by Philip Dwyer
Bonaparte had not wanted to go to the Opera that evening; he was tired and he much preferred tragedy to opera. It was his daughter-in-law, Hortense, who insisted. When the Consular party was about to enter the carriage, Bonaparte commented on the shawl Josephine was wearing, so she went off to get another. The incident made them leave the Tuileries a little late, and possibly saved their lives. Josephine’s carriage, which carried her daughter and her pregnant sister-in-law Caroline Bonaparte, would normally have followed immediately behind the First Consul. Now it was at some distance. The First Consul’s carriage reached the nearby rue Saint-Nicaise shortly before eight o’clock. Bonaparte’s coachman, who had had a little too much to drink, managed to avoid the merchant’s cart that partially blocked the street, and then continued on his way. A few seconds later, a deafening blast rocked the coach and threw most of the mounted grenadiers accompanying Bonaparte to the ground. Josephine’s carriage, which had not yet reached the cart, was lifted off the ground, the windows broken and Hortense lightly wounded.4 The cart had exploded, leaving a number of people dead – the figures range between four and ten5 – twenty-odd people wounded and a dozen or so houses damaged. Some of the popular prints that followed centred on the destruction caused by the explosion. Among the dead was a fifteen-year-old girl by the name of Peusol who had been asked by the would-be assassins to hold the horse harnessed to the cart. She was found in a gutter, in the middle of the rue Saint-Nicaise. The blast had ripped off her clothes, and both arms, which were found on either side of the street. Her mother, a widow, a street vendor who sold buns, reclaimed the body two days later.
Anonymous, Explosion de la machine infernale de la rue Nicaise, après le passage de la voiture du premier Consul (Explosion of the infernal machine in rue Nicaise, after the passage of the First Consul’s carriage), no date. The accent in this engraving is on Bonaparte escaping death by a hair’s breadth. This was part of the narrative constructed around the assassination attempt: a few seconds earlier, and the ‘genius of liberty’, the Saviour of France, would have been killed.6 The conclusion people were meant to draw was that providence was at work to protect Bonaparte.
Bonaparte escaped without so much as a scratch. In fact, he had been asleep, dreaming that he was at Arcola, crossing the Tagliamento river under the Austrian bombardment. When the bomb went off – later dubbed the machine infernale – he is supposed to have woken up with the cry, ‘We are undermined!’, or so goes the legend.7 Bonaparte showed remarkable composure under the circumstances, at least in public at the Opera. Once back in the Tuileries, however, he began ranting against those whom he assumed were responsible for the assassination attempt – the Jacobins. The machine infernale was the first of its kind, a precursor of the improvised explosive device, designed to cause as much damage and to kill as many as possible. Over the coming days, Bonaparte more or less bullied the Council of State and the Tribunate into adopting extraordinary measures (rather than using the existing judicial structures) to deal with the Jacobins.8
Things came to a head on 1 January 1801. The Council of State proposed reviving the infamous revolutionary tribunals, which had expedited the delivery of the victims of the Terror to the guillotine and were again under consideration as a means of dealing with brigandage in the provinces. But Bonaparte wanted blood and he wanted it right away. ‘The tribunals you talk of would be too slow in action. More drastic vengeance is needed, something as rapid as gunfire. Blood must flow! As many culprits must be shot as there were victims.’9 Bonaparte insisted that a further 150–200 former ‘terrorists’ be deported without trial. If there was no proof against them for the machine infernale, they had committed all sorts of crimes during the Revolution and had gone unpunished; they were now getting their just deserts. A member of the Council of State, Antoine-Clair Thibaudeau, present during this rant, summed up the argument nicely: ‘It is no longer a question of judging according to existing laws or according to laws that have yet to be passed, but of deporting and shooting as a measure of public safety.’10
The investigation that followed the explosion, however, came up with an entirely different set of culprits. A number of anecdotes recount just how the police managed to track down the perpetrators, but all agree that this is one of the first examples of modern forensic investigation. Not much of the horse that had drawn the explosive contraption remained. Some maintain that the head, others a newly shod leg, was taken and shown to the blacksmiths of Paris until one recognized it; others that a description of the horse and the cart was posted around Paris. Whatever the means, the police were able to find the merchant who had sold the cart and horse to the ‘terrorists’ and got a description from him.11 Using his police files, Fouché began rounding up suspects and learnt in the course of his investigations that royalists were behind the plot.12 But when he reported the results of his investigation in the presence of Bonaparte, the minister of the interior and the Council of State, Bonaparte simply retorted that ‘anarchists’ and septembriseurs (a reference to those who had committed the massacres in Paris of September 1792) were to blame. ‘I will not be misled,’ he declared. ‘There are no nobles, Chouans or priests in any of this. It is the work of septembriseurs, scoundrels covered in crime who are in permanent conspiracy, in open rebellion . . . against each succeeding government.’13
