As a man of action with a military background and a mathematical mind, Bonaparte had a clear idea of how to proceed with the task he had set himself. Following the Brumaire coup he had provided himself with the means of getting on with it, and after Marengo he acquired even greater power. Many welcomed this. Germaine de Staël was enthusiastic about the ‘glorious dictatorship’ of ‘this great man’ who according to her had the ability to ‘uplift the world’. Lafayette too expressed his approval of the ‘restorative dictatorship’ he was exercising, seeing in it the only hope of repairing the state and safeguarding liberty. But there were many who disagreed.16
A decade of debate had encouraged speculation and discussion, as well as a sense of self-importance among the intellectual elites which had dominated politics from the start of the Revolution, at the expense of pragmatism. In the interests of including representatives of the whole spectrum of French politics, Bonaparte had given seats to them in one or other of the assemblies. As soon as they took their seats his opponents began to denounce him as a tyrant, emboldening the more moderate who were alarmed at the developments. His doings were also discussed and criticised in salons and at the Institute, towards which he had cooled markedly, no longer addressing its members endearingly as ‘colleagues’. Much of it was harmless verbiage, but like many witnesses of the Revolution Bonaparte was wary of demagogy. Having got used to giving orders and brooking no discussion, he saw any dissent as a challenge to his authority. His sense of insecurity made him umbrageous, and he took obstruction or even delay personally.
There was also resistance in the army, which was highly politicised and clung to the ideals of the Revolution more tenaciously than the rest of society. Generals did not look favourably on one of their kind being placed above them, and there were some who felt equally entitled to such distinction. Bonaparte’s best hope here, as in the political field, where he reached over the heads of the political class and appealed to the nation, was to bypass the generals and capture the hearts of the soldiers. That task was not going to be made any easier by his intention of bringing about a national reconciliation involving what he called a social ‘fusion’ of those who had served the ancien régime with those wedded to the Republic, which involved the reintegration into the mainstream of royalist dissidents and émigrés. This would both eliminate a threat to the state and at the same time capture a wealth of talent for it. It also involved something which was bound to offend most soldiers as well as the entire political class.
The Bulletin of 18 June from Milan had carried an unctuous account of the first consul’s attendance at the Te Deum in the Duomo, where the clergy of the city had treated him with the utmost respect. It was not a gratuitous piece of self-promotion. Bonaparte’s views on religion were influenced by the writings of the Enlightenment, and like many of his contemporaries he rejected much of Christian teaching – he found the divinity of Christ not credible, the resurrection physically impossible, and miracles ridiculous. He could not accept that, as he put it, Cato and Caesar were damned because they were born before Christ. He was also anti-clerical. But he displayed lingering attachment to the faith, making the sign of the cross at critical moments and admitting to a love of the sound of church bells. He pondered the meaning of life, seeking explanations which were not always rational, and with time even came to believe that he had a soul. ‘I do not believe in religions, but in the existence of God,’ he said to Thibaudeau in June 1801, adding, ‘Who created all this?’ ‘Everything proclaims the existence of a God, that is beyond doubt,’ he asserted to another.17
More important, he valued the role of religion itself. ‘As for me, I do not see in religion the mystery of the Incarnation, only the mystery of the Social Order,’ he told his councillors. ‘How can one have order in a state without religion?’ he challenged Roederer. ‘Society cannot exist without inequality of wealth and inequality of wealth cannot exist without religion. When a man is dying of hunger next to another who is gorging, he cannot possibly accept this difference if he has not had it on good authority that: “God wishes it so: there must be poor and rich people in the world, but afterwards, and for eternity, things will be divided up differently.”’ A proper religion, he assured the Council of State, was ‘a vaccine for the imagination’, inoculating people against ‘all sorts of dangerous and absurd beliefs’. He held atheism to be ‘destructive of all social organisation, as it robs Man of every source of consolation and hope’.18
He also appreciated that religious observance lay at the heart of the spiritual and temporal lives of the rural masses which made up the overwhelming majority of the population, and that by attacking it the Revolution had alienated them from the state. Attempts at introducing new, supposedly rational, substitutes such as the cult of the Supreme Being and Theophilanthropy he dismissed as inept since they lacked a numinous dimension. He was convinced that France could only be ‘restored’ (and his domination firmly established) if the state could engage the acceptance, if not the affection, of the rural masses and the old nobility, and this meant re-establishing the Church. Circumstances favoured him in one way.
