15

Coronation

‘We must show the Bourbons that the blows that they strike at others will rebound on their own heads.’

Napoleon on the Duc d’Enghien

‘We are here to guide public opinion, not to discuss it.’

Napoleon to the Conseil d’État, 1804

After the declaration of war on May 18, events moved swiftly. France invaded George III’s ancestral electorate of Hanover at the end of the month, and Napoleon ordered General Édouard Mortier, whose mother was English and who had been educated at the English College at Douai, to cut down timber from its forests to build the flat-bottomed boats needed for the invasion of Britain.¹ The Royal Navy blockaded the mouths of the Elbe and Weser rivers in Germany in retaliation; Nelson closed off Toulon in July; and by September Britain had recaptured St Lucia, Tobago, Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo. Napoleon meanwhile sent the outstanding soldier (and failed artist) General Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, whose aloofness led to his being nicknamed ‘The Owl’ by his men, to re-garrison Taranto, Brindisi and Otranto, in Italy, in violation of a Franco-Neapolitan treaty signed in 1801, and despite a vigorous Russian protest.

In June Napoleon ordered the construction of five large invasion camps at Brest, Boulogne, Montreuil, Bruges and Utrecht. The Bruges camp was later transferred to Ambleteuse, near Boulogne, and soon the main camp there stretched along 9 miles of the coast, complete with kitchen gardens. ‘I am housed in the middle of the camp and on the edge of the ocean,’ Napoleon told Cambacérès from his headquarters at Pont-de-Briques on November 5, ‘where at a glance it is easy to measure the distance that separates us from England.’²

Support camps for cavalry and the reserve were set up at Saint-Omer, Compiègne, Arras, Étaples, Vimereaux, Paris and Amiens. The Army of England absorbed the men from the Army of the West in the Vendée and was renamed the Army of the Ocean Coasts. By January 1804 it numbered 70,000 men, and by March 120,000.³ Napoleon later claimed that he only ever meant to scare Britain, lull Austria and train his army, and had no real intention of actually invading. This was nonsense. Captain Édouard Desbrière’s five-volume work, Projets et tentatives de débarquement aux îles Britanniques (published in 1900–1902), reviewed Napoleon’s invasion plans and outlined in no fewer than 2,636 pages precisely where each demi-brigade was intended to land, and, despite the misprints of ‘Frey-Harock’ for Grays-Thurrock and ‘Green-hill’ for Greenhithe, makes it clear that Napoleon was not bluffing.⁴ He had books and articles published about successful invasions of England from Julius Caesar onwards, began to refer to Britain as Carthage, put the Bayeaux Tapestry on display in the Louvre and instructed Denon to strike a ‘Descent on England’ medal – depicting a near-naked Napoleon wrestling successfully with a merman – which states on the reverse: ‘Struck in London 1804’.⁵

The huge amount of work done on the canals which would enable him to maintain internal communications between Nantes, Holland, Antwerp, Cherbourg, Brest and Rochefort, and the expansion of the docks at Flushing to allow the entire Dutch navy to go to sea at twenty-four hours’ notice, all point to the deadly seriousness of his intentions.⁶ So too do the mountains of detailed correspondence with his admirals and generals. In 1803 and 1804, Napoleon wrote to Berthier 553 times and to Admiral Decrès 236 times.⁷When General Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult, who was in charge at Saint-Omer (77 letters) reported that it was impossible to embark the entire force in twenty-four hours, Napoleon expostulated, ‘Impossible, sir! I am not acquainted with the word; it is not in the French language, erase it from your dictionary.’⁸

On December 23, 1803, Berthier drew up a list of the forces composing what he and Napoleon privately called in their correspondence l’armée d’expédition d’Angleterre. It consisted of 79,000 infantry, 17,600 cavalrymen with 15,000 horses, 4,700 artillerymen, 4,600 carters and 7,800 civilians, an unnumbered amount of caïques (each of which was to carry 20 men, 2,000 cartridges, 200 biscuits, 10 bottles of eau-de-vie and a haunch of mutton) and large numbers of semi-armed fishing boats.⁹ State Councillor Pelet put the size of the flotilla at 250 sloops with three guns each, 650 gunboats and pinnaces with one each, many 6-gun praams, and 750 transports with artillery.¹⁰ At its height the flotilla numbered over 1,831 craft of all descriptions, and 167,000 men.¹¹

The flat bottoms of many of the boats, whose maximum draft was 6 feet fully loaded, meant that they could be run up on a beach, but although most were ready by the spring of 1804 they tended to ship water and sailed very badly unless the wind was dead astern, and south-eastern winds are rare in the English Channel.¹² The pinnaces also needed to be rowed if they were not going dead ahead, which over 22 miles of sea would have been exhausting for the troops. Although a night attack was intended, a full eight hours of darkness came only in the autumn and winter, when the weather was too bad to risk a crossing in flat-bottomed boats.¹³ The Channel made up for its narrowness by its notorious unpredictability; there were sound logistical reasons why England hadn’t been successfully invaded since the fifteenth century (when she had been by land from Wales). By the early nineteenth she had the largest, best-trained and best-led navy in the world.

