Citizen Emperor

by Philip Dwyer

  The autopsy carried out in Milan showed that Desaix had died instantly by a bullet to the heart; this was almost as soon as the French counter-attack began.91 Moreover, since he was not wearing his general’s uniform at the time, his death went perfectly unnoticed and his body, almost naked after being stripped by marauders, was not retrieved until two days later by one of his aides-de-camp, Anne-Jean-Marie-René Savary, and was embalmed two days after that in Milan.92 It is even possible that he was shot by friendly fire as he turned around to harangue his own troops. Bonaparte insisted that the bulletin record his own words, supposedly uttered on hearing of the death of Desaix: ‘Why am I not permitted to weep?’93 It is an interesting question, even if rhetorical. In an age when men readily cried in public,94 there are no accounts of Bonaparte ever openly weeping. This does not mean that he was not affected by Desaix’s death, but we do not know with certainty whether he even liked the general or considered him a friend.95 If he lavished praise on him, it was because he was dead and could not therefore pose a threat to his own reputation. Others who knew Desaix certainly did weep openly.96 The following day Bonaparte wrote to his fellow consuls telling them that he was ‘plunged in grief’ for a man whom he had ‘loved and esteemed’.97 These words and the paintings that captured the moment of Desaix’s death displayed at the Salon of 1806 were meant as political commentary, a kind of civic sermon that would serve to inspire others, and were recognized as ‘true’ because enveloped in a documentary style.98

  Jean Broc, Mort du général Desaix à la bataille de Marengo le 14 juin 1800 (Death of General Desaix at the battle of Marengo on 14 June 1800), 1806.

  A good tale is worth telling time and again, and if told often enough it eventually becomes difficult to see the difference between the reality and fiction. In 1804, shortly before the proclamation of the Empire, Berthier, who had done so much to promote Bonaparte’s name in Italy and Egypt by the publication of exaggerated accounts of those campaigns, added to the First Consul’s aura by publishing a narrative of the battle of Marengo, placing the responsibility for the victory squarely at his feet.99 The Relation de la bataille de Marengo conveniently forgot the role played by Desaix and even Kellermann, and presented the retreat the French were forced into towards the end of the day as part of Bonaparte’s overall plan, so that he was portrayed as having perfect control of the situation from beginning to end.100 During the Consulate, Marengo was to become a point of reference for future Napoleonic battles, and was re-enacted on a number of occasions (at Marly in 1800, and again in 1805 when Napoleon was en route to Milan to be crowned king of Italy). It is possible that Bonaparte’s conscience was pricked by this (mis)use of a comrade’s body, but if so he never talked about it. General Kellermann believed that ‘Of all the victories carried off by Bonaparte, Marengo is the one from which he obtained the greatest profit for the least personal glory. He was tormented by it; he was weak enough to want to appropriate it all the more since it belonged to him the least. It explains the contradictory and untruthful accounts, which he told and retold again and again.’101

  ‘If I am a Traitor, Become Brutus’

  Bonaparte left for the army in the costume of the French Institute (what is called the habit vert, dark-blue vest and trousers with green brocade in the form of olive leaves worn by the learned members of the Institut de France or the French Academy). On his return he was dressed in a military uniform, and it was in that uniform that he was now mostly (but not yet always) to appear in public, including when he presided over the Council of State. Not that this was unusual. Most European monarchs appeared in public in military uniform; so too did presidents like George Washington. Bonaparte, on the other hand, had until then studiously avoided doing so in order not to alienate the intellectuals associated with Brumaire. After Marengo, his uniform was a sure sign that he seemed not to care any longer about what they thought, and that the military was now at the forefront of political life.

