9

Brumaire

‘I returned to France at a fortunate moment, when the existing government was so bad it could not continue. I became its chief; everything else followed of course – there’s my story in a few words.’

Napoleon on St Helena

‘The men who have changed the world never succeeded by winning over the powerful, but always by stirring the masses. The first method is a resort to intrigue and only brings limited results. The latter is the course of genius and changes the face of the world.’

Napoleon on St Helena

Napoleon made his way to Paris from Saint-Raphaël via Aix (where he had his luggage stolen), Avignon, Valence, Lyons and Nevers, arriving in the capital on the morning of Wednesday, October 16, 1799. He enjoyed ‘a triumphal march’ along the route, and was given a hero’s welcome everywhere as France’s saviour.¹ When he arrived in Lyons a play entitled The Hero’s Return was staged in his honour in front of large crowds who thronged the streets. They cheered so loudly that the lines were drowned out, which was probably just as well as they had been written overnight and were unrehearsed. The seventeen-year-old future cavalry officer Jean-Baptiste de Marbot recalled: ‘People were dancing in the open spaces and the air rang with cries of “Hurrah for Bonaparte! He will save the country!”’² He marvelled at Napoleon and his senior colleagues, especially ‘their martial air, their faces bronzed by the eastern sun, their strange costumes, and their Turkish sabres, slung by cords’.³

Before he could determine what to do politically, Napoleon needed to decide what he wanted matrimonially. Although he didn’t know it, Josephine had made an attempt at ending her affair with Hippolyte Charles in February 1799. ‘You can be assured, after this interview, which will be the last, that you will no longer be tormented by my letters or by my presence,’ she had written to him. ‘The honest woman who has been deceived retires and says nothing.’⁴ In fact she continued writing to him about various sleazy business dealings they had had over Army of Italy contracts as late as October, and she tried (unsuccessfully) to find a job for a friend of his even after that. It was Charles who finally rejected the bereft Josephine romantically, whereupon the dapper boulevardier-hussar strolled off the pages of history. When Napoleon came to absolute power very shortly afterwards, he made no attempt to pursue or punish him.

It had been sixteen months since he had learned of Josephine’s infidelity, so much of his anger was spent, and he had retaliated comprehensively with Pauline Fourès. A divorce might damage him politically, especially with devout Catholics, and Josephine was helpful to him politically with her royalist and social connections, as well as in smoothing over the sensibilities of those rebuffed by his brusqueness. Although her overspending was pathological, the bills her tradesmen sent were negotiable, and they were often happy to settle for fifty centimes in the franc, which still gave them sizeable profits.

Napoleon went first to rue de la Victoire, perhaps in itself an indication that he was going to forgive her, and when on October 18 Josephine arrived from Malmaison – a lovely chateau 7 miles west of Paris bought for 325,000 (borrowed) francs while Napoleon was in Egypt – having taken the wrong road to intercept him, they had a full-scale domestic scene. There was shouting, weeping and pleading on knees outside locked doors. Bags were packed, Hortense and the wounded Eugène were recruited by their mother to appeal to Napoleon’s step-fatherly sensibilities (which were strong and genuine), and finally there was a dramatic reconciliation. When Lucien arrived to see his brother the next morning he was shown into the bedroom where the couple were sitting up in bed.⁵ It is hard not to suspect that Napoleon stage-managed at least part of the titanic row to ensure total domination over her for the rest of their marriage: afterwards she was faithful to him, though he certainly wasn’t to her.

Other theories as to why he stayed with her have been that he was ‘softened by her tears’, was sensually aroused and didn’t care, believed her denials (the least likely), was too concerned with politics to have time for domestic strife, wanted a child, and that he did love her despite everything. Whichever was the true explanation, or combination of them, he forgave Josephine totally, and never made allusion to her infidelity again, either to her or to anyone else. Thereafter, they slipped into comfortable domestic happiness, until dynastic considerations emerged a full decade later. She seems now genuinely to have fallen in love with him, although she always called him ‘Bonaparte’. The story of Napoleon and Josephine is thus certainly not the romantic Romeo-and-Juliet love story of legend, but something subtler, more interesting and, in its way, no less admirable.

