Citizen Emperor

by Philip Dwyer

  68. Moniteur universel, 14 nivôse an VIII (5 January 1800); Honoré Duveyrier, Anecdotes historiques (Paris, 1907), pp. 312–20, has a different version of events. See Léon de Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon, 8 vols (Paris, 1905–13), i. pp. 177–8; Frédéric Masson, Napoléon et sa famille, 13 vols (Paris, 1897–1919), i. p. 305.

  69. Vandal, L’avènement de Bonaparte, ii. pp. 48–55; Kurt Kloocke, Benjamin Constant: une biographie intellectuelle (Geneva, 1984), p. 96.

  70. Jainchill, Reimagining Politics, pp. 198–9.

  71. Gazette de France, 12 January 1800 (22 nivôse an VIII); La Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique, 20 nivôse an VIII (20 January 1800); Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat, i. pp. 79–80, 84, 87; Vandal, L’avènement de Bonaparte, ii. pp. 54–5; Louis de Villefosse and Janine Bouissounouse, L’opposition à Napoléon (Paris, 1969), pp. 116–17.

  72. P.M., ‘Un document sur l’histoire de la presse: la préparation de l’arrêté du 27 nivôse an VIII’, La Révolution française, 44 (January–June 1903), 78–82; André Cabanis, La Presse sous le Consulat et l’Empire (Paris, 1975), pp. 12–14.

  73. P.-J.-B. Buchez and P.-C. Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, ou Journal des assemblées nationales depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1815, 40 vols (Paris, 1834–8), xxxviii. pp. 331–2.

  74. Cabanis, La presse, pp. 11–41, 69–71; ‘Introduction’, in Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (eds), Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 16; Henri Welschinger, La censure sous le Premier Empire, avec documents inédits (Paris, 1882), p. 119.

  75. Michael Marrinan, ‘Literal/Literary/“Lexie”: History, Text, and Authority in Napoleonic Painting’, Word & Image, 7:3 (1991), 178–9; Fernand Mitton, La presse française (Paris, 1945), ii. pp. 210–11; Simon Burrows, ‘The Cosmopolitan Press, 1759–1815’, in Barker and Burrows (eds), Press, Politics and the Public Sphere, p. 38; Simon Burrows, ‘The War of Words: French and British Propaganda in the Napoleonic Era’, in David Cannadine (ed.), Trafalgar in History: A Battle and its Afterlife (Basingstoke, 2006), p. 48.

  76. Jeremy D. Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799 (Durham, 1990), pp. 151–62; Michel Biard, Parlez-vous sans-culotte?: dictionnaire du ‘Père Duchesne’, 1790–1794 (Paris, 2009), pp. 285–6.

  77. Hugh Gough, The Newspaper Press in the French Revolution (London, 1988), pp. 141–59; Popkin, Revolutionary News, pp. 169–79.

  78. P.M., ‘Un document sur l’histoire de la presse’, 78, 79, 80.

  79. Michael Polowetzky, A Bond Never Broken: The Relations between Napoleon and the Authors of France (Rutherford, 1993), pp. 71–2.

  80. See, for example, Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, Mémoires inédits: éclaircissements publiés par Cambacérès sur les principaux événements de sa vie politique, 2 vols (Paris, 1999), i. p. 480; Cabanis, La presse, p. 87.

  81. Thibaudeau, Mémoires sur le Consulat, p. 267; John Holland Rose, ‘The Censorship under Napoleon I’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, 18:1 (1918), 62.

  82. A. Périvier, Napoléon journaliste (Paris, 1918), p. 105, speaks of the ‘total enslavement’ of the press. See also Geoffrey Ellis, Napoleon (Harlow, 1997), pp. 168–9; Felix Markham, Napoleon (London, 1963), p. 86; Jeremy D. Popkin, The Right-Wing Press in France, 1792–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1980), pp. 170–2. The exception is Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Biography (New York, 2004), pp. 312–13.

