PART TWO

Mastery

10

Consul

‘If he lasts a year, he’ll go far.’

Talleyrand on Napoleon’s consulship

‘The masses . . . should be directed without their being aware of it.’

Napoleon to Fouché, September 1804

At ten o’clock on the dark and rainy morning of Monday, November 11, 1799, Napoleon arrived at the Luxembourg Palace in civilian dress escorted by six dragoons to start the business of the provisional Consulate* in the same room where the Directory had met.¹Having pulled off a coup the previous day, he was intent on conducting a second as soon as was practicable against his chief co-conspirator. Sieyès had already written two constitutions for France, in 1791 and 1793, and Napoleon did not believe the Revolution would be safeguarded by his third, which was packed with checks and balances to centralized power. He later wrote of Sieyès, ‘He was not a man of action: knowing little of men’s natures, he did not know how to make them act. His studies having always led him down the path of metaphysics.’²

At the first meeting of the three consuls, Ducos said to Napoleon: ‘There’s no point having a vote for the presidency: it’s yours by right.’³ When Sieyès grimaced, Napoleon proposed a compromise: it would rotate every twenty-four hours, starting alphabetically by surname (that is, with him). He then took the large chair at the centre of the table where the president of the Directory had sat, and that was his chair thereafter. ‘Come on,’ he chivvied them. ‘Swear the oath, we’re in a hurry.’⁴ As the dynamo of the Consulate, it hardly mattered who formally presided over what was, after all, only a three-man meeting; it was Napoleon who tended to come up with most of the ideas discussed and who also then drove them forward.

The day after the coup the city was already placarded with Napoleon’s version of events – ‘twenty assassins threw themselves upon me and aimed at my chest’ – and his call for national unity. The narrative mentioned neither Sieyès nor Ducos. ‘Conservative, protective and liberal ideas have been restored to their rightful place by the dispersal of the agitators,’ the posters stated, appealing to Frenchmen who had lost patience with the Directory and didn’t think a government run by a successful general could be any worse.⁵

Although Napoleon’s propagandists had been up all night printing the posters and plastering them around Paris, Sieyès and his supporters weren’t so energetic. When Boulay de la Meurthe, the chairman of an inner committee of seven from the interim commission of fifty that had been appointed to draw up the new constitution, arrived at Sieyès’ apartment to receive the new document, all Sieyès had to show him was a bundle of notes. So Boulay and Sieyès sat down to fashion a first draft, which was later worked on by the constitutional expert and ex-Girondin Pierre Daunou.⁶ Roederer soon afterwards warned Napoleon that Sieyès planned to propose that a ‘Grand Elector’ oversee the work of the other two consuls, one responsible for foreign affairs and the other domestic. In a complex system of separation of powers, ‘notables’ would control the Senate, and only they could dismiss the Grand Elector.⁷ Sieyès clearly saw himself as this philosopher-king, with Napoleon as his consul for war and Ducos for the interior. This was very different from how Napoleon viewed the situation.⁸

Over the next five weeks, before ‘the Constitution of the Year VIII’ was read out in public places around Paris to the sound of drumbeats and trumpet fanfares, there followed intense discussion in various unofficial committees and sub-committees formed by the Brumairians, during which Napoleon’s faction, led by Lucien and Boulay, brought over Daunou, who thought authority needed to be more concentrated, and comprehensively outmanoeuvred Sieyès and his smaller group of supporters. Cambacérès’ timely defection to Napoleon’s side helped greatly. Boulay finally made it clear to the interim committee that it was their ‘mission’ to give Napoleon decisive powers for ten years as First Consul, without any Grand Elector to watch over him but with a Conseil d’État to advise him, which would have the sole authority to initiate legislation.⁹ Article 41 of the new constitution stated: ‘The First Consul promulgates laws; he names and dismisses at his pleasure members of the Conseil d’État, ministers and ambassadors and other chief foreign agents, officers of the army and navy, the members of local administrations and government commissioners attached to the courts.’¹⁰ He also had treaty-making powers, would live at the Tuileries and would receive 500,000 francs per annum, fifty times an ambassador’s salary. It was thus very clear, right from the beginning, where true power lay; the second and third consuls would also live at the Tuileries but they would draw only 150,000 francs per annum for their roles as constitutional figleafs.

The Consulate issued a spate of decrees aimed at making the new regime popular and, in its own phrase, ‘completing the Revolution’. Versailles was turned over to wounded soldiers; a vicious anti-émigré law was repealed, with Napoleon going personally to the Temple prison to set hostages free; the police were ordered not to harass returning émigrés or to make them take out forced ‘loans’; and the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and 1 Vendémiaire (the republican New Year’s Day) were made public holidays. Pensions would be awarded to the war-wounded as well as to soldiers’ widows and orphans and non-juring priests were no longer deported for refusing to take the Constitutional Oath. A full ten days of mourning was ordained for George Washington, who died in December, despite the fact that France and America were still fighting the Quasi-War; in the public eulogies to ‘the American Cincinnatus’, analogies were drawn between Washington and Napoleon.¹¹ Nor did Napoleon forget his parting promise to Kléber, ordering the new interior minister, the mathematician and astronomer the Marquis de Laplace, to send ‘a troupe of comedians’ out to Egypt on the first available boat.¹² ‘A newly born government must dazzle and astonish,’ he told Bourrienne at this time. ‘When it ceases to do that it fails.’¹³