 • • •

Between his arrival in Paris and his reconciliation with Josephine, Napoleon had met Louis Gohier, a lawyer-politician who had joined the Directory in June and on the basis of its three-month revolving presidency was at its head. On October 17 he was fêted at a public meeting at which he wore an Egyptian round hat, an olive green coat and a Turkish scimitar attached by silk cords. In reply to Gohier’s eulogy, Napoleon said he would only draw his sword in defence of the Republic and its government.⁶ The Directory privately had to decide whether to arrest Napoleon for desertion (he had left his army in Egypt without orders) and quarantine-breaking, or to congratulate him for winning the battles of the Pyramids, Mount Tabor and Aboukir, conquering Egypt, opening up the East and establishing a vast new French colony, as his propagandists were putting out. If the Directors ever seriously considered a suggestion from Bernadotte that he be court-martialled, they quickly dropped it after hearing their own guard break out into spontaneous cheers of ‘Vive Bonaparte!’ once he was recognized outside their council chamber.⁷

Over the following days, the rue de la Victoire was besieged by crowds of spectators and well-wishers. General Paul Thiébault, who had fought at Rivoli, was in the Palais-Royal when he heard that Napoleon had returned:

The general commotion in Paris left no doubt as to the truth of the news. The regimental bands belonging to the garrison of the city were already promenading the streets as a sign of public cheerfulness, swarms of people and soldiers following them. At night illuminations were hastily got up in every quarter, and in all the theatres the return was announced by shouts of ‘Vive la République! Vive Bonaparte!’ It was not the return of a general; it was the return of a leader in the garb of a general . . . Only the ghost of a government remained in France. Breached by all parties, the Directory was at the mercy of the first assault.⁸

Yet that assault still needed to be planned. To plot to overthrow the Constitution of the Year III – which Napoleon had solemnly sworn to uphold – constituted treason, punishable by the guillotine. Moreover there were so many plots to overthrow the Directory swirling around Paris that Napoleon might not be the first to mount one. That June, only the day after the legislature had replaced Jean-Baptiste Treilhard with the ex-Jacobin Gohier, there had been a mini-coup, the so-called journée parlementaire (parliamentary day), when General Joubert, with Barras’ and Sieyès’ support, had used force to replace La Révellière and Douai as Directors with Pierre-Roger Ducos and the ex-Jacobin General Jean-François Moulin. With the exceptions of Barras, Carnot and Sieyès, none of the thirteen men who held the post of Director between 1795 and 1799 were particularly impressive politicians.

Among those visiting Napoleon over the following days were almost all the key conspirators of the coming coup. First through the door was Talleyrand, who had been forced to resign as foreign minister in July when he was caught repeatedly and insistently demanding $250,000 in ‘gratification’ from the three impeccably honourable American envoys to Paris (one of whom was the future Supreme Court justice John Marshall) before he would deign to negotiate with them over loan repayments.⁹ Talleyrand worried that Napoleon would hold his non-appearance in Constantinople against him, but was instantly forgiven. Another early visitor was Pierre-Louis Roederer, a malleable but highly intelligent politician who had been elected to the Estates-General in 1789 and had survived every subsequent regime; he was to become one of Napoleon’s closest advisors. Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, the former editor whom Napoleon had left to administer Malta, turned up, as did Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, a key supporter from the lower house of the legislature, the Council of the Five Hundred. Other co-conspirators during those October days included Vice-Admiral Eustache Bruix of the Brest squadron, the ‘well-bred and gentlemanlike’ bureaucrat Hugues-Bernard Maret, and a senior police official, the former Jacobin Pierre-François Réal.¹⁰

