Napoleon

by Adam Zamoyski

  His prime instrument for the reconstruction of the French polity was the Council of State, initially composed of twenty-nine people chosen by himself, grouped in five sections (Legislation, Interior Affairs, Finances, War and Naval), all of them with high levels of expertise in their fields, and well versed in the issues of the day. They represented a spectrum of social origins, ideology and political affiliation. It was the powerhouse in which the wishes of the first consul took shape.

  Bonaparte worked them hard, as he did himself, almost frantically determined as he was to get as much done as quickly as possible. ‘At that time, the work of a councillor of state was as painful as it was extensive,’ recalled one of them. ‘Everything needed to be reorganised, and we would meet every day, either as a whole council or in our sections; almost every evening we would have a session with the First Consul, in which we would discuss and deliberate from ten o’clock until four or five in the morning.’ According to Bourrienne, the first consul would give vent to his elation after work well done by singing – horribly flat.18

  In order to cut out needless discussion, the eight ministers who made up Bonaparte’s executive did not operate as a cabinet – he sent for them when he needed them, as a general might his officers. He communicated with them through the secretary of state, Maret, who acted as a kind of civil chief-of-staff. ‘I am a man you can say anything to,’ he instructed Maret when he took up the job, and Maret claims he did in those days often argue with Bonaparte. A lawyer under the ancien régime and a diplomat during the Revolution, Maret was regarded by some as an obsequious nonentity, but he had the requisite skills for this task, marshalling the eight ministers to do his master’s will. They had to regularly submit written reports of their activities and be prepared to be summoned into Bonaparte’s presence to answer questions about them. Like his generals, they soon learned to have the facts at their fingertips, as he might suddenly ask how many barges with grain were moored on the Seine, or how much had been expended on a given project, and would not accept an approximate answer.19

  That did not mean they were subservient cyphers. Laplace, who had been overwhelmed by the task facing him at the Ministry of the Interior, had been replaced by Lucien. Cambacérès had been succeeded at the Ministry of Justice by André-Joseph Abrial, a distinguished lawyer and an efficient administrator. The minister of finance, Gaudin, had worked in the treasury under Louis XVI and under the Revolution, had stood up to Robespierre and not only managed to save his own neck but those of his employees from the guillotine.

  The minister of police, Fouché, was nothing if not independent, and he did communicate directly with Bonaparte. His position gave him information that made him invaluable to the first consul. He had created an independent source of funding, by imposing taxes on brothels and gaming houses, ‘making vice, which is endemic to all large cities, contribute to the security of the state’, as he put it, and used the money to pay a web of informers of every rank and station. He made himself useful to many, and wielded considerable influence. ‘Fouché has a detestable reputation,’ Bonaparte admitted to Cambacérès. ‘He talks ill of everyone and well only of himself. I know that he has not broken off relations with his terrorist friends. But he knows who they are and that will make him very useful to us. I will keep an eye on him. If I discover any infidelity in him I will not spare him.’ Fouché records that their meetings occasionally led to ugly scenes, but he valued Bonaparte for his ability to make things happen and impose order on chaos.20

  Imposing order on the country was a challenge. Ten days after the coup, the consuls sent envoys to the twenty-two military districts into which the country was divided to sound out public opinion and ‘explain’ what had happened. The new government had received professions of loyalty and congratulations from many local authorities, but these were largely valueless, and twenty out of the ninety-nine departments had not reacted at all. The envoys found public opinion around the country indifferent or suspicious. In some areas the National Guard had refused to swear loyalty to the new authorities, there were protests from Jacobins, and the administration of the department of Jura proclaimed Bonaparte a ‘usurping tyrant’. In the west and the south, where royalist sentiment was strong, news of the coup was greeted with hostility by those who assumed it to have brought republicans to power and with joy by those who fancied it heralded a Bourbon restoration.21