  Some took this as a sign that the Republic was dead; Bonaparte was already being called a tyrant in 1800, in the sense given to the word by Plutarch – that is, an absolute ruler. Republicans publicly demonstrated their disapproval, and were to do so throughout the Consulate. One young officer was seen ‘kissing with transport a bust of Marcus Brutus’.102 That was not as extreme, however, as the young man who shot himself in the head in front of a statue of Liberty, shortly after Bonaparte came to power.103 Of course, the implication was that Bonaparte was a despot like Julius Caesar and that another Brutus had to be found to do away with him. Another wrote that almost all the generals in the army were enemies of Bonaparte.104 There were even members of the Consular Guard who were supposed to have been heard speaking out against him.105 It is true that some of them whinged about the discipline and the dress code imposed on them, and some officers railed against what they considered to be the ‘atrocious despotism’ (despotisme affreux) that weighed on France, but they were probably the exception.106

  After his victory at Marengo, radical elements within the royalist and Jacobin movements seemed more determined than ever to eliminate Bonaparte. The number of assassination attempts made against Bonaparte (and later Napoleon) is not known with any certainty, but somewhere between twenty and thirty plots were hatched in the course of his reign.107 To put this into perspective, plots against the life of the king during the eighteenth century were not rare. Between 1680 and 1750, about fifty assassination plots were uncovered against French kings.108 Between the years 600 and 1800, a total of 219 European kings were murdered, while another 338 met a violent end.109 During the Consulate, both republicans and royalists sought to put an end to Bonaparte’s reign through assassination. But then those dubbed the ‘exclusives’ or ‘anarchists’ by the Bonapartists – that is, those bent on overthrowing the government – did not have any other means at their disposal. Since insurrection in the faubourgs was a thing of the past, no longer possible after its leaders had, for the most part, been guillotined during the Terror, and since there was no longer the possibility of a parliamentary opposition within the complex system that had been established by the Constitution of the Year VIII, the only means of acting against Bonaparte’s supposed tyranny was through conspiracy or individual attacks. There was, moreover, a certain tradition, an expectation created since the Revolution, that the true defenders of liberty would stand up to those who threatened it. In 1790 a ‘Brutus Legion’ and in 1792 the ‘volunteers of tyrannicide’ were created to assassinate the sovereigns of Europe.110 The killing of a man considered to have illegitimately appropriated the government, namely Bonaparte, was portrayed by the opposition as tyrannicide.

  The theme of tyrannicide was taken up in a republican pamphlet written by Bernard Metge entitled Le Turc et le militaire français (The Turk and the French soldier). The pamphlet begins with an indictment of Bonaparte for the crimes which he was allegedly responsible for, notably spilling French blood, the murder of inhabitants of Egypt and taking public money.111 It goes on to accuse him of abandoning the army in Egypt, and concludes that in ‘my country a general who had committed the thousandth part of the crimes that your Bonaparte has sullied himself with would have paid with his head’. In essence, the pamphlet was a call for Bonaparte’s murder. Another pamphlet, the Code des tyrannicides (Code of the tyrannicides), expressed the same sort of sentiment. It went so far as to quote Bonaparte himself – ‘If I am a traitor, become Brutus’ – as a justification for his elimination.112 The same reasoning persisted in the royalist camp; newspaper articles and pamphlets along those lines, funded or supported by the British government and written by émigrés, began to reach France.113

  Most of the assassination attempts were nevertheless badly organized. What is considered to be the last ‘Jacobin plot’ (11 October 1800), known as the ‘Conspiracy of the Opera’, or the ‘Conspiracy of the Knives’, included the Corsican malcontent Joseph Aréna (brother of the Corsican deputy Barthélemy Aréna, who was accused of wanting to stab Bonaparte during the coup of
Brumaire), an Italian refugee by the name of Diana, the sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi, who had modelled a bust of Bonaparte at Montebello in Italy, the painter Topino-Lebrun, a former pupil of David’s, who designed the daggers with which they intended to assassinate the First Consul, and a former employee of the Committee of Public Safety, Dominique Demerville.114 They were arrested in the crowd waiting for Bonaparte to come out of the Opera.115 The group was infiltrated and indeed manipulated by the police, with the knowledge of Bonaparte, who wanted to profit from the public sympathy that would come his way after the plot was dramatically uncovered.116 The public, however, was never to know the extent to which the police had controlled the conspirators: they were simply told that Bonaparte had miraculously escaped a trap organized by ‘terrorists’ – read Jacobins or the far left. They were subsequently executed, while Bonaparte used the presence of Italians among the conspirators as a pretext to expel from France Italian revolutionaries whose opinions were a little too radical for his liking.117

