Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life

by Alan Schom

  By November 6 (15 Brumaire) the great plot to overthrow the government was well in hand, Fouché declaring himself more firmly on Bonaparte’s side. On that date a huge subscription banquet was given in General Bonaparte’s honor by the Council of Ancients, held in the former Eglise Saint-Sulpice. It was in fact originally conceived by Lucien as a good means of feting his brother and reconciling most members of the Ancients to Bonaparte, at the same time providing an excellent opportunity for the conspirators to take a reading of public opinion and how their chances stood. It proved a “bizarre feast,” as Bourrienne put it, where everyone spoke quietly, with considerable reserve, there being “no freedom, no open comments...no gaiety...everyone carefully observing one another and saying little.”[328] Though they were colleagues when meeting daily as the Council of Ancients, there was little camaraderie among them now. Indeed, extraordinary caution was evident in the hushed conversations taking place in that unheated seventeenth-century edifice, where about the only thing anyone was thinking about — apart from wondering what Bonaparte had up his sleeve — was how to keep from freezing. Napoleon himself got quickly irritated with the whole affair, and after gulping down his food, with General Berthier at his side, made his rounds, circumnavigating the immense U-shaped chain of tables, rubbing his hands to keep warm as he said a few words to most of the 250 guests. Then, suddenly taking his coat, he darted out into the cold drizzle and ordered his carriage to take him to the Luxembourg Palace for another secret meeting.[329] Despite everything, however, the dinner had achieved its goal, drawing to his side most of those members who had previously shied away from him, thanks in large part to the work of Sieyès. As for Bonaparte’s fellow soldiers, only three important ones refused to support him: Generals Jourdan, Augereau, and, of course, Bernadotte.[330]

  Though close to Barras, Bernadotte remained wary of both his brother-in-law, Napoleon (his wife, Désirée Clary, was the sister of Joseph Bonaparte’s wife, Julie), for his egotistical antirepublican plans, and Abbé Sieyès, for having fired him that summer as war minister. But at least Joseph Bonaparte had succeeded in bringing Napoleon and Bernadotte together again, if hardly on cordial terms. The Bernadottes then gave a splendid dinner party for the entire detestable Bonaparte clan, though interspersing them among other guests, including General and Madame Moreau, Pierre Louis Roederer and his wife, Prince Talleyrand, and the Volneys. But at this chic dinner in a fashionable mansion in the Rue Cisalpine, even the presence of a bevy of beautiful ladies and fine old wines could not close the gap of intrinsic distrust and hostility between Napoleon and his brother-in-law, whom Napoleon described in private as “a very zealous republican” — a point of view that worried him. “He is a curious fellow, this Bernadotte,” he confided to Bourrienne. “He is stubborn...a man who creates obstacles...He has Moorish blood in his veins: he is enterprising and hardy...he does not like me. I am almost certain he will oppose me...He is too idealistic...a devilish fellow.”[331] And thus it was as enemies they met that evening and as enemies they parted.

  In Paris, so it is said, when one entertains lavishly there is no plot afoot. With the coup initially set for November 7 (16 Brumaire), it was under just such culinary cover that Josephine gave a sumptuous dinner on the sixth in the Rue de la Victoire, where friends and foes alike could be found rubbing elbows, including Director Gohier and his wife.[332]

  But at the last minute the conspirators had to postpone the critical date to the ninth (18 Brumaire). Two final steps had yet to be taken if success was to be assured: moving the sessions of the two councils — the Ancients and the Five Hundred — from the heart of Paris, where a vociferous Jacobin opposition had many friends and could physically break up and destroy Bonaparte’s plans; and replacing Gen. François-Joseph Lefebvre, the commander of the Seventeenth Military District, with Bonaparte himself, to ensure a disciplined control of the ten thousand or so troops garrisoned in and around Paris.

  On November 8 the various Bonapartist henchmen — and there was now a sizable number of well-informed conspirators — were busily at work on the final preparations — including such details as what each individual would be doing and which senior officers would be in command of which military units, and where. With the coup set for the next day, yet another dinner had to be hastily arranged, this time at Justice Minister Cambacérès’s spacious residence, while still later that night Sieyès and President Louis Lemercier arranged to convene an emergency session of the Council of Ancients at dawn, in order to execute the final two items of business required prior to putting the coup in motion.[333]

  Meanwhile the last of those joining the now-large conspiracy went over their roles, as the circle widened to include Cambacérès and Napoleon’s banker, Collot, who agreed to ensure the financial side of operations. During the night of 17-18 Brumaire, General Lefebvre, who was about to be replaced as the commander of the Paris region, moved up cavalry regiments along the Champs-Elysées and the principal boulevards,[334] while Fouché and Réal ordered the police to take up positions before the main government buildings.