  Bonaparte could take nothing for granted, not even the army, which was underpaid and on the brink of mutiny. ‘The spirit of the army is not at all favourable to the events of 18 and 19 brumaire,’ Masséna reported from the Army of Italy. He had recently had to conduct a military operation against a band of 1,200 deserters who had gone on the rampage. Marmont, who had been sent to ascertain the mood in the Army of the North, was badly received. Bonaparte had already instructed Berthier to carry out a gradual purge of politically unreliable officers and malcontents.22

  A virtuoso of manipulation, he had been quick to take control of the levers of public opinion. ‘If I give free rein to the press, I won’t survive in power for three months,’ he asserted. Fouché needed little prompting. ‘Newspapers have always been the tocsin of revolutions,’ he wrote. ‘They foretell them, prepare them and end up making them inevitable.’ Bonaparte nevertheless recognised the usefulness of an element of press freedom. On 17 January sixty out of the total of seventy-three papers were closed down, leaving a few to reflect the views of factions such as the royalists. Through the Interior Ministry he supported Le Mercure, a counter-revolutionary journal edited by the returned émigré and ardent royalist Louis de Fontanes, who as well as being the lover of Élisa Bacciochi was convinced Bonaparte was the only man who could reform not only France but the world. Another journal, Le Moniteur, was taken over and turned into the mouthpiece of the government, propounding Bonaparte’s views and explaining his actions in unsigned articles.23

  Fouché extended censorship to the theatre, and henceforth every word uttered on stage was strictly controlled. Bonaparte had pronounced views and tastes when it came to the theatre, and was alert to its political potential. He despised comedy, with the exception of Molière’s Tartuffe, and believed only grand tragedy worth watching, since it revealed truths about human nature and affairs. He held Corneille and to a lesser extent Racine to be the masters, and in his lifetime he saw the former’s Cinna at least a dozen times, Oedipe at least nine, and Le Cid at least eight, and Racine’s Phèdre and Iphigénie en Aulide at least ten times each. Wishing to avoid the representation of historical events that might suggest parallels with the present, he instructed Fouché not to allow any plays set after the fifteenth century. By flattering and favouring writers who knew how to please, Bonaparte would gradually nurture a literature of approval which bordered on adulation.24

  He also looked to his own reputation by putting in hand a thorough search through the archives for all documents relating to his past, particularly his relationship to Paoli and his attempts to take over the citadel of Ajaccio from French government forces in 1792. Some papers were destroyed, others replaced by forgeries rewriting history, and some of his own writings were doctored in the process.25

  The only other minister who had as direct access to Bonaparte and worked as closely with him as Fouché was Talleyrand. Although his loyalty was always in question, he had proved useful in the past, and as Bonaparte remarked to Cambacérès, who had warned him of Talleyrand’s treacherousness and rapacious venality, ‘his personal interests are our best guarantee’. Talleyrand was not only a talented negotiator and an instinctive diplomat, he was also, for all his revolutionary past, an aristocrat of the ancien régime, and thereby well placed to conduct unofficial negotiations through his kin all over Europe. This was vital in securing peace within France as well as abroad, and the first was a high priority, essential not only for reasons of security but also for Bonaparte’s credibility as the man who would bring all Frenchmen together and cauterise the wounds of the Revolution.26

  Talleyrand had
got wind of the arrival in Paris of two agents of Louis XVIII, the baron Hyde de Neuville and the comte d’Andigné, who had been sent to organise a royalist coup, or alternately to persuade Bonaparte to bring about a restoration of the monarchy. Bonaparte seized the opportunity this offered, and bade Talleyrand arrange a meeting.

