Moreau was far more representative of the mainstream French army than Napoleon who was junior to him as an officer and had a smaller following in the army (quite apart from being a Corsican compared to Moreau’s well-established mainland background). Moreau saw himself as a potential dictator in place of Napoleon, rather than as a stalking horse for a new King. When he let this be known, the royalists Pichegru and Cadoudal were horrified.
At the end of January 1804 a double agent tipped off Napoleon’s supporters as to the arrival of the conspirators in Paris . A suspected conspirator, Dr Querelle, was arrested, tortured and threatened with execution; he broke down and revealed the addresses of the safe houses where Cadoudal had stayed, as well as confirming the existence of the plot. A servant of Cadoudal was captured at one of the safe houses and tortured, revealing his master’s current whereabouts, but the bird had flown before the police arrived.
Finally Moreau was arrested in early February, which proved easy enough as his movements were public knowledge. Pichegru was then captured in his hideout at the end of the same month, after a fierce struggle. Cadoudal himself, after a spectacular chase in a coach, shot the two policemen following him and then tried to mingle with the crowd that assembled at the spot, only to be recognized and arrested.
Oddly, however, there was a mystery over the Bourbon prince they had planned to put on the throne. Cadoudal had been visited by a mysterious figure. According to Fouché he was ‘. . . an important personage . . . extremely well dressed . . . when he was in the room . . . everybody . . . rose and did not sit down until he had retired.’ This description corresponded neither with the age of the Comte d’Artois, nor the person of the Duc de Berri . . . The Duc d’Angoulême was at Mittau . . . the Duc de Bourbon was known to be in London. Attention was therefore directed at the Duc d’Enghien. D’Enghien, aged just thirty-one, was the only son of the Duc de Bourbon, the grandson of the Prince of Condé. Fouché was certain of his complicity. Talleyrand wrote on 8 March recommending the arrest of the young Duc, of whom Napoleon had never even heard.
On the night of 15 March a force of 300 armed men was despatched across the French border to Baden and seized the Duc in bed; his faithful dog jumped into the carriage into which he was bundled. The kidnappers reached Strasbourg, where they waited four days before being ordered to the Forest of Vincennes outside Paris . There the alleged young pretender ate a hearty meal, asking his captors what they intended to do with him. After supper he was taken to a room where a general and six colonels were waiting. There he admitted receiving 4,200 guns a year from the British who had told him to wait on the Rhine ‘where I would have a part to play immediately’. He demanded to see Napoleon. ‘My name, my rank, my manner of thinking and the horror of my situation induce me to hope he will not refuse my request.’
The following day he was summoned at six o’clock and led down a stone staircase. He asked where he was being taken and, receiving no answer, assumed he was in no danger. Instead he was led out to the dry moat of the castle, where a hole had been dug and a captain and six soldiers were waiting. ‘I gave the word to fire,’ said the quartermaster. ‘The man fell and, after the execution, I learned that we had shot the Duc d’Enghien.’ The dog was led away howling.
It had been one of Napoleon’s most characteristically brutal and decisive acts. He was determined to show he would be pitiless towards any further conspiracies and to remove the most promising pretender (the others being the bloated and idle Comte de Provence and his younger brother, the scheming and vindictive Comte d’Artois). The illegal abduction of a senior prince of the royal blood across national borders was a scandalous act of international piracy, and the royal courts of Europe reacted as though they had been struck in the chest, having lost one of their own.
Possibly Napoleon underestimated the reaction to the murder of this hitherto obscure prince. The new Tsar of Russia was appalled: Baden was ruled by his father-in-law, Joseph, who had tried to dissuade Napoleon from the act and called it a ‘barbarity’. Even Fouché was said to be aghast. The next horror was the discovery of the veteran Pichegru’s body in his gaol cell. He had been garrotted with a neckcloth attached to a sharp stick. It was announced that he had committed suicide – something almost impossible to do with a garrotte.