The appointment of a distinguished scientist like Laplace to such a high-profile post made it clear that, just because Napoleon was a soldier and Brumaire had been a military coup, this was emphatically not a military dictatorship. Talleyrand returned as foreign minister and only one soldier joined the government, the new minister of war Alexandre Berthier.¹⁴ ‘If I die within three or four years of fever in my bed,’ Napoleon told Roederer the following year, ‘I will say to the nation to watch out against military government. I will tell it to appoint a civil magistrate.’¹⁵ Fouché predictably became minister of police and Martin Gaudin, a former high official in the treasury who had served every regime since Louis XVI, was appointed finance minister. Gaudin quickly set about reforming the fiendishly complex French tax code and lowering rates. Financial management moved from local authorities to the finance ministry and the whole public accounting system was eventually centralized.¹⁶ Napoleon quickly established a central system for the payment of the army, hitherto done through the departments, a classic example of how he was able to slice through bureaucracy and implement a much-needed reform without delay.

At the final meeting of the constitutional commission on December 13, Napoleon invited Sieyès to propose the names of the three consuls to be presented to the nation as part of the new Constitution of the Year VIII in a plebiscite in February. Having by then accepted a reputed 350,000 francs in cash, an estate outside Versailles and a house in Paris (funded by the state), Sieyès duly proposed Napoleon as First Consul, Cambacérès as Second and the infinitely flexible lawyer and former deputy Charles-François Lebrun, who had supported every party except the Jacobins in his time, as Third. Sieyès was merely allocated the presidency of the Senate and Ducos (who took 100,000 francs for giving up his provisional consulship) its vice-presidency. Napoleon’s second coup had taken a little longer than the first, but it was just as bloodless and successful. Although a formal plebiscite, scheduled for February, would be required to confer legal legitimacy on the Consulate, Napoleon himself never doubted that he had the moral right to rule France. As he was to write of Julius Caesar, ‘In such a state of affairs these deliberative assemblies could no longer govern; the person of Caesar was therefore the guarantee of the supremacy of Rome in the universe, and of the security of citizens of all parties. His authority was therefore legitimate.’¹⁷ His attitude to the government of France in 1799 was identical.

 • • •

‘Frenchmen!’ Napoleon proclaimed on December 15, ‘A Constitution is presented to you. It ends the uncertainties . . . [in] the internal and military situation of the Republic . . . The Constitution is founded on the true principles of representative government, on the sacred rights of property, equality and liberty . . . Citizens, the Revolution is established on the principles which began it. It is finished.’¹⁸

The placing of property rights before those of equality and liberty was indicative of how Napoleon intended to defend the interests of tradesmen, employers, strivers and the owners of the biens nationaux – the kind of people who struggled to run small businesses like a mulberry orchard. These were France’s backbone; he understood their concerns and needs. Article 94 of the ninety-five-article constitution (less than a quarter the length of the previous one) stated categorically that the property and lands of the monarchy, Church and aristocracy which had been taken and sold during the Revolution would never be returned to their original owners. These were promises Napoleon reiterated in 1802 and 1804, but he did not promise further redistribution. When he spoke of equality, he meant equality before the law and not of economic situation. His strongest natural supporter, the army, did well out of the coup, with better pay and conditions, pensions and the promise of land (though no-one seems to have been given sixarpents). The law suspending payments to contractors was repealed and they were quickly paid in full.

Late December saw the formal installation of what would become the institutions of Napoleonic rule. On the 22nd the Conseil d’État was inaugurated in its own rooms at the Luxembourg. Consisting largely of apolitical technocrats appointed by the First Consul and very much under his personal control, the Conseil was the main deliberative body of the new government of France, advising the First Consul and helping him to draft laws. Only six of the fifty members were soldiers. So long as they were respectful, members of the Conseil were invited to be as outspoken as they felt was necessary, and Napoleon encouraged debate between them. Under the new constitution the Conseil was both the final court of appeal in administrative law cases and the body responsible for the examination of the wording of bills before they went before the legislature, functions it still retains today. Ministers were ex officio members of the Conseil; they attended meetings when the agenda covered their areas of responsibility.

At 8 a.m. on December 25 (Christmas Day was not officially recognized again until 1802) the Constitution of the Year VIII came into force. A speech by Boulay served as a preface to its printed version, which argued that the vast majority of French citizens wanted a republic that was neither ‘the despotism of the Ancien Régime nor the tyranny of 1793’.¹⁹ The new constitution, he stated, could be summed up in the dictum: ‘Confidence comes from below, power from above.’²⁰ Under it, the First Consul would hold political and administrative power for ten years and the other two consuls would advise him for that period. A sixty-man Senate, whose members served ‘inviolable and for life’ and whose numbers would increase by two every year to a maximum of eighty, would choose the consuls, the deputies to the three-hundred-strong Legislative Body and the hundred-man Tribunate from national lists which were produced as the result of four rounds of elections. Most importantly, proclamations made by the majority of the Senate, called sénatus-consultes, had the full force of law, although initially they were intended to be passed solely for the purpose of altering the constitution.