  Just before the crack of dawn on 18 Brumaire, Saturday, November 9, 1799, President Lemercier duly issued the orders for an emergency convocation of the Ancients within the hour at the Salle de Manège, the Royal Riding School of the Tuileries Palace. At about the same time Talleyrand, Louis Roederer, and his son met secretly to draft Barras’s letter of resignation. With that accomplished, at seven o’clock they set out for the Rue de la Victoire, where they found the narrow street crowded with army brass. Surprisingly, among their numbers they found a new convert, General Moreau, “a soft man lacking enterprise,” Bonaparte said of him privately.” Although the Gohiers had also been invited to breakfast with Josephine, only Madame Gohier had turned up. Her husband had heard the endless round of rumors circulating throughout the capital and, fearing a trap, had sent his wife to see what was in the wind.

  On his arrival Bourrienne seemed equally startled by the “great number of generals and other high officers [including Berthier, Bruix, Leclerc, and Murat] all those devoted to him. I have never seen such a great number in the Rue de la Victoire...all in full-dress uniform, overflowing from Bonaparte’s little town house into the courtyard and the side paths.” As for Napoleon, Bourrienne found him “calm, just the way he always was immediately prior to a battle.”[335] Then, with the arrival of Joseph Bonaparte, bringing Bernadotte (in mufti), the assembly was complete, though a heated scene ensued between Bonaparte and the influential and popular Bernadotte, the latter denouncing any “rebellion” against the government and refusing to go along with the intended coup, of whose details he was only now fully informed. “[He called it a] rebellion! Can you imagine that!” Bonaparte afterward related to Bourrienne, unaccustomed to and shocked by the full truth. “A pack of fools!” Nevertheless, the general tried to reassure Bernadotte, informing him that he would be acting legally, not in rebellion, in fact commanding government troops under the direct orders of the Council of Ancients, which he expected to receive at any moment, though acknowledging to Bourrienne that he would not be able to win over Bernadotte, whom he described as “hard as a stick...What a pity.”[336]

  While all this was taking place in the Rue de la Victoire, not far away at the Tuileries, Deputy Cornet, another Bonaparte stooge and a member of the “commission des inspecteurs” (roughly equivalent to party whips), was addressing the Council of Ancients. In the flamboyant language of the day he denounced another fearful “Jacobin plot,” describing the “alarming symptoms” that had been uncovered, those “poignards” — literally, knife-wielding assassins — and “vultures,” along with “sinister reports” reaching the authorities. Standing before that august assembly at that ungodly hour, in the drafty, unheated Riding School, Cornet harangued them, sounding the familiar clarion “The fatherland is in danger,” and warning that “if they did not take immediate measures” to leave the capital, all would be lost.[337] Deputy Regnier, another man in on the plot, invoking Article
102 of the Constitution of the Year III, moved that their proceedings be continued the next morning at the royal residence at St.-Cloud, where their safety from invading mobs could be more easily assured. In a final motion he concluded the proceedings by nominating General Bonaparte, “this illustrious man who has so merited of his country [and] is burning to crown his national achievements,” to replace General Lefebvre as the commander of all troops stationed in and around Paris, including the special Guards assigned to protect the Directory and the two parliamentary councils.[338] Lemercier then ordered a vote on both motions, which were carried. They duly agreed to meet, along with the Council of Five Hundred, the next day at St.-Cloud.

  Instructed to notify General Bonaparte posthaste of his new military command, Cornet set off for the Rue de la Victoire, where he ordered Bonaparte to take “all necessary measures to ensure the safety of the nation’s representatives.”[339] Looking on with consternation as Cornet handed Bonaparte his written instructions to repair immediately to the Tuileries to take his new oath of office, Bernadotte finally acquiesced in the inevitable. “I will not march against you,” he told Bonaparte, “but if the Directory orders me to act, I will march against any and all troublemakers,” which of course would include Bonaparte himself. With that Napoleon leaped into the saddle and, with his full entourage of generals, galloped off to the Royal Palace.

  Appearing before the Ancients, Bonaparte was duly called upon to take the loyalty oath (which in fact he had personally drafted for the occasion), ending: “We want a Republic founded on true freedom, on civil liberties, on full national representation. We shall have it, I swear it, in my name and in that of my companions-in-arms.”[340] No one bothered to point out that the Ancients’ replacing of Lefebvre with Bonaparte was quite illegal, exceeding the authority granted them by the Constitution, not one of the dozens of lawyers present protesting.

