26
Towards Empire
Bonaparte reacted with fury to the unannounced resumption of hostilities. He decreed that every male British subject in France and its dependencies aged between eighteen and sixty was to be arrested as a prisoner of war, ordered General Mortier to invade the British royal family’s fief of Hanover, and announced the formation of an Army of England. Riding a wave of anti-British feeling, he opened a public subscription for the building of boats which were to take it across the Channel to teach ‘perfidious Albion’ a lesson. ‘The anger is extreme,’ recorded the architect Fontaine. ‘Everyone is eagerly offering the government voluntary subsidies.’1
Bonaparte set about the formation of the Army of England, complete with a corps of guides who spoke English, overseeing the building of barges to transport the men and gunboats to protect them. He made frequent trips to its main camp at Boulogne, looking into every detail of the preparations, riding about in all weathers and getting drenched as he inspected and badgered. Soon a large force had assembled on the Channel coast, strung out in camps from Normandy to Antwerp, and hundreds of boats had been built. On the evening of 29 October he assured those gathered at Saint-Cloud that he would plant his flag on the Tower of London or die in the attempt. Two weeks later, from the heights above Ambleteuse he surveyed the English coast through his telescope, and could see people going about their business. ‘It is a ditch which will be crossed if one dares to try,’ he wrote. Ever the propagandist, he had an article placed in Le Moniteur describing how, when pitching a tent for him, the men had uncovered medals of William the Conqueror and an axe-head left behind by the legions of Julius Caesar.2
Across the Channel, George III declared that he would never abandon the cause of the Bourbons, and the Aliens Office went into action once again with the aim of overthrowing Bonaparte. Funds began to flow once more, agents were activated and émigré diehards smuggled into France. Georges Cadoudal landed on 20 August at Biville, with his servant Picot and several accomplices, two of whom had been involved in the explosion of the rue Saint-Nicaise. Ten days later they were in Paris. The next to be sent was General Pichegru, who had escaped from Guyana and had been living in London on a British pension. The plan was to kidnap Bonaparte and send him to the remote Atlantic island of St Helena, replacing him with Louis XVIII.3
In an attempt to provide moral justification for what was becoming an increasingly personal vendetta, Bonaparte was henceforth referred to by the British government as a ‘usurper’. Despite having maintained official relations and signed treaties with the first consul as ‘Bonaparte’, it now referred to him only as ‘Buonaparte’, in an effort to demean him through the suggestion of ‘foreign’ origins. Encouraged by the government, the press went to town, regurgitating all the slanders and gossip about ‘Boney’ and his family, and building up an image of him as a demonic figure hungry for British blood; the government used the threat of invasion as an excuse to repress dissent at home and wrongfoot the opposition, denouncing it as unpatriotic or even treasonable.4
The resumption of hostilities was useful to Bonaparte as well. The organisation of the Army of England provided an opportunity for disrupting cliques of the discontented in the army by moving around units and commanders, purging the lukewarm and promoting the loyal. But bringing together so many units had disadvantages, and, unbeknown to Bonaparte, a secret society of Philadelphes was formed by hostile officers. The war also strengthened his hand in the assemblies, so he was able to put through a number of projects without trouble. It also helped to distract public opinion from the debacle of his Caribbean enterprise.
