At the final meeting of the constitutional commission on December 13, Napoleon invited Sieyès to propose the names of the three consuls to be presented to the nation as part of the new Constitution of the Year VIII in a plebiscite in February. Having by then accepted a reputed 350,000 francs in cash, an estate outside Versailles and a house in Paris (funded by the state), Sieyès duly proposed Napoleon as First Consul, Cambacérès as Second and the infinitely flexible lawyer and former deputy Charles-François Lebrun, who had supported every party except the Jacobins in his time, as Third. Sieyès was merely allocated the presidency of the Senate and Ducos (who took 100,000 francs for giving up his provisional consulship) its vice-presidency. Napoleon’s second coup had taken a little longer than the first, but it was just as bloodless and successful. Although a formal plebiscite, scheduled for February, would be required to confer legal legitimacy on the Consulate, Napoleon himself never doubted that he had the moral right to rule France. As he was to write of Julius Caesar, ‘In such a state of affairs these deliberative assemblies could no longer govern; the person of Caesar was therefore the guarantee of the supremacy of Rome in the universe, and of the security of citizens of all parties. His authority was therefore legitimate.’17 His attitude to the government of France in 1799 was identical.
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‘Frenchmen!’ Napoleon proclaimed on December 15, ‘A Constitution is presented to you. It ends the uncertainties . . . [in] the internal and military situation of the Republic . . . The Constitution is founded on the true principles of representative government, on the sacred rights of property, equality and liberty . . . Citizens, the Revolution is established on the principles which began it. It is finished.’18
The placing of property rights before those of equality and liberty was indicative of how Napoleon intended to defend the interests of tradesmen, employers, strivers and the owners of the biens nationaux – the kind of people who struggled to run small businesses like a mulberry orchard. These were France’s backbone; he understood their concerns and needs. Article 94 of the ninety-five-article constitution (less than a quarter the length of the previous one) stated categorically that the property and lands of the monarchy, Church and aristocracy which had been taken and sold during the Revolution would never be returned to their original owners. These were promises Napoleon reiterated in 1802 and 1804, but he did not promise further redistribution. When he spoke of equality, he meant equality before the law and not of economic situation. His strongest natural supporter, the army, did well out of the coup, with better pay and conditions, pensions and the promise of land (though no-one seems to have been given six arpents). The law suspending payments to contractors was repealed and they were quickly paid in full.
Late December saw the formal installation of what would become the institutions of Napoleonic rule. On the 22nd the Conseil d’État was inaugurated in its own rooms at the Luxembourg. Consisting largely of apolitical technocrats appointed by the First Consul and very much under his personal control, the Conseil was the main deliberative body of the new government of France, advising the First Consul and helping him to draft laws. Only six of the fifty members were soldiers. So long as they were respectful, members of the Conseil were invited to be as outspoken as they felt was necessary, and Napoleon encouraged debate between them. Under the new constitution the Conseil was both the final court of appeal in administrative law cases and the body responsible for the examination of the wording of bills before they went before the legislature, functions it still retains today. Ministers were ex officio members of the Conseil; they attended meetings when the agenda covered their areas of responsibility.
At 8 a.m. on December 25 (Christmas Day was not officially recognized again until 1802) the Constitution of the Year VIII came into force. A speech by Boulay served as a preface to its printed version, which argued that the vast majority of French citizens wanted a republic that was neither ‘the despotism of the Ancien Régime nor the tyranny of 1793’.19 The new constitution, he stated, could be summed up in the dictum: ‘Confidence comes from below, power from above.’20 Under it, the First Consul would hold political and administrative power for ten years and the other two consuls would advise him for that period. A sixty-man Senate, whose members served ‘inviolable and for life’ and whose numbers would increase by two every year to a maximum of eighty, would choose the consuls, the deputies to the three-hundred-strong Legislative Body and the hundred-man Tribunate from national lists which were produced as the result of four rounds of elections. Most importantly, proclamations made by the majority of the Senate, called sénatus-consultes, had the full force of law, although initially they were intended to be passed solely for the purpose of altering the constitution.
The Tribunate would discuss the draft laws that the First Consul and the Conseil had formulated, but couldn’t veto; the Legislative Body could vote on the laws, but not discuss them. The Tribunate could discuss legislation that the Consulate sent to it, and tell the Legislative Body what it thought; the Legislative Body would sit for no longer than four months a year to consider their views. Only the Senate could amend the constitution, but none of the three chambers had powers to initiate or amend legislation. By these means, Napoleon ensured the separation of fairly feeble powers among them, keeping the lion’s share for himself.
