Napoleon
Page 32
Napoleon had been taken aback by the ferocity of the deputies’ response, but claims of his losing his composure and handing everything over to Lucien are exaggerated. Although Lavalette reported that he found Napoleon ‘walking with much agitation in an apartment which had no other furniture than two armchairs’, saying to Sieyès: ‘Now you see what they are doing!’ and ‘beating the ground with his whip’ exclaiming ‘This must have an end!’, this all relates to the period before he spoke to the Elders on Day Two, not after he spoke to the Five Hundred, and is therefore evidence of his frustration and impatience rather than any lack of nerve.72 For the period after his escape/expulsion from the Orangery, the conspirators had a contingency plan, which they put into operation once Lucien had also got out. The half-hour was spent waiting for Lucien to emerge, collecting the conspirators, spreading the word of Napoleon’s manhandling by the deputies, and planning how to persuade the Corps Legislatif guards to support the coup.
It was during this dangerous hiatus that Augereau, who was a member of the Five Hundred but who had not committed himself either way, came out to Napoleon at the Gallery of Mars to say, somewhat unhelpfully, ‘You’re in pretty deep water now,’ to which Napoleon replied: ‘So what, it was much worse at Arcole.’73 In Napoleon’s later recollection he even threatened Augereau, saying, ‘Believe me, keep quiet if you don’t want to be a victim. In half an hour you’ll see how things turn out.’74 Whichever response is more accurate, both imply that Napoleon knew he had botched the start of the second phase of the coup, and was in a scrape, but also that he was hardly suffering a catastrophic haemorrhage of courage.75 Moreover, both responses imply that he had a plan to reverse the situation.
• • •
The next stage was to win over the four-hundred-strong Corps Legislatif guard under Captain Jean-Marie Ponsard. This was achieved not by Napoleon alone but instead by a piece of pure theatre that one suspects might have been stage-managed, possibly even practised beforehand. It bears an uncanny resemblance to a remark Napoleon had made to the French consul in Genoa, Tilly, just before his arrest in 1794, when he wrote of Augustin Robespierre, ‘Had he been my own brother, if he’d aspired to tyranny I’d have stabbed him myself.’76 Now, five years later, Lucien made precisely the same point when he leaped onto a horse to harangue the guards about how the majority of the Five Hundred were being terrorized by a minority of fanatics in the pay of English gold. He then drew his sword, held its point against Napoleon’s breast, and cried: ‘I swear that I will stab my own brother to the heart if he ever attempts anything against the liberty of Frenchmen.’77 It was a promise as disingenuous as it was histrionic, but it worked. (It was also the last time that any of Napoleon’s brothers proved anything other than a complete liability to him until the battle of Waterloo itself.)
‘Captain,’ Napoleon told Ponsard, at least according to one much later account, ‘take your company and go right away to disperse this assembly of sedition. They are not the representatives of the nation anymore, but some scoundrels who caused all its misfortunes.’ Ponsard asked what to do in case of resistance. ‘Use force,’ Napoleon replied, ‘even the bayonet.’ ‘That will suffice, mon général.’78 With General Charles Leclerc (who was married to Napoleon’s sister Pauline) and Murat (who was engaged to Napoleon’s other sister Caroline), Bessières, Major Guillaume Dujardin of the 8th Line and other officers, including Lefebvre and Marmont, denouncing the lawyer-politicians who had supposedly been bought by English gold, Ponsard’s soldiers simply cleared out the Orangery, ignoring the deputies’ cries of ‘Vive la République!’ and appeals to the law and the constitution.79
‘Only half an hour had passed,’ Berlier recalled, ‘when one of the main doors of the room opening with a great noise, we saw the army, led by Murat, penetrating, bayonets fixed, into the room to evacuate it.’ When they entered, the deputies Joseph Blin, Louis Talot and Bigonnet – one source also cites Jourdan – implored them to disobey their officers, but they didn’t.80 Fearing arrest, many deputies then fled, according to legend some of them jumping out of the Orangery’s ground floor windows. Lavalette recorded them ‘doffing their Roman toga and square cap costumes, the easier to flee incognito’.81 The grenadiers seem to have viewed their vital role in overthrowing the constitution with perfect equanimity. They put the orders of the officers under whom many of them had served on campaign – and whom all had heard of in the barrack-room as heroes back from Egypt – before those of their elected representatives. When it came down to a choice between obeying these giants of their profession or the politicians baying for their arrest in the Orangery, there was simply no contest. It helped that a former war minister, General Pierre de Beurnonville, was present and supportive: by the end of the month Napoleon had sent him a pair of pistols inscribed ‘Day of St-Cloud, 19th Brumaire Year VIII’. Similar presents were also given to Lefebvre and Bessières.82
