On November 6 both chambers of the legislature threw a subscription banquet of seven hundred covers in honour of Napoleon and General Moreau in the church of St-Sulpice – renamed the Temple of Victory in the Revolution – whose cavernous dimensions resemble a cathedral and whose towers were so high that they were used by the government for semaphore. With its black walls and acoustics designed to turn words into echoing incantations, it was perhaps the last place to choose for such a vast dinner on a cold November night, though the place has an undeniable majesty. Most of political France was there, but not Bernadotte, who (so Barras claimed) refused to put his name to the subscription ‘until Bonaparte has satisfactorily explained the reasons which have caused him to forsake his army’, adding: ‘I do not care to dine in the company of a plague-carrier.’36 It was said that Napoleon ‘ate nothing but eggs’ at the dinner, for fear of being poisoned by the Directory, and left early.37 In his speech he concentrated on the importance of unity between Frenchmen, a safe enough theme to which he would return repeatedly in the coming weeks and months.
Otherwise, of all the many people who asked to throw dinners in his honour after he returned from Egypt, almost the only invitation Napoleon accepted was from Cambacérès, whom he said he ‘esteemed greatly’.38 A fat, flamboyant, homosexual gastronome and epicurean, Cambacérès came from a distinguished Montpellier legal family. He had voted for the execution of Louis XVI, but only should the Austrians invade. He was one of the few lawyers Napoleon liked, and was to become with Duroc his closest and most trusted advisor. ‘He had great conversational powers,’ recalled Laure d’Abrantès, ‘and his narratives acquired novelty and grace from the turn of his language … He bore … the character of the ablest civilian in the country.’39 She also added that he was ‘extraordinarily ugly … long nose, long chin, and yellow skin’. Cambacérès sought influence rather than power and never the limelight, and he was later allowed to express private opposition to what Napoleon did because his loyalty was unquestionable. (Napoleon wasn’t a bigot; besides his closeness to Cambacérès he made the openly homosexual Joseph Fiévée prefect of the Nièvre department, where he and his lifelong partner deeply shocked the locals.)
Cambacérès’ judgement of both men and measures was exemplary. ‘The only two people who could calm Bonaparte’s rages were Cambacérès and Josephine,’ recalled a minister. ‘The former made sure never to rush or contradict this impetuous character. That would have been to push him to ever-greater fury; but he let him get on with his rage; he gave him time to dictate the most iniquitous edicts, and waited with wisdom and patience for the moment when this fit of anger had finally blown over to make some observations to him.’40 For all the ‘grace’ of his narratives, Cambacérès also had a broader side to his humour. After news of one of Napoleon’s victories arrived during a dinner and Josephine announced to the table that they had ‘vaincu’ (vanquished), Cambacérès pretended that she had meant ‘vingt culs’ (twenty bottoms) and quipped: ‘Now we must choose!’ Later in his reign Napoleon tried to persuade Cambacérès to stop taking so many drugs, but conceded that ‘these are the habits of a confirmed bachelor (vieux garçon)’ and didn’t insist.41 So great was Napoleon’s trust in Cambacérès that he allowed him to run France during his absences on campaigns, a confidence returned by Cambacérès’ daily reports to him on every conceivable subject.
Two separate stages of the coup were planned. On Day One, which was originally intended to be Thursday, November 7 (16 Brumaire), 1799, Napoleon would attend a specially called session of the upper house, the Elders, where it sat at the Tuileries, to inform them that because of British-backed plots and neo-Jacobin threats, the Republic was in danger, so they must authorize that the next day’s meeting of both the Elders and the lower house, the Five Hundred, should be held 7 miles west of Paris in the former Bourbon palace of Saint-Cloud. Primed by Sieyès, the Elders would appoint Napoleon as commander of all the troops in the 17th military district (i.e. Paris). That same day Sieyès and Ducos would resign from the Directory, and Barras, Gohier and Moulin would be prevailed upon to resign also by a judicious mixture of threats and bribery, leaving a power vacuum. Then, on Day Two, Napoleon would go to Saint-Cloud and persuade the legislature that in view of the national emergency, the Constitution of the Year III must be repealed and a new one established replacing the Directory with a three-man executive government called – with fittingly Roman overtones – the Consulate, comprising Sieyès, Ducos and himself, with elections to be held thereafter for new representative assemblies that Sieyès had been formulating. Sieyès believed he had the Elders under control. If the Five Hundred baulked at abolishing themselves, their newly elected president, Lucien, would dissolve the body.