These men were all to hold key positions in Napoleon’s government after the coup; several became members of the Conseil d’État and almost all peers of France. Another crucial figure in the coup was Lucien Bonaparte, who had been elected to the Five Hundred in June 1798 aged twenty-three and was shortly to become its president, allowing the plotters their opportunity to clothe their coup with a spurious constitutionalism. ‘Tall, ill-shaped, having limbs like those of a field-spider, and a small head,’ Laure d’Abrantès described Lucien, ‘very near-sighted, which made him half shut his eyes and stoop his head.’¹¹ As one had to be thirty to qualify for election, his birth certificate was doctored to meet the requirement.¹²

‘Brumaire’ means ‘season of mists and fog’, and it is appropriately hard to piece together the mechanics of what took place next because Napoleon deliberately committed nothing to paper; only two letters of his survive for the twenty-three days between his arrival in Paris on October 16 and the 18 Brumaire when the coup was launched, neither of them compromising.¹³ For a man who wrote an average of fifteen letters a day, this time everything was to be done by word of mouth. He had already once in his life had his correspondence ransacked for evidence with which to guillotine him, and he wasn’t going to allow it to happen again. In his public appearances he went back to wearing his uniform of the Institut de France rather than that of a general.

The coup wasn’t Napoleon’s brainchild, but that of the Abbé Sieyès, who had replaced Reubell as a Director in May 1799 but who soon concluded that the government of which he was a leading member was simply too incompetent and corrupt to deal with the issues facing France. His co-conspirators, including fellow Director and crony Ducos, the police chief Joseph Fouché and the justice minister Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, had far more political weight than Napoleon’s friends (except Talleyrand), and Sieyès regarded Napoleon as merely the ‘sword’, or muscle, necessary to see the enterprise through. Sieyès was one of those who personally detested Napoleon, a feeling that was entirely mutual. Sieyès had privately suggested that he be shot for deserting his post in Egypt, while Napoleon had said that Sieyès should lose his Directorship for having sold himself to Prussia (of which there’s no proof).¹⁴ When his first choice of ‘sword’, General Joubert, had been shot through the heart at the battle of Novi, north of Genoa (coincidentally on Napoleon’s birthday), Sieyès had little choice but to turn to Napoleon: of the other leading generals Jourdan supported the constitution, Schérer had been discredited by defeat, Jacques Macdonald (the son of a Jacobite Highlander) and Moreau seem to have refused the offer, and Pichegru was by then fighting for the enemy. As on Vendémiaire, the key role fell to Napoleon almost by process of elimination.

It was Talleyrand who finally persuaded a reluctant Sieyès to choose Napoleon on the basis of his irreproachable republican record, and the lack of alternatives.¹⁵ To Napoleon he is credited with saying, ‘You want the power and Sieyès wants the constitution, therefore join forces.’¹⁶ Napoleon’s popularity with Parisians was obviously a factor in Sieyès’ decision; at a visit to the Celestins theatre at this time Napoleon sat at the back of the box and placed Duroc at the front, but ‘the call for Bonaparte grew so violent and so unanimous’ that they were forced to swap places, as Napoleon presumably expected would happen.¹⁷

Napoleon and Sieyès only met for the first time on the afternoon of October 23. ‘I was in charge of negotiating the political conditions of an agreement,’ recalled Roederer. ‘I was forwarding to one and the other their respective views of the constitution to be established, and the position that each would take.’¹⁸ Napoleon wanted to keep his options open and was entertaining other offers, though none from a group as politically well-connected. There may have been as many as ten active plots to overthrow the Directory being secretly discussed in these months.

