The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  Napoleon rose early the following morning and sent a letter to the Council of Elders summoning them to an urgent meeting. Then he invited all the top generals to secure their support or at least their neutrality. Bernadotte alone came in civilian clothes and told him he wanted no part in the conspiracy. The military governor of Paris, General Lefevre, who had the key control of the army units stationed in the capital, asked whether Barras was part of the coup; Napoleon lied that he was. Gohier however refused to be summoned by Napoleon, who intended to place him under arrest.

  At the Council of Elders, Sieyès persuaded the majority to move to the Palace of St Cloud, which he knew could be surrounded and intimidated by Napoleon’s soldiers. Napoleon himself went to the Council of Elders and solemnly swore to uphold the Republic: he was appointed commander-in-chief of all units in the Paris area. He immediately went to address the troops and furiously attacked the Directory for undermining the army.

  Gohier, the leader of the Directory and Jean Moulin, the fifth member, who was loyal to him, went to the Tuileries to confront Napoleon. The general bluntly told them that Sieyès and Ducos had resigned, as well as Barras, another lie, so that the Directory had been dissolved. When Gohier refused to resign he ordered both men placed under house arrest. Meanwhile two other conspirators, Talleyrand and Admiral Bruix, arrived at Barras’s house to inform him that all the other members of the Directory had resigned, and demanded his own resignation. Talleyrand had been given 2 million francs to bribe Barras to resign. There are conflicting accounts as to whether the money was paid, or whether Talleyrand simply pocketed it (or paid Barras half a million and took the rest, as some suggested). Barras resigned without a fuss.

  So far the conspiracy had worked like clockwork. But on the following day Napoleon travelled to St Cloud to find the palace still being prepared for the crucial sitting of the Assembly. Desperately worried, he paced up and down in an upstairs room. Outside, a handful of veterans formed a palace guard to protect the parliamentary sitting. Before them, Murat had drawn up 6,000 men loyal to Napoleon.

  The Elders did not meet until 3.30, when the resignation of the Directors was announced. It was proposed that a new Directory be elected. Napoleon was appalled: he had been counting on the Elders to set up a committee to draw up a new constitution. It seemed the representatives were beginning to understand that a coup was in the making – and that it was being organized by their supposed saviour, Napoleon himself. Napoleon could stand their prevarications no longer, and illegally broke into the sitting. He declared: ‘You are at the edge of a volcano. Let us save at all costs the two things for which we have sacrificed so much, liberty and equality.’

  ‘What about the constitution?’ heckled one of the Elders.

  The constitution, Napoleon told them, was no longer required. Conspiracies were being hatched in its name. ‘I know all about the dangers that threaten you.’ ‘Name the conspirators,’ shouted another delegate. Napoleon blurted out another falsehood, that Barras and Moulin had been inviting him to place himself at the head of their conspiracy. He was now thrashing around, red-faced with the effort of lying as the parliamentarians interrupted him: he was no orator, except to obediently silent troops.

  He began to bluster angrily and almost incoherently: ‘I shall preserve you from dangers surrounded by my comrades in arms. Grenadiers, I see your bearskins and bayonets . . . With them I have founded republics . . . If some orator in the pay of a foreign power should propose to outlaw me, may the lightning of war instantly crush him! If he proposed to outlaw me, I should call on you, my brave companions in arms! Remember, that I march accompanied by the god of victory and the god of fortune.’ An angry murmur of dissent spread through the room and Napoleon strode out, having made a fool of himself and endangered his coup.

  He strode over to the chamber in which the popular assembly, the Five Hundred, were sitting. As soon as he arrived his arm was grabbed by a Jacobin member. ‘How dare you. Leave at once. You are violating the sanctuary of the law.’ There were shouts of ‘Kill him’ and ‘Get out’. Then a general cry arose, ‘Hors la loi!’ – ‘Outlaw’ – a charge which if it stuck would condemn Napoleon to death. The two guards accompanying Napoleon were seized and held and Napoleon himself shaken as the deputies surged towards him. It was a scene that recalled the fall of Robespierre.

