Citizen Emperor

by Philip Dwyer

  At first, Bonaparte actually opposed the idea of recalling them.8 He had fought against them when royalists had rebelled at Toulon in 1793 and they had been in the ranks of the Austrian army in Italy. In Syria, it had been an émigré, Phéllipeaux, who had contributed to his defeat before the walls of St John of Acre. The idea put to him by Fouché that they might be brought back in large numbers appeared dangerous. Fouché, on the other hand, considered them more dangerous outside the country than under surveillance within. The first measures allowing émigrés to re-enter the country introduced in the first half of 1800 were accompanied by a number of newspaper articles written by Fouché, designed to appease republicans. Thus, in Le Diplomate in January 1800, the minister of police declared that the doors were irrevocably closed to ‘traitors and parricides’.9 By the end of 1801, however, inundated with requests from émigrés, he was pushing for a general amnesty. The alternative was to have individual émigrés appear before a court of law, something Fouché feared might encourage some of them to reclaim their lost property. A simple pardon from the state, on the other hand, would not bring into question the usurpation of their property during the Revolution.10

  With his hold on power increasing, Bonaparte came around to the idea. Now that war had been brought to an end, there was no reason for émigrés to continue fighting France in foreign or émigré armies, and in any event they would be demobilized. On 11 April 1802, the Council of State accepted a law granting amnesty to émigrés; a senatus consultum – an act voted on by the Senate that had the force of law – followed on 26 April. The amnesty was accorded to all individuals who availed themselves of it before 23 September and who were prepared to take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. Only those who had been the leaders of rebel bands or enemy armies were excluded (as well as a few other categories such as princes of the House of Bourbon, or deputies who had been declared guilty of treason – in all fewer than 1,000 people).11 To those who accepted the offer, the state agreed to restore whatever property had been seized during the Revolution, but which had not yet been sold. This lure, coupled with the nostalgia for France felt by many émigrés, had an immediate and overwhelming effect – over 40,000 émigré families crossed the Channel and the Rhine to return home.12 ‘The fashion was to return’, one émigré lamented, ‘just as it once was to leave.’13 What few realized, however, was that the return was swaddled in police surveillance – up to one-third of police personnel were involved in watching returned émigrés – and that Fouché arrested dozens of them and had them imprisoned without trial.14

  Emigrés had been attacked for years, held responsible for everything from inflation to famine.15 One can imagine then how much the introduction of an amnesty was a topic of general conversation.16 From police reports we know that republicans were offended and that even officers in the Consular Guard were wary that émigrés would be imposed on them. Most people, however, seem to have approved of the measure and considered it a sign of the government’s strength.17 As for officers who had emigrated and even fought in the royalist Army of Condé against France, it was now a question of deciding whether they could serve Bonaparte. The choice would have been difficult for many, but it appears that a number of former royalist officers did indeed opt for Bonaparte, some for financial reasons, others because they wanted to serve France.18 Their integration was facilitated by the fact that they kept their former ranks. This was then a pragmatic decision for some but that does not mean they necessarily hid their royalist sentiments. As we shall see, a number of them were to welcome the return of the Bourbons in 1814 and betray Napoleon in the process.

  According to one police report, there were two types of returning émigrés: those who were young and found the decision on the part of Bonaparte magnanimous; and those who were ‘encrusted’ in the ways of the ancien régime and awaited the return of their ‘legitimate’ sovereign.19 It was no doubt a simplistic appraisal of a complex situation, but there is some evidence to suggest that a number of returning nobles ensconced themselves in their old neighbourhoods and formed a sort of royalist colony, living an alternative life with their own salons, balls and receptions.20 Moreover, some returning émigrés were convinced that their lands, confiscated and sold off during the Revolution, would be returned to them. This resulted in enormous friction between returning nobles and those who had acquired their land, which sometimes led to violence. In Normandy, for example, a number of returned émigrés were murdered, their throats cut.21 Nevertheless, the émigrés were now here to stay. They too had become part and parcel of Bonaparte’s politics of fusion. The only people not to rally were a royalist fringe living either on the margins or attached to the court of Louis XVIII in exile.