Napoleon was undeterred. On July 30, 1804 he told General Brune, we ‘only await a favourable wind in order to plant the imperial eagle on the Tower of London. Time and fate alone know what will happen.’¹⁴ On his tours of inspection of the camps, which could take up to twenty-five days, he checked everything from the fortifications to sanitary arrangements, but particularly enjoyed talking to the men. ‘He would mix with them freely,’ recalled an aide-de-camp, ‘entering into every little detail of their comfort and bestowing with discrimination his praise, his favours, and any well-merited advancement, thus provoking their utmost enthusiasm.’¹⁵ On July 22 he wrote to the naval ministry to complain that, due to non-payment of expenses, workers in the Channel ports were having to sell their silver sleeve-buttons. ‘They must absolutely not be the ones to suffer,’ he insisted, ‘no matter how things stand the workers must be paid.’¹⁶ They must also drink. Writing about the houses to be requisitioned in the Boulogne area for the billeting and provisioning of the invasion force, he told Decrès, ‘Make sure there are cellars for wine.’ He then added that the invasion of Britain would require 300,000 pints of brandy.¹⁷

 • • •

Napoleon began negotiations with the leaders of the United Irishmen in Paris in August, hoping that 20,000 Irish rebels would support the French army if he landed in Ireland.¹⁸ He wanted them to join the corps of 117 guide-interpreters he would need in England. He designed a uniform for them of ‘dragoon-green coats with red lining, scarlet facings, white buttons’, right down to the colour of their spurs, and decided that they would have two drummers.¹⁹ This mania for micro-management extended to ordering that a marble bust of the seventeenth-century naval hero Jean Bart be placed in the town hall of his birthplace, Dunkirk, to encourage pride in French maritime exploits.

As always, Napoleon required more than warfare and politics for his mental nourishment. On October 1 he thanked the American physicist Sir Benjamin Thomson, who was living in Paris, for his dissertation on heat conservation, and commented:

The rough surface of unpolished bodies is mountainous compared to the extreme attenuation of calorific molecules; their total surface area is much greater than that of the same body when polished, and from the area of the surface used for measuring the number of issues or accesses of calories, it follows that this number must be greater, and therefore, temperature changes should be faster for an unpolished body than for a body that is polished. These are the ideas that I formulated, and that were confirmed by your paper. It is through many experiments made with precision, in order to arrive at the truth . . . that we advance gradually and arrive at simple theories, useful to all states of life.²⁰

That last sentence alone confirms Napoleon as a product of the Enlightenment.

His sexual life too was very active at this time. It seems likely that Napoleon had a mistress in the Boulogne region, as he wrote to an unidentified ‘Madame F’ while stationed there in early November, promising that the next time they met, ‘I will again be the gate-keeper, if you like; but this time I will absolutely not let the care of accompanying you on the voyage to the island of Kythira fall to any others.’ Kythira was the home of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and none of the other recipients of his letters at the time were designated by an initial alone. He was also sleeping with Chaptal’s mistress, Marie-Thérèse Bourgoin, an actress at the Comédie-Française, to Chaptal’s intense chagrin.

Did Josephine know? In November 1804 he replied to what he called a ‘sad’ letter from her: ‘The good, the tender Josephine cannot be erased from my heart except by Josephine herself, by her becoming despondent, tetchy, troublesome. My life is made up of many sorrows; a sweet agreeable home, free from all strain, can alone make me endure them.’²¹ In January, however, he was writing ‘a thousand kind things to the little cousin’, as well as telling her that Eugène was ‘wooing all the women in Boulogne and is none the better for it’.²²

 • • •

All the leading French admirals – Ganteaume, Eustache Bruix, Laurent Truguet, Pierre de Villeneuve, as well as Decrès – opposed the English expedition as far as they reasonably could, chastened by the two Channel squadrons of over thirty British ships-of-the-line on permanent station. The most capable officer for its overall command, Louis Latouche Tréville, had been ill since returning from Saint-Domingue, and died in August 1804; his replacement, Bruix, died of tuberculosis in March 1805. Napoleon and his senior advisors recognized that it would be impossible to send large numbers of men over on a single tide, and a surprise crossing in fog was also deemed too dangerous. Louis XIV had prepared for an invasion of Britain in 1692, plans had been made by Louis XVI in 1779 and Napoleon himself had looked into the possibilities in 1797–8. The best strategy that could be devised on any of these occasions was the ruse of luring the Royal Navy away from the English south coast for long enough to cross the Channel. Yet the idea that the Admiralty Board in London could be induced to leave the narrows of the Channel under-guarded for even one tide was always utterly fanciful.

