself in his cell, which as one of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp, Philippe de Ségur, commented, ‘confirmed the gravity of the plot without throwing any light upon it’.35

  Wright next landed General Charles Pichegru, the former Brienne instructor, French Revolutionary War hero and Jacobin-turned-royalist, along with seven co-conspirators at Biville on January 16, 1804, and returned to Walmer Castle in Kent, where British naval intelligence was based.36 Wright was acting under the orders of Admiral Lord Keith, commander-in-chief of the North Sea Fleet, who reported to Admiral Earl St Vincent, the First Sea Lord. St Vincent’s own orders from Lord Hawkesbury were that it was ‘of the utmost importance that Captain Wright should be involved in the fullest latitude’. Other documents, including one from Keith specifying that Wright ‘is employed on a secret and delicate service’, connect the British government intimately with the Cadoudal conspiracy, at the highest levels of both.37 Further evidence of direct British government involvement in the 1804 plot to murder Napoleon lies in several letters, the first written on June 22, 1803, from a Mr Walter Spencer to Lord Castlereagh, a senior British cabinet minister, asking for the repayment of £150 for himself and £1,000 for Michelle de Bonneuil, a royalist plotter with several identities who is known to have met Louis XVIII’s brother the Comte d’Artois (the future King Charles X) in Edinburgh during the Amiens peace. Spencer said the money had been advanced ‘relative to a political intrigue planned by Lord Castlereagh to abduct Bonaparte in 1803’, which was co-ordinated by Mr Liston, the British envoy to The Hague.38 (Plots to ‘abduct’ Napoleon at this time were transparent covers for his assassination.) Although there is nothing directly incriminating from the government side in the exchange – as might be expected – George Holford, a member of parliament who was Castlereagh’s closest friend in politics, wrote to Spencer saying that if he would ‘take the trouble of calling in Downing Street his Lordship will see him upon it’. This would hardly have been the case if Spencer had been a crank.

  On January 28 Pichegru met General Moreau, who seems to have equivocated over the plot, and who crucially failed to warn the authorities, thereby making himself complicit. He was waiting to see what developed; the nation might well have turned to him, as the victor of Hohenlinden, in the event of Napoleon’s ‘abduction’. By then he had already told General Thiébault that he believed Napoleon ‘the most ambitious soldier who ever lived’, whose rule meant ‘the end of all our labours, all these hopes, all that glory’.39

  The arrest of a British secret agent called Courson on January 29 helped Fouché piece together the outlines of the plot. A French intelligence officer by the name of Captain Rosey also managed to persuade Spencer Smith, the British envoy to Stuttgart and Sir Sidney Smith’s brother, that he, Rosey, was the aide-de-camp of a dissident French general, a ploy which yielded information once Smith had taken him into his confidence.40 Fouché informed Napoleon, thanks to his spy network in London, that Pichegru had dined with a British minister in Kensington three days before leaving for France, and that the conspirators were connected to Moreau. Napoleon was genuinely astonished. ‘Moreau!’ he cried. ‘What! Moreau in such a plot!’ He ordered the general’s arrest as soon as he was certain that Pichegru was indeed in France. ‘Nothing can equal the profound stupidity of this whole plot,’ Napoleon wrote to Moreau’s friend and former chief-of-staff General Jean-Joseph Dessolle, who was commanding in Hanover, ‘unless it is its wickedness. The human heart is an abyss that is impossible to predict; the most piercing looks cannot gauge it.’41

  Quickly thereafter guards were increased on the gates of Paris and ordered to look out for the tall and burly Cadoudal; the Tuileries and Malmaison were put on high alert and the passwords changed; Dr Querelle was captured and taken to the Abbaye prison in the capital.42 Threatened with the guillotine, he gave away Cadoudal’s safe-house (maison de confiance) as the Cloche d’Or tavern. Meanwhile Savary, who commanded a separate secret police unit from Fouché as Napoleon didn’t like placing too much power in Fouché’s hands, went to Biville to try to intercept Wright. Cadoudal’s servant Louis Picot was arrested at the Cloche d’Or on February 8. He broke when he was subjected to thumbscrews and gave the police Cadoudal’s safe-house in Chaillot, near Passy, but Cadoudal wasn’t there either. Cadoudal’s lieutenant, Bouvet de Lozier, who was, tried to strangle himself, but on being ‘restored to life and misery’ he confirmed that Pichegru and Moreau were indeed implicated in the plot.43