  On 26 December Talleyrand duly picked up Hyde de Neuville in his carriage and drove him to the Luxembourg, where he was ushered into a room and told to wait. When ‘a small insignificant-looking man dressed in a scruffy greenish tail-coat entered, his head lowered’, Hyde took him to be a servant, but the man walked over to the fireplace and, leaning against the mantelpiece, looked up and, as Hyde notes, ‘he appeared suddenly taller and the flaming light in his eyes, now piercing, announced Bonaparte’. The first consul accepted that the royalists had a right to resist what they saw as oppression, and expressed his admiration for their loyalty to the cause of the Bourbons, but told Hyde it was now time to accept the new reality. He dismissed him after a short interview (there was a session of the Institute he wished to attend), asking him to return the following day with his colleague. Andigné too was astounded at finding himself face to face with a ‘small man of mean appearance’ in an ‘olive coloured’ tail-coat when he called with Hyde. Bonaparte urged them to give up their struggle, proposing various concessions. ‘I will re-establish religious practice, not for your sake, but for mine,’ he promised among other things. ‘We nobles have no great need of religion, but the people need it, so I shall re-establish it.’ He angrily rebuffed their suggestion that he pave the way for a Bourbon restoration, for which he would be richly rewarded. He accused the Bourbon princes of cowardice, saying that if they had had the courage to land and lead their partisans in the Vendée he might well have embraced their cause himself. He urged Hyde and Andigné to rally to him, offering to make them generals, prefects or whatever they liked.27

  ‘In his disagreeable foreign accent, Bonaparte expresses himself with brevity and energy,’ noted Andigné. ‘A very lively mind causes him to run his sentences one into the other, so much so that his conversation is quite difficult to follow and leaves much to be guessed at. As animated in his conversation as he is nimble in his ideas, he continually leaps from one subject to another. He touches on a matter, leaves it, returns to it, appears to hardly listen to one while not missing a word of what one says … An immoderate pride which causes him to place himself above all that surrounds him leads him continually back to himself, and to what he has done. He then becomes prolix and listens to himself speak with visible pleasure, and does not spare one a single detail that could flatter his amour-propre …’28

  The following day Bonaparte proclaimed an amnesty to those who laid down their arms, and freedom of religious practice. He opened negotiations with the royalist commanders through the militant monarchist Abbé Étienne-Alexandre Bernier, while declaring that troops would be deployed against those who continued to fight. The stick-and-carrot policy bore fruit, and on 18 January the royalist commander on the left bank of the Loire submitted, followed a few days later by his colleague on the right bank. They recognised that they were fighting for a lost cause, and lost faith in their ally. ‘England was inclined to furnish us with some of the means to resist, but refused us those which would have allowed us to triumph,’ reflected Andigné. On 25 January, in response to a sally by diehard royalists further north, the army moved in and carried out savage reprisals. Within a couple of weeks all the remaining royalist forces capitulated, and in Normandy one of the most unrepentant leaders, Louis de Frotté, was shot. Isolated bands continued to resist, crossing the line into more or less outright brigandage, even if they did claim to be robbing ‘in the name of the King’. Three weeks later Bonaparte made another move to pull the rug from under the royalists’ feet by setting up a commission to vet émigrés wishing to return to France: in under two years, some 40 per cent of them (around 45,000) would do so and accept the new regime. On 6 March he held an audience for the principal royalist commanders in the course of which he managed to impress them with his professions of national reconciliation, and indeed his charm. One who resisted this was the Breton Georges Cadoudal, and there were others in the country and among the émigrés who would carry their struggle underground. But Bonaparte had managed to achieve what successive governments had failed to for more than half a decade: to put an end to the civil war.29

  ‘Even the most impartial will not hesitate to admit that it seemed as though a kind of predestination had called him to command men,’ wrote the forty-two-year-old barrister François-Nicolas Mollien. The veteran General Mathieu Dumas reflected that Bonaparte ‘did not destroy liberty, because it no longer existed; he smothered the monster of anarchy; he saved France’. A much younger man, Mathieu Molé, declared that only one man could have achieved this, explaining that Bonaparte’s origin, his exploits, his virtues, his vices and ‘the kind of magic that enveloped his life’ ‘made him the only instrument Providence could have employed for such a purpose’. The young aristocrat Philippe de Ségur did not deny his achievement, but felt that ‘it was also the work of France’.30