Napoleon wrote to Ganteaume on November 23, 1803 about the flotilla of 300 armed longboats (chaloupes cannonières), 500 gunboats (bateaux cannoniers) and 500 barges he hoped soon to have ready. ‘Do you think it will take us to the shores of Albion? It can carry 100,000 men. Eight hours of night in our favour would decide the fate of the universe.’²³ The next day he asked Chaptal to have several songs written ‘for the invasion of England’, one to the tune of ‘Le Chant du Départ’.²⁴ In mid-December he directed that brigadiers could take four servants to England but colonels would have to make do with two.* ‘Everything is beautiful here and comforting to see,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘I really like this beautiful, good Normandy. It’s the real France.’²⁵ A year later, on November 12, 1804, he wrote to Augereau from Boulogne, ‘I have been here for the last ten days, and I have reason to hope that I shall arrive at the goal for which Europe awaits. We have six centuries of insults to avenge.’²⁶ Four days later he told Cambacérès that he could distinguish ‘the houses and the movement’ on the English coast from the cliffs at Ambleteuse, after which he described the Channel as ‘a ditch which will be crossed when we have the audacity to try’.²⁷

On January 24, 1804 Napoleon ordered the double-agent Mehée de la Touche to leak to Francis Drake, the British envoy at Munich, the information that ‘the preparations at Boulogne are false demonstrations which, however costly, are less than would appear at first glance; that the launches are so constructed that they can be turned into merchant vessels, etc, etc; that the First Consul is too crafty and considers his position too firmly established today to attempt a doubtful operation where a mass of troops would be compromised’.²⁸ That month Napoleon even tried to draw the Pope into supporting the operation, writing to him of the ‘intolerable . . . oppression’ of Irish Catholics. There was no response from Rome.²⁹

Napoleon spoke openly and frequently about his invasion plans while in exile on Elba a decade later, saying that all he had needed were superior numbers in the Channel for three or four days to protect the flotilla. ‘As he should march immediately to London, he should prefer landing on the coast of Kent,’ he later recalled of himself, ‘but this must depend upon wind and weather.’³⁰ He claimed that he would place himself in the admirals’ and pilots’ hands over where to land his 100,000 men, with artillery and cavalry following on soon afterwards. He believed he could have ‘arrived in London in three days’, just at the moment that Nelson would have returned from the West Indies from chasing another French fleet, too late to save his country.³¹

Yet even if Napoleon had succeeded in getting ashore in Britain, Nelson’s return would have cut him off from resupply and reinforcement, and 100,000 men was not a large enough force with which to conquer 17 million waiting Britons, many of them under (admittedly makeshift) arms. Britain had undertaken intense preparations to repel an invasion from 1803 onwards: southern towns were garrisoned, fire beacons prepared; provisions stockpiled in depots located at places such as Fulham, Brentford and Staines, and every landing place was itemized from Cornwall to Scotland. Seventy-three small ‘Martello’ beacon towers were built along the south coast between 1805 and 1808, defensive breastworks were dug around south London, and some 600,000 men (between 11 and 14 per cent of the adult male population) were enlisted in the British army and Royal Navy by the end of 1804, with a further 85,000 in the militia.³²

 • • •

In the early hours of August 23, 1803, a Royal Navy intelligence officer, Captain John Wesley Wright, secretly landed Georges Cadoudal, a Dr Querelle and a small number of other Chouans at Biville in Normandy.* Wright had fought alongside the Chouans in the 1790s and been imprisoned and had subsequently escaped from the Temple prison; he had spied on the French disguised as an Arab during the Syrian campaign and had run a number of similar clandestine operations.³³

Fouché and Napoleon – who insisted on seeing all the raw secret service intelligence, so as not to be dependent on others for its interpretation – discovered the presence of Querelle and an accomplice named Troche. ‘Either I’m very wrong,’ Napoleon said of Querelle, ‘or this one knows something.’³⁴ When a plotter named Danouville was captured at one of Wright’s landing-places he hanged himself in his cell, which as one of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp, Philippe de Ségur, commented, ‘confirmed the gravity of the plot without throwing any light upon it’.³⁵