  At 8 a.m. on February 15, Moreau was arrested on the bridge at Charenton and taken to the Temple prison.44 The next day Napoleon ordered the arrests of generals Jean-Jacques Liébert and Joseph Souham, on the basis of their closeness to Moreau (both were exonerated and reinstated). On the 19th he told Soult that the police had seized fifteen horses and uniforms which were to be used in an attack on him on the road between Paris and Malmaison, but added phlegmatically: ‘You must not attach more importance to the affairs of Paris than they deserve.’45 To Melzi he wrote: ‘I was never in any danger, since the police had their eye on all machinations.’46

  Pichegru fought three gendarmes with his fists when they came to arrest him in bed in the rue Chabanais in the 2nd arrondissement on the night of February 26.47 ‘The struggle was severe,’ recalled Ségur, ‘and was only ended by violent pressure on the most tender part of his body, causing him to become unconscious.’48 The next day, Napoleon received his first indication that the Duc d’Enghien might in some way be implicated.

  The handsome, thirty-one-year-old Louis de Bourbon Condé, Duc d’Enghien, was a direct descendant of Louis XIII and grandson of the Prince de Condé who had commanded the émigré army at Valmy. When one of the plotters attested that everyone had stood up when a leader had entered the room, Fouché decided that d’Enghien was the only Bourbon prince who matched the man’s physical description and had been close enough to France to have attended the meeting. It was a tragic error, based on circumstantial evidence.

  Until as late as March 12, Napoleon believed that Charles François Dumouriez, the French general who had defected to the Austrians in 1793, had met d’Enghien at his house at Ettenheim, only 10 miles across the French border in Baden. ‘What,’ Ségur reports Napoleon saying to the police chief Réal,

  you did not tell me that the duc d’Enghien was only four leagues [that is, 12 miles] from my frontier! Am I a do
g to be killed in the street? Are my murderers sacred beings? Why was I not warned that they are assembling at Ettenheim? My very person is attacked. It is time that I should give back blow for blow. The head of the most guilty amongst them must atone for this.49

  Fouché – who told Napoleon ‘the air is full of daggers’ – convinced himself that d’Enghien was behind the plot, as did Talleyrand on the same flimsy evidence.50

  Cadoudal was finally captured at 7 p.m. on March 9, in the Place de l’Odéon, but not before he had killed one gendarme in a carriage chase and wounded another. Napoleon told Davout two hours later that the news of the capture ‘has made the people touchingly happy’.51 Cadoudal openly admitted that he had come to Paris to kill Napoleon, but didn’t mention d’Enghien.

  The next day Napoleon held a meeting at the Tuileries attended by Talleyrand, Fouché, Cambacérès, Lebrun and Regnier, at which they agreed to kidnap d’Enghien. Napoleon’s much later claim that it had been Talleyrand who persuaded them to adopt this course of action was supported by Cambacérès in his 1828 memoirs.52* Napoleon told Berthier of his decision, and chose his master of horse General Armand de Caulaincourt to oversee the operation from Offenburg, and his own commander of the grenadiers à cheval of the Consular Guard, General Michel Ordener – ‘a man who knew only how to obey’, according to Cambacérès – to carry it out. ‘This is getting beyond a joke,’ Napoleon told Savary on March 12, ‘coming from Ettenheim to Paris to organize an assassination, and to believe oneself safe because one is behind the Rhine! I would be too stupid if I were to allow it.’53 Napoleon then went to Malmaison and stayed there until the morning of the 20th.