The Tribunate would discuss the draft laws that the First Consul and the Conseil had formulated, but couldn’t veto; the Legislative Body could vote on the laws, but not discuss them. The Tribunate could discuss legislation that the Consulate sent to it, and tell the Legislative Body what it thought; the Legislative Body would sit for no longer than four months a year to consider their views. Only the Senate could amend the constitution, but none of the three chambers had powers to initiate or amend legislation. By these means, Napoleon ensured the separation of fairly feeble powers among them, keeping the lion’s share for himself.

Citizens could vote on the initial selection of Legislative Body deputies, though the final selection would be made by the Senate. All adult male voters in a community would thus choose 10 per cent of their number as ‘Notabilities of the Commune’, who would then choose 10 per cent of their number as the ‘Notabilities of the Departments’, who would then choose the five or six thousand ‘Notabilities of the Nation’ from whom the four hundred members of the Legislative Body and Tribunate would be appointed. As it turned out, there was a good deal of continuity with the earlier chambers. Out 60 senators, 38 had sat in a national assembly before, as had 69 of the 100 tribunes and 240 of the 300 deputies.²¹ Their experience was useful as Napoleon went about consolidating, adapting and, in his own description, ‘finalizing’ the Revolution.²² The sheer complexity of the constitution, especially the triple-voting system of election to the legislature, suited Napoleon perfectly as it gave him ample opportunity to winnow out opposition.²³

There was plenty more in the new constitution to calm the nation: authorities could enter a Frenchman’s home without invitation only in the case of fire or flood; citizens could be held for no more than ten days without trial; ‘harshness used in arrests’ would be a crime.²⁴ On January 1, 1800 (a date with no particular significance in the revolutionary calendar as it was 11 Nivôse Year VIII) the Legislative Body and Tribunate met for the first time.

Just because the freedom of the legislature was circumscribed did not mean that the Napoleonic regime didn’t listen. Petitioners always got a hearing, and debates within the departments at the conseils de préfecture and conseils généraux tended to be reasonably open, though they had little effect on government policy.²⁵ The regime heard people’s complaints well enough; it just didn’t provide them with any means of amplifying criticism and there was little possibility of concerted political opposition.

 • • •

In his first week as First Consul, Napoleon wrote two letters proposing peace to Emperor Francis of Austria and to Britain’s King George III. ‘I venture to declare that the fate of all civilized nations is concerned in the termination of a war which kindles a conflagration over the whole world,’ he told the latter.²⁶ When the British foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, responded by saying that Napoleon should restore the Bourbons, Napoleon replied that if the same principle were applied to Britain it would result in the restoration of the Stuarts. He made sure that milord Grenville’s letter received wide publicity in France, and it consolidated support behind the Consulate.²⁷ The Russians having dropped out of the Second Coalition after their defeat at Masséna’s hands at the Second Battle of Zurich in late September 1799, the Austrians entered peace negotiations which went on for months, but without success. By the time the new campaigning season began in the spring they would be ready to try to capture Genoa and invade south-east France.

‘I want you all to rally around the mass of the people,’ Napoleon wrote of the French political class to a former deputy of the Five Hundred, François Beyts, who had been one of the sixty-one people proscribed during Brumaire. ‘The simple title of French citizen is worth far more than that of Royalist, Chouan, Jacobin, Feuillant, or any of those thousand-and-one denominations which have sprung, during these past ten years, from the spirit of faction, and which are hurling the nation into an abyss from which the time has at last come to rescue it, once and for all.’²⁸ This worked for Beyts, who was appointed prefect of the Loir-et-Cher department the following March. But not all were seduced and Napoleon responded harshly to those who questioned his policy of national unification. When the mayor of Lille expressed reservations about welcoming a former Jacobin general to his city, Napoleon retorted: ‘Do not dare to say anything of the kind; do you not see that now we are all equally serving France? I would have you know, sir, that between 17 and 18 Brumaire I have erected a wall of brass which no glance may penetrate, and against which all recollections must be dashed to pieces!’²⁹ It was the first time since the Revolution that an incoming regime had not comprehensively purged its predecessor, and although opposition figures were indeed removed from the Legislative Body three years later, Frenchmen were no longer guillotined for their political views.

Napoleon’s brass-wall policy allowed him to rally a very wide spectrum of opinion to his government, spanning every faction except the neo-Jacobins. Despite having been a Jacobin himself, or perhaps because of it, he recognized that while plenty of ex-Jacobins might rally to his cause, the neo-Jacobin movement itself would always be ideologically opposed to him. The process of national unification regardless of previous political stances was called ralliement – literally, winning over – and although some joined the Napoleonic regime out of self-interest, many did it out of genuine patriotism, once they saw how Napoleon was regenerating France.³⁰ A second, related policy, called amalgame – consolidation – sought to encourage active enthusiasm for the regime, as distinct from mere support.³¹

