by Philip Dwyer
On 23 August 1803, an English ship brought Georges Cadoudal and a number of other royalist agents to the French coast where they disembarked on the beaches of Biville-sur-Mer, not far from Dieppe in Normandy. Cadoudal was a big, corpulent, blond man, who had been dubbed ‘Gideon’ during the Chouan struggle against the Revolution.* Described as having ‘a short, squashed nose, blue eyes, a small mouth, a round dimpled chin, a flat face, hair à la Titus,* and thin sideburns’,1 Cadoudal was intelligent, completely devoted to the royalist cause, audacious and untiring, and he hated Bonaparte with a passion.2 His best friend and his brother had both been killed in the struggle against the revolutionary state. He had left France in 1800 after the offensive launched by Bonaparte against the counter-revolution. Before Cadoudal left, Pitt, informed of what the group was up to, asked him to bring back Bonaparte alive – there were thoughts even at this stage of exiling him to St Helena – but whether he really believed that Bonaparte would be captured and not killed is another matter. It was not the first time that the British government had been involved in eliminating a European sovereign whose foreign policy they found to be an impediment. It had been, after all, deeply implicated in the assassination of Paul I of Russia in 1801.
When Cadoudal and his small band landed, they made their way to Paris in stages, arriving on 30 August. During the five months he was there, Cadoudal would change his place of residence as often as he could so as not to get caught, on one occasion living only a few hundred metres from the prefecture of police. His plan was to stop Bonaparte on the road to Saint-Cloud or Malmaison, occasions when the First Consul moved around with only a weak escort. Even then, however, it was obvious that a fight would be necessary, and Cadoudal would have to gather a sufficient number of men,3 as well as weapons and horses, to overwhelm Bonaparte’s guard; this necessarily carried the risk of someone leaking the plan, inadvertently or deliberately. One response was to kill anyone who got in the way; in the second half of December 1803, a dozen executions were carried out against denunciators and government functionaries. Louis XVI’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, is meant to have assured Cadoudal before the royalist left Britain that he would appear on French soil to launch a general insurrection as soon as he received news of Bonaparte’s kidnapping. It was impractical madness, based on the notion that it was enough to eliminate one man for the whole system to crumble. The fact that the émigré press had been focusing its attacks on the head of the French state probably contributed to that illusion.4 And yet Cadoudal was convinced he could pull it off.
General Charles Pichegru lent his support (he had escaped from Guiana where he had been exiled after Fructidor in 1797), and was also transported on a British vessel to France where he landed on 16 January 1804. His role was to convince Moreau to take part in the conspiracy, to overthrow the government and assume provisional control while awaiting the return of the Comte d’Artois.5 The plan was puerile in its conception, not to mention the fact that the police were on the plotters’ tails from the moment they entered Paris.6 We know that Pichegru met with Moreau at the beginning of 1804. One of the conspirators, General Frédéric-Michel de Lajolais, turned up at Moreau’s house announcing the arrival of Pichegru and asking for an interview.7 Moreau refused, but Pichegru took advantage of a reception being held on 1 February to introduce himself into Moreau’s house. Moreau, wary of getting involved, simply declared that he did not want to participate in the restoration of the Bourbons and told him to flee to Germany. Some historians, more sympathetic towards Bonaparte, find in Moreau a small-minded, vain man who bore a grudge against Bonaparte because he considered that his own military victories had not received due attention. This was true, but personal motives do not make for sound politics, and were in any event a poor excuse to plot against a head of state. Moreau himself perhaps understood this, or perhaps had greater political ambitions than the conspirators realized; he rejected the royalist solution but seemed prepared to discuss the plot with the conspirators. In February, another meeting between Pichegru and Moreau took place, this time with Cadoudal present; several other meetings between the two generals followed.