 • • •

None of the myriad failures of the Directory over the previous four years could credibly be laid at the door of the absent Napoleon. Defeats abroad had stripped France of the territories he had won in 1796–7 and had cut her off from German and Italian markets. While Russia, Britain, Portugal, Turkey and Austria had joined the War of the Second Coalition against her, there was also a so-called ‘Quasi-War’ with America over the repayments of debts that the United States argued she owed the French Crown and not the French state. There had already been no fewer than four French war ministers in eight months that year, and with army pay so deeply in arrears, desertion, brigandage and highway robbery were rampant in the countryside. Royalist revolts in Provence and the Vendée had reignited. A Royal Navy blockade had wrecked overseas trade and the paper currency was next to worthless. The taxation of land, doors and windows, the seizure of suspected pro-Bourbon hostages, and the Jourdan Law of 1798 that turned the earlier emergency levées en masse into something approaching universal military conscription, were all deeply unpopular. Corruption over government contracts was even more rife than usual, and was correctly assumed to involve Directors such as Barras. Freedom of the press and association were heavily restricted. The 1798 and 1799 elections for one-third of the legislature had seen widespread fraud, and, crucially, the middle-class buyers of the biens nationaux (nationalized property) feared for the security of their acquisitions.

Few blights undermine a society more comprehensively than hyperinflation, and great political prizes would go to anyone who could defeat it. (The deputies of the legislature paid themselves in an inflation-proof way, by index-linking their salaries to the value of 30,000 kg of wheat.) The Directory had abolished the Law of the Maximum, which kept prices down on staples such as bread, flour, milk and meat, so the bad 1798 harvest had led to a pound of bread reaching above 3 sols for the first time in two years, leading to hoarding, riots and genuine distress. Perhaps worst of all, people couldn’t see how anything could improve, because revisions of the constitution had to be ratified three times by both chambers at three-year intervals and then by a special assembly at the end of the nine-year process.¹⁹ This was unlikely to happen in a legislature as fluid and unstable as that of late 1799, which included covert royalists, Feuillant constitutionalists (moderates), former Girondins, neo-Jacobin ‘patriots’, but precious few supporters of the Directory. By contrast, the constitutions that Napoleon had recently imposed on the Cisalpine, Venetian, Ligurian, Lemanic, Helvetian and Roman republics, along with his administrative reforms of Malta and Egypt, made him look like a zealous, efficient republican who believed in strong executives and central control, solutions that might also work well for metropolitan France.

France was not quite a failed state in the autumn of 1799, indeed in some areas the Directory had reason to be optimistic. Some economic reforms were being undertaken, Russia had left the Second Coalition, the situation in the Vendée was improving, British forces had been expelled from Holland, and Masséna had won some victories in Switzerland that meant that France was no longer in imminent danger of invasion.²⁰ Yet none of this was enough to dispel the overall impression among Frenchmen that the Directory had failed and, as Napoleon put it at the time, ‘the pear was ripe’.²¹ Nor was there a place for Napoleon within the existing political structure, as the minimum age for Directors was still forty, whereas Napoleon was thirty, and Gohier hadn’t seemed keen to alter the constitution for him.

Napoleon has been accused of killing French democracy at Brumaire, and so he did, but even the Westminster parliament was hardly a paragon of Jeffersonian ideals, containing many seats that only had a few score electors and remaining firmly in the grip of an aristocratic oligarchy until well into the second half of the nineteenth century. Although the coup has been depicted as destroying French liberty too, since the Thermidor coup that overthrew Robespierre and brought the Directory into being in July 1794 there had been the coup attempt of Vendémiaire in 1795, the purge of Fructidor in 1797 and the Prairial parliamentary day of June 1799. For all its undoubted unconstitutionality, the Brumaire coup was hardly a new departure in French politics. Napoleon had sworn to uphold the constitution and much of his popularity had been based on the belief that he was a true republican. But ‘When the house is crumbling, is it the time to busy oneself in the garden?’ Napoleon asked Marmont rhetorically. ‘A change here is indispensable.’²²