In Saint-Domingue the fighting went on in a spiral of unspeakable cruelty, with Leclerc’s successor General Rochambeau waging what can best be described as a racial war against the insurgents. On 19 November 1803 he was forced to capitulate and sailed off with his remaining 1,500 troops, but ran into a British naval squadron. He managed to negotiate terms and a return to Europe for his men, but these were not respected, and they were imprisoned until 1811. They were more fortunate than the 800 men left behind in the hospital at Port au Prince under a guarantee of immunity, who were massacred.5
Pauline had shown remarkable courage and devotion, nursing her husband in his final illness. She had his body embalmed and wrapped like a mummy’s, having cut off her hair to cover his face, and the whole sealed in a lead coffin. His heart she enclosed in a gold urn inscribed with the words: ‘Paulette Bonaparte, married to General Leclerc on 20 prairial Year V, has enclosed in this urn her love with the heart of her husband, whose dangers and glory she shared’. As they watched hardy grenadiers straining to carry the heavy coffin on its return to France, cynics quipped that it must contain treasure she had amassed in the West Indies.6
Bonaparte was keen to get her married again before she could start misbehaving, but while many lusted, few had the courage to take her on. He offered her to Melzi, who politely declined. Another Italian, Prince Camillo Borghese, did marry her, at Mortefontaine on 5 November. Bonaparte was not present, as he was on a landing barge off Boulogne watching an engagement with British vessels. But he wrote instructing her to refrain from annoying the Romans by praising the pleasures of Paris and to behave as they did, however tiresome she found their customs, and to show respect for the Pope.7
He was himself being unfaithful to Josephine with, among others, the actress Mademoiselle Georges, according to whom he was tender and loving, even childlike at times. His philandering always upset Josephine, not least because when engaged on an affair he became irritable, but also because it exposed the inherent insecurity of her position. His siblings acted as little short of pimps, putting nubile women in his path in the hope that one of them might lead to his divorcing her. He protested that he did not want an heir, even going so far as to say that he was not ‘a family man’, but it was likely that one day he would feel the urge to procreate.8
On 11 November he wrote from Boulogne in response to Josephine’s reproaches, assuring her that his feelings for her had not changed. ‘The good, sweet Josephine cannot be effaced from my heart except by Josephine herself, and only by one who had become sad, jealous and tiresome,’ he wrote, explaining that in order to bear all his troubles he needed a happy and understanding home life, and assuring her that ‘it is my destiny to love you always’. ‘My intention is to console you, my desire to please you, my wish to love you.’ This had the desired effect. ‘All my sorrows have vanished,’ she wrote back, saying she was pressing his letter to her heart. ‘It does me so much good! I shall keep it always! It will be my consolation in your absence, my guide when I am with you, because I wish to always remain in your eyes the tender Josephine who thinks only of your happiness.’9
He was less successful when it came to the feelings of potential allies. While Britain was engaged on a diplomatic offensive aimed at forming a new coalition against him, he showed few signs of concern. He ignored Talleyrand’s suggestion of a rapprochement with Austria to balance British efforts to engage the support of Russia. At the same time, he mishandled Tsar Alexander. He had sidelined him in the process of reorganising the Holy Roman Empire. He then snubbed him when he attempted to mediate in the stand-off with Britain, and in October 1803 the exasperated tsar recalled his ambassador, leaving only Peter von Oubril as chargé d’affaires in Paris. Relations with every country in Europe were about to be placed under even greater strain.
In October 1803 the police arrested a number of royalists, an advance party in a plot to assassinate Bonaparte. Ambushes laid along the Normandy coast to intercept the second wave came to nothing, as British ships bringing them were warned off by signals from land. Those already arrested were condemned to death by a military court, and faced with the firing squad one of them confessed that Cadoudal was in Paris. Another revealed that Pichegru was on his way; the plan was to assassinate Bonaparte and stage a simultaneous rising in Paris, whereupon a Bourbon prince would come and, with Moreau’s support, re-establish the monarc