The flaws in the plan were glaring. A two-day coup might lose the conspirators the all-important initiative, yet without the move to Saint-Cloud it was feared that the deputies on the Left would be able to raise the Parisian faubourgs and Sections in defence of the Constitution of the Year III, and fighting in central Paris could wreck the chances of success. The second problem was to keep the coup secret to prevent Barras, Gohier and Moulin from taking counter-measures, while still bribing successfully enough of the Elders to assure a positive vote on the motion to move the session to Saint-Cloud.
The first thing to go wrong was that the whole coup had to be put back forty-eight hours when some key Elders – ‘these imbeciles’ as Napoleon called them – started baulking at the whole prospect at the last moment and needed to be reassured.42 ‘I’m leaving them some time to convince them that I can do without them,’ Napoleon said optimistically, employing the two days usefully in persuading Jourdan not to stymie the coup even if he couldn’t support it. When the officer corps of the Paris garrison asked to be presented to Napoleon, he told them to attend on him at 6 a.m. on November 9, the new Day One.
On the night of the 7th he dined with Bernadotte and his family at the rue Cisalpine, along with Jourdan and Moreau, trying to put the three generals’ minds at rest about the coming events. Bernadotte, who had married Napoleon’s former fiancée (and Joseph’s sister-in-law) Désirée Clary while Napoleon was in Egypt, was deeply sceptical, and watched the coup from the sidelines, telling Napoleon: ‘You’ll be guillotined,’ to which Napoleon ‘coldly’ replied, ‘We’ll see.’43 Moreau, by contrast, agreed to help by arresting the Directors at the Luxembourg Palace on Day One, whereas Jourdan stuck to his policy merely not to hinder the coup. (His republicanism meant that he was never truly reconciled to Napoleon, and was later the only one of the twenty-six marshals of the Empire not to be ennobled by him.)44
On November 8, the day before the coup, Napoleon revealed the plot to Colonel Horace Sébastiani, who had been wounded at Dego and had fought at Arcole; he promised that the 9th Dragoon regiment would be at Napoleon’s disposal the next morning. Napoleon dined that night with Cambacérès at the ministry of justice and was reported to be extremely relaxed, singing a favourite revolutionary song, the ‘Pont-Neuf’, that his entourage said he only sang when ‘his spirit was tranquil and heart satisfied’.45 Of course he might well have been putting on a show for his fellow conspirators and been secretly nerve-wracked, as he had implied in his letter to Roederer comparing himself to ‘a woman giving birth’.
At 6 a.m. on the cold and grey morning of November 9 (18 Brumaire), 1799, sixty officers of the 17th District and adjutants of the National Guard assembled in the courtyard of the house at rue de la Victoire. Dressed in civilian clothes, Napoleon ‘explained to them in a forcible manner the desperate situation of the Republic, and asked of them a testimony of devotion to his person, with an oath of allegiance to the two chambers’.46 It was a smart move to suggest that he was in fact protecting the chambers even while he was in the very process of abolishing them.
Meanwhile, at the Tuileries, Sieyès’ influence ensured that all the necessary decrees were passed by the Elders by 8 a.m., including the one appointing Napoleon commander of the 17th District and the Nati
onal Guard, although technically that appointment lay with the war minister, who reported to the Directory, rather than with the Elders.47 A second decree stated that the Elders had changed the venue of their session from the Tuileries to Saint-Cloud ‘to restore domestic peace’, and ordered Parisians to ‘be calm’, stating that ‘in a short time, the presence of the Legislative Body will be returned to you’.48 Those members of the Elders likely to oppose the decree simply weren’t given proper notice of the extraordinary (and extraordinarily early) meeting, one of the oldest tricks in politics. Failing to spot what was going on, Gohier gullibly countersigned the Saint-Cloud decree.