  A couple of weeks later, a slightly more serious affair led to the arrest of Bernard Metge and a dozen or so other conspirators.118 It was Metge, the police discovered, who had written Le Turc et le militaire français, in which he called for the birth of ‘a thousand Brutuses’ to assassinate the tyrant Bonaparte. This group planned to throw what were known as ‘red eggs’ or ‘incendiary eggs’ (oeufs rouges or oeufs incendiaires), a kind of hand grenade that would explode like a Molotov cocktail, into Bonaparte’s carriage as it passed by, but they too were arrested before the plan could be put into effect. One of the conspirators arrested was Thomas Desforges, who had been a friend of Josephine’s before her marriage with Bonaparte. Metge was later executed.

  These plots did a great deal to enhance the popularity of Bonaparte. Laure, Duchesse d’Abrantès, the wife of General Junot, recalled the overwhelming feelings Bonaparte inspired in people in the winter of 1800: ‘Confidence returned; everyone saw General Bonaparte with the same eyes and at that time those eyes looked on him with love . . . How he was loved then! Yes, he was loved, he was loved everywhere, and even when there was no love there was admiration and confidence in his character.’119 No doubt, but then Laure may have been the dupe of propaganda after Marengo that made Bonaparte out to be a humane leader, beloved by his troops. If both royalists and terrorists were attempting to assassinate him, it meant that Bonaparte was both revolutionary and an enemy of Jacobin excesses. The idea appealed to a country that aspired to peace after ten years of internal strife.120 After the uncovering of these conspiracies, Bonaparte was cheered by the crowds whenever he appeared in public. Indeed, the month of October 1800 led to an outpouring of public assurances of affection for the First Consul.121

  It also provided an excellent opportunity for what some in Bonaparte’s entourage had been considering, namely, bestowing on Bonaparte the Consulate for life, and giving him the powers to name a successor. To lend support to this argument, a pamphlet by Lucien appeared at the end of October, probably written with the help of the journalist and founder of the Mercure de France Louis Fontanes, possibly at the instigation of Bonaparte himself, entitled Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monck et Bonaparte.122 Whoever the author was, he deliberately cast back to the time of the Merovingians and Carolingians to compare Bonaparte with Charles Martel123 and Charlemagne. He also harked back to ancient Rome when Caesar, as consul, had become dictator for life and was then proclaimed king, only to be assassinated by Brutus (among others) on the Ides of March.124 Ten years of civil war followed before Augustus triumphed and proclaimed the Empire. The author preferred this option, minus the assassination, and suggested that in order to avoid further civil unrest in France, it was best to confer a hereditary dignity on the First Consul, or at least to enable him to name his successor. The last few paragraphs in particular raised the need for a hereditary office without, however, ever mentioning the word ‘hereditary’. ‘If all of a sudden the patrie were to lose Bonaparte, where are his heirs, where are the institutions which could maintain his example and perpetuate his genius? The fate of thirty million men is linked to the life of one man!’

  Coming less than one month after the assassination attempt against Bonaparte by Aréna and Ceracchi, the pamphlet reinforced rumours surrounding Bonaparte’s political ambitions, and led people to believe that it was nothing less than a government manoeuvre.125 As such, the reaction was less than favourable. Prefects from all over the country sent in complaints.126 Moreau let Bonaparte know personally that the impact the pamphlet had produced on the Army of the Rhine was deplorable.127 In short, the debate about an heir had come too soon. Bonaparte may have been testing the waters by allowing his brother to publish the text – Bourrienne, who cannot be trusted, asserts that he had seen an annotated version of it in Bonaparte’s office before it was published128 – but it is more likely that the initiative came from those in his entourage. A month or so later, Bonaparte admitted to Roederer that he had ‘given the idea [for the pamphlet], in order to respond to English calumnies’, but that ‘the last two pages are madness; heredity has never been instituted; it instituted itself. It is too absurd to be accepted as law.’129 If the pamphlet had been designed to test the waters on the question of allowing a hereditary succession based on the Bonaparte family, the response was a resounding no.130