In June the other conspirators were tried and sentenced. Napoleon had taken a considerable risk in arresting the popular hero Moreau, which could have set off a revolt in the army or a popular uprising. In the event, Moreau’s courage at his trial was applauded by the crowd. He ‘was as calm as his conscience; and, as he sat on the bench, he had the appearance of one led by curiosity to be present at this interesting trial, rather than of an accused person, to whom the proceedings might end in condemnation and death . . . The result, clear as day to all present, was that Moreau was a total stranger to all their plots, all the intrigues, which had been set on foot in London.’ The popular general was sentenced to just two years in prison because of the paucity of evidence against him and Napoleon’s fear that his condemnation might spark an uprising. Soon afterwards he was exiled to the United States.
Cadoudal and thirteen others were sentenced to death. Cadoudal was executed on 25 June, telling the gaoler, ‘We have achieved more than we intended. We came to give France a King; we have given her an Emperor.’ It was an ironic jest, as his conspiracy was indeed directly responsible for Napoleon’s decision to become Emperor. He asked to be the first to be executed.
Wright, the British liaison officer for the conspiracy, was captured on his ship off the French coast soon afterwards. He made a fight of it and was wounded in the leg. His surgeon reported: ‘Our firing almost ceased, three of the guns being dismounted and the rest encumbered with lumber from falling booms, the supporters having been shot away and the vessel nearly sinking, Captain Wright was forced to hail that he had struck [surrendered] just in time to save the lives of the few that could keep the deck, as the gunboats were rowing up alongside with numerous troops to board.’
Wright was denounced as ‘a most artful and dangerous adventurer’ and imprisoned in the Temple. He languished there as a spy, demanding to be treated as a prisoner of war, for more than a year; then just a week after the Battle of Trafalgar he was found with his throat slit. According to the French, he had cut his throat with a razor.
The Times wrote: ‘We fear there is no doubt of the fact of Captain Wright’s decease but we cannot believe that a gallant officer, who has so often looked death in the face and was proverbial for courting danger, fell in the manner mentioned. Those, who ordered and perpetrated the midnight murders of Pichegru and the Duke d’Enghien, can, no doubt, explain the nature of Captain Wright’s death.’
Years later in St Helena Napoleon was furious at the accusation that he was responsible. One who spoke to him then remembered:
He asked me to my great surprise if I remembered the history of Captain Wright. I answered, ‘Perfectly well and it is a prevailing opinion in England that you ordered him to be murdered in the Temple.’ With the utmost rapidity of speech, he replied, ‘For what object? Of all men, he was the person whom I could have most desired to live. Whence could I have procured so valuable evidence as he would have provided on the conspirators in and about Paris? . . . If I had acted properly, I should have ordered Wright to be tried by a military commission as a spy and shot within twenty-four hours, which by the laws of war I was entitled to do. What would your ministers, or even your parliament, have done to a French captain that was discovered landing assassins in England to murder King George? . . . They would not have been so lenient as I was with Wright. They would have had him tried and executed sur le champ.’
Chapter 44
THE EMPEROR’S WAR
The plot had one unintended consequence, alluded to by Cadoudal. Napoleon resolved to make himself Emperor as fast as possible so as to create a dynasty, he said, which would survive in the event of his death. He had already hinted as much: ‘If I die in four or five years, the clock
will be wound up and will run. If I die before then, I don’t know what will happen . . . These fanatics will end by killing me and putting angry Jacobins in power. It is I who embody the French Revolution.’
One of his backers said: ‘They want to kill Bonaparte; we must defend him and make him immortal.’ A motion was introduced in the tribunate to make Napoleon Emperor of the French: ‘The imperial destiny should be hereditary in his family.’ The honest Carnot opposed it. To establish his throne in the popular will, Napoleon held yet another referendum. This time 3,570,000 votes were counted in his favour against some 2,500 votes. The pattern by now had been established.
Napoleon’s elevation to Emperor is too often glossed over as simply a reaction to the assassination threat. In fact it was a turning point. Napoleon’s real reasons for seeking the title were many. Indeed, he could reconcile it with the notion of being a republican – as had briefly been the case in ancient Rome. It was quite distinct, in his opinion, from the crown of the Bourbon monarchy: to have called himself King would truly have been a repudiation of the Revolution, unacceptable to his remaining Jacobin supporters. By securing a mandate from the people, he could mysteriously anchor his rule in the will of the French nation, making it distinct from a King ordained by divine right from above.