This was imprudent, given the counter-intelligence networks that were in place. Over a period of several weeks the police cast their net wide; houses were raided and anyone slightly suspect was brought in for questioning, and more often than not thrown in jail. Those with powerful protectors could get out within a day or so; others were imprisoned for weeks on end.8 At the beginning of February, Cadoudal’s servant, Louis Picot, was arrested and revealed the presence of Cadoudal and Pichegru in Paris.9 On 9 February, another conspirator was arrested, Bouvet de Lozier.10 After a failed suicide attempt – he tried to hang himself in his cell but a jailer cut the cord in time – he revealed the name of another accomplice: Moreau. ‘Monsieur [that is, the Comte d’Artois] was to arrive in France and put himself at the head of the royalist party, Moreau promised to join the Bourbon cause.’ Bonaparte was in the middle of being shaved by his valet, Constant, when the minister of justice and grand judge, Claude-Ambroise Régnier, who had personally questioned the prisoner, came to tell him the news. Bonaparte, nevertheless, acted with some caution.11
There was nothing shocking about Pichegru being implicated in a plot against Bonaparte; he had been involved with royalist plots before and was known to the authorities. Moreau was another story. What was Bonaparte supposed to do with the victor of Hohenlinden? Were other generals involved? Bonaparte must have been feeling paranoid at this point, although we have no idea what he actually thought since he never revealed himself, at least not on a level that would satisfy the curious biographer. He spoke about this event on St Helena a number of times, but without really assuming responsibility for his acts and always hiding behind the façade of ‘reasons of state’.12
The conspirators hoped to get Moreau onside and, through him, part of the army he commanded, more loyal to its commander-in-chief than to the government. Moreau’s reputation was such that many reformed officers (officers on half-pay) considered him an alternative to Bonaparte.13 During an emergency meeting of the Council of State, the First Consul read out Bouvet de Lozier’s confession. Talleyrand and Fouché did not see any proof of guilt but it was enough for Bonaparte. Ignoring their advice, he had an order for Moreau’s arrest issued. Moreau was taken on the morning of 15 February 1804, his carriage surrounded by elite gendarmes as he was crossing the bridge at Charenton, coming into Paris.14
One should not underestimate the ruthlessness of Bonaparte. At the same time that Moreau was taken into custody, 356 other arrests were made, some of them of ultra-republican and royalist generals.15 It was an opportune moment to purge the army once and for all of elements that opposed the regime. Nevertheless, news of Moreau’s arrest caused a tremendous stir in Paris.16 The police reports from this period are witness to how much the public disapproved of it.17 He was popular, and was assumed to be a republican, at least in army circles. ‘Everyone here praises and extols you,’ wrote Moreau’s brother.18 For those in the army, Hohenlinden was considered a great victory; Moreau, regarded as the ‘son of the Revolution’, was idolized by republicans. Rather than see in his arrest proof that he had been involved in a plot against the government, people suspected Bonaparte of trying to eliminate a rival on his route to absolute power.19 Officers who had served with Moreau considered his disgrace to have been prompted by jealousy on the part of the First Consul.20 A delegation from the Tribunate even went to Bonaparte to plead Moreau’s case.21 If the people of Paris had not exactly been shaken as if by an earthquake, as one diplomat put it, many were taken aback.22
Almost two weeks later, sold out by a supposed friend, Cadoudal was arrested after a chase through the streets of Paris that ended in one police officer being killed and another wounded. His description had been posted on the walls of Paris, as well as in the Moniteur, so it was only a matter of time before he was caught. Shortly afterwards, on 28 February 1804, Pichegru was arrested, also denounced by a ‘fri
end’.23 The whole conspiracy was unravelling. Imprisoned in the Temple, where only a few short years before the royal family had been held, Cadoudal willingly admitted to wanting to ‘attack the First Consul with violence [vive force]’, although he denied that he had ever met Moreau. Under torture, the conspirators admitted that a Bourbon prince was expected in France.
The Kidnapping and Execution of the Duc d’Enghien
The arrest of Georges Cadoudal was a great coup for the regime; people no longer questioned whether there had been a plot to kill Bonaparte, and it led to people doubting Moreau’s innocence. If a plot really existed, and so many people had been arrested, then Moreau could not have been arrested without reason.24 In the meantime, everyone was scratching their heads trying to figure out who was the ‘prince’ Cadoudal referred to. Certainly, the Comte d’Artois came to mind and was the prince most people were talking about in the cafés in Paris. There had been, months before Cadoudal’s arrest, rumours that Artois was about to land in France.25 Bonaparte took them seriously enough to send General Savary, whom we met when he was Desaix’s aide-de-camp, in person to the cliffs of Biville-sur-Mer to watch out for his arrival. A vessel did approach the coast and Savary tried to lure it in further by lighting signal fires, but the ship sailed away.