Fouché was instructed to draw up a list of ‘anarchists’ even as he was completing his investigations into the suspected royalist perpetrators. He complied, probably afraid that if he did not obey he would simply be dismissed from office.14 No amount of proof could persuade Bonaparte to change his mind; he refused to rescind the orders against the Jacobins. To do so would weaken not only his own authority, but also that of the Senate.15 The list was ready by 4 January. As a result, 130 men, accused of no specific crime, not even that of being involved in the assassination attempt, and without appearing before a judge, were condemned. The arrests caused quite a bit of consternation in the working-class districts like the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.16 As the accused were taken through Paris on their way to their final destinations, some people looking on gave vent to their hostility towards them, but most were indifferent.17 Of the 104 who were actually deported, over half died in exile. Some were simply kept on the island of Oléron or the Île de Ré off the Atlantic coast, but most were shipped to Guiana, or to the Seychelles (considered even worse than Guiana). A few of them made their way back to France in 1809 after an Anglo-Portuguese-Brazilian operation against Guiana, but they were rearrested and imprisoned in 1813. Those sent to the Seychelles fared the worst. Of the seventy sent there, thirty-eight had died by the end of 1807, nine had escaped and only twenty-three survived. When they petitioned Napoleon for clemency in January 1807, he ignored their pleas.18
A man who was later to become a prefect during the Empire, the Baron de Barante, referred to Bonaparte’s decision to arrest, condemn and deport these men as ‘an act of absolute power’, in the course of which the Senate lost all backbone and became his docile tool.19 It is true that throughout their ordeal no one protested or attempted to defend those on the list. Even after two royalists had been executed for the assassination attempt – a domestic servant by the name of Carbon and a former naval officer by the name of Saint-Réjant – no one thought of rescinding the decree against the Jacobins. But it is an exaggeration to claim that the Senate had become Bonaparte’s docile tool. On the contrary, most of the political elite were complicit in the process, out of a desire on the part of the conservative establishment to see radical Jacobins eliminated once and for all.
Of more interest is what this tells us about Bonaparte, and why he so relentlessly pursued the Jacobins. His desire for blood, the demand for vengeance, shows the extent to which he was personally affected by the explosion. It is a little glib to suppose that it brought out the Corsican in him, but it certainly brought to the fore his authoritarian tendencies.20 As for his willingness to blame the Jacobins, in some respects it was an easy enough conclusion to jump to: a Ja
cobin by the name of Chevalier, a former employee in the armaments workshop of the Committee of Public Safety, had been arrested only a few weeks previously after having experimented with and detonated a contraption similar to the machine infernale (he was later executed).21 Moreover, Fouché’s spies had kept the First Consul well informed of the Jacobins’ talk of wanting to kill him or blow him up, although they were mostly empty threats muttered under the influence of alcohol. When the assassination attempt took place, therefore, Bonaparte and others were only too willing to believe that the Jacobins were the authors and that it was time to purge France of these ‘criminal elements’. The fact that the prefect of police, Louis-Nicolas Dubois, who came in for a drubbing from Bonaparte on the night of the assassination attempt, went about arresting a number of ‘fanatical demagogues’ only lent credence to the general belief that Jacobins must have been behind the plot.22
That attitude can be seen in letters sent to Paris by supporters of the regime who expressed outrage at the assassination attempt.23 To that extent, if Bonaparte’s initial reaction was emotive, the actions that followed are best understood in the light of cold politics. Little did it matter that Bonaparte himself had been a Jacobin in his youth; of utmost importance now was to send a very clear message to anyone thinking of plotting against his life – they would be swiftly and ruthlessly dealt with. For this reason, all opposition was stigmatized by using a particular vocabulary – its disparate members were called ‘terrorists’, ‘exclusives’, ‘enragés’ and ‘anarchists’.24 Napoleon later justified his willingness to eliminate all opponents when he instructed Joseph, by then King of Spain, to shoot rebels or send them to the galleys. ‘I obtained tranquillity in France only after arresting 200 firebrands, bandits and September murderers, whom I then sent to the colonies. Since then, the mood in the capital has changed as if a whistle had suddenly blown.’25
Hohenlinden
In some respects, the machine infernale was a sign that the politics of national reconciliation pursued by the Brumairians had not succeeded, at least not in relation to Bonaparte. The peace that was soon to be concluded, however, would allow the Brumairians to make considerable progress down that path.