  83. Jean-Luc Chappey, ‘Pierre-Louis Roederer et la presse sous le Directoire et le Consulat: l’opinion publique et les enjeux d’une politique éditoriale’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 334 (2003), 19.

  84. See Dennis A. Trinkle, The Napoleonic Press: The Public Sphere and Oppositionary Journalism (Lewiston, 2002), pp. 1–4.

  85. Jainchill, Reimagining Politics, p. 263; Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi,Recherches sur les constitutions des peuples libres, ed. with an introduction by Marco Minerbi (Geneva, 1965). To cite but one example, in October 1800, after a Jacobin assassination plot against Napoleon had been uncovered, a song circulated that insulted Bonaparte and his whole family. AN F7 3702, 22 vendémiaire an IX (14 October 1800); Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat, i. p. 715.

  86. Corr. vi. n. 4422 (15 December 1799). A second proclamation was issued ten days later, Corr. vi. n. 4447 (25 December), and was drawn up by Pierre-Louis Roederer. It states that the new regime’s two primary goals were, first, to consolidate the Republic and, second, to make France formidable to its enemies. Roederer, Oeuvres, iii. pp. 328–30.

  87. Claude Nicolet, La fabrique d’une nation: la France entre Rome et les Germains (Paris, 2003), p. 143.

  88. Entretien politique sur la situation actuelle de la France et sur les plans du nouveau gouvernement. Translation in Marc-Antoine Jullien, From Jacobin to Liberal: Marc-Antoine Jullien, 1775–1848, ed. and trans. R. R. Palmer (Princeton, 1993), pp. 94–100 (December 1799), here p. 95.

  89. See, for example, the account written one year after Brumaire of a France on the brink of collapse in the opening passages of Pierre-Louis Roederer, La Première année du Consulat de Bonaparte (n.p., n.d.).

  90. For the following see Jérémie Benoît, ‘La peinture allégorique sous le Consulat: structure et politique’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 121 (1993), 78–9; Marc Sandoz, Antoine-François-Callet: 1741–1823 (Paris, 1985), p. 123.

  91. After 1802, when the Consulate for life was proclaimed, there were no longer any references to the people in the paintings commanded by the state.

  92. Victor de Broglie (ed.), Souvenirs, 1785–1870, 4 vols (Paris, 1886), i. pp. 31–2; Roguet, Mémoires, ii. p. 418.

  93. The same can be said for the other Napoleonic plebiscites. See Josiane Bourguet-Rouveyre, ‘La survivance d’un système électorale sous le Consulat et l’Empire’, Annales historique de la Révolution française, 346 (2006), 17–29.

  94. Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy,1789–1799 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 191.

  95. For this and the following see Malcolm Crook, ‘Les réactions autour de Brumaire à travers le plébiscite de l’an VIII’, in Jean-Pierre Jessenne (ed.), Du Directoire au Consulat, 3 vols (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2001), iii. pp. 323–31.

  96. Jeff Horn, ‘Le plébiscite de l’an VIII et la construction du système préfectoral’, in Jessenne (ed.), Du Directoire au Consulat, iii. pp. 552–3.

  97. Jean Tulard, Napoléon ou le mythe du sauveur (Paris, 1977), p. 131.

  98. Claude Langlois, ‘Le plébiscite de l’an VIII ou le coup d’état du 18 pluviôse an VIII’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 44 (1972), 43–65, 231–6 and 390–415; Claude Langlois, ‘Napoléon Bonaparte plébiscité?’, in Léo Hamon and Guy Lobrichon (eds), L’élection du chef de l’état en France de Hugues Capet à nos jours (Paris, 1988), pp. 90–1; Malcolm Crook, ‘Confiance d’en bas, manipulation d’en haut: la pratique plébiscitaire sous Napoléon (1799–1815)’, in Philippe Bourdin et al. (eds), L’incident électoral de la Révolution française à la Ve République (Clermont-Ferrand, 2002), pp. 77–87.