These policies allowed Napoleon to recruit a very talented group of public officials to his government, led by Cambacérès (a regicide), and including the future minister of justice Louis-Mathieu Molé (a royalist whose father had been guillotined), Jean-Étienne Portalis (an anti-Directory moderate) who dealt with religious affairs, and his equally efficient son Joseph-Marie, the scientist and future interior minister Jean Chaptal (a Girondin), the military administrator General Jean-Gérard Lacuée (a moderate), the councillor of state Antoine Thibaudeau (another regicide), Étienne-Denis Pasquier (a moderate whose father had been guillotined) at the prefecture of police, and the treasury minister Nicolas-François Mollien (a former minister of Louis XVI’s). ‘The art of appointing men’, Napoleon told Mollien, ‘is not nearly so difficult as the art of allowing those appointed to attain their full worth.’³² Despite having overthrown him at Fructidor, Napoleon recognized Carnot’s great abilities and appointed him minister of war on April 2, 1800, sending Berthier to command the Army of the Reserve.³³

Within a week of Brumaire, as a result of the new sense of stability, efficiency and sheer competence, the franc–dollar and franc–pound exchange rates had doubled. By the end of January 1800 100-franc government bonds that had been languishing at 12 francs had soared to 60 francs. Two years later, partly by forcing the tax-collecting authorities to make deposits in advance of estimated yields, the finance minister Martin Gaudin had balanced the budget for the first time since the American War of Independence.³⁴

 • • •

On taking power, Napoleon had made it clear that the new Constitution of the Year VIII would be legitimized by a nationwide plebiscite of all French citizens, taking place over several days at the end of January and beginning of February 1800. All adult males could vote by signing a register, which was kept open for three days. In order to make certain of a positive outcome Napoleon replaced Laplace as interior minister with his brother Lucien in December. On February 7 Lucien formally announced the results of the plebiscite, asserting that 3,011,007 Frenchmen had voted in favour of the Constitution of the Year VIII and only 1,562 against.³⁵ It was of course ludicrous to claim that 99.95 per cent of Frenchmen had voted yes, even on the low turnout of 25 per cent – which can in part be blamed on the weather and lack of transportation for a rural population – not least because the Midi and Vendée were still rife with royalism.³⁶ In Toulon, for example, it was claimed that 830 people had voted in favour and one Jacobin cobbler against.

There are over four hundred bundles of votes in the Archives Nationales which show clear proof of the systematic falsification of the results by Lucien in his own handwriting. On February 4 he ordered the interior ministry to stop counting the votes as he wanted to announce the total three days later. So for the south-west region, the government simply calculated what they thought the result might be from the twenty-five departments that had already been counted, including Corsica.³⁷ By simply adding an additional 8,000 yes votes to twenty-four departments’ totals and 16,000 to that of the Yonne, Lucien extrapolated an extra 200,000 yes votes in the south-west alone. In the south-east he added about 7,000 votes per department and in the north-east between 7,000 and 8,000. He often didn’t even bother to falsify using unusual numbers, but simply added round ones, with the goal of getting the yes vote to over 3 million. In total he added around 900,000 yes votes between February 4 and 7.³⁸ The military vote of 556,021 in favour and precisely nil against was simply invented. Although there were 34,500 naval votes cast, often only a ship’s officers would vote but the whole ship’s complement would be added on. The true result was probably around 1.55 million yes against several thousand no.³⁹Napoleon had therefore won some kind of democratic legitimacy, but by far less than he claimed and indeed less than a plebiscite that Robespierre had won in 1793.⁴⁰ Even the figures that Lucien falsified had themselves already been manipulated by local officials, who knew that an important part of their job was to please whoever was in power in Paris. Officials went unscrutinized, voting was open rather than by secret ballot and so liable to intimidation, and half the electorate was illiterate but nevertheless had the right to vote, so the mayors filled in their ballot papers for them.

Lucien’s fiddling of the figures provides a perfect insight into one of the most characteristic aspects of the Napoleonic story. Napoleon was always going to win by a huge landslide, yet the Bonapartists simply couldn’t resist exaggerating even those numbers, thereby allowing the opposition – neo-Jacobins, royalists, liberals, moderates and others – to argue in their salons and underground cells that the whole process was a fraud. So often, when it came to manipulating battle casualties, or inserting documents into archives, or inventing speeches to the Army of Italy, or changing ages on birth certificates, or painting Napoleon on a rearing horse crossing the Alps, Napoleon and his propagandists simply went one unnecessary step too far, and as a result invited ridicule and criticism of what were genuinely extraordinary achievements.

 • • •

Of all the Consulate’s policies, the one to smash rural brigandage was among the most popular. ‘The art of policing is in punishing infrequently and severely,’ Napoleon believed, but in his war against the brigands who were terrorizing vast areas of France, he tended to punish both frequently and severely.⁴¹ Brigands could be royalist rebels (especially in western and southern France), groups of deserters or draft-dodgers, outlaws, highwaymen, simple ruffians or a combination of all these. The Ancien Régime, the Committee of Public Safety and the Directory had all fought against endemic lawlessness in the countryside, but the Consulate fought to win with every means at its disposal. Napoleon interned and deported suspected brigands, and used the death penalty against convicted ones, who were often called such unedifying names as ‘The Dragon’, ‘Beat-to-Death’ and ‘The Little Butcher of Christians’, and who raided isolated farmhouses as well as hijacking coaches and robbing travellers.