  A Vaccine against Religion

  One week after the amnesty of émigrés, on 18 April 1802, Easter Sunday according to the old Gregorian calendar, a mass and then a Te Deum were celebrated in Notre Dame to mark both the signing of peace with Great Britain and the Concordat with the Catholic Church.22 The aisles of the cathedral had been decked out with Gobelin tapestries, while two canopies of crimson and gold had been erected, crowned with plumes of white feathers.23 Under one canopy sat the consuls, and under the other the papal legate, Cardinal Gian Batista Caprara. The Te Deum was, according to one English witness, ‘the grandest thing I ever heard’. Mixing the two ceremonies was meant to placate public elements hostile to the Concordat – a treaty reconciling the French state with the Church – but really the ceremony was about the religious, not the diplomatic peace, and it was the former that was the subject of conversations in the cafés of Paris.24

  The First Consul and his entourage left the Tuileries at about eleven o’clock to weave their way through the streets to the cathedral – described by an English visitor as a ‘dirty place, and miserable’25 – escorted by cavalry and announced by a sixty-gun salute and the pealing of the cathedral bells. It was the first time in ten years that the people of Paris had heard the bells ring out over their city and it brought tears to the eyes of those who lived close by.26 It was also the first time in many years that the crowds saw livery in the official procession to the cathedral, while old royal carriages were dragged out of storage and spruced up for use by the dignitaries. According to one English observer, on seeing the livery the crowds exclaimed how delighted they were to see a bit of colour again.27 Bonaparte’s carriage was drawn by eight horses, the number once reserved for the king. The soldiers forming the guard of honour along the route certainly let it be known what they thought of it all – not much – while old royalists muttered at the sight of Bonaparte’s carriage. There were grumblings in some of the cafés the next day, but that was probably not the sentiment of the vast majority of people; workers thought that the restoration of the churches would see them employed.28 Cambacérès later claimed that a large number of people, ‘expressing their joy by continuous acclamations’, followed the consuls from the Tuileries to Notre Dame.29 It was not so much the pomp, by now an increasingly familiar sight, that impressed the crowds as the fact that Catholicism was now being officially recognized by the regime, and could now be openly practised by the faithful.

  At about one o’clock, the dignitaries of the regime filed into the cathedral, Bonaparte at their head, followed by the other two consuls, then the various members of the Council of State, the Senate, the legislature, the army and only then, tellingly, by the Church hierarchy. Contemporaries were not unaware how strange it was to see men like Talleyrand and Fouché – the former a defrocked priest, the latter a priest who never took his final vows – make the sign of the cross.30 A point was being made. The Church was now subordinated to the state and was to remain that way.31 Many of those present were decidedly unimpressed by the amount of gold braid, purple and carmine cloth. The military in particular were present against their will – they had been co-opted for the occasion by Berthier, the minister of war – disgusted by any arrangements with a Church that had betrayed the Revolution and against which they had fought so har
d. They let the whole world know just what they thought of the ceremony.

  Masséna was one of them. He disliked Bonaparte intensely and referred to him in private as ‘that bugger there’ (ce bougre-là).32 From his house in Reuil he was known to have stood on a hill overlooking Malmaison and said to the great amusement of his friends, ‘From here, I can piss on him whenever I want.’33 When Masséna and about sixty other generals entered the cathedral, they discovered that no seats had been reserved for them. ‘Go and fuck yourself’ was Masséna’s response to the assistant master of ceremonies; the generals simply manhandled some priests and took over their seats.34 They calmed down after Bonaparte, annoyed by the disturbance, turned and glared at them.35 Jean-François Boulart, a colonel in the artillery, was sickened by the spectacle. He later recalled that ‘There was in me a profound aversion and disgust aroused by the lies, and all I saw was lies and hypocrisy.’36 He nevertheless came away with the feeling that there was much to look forward to. ‘Who [are] they trying to fool?’ remarked another disgruntled republican.37 Certain generals, such as Jourdan, Augereau, Brune and Lannes, were considered too republican and were given various missions away from Paris during the celebrations.