  99. Michel Vovelle, La Révolution française: 1789–1799 (Paris, 1998), pp. 83–4.

  100. Langlois, ‘Le plébiscite de l’an VIII’, 43–65, 231–46, 390–415, here 241–3. The official figures were 3,011,007 ‘yes’ votes and 1,562 ‘no’ votes.

  101. Other meetings took place the following year with Georges Cadoudal, and comtes de Bourmont, Châtillon and d’Autichamp. See Corr. vi. n. 4639 (5 March 1800). We shall come across Cadoudal a little further on.

  102. According to Jean-Guillaume Hyde de Neuville, Mémoires et souvenirs du baron Hyde de Neuville, 3 vols (Paris, 1888), i. pp. 268–75.

  103. Corr. vi. n. 4473 (28 December 1799).

  104. Corr. vi. n. 4506 (11 January 1800).

  105. Brown, ‘Echoes of the Terror’, 550; Howard G. Brown, ‘Special Tribunals and the Napoleonic Security State’, in Philip Dwy
er and Alan Forrest (eds), Napoleon and his Empire: Europe, 1804–1814 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 79–95.

  106. Corr. vi. n. 4603 (18 February 1800); Hyde de Neuville, Mémoires et souvenirs, i. pp. 299–302; Léon de La Sicotière, Louis de Frotté et les insurrections normandes, 1793–1832 (Paris, 1889), pp. 467–542; Villefosse and Bouissounouse, L’opposition à Napoléon, pp. 128–30; Brown, Ending the French Revolution, pp. 264–5.

  107. Cabanis, Le sacre de Napoléon, p. 54.

  108. Corr. vi. n. 4589 (13 February 1800); Hyde de Neuville, Mémoires et souvenirs, i. pp. 282–3; Cabanis, Le sacre de Napoléon, p. 53.

  109. Brown, Ending the French Revolution, pp. 325–6, 330–8, 341.

  110. Corr. vi. n. 4523 (14 January 1800).

  111. Charles-Louis Chassin, Etudes documentaires sur la Révolution française. Les Pacifications de l’Ouest. 1794–1815, 3 vols (Paris, 1896–9), iii. pp. 545–61; Eric Muraise, Sainte Anne et la Bretagne (Paris, 1980), pp. 101–6. Both authors play down the severity of the repression. On the other hand, Brown, Ending the French Revolution, pp. 264–5, is much more realistic.

  112. Corr. vii. n. 5557 (3 May 1801).

  113. See, for example, Corr. vi. n. 4498 (5 January 1800).

  114. Brown, Ending the French Revolution, pp. 331–2.

  115. Stephen Clay, ‘Le brigandage en Provence du Directoire au Consulat (1795–1802)’, in Jessenne (ed.), Du Directoire au Consulat, iii. pp. 67–89.

  116. Brown, Ending the French Revolution, pp. 317–20; Brown, ‘Special Tribunals and the Napoleonic Security State’, pp. 79–95.

  117. Brown, Ending the French Revolution, p. 323; Brown, ‘Echoes of the Terror’, 553–5.

  118. Brown, Ending the French Revolution, pp. 236, 316–24, 330; Brown, ‘Echoes of the Terror’, 529–58; Howard G. Brown, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte, Political Prodigy’, History Compass,5 (2007), 1387.

  119. Paul R. Hanson, The Jacobin Republic under Fire: The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution (University Park, Pa., 2003), p. 193.

  120. Brown, Ending the French Revolution, pp. 264–6; Brown, ‘Echoes of the Terror’, 555.

  2: ‘Perfect Glory and Solid Peace’

  1. On this episode see Jacques-Olivier Boudon, ‘L’incarnation de l’état de brumaire à floréal’, in Jessenne (ed.), Du Directoire au Consulat, iii. pp. 334–6.

  2. Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat, i. p. 156, although one has to wonder to what extent the police may have exaggerated the crowd’s reaction in order to please their new masters.

  3. Thibaudeau, Mémoires sur le Consulat, p. 2.

  4. Victorine, comtesse de Chastenay, Mémoires de Madame de Chastenay, 1771–1815,2 vols (Paris, 1896), i. p. 418.

  5. Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon, i. pp. 77–81.