At the end of Day Two and late into the night, Lucien assembled as many deputies in the Orangery as he could find who supported the coup, whose numbers vary according to the sources but seem to have been around fifty, so only 10 per cent of the lower chamber.83 ‘The Directory is no more’, they decreed, ‘because of the excesses and crimes to which they were constantly inclined.’84 They appointed Sieyès, Ducos and Napoleon – in that order – as provisional Consuls, pointing out that the first two were former Directors, which offered a sense of constitutional continuity, however spurious. Lucien’s rump of the Five Hundred also adjourned both chambers for four months – but as it turned out, for ever – and ordered the expulsion from the legislature of sixty-one mostly neo-Jacobin opponents of the new regime, although only twenty people were exiled.85 An interim commission of fifty members, twenty-five from each chamber, would draw up a new constitution, which everyone assumed Sieyès had already written.
• • •
Was a dagger ever actually pulled on Napoleon in the Orangery, as the supporters of the coup alleged? In the large number of conflicting and highly politically motivated accounts of what happened, it is impossible to say for certain, but it is extremely unlikely, partly because no blood – Napoleon’s or anyone else’s – was shed that day. Many people carried small knives for everyday use from quill-sharpening to oyster-shucking rather than for self-defence, and the Five Hundred’s uniform of a long blue velvet toga-like cape made them easy to conceal. Lucien and Marmont of course told the troops at the time that Napoleon had been attacked with a dagger, and Lavalette named the Corsican anti-Bonapartist deputy Barthélemy Aréna as wielding one, but no-one else seems to have seen it. (Aréna wrote a letter to Le Journal des Républicains on 23 Brumaire pointing out that he was at the opposite end of the room, but he fled the country just in case.)86 An early, anti-Napoleonic four-volume account of the coup, published in 1814, states that when the shouts were of ‘Cromwell’ and ‘Tyrant’, ‘Fifty deputies moved in around him, pushed him, spoke to him, seemed to push him back; one amongst them pulled a dagger innocently scratching the hand of the grenadier closest to the general, dropped his weapon and lost himself in the crowd.’87 How one can innocently scratch someone with a dagger under those circumstances wasn’t explained, and Grenadier Thomé seems only to have been lightly scratched when his sleeve was torn or ripped, rather than cut.88
The first time a dagger was mentioned in the Moniteur was on 23 Brumaire, by which time the Bonapartists were fully in charge of the government propaganda machine. No other papers reported one, but the supposed dagger attack nonetheless became an important part of the justification for the clearing of the chamber, and a staple of the prints and engravings that started to appear shortly afterwards. Within a year a print had been published in London entitled Bonaparte at the Corps Legislatif, for example, showing Napoleon bravely withstanding a murderous assault from furious, dagger-wielding deputies. ‘General Bonaparte,’ read his Order of the Day of November 11, ‘expresses his particular satisfaction to those brave grenadiers who covered themselve
s with glory in saving the life of their general when on the point of falling beneath the blows of representatives armed with daggers.’89 A hero was made of Thomé, who was granted a 600-franc pension for life, given a 2,000 écu diamond ring and a kiss from Josephine at a luncheon three days later.*
The real question perhaps ought to be: why wasn’t even so much as a penknife pulled in defence of the constitution, if not at Saint-Cloud then at least back in Paris? If either the Directory or the Five Hundred had had any popular support at all there would have been barricades in Paris that night and in other major French cities once the news reached them, but in fact not one was raised nor a shot fired in their defence. The working-class arrondissements such as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had no love for the Directory, and failed to rise. Instead the price of 3 per cent consols on the Stock Exchange rose from Fr. 11.4 the day before the coup to Fr. 20 a week later.90 Far from Paris there was some localized opposition: the Pas-de-Calais, Jura and Pyrénées Orientales authorities voiced disquiet, but no-one was in a mood for a civil war against the Consulate and Napoleon, and it very soon sputtered out.