Although the gendarmerie or paramilitary police had been inaugurated in April 1798 with a force of 10,575 men, Napoleon reorganized it, increased its numbers to 16,500, paid it well and on time, improved its morale and stamped out most of the corruption within its ranks.⁴² Patrols were increased and were mounted on horseback when before they had been on foot; special tribunals and military commissions guillotined suspects on circumstantial evidence without the right to a defence lawyer; and huge mobile columns were sent out which meted out summary justice. In November 1799, some 40 per cent of France was under martial law, but within three years it was safe to travel around France again, and trade could be resumed. Not even his Italian victories brought Napoleon more popularity.⁴³

In March 1800 the Consulate replaced more than 3,000 elected judges, public prosecutors and court presidents with its own appointees. Political opinions don’t seem to have been the deciding factor so much as practical expertise, as well as Napoleon’s keenness to sack elderly, corrupt or incompetent lawyers. It took seven months for the system to run smoothly again due to the backlogs, but thereafter the delivery of justice was improved.⁴⁴

In his bid to end some of the more symbolic aspects of the Revolution once he had declared it to be over, Napoleon ordered that the red bonnets that had been put on church steeples and public buildings during the Revolution be taken down. MonsieurandMadame replaced citoyen and citoyenne, Christmas and Easter returned, and finally, on January 1, 1806, the revolutionary calendar was abolished. Napoleon had always been alive to the power of nomenclature and so he renamed the Place de la Révolution (formerly the Place Louis XV) as the Place de la Concorde, and demolished the giant female statue of Liberty there. ‘Concord,’ he later wrote, ‘that is what renders France invincible.’⁴⁵ Other examples of his passion for renaming included rechristening his invention the Cisalpine Republic as the Italian Republic, the Army of England as the Grande Armée (in 1805), and the Place de l’Indivisibilité – the old Place Royale – as the Place des Vosges. Over the Consular period, Napoleon’s written style subtly altered, with revolutionary clichés such as inaltérable and incorruptible being replaced by the more incisive grand, sévère and sage.⁴⁶

Napoleon next went about persuading the émigrés – aristocrats, property-owners, royalists and priests who had fled during the Revolution – to return to France, on the understanding that they must not expect to get their property back. He eventually restored their voting and citizenship rights.⁴⁷ In October 1800 he removed 48,000 émigrés’ names from the list of 100,000 proscribed during the Revolution, and in April 1802 all but 1,000 irreconcilable royalists were removed altogether. Although much of the Ancien Régime nobility stayed aloof, several prominent members agreed to serve Napoleon, including men such as the Comte de Ségur, the Duc de Luynes, the Comte de Narbonne, the Duc de Broglie, Talleyrand and Molé. Other supporters were from non-émigré families who had been on the brink of ennoblement in 1789, such as Marmont, Rémusat, Berthier and Roederer. By May 1803, some 90 per cent of all émigrés had returned to France, reversing the huge drain of talent that had so weakened the country.⁴⁸ Of the 281 prefects appointed by Napoleon between 1800 and 1814, as many as 110 (39 per cent) had been Ancien Régime nobles.⁴⁹

As well as appealing to royalists abroad, Napoleon appealed to them in the Vendée, offering a general amnesty to any Chouans who laid down their weapons. He told them that the ‘unjust laws’ and ‘arbitrary acts’ of the Directory had ‘offended personal security and freedom of conscience’ and offered a ‘complete and total amnesty’ for all past events, in return for which the insurgents were asked to hand in their weapons by February 18, 1800.⁵⁰ The priest Étienne-Alexandre Bernier accepted these terms, although the Chouan leaders Comte Louis de Frotté, Georges Cadoudal and Comte Louis de Bourmont fought on. (Bernier became bishop of Orleans, part of what Napoleon called his ‘sacred gendarmerie’ of loyal bishops.) Napoleon instructed General d’Hédouville to deal with the rebels robustly: ‘If you make war, employ severity and activity; it is the only means by which you make it shorter, and consequently less deplorable for humanity.’⁵¹

By early 1801 Napoleon had succeeded in decapitating the leadership of the Chouan rebellion, literally as well as metaphorically in some cases. He was criticized for deceit, but guerrilla campaigns have always invited different rules of engagement. Frotté was executed on February 18, Cadoudal came to breakfast with Napoleon on March 5 but later went into English exile, and Bourmont eventually changed sides altogether and fought for France. The Chouans had been fighting against the Republic in twelve western departments ever since 1793 and once numbered 30,000 armed rebels, but by the end of 1800 the Vendée was quiet. The Chouan activities would henceforth be largely confined to plotting against Napoleon’s own life.

 • • •

On January 17, 1800, Napoleon closed no fewer than sixty of France’s seventy-three newspapers, saying that he wouldn’t ‘allow the papers to say or do anything contrary to my interests’.⁵² The decree, which wasn’t subjected to parliamentary scrutiny, stated that some ‘of the newspapers which are printed in the departments of the Seine are instruments in the hands of the enemies of the Republic’, and that therefore ‘during the course of the war’ only thirteen newspapers could publish, except those ‘devoted to the sciences, arts, literature, commerce and advertisements’.⁵³ It further warned that any newspaper that included articles ‘disrespectful’ of the social order, of the sovereignty of the people, of the glory of the armies or of friendly governments ‘will be suppressed immediately’. Napoleon also blocked the circulation of foreign newspapers within France.⁵⁴ He believed that any attempt to foster national unity would be impossible if the royalist and Jacobin newspapers were permitted to foment discontent.