  At 5 a.m. on Thursday, March 15, 1804, Ordener and a detachment of dragoons kidnapped the Duc d’Enghien at his house in Ettenheim and took him, his dog, his papers and 2.3 million francs that had been in his safe to the fortress at Strasbourg.54 There was no sign of Dumouriez, whose name (it soon emerged) had only come up due to a misunderstanding. Meanwhile Caulaincourt went to Carlsruhe to present a note from Talleyrand to the Duke of Baden explaining the violation of Baden’s sovereignty. On the morning of March 18 Napoleon told Josephine what had happened. She strongly disapproved and begged him not to have d’Enghien executed – as much to protect Napoleon’s own reputation as out of her latent royalist sympathies or pity for d’Enghien.55 She was told she didn’t understand politics and was ignored.*

  The next morning Napoleon was informed by a courier from Alsace that d’Enghien’s papers revealed no evidence of complicity in the Cadoudal conspiracy, but did show that the duke had offered to serve in the British army, was receiving large amounts of money from London, was paying British gold to other émigrés, and was hoping to follow the Austrians into France should they invade.56 He had also corresponded with William Wickham at the Aliens Office (that is, the British secret service) in London and with Spencer Smith in Stuttgart.57 ‘There are few months in which I don’t receive from the Left Bank some requests from our former comrades-in-arms,’ d’Enghien had written in one letter, ‘officers and soldiers alike, employed or not, who are only waiting for a gathering point and an order to arrive and bring me some of their friends.’58 In September 1803 he had promised to start a Legitimist (that is, royalist anti-revolutionary) coup in Alsace should Napoleon be assassinated, writing, ‘I am waiting, hoping, but don’t know anything.’ So although he was not specifically aware of the Cadoudal–Pichegru plot, he was clearly holding himself in readiness. It hardly constituted strong enough grounds to have him executed, however, except as a ruthless message to Louis XVIII to call off any further plots.

  ‘There is nothing inviolate about the blood of the Legitimists,’ Napoleon said at this time.59 On the afternoon of March 18, 1804 he ordered Murat, as governor of Paris, to set up a court martial. Murat said, or at least later claimed he had said, that he wanted no part in what would effectively be a judicial execution.60 The entire incident is full of claims, counter-claims, finger-pointing and excuses, as everyone attempted to escape responsibility for what happened next. Talleyrand blamed Savary and vice versa, Caulaincourt claimed that he had had no idea that d’Enghien would be executed. Only Napoleon, upon whom the ultimate responsibility must of course rest, argued afterwards that it had been the correct course of action, pleading the right of self-defence and saying of the Bourbons, ‘My blood, after all, was not made of mud: it was time to show that it was the equal of theirs.’61 On Elba he justified his actions ‘on the score of [d’Enghien] having been engaged in a treasonable conspiracy, and having made two journeys to Strasbourg in disguise’.62

  Napoleon returned to the Tuileries on the morning of Tuesday, March 20. He had an argument with Murat and threatened to send him back to his estates in Quercy, after which Murat finally agreed to call the court martial. Napoleon went then to Malmaison, where Talleyrand joined him in the afternoon for a walk in the park.63 Joseph arrived shortly afterwards and then at 3 p.m. a courier reported that d’Enghien was on his way to Le Donjon, the forbidding, 150-foot-high keep at Vincennes Castle, the tallest in Europe, in which Mirabeau, Diderot, the Marquis de Sade and Mata Hari were all imprisoned at different times. He arrived there at 5.30 p.m., and Napoleon sent Savary to Murat with a message to ensure that ‘the business’ was finished that same night. Napoleon personally drew up the list of eleven questions for the police chief Réal to ask d’Enghien – ‘Have you borne arms against your country?’, ‘Are you in the pay of England?’, ‘Did you offer your services to England to fight against General Mortier in Hanover?’, ‘Have you offered to raise a legion of deserters from the Republic’s army?’ and so on – which the duke answered honestly, making no attempt not to incriminate himself.64 The president of the court martial was General Pierre-Augustin Hulin, the man who had captured the Bastille in 1789 and was now the commander of the Consular Guard grenadiers. He later protested that he too had thought d’Enghien would be reprieved.