All of these were coherent reasons. Yet Napoleon was no fool: the title as he well knew was a throwback to the Roman Empire originally, and more recently to the Holy Roman Empire. It was generally attached to a ruler with much wider domains than his native country: and by becoming Emperor, Napoleon was signalling France’s preeminence among nations, with a great many vassal states. But the title signalled both an expansionary power and, in Napoleon’s case, a man determined to establish a dynasty as lasting as any that had sat on the French throne, though one rooted in the popular will rather than ordained by God. It was also an end to Napoleon’s republican pretensions. Abroad, the few remaining admirers of the French Revolution were heartbroken: Wordsworth, as we have seen, returned disillusioned to his native land; Fox’s eyes were opened; Beethoven in Vienna tore up the dedication of his Third Symphony to Napoleon; Simon Bolivar, a young man visiting Spain and France at the time, was horrified by the decision.
It also marked an inner change within Napoleon’s own volatile and explosive personality. Napoleon had all his life been a combination of the practical man of action and the egomaniac dreamer. In Egypt the latter trait had won and had led him to disaster. The practical man had then reasserted himself and had seized power in France. Now again he was exhibiting a self-belief that was to prove his undoing: for as an Emperor he had to continue to maintain France’s paramountcy in Europe.
He could argue that he was doing no more than emulate the Emperor Joseph of Austria; but the latter was the heir to an ancient title, carried on now by the fiction of the Holy Roman throne and ruling over a vast and varied collection of peoples. Napoleon could not have signalled more clearly his intention to do likewise, to add to France’s dominions under his control. To those that had plotted against him in France, he was responding that he was no mere general, no mere military dictator, but the aspiring ruler of all Europe, endorsed by popular plebiscite, and legitimized by force of arms not just in France but outside. That he was no longer ‘freeing’ the countries he conquered in the name of progressive revolutionary ideals did not matter: progress was synonymous with France’s national interest and his own rule. He was not just the foremost citizen of France but of the world. Both he and France were now committed to incorporating new territories into the empire.
His immediate folie de grandeur displayed itself most clearly with the decision to insist that the Pope come to Paris for the coronation. This, Napoleon argued, would secure the support of all Catholics as well as impress foreign countries with his legitimacy. In fact it was merely a supreme vanity, designed to impress the world with his special status.
Napoleon meticulously organized his own coronation, choosing the eagle as the emblem of France, adopting a sixth-century Gallic motif as his own, equipping himself with a sword which was supposedly that of Charlemagne, and designing a crown of gold laurel. On 2 December 1804, Napoleon walked with his brother Joseph into Notre Dame. ‘Joseph, if only our father could see us,’ said Napoleon to his brother.
The Pope said mass and at the appropriate moment anointed Napoleon in the style of a French monarch. Then Napoleon crowned himself so, as he said, to avoid a dispute between the Pope and the Archbishop of Rheims, who traditionally crowned the monarch. The real reason was to establish the supremacy of state represented by Napoleon, over the church; the archbishop would surely have given way to the Pope, who would not normally have stirred from Rome for the occasion.
Napoleon then crowned Josephine Empress. To the last moment she feared she would not be given this accolade. After the Pope had discreetly withdrawn, Napoleon intoned the coronation oath: ‘I swear to uphold the integrity of the Republic’s territory, to respect and impose the laws of the Concordat and religious freedom, to respect and impose the respect of equal rights, political and civil liberties, the irrevocability of the sale of national property, to raise no duty and to establish no tax except through the law, to uphold the institution of the Legion of Honour, to rule only in the interests of the happiness and glory of the French people.’
Napoleon immediately afterwards insisted that he had not changed. Mostly he poked fun at those intimates who called him ‘Sire’ or ‘Your Majesty’. Yet he was quick to put into place the full flummery of an imperial court, exceeding that of even Louis XIV in its pretension. In the front rank was his own family – as quarrelsome a group of competing nepotists as was to be found anywhere. Josephine, the Empress, was universally despised by the Bonaparte clan, and Napoleon’s sisters deeply resented having to bear her train. Letizia had been furious to be given the patronizing and inadequate title of ‘Madame Mère de son Majesté l’Empereur’ and refused to attend the coronation altogether.