  Moreau’s mother-in-law, Mme Hulot, and his wife, Eugénie, took seats reserved for the Bonaparte family; no one dared say anything to them.38 At one stage Bonaparte had thought of having the army’s flags blessed by the Archbishop of Paris but probably in the face of objections from the military abandoned the idea.39 Opposition to the Concordat was expressed that evening during a reception held at the Tuileries to celebrate the event. General Delmas was heard replying to a question from Bonaparte that he had thought the ceremony at Notre Dame ‘a wonderful mummery [une belle capucinade]. It is a shame that the million or so men who got themselves killed destroying what you have re-established were not there.’40 Such frank talk was not appreciated; Delmas was exiled from Paris for his effrontery and was not reinstated in the army until the Empire had its back to the wall in 1813.41

  Moreau too had come out against the Concordat and, although invited to attend the ceremony at Notre Dame, decided instead to go for a walk in the Tuileries gardens, publicly distancing himself from the event.42 He was becoming, possibly in spite of himself, the centre of an opposition movement, and was emulating Bonaparte’s earlier tactics. After his victories in Bavaria, and his return to Paris in December 1802, for example, he attended a dinner at the ministry of war not in military uniform but in civilian dress – a simple brown morning coat, knee-length breeches and silk stockings.43 He may very well have been making a statement, ridiculing the elaborate uniforms that were already starting to appear at the Consular court, attempting to give Bonaparte an object lesson in modesty.

  Bonaparte’s attitude towards the Church had never been as radical as the Jacobins’. Unlike the revolutionary governments that had preceded him, he entirely understood the role of religion in society, and realized that for religion to cease being such a divisive issue bridges had to be mended with the Church.44 This was above all a practical and not a spiritual process, part of the politics of fusion and reconciliation.45 Revolutionaries for the most part accepted the measures in favour of the Church, as did the vast majority of the French people, who wanted a restoration of the Catholic religion. Some newspapers, such as the conservative Mercure de France, had been campaigning, albeit discreetly, in favour of the Catholic Church.46 In July 1800, a further nail was hammered into the anti-clerical coffin when Bonaparte allowed people to choose between Sunday and the décadi of the revolutionary calendar as their day off (admittedly, the décadi was still observed only in a few towns).47

  It is nevertheless significant that the first public manifestation of Bonaparte’s decision to initiate a reconciliation with the Catholic Church had taken place outside France, in Italy. On 5 June 1800, Bonaparte gathered the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Milan for a Te Deum. It was the first time that an official of the French Republic had been seen at a Catholic ceremony since the early days of the Revolution, and Bonaparte made sure that all France and Europe knew of it.48 During the Te Deum, he made a speech in which he declared that a rapprochement between the French government and the papacy was now possible.49 On 25 June, he had a conversation with Cardinal Martiniana at the town of Vercelli, about seventy kilometres from Turin, during which the idea of a treaty or Concordat with the Church was discussed. Bonaparte had taken the first step, and in doing so had signalled his desire to tackle head on the religious question.

  Not that Bonaparte was religious. His attitude has always been depicted as strictly utilitarian, but one should not forget that he was born and raised a Catholic and that if he was not what one might call a true believer, nor was he an atheist.50 ‘Without religion’, he wrote, ‘there is no happiness and no possible future.’51 It seems that he had lost his faith and begun to question the purpose of the Church around the age of thirteen, but religion nevertheless continued to play an important part in his life. Bonaparte’s religious beliefs aside, he was perfectly aware that religion was necessary for the stability of the state, and he sensed that the public mood in France had swung in favour of religion, a mood which his government could harness for political purposes.52