The government was persuaded that Artois was the prince in question, but he was inaccessible, safely tucked away in England. The only Bourbon prince anywhere near French territory was the Duc d’Enghien, in Ettenheim, a small village on the Rhine in Baden about forty kilometres south of Strasbourg, where he lived ‘in great simplicity’, attending to his garden with the few friends that had remained with him.26 The only reason why Enghien, tenth in line to the throne, was living in Ettenheim in the first place was to be with the Princess Charlotte de Rohan, with whom he was in love. Rumour had it, entirely false as far as we know, that Enghien sometimes visited Strasbourg, then on French territory.27 The prince, although not involved in the plot, was in the pay of the English and was believed to be working towards an invasion of France and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. It was for that reason that Bonaparte ordered that he be kidnapped and brought back to Paris.
Rarely did Bonaparte make important decisions without first consulting his ministers and closest advisers. This is what occurred on 10 March at the Tuileries. We do not have any details about what was actually said during this meeting, and most of what we have was written by those present years after the fall of the Empire, at a time when the Bourbons were back on the throne. Their accounts were therefore an attempt to play down their involvement in the killing of a prince of the blood, and cannot be considered particularly accurate. The two other consuls supposedly raised objections, Lebrun arguing that it would make a ‘terrible noise’, and Cambacérès that public opinion would be even more worked up against them, coming as it did on top of the arrest of Moreau.28 Cambacérès was reprimanded for his trouble by Bonaparte along the lines of ‘It becomes you well [il vous sied bien] to be so scrupulous, to be so sparing of the blood of kings, you who voted for the death of Louis XVI.’29 We do have a document from Talleyrand, who let his views be known a couple of days before. This was, he wrote, an occasion to resolve any concerns about the stability of the government. Bonaparte had the right to defend himself. ‘If justice must punish rigorously, it must also punish without exceptions.’30 Talleyrand’s suggestion is clear – in order to allay any fears that there might be a return of the former royal House, an example had to be set. Two days after the meeting, Bonaparte was at Malmaison. It was from there that he ordered Enghien kidnapped, and held in the Château de Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris, and not in the Temple, where state prisoners were usually kept. It is difficult to know whether Bonaparte, as some claim, hesitated a good deal before ordering Enghien’s arrest,31 but once the decision was made it seems likely that there was every intent to execute him.32
Everything was quickly put into place. On 15 March, a squad of several hundred troops and gendarmes, under the command of General Michel Ordener, penetrated the neutral territory of Baden in a commando-style raid and captured Enghien in Ettenheim.33 It was indicative of the arrogance of the French, born of military superiority, that Bonaparte did not even bother to ask the Elector of Baden for approval to enter his territory. If he had done so, it is highly unlikely the Elector would have been able to refuse. Not doing so, however, caused a diplomatic storm, and a good deal of ill-will. Before being kidnapped, Enghien was going about his life, untroubled, despite a number of signs that should have put him on his guard. According to one source, he received a messenger from Paris at the beginning of March warning him that he had been discussed at the highest political levels. He at first refused to believe that he could be the subject of a kidnap, and then when he was brought around to the idea, severely underestimated the extent of the force that would be deployed against him.34
After being held in a prison in Strasbourg, Enghien was brought to Paris where he arrived in the evening of 20 March. The only thing that he had with him was his pug, Mohiloff, and only then because the pug had chased after its master all the way from Ettenheim, even swimming across the Rhine, before being allowed to get into the carriage used to escort the Duc. At the Château de Vincennes, Enghien was interrogated around midnight before appearing before a military tribunal. At the last minute, Bonaparte, who was possibly having second thoughts, sent the prefect of police, Pierre-François Réal, to interrogate the prisoner further. He arrived too late. At two o’clock in the morning, the tribunal condemned Enghien to death, a sentence that was carried out immediately. His grave had already been dug in the moat of the château, next to what is known as the Queen’s Tower, and a firing squad had been made up of elite gendarmes. At three in the morning, by the light of a lantern, Enghien fell under a hail of musket shot, his dog by his side. Before doing so, his last words were supposed to have been ‘How awful it is to die this way and at the hands of Frenchmen.’35 We are not too sure what happened next, but when his body was exhumed in 1816, it was discovered that his skull had been crushed with a rock. The pug stayed over its master’s grave howling for several days until the wife of the commander of the château adopted it.