Napoleon’s amiable but incompetent older brother Joseph caused him little trouble, and his marriage to Bernadotte’s sister-in-law gave Napoleon a valuable link with a potentially troublesome military Jacobin challenger.
Lucien, his younger brother, however, was a greater problem. Good-looking, eloquent and a natural politician, Lucien was intensely disliked by Napoleon, although he shared Napoleon’s political interests. After his bravura performance in helping to stage Napoleon’s military coup, he was rewarded with the powerful ministry of the interior but then embarrassed Napoleon by comparing him to Cromwell and was sent off as ambassador to Spain.
Later he returned to Paris as a businessman. Napoleon wanted him to marry the widowed Queen of Etruria; instead Lucien married a businessman’s widow, Madame Alexandrine Joubertoun, in secret. Napoleon furiously attacked his young brother for marrying a ‘whore’. ‘At least my whore is pretty,’ was the rejoinder, for which Napoleon never forgave him. Lucien was supported by Letizia and went off in a sulk, accusing Napoleon of having slept with his stepdaughter Hortense who had married Louis, Napoleon’s next brother.
Louis was an idler, a neurotic, a dreamer and a homosexual; the marriage was forced upon both parties by Napoleon and Josephine. There was speculation that Napoleon had indeed fathered Hortense’s son, because his own wife Josephine could bear no children, as a means of producing an heir from a surrogate mother; Napoleon was certainly distraught when tragedy struck and the five-year-old boy died. But Napoleon personally got on well with Louis, who posed no challenge to him.
Jerome, the youngest sibling, was good-looking but spoilt, boastful and disagreeable; he enraged Napoleon by marrying a beauty in America after deserting the ship he was serving on. However Napoleon was later to admire his pretty wife.
Napoleon’s sisters were hardly easier personalities. They demanded the right to be called princess, as his brother’s wives were, and Napoleon relented. The plain but intelligent Caroline was intensely ambitious and cold. She had married General Joachim Murat, o
ne of Napoleon’s oldest lieutenants, the beefy, dashing, courageous cavalry commander who had been beside him at the massacre in rue St Raul, and then served with him in Italy and Egypt as well as acting as his principal lieutenant during the military coup. He was good-looking, curly-haired, blue-eyed and thick-lipped, the most romantic-looking of Napoleon’s generals. Of humble origins – he was an innkeeper’s son – he was the hero of his countrymen and very attractive to women. Murat, reflecting Caroline’s views, detested Josephine and had reported to Napoleon the evidence of her infidelity.
Brave and attractive though he was, Murat was also stupid and Caroline had incomparably the better brain, often turning him against his old friend, her brother, whom she understood better than he did. After the successful Marengo campaign, Napoleon had rewarded Murat by making him head of the elite Army of Observation and the commander-in-chief in Italy, where he settled down to looting on a grand scale. He and Caroline ruled in great splendour in Milan and both enjoyed countless affairs.
Elisa, the second sister, was the intellectual of the family, but so ugly as to be almost deformed. She ran a fashionable salon from her home in Paris, which was frequented by the vicious revolutionary painter, David, and a circle of literary women. Her husband, a Corsican soldier, was more or less estranged from her.
The favourite of Napoleon’s sisters was Pauline, who was not just stunningly beautiful and sexually irresistible, but a nymphomaniac. At seventeen she had married a pompous young general, Emmanuel Leclerc, who had stood alongside Napoleon at Toulon. She was vague, somewhat neurotic and given to laughing for no reason: and she adored men. At a tender age she had been the lover of three much older generals at once – including Moreau. Another of them was General MacDonald. In 1801 Napoleon suddenly appointed Leclerc commander-in-chief of an expedition to the large Caribbean island of St Domingue, which was divided between Haiti and Santo Domingo. Many believed the intention was to remove Pauline from Paris, where her love life was scandalizing society. She was said to have taken part in an orgy with five men before departing, and taken three lovers with her aboard ship.
The War of Wars Page 43