Wright next landed General Charles Pichegru, the former Brienne instructor, French Revolutionary War hero and Jacobin-turned-royalist, along with seven co-conspirators at Biville on January 16, 1804, and returned to Walmer Castle in Kent, where British naval intelligence was based.³⁶ Wright was acting under the orders of Admiral Lord Keith, commander-in-chief of the North Sea Fleet, who reported to Admiral Earl St Vincent, the First Sea Lord. St Vincent’s own orders from Lord Hawkesbury were that it was ‘of the utmost importance that Captain Wright should be involved in the fullest latitude’. Other documents, including one from Keith specifying that Wright ‘is employed on a secret and delicate service’, connect the British government intimately with the Cadoudal conspiracy, at the highest levels of both.³⁷ Further evidence of direct British government involvement in the 1804 plot to murder Napoleon lies in several letters, the first written on June 22, 1803, from a Mr Walter Spencer to Lord Castlereagh, a senior British cabinet minister, asking for the repayment of £150 for himself and £1,000 for Michelle de Bonneuil, a royalist plotter with several identities who is known to have met Louis XVIII’s brother the Comte d’Artois (the future King Charles X) in Edinburgh during the Amiens peace. Spencer said the money had been advanced ‘relative to a political intrigue planned by Lord Castlereagh to abduct Bonaparte in 1803’, which was co-ordinated by Mr Liston, the British envoy to The Hague.³⁸ (Plots to ‘abduct’ Napoleon at this time were transparent covers for his assassination.) Although there is nothing directly incriminating from the government side in the exchange – as might be expected – George Holford, a member of parliament who was Castlereagh’s closest friend in politics, wrote to Spencer saying that if he would ‘take the trouble of calling in Downing Street his Lordship will see him upon it’. This would hardly have been the case if Spencer had been a crank.

On January 28 Pichegru met General Moreau, who seems to have equivocated over the plot, and who crucially failed to warn the authorities, thereby making himself complicit. He was waiting to see what developed; the nation might well have turned to him, as the victor of Hohenlinden, in the event of Napoleon’s ‘abduction’. By then he had already told General Thiébault that he believed Napoleon ‘the most ambitious soldier who ever lived’, whose rule meant ‘the end of all our labours, all these hopes, all that glory’.³⁹

The arrest of a British secret agent called Courson on January 29 helped Fouché piece together the outlines of the plot. A French intelligence officer by the name of Captain Rosey also managed to persuade Spencer Smith, the British envoy to Stuttgart and Sir Sidney Smith’s brother, that he, Rosey, was the aide-de-camp of a dissident French general, a ploy which yielded information once Smith had taken him into his confidence.⁴⁰ Fouché informed Napoleon, thanks to his spy network in London, that Pichegru had dined with a British minister in Kensington three days before leaving for France, and that the conspirators were connected to Moreau. Napoleon was genuinely astonished. ‘Moreau!’ he cried. ‘What! Moreau in such a plot!’ He ordered the general’s arrest as soon as he was certain that Pichegru was indeed in France. ‘Nothing can equal the profound stupidity of this whole plot,’ Napoleon wrote to Moreau’s friend and former chief-of-staff General Jean-Joseph Dessolle, who was commanding in Hanover, ‘unless it is its wickedness. The human heart is an abyss that is impossible to predict; the most piercing looks cannot gauge it.’⁴¹

Quickly thereafter guards were increased on the gates of Paris and ordered to look out for the tall and burly Cadoudal; the Tuileries and Malmaison were put on high alert and the passwords changed; Dr Querelle was captured and taken to the Abbaye prison in the capital.⁴² Threatened with the guillotine, he gave away Cadoudal’s safe-house (maison de confiance) as the Cloche d’Or tavern. Meanwhile Savary, who commanded a separate secret police unit from Fouché as Napoleon didn’t like placing too much power in Fouché’s hands, went to Biville to try to intercept Wright. Cadoudal’s servant Louis Picot was arrested at the Cloche d’Or on February 8. He broke when he was subjected to thumbscrews and gave the police Cadoudal’s safe-house in Chaillot, near Passy, but Cadoudal wasn’t there either. Cadoudal’s lieutenant, Bouvet de Lozier, who was, tried to strangle himself, but on being ‘restored to life and misery’ he confirmed that Pichegru and Moreau were indeed implicated in the plot.⁴³

At 8 a.m. on February 15, Moreau was arrested on the bridge at Charenton and taken to the Temple prison.⁴⁴ The next day Napoleon ordered the arrests of generals Jean-Jacques Liébert and Joseph Souham, on the basis of their closeness to Moreau (both were exonerated and reinstated). On the 19th he told Soult that the police had seized fifteen horses and uniforms which were to be used in an attack on him on the road between Paris and Malmaison, but added phlegmatically: ‘You must not attach more importance to the affairs of Paris than they deserve.’⁴⁵ To Melzi he wrote: ‘I was never in any danger, since the police had their eye on all machinations.’⁴⁶

Pichegru fought three gendarmes with his fists when they came to arrest him in bed in the rue Chabanais in the 2nd arrondissement on the night of February 26.⁴⁷ ‘The struggle was severe,’ recalled Ségur, ‘and was only ended by violent pressure on the most tender part of his body, causing him to become unconscious.’⁴⁸ The next day, Napoleon received his first indication that the Duc d’Enghien might in some way be implicated.

