by Jon Kukla
Nature speaks a more powerful language than philosophy or interest. Already have two colonies of fugitive negroes been established, to whom treaties and power give a perfect security…. These are so many indications of the impending storm, and the Negroes only want a chief, sufficiently courageous, to lead them on to vengeance and slaughter. Where is this great man, whom nature owes to her afflicted, oppressed, and tormented children? Where is he? He will undoubtedly appear, he will shew himself, he will lift up the sacred standard of liberty. This venerable signal will collect around him the companions of his misfortunes…. Spaniard, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, all their tyrants will become the victims of fire and sword. The plains of America will suck up with transport the blood which they have so long expected…. The name of the hero, who shall have restored the rights of the human species will be blest, in all parts trophies will be erected to his glory. Then will the black code be no more, and the white code will be a dreadful one, if die conqueror only regards the right of reprisals.
At least one copy of Raynal’s history found its way to a sugar plantation in the French colony of St. Domingue. Thousands of miles away from Valence and Marseilles, on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, a slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture read the Abbé Raynal’s words over and over again. “Where is he? He will undoubtedly appear.” When the French Revolution came, Napoleon would fashion his own version of William Tell, and Haiti would embrace Toussaint L’Ouverture as “the black Spartacus who, as [the Abbé] Raynal predicted, has come to revenge all the evil done to his race.”8
“Revolutions,” Napoleon Bonaparte told a fellow artillerist in September 1789, “are ideal times for soldiers with a bit of wit and the courage to act.” He had both, and they quickly overwhelmed his aspirations as a writer. After a stint in the Corsican national guard, Bonaparte returned to France in 1793 and was assigned to a revolutionary army laying siege to the port city and naval base of Toulon, where royalists assisted by the British fleet had revolted against the French republic. The city’s defenses fell before his cannon, and the British fleet fled the harbor. On December 19, 1793, Major Bonaparte turned his guns on hundreds of royalist collaborators gathered in the town square for their slaughter, and then he leveled the public buildings of Toulon as a warning to royalists elsewhere. “I cannot find praiseworthy enough words to describe Bonaparte’s full worth,” the commanding officer reported to the war ministry in Paris. “He has a solid scientific knowledge of this profession and as much intelligence, if too much courage, voilá. … It now only remains for you, Minister, to consecrate his talents to the glory of the Republic!” Three days later the twenty-four-year-old military genius was promoted to the rank of brigadier general.9
General Bonaparte was among seventy-four officers detained as a precaution after the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 and then released and reinstated. Wary of Jacobinism and the excesses of the guillotine, the new and more conservative Directory recognized “the services his military talents can still provide … at a time when men of his high caliber are extraordinarily rare.” Early in October, still uncertain about his future, Napoleon called upon Paul François Nicolas de Barras, one of the most influential members of the five-man Directory that now ruled France, at the seat of government in the Tuileries (a building destroyed in 1871 and now the site of I. M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre). Much later in the day about midnight, a crowd of several thousand working-class Parisians and royalists led by a self-proclaimed General Danican gathered ominously at the Tuileries. In the wee hours of the morning of 13 Vendémiaire (October 4) Barras summoned Bonaparte to defend the government.10
Soon after dawn General Bonaparte arrived with forty cannon, the largest of which he positioned at the Eglise St.-Roch, just north of the Tuileries and its gardens. Twice the rebellious crowd surged toward the building, peppering the defending regiments with small-arms fire. Twice the defenders held their ground, and the second time they pushed the armed rebels back toward the Eglise St.-Roch, where Bonaparte opened fire with his cannon. “The enemy attacked us at the Tuileries,” he wrote that night to his brother Joseph.
We killed a great many of them. They killed thirty of our men and wounded another sixty…. Now all is quiet. As usual I did not receive a scratch. I could not be happier.