The death of Pope Pius VI in August 1799 was followed by a long interregnum, and it was not until 14 March 1800 that the conclave, sitting in Venice, elected a new pope in the fifty-seven-year-old Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti, who took the name Pius VII. Not only was he an open-minded and intelligent man not averse to republican forms of government, he was locked in conflict with Austria and Naples, which both had designs on the Papal States.
A week after the Te Deum in Milan, at Vercelli on his way back to Paris, Bonaparte encountered Cardinal Martiniana, to whom he expressed the wish to open negotiations with the Pope to regularise the status of the Church and religious practice in France. It was not going to be easy to achieve; most of the political class was dogmatically irreligious, while most of the military were ‘cassock-haters’ who had only ever entered churches in order to loot.
Many in Bonaparte’s entourage were appalled when he mentioned the idea. Neither Cambacérès nor Lebrun relished it. Fouché and Talleyrand were horrified – the first had been a teacher in Oratorian schools, the second a bishop, and any reminder of their ecclesiastical past was unwelcome. Fouché argued that it would be unpopular among the people. Talleyrand, who was still technically in holy orders, did everything he could to discourage Bonaparte, but once he realised the process was unstoppable, he set about trying to get the Pope to release him from his sacerdotal vows – which Pius VII refused to do. On 5 November Monsignor Spina, Archbishop of Corinth, arrived in Paris to open negotiations. Bonaparte greeted him cordially and appointed the Abbé Bernier to prepare the ground, under the supervision of a squirming Talleyrand.19
Spina’s arrival was overshadowed by another event, which caused a sensation: the publication on 1 November of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monck et Bonaparte. ‘There are men who appear at certain epochs to found, destroy or repair empires,’ it proclaimed. ‘For ten years we have been seeking a firm and able hand which could arrest everything and sustain everything […] That man has appeared. Who can fail to recognise him in Bonaparte?’ The author went on to say that where Cromwell destroyed, Bonaparte repaired, where Cromwell had made civil war, Bonaparte had united Frenchmen. As for Monck, how could anyone believe that Bonaparte would be happy with a dukedom and retirement under some indolent monarch? ‘Bonaparte is, like Caesar, one of those characters before whom all obstacles and all opposition give way: his inspiration seems so supernatural that in ancient times when the love of the wondrous filled people’s minds they would not have hesitated to believe him to be protected by some spirit or god.’ By suggesting the parallel with Caesar, the pamphlet suggested Bonaparte’s elevation to the ultimate authority, but also raised fears (the Aréna–Ceracchi conspiracy was fresh in people’s minds). ‘Happy republic if he were immortal. […] If suddenly Bonaparte were lost to his country, where are his heirs?’ The author feared that if he wer
e to be killed they would find themselves back under either the ‘tyranny of the assemblies’ or a ‘degenerate race’ of kings. Without proposing anything, he suggested the need to give permanence to Bonaparte’s authority and ensure its perpetuation.20
The author was Lucien, possibly encouraged by Bonaparte, in the interests of testing public opinion. This reacted with a predictable degree of outrage. The first consul affected to share it, ordering a thousand copies to be publicly burned. For the benefit of insiders who knew or suspected the identity of the author he staged a dressing-down of his younger brother which culminated in Lucien throwing his ministerial portfolio onto the desk and flouncing out of the room. On 5 November he was relieved of his post and replaced by a favourite of the ideologues, Jean-Antoine Chaptal. Letizia attempted to intervene on behalf of her favourite son, and Joseph tried to mediate, but Bonaparte was intractable. Lucien’s wife had died, and he was leading a rackety life of promiscuity ill-suited to a leading minister (he would as good as rape any woman unwise enough to call at the ministry), which Fouché was avidly recording and publicising. Talleyrand suggested sending the delinquent to Madrid as ambassador, and he duly left Paris. Josephine and Fouché were exultant – Fouché because he hated Lucien, Josephine for even more weighty reasons.21