On receiving the news of his appointment by the Elders, Napoleon changed into his general’s uniform and rode to the Tuileries, arriving at 10 a.m., where he found Sébastiani and his dragoons. The new war minister, the neo-Jacobin Edmond Dubois de Crancé, had specifically forbidden any troop movements in the capital without his personal order ‘under pain of death’, but this was simply ignored. Napoleon was received with great ceremony in the Elders’ chamber and delivered another speech calling for national unity, which was well received. ‘You are the wisdom of the nation,’ he flattered them, ‘it’s up to you to indicate the measures in these circumstances that can save our country. I come here, surrounded by all the generals, to promise you all their support. I name General Lefebvre as my lieutenant. I will faithfully carry out the mission you have entrusted to me. No attempt should be made to look in the past for examples of what is happening: nothing in history resembles the end of the 18th century.’49 Hard-headed and brave, François-Joseph Lefebvre was a miller’s son who had been a sergeant at the outbreak of the Revolution and had fought in Belgium and Germany; reassuringly, he seemed to personify the republican virtues.
As Napoleon rode past the Place de la Révolution that evening, where Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Danton, Babeuf, the Robespierre brothers and so many others had been guillotined, he is said to have remarked to his co-conspirators: ‘Tomorrow we’ll either sleep at the Luxembourg, or we’ll finish up here.’50
On Day Two, November 10 (19 Brumaire), Napoleon was up at 4 a.m. and rode out to Saint-Cloud. Meanwhile, over at the Luxembourg Palace, Gohier was woken by a message from Josephine taken personally by Eugène, inviting him and his wife to breakfast at 8 a.m., where they would have been put under house-arrest had they accepted. Dubois de Crancé had accused Napoleon of plotting a coup, but Gohier refused to believe the rumours as he had spoken to his police minister asking the news, and Fouché had replied: ‘New? Nothing, in truth.’51 Gohier was not so naive as to be convinced and sent his wife, a friend of Josephine’s, to the breakfast in his stead. Lavalette recorded that Josephine had to ‘work upon Madame Gohier’s alarm to obtain her husband’s submission’.52
Moreau arrived at the Luxembourg later that morning and subverted the palace guard; he arrested Barras, Gohier and Moulin and demanded their resignations as Directors. Barras was persuaded by Talleyrand and Bruix, who offered him a deal whereby he kept his large estate and all the proceeds from his many years of peculation at the top of government.53 Gohier and Moulin held out for over twenty-four hours, but signed the next day.* Talleyrand was characteristically profiting from the situation. When Napoleon years later asked him how he had made his fortune, he insouciantly replied ‘Nothing simpler; I bought rentes [government securities] on the 17th Brumaire and sold them on the 19th.’54
At Saint-Cloud Napoleon addressed the Elders, but it was an unimpressive oratorical performance which reads better than it apparently sounded:
You are on a volcano. The Republic no longer has a government; the Directory has been dissolved, the factions are agitating; the time to make a decision has arrived. You have summoned me and my companions-in-arms to aid your wisdom, but time is precious. We must decide. I know that we speak of Caesar, of Cromwell, as if the present time could be compared to past times. No, I want only the safety of the Republic, and to support the decisions that you are going to take.55
He referred to his grenadiers, ‘whose caps I see at the doors of this chamber’, and called on them to tell the Elders ‘Have I ever deceived you? Have I ever betrayed my promises, when, in the camps, in the midst of privations, I promised you victory and plenty, and when, at your head, I led you from success to success? Tell them now: was it for my interests or for those of the Republic?’ Of course he got a cheer from the troops, but then a member of the Elders named Linglet stood up, and said loudly: ‘General, we applaud what you say; therefore swear obedience with us to the Constitution of Year III, that is the only thing now that can maintain the Republic.’ These words produced ‘a great silence’: Napoleon had been caught in a trap. He collected himself for a moment, and said: ‘The Constitution of Year III you have no more: you violated it on 18 Fructidor, when the government made an attempt on the independence of the legislature.’ He then reminded them of the Prairial coup, arguing that since the constitution had been ‘violated, we need a new pact, new guarantees’, failing to point out that one of the senior instigators of Fructidor had been himself.56
Receiving a reasonably respectful audience from the Elders, and bolstered by his comrades outside, Napoleon then walked the hundred yards or so up the slight incline to where the Five Hundred were meeting in the palace Orangery. There he received a very different reception. The interval between Day One and Day Two had given the opposition time to organize to try to block the provisional Consulate that Napoleon and Lucien were about to propose. The Five Hundred included many more neo-Jacobins than the Elders and was twice the size; it was always going to be far harder to convince. At the very start of their session, which had also begun at noon, its members had taken a roll-call pledge of loyalty to the Constitution of the Year III.57 Lucien, Boulay and all the Bonapartists were forced to pledge their allegiance in their alphabetical turn, to catcalls from the neo-Jacobins at their hypocrisy. These pledges allowed deputies to make short speeches about the glories of the constitution that were listened to by their guards.