  There was the briefest excuse of a trial, held at 2 a.m. on Wednesday, March 21, during which d’Enghien told Hulin and five colonels that he lived at Ettenheim for his love of sport. He also ‘frankly declared that he was ready to make war with France in concert with England, but he protested that he had never had any relations with Pichegru, and was glad of it’.65 The law of 25 Brumaire, Year III, Title 5, Section 1, Article 7 provided that ‘émigrés who have borne arms against France shall be arrested, whether in France or in any hostile or conquered country, and judged within twenty-four hours’. D’Enghien had admitted to being in the pay of England and of bearing arms against France, both of which were capital offences for Frenchmen. If he hadn’t admitted it, the vast amount of money in his safe would anyway have condemned him.

  D’Enghien was thereafter, in Ségur’s words, ‘hurriedly led to the castle moat, where he was shot, and buried in a grave that had already been dug’.66 His last words were ‘I must die then at the hands of Frenchmen!’, which was rather a statement of the obvious but excusable under the circumstances.67 His dog was later owned by Gustav IV of Sweden, and wore a collar declaring: ‘I belong [sic] to the unhappy Duc d’Enghien’.68

  That evening a reception was held at Malmaison to celebrate the proclamation of the Civil Code, which neatly underlines the two sides of Napoleon as both ruthless dictator and inspired lawgiver. When d’Enghien’s execution became public, a shocked Europe almost universally recalled the Corsican penchant for vendettas, and Pelet recorded that Parisians worried that Napoleon had ‘fallen into the evil ways’ of Robespierre.69 Liberals across Europe started to perceive Napoleon differently: this was the moment when René de Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant turned against him. In reply to a Russian protest over the execution, Napoleon ordered his ambassador to St Petersburg, General d’Hédouville, to call for his passports, which he did on June 7, inaugurating a period of very bad Franco-Russian relations that was eventually to erupt into war.70 The cynical remark made about d’Enghien’s execution – ‘It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder’ – has
often been wrongly attributed to Talleyrand, but whether it was Fouché who said it or Boulay de la Meurthe, it was true. Everyone could see that, except the First Consul.

  Napoleon was back in Paris on March 23, where he tacitly acknowledged the unpopularity of his actions. He ‘flung himself’ into his armchair at the Conseil d’État ‘with his brows knitted’ and said, ‘The population of Paris … is a collection of blockheads [un ramas de badauds] who believe the most absurd reports.’ He then added that public opinion ‘has caprices which we ought to learn to despise’.71 Echoing (presumably unconsciously) Queen Elizabeth I, he went on, ‘I don’t investigate the hearts of men to discover their secret sorrows.’ He spoke of the Duke of Baden’s minimal reaction, Louis XIV’s expulsion of the Stuarts after the Treaty of Utrecht, Russian agents, and his anger with the Journal de Paris for publishing details of d’Enghien’s ‘conspiracy’ too early. ‘Napoleon frequently interrupted himself while running on in this way,’ noted Pelet, ‘for he evidently felt the need to make out a justification, but was puzzled what to say, and hence the vagueness of his expressions, and their want of coherence.’72 After he had stopped speaking no one else followed, and Pelet thought that ‘this silence was abundantly significant’. Napoleon left the room and the meeting was over.

  After Mass that Sunday, Ségur noticed that the groups which formed around Napoleon ‘listened to him with watchful curiosity, in a dejected and embarrassed attitude, and for the most part in a silence of evident disapproval’. As a result, ‘His haughty and severe demeanour, though at first inclined to expand, became more and more sombre and reserved.’73 D’Enghien might not have had a funeral, but it seems he had a wake.

  On the morning of April 6, Charles Pichegru was found dead in his cell. According to the Moniteur, he was reading Seneca’s account of the suicide of Cato, and the page was left open at the quotation: ‘He who conspires should not fear death.’74 The official explanation was that he had strangled himself ‘by means of a stick which he had twisted into his silk necktie’.75 Napoleon has been regularly blamed for ordering the murder so soon after d’Enghien’s, and it was even alleged that he sent four Mamluks to do the deed, who were themselves shot the next day.76 Talleyrand, who could always be relied upon for a quip, said of Pichegru’s demise: ‘It was very sudden and very opportune.’77 Yet there is no evidence, even circumstantial, that Napoleon was involved; indeed his supporters argued that after the d’Enghien debacle he particularly wanted the opportunity to have Pichegru’s guilt demonstrated in open court and then punished equally publicly, so he had nothing to gain from having Pichegru murdered.