 • • •

At breakfast at the rue de la Victoire on October 26 Napoleon openly criticized the Directory to Thiébault, contrasting their soldiers’ esprit on the Italian campaign with the government’s lethargy. ‘A nation is always what you have the wit to make it,’ he said. ‘The triumph of faction, parties, divisions, is the fault of those in authority only . . . No people are bad under a good government, just as no troops are bad under good generals . . . These men are bringing France down to the level of their own blundering. They are degrading her, and she is beginning to repudiate them.’ Forthright opinions like those had cost lives earlier in the Revolution, but Napoleon felt secure enough to talk sedition to a comrade he was hoping to win over, ending with one of his most regular condemnations: ‘Well, what can generals expect from this government of lawyers?’²³

‘There’s no-one more pusillanimous than me when I make a military plan,’ Napoleon told Roederer on the 27th. ‘I exaggerate all the possible dangers and all the possible harms in the circumstances. I get in a very tiresome agitation. This doesn’t prevent me looking very serene in front of those surrounding me. I’m like a woman who’s giving birth. And when I’m resolved, everything is forgotten except what can make it succeed.’²⁴ Napoleon applied the same obsessive attention to the planning of the Brumaire coup. His precise actions are impossible to know because of the total dearth of contemporary written evidence, but once it was launched everyone seems to have known where to be and what to do.

Days before the coup the Directory, probably suspecting what was afoot, offered Napoleon his pick of foreign commands, which he refused on health grounds. They also secretly accused him through the press of embezzlement in Italy, which he vigorously denied.²⁵ The story is told from this period of Napoleon plotting at Talleyrand’s house when loud noises were heard in the street below. Fearing they were about to be arrested, the conspirators blew out the candles, rushed to the balcony and were hugely relieved to see the commotion had been caused by a carriage accident involving gamblers returning from the Palais-Royal.²⁶

The gamble they were embarked upon was aided greatly on October 29 when a new law suspended the payment of pre-assigned monies to government contractors until their accounts were audited. The contractor Jean-Pierre Collot, a protégé of Cambacérès who was bankrolling the conspiracy, now felt he had less to lose.²⁷

The moment that decided Napoleon to cross his Rubicon came the next day, when he dined with Barras at the Luxembourg Palace, where the whole Directory lived and worked. After dinner Barras proposed that General Gabriel d’Hédouville, whom Napoleon thought ‘excessively mediocre’, should become president of France to ‘save’ the Republic. Although he’d fought at Valmy, d’Hédouville had recently been forced to flee Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) by the black nationalist leader Toussaint L’Ouverture’s revolution, and certainly wasn’t presidential material. ‘As for you, General,’ Barras told Napoleon, ‘your intention is to return to the army; and I, sick, unpopular, worn out, I am good for nothing except to return to private life.’²⁸ In one of Napoleon’s recollections of that occasion he merely stared at Barras without replying, but in another, ‘I answered with a manner calculated to convince him that I was not his dupe. He looked down and muttered a few remarks that at once decided me. From his apartment in the Luxembourg, I went down to that of Sieyès . . . I told him I had made up my mind to act with him.’²⁹

Barras, realizing his terrible error, visited the rue de la Victoire at 8 a.m. the next morning to try to make amends, but Napoleon replied that he ‘was tired, indisposed, that he could not get used to the humidity of the atmosphere in the capital, coming from the dry climate of the sands of Arabia’, and ended the interview ‘with similar platitudes’.³⁰ Napoleon met Sieyès secretly at Lucien’s house on November 1 to co-ordinate the details of the coup which by then Talleyrand and Fouché had also joined.

Joseph Fouché was no ordinary police chief. An Oratorian intending to join the Church until he was twenty-three, he became a regicide Jacobin in 1793. More interested in power than ideology, he kept up many contacts among the royalists, and he protected priests, especially Oratorians, despite being a leader of the anti-clerical party. ‘Everyone knows this personage’, wrote Napoleon’s future aide-de-camp Comte Philippe Ségur, ‘his medium stature, his tow-coloured hair, lank and scanty, his active leanness, his long, mobile face with the physiognomy of an excited ferret; one remembers his piercing keen gaze, shifty nevertheless, his little bloodshot eyes, his brief and jerky manner of speech which was in harmony with his restless, uneasy attitude.’³¹