From a military perspective, this is a curious phase in Bonaparte’s career. He did not take to the field again once hostilities with Austria were resumed at the end of autumn 1800, preferring instead to leave the campaign to Moreau, conferring on him command of the armies in Germany.26 It is not as if he had to. His position had been considerably strengthened by Marengo, although after the intrigues at Auteuil he may still have felt a little unsure of his power-base. Of course, Moreau’s position in the Army of the Rhine was still very strong. This is one of the reasons Bonaparte left Germany to Moreau. Whatever his reasons, while France was at war the First Consul was never away from the capital for any length of time. The period between his return to Paris from the second Italian campaign in July 1800 and his departure for the campaign that would culminate in Austerlitz in September 1805 (with short trips to various parts of the French Empire) was the longest during which he stayed in and around Paris.
After Marengo, Bonaparte again wrote to the King of Austria suing for peace.27 It was unfortunate timing; the court of Vienna had just signed an agreement with London promising that, in return for subsidies, Austria would continue the war until February 1801. Vienna nevertheless sent a diplomat by the name of General Francis Count Saint Julien to Paris, not so much to conclude peace as to win time so that the Austrian army could organize itself before launching another campaign. Saint Julien arrived in Paris in July 1800. He was an inexperienced although ambitious diplomat; Bonaparte and Talleyrand quickly bamboozled him into signing peace preliminaries based on the Treaty of Campo Formio. In fact, Saint Julien, believing that he was doing the right thing and that he would be greeted on his return to Vienna as a hero, had no authorization to sign a peace treaty and had on the contrary received instructions to ‘do nothing’.28 When he returned to Vienna, he was thrown into prison for overstepping his instructions. The Austrian government thereby disavowed its envoy and showed its real intentions to the world.
A week prior to his arrival, one of Moreau’s commanders, General Lecourbe, had won a victory at Feldkirch (13 July) against the Austrian General Kray, as a result of which Moreau signed an armistice (as far as the fighting in Germany was concerned), at Parsdorf not far from Munich. With Vienna yet again under threat from the Army of the Rhine the armistice was greeted with relief by Austrians. Francis II decided to send his new foreign minister, Count Louis Cobenzl, to Lunéville, a town in Lorraine about thirty kilometres south-east of Nancy, where negotiations were meant to take place between the two countries. Cobenzl arrived there in November, but was invited to Paris by Bonaparte. There the First Consul locked himself away with Cobenzl in his office for an entire night, discussing the possibility of an arrangement with Austria. Talleyrand gives an account of the scene between the two men, at nine o’clock in the evening, with Bonaparte having arranged the lighting and furniture – no chairs except the one Bonaparte was sitting on and only one lamp – in order to intimidate his interlocutor.29 But it was to negligible effect; Cobenzl went back to Lunéville without having budged an inch. With the failure of negotiations, Bonaparte had little choice but to announce that hostilities would resume on 22 November 1800.