hy. Pichegru reached France on 16 January 1804, accompanied by an aide to Artois, the marquis de Rivière, and Prince Jules de Polignac. He made his way to Paris, where on 28 January he had the first of several meetings with Moreau.10
Réal, who was in charge of the police in Paris, was scouring the city while Lavalette, now head of the postal service, kept his cabinet noir, the interception unit, busy reading suspect letters. Bonaparte’s correspondence over the last month of 1803 and the first two of 1804 reveals a murky world of espionage and counter-espionage as his intelligence sources followed the movements of plotters and double agents. The British consul in Munich, Francis Drake, his counterpart in Hamburg, George Rumbold, and the royalist in the pay of Russia and Britain, d’Antraigues, currently in Dresden, handled agents in Paris, some of them in Josephine’s entourage. Some of these were double agents, feeding disinformation supplied by Bonaparte. He monitored the situation, ordering the arrest of this one, the tracking of that one and the interrogation of a third, as he and Réal gradually made sense of what was going on.11
On 8 February, Cadoudal’s servant Picot was picked up, and under interrogation confirmed his master’s presence in Paris. Réal was certain that Pichegru was also in the capital and in touch with Moreau. At a meeting of his privy council on the night of 14–15 February, Bonaparte decided to act. The following morning, as he sat by the fireside in Josephine’s bedroom with Hortense’s baby son Napoléon-Charles on his knees, he suddenly said, ‘Do you know what I have just done? I have given the order for the arrest of Moreau.’ Josephine burst into tears. He got up, went over to her and, taking her chin in his hand, asked her whether she was afraid. She replied that she was only afraid of what people would say. She was right to be. The news of Moreau’s arrest caused outrage in many quarters, particularly the army. Some jumped to the conclusion that the talk of conspiracy was no more than a ploy to incriminate Moreau. Few remembered that it was he who had covered up Pichegru’s treachery after he had betrayed the positions and strengths of the army under his command to the Austrians in 1795.12
In a letter to Bonaparte, Moreau admitted his involvement in the plot, and explained that he had not committed himself to it since he thought it unlikely to succeed. He had been playing a waiting game, keeping his options open, as ready to assume the role of dictator if the royalists were to succeed in assassinating Bonaparte as to play that of a ‘Monck’ in the Bourbon cause. But unless Moreau could be definitively implicated in a conspiracy, the first consul would be viewed as a vindictive tyrant bent on eliminating a potential rival. The police combed the city for the evidence that would vindicate him.13
This came with the arrest two weeks later of Pichegru, whom the police had finally managed to locate, and on 4 March of Polignac and Rivière. On the evening of 9 March, Cadoudal too was arrested, with the help of a crowd of bystanders after a dramatic chase through the streets of Paris. That brought to forty the number behind bars, and people accepted that there really was a conspiracy. The persistence of these royalists in their determination to overthrow the state caused public opinion to swing back in support of the first consul. Police reports stressed the ‘universal joy’ expressed by the inhabitants of Paris. But that was not to be the end of the matter.14
On 1 March Bonaparte had received a report from a double agent which identified the ‘royal prince’ who was behind the conspiracy as Louis de Bourbon, duc d’Enghien, the thirty-two-year-old grandson of the prince de Condé, who had commanded the counter-revolutionary forces at Koblenz. After that army had been dissolved he had settled at Ettenheim in Baden, just across the Rhine. When questioned, Cadoudal confirmed that the conspiracy hinged on the arrival on French soil of a royal prince to act as figurehead, though he could not specify which one. Enghien seemed the obvious candidate. His connection to the conspiracy appeared to be confirmed by a report that a number of people had joined him at Ettenheim, including General Dumouriez, who had deserted the Revolution and gone over to the enemy in 1793, and a ‘Lieutenant Smith’, who was assumed to be the British agent Spencer Smith (the pronunciation of the German informers had turned a General Thumery and the prince’s equerry Schmitt into the more dangerous Dumouriez and Smith).