  As a result, Lucien was made the fall guy. The standard account of this event has Lucien being called to Paris by Bonaparte to explain himself.131 Fouché was present at the meeting. Lucien could not deny that the pamphlet had been sent by his office and on his orders, but in his defence he claimed that Fontanes had written the piece and that he had overstepped his orders. That was, to put it mildly, an equivocation. In the scene that followed, Fouché and Lucien threw insults at each other with verve. Fouché made it personal by listing the number of mistresses that Lucien had accrued – although this would hardly have discredited him in the eyes of his brother. Lucien’s counter-accusations were much more to the point: Fouché was charged with taking some of the gaming taxes (which was true). Bonaparte had to intervene and did so in support of Fouché, his minister of police. Beside himself, Lucien threw his minister’s portfolio on to his brother’s desk and stormed out of the Tuileries.

  Public opinion had turned against Lucien not only because his name was associated with the pamphlet, but also because he gained the unfortunate reputation of being a spendthrift.132 Moreover, as minister of the interior he had been difficult. He had simply refused to work with the other two consuls and had exasperated them with his lack of discipline. Fouché was ordered to seize the remaining copies of the Parallèle. A thousand of them were burnt in front of the Invalides to appease the army.133 Tensions within the Bonaparte family were exacerbated when, during an encounter at the Tuileries, the matriarch Letizia took sides with Lucien; Joseph attempted to mediate between his two brothers; and their sister Elisa, who had become close to Lucien during his period of mourning, was reduced to tears.134 Talleyrand solved the problem by suggesting that Lucien be shunted off to Madrid as ambassador. The very next day, 8 November, Lucien left Paris to enter a kind of gilded exile; the man who had helped bring his brother to power was now effectively marginalized. Josephine and her daughter, Hortense, both of whom detested Lucien, were delighted.135

  The balance of power had dramatically shifted in Bonaparte’s entourage. With Lucien out of the way, and Carnot having resigned, Fouché’s influence was more pronounced than ever. This worried the more moderate elements in Bonaparte’s circle.136 Fouché’s hands were covered in blood; he had been responsible for one of the worst massacres committed during the Revolution, in Lyons in 1793. More than 1,800 people had been killed during the repression of a revolt in the city.137 The moderates in Bonaparte’s circle were now on the lookout for an opportunity to diminish if not eliminate Fouché altogether. As for the crisis sparked by the pamphlet, it was short-lived, largely because Bonaparte had acted so swiftly to distance himself from his brother that people were inclined
to believe Lucien had been acting on his own. Bonaparte emerged from the fray if not squeaky clean, then absolved from accusations of excessive ambition. What lingered in the air though was the question of a successor. It was brought to a head by an attempt on Bonaparte’s life that very nearly succeeded.

  4

  Peace

  ‘Blood Must Flow!’

  On Christmas Eve 1800, little more than a year after Brumaire, Bonaparte and his party left the Tuileries on their way to the Opera.1 A new piece by Joseph Haydn was being performed, The Creation, and the boxes had been rented within twenty-four hours of its opening. All Paris had turned out.2 The orchestra had started playing the introduction, the ‘Representation of Chaos’, when the audience heard an explosion in the distance. Jacques Marquet de Montbreton de Norvins, who had managed to get a box, emerged into the theatre to see a pale and out-of-breath Hugues-Bernard Maret, one of Bonaparte’s secretaries, talking animatedly to a friend; he had just learnt that there had been an assassination attempt against the First Consul. Within moments the whole theatre was abuzz with the news. When Bonaparte appeared, all eyes turned to him.3 The applause was so loud and energetic that the auditorium shook. Bonaparte, visibly moved, got up several times to thank the public until, on his signal, the opera recommenced.