Citizens could vote on the initial selection of Legislative Body deputies, though the final selection would be made by the Senate. All adult male voters in a community would thus choose 10 per cent of their number as ‘Notabilities of the Commune’, who would then choose 10 per cent of their number as the ‘Notabilities of the Departments’, who would then choose the five or six thousand ‘Notabilities of the Nation’ from whom the four hundred members of the Legislative Body and Tribunate would be appointed. As it turned out, there was a good deal of continuity with the earlier chambers. Out 60 senators, 38 had sat in a national assembly before, as had 69 of the 100 tribunes and 240 of the 300 deputies.21 Their experience was useful as Napoleon went about consolidating, adapting and, in his own description, ‘finalizing’ the Revolution.22 The sheer complexity of the constitution, especially the triple-voting system of election to the legislature, suited Napoleon perfectly as it gave him ample opportunity to winnow out opposition.23
There was plenty more in the new constitution to calm the nation: authorities could enter a Frenchman’s home without invitation only in the case of fire or flood; citizens could be held for no more than ten days without trial; ‘harshness used in arrests’ would be a crime.24 On January 1, 1800 (a date with no particular significance in the revolutionary calendar as it was 11 Nivôse Year VIII) the Legislative Body and Tribunate met for the first time.
Just because the freedom of the legislature was circumscribed did not mean that the Napoleonic regime didn’t listen. Petitioners always got a hearing, and debates within the departments at the conseils de préfecture and conseils généraux tended to be reasonably open, though they had little effect on government policy.25 The regime heard people’s complaints well enough; it just didn’t provide them with any means of amplifying criticism and there was little possibility of concerted political opposition.
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In his first week as First Consul, Napoleon wrote two letters proposing peace to Emperor Francis of Austria and to Britain’s King George III. ‘I venture to declare that the fate of all civilized nations is concerned in the termination of a war which kindles a conflagration over the whole world,’ he told the latter.26 When the British foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, responded by saying that Napoleon should restore the Bourbons, Napoleon replied that if the same principle were applied to Britain it would result in the restoration of the Stuarts. He made sure that milord Grenville’s letter received wide publicity in France, and it consolidated support behind the Consulate.27 The Russians having dropped out of the Second Coalition after their defeat at Masséna’s hands at the Second Battle of Zurich in late September
1799, the Austrians entered peace negotiations which went on for months, but without success. By the time the new campaigning season began in the spring they would be ready to try to capture Genoa and invade south-east France.
‘I want you all to rally around the mass of the people,’ Napoleon wrote of the French political class to a former deputy of the Five Hundred, François Beyts, who had been one of the sixty-one people proscribed during Brumaire. ‘The simple title of French citizen is worth far more than that of Royalist, Chouan, Jacobin, Feuillant, or any of those thousand-and-one denominations which have sprung, during these past ten years, from the spirit of faction, and which are hurling the nation into an abyss from which the time has at last come to rescue it, once and for all.’28 This worked for Beyts, who was appointed prefect of the Loir-et-Cher department the following March. But not all were seduced and Napoleon responded harshly to those who questioned his policy of national unification. When the mayor of Lille expressed reservations about welcoming a former Jacobin general to his city, Napoleon retorted: ‘Do not dare to say anything of the kind; do you not see that now we are all equally serving France? I would have you know, sir, that between 17 and 18 Brumaire I have erected a wall of brass which no glance may penetrate, and against which all recollections must be dashed to pieces!’29 It was the first time since the Revolution that an incoming regime had not comprehensively purged its predecessor, and although opposition figures were indeed removed from the Legislative Body three years later, Frenchmen were no longer guillotined for their political views.
Napoleon’s brass-wall policy allowed him to rally a very wide spectrum of opinion to his government, spanning every faction except the neo-Jacobins. Despite having been a Jacobin himself, or perhaps because of it, he recognized that while plenty of ex-Jacobins might rally to his cause, the neo-Jacobin movement itself would always be ideologically opposed to him. The process of national unification regardless of previous political stances was called ralliement – literally, winning over – and although some joined the Napoleonic regime out of self-interest, many did it out of genuine patriotism, once they saw how Napoleon was regenerating France.30 A second, related policy, called amalgame – consolidation – sought to encourage active enthusiasm for the regime, as distinct from mere support.31
These policies allowed Napoleon to recruit a very talented group of public officials to his government, led by Cambacérès (a regicide), and including the future minister of justice Louis-Mathieu Molé (a royalist whose father had been guillotined), Jean-Étienne Portalis (an anti-Directory moderate) who dealt with religious affairs, and his equally efficient son Joseph-Marie, the scientist and future interior minister Jean Chaptal (a Girondin), the military administrator General Jean-Gérard Lacuée (a moderate), the councillor of state Antoine Thibaudeau (another regicide), Étienne-Denis Pasquier (a moderate whose father had been guillotined) at the prefecture of police, and the treasury minister Nicolas-François Mollien (a former minister of Louis XVI’s). ‘The art of appointing men’, Napoleon told Mollien, ‘is not nearly so difficult as the art of allowing those appointed to attain their full worth.’32 Despite having overthrown him at Fructidor, Napoleon recognized Carnot’s great abilities and appointed him minister of war on April 2, 1800, sending Berthier to command the Army of the Reserve.33
Within a week of Brumaire, as a result of the new sense of stability, efficiency and sheer competence, the franc–dollar and franc–pound exchange rates had doubled. By the end of January 1800 100-franc government bonds that had been languishing at 12 francs had soared to 60 francs. Two years later, partly by forcing the tax-collecting authorities to make deposits in advance of estimated yields, the finance minister Martin Gaudin had balanced the budget for the first time since the American War of Independence.34
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On taking power, Napoleon had made it clear that the new Constitution of the Year VIII would be legitimized by a nationwide plebiscite of all French citizens, taking place over several days at the end of January and beginning of February 1800. All adult males could vote by signing a register, which was kept open for three days. In order to make certain of a positive outcome Napoleon replaced Laplace as interior minister with his brother Lucien in December. On February 7 Lucien formally announced the results of the plebiscite, asserting that 3,011,007 Frenchmen had voted in favour of the Constitution of the Year VIII and only 1,562 against.35 It was of course ludicrous to claim that 99.95 per cent of Frenchmen had voted yes, even on the low turnout of 25 per cent – which can in part be blamed on the weather and lack of transportation for a rural population – not least because the Midi and Vendée were still rife with royalism.36 In Toulon, for example, it was claimed that 830 people had voted in favour and one Jacobin cobbler against.