The word ‘newspaper’ overly dignifies several of the scandal sheets that were alleging, among many other things, that Napoleon was sleeping with his own sister Pauline, but the decree was undoubtedly a powerful blow against free speech in France. ‘Controlled by the government, a free press may become a strong ally,’ Napoleon said years later, apparently unaware of the contradiction in terms. ‘To leave it to its own devices is to sleep beside a powder keg.’⁵⁵ On another occasion he declared: ‘The printing press is an arsenal; it cannot be private property.’⁵⁶ He had learned the power of stage-managed proclamations in Italy and Egypt and was not now prepared to cede control over communications at home. France had no tradition of press freedom before the Revolution. Freedom of speech was declared to be a universal right in 1789, and the number of officially sanctioned journals ballooned from four to over three hundred, but the government started closing journals as early as 1792, and periodic purging on political grounds had brought the number down to seventy-three by 1799.⁵⁷ Freedom of the press didn’t exist in Prussia, Russia or Austria at the time, and even in 1819 the British government passed the notorious Six Acts, which tightened the definition of sedition, and by which three editors were arraigned. That was in peacetime, whereas France in January 1800 was at war with five countries, each of which had vowed to overthrow its government. Objectionable by modern standards, Napoleon’s move was little other than standard practice for his time and circumstances.

After the decree, most journalists stayed in the profession and merely sang a more Bonapartist tune, writing for papers such as the Bertin brothers’ Journal des Débats, Amélie Suard’s Publiciste and the Journal de Paris. Royalist writers started praising Napoleon, not least for his tough law-and-order stances which they had long advocated. The numbers of papers shrank, but overall readership remained much the same.⁵⁸ Napoleon also co-opted a large number of former royalist journalists into his regime, an indication of his growing conservatism. Pierre-Louis Roederer was appointed to the Conseil, Louis Fontanes to the chancellorship of the Imperial University set up in 1808, Charles de Lacretelle to the Académie Française.

The Moniteur Universel, founded in 1789, became in the words of Comte Molé, ‘nothing but the docile instrument and depository of all [Napoleon’s] desires’.⁵⁹ It was a private concern but government officials wrote articles for it and the provincial press relied on it as the government’s news-sheet.⁶⁰ Its ‘Interior’ column was written by the interior ministry, and Napoleon’s office wrote the ‘Paris’ column, often from his direct dictation, especially its criticisms of Britain. ‘Miscellany’ was written by other officials, including some in the police ministry. Though it was a state propaganda news-sheet, full of lies and exaggerations, it was rarely dull, with contributions about poetry, literature, theatre and the Institut de France. Napoleon took a deep personal interest in the strategic dissemination of news. ‘Spread the following reports in an official manner,’ he once instructed Fouché. ‘They are, however, true. Spread them first in the salons, and then put them in the papers.’⁶¹ Overall, as he told his interior minister in 1812, ‘My intention is that everything is printed, absolutely everything except obscene material and anything that might disturb the tranquillity of the State. Censorship should pay no attention to anything else.’⁶²

 • • •

Ten days after announcing the results of the plebiscite in February 1800, the Consulate passed a law (by 71 to 25 in the Tribunate and 217 to 68 in the Legislative Body) placing the administration of all eighty-three departments or regions of France, which had been created in 1790 in an effort to devolve power, under prefects who were appointed by the minister of the interior. An essential element of local democracy established by the Revolution was thus completely abolished at a stroke, and brought about a massive concentration of power into Napoleon’s hands. Each department now had a centrally appointed prefect, with sub-prefects to look after the arrondissements and mayors for communes, who were also centrally appointed if they had more than 5,000 inhabitants in their charge. To the original eighty-three departments of 1790, the Consulate added twenty more in 1800, as well as between two and six arrondissements within each department. The departément–arrondissement–commune system is still in place today.

Local self-government, in which after 1790 about one Frenchmen in thirty was a local official of some kind, was thus replaced by one in which initiative and control were vested ultimately in the First Consul. There were local elected councils, but these functioned in a purely advisory capacity and sat for only two weeks a year. The juges de paix (magistrates), who had formerly been elected, were now named by the prefects. Although sub-prefects came from the department itself, the prefects – who lasted on average 4.3 years in office – almost always came from outside, to ensure that their ultimate loyalty was to Napoleon.⁶³ But despite its authoritarianism, the prefectorial system turned out to be far more efficient than its ungainly predecessor.⁶⁴ As First Consul Napoleon made all public officials salaried servants of the state, ensured they were properly trained, and abolished promotion through corruption and nepotism, replacing it with rewards for talent and merit. He insisted that his prefects provide him with systematic statistical data, ordering them to make extensive annual tours of their departments to glean first-hand information.⁶⁵ He would later describe them as empereurs au petit pied (mini-emperors). Boniface de Castellane-Novejean, prefect of the Basses-Pyrénées, summed up the prefect’s task as to ‘make sure that the taxes are paid, that the conscription is enacted, and that law and order is preserved’. In fact he also had to impound horses for the cavalry, billet troops, guard prisoners-of-war, stimulate economic development, deliver political support for the government at plebiscites and elections, fight brigands and represent the views of the department, especially its elites, to the government.⁶⁶ Only in areas in which Napoleon wasn’t interested, such as the relief of the poor and primary education, was much power left with the departments.⁶⁷