The handsome, thirty-one-year-old Louis de Bourbon Condé, Duc d’Enghien, was a direct descendant of Louis XIII and grandson of the Prince de Condé who had commanded the émigré army at Valmy. When one of the plotters attested that everyone had stood up when a leader had entered the room, Fouché decided that d’Enghien was the only Bourbon prince who matched the man’s physical description and had been close enough to France to have attended the meeting. It was a tragic error, based on circumstantial evidence.

Until as late as March 12, Napoleon believed that Charles François Dumouriez, the French general who had defected to the Austrians in 1793, had met d’Enghien at his house at Ettenheim, only 10 miles across the French border in Baden. ‘What,’ Ségur reports Napoleon saying to the police chief Réal,

you did not tell me that the duc d’Enghien was only four leagues [that is, 12 miles] from my frontier! Am I a dog to be killed in the street? Are my murderers sacred beings? Why was I not warned that they are assembling at Ettenheim? My very person is attacked. It is time that I should give back blow for blow. The head of the most guilty amongst them must atone for this.⁴⁹

Fouché – who told Napoleon ‘the air is full of daggers’ – convinced himself that d’Enghien was behind the plot, as did Talleyrand on the same flimsy evidence.⁵⁰

Cadoudal was finally captured at 7 p.m. on March 9, in the Place de l’Odéon, but not before he had killed one gendarme in a carriage chase and wounded another. Napoleon told Davout two hours later that the news of the capture ‘has made the people touchingly happy’.⁵¹ Cadoudal openly admitted that he had come to Paris to kill Napoleon, but didn’t mention d’Enghien.

The next day Napoleon held a meeting at the Tuileries attended by Talleyrand, Fouché, Cambacérès, Lebrun and Regnier, at which they agreed to kidnap d’Enghien. Napoleon’s much later claim that it had been Talleyrand who persuaded them to adopt this course of action was supported by Cambacérès in his 1828 memoirs.⁵²* Napoleon told Berthier of his decision, and chose his master of horse General Armand de Caulaincourt to oversee the operation from Offenburg, and his own commander of the grenadiers à cheval of the Consular Guard, General Michel Ordener – ‘a man who knew only how to obey’, according to Cambacérès – to carry it out. ‘This is getting beyond a joke,’ Napoleon told Savary on March 12, ‘coming from Ettenheim to Paris to organize an assassination, and to believe oneself safe because one is behind the Rhine! I would be too stupid if I were to allow it.’⁵³ Napoleon then went to Malmaison and stayed there until the morning of the 20th.

 • • •

At 5 a.m. on Thursday, March 15, 1804, Ordener and a detachment of dragoons kidnapped the Duc d’Enghien at his house in Ettenheim and took him, his dog, his papers and 2.3 million francs that had been in his safe to the fortress at Strasbourg.⁵⁴ There was no sign of Dumouriez, whose name (it soon emerged) had only come up due to a misunderstanding. Meanwhile Caulaincourt went to Carlsruhe to present a note from Talleyrand to the Duke of Baden explaining the violation of Baden’s sovereignty. On the morning of March 18 Napoleon told Josephine what had happened. She strongly disapproved and begged him not to have d’Enghien executed – as much to protect Napoleon’s own reputation as out of her latent royalist sympathies or pity for d’Enghien.⁵⁵ She was told she didn’t understand politics and was ignored.*

The next morning Napoleon was informed by a courier from Alsace that d’Enghien’s papers revealed no evidence of complicity in the Cadoudal conspiracy, but did show that the duke had offered to serve in the British army, was receiving large amounts of money from London, was paying British gold to other émigrés, and was hoping to follow the Austrians into France should they invade.⁵⁶ He had also corresponded with William Wickham at the Aliens Office (that is, the British secret service) in London and with Spencer Smith in Stuttgart.⁵⁷ ‘There are few months in which I don’t receive from the Left Bank some requests from our former comrades-in-arms,’ d’Enghien had written in one letter, ‘officers and soldiers alike, employed or not, who are only waiting for a gathering point and an order to arrive and bring me some of their friends.’⁵⁸ In September 1803 he had promised to start a Legitimist (that is, royalist anti-revolutionary) coup in Alsace should Napoleon be assassinated, writing, ‘I am waiting, hoping, but don’t know anything.’ So although he was not specifically aware of the Cadoudal–Pichegru plot, he was clearly holding himself in readiness. It hardly constituted strong enough grounds to have him executed, however, except as a ruthless message to Louis XVIII to call off any further plots.