Fourteen hundred rebellious citizens lay dead in the streets, and the government was safe. Two weeks later he was promoted to major general, and on October 25 he succeeded Barras as commander of the Army of the Interior. Bonaparte, having dropped the letter u from his last name, was the man of the hour. The next spring, on March 6, 1796, he married Barras’s former mistress, Josephine de Beauharnais, who was adorned in republican simplicity with a white muslin dress, a tricolor sash, and his wedding gift of an enameled locket with the inscription “To Destiny.” Two days after the wedding, Bonaparte headed for Nice and the headquarters of the Army of Italy, his new command.11
Thirty-two-year-old Josephine de Beauharnais had lost her husband to the guillotine during the Terror and taken up with Barras as his principal mistress—a fact that now spawned ugly scuttlebutt about Bonaparte’s new assignment. The gossip, as the baron de Frénilly recorded it in his memoirs, was that Barras had “tired of her and got rid of her by giving the Army of Italy as a dowry,” and that “the little General of 13 Vendémiaire took the dowry and the mistress, and made of her an Empress.”12
Barras was, in fact, instrumental in making the appointment, but for all the members of the Directory, the choice was sweetened by Bonaparte’s proven abilities and his previous obscurity. Better to entrust the Army of Italy to a talented but unknown general, the reasoning went, than to place it in the hands of others whose power and fame might threaten the government. Bonaparte, of course, confounded these calculations.13
In Italy he defeated four Austrian generals in succession, each with superior numbers, and forced Austria and its allies to sue for peace. In the north he founded the Cisalpine Republic, later known as the kingdom of Italy, and bolstered his influence at home by sending treasure worth millions of francs to the nearly bankrupt Directory. Plagued by financial problems, factional strife, corruption, and a series of attempted coups d’état, the Directory governed without distinction for four years, its income always dependent on the plunder sent home from Bonaparte’s conquests. “The directors believe that they are using him,” warned Bonaparte’s former mathematics instructor, General Jean Charles Pichegru, “but one fine morning he is going to gobble them up, without their being able to do anything about it.”14
That fine morning dawned in October 1799 after Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt. While in Italy Bonaparte had realized “for the first time” that he “no longer considered [him]self a mere general, but a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples.” Sensing his resolve, aware of their own vulnerability, and relieved at the prospect of sending this dashing hero on a white horse to the far end of the Mediterranean, in February 1798 the members of the Directory had happily agreed to Bonaparte’s expedition against Egypt. His aide Louis Antoine Fauvelet Bourrienne had asked how long they would be gone. “A few months, or six years,” Bonaparte had replied, “it all depends on events”—events in Paris.15
By October 1799 Paris was a confusing snake pit of plots and intrigue. The panoply of conspirators—including royalists, British agents, former Jacobins, members of the Directory itself, and a group of self-styled communists for whom “the Revolution is not over” because “the rich still have all the money”16—agreed only that the Directory’s days were numbered. For their part, on October 8 the five directors took what proved to be a final decisive and symbolic act when they ordered the ringing of church bells and firing of artillery salutes in celebration of a dispatch from Bonaparte announcing his final victory over the Turks at Abukir Bay near the mouth of the Nile.17
Five days later came daunting news that Napoleon Bonaparte himself had landed at the tiny harbor of Fréjus, on the Mediterranean coast midway between Toulon and Nic
e. He was rushing toward Paris, greeted by cheering crowds, “unanimous applause,” and “general euphoria.” The final morning of the Directory was in sight.18
The coup d’état that overthrew the Directory on November 9–10, 1799 (18–19 Brumaire, the month of fog), was the work of a wide coalition of politicians—including Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Joseph Fouché, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieves, and many others—and it is generally regarded as the end of the revolution that began with the fall of the Bastille ten years earlier. The new Constitution of the Year VIII (1799) created offices for three consuls, sixty senators, one hundred tribunes, and three hundred legislative representatives, but in fact it soon made First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte a virtual dictator.