 • • •

With renewed fighting against Austria and her allies – though not now Russia – looming as soon as weather permitted, Napoleon needed to replenish the near-empty Treasury. He instructed Gaudin to borrow at least 12 million francs from the fifteen or so richest bankers in Paris. The best they would offer was 3 million francs, helpfully suggesting that a national lottery be established to raise the rest. Unimpressed, on January 27, 1800 Napoleon simply arrested Gabriel Ouvrard, the most powerful banker in France and the owner of the vast navy supply contract from which he was rumoured to have made a profit of 8 million francs over the previous four years.⁶⁸ (It cannot have helped Ouvrard that he had refused to help finance the Brumaire coup.) Ouvrard’s experience helped loosen the purse-strings of other bankers, but Napoleon wanted to place France’s finances on a far surer footing. He could not continue, in effect, to need bankers’ and contractors’ permission before he could mobilize the army.

On February 13, Gaudin opened the doors of the Banque de France, with the First Consul as its first shareholder. Not wanting to solicit the instinctively cautious and unco-operative Parisian banking establishment for its creation, he had turned to a Rouen manufacturer, Jean-Barthélémy le Couteulx de Canteleu, and a Swiss banker, Jean Perregaux, for initial funding and guidance. They were two of the six regents who initially governed the bank. To encourage people to subscribe to the Banque de France’s start-up capital of 30 million francs, in share blocks of 1,000 francs, Napoleon decreed that it had the protection of the Consulate and ensured that his entourage, including Joseph, Hortense, Bourrienne, Clarke, Duroc and Murat all joined the subscription list.⁶⁹ The bank would theoretically be independent of the government, indeed the Moniteur had to state before its official launch that it ‘had been wrongly compared to the Bank of England, as none of its capital went to the Government’, but in time this policy was quietly dropped, and the bank did indeed help finance Napoleon’s wars.

In April 1803 the bank was granted the exclusive right to issue paper money in Paris for fifteen years, notes which in 1808 became French legal tender, supported by the state rather than just the bank’s collateral. In time the confidence that Napoleon’s support gave the bank in the financial world allowed it to double the amount of cash in circulation, discount private notes and loans, open regional branches, increase revenues and the shareholder base, lend more, and in short create a classic virtuous business circle. It was also given important government business, such as managing all state annuities and pensions. Napoleon kept a tight control over so important an institution; in April 1806 he replaced the regents with a governor and two deputy governors appointed by himself. He never quite escaped the situation whereby the Treasury had to borrow from other banks, but it did alleviate the need to arrest their owners.

 • • •

On February 19, 1800, Napoleon left the Luxembourg Palace and took up residence at the Tuileries. He was the first ruler to live there since Louis XVI had been taken away to the Temple prison in August 1792, an event he had witnessed as a young officer. Although Cambacérès had the right to live in the Tuileries on becoming Second Consul he shrewdly decided not to, noting that he would only have to leave it soon – that is, once Napoleon had won the plebiscite and wanted the palace to himself.

When the Bonapartes moved in, Napoleon took Louis XVI’s first-floor rooms overlooking the gardens laid out by Catherine de Médici, and Josephine took Marie Antoinette’s suite on the ground floor. ‘I can feel the Queen’s ghost, asking what I am doing in her bed,’ she is credited with having told a chamberlain. Napoleon appears to have had no such scruples, allegedly picking Josephine up and carrying her into their bedroom with the words ‘Come on, little Creole, get into the bed of your masters.’⁷⁰ They put the Tuileries to good use, throwing dinners for two hundred people every ten days. Bronzes and tapestries were brought out of storage from Versailles, and a drawing room was decorated in yellow and lilac silk. From this period can be dated Josephine’s central role in the creation of what became the Empire style, which influenced furniture, fashion, interior decoration and design. She also championed the revival of etiquette after a decade of revolution.

Soon after his arrival at the Tuileries, Napoleon collected twenty-two statues of his heroes for the grand gallery, starting, inevitably, with Alexander and Julius Caesar but also featuring Hannibal, Scipio, Cicero, Cato, Frederick the Great, George Washington, Mirabeau and the revolutionary general the Marquis de Dampierre. The Duke of Marlborough, renowned for his victory at the battle of Bleinheim, was included, as was General Dugommier, whose presence alongside such genuine military giants as Gustavus Adolphus and Marshal Saxe must have been based on his perspicacity in spotting Napoleon’s worth at Toulon. Joubert was there too, since he was now safely dead. Surrounded by these heroes, about half of whom were in togas, had its effect: it was in Jean-Auguste Ingres’ painting of him as First Consul that Napoleon is first seen with his hand tucked inside his waistcoat.⁷¹