  20

  Consolidation

  On 19 February 1800 the consuls transferred from the Luxembourg to the Tuileries. The move was dictated by the need to make room for the Senate at the Luxembourg, and by the fact that the former royal palace was more centrally situated and easier to defend against mob violence. According to Cambacérès, Bonaparte was also concerned that if a use were not found for it the building would fall into ruin. On inspecting the palace before the move he was disgusted to see revolutionary graffiti scrawled on the panelling.1

  On the day, in fine spring weather, the three consuls left the Luxembourg in some pomp in a coach drawn by six white horses, with Roustam resplendent in his Mameluke gear riding alongside. They were preceded by the ministers, who had to make do with ordinary Paris cabs, their numbers papered and painted over for the occasion, and by a detachment of Bonaparte’s Guides. Behind the carriage came the cavalry of the new Consular Guard and an escort of other troops. The cortège was cheered by a small crowd of onlookers as it arrived before the palace. The consuls alighted, and while Cambacérès and Lebrun entered the palace, Bonaparte mounted a horse and inspected three demi-brigades which were drawn up on parade in front of the building. He then installed the Council of State in one of the galleries and formally received the city’s civil and military authorities.2

  With the ceremonial over, Bonaparte and Josephine settled into their new abode. She was uneasy, as the place brought to mind the fate of its last occupant, Marie-Antoinette. Her apartment, which she had redecorated in yellow silk and filled with mahogany furniture, was on the ground floor. The windows opened on to the Tuileries gardens, from which the palace was separated only by a narrow terrace and a few steps. As the gardens were open to the public she made little use of them, but Bonaparte often did when he felt the need for some exercise.3

  He took over a set of rooms above, linked to hers by a hidden staircase. He installed his study in a room with a single window overlooking the gardens which had been a queen’s bedroom, decorated in the reign of Louis XIV with a fresco of Minerva being crowned by Glory on the ceiling and landscapes on the walls. With time he would tailor the quarters to suit his working needs, but to begin with he accommodated himself as best he could, using a desk that had belonged to the last king and converting a small oratory into a bathroom.

  His household consisted of ten men, including a librarian, a groom, a cook and a valet, and a dozen or so lesser staff, all marshalled by Bourrienne. He was also constantly attended by Roustam, who slept in the next room. At the end of March, Bonaparte took over from Josephine the twenty-one-year-old Belgian Constant Wairy, who became his principal valet.4

  He usually rose at seven and had the newspapers and sometimes a novel read to him while he washed, had himself shaved (something he was slow to learn to do for himself) and dressed. He would then work with Bourrienne in
his study, only leaving it to receive ministers or officials in an outer office. He usually ate lunch alone, seldom spending more than fifteen minutes over it and often less. He preferred simple dishes, although he had brought home from Egypt a taste for dates, and enjoyed a ‘pilaff’. He only ever drank a single glass of wine, always Chambertin, usually watered down. He would follow this with strong coffee. He was sometimes joined by Josephine, and often employed the time talking to people such as artists or writers he wished to see, who stood around as he lunched.

  The other two consuls had been meant to take up their quarters in the palace too, but while Lebrun obliged, Cambacérès preferred to stay in his own house. The prospect of being able to keep his own table probably played a part, as no doubt did the freedom to take his pleasure without censure from the prudish Bonaparte, but so did his wise prescience that he might with time have to face the indignity of being asked to vacate the palace, as Lebrun would one day.

  On the morning after he moved in, Bonaparte held the first meeting of the three consuls in the former royal palace. By coincidence, that same day its would-be occupant, Louis XVIII wrote to him from his Warsaw exile proposing he assist him in recovering the throne. Bonaparte did not reply. Cambacérès believed that at this stage he had no clear idea of the future, beyond the reconstruction of France. ‘All the signs were that he wanted to be the master,’ he wrote. ‘Nothing suggested that the title of First Consul seemed insufficient to him.’ In conversation with Roederer, Bonaparte said he would retire if he felt the French people were ‘displeased’ with him. ‘As for me, I require little,’ he told him. ‘I have an income of 80 or 100,000 livres, a town house, one in the country: I do not need more.’ But, he added, so far they seemed satisfied with him. He was there to stay, and made a point of showing it.5