Of approximately five million votes cast in a national referendum, the new constitution was approved by a margin of 3,011,007 to 1,562—at least according to the official tabulation made by Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, who conveniently ignored 3.5 million negative votes and double-counted 1.5 million favorable ballots. “Citizens,” the first consul proclaimed after the coup d’état of 18–19 Brumaire, “the revolution remains faithful to the principles which gave it birth. It is finished.” Two years later, with similar assistance at the polls, French voters approved a constitutional revision that made Bonaparte consul for life, and in 1804 they sanctioned yet another revision that created him Emperor Napoleon I.19
On the eve of a new century, the once reserved and studious youth of the Ecole Militaire had conquered Italy and Egypt and now ruled France. Much had changed, but that inquisitive young man who spent his evenings reading good authors had not disappeared. Napoleon enjoyed the company and conversation of learned and witty men—and in his heart he knew that the trophies and acclaim of a warrior were fleeting. “The people,” he had commented while gazing from his carriage upon throngs of admirers who filled the streets of Paris, “would crowd as fast to see me if I were going to the scaffold.” Of his many honors and triumphs, none pleased him more than his election to the prestigious National Institute of Science and Arts (now the Institut de France) in 1797.20
First proposed by the liberal statesman and bishop of Autun, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, in a report on public education delivered to the national legislature in May 1791, the National Institute was established in 1795 as the republican successor to the royal academies of the ancien regime, which had been abolished in 1792. With 144 full members and 144 associate members, the institute gathered the nation’s preeminent intellectuals into three sections—physical sciences and mathematics, moral and political sciences, and literature and the fine arts—and charged them with “improving the arts and sciences” and promoting discovery and invention. “True conquests,” Bonaparte proclaimed on the occasion of his induction into the National Institute of Science and Arts on December 26, 1797, “are those made over ignorance…. The true power of the French Republic should consist henceforth in allowing no single new idea to escape its embrace.”21
Forced into the priesthood by a childhood injury that gave him a permanent limp, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord had risen to bishop of Autun when he embraced the French Revolution in 17S9. He was instrumental in drafting important provisions of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, and he remained, through all the vagaries of his remarkable career, a persistent advocate of its goals. One of history’s consummate survivors, Talleyrand escaped the Reign of Terror as an exile in England and the United States. Although he disliked Philadelphia, Talleyrand admired American religious liberty and advocated toleration and colonization in the public lectures that marked his return to France and to power in 1797. He broke with Napoleon in August 1807 and subsequently helped engineer the reconstruction of Europe as Louis XVIII’s representative at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1S15. Talleyrand died in Paris on May 17, 1838. This engraving, based on an oil portrait by François Gerard, a student of Jacques-Louis David, depicts Talleyrand at the height of his powers. (Collection of the author)
As if to demonstrate the validity of Bonaparte’s sentiments, Paris was swiftly embracing two singular ideas advanced in lectures at the National Institute by another new member on April 4 and July 3, 1797. The lecturer was Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who had survived the Terror by exiling himself first to London and then to Philadelphia. His themes, derived in large measure from his observation in England and America, were the importance of religious toleration and the benefits of colonization.22
Unlike a palace coup, Citizen Talleyrand told the audience at the National Institute on April 4, 1797, a general revolution in which “everybody took part” arouses popular hatreds and “shakes up everything.” In its wake comes “a general uneasiness in people’s souls, a vague disposition toward risky enterprises, and a craving for incessant change and destruction.” Since these feelings “cannot be muffled, they must be regulated”—controlled “not at the expense but for the benefit of public happiness.”23
Freedom of religion, the former bishop of Autun had learned in America, promoted social and political harmony. “The freedom and especially the equality of religious beliefs is one of the strongest guarantees of social tranquillity, since where beliefs are respected, the other rights are necessarily respected as well.” To enjoy the general blessings of liberty, Talleyrand declared, France must transcend its long history of violent religious wars, embrace freedom of religion, and “learn how to give up our hatreds if we do not want to forever give up our happiness.”24