  The clock for the greatest coup in French history had now begun to tick, as Bonaparte mounted his horse and went into the Tuileries Gardens to address the nearly ten thousand troops assembled there:

  The Republic has been badly governed for two years now. You have hoped that my return would put an end to such ills...Liberty, victory, and peace will once again place the French Republic in the position it formerly occupied in Europe, and which only ineptitude and treason had forced it to relinquish.[341]

  While all this was happening, the people of Paris could read Bonaparte’s own proclamation to them, put up earlier by Fouché: “Under the present special circumstances, it [the nation] needs the unanimous support and confidence of its patriots. Rally round it, for it is the sole means of seating the republic on the foundation of civil liberty, national happiness, victory, and peace.”[342]

  Next, in his new capacity as the commander of the Seventeenth Military District, Bonaparte named General Moreau commander of the Guard for the Luxembourg Palace, while ordering the immediate sealing off of the city and the closing of its gates. It was hardly subtle, but with orders in hand from the Ancients, and the Army behind him, there was no body powerful enough to challenge him.

  Meanwhile, across the Seine, at eleven o’clock that same morning, Lucien Bonaparte convoked the emergency rump session of the Council of Five Hundred in the National Assembly — the more volatile opposition Jacobin members not having been notified — where he, as its new president, had the earlier decree passed by the Ancients read aloud. They were stupefied, and there was soon much open anger, but Lucien, keeping a lid on events, immediately closed the session to all debate, pending the transfer to St.-Cloud the following day. Napoleon’s timetable continued to run on schedule.

  Meanwhile Director Sieyès had gone to the Tuileries as planned, where he was soon joined by fellow director and conspirator Roger-Ducos, remaining there for the moment under the protection of Bonaparte’s troops ringing that ancient palace, while Gohier, Moulin, and Barras remained as usual at the Luxembourg Palace, still more or less ignorant of these immediate events.

  Toward noon Talleyrand stepped briefly into the limelight, arriving at the Luxembourg with Barras’s letter of resignation in his pocket, next to a banker’s draft for a couple of million francs to soften the blow. Barras, who had never refused a good bribe, was expected to comply.[343] Nevertheless Barras, the Red Viscount, was not altogether uninformed of what had been transpiring in the capital in the past couple of weeks. Thanks to his close friend and confidant Fouché, and numerous other friends and “ears” throughout society, he knew of course that his former protégé, General Bonaparte, was preparing a coup d’état and that it was imminent. Hence his lack of surprise when he saw Talleyrand approach the table where he had been breakfasting late with the financier Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard, who had reported earlier seeing Bonaparte riding past his mansion with a bevy of senior officers at his side. Though he acted astonished, Barras acquiesced without a struggle, not even asking for compensation in exchange for signing the letter of resignation now thrust before him. Talleyrand, only too pleased with the proceedings, thus left the palace with the bribe — fortunately made out “to the bearer” — intact, his task completed, and himself unexpectedly a couple of million francs the richer.[344]

  Meanwhile General Moreau arrived at three o’clock to escort the remaining two directors, Gohier and Moulin, to the Tuileries to sign and therefore “legalize” (albeit under duress) the decree drawn up earlier by the Ancients, along with their own resignations. In the meantime ex-Director Barras, also under military escort, vacated his apartments in the Luxembourg, leaving Paris for his estate of Grosbois for the last time as a former public official.[345]

  That same Saturday evening, there was a final meeting of the conspirators in the Rue de la Victoire, including Lucien, Joseph, Roederer, Sieyès, Murat, Réal, Cambacérès, and several generals, apparently little realizing that they had already made one nearly fatal error by neglecting the cardinal principle of any coup — speed. By not having concluded the whole thing the first day, they jeopardized everything, giving their powerful Jacobin opposition time in which to rally. Nonetheless Bonaparte was not displeased with the results, as he saw the last of the conspirators to the door that night. “All in all it has not turned out badly today,” he said as Bourrienne was taking his leave. “We shall see what happens tomorrow.”[346]

  The capital remained peaceful during the night, thanks to the presence of troops and police in great numbers. At dawn on a cold, overcast Sunday, November 10 (19 Brumaire), Bonaparte ordered some five thousand troops to set out for the Palace of St.-Cloud, including Milet and Sébastiani (a fellow Corsican), who had been with Bonaparte’s army in Italy.[347] Once again, but for the last time, everything was going precisely according to schedule.