In making the announcement, Bonaparte gave the Austrians advance warning, and they acted quickly. On 27 November, an army of 100,000 men under the (nominal) command of Francis’s brother Archduke John crossed the River Inn and took the offensive in Bavaria, outflanking Moreau. Moreau was nonetheless able to regroup and fought a pitched battle at Hohenlinden, about thirty-five kilometres outside Munich, where on 3 December 1800, despite being badly outgunned, he inflicted a crushing defeat on the Austrian forces.30 Moreau was Bonaparte’s military equal in some respects, but not as decisive in action. Even though the road to Vienna now lay wide open, he hesitated a few days about what to do before finally lumbering on towards the Austrian capital. It took him another twenty-five days to march 300 kilometres, a leisurely pace by anyone’s standards. When he was within sixty-five kilometres of Vienna, another of Francis’s brothers, the Archduke Charles, asked for and obtained an armistice from the French.
Bonaparte had just returned from the theatre when Bourrienne handed him a dispatch announcing the victory; immediately understanding its implications, the First Consul is supposed to have jumped for joy.31 Moreau’s campaign in Germany had been more successful, in political terms at least, than Bonaparte’s second campaign in Italy. It was the general’s victory at Hohenlinden, rather than Bonaparte’s victory at Marengo, which sealed Austria’s fate in the war and forced it to conclude peace. It was Hohenlinden, much more than Marengo, which consolidated Bonaparte’s hold on power.32
One could be forgiven then for thinking that Bonaparte was slightly jealous. He did not send a letter of congratulations to Moreau, and not much was made of the victory in the press; a letter recounting the victory was published in the Moniteur,33 and mention was made of a delegation sent by the Tribunate to Bonaparte to propose that 3 December become a national feast day.34 The most Bonaparte conceded was a letter to the Legislative Corps in which he referred to the ‘victory of Hohenlinden resounding throughout Europe’, but Moreau’s name, interestingly, was never once mentioned.35 In fact, the battle was almost never cited in the press in conjunction with the name of Moreau and was never celebrated in painting the way other Bonapartist victories were commemorated.36 This was ungenerous to say the least and demonstrates how much Bonaparte may have felt threatened by Moreau’s success.
Contemporaries believed that Bonaparte now saw Moreau as a dangerous rival.37 The general was annoyed by Bonaparte’s lack of acknowledgement, and some would have it that he too was jealous of the First Consul’s ascendancy.38 Slights received by his wife at Josephine’s summer residence west of Paris, the Château de Malmaison – on one occasion, Bonaparte did not ask her
how her husband was doing, on another Josephine kept her waiting before receiving her – did not help matters.39 When, a month after the battle, Bonaparte finally did write to Moreau, it was a very brief response to a letter he had received about the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Poland, and only then did he refer indirectly to the campaign in which the general had ‘surpassed’ himself.40
France was not big enough for two heroes. Moreau’s victories were never allowed to outshine that of Marengo. Two articles appeared in the Moniteur that suggested Moreau had not paid the Army of the Rhine in seven or eight months, and that it was going to be paid from the Public Treasury.41 The story was entirely incorrect; Bonaparte may have had these little bits of information inserted in order to discredit Moreau. The general had in effect paid his men through contributions that had been imposed on the German population, to the tune of forty-four million francs. The suggestion, vague in nature but clear to contemporaries, was that either Moreau was a drain on the public coffers, or he had pocketed the money for himself. Given that the state controlled the press, Moreau was unable to reply to these accusations. Instead, he had a response published at his own expense.42
‘We Blessed the Name of Bonaparte’
While various offensives and counter-offensives were being undertaken in Switzerland, the Tyrol and northern Italy, the peace negotiations with Austria continued at a sluggish pace.43 Joseph had been sent by his brother to represent France; he entertained the Austrian envoy, Count Cobenzl, at Mortefontaine, his house north of Paris, in a series of dinners, balls, theatre outings and excursions to neighbouring sites.44 Joseph was not without some diplomatic experience; he had been ambassador to Rome during the Directory and had negotiated peace with the United States earlier in the year, but if Bonaparte sent his brother to Lunéville it was not because of his negotiating skills. He wanted rather to maintain control over foreign policy. Bonaparte, through Talleyrand, controlled Joseph tightly, corresponding with him every day, placing by his side trusted, experienced aides who could help him out.45