Whatever the public reaction, Lucien’s pamphlet had provoked discussion on how to ensure the survival of the stability achieved over the past year. It had made the connection between that and the person of the first consul, and pointed the discussion in the direction along which he was thinking. What Bonaparte, and the country, needed above all was an end to the war. Whether he believed it or not, he argued that a republic by its very nature represented an affront to the hereditary monarchies of Europe, and therefore a fundamental casus belli. The only way of removing this source of conflict was to give the French state’s political institutions a ‘form’, as he put it, ‘a little more in harmony’ with theirs. The Revolution’s primary achievement had been to overthrow the feudal aspects of the ancien régime and establish a constitutional monarchy. The Republic had come into being as a result of untoward events which the majority of the population did not endorse. Turning the state back into a monarchy was unthinkable only to the relatively small number of dedicated republicans. ‘The party which longs for a king is immense, enormous, although it is united by nothing other than the deep feeling that there should be one,’ reported an informer in Paris to the court of Naples in the spring of 1798, adding that nobody wanted Louis XVIII, only a warrior king and a constitutional monarchy.22
The institution of monarchy may have still surrounded itself with anachronistic pomp, but it no longer required the kind of sacral aura it had in the days of divine right. Whereas the Bourbons had been on the throne of France for 300 years, the house of Hanover had reigned in Britain for only eighty-six, the same as the Bourbons in Spain, those of Naples only sixty-six, and the Habsburgs had entrenched themselves on the imperial throne as late as 1745. The elector of Brandenburg had decided to call himself king in Prussia less than a hundred years before, and the tsar of Muscovy emperor of Russia in 1721.
In the circumstances, there was no reason why France should not acquire a new dynasty. The question was who was to found it. There were potential candidates among the cadet branches of the French royal house, but they were too closely associated with the ancien régime. They were also unlikely to possess the qualities requisite to deal with the dangers of the French political scene. The man who had those was currently in charge, so there seemed little point in getting rid of him. But he had no heir. And since he had no ancient lineage, or other assets beyond his talents, military and administrative, there was no a priori reason to differentiate between him and any other capable general.
At the beginning of December, news reached Paris of a brilliant victory over the Austrians at Hohenlinden by Moreau. Bonaparte heaped praise on his general’s military skills, and presented him with a magnificent pair of pistols. But he was not impressed, or pleased. He had attempted to neutralise him, even going so far as suggesting he marry his sister Caroline, but Moreau was ruled by his mother-in-law, Madame Hulot, a harridan who hated Bonaparte and particularly Josephine. The feeling was mutual, and Bonaparte’s cup overflowed when she made a snide remark about his alleged incestuous affair with Caroline.23
Following his victory, Moreau’s reputation rode high, and while he was far from eclipsing Bonaparte, he was a reminder that there were alternatives, and his very existence heartened ideologues frightened by Bonaparte and royalists still searching for a ‘Monck’. He might well have found himself playing that role if things had turned out differently on the night of 24 December.
That evening, Bonaparte went to the Opéra to listen to Haydn’s Creation. As his carriage trundled down the rue Saint-Nicaise, it passed a stationary cart loaded with a large barrel. This was filled with gunpowder, and exploded just after his carriage had passed it, devastating the street, killing four bystanders and wounding another sixty, some of whom would die, but inflicting no harm on Bonaparte. He carried on to the Opéra, where he was deliriously greeted by an audience who had heard the explosion and feared the worst.