The key point about Brumaire, however, is not that the Directory was abolished, since it was clearly failing and likely to fall, but that both houses of the legislature were effectively abolished too, along with the Constitution of Year III. The legislature had not been deeply infected with the Directory’s unpopularity; the neo-Jacobins were no great threat, and the nation was in no immediate danger. Yet Sieyès and Napoleon succeeded in closing down both the Elders and the Five Hundred without any significant popular reaction. After a decade of Revolution, many Frenchmen were desperate for leadership and recognized that the parliamentary process inhibited that, as did a constitution that was next to impossible to amend. They were thus willing to see representative government temporarily suspended in order for Napoleon and his co-conspirators to cut the Gordian knot. Certainly public opinion in Paris was indifferent to whether Napoleon had used force to gain power or not. Army officers prize order, discipline and efficiency, each of which Napoleon considered by then to be more important than liberty, equality and fraternity, and at that moment the French people agreed with him. He was able to present France with a narrative of national success, whereas, as he himself put it, ‘These Directors know how to do nothing for the imagination of the nation.’91 Although his victories were part of Napoleon’s attraction, so too were the peace treaties he had delivered to a nation now exhausted by war.
Brumaire was not described as a coup d’état at the time, though of course it was one and the term was very much in the political vernacular (it had been used to describe the Thermidor purge). To contemporaries these were simply les journées (the days). For all the melodramatic aspect of the events – Lucien pointing his sword at Napoleon’s chest, Thomé getting a diamond ring for a dagger attack which probably never happened, and so on – the neo-Jacobins had proved tougher than expected, and if the Guard of the Corps Legislatif had showed any loyalty to the Five Hundred the conspirators would have faced great danger. The day after the Brumaire coup, in fulfilment of his own prophecy, Napoleon and Josephine did indeed sleep at the Luxembourg Palace, moving into Gohier’s apartment on the ground floor, to the right of the main palace on the rue de Vaugirard, only a hundred yards from the prison of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes where Josephine had come so close to death five years earlier.
PART TWO
Mastery
10
Consul
‘If he lasts a year, he’ll go far.’
Talleyrand on Napoleon’s consulship
‘The masses . . . should be directed without their being aware of it.’
Napoleon to Fouché, September 1804
At ten o’clock on the dark and rainy morning of Monday, November 11, 1799, Napoleon arrived at the Luxembourg Palace in civilian dress escorted by six dragoons to start the business of the provisional Consulate* in the same room where the Directory had met.1 Having pulled off a coup the previous day, he was intent on conducting a second as soon as was practicable against his chief co-conspirator. Sieyès had already written two constitutions for France, in 1791 and 1793, and Napoleon did not believe the Revolution would be safeguarded by his third, which was packed with checks and balances to centralized power. He later wrote of Sieyès, ‘He was not a man of action: knowing little of men’s natures, he did not know how to make them act. His studies having always led him down the path of metaphysics.’2
At the first meeting of the three consuls, Ducos said to Napoleon: ‘There’s no point having a vote for the presidency: it’s yours by right.’3 When Sieyès grimaced, Napoleon proposed a compromise: it would rotate every twenty-four hours, starting alphabetically by surname (that is, with him). He then took the large chair at the centre of the table where the president of the Directory had sat, and that was his chair thereafter. ‘Come on,’ he chivvied them. ‘Swear the oath, we’re in a hurry.’4 As the dynamo of the Consulate, it hardly mattered who formally presided over what was, after all, only a three-man meeting; it was Napoleon who tended to come up with most of the ideas discussed and who also then drove them forward.