  Pale and trembling with shock, Napoleon was rescued by five guards who broke into the chamber. When he emerged his face was streaked with blood, allegedly from the attacks of his assailants, although it seems more likely that Napoleon himself scratched his face, which was pockmarked with acne sores, for dramatic effect. Lucien Napoleon as president of the Assembly succeeded at last in getting the Five Hundred to quieten down. Meanwhile Napoleon, frustrated in his attempt to secure a constitutional coup, had now decided that brute force was his only solution. He mounted his horse and rode to Murat’s troops, the blood still on his face, and ordered a detachment to bring Lucien to him.

  When his brother arrived he addressed Murat’s forces. The majority of the Assembly, Lucien declared, being as accomplished a liar as his brother, were being terrorized by a minority armed with knives in the pay of England, and had tried to kill Napoleon. Then he urged the palace guards outside to break in and remove them. Brandishing a sword, Lucien pointed at Napoleon theatrically and swore that he would kill him ‘if he ever interferes with the freedom of Frenchmen’. The men could see deputies hanging out of the window of the chamber calling for Napoleon to be arrested as an outlaw.

  What persuaded the guards more than Lucien’s rhetoric was fear of Murat’s 6,000 troops outside, who could overwhelm them in an instant. There Generals Augereau and Jourdan had been urging the troops in vain to have nothing to do with the coup. The ordinary soldiers disarmed the largely honorific Assembly guard and filed into the chamber, ordering the deputies out. When they refused, their commander ordered his men to clear them out by force and the deputies at last got the message: most escaped by the windows.

  Soon afterwards Lucien rounded up eighty deputies drinking in nearby taverns, a quorum, and at 2 a.m. they formally dissolved the Directory and set up a triumvirate of consuls to govern France consisting of Napoleon, Sieyès and his henchman Ducos. Committees were set up to draft a new constitution. Napoleon went to swear an oath of loyalty to the Republic before the Elders. No one was fooled: it was a military coup d’état secured by force, with only the thinnest veneer of constitutionalism. True, Napoleon had to share his power with Sieyès. But what the wily abbé failed to understand was that his authority depended entirely on force, and Napoleon provided the force: Sieyès in reality was the junior member of the two.

  Still, Napoleon had to go through the necessary formalities of entrenching his power. He agreed to settle down with Sieyès, Ducos merely acting as an observer, to draw up a new constitution to replace the one just overthrown. So it was that France’s youngest general, a thirty-year-old with a distinguished military record in Italy and a largely disastrous one in Egypt and Syria, a man who had abandoned his army and his countrymen to certain defeat and presided over the annihilation of his fleet, seized power in France by force on 9 November 1799, a dramatic day that was to change the world. He had proved himself a skilled general, although not by any means France’s best. He had become adept, however, in taking advantage of the divisions within France’s government to suit his own purposes, and in seizing the opportunity that his concentration of military force outside the Assembly had allowed him.

  Even so, it had been a shabby seizure of power by armed men from the constitutional representatives of the nation. None observing that crude putsch could have believed that the future of Europe was now radically to change. For up to then, France seemed to be gradually settling down to constitutional rule, and the expensive revolutionary war might even have been winding down. By contrast Napoleon, as a military strongman, was committed to an expansionist continuation of the war with a ferocity, determination and ambition few who had not witne
ssed his Egyptian and Syrian campaigns could have foreseen.

  It is possible that the great European war might at last have fizzled out around the turn of the century had the Directory or some kind of constitutional successor remained in power. Napoleon’s seizure of power was to prolong it for a further sixteen years, with two deceptive pauses – more than twice as long as it had already lasted – and cause immeasurable suffering to the peoples of Europe.

  The final step in Napoleon’s accession to supreme power had yet to be taken. Napoleon appointed his closest associates to senior posts: Talleyrand became minister for foreign affairs, Fouché minister of police, Berthier minister of war and Murat commander of the constitutional guard – Napoleon’s own personal force. Masséna was appointed commander of the army in Italy and MacDonald commander of the Army of the Reserve. All of these men were allies of Napoleon, but they were also substantial figures in their own right and to some extent were a check on his absolutism: at this stage Napoleon was merely first among equals. Moreover he was forced to retain the highly professional General Moreau, whom he deeply distrusted.