‘There is nothing inviolate about the blood of the Legitimists,’ Napoleon said at this time.⁵⁹ On the afternoon of March 18, 1804 he ordered Murat, as governor of Paris, to set up a court martial. Murat said, or at least later claimed he had said, that he wanted no part in what would effectively be a judicial execution.⁶⁰ The entire incident is full of claims, counter-claims, finger-pointing and excuses, as everyone attempted to escape responsibility for what happened next. Talleyrand blamed Savary and vice versa, Caulaincourt claimed that he had had no idea that d’Enghien would be executed. Only Napoleon, upon whom the ultimate responsibility must of course rest, argued afterwards that it had been the correct course of action, pleading the right of self-defence and saying of the Bourbons, ‘My blood, after all, was not made of mud: it was time to show that it was the equal of theirs.’⁶¹ On Elba he justified his actions ‘on the score of [d’Enghien] having been engaged in a treasonable conspiracy, and having made two journeys to Strasbourg in disguise’.⁶²

Napoleon returned to the Tuileries on the morning of Tuesday, March 20. He had an argument with Murat and threatened to send him back to his estates in Quercy, after which Murat finally agreed to call the court martial. Napoleon went then to Malmaison, where Talleyrand joined him in the afternoon for a walk in the park.⁶³ Joseph arrived shortly afterwards and then at 3 p.m. a courier reported that d’Enghien was on his way to Le Donjon, the forbidding, 150-foot-high keep at Vincennes Castle, the tallest in Europe, in which Mirabeau, Diderot, the Marquis de Sade and Mata Hari were all imprisoned at different times. He arrived there at 5.30 p.m., and Napoleon sent Savary to Murat with a message to ensure that ‘the business’ was finished that same night. Napoleon personally drew up the list of eleven questions for the police chief Réal to ask d’Enghien – ‘Have you borne arms against your country?’, ‘Are you in the pay of England?’, ‘Did you offer your services to England to fight against General Mortier in Hanover?’, ‘Have you offered to raise a legion of deserters from the Republic’s army?’ and so on – which the duke answered honestly, making no attempt not to incriminate himself.⁶⁴ The president of the court martial was General Pierre-Augustin Hulin, the man who had captured the Bastille in 1789 and was now the commander of the Consular Guard grenadiers. He later protested that he too had thought d’Enghien would be reprieved.

There was the briefest excuse of a trial, held at 2 a.m. on Wednesday, March 21, during which d’Enghien told Hulin and five colonels that he lived at Ettenheim for his love of sport. He also ‘frankly declared that he was ready to make war with France in concert with England, but he protested that he had never had any relations with Pichegru, and was glad of it’.⁶⁵ The law of 25 Brumaire, Year III, Title 5, Section 1, Article 7 provided that ‘émigrés who have borne arms against France shall be arrested, whether in France or in any hostile or conquered country, and judged within twenty-four hours’. D’Enghien had admitted to being in the pay of England and of bearing arms against France, both of which were capital offences for Frenchmen. If he hadn’t admitted it, the vast amount of money in his safe would anyway have condemned him.

D’Enghien was thereafter, in Ségur’s words, ‘hurriedly led to the castle moat, where he was shot, and buried in a grave that had already been dug’.⁶⁶ His last words were ‘I must die then at the hands of Frenchmen!’, which was rather a statement of the obvious but excusable under the circumstances.⁶⁷ His dog was later owned by Gustav IV of Sweden, and wore a collar declaring: ‘I belong [sic] to the unhappy Duc d’Enghien’.⁶⁸

That evening a reception was held at Malmaison to celebrate the proclamation of the Civil Code, which neatly underlines the two sides of Napoleon as both ruthless dictator and inspired lawgiver. When d’Enghien’s execution became public, a shocked Europe almost universally recalled the Corsican penchant for vendettas, and Pelet recorded that Parisians worried that Napoleon had ‘fallen into the evil ways’ of Robespierre.⁶⁹ Liberals across Europe started to perceive Napoleon differently: this was the moment when René de Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant turned against him. In reply to a Russian protest over the execution, Napoleon ordered his ambassador to St Petersburg, General d’Hédouville, to call for his passports, which he did on June 7, inaugurating a period of very bad Franco-Russian relations that was eventually to erupt into war.⁷⁰ The cynical remark made about d’Enghien’s execution – ‘It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder’ – has often been wrongly attributed to Talleyrand, but whether it was Fouché who said it or Boulay de la Meurthe, it was true. Everyone could see that, except the First Consul.