The day after the coup the city was already placarded with Napoleon’s version of events – ‘twenty assassins threw themselves upon me and aimed at my chest’ – and his call for national unity. The narrative mentioned neither Sieyès nor Ducos. ‘Conservative, protective and liberal ideas have been restored to their rightful place by the dispersal of the agitators,’ the posters stated, appealing to Frenchmen who had lost patience with the Directory and didn’t think a government run by a successful general could be any worse.5
Although Napoleon’s propagandists had been up all night printing the posters and plastering them around Paris, Sieyès and his supporters weren’t so energetic. When Boulay de la Meurthe, the chairman of an inner committee of seven from the interim commission of fifty that had been appointed to draw up the new constitution, arrived at Sieyès’ apartment to receive the new document, all Sieyès had to show him was a bundle of notes. So Boulay and Sieyès sat down to fashion a first draft, which was later worked on by the constitutional expert and ex-Girondin Pierre Daunou.6 Roederer soon afterwards warned Napoleon that Sieyès planned to propose that a ‘Grand Elector’ oversee the work of the other two consuls, one responsible for foreign affairs and the other domestic. In a complex system of separation of powers, ‘notables’ would control the Senate, and only they could dismiss the Grand Elector.7 Sieyès clearly saw himself as this philosopher-king, with Napoleon as his consul for war and Ducos for the interior. This was very different from how Napoleon viewed the situation.8
Over the next five weeks, before ‘the Constitution of the Year VIII’ was read out in public places around Paris to the sound of drumbeats and trumpet fanfares, there followed intense discussion in various unofficial committees and sub-committees formed by the Brumairians, during which Napoleon’s faction, led by Lucien and Boulay, brought over Daunou, who thought authority needed to be more concentrated, and comprehensively outmanoeuvred Sieyès and his smaller group of supporters. Cambacérès’ timely defection to Napoleon’s side helped greatly. Boulay finally made it clear to the interim committee that it was their ‘mission’ to give Napoleon decisive powers for ten years as First Consul, without any Grand Elector to watch over him but with a Conseil d’État to advise him, which would have the sole authority to initiate legislation.9 Article 41 of the new constitution stated: ‘The First Consul promulgates laws; he names and dismisses at his pleasure members of the Conseil d’État, ministers and ambassadors and other chief foreign agents, officers of the army and navy, the members of local administrations and government commissioners attached to the courts.’10 He also had treaty-making powers, would live at the Tuileries and would receive 500,000 francs per annum, fifty times an ambassador’s salary. It was thus very clear, right from the beginning, where true power lay; the second and third consuls would also live at th
e Tuileries but they would draw only 150,000 francs per annum for their roles as constitutional figleafs.
The Consulate issued a spate of decrees aimed at making the new regime popular and, in its own phrase, ‘completing the Revolution’. Versailles was turned over to wounded soldiers; a vicious anti-émigré law was repealed, with Napoleon going personally to the Temple prison to set hostages free; the police were ordered not to harass returning émigrés or to make them take out forced ‘loans’; and the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and 1 Vendémiaire (the republican New Year’s Day) were made public holidays. Pensions would be awarded to the war-wounded as well as to soldiers’ widows and orphans and non-juring priests were no longer deported for refusing to take the Constitutional Oath. A full ten days of mourning was ordained for George Washington, who died in December, despite the fact that France and America were still fighting the Quasi-War; in the public eulogies to ‘the American Cincinnatus’, analogies were drawn between Washington and Napoleon.11 Nor did Napoleon forget his parting promise to Kléber, ordering the new interior minister, the mathematician and astronomer the Marquis de Laplace, to send ‘a troupe of comedians’ out to Egypt on the first available boat.12 ‘A newly born government must dazzle and astonish,’ he told Bourrienne at this time. ‘When it ceases to do that it fails.’13
The appointment of a distinguished scientist like Laplace to such a high-profile post made it clear that, just because Napoleon was a soldier and Brumaire had been a military coup, this was emphatically not a military dictatorship. Talleyrand returned as foreign minister and only one soldier joined the government, the new minister of war Alexandre Berthier.14 ‘If I die within three or four years of fever in my bed,’ Napoleon told Roederer the following year, ‘I will say to the nation to watch out against military government. I will tell it to appoint a civil magistrate.’15 Fouché predictably became minister of police and Martin Gaudin, a former high official in the treasury who had served every regime since Louis XVI, was appointed finance minister. Gaudin quickly set about reforming the fiendishly complex French tax code and lowering rates. Financial management moved from local authorities to the finance ministry and the whole public accounting system was eventually centralized.16 Napoleon quickly established a central system for the payment of the army, hitherto done through the departments, a classic example of how he was able to slice through bureaucracy and implement a much-needed reform without delay.