  6. Karl Roider, ‘The Habsburg Foreign Ministry and Political Reform, 1801–1805’, Central European History, 22 (1989), 178. George III was the exception to the rule. The coach he commissioned is still used on state occasions today (Jonathan Marsden and John Hardy, ‘“O Fair Britannia Hail!” The “Most Superb” State Coach’, Apollo, 153:468 (2001), 3–12; Jonathan Marsden, ‘George III’s State Coach in Context’, in Jonathan Marsden (ed.), The Wisdom of George the Third (London, 2005), pp. 43–59).

  7. Jean-Paul Bertaud, ‘Napoleon’s Officers’, Past & Present, 112 (1986), 97.

  8. Chastenay, Mémoires, i. p. 418.

  9. Jean-Pierre-Galy Montaglas, Historique du 12e chasseurs à cheval, depuis le 29 avril 1792 jusqu’au traité de Lunéville (9 février 1801) (Paris, 1908), p. 78; A. Gautier-Sauzin, Discours prononcé par le maire de Montauban, le 18 brumaire an X, jour de la fête de la Paix (Montauban, 1801); Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat, i. p. 4; Michael J. Hughes, ‘“Vive la Republique, Vive l’Empereur!”: Military Culture and Motivation in the Armies of Napoleon, 1803–1808’, PhD dissertation (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005), p. 65.

  10. Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon, i. p. 78; Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat, i. pp. 158–9, 170.

  11. Antoine Boulant, Les Tuileries, palais de la Révolution (1789–1799) (Paris, 1989).

  12. Cambacérès, Mémoires inédits, i. p. 489.

  13. See Marie-Cécile Thoral, ‘The Limits of Napoleonic Centralization: Notables and Local Government in the Department of the Isère from the Consulate to the Beginning of the July Monarchy’, French History, 19 (2005), 463–81; John Dunne, ‘Les maires de Brumaire, notables ruraux ou “gens des passage” ’, in Jessenne (ed.), Du Directoire au Consulat, iii. pp. 451–65; John Dunne, ‘Napoleon’s “Mayoral Problem”: Aspects of State–Community Relations in Post-Revolutionary France’, Modern & Contemporary France, 8 (2000), 479–91; John Dunne, ‘Power on the Periphery: Elite–State Relations in the Napoleonic Empire’, in Dwyer and Forrest (eds), Napoleon and his Empire, pp. 61–78.

  14. Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon, i. p. 78; Cabanis, Le sacre de Napoléon, pp. 44–5.

  15. Masson, Napoléon et sa famille, ii. pp. 78–9; Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon, i. p. 85; iii. pp. 79–83.

  16. Thibaudeau, Mémoires sur le Consulat, pp. 7–9. For a similar phenomenon in the British army see Scott Hughes Myerly, British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 139–50. Myerly argues that dress and discipline moulded the soldier and that the military parade won over the civilian population.

  17. On this point see Hughes, ‘Vive la République, Vive l’Empereur!’, pp. 55–60; Jean Morvan, Le soldat impérial, 2 vols (Paris, 1904), ii. pp. 510–17; John R. Elting, Swords around a Throne: Napoleon’s Grande Armée (New York, 1988), pp. 596–601.

  18. J. p. T. Bury and J. C. Barry (eds), An Englishman in Paris, 1803: The Journal of Bertie Greatheed (London, 1953), pp. 114–15; Alan Forrest, Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (London, 2002), pp. 102–3; Hughes, ‘Vive la République, Vive l’Empereur!’, pp. 57–9.

  19. See, for example, the Moniteur universel, 23 brumaire an XII (15 November 1803), later printed as Trait curieux arrivé au Premier Consul en passant l’armée en revue à Boulogne-sur-Mer (Paris, n.d.).

  20. Philip Mansel, The Eagle in Splendour: Napoleon I and his Court (London, 1987), p. 14.

  21. Francis William Blagdon, Paris As It Was and As It Is, or a Sketch of the French Capital Illustrative of the Effects of the Revolution, 2 vols (London, 1803), i. p. 328.