Napoleon was back in Paris on March 23, where he tacitly acknowledged the unpopularity of his actions. He ‘flung himself’ into his armchair at the Conseil d’État ‘with his brows knitted’ and said, ‘The population of Paris . . . is a collection of blockheads [un ramas de badauds] who believe the most absurd reports.’ He then added that public opinion ‘has caprices which we ought to learn to despise’.⁷¹ Echoing (presumably unconsciously) Queen Elizabeth I, he went on, ‘I don’t investigate the hearts of men to discover their secret sorrows.’ He spoke of the Duke of Baden’s minimal reaction, Louis XIV’s expulsion of the Stuarts after the Treaty of Utrecht, Russian agents, and his anger with the Journal de Paris for publishing details of d’Enghien’s ‘conspiracy’ too early. ‘Napoleon frequently interrupted himself while running on in this way,’ noted Pelet, ‘for he evidently felt the need to make out a justification, but was puzzled what to say, and hence the vagueness of his expressions, and their want of coherence.’⁷² After he had stopped speaking no one else followed, and Pelet thought that ‘this silence was abundantly significant’. Napoleon left the room and the meeting was over.

After Mass that Sunday, Ségur noticed that the groups which formed around Napoleon ‘listened to him with watchful curiosity, in a dejected and embarrassed attitude, and for the most part in a silence of evident disapproval’. As a result, ‘His haughty and severe demeanour, though at first inclined to expand, became more and more sombre and reserved.’⁷³ D’Enghien might not have had a funeral, but it seems he had a wake.

On the morning of April 6, Charles Pichegru was found dead in his cell. According to the Moniteur, he was reading Seneca’s account of the suicide of Cato, and the page was left open at the quotation: ‘He who conspires should not fear death.’⁷⁴ The official explanation was that he had strangled himself ‘by means of a stick which he had twisted into his silk necktie’.⁷⁵ Napoleon has been regularly blamed for ordering the murder so soon after d’Enghien’s, and it was even alleged that he sent four Mamluks to do the deed, who were themselves shot the next day.⁷⁶ Talleyrand, who could always be relied upon for a quip, said of Pichegru’s demise: ‘It was very sudden and very opportune.’⁷⁷ Yet there is no evidence, even circumstantial, that Napoleon was involved; indeed his supporters argued that after the d’Enghien debacle he particularly wanted the opportunity to have Pichegru’s guilt demonstrated in open court and then punished equally publicly, so he had nothing to gain from having Pichegru murdered.

The following month Napoleon had the satisfaction of hearing that Captain Wright had been captured after a two-hour fight when his brig was becalmed off Port Navalo in Brittany. Recognized by a French officer who had served in Syria, Wright was sent back to the Temple prison from which he had escaped years six years earlier. On October 27, 1805, eighteen months after Pichegru’s death, Wright’s corpse was found in his cell with his throat cut. Sir Sidney Smith, who investigated the death ten years later, alleged that he had been murdered, but the authorities again stated it had been suicide. Napoleon claimed in 1815 that he hadn’t heard of Captain Wright until Lord Ebrington mentioned him the previous year on Elba, and said he had been of too inferior rank for him to have ‘attached importance to his death’.⁷⁸ In fact Napoleon had written to Admiral Federico Gravina, the Spanish ambassador, expressing satisfaction at Wright’s capture, observing: ‘It’s for posterity to stamp the seal of infamy upon Lord Hawkesbury and those men who are base enough to adopt murder and crime as a method of war.’⁷⁹ That does not mean he was lying – he sent tens of thousands of letters in the intervening years and might have just forgotten. Yet the argument that someone was of too ‘inferior a rank’ to warrant his attention is unconvincing. Only the month before Wright’s death Napoleon had written to his religious affairs minister ordering him to ‘Convey my dissatisfaction to M. Robert, the priest of Bourges, who gave a very bad sermon on 15 August.’⁸⁰

The deaths of d’Enghien, Pichegru and Wright have been presented as conclusive proof that Napoleon was a vengeful ruler, but this is too much of a construction to put on what happened. D’Enghien’s judicial murder was an utterly ruthless, if misjudged, act of self-defence, and the other two are unproven as murders, let alone murders ordered by Napoleon. Prisoners about to be condemned to death (in Pichegru’s case) or imprisoned for the duration of a long war (in Wright’s) become depressed, though the circumstances in both cases point elsewhere.* The most likely explanation is that an overzealous underling such as Fouché or Savary was doing what he thought Napoleon wanted, rather in the manner of Henry II’s knights who murdered Thomas à Becket. The trials of Cadoudal, Moreau and the other plotters were set for June.