  However, Bonaparte does not appear to have appreciated the enormous problems that had to be overcome, which involved questions of what to do with a Church whose property had been nationalized and that had been rent in two by the revolutionaries with the introduction of an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.53 Only about half of parish priests and a few bishops took the oath; the rest were deemed ‘refractory’. It obliged all Catholics to choose between the Revolution and Rome. Bonaparte naively thought that an arrangement could be forced through in a short space of time. In much the same way that he had negotiated treaties with defeated powers, Bonaparte believed he was negotiating from a position of strength – an army in Tuscany threatened to invade the Papal States if the Church did not toe the line – and believed that he could obtain what he wanted without conceding anything. That was Bonaparte’s way of negotiating – place a knife to your opponent’s throat and then tell him what he is about to concede. But this was to ignore the fact that the spiritual power and influence of the Church had not been diminished by ten years of Revolution and the material losses that went with it.

  After weeks of fruitless negotiations, Bonaparte called the Holy See’s envoy, Monsignor Spina, to Malmaison and threatened to convert to Lutherism or Calvinism if he did not get his way.54 It was, of course, an empty threat, one among many, and we should not be taken in by his blustering. He sensed how far he could push an opponent in order to gain concessions. This approach was part of what one historian has dubbed the ‘frontiers of manoeuvre’.55 One of the stumbling blocks had been Talleyrand. A bishop during the ancien régime, he had walked away from the Church during the Revolution and was one of the men responsible for the nationalization of Church property in France. He did not want a Concordat that would prevent a defrocked priest from marrying; he had his sights set on a certain Mme Grand, considered one of the most beautiful women in Europe, even if she was lacking somewhat in esprit (Bonaparte described her rather ungraciously as a ‘stupid old tart’).

  It was only with the arrival of Cardinal Ercole Consalvi in Paris, and a sudden bout of ‘rheumatism’ that obliged Talleyrand to take the waters, that progress was made.56 A number of drafts and counter-drafts were exchanged in the space of a few days; Bonaparte threw the eighth draft into the fire. Consalvi, the papal secretary of state, was invited to Malmaison for a meeting with Bonaparte in June 1801;57 Joseph was appointed to assist Bonaparte’s principal negotiator, Etienne-Alexandre Bernier (who in turn worked under Talleyrand), in the hope that everything could be concluded by 14 July. A meeting was held at Joseph’s house at Mortefontaine on the 13th that lasted twenty hours. Progress was made, but not enough for an accord. On the evening of the 14th, Consalvi attended a gala dinner during which the negotiations continued.
It was on this occasion that Bonaparte told him that Rome would ‘shed tears of blood’ if he did not sign.58 It was perhaps enough to give the final impetus to talks; an accord was signed the next day after another marathon twelve-hour session.

  During the night of 15–16 July 1801, Cardinal Consalvi signed the Concordat of seventeen articles in Joseph’s residence. As a preamble, the French government recognized the Roman Catholic religion as being that of the ‘great majority of the French people’. The implication was that there were other faiths, and that the state would now remain neutral in questions of religion.59 One of the terms of the Concordat was formal recognition of Bonaparte’s government, something that the First Consul insisted upon because he rightly assumed it would be a blow against royalism; it undermined one of their objections to the Revolution. It was not the end of the process, however. The treaty was signed in secret – it was not made public until Easter Sunday on 8 April 1802 – and still had to be passed by the legislative bodies, something that was by no means assured.60 The Concordat was ratified in Rome on 15 August and in Paris on 8 September 1801. Meanwhile Bonaparte, at the suggestion of Talleyrand and without consulting the pope, Pius VII, inserted the infamous addendum referred to as the ‘Organic Articles’,61 which were published at the same time as the Concordat in 1802 in order to give the impression that Rome had agreed to them. Introduced at the last minute in an attempt to appease anti-clericals within the assemblies, the Organic Articles imposed a much more ‘caesaro-papist formula’ on Church–state relations: they denied the pope authority to intervene in many areas of the French Church; they strengthened the First Consul’s power to do so; they formalized the loss of Church property during the Revolution; and they brought all papal communications with the French clergy under the strict control of the government.62