Returning to the podium of the National Institute on July 3, Citizen Talleyrand offered colonization as his second prescription for social and political order in the aftermath of the revolution. Once again his advice to France reflected his experience in America, where vast unexplored territories offered restless souls and malcontents—“cette multitude de malades politiques”—places to seek adventure and make a fresh start in life. “The art of putting people in their places is foremost in the science of government,” Talleyrand believed, “but the art of finding a place for the malcontent is certainly the most difficult.” Colonies in “far-off places with landscapes equal to their dreams and desires,” Talleyrand suggested, were “one good solution for this social difficulty”25
Egypt and some “fertile but uninhabited” islands along the coast of Africa were the specific far-off places that Talleyrand had in mind as homesteads for French malcontents, but neither the rebellious island of St. Domingue nor the provinces of Canada and Louisiana had been forgotten by the influential crowd who attended his lectures at the National Institute. In this regard, Talleyrand knew his audience when he invoked the name of Etienne François due de Choiseul as “one of the great men of our time, who had a keen sense of the future” while serving as chief minister during the Seven Years’ War and the last dozen years of the reign of Louis XV. It suited the purpose of Talleyrand’s lecture to remind his audience that, years before the events happened, Choiseul had predicted both American independence and the partitioning of Poland, and that he had also advocated French colonization in Egypt. Talleyrand did not need to remind his listeners that Choiseul had also been interested in regaining control of Louisiana.26
Talleyrand advocated colonization as a means of dispersing malcontents in order to achieve political and social stability in France. He invoked Choiseul’s interest in Egypt as support for his vision, while Napoleon would also embrace Choiseul’s interest in Louisiana and St. Domingue.
Since the loss of Canada and Louisiana at the end of the Seven Years’ War, the idea of regaining possession of the former French colonies in North America was a recurrent dream that blossomed whenever war or diplomacy went well for France or poorly for Great Britain. Rumors of French designs on Louisiana began with the Franco-American alliance of 1778 and spread widely after the defeat of Great Britain—so much so that in 1786 Louis XVI’s ministers directed the French envoy in New York to disavow them. “There has never been a question of an exchange of Louisiana for a French poss
ession in the West Indies,” Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, bluntly told Louis-Guillaume Otto, “and if it is again mentioned to you, you will formally deny it.” Otto published Vergennes’s denial in the New York Packet on January 19, 1787,27 but vague rumors proved as persistent in America as the dream was in France.
That summer a French trader who lived in Kentucky, Barthélemi Tardiveau, revived the idea in a letter to the comte Eléonore François Elie Moustier, Otto’s successor as charge d’affaires to the United States. Moustier, in turn, incorporated Tardiveau’s information in a lengthy report, forwarded to Paris in January 1789, in which he argued that returning Louisiana to France was in the best interests of both nations.
French control of the province, Moustier contended, offered Spanish Louisiana a more effective barrier against American aggression and France a profitable and self-sufficient empire in the Caribbean. From a diplomatic perspective, possession of the Mississippi Valley would enable France to counterbalance American and British territorial ambitions on the continent of North America. Commercially, the produce of Louisiana and the American settlements—food, timber, firewood, naval stores, and “the kinds of merchandise required by negroes”—would pass through the port of New Orleans to support the lucrative sugar, coffee, and cocoa industries of St. Domingue and the French West Indies.28
The idea of a Spanish retrocession of Louisiana alarmed Americans, but Moustier’s stay in the United States was brief. His influence was limited. And his memorandum was fated to arrive in Paris weeks before the fall of the Bastille. For several years thereafter—during the bloody Reign of Terror, the war with Spain, and Citizen Genet’s fiasco with George Rogers Clark—Moustier’s memorandum advocating negotiations for a retrocession of Louisiana gathered dust in the files while a parade of ministers passed through the foreign office.29