There are over four hundred bundles of votes in the Archives Nationales which show clear proof of the systematic falsification of the results by Lucien in his own handwriting. On February 4 he ordered the interior ministry to stop counting the votes as he wanted to announce the total three days later. So for the south-west region, the government simply calculated what they thought the result might be from the twenty-five departments that had already been counted, including Corsica.37 By simply adding an additional 8,000 yes votes to twenty-four departments’ totals and 16,000 to that of the Yonne, Lucien extrapolated an extra 200,000 yes votes in the south-west alone. In the south-east he added about 7,000 votes per department and in the north-east between 7,000 and 8,000. He often didn’t even bother to falsify using unusual numbers, but simply added round ones, with the goal of getting the yes vote to over 3 million. In total he added around 900,000 yes votes between February 4 and 7.38 The military vote of 556,021 in favour and precisely nil against was simply invented. Although there were 34,500 naval votes cast, often only a ship’s officers would vote but the whole ship’s complement would be added on. The true result was probably around 1.55 million yes against several thousand no.39 Napoleon had therefore won some kind of democratic legitimacy, but by far less than he claimed and indeed less than a plebiscite that Robespierre had won in 1793.40 Even the figures that Lucien falsified had themselves already been manipulated by local officials, who knew that an important part of their job was to please whoever was in power in Paris. Officials went unscrutinized, voting was open rather than by secret ballot and so liable to intimidation, and half the electorate was illiterate but nevertheless had the right to vote, so the mayors filled in their ballot papers for them.
Lucien’s fiddling of the figures provides a perfect insight into one of the most characteristic aspects of the Napoleonic story. Napoleon was always going to win by a huge landslide, yet the Bonapartists simply couldn’t resist exaggerating even those numbers, thereby allowing the opposition – neo-Jacobins, royalists, liberals, moderates and others – to argue in their salons and underground cells that the whole process was a fraud. So often, when it came to manipulating battle casualties, or inserting documents into archives, or inventing speeches to the Army of Italy, or changing ages on birth certificates, or painting Napoleon on a rearing horse crossing the Alps, Napoleon and his propagandists simply went one unnecessary step too far, and as a result invited ridicule and criticism of what were genuinely extraordinary achievements.
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Of all the Consulate’s policies, the one to smash rural brigandage was among the most popular. ‘The art of policing is in punishing infrequently and severely,’ Napoleon believed, but in his war against the brigands who were terrorizing vast areas of France, he tended to punish both frequently and severely.41 Brigands could be royalist rebels (especially in western and southern France), groups of deserters or draft-dodgers, outlaws, highwaymen, simple ruffians or a combination of all these. The Ancien Régime, the Committee of Public Safety and the Directory had all fought against endemic lawlessness in the countryside, but the Consulate fought to win with every means at its disposal. Napoleon interned and deported suspected brigands, and used the dea
th penalty against convicted ones, who were often called such unedifying names as ‘The Dragon’, ‘Beat-to-Death’ and ‘The Little Butcher of Christians’, and who raided isolated farmhouses as well as hijacking coaches and robbing travellers.
Although the gendarmerie or paramilitary police had been inaugurated in April 1798 with a force of 10,575 men, Napoleon reorganized it, increased its numbers to 16,500, paid it well and on time, improved its morale and stamped out most of the corruption within its ranks.42 Patrols were increased and were mounted on horseback when before they had been on foot; special tribunals and military commissions guillotined suspects on circumstantial evidence without the right to a defence lawyer; and huge mobile columns were sent out which meted out summary justice. In November 1799, some 40 per cent of France was under martial law, but within three years it was safe to travel around France again, and trade could be resumed. Not even his Italian victories brought Napoleon more popularity.43
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