On his return to the Tuileries after the performance, he found the palace teeming with concerned generals and officials. When Fouché turned up, Bonaparte taunted him for failing to forestall the attempt on his life, which he attributed to Fouché’s Jacobin ‘friends’. The minister assured him that it had been the work of royalist conspirators, and promised to prove it within a week.
With his colleague Réal, Fouché carried out a forensic examination of the scene and what remained of the horse that had drawn the ‘infernal machine’ into position. Réal noticed that one of its legs was newly shod. They showed the shoe to every farrier in Paris, until one recognised it and was able to give a description of the men who had brought the horse to him. They took the nag’s head to every horse-dealer, which led them to the man who had bought it. The arrests that followed established a direct link to Georges Cadoudal, and to the British government.24
It was all of a piece with Hyde’s earlier plan to kidnap Bonaparte, and his more recent one, uncovered by the police, of landing a force at Saint-Malo. But Bonaparte feared the Jacobins more than the royalists. ‘The [royalist rebels] and the émigrés are a disease of the skin,’ he said to Fouché a couple of days after the attempt, ‘while [the Jacobins] are a malady of the internal organs.’ He ordered Fouché to draw up a list of active Jacobins, whom he intended to have deported to the penal colonies of Cayenne and Guyana. It came to about a hundred names. The assemblies balked at proscribing so many, some of them colleagues. In order to bypass them, Cambacérès and Talleyrand devised a legal ploy whereby the Senate, acting in its capacity as guardian of the constitution, issued a senatus-consulte, an edict dressed up as a constitutional safeguard, enacting the contested measure.25
The event had proved a godsend to Bonaparte. A number of royalists were shot, as were some Jacobins. A larger number of those were deported, including what Bonaparte called the sergeants of revolution, those capable of rousing the masses. ‘From then on, I began to sleep peacefully,’ he confided. More important, the episode had led to the invention of the senatus-consulte, a mechanism for making law on the hoof, which he would soon be using to force through a measure establishing special tribunals without juries to deal with certain categories of criminal activity.26
Most important of all, the attempted assassination had shocked public opinion, not only by its violence. It was seen as an attempt not just on Bonaparte’s life, but on the future of the state just as it was emerging from ten years of anarchy and violence. It drew to Bonaparte all the sympathy a victim elicits, and at the same time brought home how fragile was the new-found stability, and how closely it was tied up with his person. It thereby bound the future of the country more closely to him and to his survival. After little more than a year in power, he had become the repository of the hopes of many, and he was about to make
the dearest of these come true.
23
Peace
Defeated in Italy by Bonaparte and pushed back further by General Brune, and trounced in Germany by Moreau, Austria could not pursue the war any longer. The emperor had sent Cobenzl to Paris in the autumn of 1800 to prepare the ground, and on 9 February 1801, as soon as she was free to do so under the terms of her alliance with Britain, Austria made peace with France by the Treaty of Lunéville. News of its signature reached Paris on 12 February. The carnival was in full swing, and people reacted with joy.
The terms were less favourable to Austria than those of Campo Formio, as she lost some of the land she had then acquired in Italy. In addition, Austria recognised France’s incorporation of Piedmont and the existence of the Batavian, Helvetic and Cisalpine republics, the last expanded by the incorporation of Modena and the Legations. The former Habsburg fief of Tuscany was renamed the kingdom of Etruria, and was to be ruled by the Bourbon Duke of Parma (which had been incorporated into the Cisalpine Republic). By the terms of a treaty negotiated with Charles IV of Spain, the new King of Etruria married one of his daughters, and his kingdom became a French satellite. Austria was also obliged to admit France as a party in the process of rearrangement of the Holy Roman Empire, made necessary by the dispossession of the former rulers of states on the left bank of the Rhine, which had been incorporated into France.
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