Fouché recruited spies from, among many others, pedlars, butchers, hairdressers, locksmiths, wigmakers, perfumers, bartenders, Louis XVI’s former valet, an ex-Jacobin known as ‘Wooden-Leg Collin’, the Baroness Lauterbourg, and the madame of the brothel at No. 133 Palais-Royal.³² ‘One day he’ll look into my bed,’ Napoleon joked of him, ‘then next into my wallet.’³³ It was welcome news for Napoleon that Fouché was supporting the coup, since he was never found on the losing side (although he also had contingency plans to arrest the ‘rebels’ should the attempt fail.³⁴) Napoleon’s attitude towards Fouché both during the coup and thereafter was that ‘Fouché, and Fouché alone, is able to conduct the ministry of police. We cannot create such men; we must take as we find.’³⁵

 • • •

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 National 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 moment 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

Napoleon had been taken aback by the ferocity of the deputies’ response, but claims of his losing his composure and handing everything over to Lucien are exaggerated. Although Lavalette reported that he found Napoleon ‘walking with much agitation in an apartment which had no other furniture than two armchairs’, saying to Sieyès: ‘Now you see what they are doing!’ and ‘beating the ground with his whip’ exclaiming ‘This must have an end!’, this all relates to the period before he spoke to the Elders on Day Two, not after he spoke to the Five Hundred, and is therefore evidence of his frustration and impatience rather than any lack of nerve.⁷² For the period after his escape/expulsion from the Orangery, the conspirators had a contingency plan, which they put into operation once Lucien had also got out. The half-hour was spent waiting for Lucien to emerge, collecting the conspirators, spreading the word of Napoleon’s manhandling by the deputies, and planning how to persuade the Corps Legislatif guards to support the coup.

It was during this dangerous hiatus that Augereau, who was a member of the Five Hundred but who had not committed himself either way, came out to Napoleon at the Gallery of Mars to say, somewhat unhelpfully, ‘You’re in pretty deep water now,’ to which Napoleon replied: ‘So what, it was much worse at Arcole.’⁷³ In Napoleon’s later recollection he even threatened Augereau, saying, ‘Believe me, keep quiet if you don’t want to be a victim. In half an hour you’ll see how things turn out.’⁷⁴ Whichever response is more accurate, both imply that Napoleon knew he had botched the start of the second phase of the coup, and was in a scrape, but also that he was hardly suffering a catastrophic haemorrhage of courage.⁷⁵ Moreover, both responses imply that he had a plan to reverse the situation.

 • • •

The next stage was to win over the four-hundred-strong Corps Legislatif guard under Captain Jean-Marie Ponsard. This was achieved not by Napoleon alone but instead by a piece of pure theatre that one suspects might have been stage-managed, possibly even practised beforehand. It bears an uncanny resemblance to a remark Napoleon had made to the French consul in Genoa, Tilly, just before his arrest in 1794, when he wrote of Augustin Robespierre, ‘Had he been my own brother, if he’d aspired to tyranny I’d have stabbed him myself.’⁷⁶ Now, five years later, Lucien made precisely the same point when he leaped onto a horse to harangue the guards about how the majority of the Five Hundred were being terrorized by a minority of fanatics in the pay of English gold. He then drew his sword, held its point against Napoleon’s breast, and cried: ‘I swear that I will stab my own brother to the heart if he ever attempts anything against the liberty of Frenchmen.’⁷⁷ It was a promise as disingenuous as it was histrionic, but it worked. (It was also the last time that any of Napoleon’s brothers proved anything other than a complete liability to him until the battle of Waterloo itself.)