When the well-born Englishwoman Mary Berry was shown around the Bonapartes’ living quarters by Josephine’s Swiss tailor, Sandos, she recorded that ‘Republican simplicity might well be excused for being startled at such magnificence. I have formerly seen Versailles, and I have seen the Petit Trianon, but I never saw anything surpassing the magnificence of this.’ She described the salon as being ‘hung and furnished with blue-lilac lustring embroidered in the honeysuckle [pattern] with maron, in the best taste possible’. The second salon, ‘furnished with yellow satin and brown and sang-de-boeuf fringes’, was even more magnificent, she enthused, especially as ‘the glasses [that is, mirrors] were all drapés and not framed’; she went on to describe in loving detail the Sèvres vases, porphyry tables, ormolu mounts, chandeliers, chairs, ‘exquisite tapestry’, candelabra and so on. She was astounded to enter the Bonapartes’ bedchamber, with its blue silk upholstery with white and gold fringes, and find that ‘they actually both sleep in one bed’.⁷²

It was characteristic of Napoleon that he wanted value for money in all this. Concerned that the upholsterers were cheating him he asked a minister how much the ivory handle at the end of a bell-rope should cost. The minister had no idea, whereupon Napoleon cut it off, called for a valet, told him to dress in ordinary clothes and inquire the price in several shops and order a dozen. When he discovered they were one-third cheaper than billed he simply struck one-third off the charges made by all the tradesmen.⁷³

‘It was part of the First Consul’s policy’, recalled Laure d’Abrantès, ‘to make Paris the centre of pleasure it had been before the Revolution.’⁷⁴ This was in part to revive the luxury trades – dressmakers, carriage-makers, silversmiths, etc. – at which the French had traditionally excelled; but Napoleon also felt that a revived social life would reflect the solidity of the new regime. A significant part of the pre-revolutionary French economy, especially in areas like Lyons, the centre of the European silk industry, had been dependent on luxury goods, and Napoleon was determined to revive it. As First Consul he habitually wore a red, gold-embroidered taffeta coat known as the habit rouge, which Josephine and the prominent silk mercer M. Levacher had persuaded him to adopt. ‘I will not deny that I have some repugnance to equip myself in this fantastic costume,’ he told d’Abrantès, ‘but for that reason my resolution will be better appreciated.’⁷⁵ It attracted the attention of illustrators, one of whom entitled his drawing Buonaparte Premier Consul de la République Française dans son grand costume.⁷⁶ The Consular Guard was also given new uniforms: shoes replaced clogs; grenadiers wore bearskins and royal-blue uniforms with white facings and red epaulettes.⁷⁷

With exquisitely bad timing, the very day after Napoleon moved into the Tuileries, Louis XVI’s younger brother, the Comte de Provence, who had styled himself King Louis XVIII after the death of his nephew in 1795, wrote to Napoleon from exile at the Jelgava Palace in Courland (present-day Latvia) with a request to be allowed to return to France. Louis suggested that Napoleon could take any post in the kingdom if he would only restore him to the French throne. Napoleon took more than six months to reply. ‘Thank you for the honest things you wrote in it,’ he finally wrote, in terms more sympathetic than one might have expected of a former Jacobin, but his message was clear and unflinching: ‘You must not wish for your return to France; you would have to march over a hundred thousand corpses. Sacrifice your interest to the peace and happiness of France. History will recognize it. I am not insensitive to the misfortunes of your family . . . I will gladly contribute to the sweetness and tranquillity of your retirement.’⁷⁸Napoleon informed Roederer and Maret of Louis’ letter: ‘The letter is very beautiful, very beautiful indeed!’ he wrote. ‘But I have my answer in consequence, and it is also very fine.’⁷⁹ When Josephine teasingly told Napoleon that her royalist friends promised if he restored the Bourbons they would erect a statue in the Place du Carrousel in which he would be represented as a genius placing the crown upon the king’s head, Napoleon joked: ‘Yes, and my body will be under the pedestal!’⁸⁰ But the Bourbons would not so easily accept a life of exile. The finality of Napoleon’s reply to Louis meant that from the autumn of 1800 onwards they started plotting against his life.

 • • •

In less than fifteen weeks Napoleon had effectively ended the French Revolution, seen off the Abbé Sieyès, given France a new constitution, established her finances on a sound footing, muzzled the opposition press, started to end both rural brigandage and the long-running war in the Vendée, set up a Senate, Tribunate, Legislative Body and Conseil d’État, appointed a talented government regardless of past political affiliations, rebuffed the Bourbons, made spurned peace offers to Britain and Austria, won a plebiscite by a landslide (even accounting for the fraud), reorganized French local government and inaugurated the Banque de France.

‘Today I’m a sort of mannequin figure that’s lost its liberty and happiness,’ Napoleon wrote to Moreau, the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine, on March 16 as France prepared to re-engage Austrian forces. ‘Grandeur is all very well, but only in retrospect and in the imagination. I envy your happy lot; you are going to accomplish grand things with your gallant men. I would willingly exchange my consular purple for the epaulette of a brigadier under your orders . . . I strongly hope that the circumstances may allow me to come and give you a helping hand.’⁸¹ Three weeks later circumstances would allow just that, when the Austrian General Michael von Melas defeated General Nicolas Soult at the battle of Cadibona, pushing him back towards Savona and forcing Masséna into Genoa, which was subsequently besieged. It was time to return to the battlefield.