  Upon arriving at St.-Cloud, Sieyès and Roger-Ducos immediately installed themselves in an unheated dilapidated room on the second floor of the palace. Like the rest of the once-elegant royal residence, this room had been ransacked by mobs during the Revolution, leaving a wantonly vandalized shambles in its place. It was from this small command center, however, that all operations were now directed. Meanwhile, up the road, in a private residence — all arranged by Napoleon’s discreet banker, Collot, Talleyrand, Roederer, and a few others met quietly to monitor the day’s events. As usual Talleyrand did not choose to be seen sur place.[348]

  But at the palace itself all was not well. Finding themselves ringed by thousands of troops as they arrived for the sessions of both councils, the deputies gave vent to angry murmurs and comments, which did nothing to improve Bonaparte’s already flagging popularity. Immediately on the opening of the session of the Five Hundred in the Orangerie at one o’clock, these deputies, who had been so effectively muzzled by Lucien Bonaparte the day before, now got completely out of control: “No dictators!” “Down with dictators!” “The Constitution is dead!” “Bayonets don’t frighten us!” The Jacobins, who not only appeared the noisiest but who were also clearly in the majority, demanded the retaking of their loyalty oath to the Constitutio
n and the Republic.[349]

  Fortunately the scene (in the Galérie d’Appollon within the château itself) was not quite so tumultuous when the Council of Ancients reconvened at two o’clock and Lemercier announced the resignation of the Directory. Flowever, the outraged Jacobin minority did demand information about the alleged plot that had forced them to seek refuge at St.-Cloud. And later one deputy suggested adding Bonaparte to the Directory, a move attended by a considerable hubbub as the party whips temporarily suspended the session. As for the man responsible for this national political eruption, Bonaparte was upstairs pacing back and forth, as Roger Ducos and Sieyès looked on, all three impatiently awaiting the outcome of the session in the Galérie d’Apollon and word from the Orangerie. Instead Bonaparte was met by infuriating silence. This was not the way he was accustomed to dealing with a situation. When finally the door did open, it was only to admit Generals Augereau and Leclerc. Napoleon burst out: “The wine has been drawn, now we must drink!” But then he simply withdrew into a stony silence once again and resumed his pacing. The minutes, then the hours, passed slowly, painfully, without word from either assembly, and by five o’clock Bonaparte’s nerves snapped. It was obvious that things were not going well, no one coming to call on him as their national savior or to establish a dual or triple consulship with him at its head.

  Suddenly he pivoted and stormed out of the room without a word, stopping outside only to gather Berthier and Bourrienne. Then, sweeping down the main staircase of the château, he barged in to the Galérie Apollon just as the Ancients were taking a break. Bonaparte carried out what his secretary described as “neither a noble nor dignified conversation” with Lemercier.[350] “You are sitting on a volcano!” Napoleon exclaimed. “The Council of Five Hundred is divided; everything now depends upon you. It’s you who gave me my new powers. You must take action! Speak out! Do something! I am here to execute your decisions. Preserve our liberties!” It was as pathetic as it was nonsensical, but he felt he had to say something — anything — to break the deadlock. “And the Constitution?” one deputy asked. “You already destroyed the Constitution when you violated it. No one respects it anymore.”[351] When pressed about the alleged plot threatening them and about its leaders, he replied: “Barras and Moulin — they have made certain proposals to me.” And in fact both the Jacobins and the royalists had secretly approached Bonaparte, who had rejected them all. After all, he had his own plot. “There are those who would like to return to the days of the Convention [and Robespierre],” Bonaparte continued, “to the revolutionary committees and the scaffold...Just remember that I am marching with the gods of victory and war on my side,” he added threateningly, “and if certain spokesmen here in the pay of foreigners ever attempt to declare me an outlaw...just let them take care that they do not instead find themselves outlawed!” Turning to the general officers serving as his aides-de-camp and standing protectively around him, he continued that he would call on “my brave companions-in-arms here.” Bourrienne urged: “Leave, General! You no longer know what you are saying.” Bonaparte blurted out incoherently: “He who loves me, will follow me!” (“His place was clearly before an artillery battery, and not before this assembly,” Bourrienne later lamented.) The general had bungled it, and as Bourrienne and Berthier hustled him out, his secretary commented, “I had the distinct feeling that instead of sleeping in the Luxembourg Palace tomorrow [as Napoleon had predicted], he would be ending his career in the Place de la Révolution” — where Louis XVI had been guillotined.