‘Captain,’ Napoleon told Ponsard, at least according to one much later account, ‘take your company and go right away to disperse this assembly of sedition. They are not the representatives of the nation anymore, but some scoundrels who caused all its misfortunes.’ Ponsard asked what to do in case of resistance. ‘Use force,’ Napoleon replied, ‘even the bayonet.’ ‘That will suffice, mon général.’⁷⁸ With General Charles Leclerc (who was married to Napoleon’s sister Pauline) and Murat (who was engaged to Napoleon’s other sister Caroline), Bessières, Major Guillaume Dujardin of the 8th Line and other officers, including Lefebvre and Marmont, denouncing the lawyer-politicians who had supposedly been bought by English gold, Ponsard’s soldiers simply cleared out the Orangery, ignoring the deputies’ cries of ‘Vive la République!’ and appeals to the law and the constitution.⁷⁹

‘Only half an hour had passed,’ Berlier recalled, ‘when one of the main doors of the room opening with a great noise, we saw the army, led by Murat, penetrating, bayonets fixed, into the room to evacuate it.’ When they entered, the deputies Joseph Blin, Louis Talot and Bigonnet – one source also cites Jourdan – implored them to disobey their officers, but they didn’t.⁸⁰ Fearing arrest, many deputies then fled, according to legend some of them jumping out of the Orangery’s ground floor windows. Lavalette recorded them ‘doffing their Roman toga and square cap costumes, the easier to flee incognito’.⁸¹ The grenadiers seem to have viewed their vital role in overthrowing the constitution with perfect equanimity. They put the orders of the officers under whom many of them had served on campaign – and whom all had heard of in the barrack-room as heroes back from Egypt – before those of their elected representatives. When it came down to a choice between obeying these giants of their profession or the politicians baying for their arrest in the Orangery, there was simply no contest. It helped that a former war minister, General Pierre de Beurnonville, was present and supportive: by the end of the month Napoleon had sent him a pair of pistols inscribed ‘Day of St-Cloud, 19th Brumaire Year VIII’. Similar presents were also given to Lefebvre and Bessières.⁸²

At the end of Day Two and late into the night, Lucien assembled as many deputies in the Orangery as he could find who supported the coup, whose numbers vary according to the sources but seem to have been around fifty, so only 10 per cent of the lower chamber.⁸³ ‘The Directory is no more’, they decreed, ‘because of the excesses and crimes to which they were constantly inclined.’⁸⁴ They appointed Sieyès, Ducos and Napoleon – in that order – as provisional Consuls, pointing out that the first two were former Directors, which offered a sense of constitutional continuity, however spurious. Lucien’s rump of the Five Hundred also adjourned both chambers for four months – but as it turned out, for ever – and ordered the expulsion from the legislature of sixty-one mostly neo-Jacobin opponents of the new regime, although only twenty people were exiled.⁸⁵ An interim commission of fifty members, twenty-five from each chamber, would draw up a new constitution, which everyone assumed Sieyès had already written.

 • • •

Was a dagger ever actually pulled on Napoleon in the Orangery, as the supporters of the coup alleged? In the large number of conflicting and highly politically motivated accounts of what happened, it is impossible to say for certain, but it is extremely unlikely, partly because no blood – Napoleon’s or anyone else’s – was shed that day. Many people carried small knives for everyday use from quill-sharpening to oyster-shucking rather than for self-defence, and the Five Hundred’s uniform of a long blue velvet toga-like cape made them easy to conceal. Lucien and Marmont of course told the troops at the time that Napoleon had been attacked with a dagger, and Lavalette named the Corsican anti-Bonapartist deputy Barthélemy Aréna as wielding one, but no-one else seems to have seen it. (Aréna wrote a letter to Le Journal des Républicains on 23 Brumaire pointing out that he was at the opposite end of the room, but he fled the country just in case.)⁸⁶ An early, anti-Napoleonic four-volume account of the coup, published in 1814, states that when the shouts were of ‘Cromwell’ and ‘Tyrant’, ‘Fifty deputies moved in around him, pushed him, spoke to him, seemed to push him back; one amongst them pulled a dagger innocently scratching the hand of the grenadier closest to the general, dropped his weapon and lost himself in the crowd.’⁸⁷ How one can innocently scratch someone with a dagger under those circumstances wasn’t explained, and Grenadier Thomé seems only to have been lightly scratched when his sleeve was torn or ripped, rather than cut.⁸⁸