That evening Bonaparte conferred with Cambacérès, Talleyrand, Réal and the chief of the department of the haute police Pierre Desmarest. He was on edge, complaining that he felt like a hunted dog; for the past few months there had been talk only of conspiracy. According to his secretary Méneval, by January 1804 he was gripped by ‘anxiety, agitation and painful insomnia’. Desmarest records that when Réal informed him that Pichegru was in Paris and Moreau was involved, Bonaparte surreptitiously made the sign of the cross. He knew that Pichegru and Cadoudal were prepared to risk their lives in order to take his, and he was convinced that the British cabinet was not just supporting them with funds but actively plotting his murder, as he believed they had that of Tsar Paul I. Various Jacobins were restive too, and one police informer had reported at the beginning of December that ‘terrible’ things were being said ‘against him up there’. Even the Russian chargé d’affaires was reporting to his court that ‘the conspiracy is far advanced’. Roustam, who normally slept on a camp bed in the next room, placed it across the door of Bonaparte’s bedroom (he was told off after, getting up in the night to check something in his study, his master tripped over him).15
On the afternoon of 10 March, the day after Cadoudal’s arrest, Bonaparte held another extraordinary meeting, attended by Cambacérès, Lebrun, the supreme judge Claude-Ambroise Regnier, Talleyrand, Réal, Murat and Fouché. Although at least two of those present later falsified their own part in it, there is little doubt as to what took place. In the evidence before him, Bonaparte spotted a golden opportunity to catch out all the major players and put an end to royalist plots, by having Enghien and his accomplices arrested and brought to trial. This would expose to the world the perfidy of the Bourbons and their British allies, and possibly that of Moreau. Cambacérès advised caution, but Talleyrand encouraged Bonaparte to act firmly. His personal desire to prevent a Bourbon restoration was in this case reinforced by a need to rehabilitate himself, as Bonaparte had recently been growing suspicious of his contacts with the royalists – Talleyrand always kept several options open. Fouché almost certainly backed up Bonaparte’s arguments, for much the same reasons. Later that day, Bonaparte summoned the minister of war and two generals, whom he ordered to cross the Rhine with a small detachment, seize Enghien and bring him to Paris.16
Early on the morning of 15 March the duke’s residence at Ettenheim was surrounded by French gendarmes and he was arrested. He was whisked across the border to Strasbourg and his papers sent to Bonaparte, who found in them a copy of a letter to the British ministry agreeing to serve under British orders against France, informing it that Enghien had supporters in French units stationed along the Rhine, and describing the French nation as his ‘cruellest’ enemy. Josephine attempted to plead for the prince, only to be told not to interfere, and later that day Bonaparte summoned Murat, who was military governor of Paris, instructing him to convene a military court.17
It was to sit at the fortress of Vincennes outside Paris, where Enghien arrived in a coach escorted by six mounted gendarmes at half past five on the afternoon of 20 March. That morning Bonaparte had signed an order for him to be tried by a military court on charges of having borne arms against France, of being in the pay of the British, and of involvement in a conspiracy to overthrow the French government.18
After dictating these orders, Bonaparte drove to Malmaison, where he was joined by Talleyrand. Some time later Joseph arrived from Mortefontaine, to be greeted by a worried Josephine who urged him to persuade Bonaparte to show mercy. According to Joseph, Bonaparte asked his advice, and after hearing Joseph’s pleas for the prince’s life, agreed to allow him to redeem himself by serving in the French army. This account can be safely ignored. In the afternoon, Bonaparte instructed Savary to go ahead with the trial. He also wrote to R�
�al ordering him to go to Vincennes to interrogate the prisoner beforehand.19
At eleven that evening Enghien was taken from his cell and brought before the military court. He pleaded guilty to all three charges, but asked to be allowed to see the first consul. The request was denied. The verdict was delivered at two o’clock in the morning. A grave had already been dug and a firing squad was waiting; he was led out, shot and buried.20
Savary, who had commanded the gendarmes making up the firing squad, went directly to Malmaison to report. According to him, Bonaparte was astonished that the act had been carried out so quickly, and that Réal had not been to Vincennes to question Enghien before the trial. ‘There is something I do not understand,’ he said to Savary. ‘There is something I cannot grasp … This is a crime, and one with no purpose.’ Savary’s account is probably coloured by the wish to show Bonaparte in a good light. Méneval and Cambacérès both write that he had been intending to reprieve Enghien, and Bonaparte himself in later years claimed that he had never wanted him shot. He may well have been intending a theatrical pardon, which would have left him with a bargaining chip in hand, but there is no real evidence, and all accounts of the event should be treated with the greatest suspicion.21
News that a distinguished person had been executed was spread through the city that morning by returning gendarmes and peasants from the locality of Vincennes bringing vegetables to market. When it became known who it was, royalists and aristocrats were horrified, and many would never forgive Bonaparte. But most accepted that the execution had been necessary – only a decade earlier that of an innocent monarch and his consort had been accepted as such. Most people wanted stability, not plots to overthrow the government, particularly as unemployment and the price of bread were both low. There was little sympathy for the Bourbons and their supporters, who, being in the pay of the British enemy in wartime, were seen as traitors. Many of those who were saddened by the execution actually felt sorry for Bonaparte, assuming that he had been regretfully obliged to carry out an act of severity.22
Napoleon Page 41