Bonaparte intended making a very simple political statement – that his blood was as precious as that of any other head of state, and that there was nothing sacred about the Bourbons.36 He knew perfectly well therefore what he was doing; the moment the Duc was kidnapped at Ettenheim, his death was a foregone conclusion. His execution is in fact revealing of Bonaparte’s style of government. If one compares it with the trial and execution of Louis XVI, the king at least had a defence lawyer; the revolutionaries observed legal procedure. The murder of Enghien, on the other hand, was carried out with no regard for legal procedure, in front of a kangaroo court, in the dead of night. The only plausible explanation for Bonaparte’s deciding Enghien should not receive a trial, apart from the fact that his abduction was less than legal, was because he felt he might get off. There was no concrete proof of his involvement in a plot against Bonaparte’s life. This is, of course, something that Bonaparte must have been aware of even while the abduction was taking place.
At St Helena, Napoleon assumed responsibility for Enghien’s death, almost. He argued that it had been an act of self-protection, a question of ‘me or them’, although he rewrote history to say that if he had known Enghien had asked to see him, he would have pardoned him.37 On this, as on so many other points, Napoleon cannot be believed. It is unlikely that Savary would have precipitated matters without the prior consent of his master.38 And yet the memoirs of the period (all written after the collapse of the Empire, it must be stressed) recall the news of the Duc’s execution as a great shock. Armand de Caulaincourt, later Napoleon’s master of the horse, who was part of the commando raid that crossed into Baden, is supposed to have cried, angry that he might have been made use of by Bonaparte in the crime;39 Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, is said to have burst into tears;40 Jose
phine’s son Eugène de Beauharnais was ‘upset’ because it had sullied Bonaparte’s glory;41 there had already been a scene between Josephine and Bonaparte on the night of the execution in which she supposedly knelt before him imploring him to spare Enghien, and when Eugène arrived at Malmaison the next day he found her in tears, directing the ‘strongest criticisms’ at Bonaparte, who listened in silence;42 Talleyrand said he disapproved and is often quoted as quipping, ‘It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder,’ although this is probably apocryphal and has also been attributed to Fouché.43 At the time, though, people who may have disapproved remained silent. When Bonaparte was informed of the death of Enghien, he supposedly murmured a passage from Voltaire’s play Alzira:
Of the Gods that we worship the difference see:
To avenge and to kill is enjoined unto thee;
But mine, when I fall ’neath thy murderous blow,
Only bids me feel pity and pardon bestow.44
That too smacks of literary embellishment. In any event, Bonaparte was observed by one contemporary receiving news of the execution when he was described as ‘troubled, preoccupied, sunk in thought . . . walking up and down his apartment, his hands at his back, his head bent down’.45
Despite the secrecy surrounding the execution, rumours raced immediately around Paris, spread by what the authorities called ‘Chouans and émigrés’. Apart from a few foreign diplomats who were shocked by the news, Paris remained relatively indifferent.46 But then newspapers were unable to state what they thought of the execution, so there could be no public debate on the subject. On the whole the French people were hardly moved by the death of a Bourbon, one moreover they had never heard of. Enghien’s execution was seen as part of the Consular process of suppressing the political extremism that had torn France apart during the Revolution. The judgment of the military tribunal that tried Enghien, along with a number of other documents, was quickly printed and distributed. It is believed that more than 50,000 copies were sold in two days, a bestseller even by today’s standards, and which leads one to suspect that if public opinion did not approve outright of the act, it was at the very least curious to find out about it.47