  22. On the notion of honour see John A. Lynn, ‘Toward an Army of Honor: The Moral Evolution of the French Army, 1789–1815’, French Historical Studies, 16:1 (1989), 152–73; Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘La maladie de l’honneur’, in Marie Gautheron and Jean-Michel Belorgey (eds), L’honneur: image de soi ou don de soi: un idéal équivoque (Paris: Autrement, 1991), pp. 20–36.

  23. Abraham Raimbach, Memoirs and Recollections of the late Abraham Raimbach (London, 1843), p. 102; F. J. Maccunn, The Contemporary English View of Napoleon (London, 1914), pp. 50–2.

  24. For the following see Marc Belissa, Repenser l’ordre européen (1795–1802): de la société des rois aux droits des nations (Paris, 2006), pp. 155–62.

  25. Corr. vi. nos. 4445 and 4446 (25 December 1799).

  26. This is the view of Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), p. 208; Roider, ‘The Habsburg Foreign Ministry’, 180.

  27. Corr. vi. n. 4623 (27 February 1800).

  28. See Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, pp. 434–5; Pascal Dupuy, ‘Le 18 Brumaire en Grande-Bretagne: le témoignage de la presse et des caricatures’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 318 (1999), 778–9; Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven and London, 2004), pp. 21–4.

  29. Mon dernier mot sur Bonaparte (London, n.d.), p. 3. The pamphlet was probably written by Francis d’Ivernois.

  30. See Semmel, Napoleon and the British, pp. 21–3.

  31. Hedva Ben-Israel, English Historians on the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 25–7; Phillip John Gray, ‘Revo
lutionism as Revisionism: Early British Views of Bonaparte, 1796–1803’, MA dissertation (University of Canterbury, 1995), 56–78; Semmel, Napoleon and the British, pp. 19–37.

  32. Simon Burrows, ‘Britain and the Black Legend: The Genesis of the Anti-Napoleonic Myth’, in Mark Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815 (Aldershot, 2006), p. 142.

  33. John D. Grainger, The Amiens Truce: Britain and Bonaparte, 1801–1803 (Woodbridge, 2004), p. 6.

  34. Harvey Meyer Bowman, ‘Preliminary Stages of the Peace of Amiens: The Diplomatic Relations of Great Britain and France from the Fall of the Directory to the Death of the Emperor Paul of Russia, November 1799–March 1801’, University of Toronto Studies,1 (1899), p. 100.

  35. A senator/banker by the name of Perregaux made contact with Lord Auckland. See Bowman, ‘Preliminary Stages of the Peace of Amiens’, pp. 101–2, 152–5.

  36. Pitt to Dundas (31 December 1800), in Philip Henry Stanhope, The Life of the Right Honourable William Pitt, 4 vols (London, 1861–2), iii. pp. 206–7, 212–13; Piers Mackesy, War without Victory: The Downfall of Pitt, 1799–1802 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 42–8; John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, 3 vols (London, 1969–96), iii. pp. 332–45; Michael J. Turner, Pitt the Younger: A Life (London, 2003), pp. 227–8.

  37. The letter was published in The Annual Register, or, A View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1800 (London, 1800); Bowman, ‘Preliminary Stages of the Peace of Amiens’, pp. 104–5.

  38. Karl A. Roider, Baron Thugut and Austria’s Response to the French Revolution (Princeton, 1987), pp. 328–33; Johann Amadeus Franz de Paula, Baron von Thugut, Vertrauliche Briefe des Freiherrn von Thugut, 2 vols (Vienna, 1872) ii. nos. 953–64.

  39. See Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, pp. 314–17, 319–21.

  40. Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, p. 209.

  41. Cited in Crook, Napoleon Comes to Power, p. 71.

  42. Corr. xxx. pp. 491–4.

  43. Corr. vi. n. 4449 (25 December 1799).

  44. Corr. vi. n. 4552 (25 January 1800).