  Napoleon’s immediate priority was to be rid of the Abbé Sieyès, who considered himself the real ruler of France. After weeks of fruitless discussion on the shape of the new constitution, led by Sieyès who favoured a system of checks and balances and powerful assemblies, Napoleon urged Sieyès to resign. He stood down as a consul, and was then out-argued by the tireless Napoleon in the committee at the beginning of December. Napoleon cunningly adopted the form of the Sieyès plan, setting up no fewer than four assemblies – a legislature of 300 members, a senate of sixty, a tribunate of a hundred and a council of state with some thirty to forty members. In fact these more or less nullified each other: the ministers were to be responsible to the consul, not to these talking shops.

  On 12 December the constitution was finally approved. Sieyès, supported by his partner, was given the honorific job of proposing Napoleon as First Consul. Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, a forty-six-year-old Napoleonic loyalist who in theory represented the Jacobin interest, was fellow consul: he was an imposing looking and verbose lawyer, a carefully groomed bachelor whose saying was ‘a country is governed by good dinner parties’, of which his own were among the best in Paris. Charles Lebrun, a sixty-year-old economist who had served under Louis XVI in the finance ministry, was chosen as a sop to the royalists, thus balancing the two major political factions. In fact Lebrun turned out to be a brilliant financier and Napoleon came to depend on him as his chief economic adviser.

  Napoleon submitted the constitution to a plebiscite – perhaps the first dictator in history to wield this traditional prop of absolutism, so that he could claim that his authority derived not from divine right, or nomination by the oligarchy, or the use of force, but from the people – and this could not be overturned by his political rivals. The result would have brought a flush of envy to the cheeks of many a twentieth-century dictator: 3,011,007 votes were cast in favour to just 1,562 votes against – 97 per cent of the vote to 3 per cent. In Paris the result was 12,440 votes to just 10 against. Half a million votes had been cast by the army en masse without the formality of a ballot, while up and down the country votes were registered by show of hands at public meetings. This was responsible for around half the votes cast in favour. Nevertheless a colossal 6 million Frenchmen did not vote at all: the First Consul thus secured only 17 per cent of the real vote. Napoleon was now a one-man ruler under the constitution, through the wielding of force, through nomination by the oligarchy and now – in theory at least – through popular plebiscite. It was a formidable combination.

  Napoleon’s assumption of power represented the end of the revolutionary process that had begun in 1789 and had lasted exactly a decade. France had undergone a brief period of constitutional monarchy, followed by mob rule, Jacobin terror, collective leadership and now dictatorship. The Revolution had turned full circle. France was now under the control again of a one-man ruler – although unlike the hereditary Bourbons he represented a new moneyed class that had emerged from the ashes of the Revolution. The revolutionary ideals of the Jacobins were to be trampled into the ground, along with virtually all the principles so vigorously asserted during the Revolution.

  Equality also was to go by the board: for Napoleon began almost immediately to acquire the trappings of a monarch and a court, in contravention of his professed beliefs in meritocracy. It seemed that the founding of a new dynasty was not far away either. For all his revolutionary pretensions, as soon as he had absolute power, he began to re-establish absolutism – with him as the monarch. Ironically his most dangerous opponents during the early years of the regime were not to be the Jacobins and radicals but the supporters of the previous dynasty, to whom Napoleon was a mere usurper. Napoleon’s response to those who were to accuse him merely of installing another absolutism was that he had modernized the system. It will be seen to what extent that claim was justified.

  Napoleon’s first priority, as befitted a man whose entire career had been a military one, was to turn the tide of war. This was crucial to establishing his legitimacy. He had been chosen as a strongman to end the corruption, muddle and alleged maladministration of the Directory; but if he could not guide France to victory in war, the choice of a general to lead France would be fatally undermined.