When Napoleon arrived with fellow officers and other troops, the younger deputies of the Left professed themselves outraged at seeing men in uniform at the door of a democratic chamber. Napoleon entered on his own and had to stride half-way into the room to reach the rostrum, in the course of which deputies started to shout at him. An eyewitness, the neo-Jacobin Jean-Adrien Bigonnet, heard Napoleon shouting back: ‘I want no more factionalism, this must finish; I want no more of it!’58 Bigonnet recalled: ‘I confess that the tone of authority coming from a leader of the armed forces in the presence of the disposers of legitimate power made me indignant … This feeling of danger was apparent on almost every face.’ Napoleon has been described as ‘pale, emotional, hesitating’ and as soon as he looked like he might be in physical danger, Lefebvre and four tall grenadiers armed with swords – one was over six-foot even without his bearskin – stepped into the room to surround him, which only infuriated the deputies more.59
‘Down with the tyrant!’ the deputies started to yell, ‘Cromwell!’, ‘Tyrant!’, ‘Down with the dictator!’, ‘Hors la loi!’ (Outlaw!)60 These cries had dangerous overtones for the conspirators because during the Terror – which had only ended five years earlier – the outlawing of someone had often been a precursor to their execution, and the cry ‘À bas le dictateur!’ had last been heard when Robespierre was stepping up onto the scaffold. Lucien tried to establish order, banging his presidential gavel and shouting for silence, but by then several of the deputies had come down from their seats into the main body of the Orangery and had started to push, shake, boo, jostle and slap Napoleon, some grabbing him by his high brocaded collar, so that Lefebvre and the grenadiers had to place themselves between him and the outraged deputies.61
Lavalette had been sent to the Orangery chamber earlier in the day to report to Napoleon everything that was happening there, and he recalled how Napoleon ‘was so pressed between the deputies, his staff, and the grenadiers … that I thought for a mome
nt he would be smothered. He could neither advance nor go back.’62 Eventually Napoleon was hustled out of the Orangery, with Grenadier Thomé’s sleeve getting torn in the scuffle. ‘He managed to get down to the courtyard,’ recalled Lavalette, ‘mounted his horse at the foot of the staircase, and sent an order for Lucien to come out to him. At this point the windows of the chamber were flung open and members of the Five Hundred pointed at him still shouting “Down with the dictator!” and “Outlaw!” ’63 Another eyewitness, the deputy Théophile Berlier, related how ‘After his retreat, followed by a great commotion to which was added several shouts of “Outlaw”, his brother Lucien, appearing at the tribune to justify him, couldn’t be heard; such that, stung, and having taken off the uniform of his post, he left the room.’64 Some deputies tried physically to hold Lucien down in the president’s chair in order to keep the continued session technically lawful while they put the motion to outlaw Napoleon, but grenadiers managed to get him out of the Orangery too.65
Talleyrand’s secretary, Montrond, later told Roederer of Napoleon’s ‘sudden pallor’ when he heard the motion that the Five Hundred were voting on.66 Yet this testimony is doubtful, as Talleyrand and Montrond only observed the events at a distance, from the palace’s pavilion.67 Collot was there too, with 10,000 francs in cash on him in case things went wrong. Sieyès – who was closer to events, although he had a carriage and six horses at the ready too – kept his head, and argued that anyone declaring Napoleon an outlaw was himself by definition an outlaw, which was just the kind of rationale used during the Terror about defenders of aristocrats, but which, for all its lack of logic, encouraged the conspirators.68
Napoleon has been accused of dithering for as long as half an hour after his expulsion from the Orangery. Lavalette believed this to have been the most dangerous moment of all, for if ‘a general of some reputation had put himself at the head of the troops of the interior’ – Augereau, say, or Jourdan, or Bernadotte – ‘it would be difficult to guess what might have happened’.69 Did Napoleon lose his nerve on 19 Brumaire, as some have alleged, accusing him of cowardice, and even of fainting and having to be carried out by his bodyguards?70 The manhandling must have been off-putting, but hardly much compared to being stabbed in the thigh by a pike or seeing one’s aide-de-camp killed by a cannonball. ‘I’d rather talk to soldiers than to lawyers,’ he said of the Five Hundred the next day. ‘I am not accustomed to assemblies; it may come in time.’71
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