The first time a dagger was mentioned in the Moniteur was on 23 Brumaire, by which time the Bonapartists were fully in charge of the government propaganda machine. No other papers reported one, but the supposed dagger attack nonetheless became an important part of the justification for the clearing of the chamber, and a staple of the prints and engravings that started to appear shortly afterwards. Within a year a print had been published in London entitled Bonaparte at the Corps Legislatif, for example, showing Napoleon bravely withstanding a murderous assault from furious, dagger-wielding deputies. ‘General Bonaparte,’ read his Order of the Day of November 11, ‘expresses his particular satisfaction to those brave grenadiers who covered themselves with glory in saving the life of their general when on the point of falling beneath the blows of representatives armed with daggers.’⁸⁹ A hero was made of Thomé, who was granted a 600-franc pension for life, given a 2,000 écu diamond ring and a kiss from Josephine at a luncheon three days later.*

The real question perhaps ought to be: why wasn’t even so much as a penknife pulled in defence of the constitution, if not at Saint-Cloud then at least back in Paris? If either the Directory or the Five Hundred had had any popular support at all there would have been barricades in Paris that night and in other major French cities once the news reached them, but in fact not one was raised nor a shot fired in their defence. The working-class arrondissements such as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had no love for the Directory, and failed to rise. Instead the price of 3 per cent consols on the Stock Exchange rose from Fr. 11.4 the day before the coup to Fr. 20 a week later.⁹⁰ Far from Paris there was some localized opposition: the Pas-de-Calais, Jura and Pyrénées Orientales authorities voiced disquiet, but no-one was in a mood for a civil war against the Consulate and Napoleon, and it very soon sputtered out.

The key point about Brumaire, however, is not that the Directory was abolished, since it was clearly failing and likely to fall, but that both houses of the legislature were effectively abolished too, along with the Constitution of Year III. The legislature had not been deeply infected with the Directory’s unpopularity; the neo-Jacobins were no great threat, and the nation was in no immediate danger. Yet Sieyès and Napoleon succeeded in closing down both the Elders and the Five Hundred without any significant popular reaction. After a decade of Revolution, many Frenchmen were desperate for leadership and recognized that the parliamentary process inhibited that, as did a constitution that was next to impossible to amend. They were thus willing to see representative government temporarily suspended in order for Napoleon and his co-conspirators to cut the Gordian knot. Certainly public opinion in Paris was indifferent to whether Napoleon had used force to gain power or not. Army officers prize order, discipline and efficiency, each of which Napoleon considered by then to be more important than liberty, equality and fraternity, and at that moment the French people agreed with him. He was able to present France with a narrative of national success, whereas, as he himself put it, ‘These Directors know how to do nothing for the imagination of the nation.’⁹¹ Although his victories were part of Napoleon’s attraction, so too were the peace treaties he had delivered to a nation now exhausted by war.

Brumaire was not described as a coup d’état at the time, though of course it was one and the term was very much in the political vernacular (it had been used to describe the Thermidor purge). To contemporaries these were simply les journées (the days). For all the melodramatic aspect of the events – Lucien pointing his sword at Napoleon’s chest, Thomé getting a diamond ring for a dagger attack which probably never happened, and so on – the neo-Jacobins had proved tougher than expected, and if the Guard of the Corps Legislatif had showed any loyalty to the Five Hundred the conspirators would have faced great danger. The day after the Brumaire coup, in fulfilment of his own prophecy, Napoleon and Josephine did indeed sleep at the Luxembourg Palace, moving into Gohier’s apartment on the ground floor, to the right of the main palace on the rue de Vaugirard, only a hundred yards from the prison of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes where Josephine had come so close to death five years earlier.