  Chapter 40

  MARENGO

  In Britain, Pitt and Grenville, those most intractable of France’s enemies, had enjoyed a year of respite. The threat of invasion had been lifted from Britain’s shores with Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile and Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. His failures there had coincided with Russia’s entry into the war in alliance with Britain. The Austrian chancellor, Baron Johann Thugut, had advised Emperor Francis to approve a Russian expeditionary force commanded by the legendary Marshal Alexander Souvorov. With skill and speed Souvorov soon expelled France from almost all of northern Italy – which helped to put Napoleon’s much vaunted Italian campaign in perspective. Conquering Italy was not as hard as it looked. Others were capable of similar feats. Archduke Charles, Austria’s best general, had driven the French back in southern Germany and northern Switzerland. Then, as we have seen, the pendulum swung back: the capable Masséna turned the tables at Zurich. By the end of the year the ‘mad Tsar’, Paul, had decided to abandon the coalition.

  Napoleon meanwhile began frantically to train his men for an offensive against the Austrians: to fund the expedition he resorted to robber-baron tactics, arresting the fabulously wealthy banker Gabriel Ourard for treason, then pardoning him when he paid ransom money in the shape of a colossal loan. Napoleon’s immediate goal was to defeat the two Austrian armies of General Kray in Germany and General Mélas in Italy. Each of these was around 100,000-men strong; after that he intended to occupy Vienna.

  Napoleon engaged in a new initiative – mobilizing, equipping artillery corps and restoring the National Guard under Junot. He also created the army corps – virtually independent armies consisting of two infantry divisions, a division of light cavalry, artillery batteries and a corps of engineers that could act almost self-sufficiently and autonomously. The First Consul assembled part of the Army of the Reserve under Berthier around Dijon which would reinforce each of France’s two main armies – Moreau’s 120,000-strong Army of the Rhine and Masséna’s smaller Army of Italy, with 36,000 men, which was operating between the Alps and the coast.

  Napoleon concocted a fantastically complex and ambitious strategy, the result of his over-promotion from commanding relatively small armies in Italy and Egypt to command of all France’s armies: he brought Moreau’s army together into a single corps to engage Kray, while the Army of the Rhine and part of the Reserve would make a dash through Switzerland on the southern flank and then veer north to capture Vienna. If Mélas’s army tried to obstruct the latter, the Army of the Rhine would attack. Napoleon’s strategy was, however, dangerously over-elaborate.

  Moreau, who regarded himself as Napoleo
n’s equal as a commander, refused and insisted that he should command the whole army in an offensive against the central front; he guessed rightly that Napoleon was trying to cut him down to size. That discomfited Napoleon, who decided to attack principally across northern Italy. Unfortunately, the Austrians had come to precisely the same conclusion: fearing that any offensive along the Rhine would run into stiff French resistance, they decided to go for a southern strategy: a surprise attack under Mélas was staged against Masséna’s forces.

  The Austrian general succeeded in splitting the French army. Masséna was left stranded in Genoa with just four weeks’ rations for his 10,000 men. The other 18,000 men were pushed beyond the Var river. The British fleet, meanwhile, blockaded Genoa. Masséna’s days looked numbered. Mélas now intended to invade France through Provence. Meanwhile Moreau was holding back from launching his long-expected northern offensive.

  At that stage, with his armies in trouble in Italy to the south and apparently blocked in the north, Napoleon himself decided to take charge of the Army of the Reserve which had moved to Geneva and, which Berthier had shown little skill in commanding. On 6 May 1800, Napoleon travelled to Geneva to take charge of 50,000 troops. Desaix, the hero of the Egyptian campaign, had just arrived and was ordered to join the First Consul. Napoleon’s new strategy was both simple and brilliant: to launch an unexpected assault over the Alpine passes into Italy and attack the Austrians where they least expected it – in the rear.

  To the north, Moreau had at last staged an offensive in late April, defeating Kray at Moskirch and forcing him into Ulm. Masséna was still holding out on half rations, which permitted Napoleon to launch what was to become his trademark manoeuvre ‘sur les derrières’ – a descent on the Austrians through the Alps. On 15 May he launched his attack across the Brenner Pass. Although this was no Hannibal-style achievement, it was difficult enough, and Napoleon skilfully sent armies through smaller passes to deceive the Austrians.