 • • •

Shortly after the failure of the Cadoudal plot, Napoleon said to the Conseil: ‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person. I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.’⁸¹ He clearly believed it, and to some extent it was true, yet it was precisely at this moment that he took his most visible turn away from the republicanism that the Revolution had proclaimed. A few days after the Duc d’Enghien’s death, the Senate had adopted a message of congratulation to Napoleon that suggested, in Fouché’s wording, that ‘other institutions’ might be needed to destroy the hopes of any future plotters.⁸² ‘Great man,’ it urged him sycophantically, ‘finish your work; make it as immortal as your own glory.’⁸³ The only way to make his work ‘immortal’ was to create an ‘other institution’ that would secure his legacy and guarantee the stability of the state in the event that a future assassin should succeed. It was felt that the uncertainty of succession would serve to fuel plots.

On March 28 Napoleon told the Conseil that ‘the subject deserved the greatest attention, that for his part he wanted nothing; he was perfectly content with his lot, but that it was his duty to consider also the lot of France, and what the future was likely to produce’. He had revised his former estimation of the legitimacy of monarchs. ‘The hereditary principle could alone prevent a counter-revolution’, he added in similar vein.⁸⁴ Afterwards, petitions started arriving from the departments begging Napoleon to take the crown. Newspapers began running articles praising monarchical institutions, and officially inspired pamphlets such as Jean Chas’s Réflexions sur l’hérédité du pouvoir souverain were published suggesting that the best way to foil the conspirators would be to found a Napoleonic dynasty.⁸⁵

By late March this carefully arranged campaign had become so successful that the Conseil d’État debated the best title for Napoleon to take. ‘No one proposed to say King!’ noted Pelet. Instead ‘consul’, ‘prince’ and ‘emperor’ were discussed. The first two sounded too modest, but Pelet believed the Conseil thought ‘that of Emperor too ambitious’.⁸⁶ Ségur, whose father the Comte de Ségur was present at the meeting and later became the imperial grand master of ceremonies, stated that twenty-seven of the twenty-eight state councillors approved of Napoleon taking an hereditary title of some kind. When the committee chairmen reported, they all recommended that the title ‘of Emperor is the only one worthy of him and of France’.⁸⁷ Napoleon told the actor Talma, who happened to be present, ‘At this moment we are talking as if we are having a conversation, well, we are making history!’⁸⁸

By the time Napoleon was ready to declare himself emperor, many of the great republican generals who might have objected were gone: Hoche, Kléber and Joubert were dead; Dumouriez was in exile; Pichegru and Moreau were about to go on trial for treachery. Only Jourdan, Augereau, Bernadotte and Brune remained and they were about to be placated with marshals’ batons. The explanation Napoleon gave Soult – ‘An end should be put to the hopes of the Bourbons’ – was of course not the whole reason; he also wanted to be able to address Francis of Austria and Alexander of Russia as equals, and perhaps also Augustus, Hadrian and Constantine.⁸⁹ France was de facto an empire by 1804, and it was only acknowledging that fact that Napoleon declared himself an emperor de jure, just as Queen Victoria would become for the British Empire in 1877. Astonishingly few Frenchmen opposed the return to an hereditary monarchy only eleven years after the execution of Louis XVI, and those who did were promised the opportunity to vote against it in a plebiscite.

 • • •

On May 10, 1804, William Pitt the Younger returned to the British premiership, replacing the shaky Addison government and committed to building a third coalition against France, on which he was willing to spend £2.5 million and to which he hoped to recruit Russia and Austria.⁹⁰ Eight days later Napoleon was officially proclaimed emperor in a fifteen-minute ceremony at Saint-Cloud, in which Joseph was appointed Grand Elector and Louis became Constable of France. He henceforth took the somewhat convoluted and seemingly contradictory style ‘Napoleon, through the grace of God and the Constitution of the Republic, Emperor of the French’.⁹¹ At dinner that evening he drily mused over the way his family were squabbling over the spoils: ‘Really, to listen to my sisters, you’d think that I’d mismanaged the inheritance of our father, the late king.’⁹²

Should Napoleon die without an heir it was resolved that Joseph and then Louis would inherit the crown, with Lucien and Jérôme cut out of the line of succession due to the marriages of which their brother disapproved. Napoleon was furious that while Jérôme, who was serving in the French navy, had been on shore leave in America in December 1803 and had married the beautiful Baltimore heiress Elizabeth Patterson rather than holding himself back for a European dynastic union. Napoleon did everything in his power thereafter to end the marriage, including importuning the Pope to have it annulled and ordering French officials to ‘say publicly that I do not recognize a marriage that a young man of nineteen has contracted against the laws of his country’.⁹³ All of his brothers except Louis had married for love, as he himself had, which was of no use to France.

‘Sole instrument of my destiny, I owe nothing to my brothers,’ he told the French ambassador to America, Louis Pichon, on April 20, insisting that he find a way of annulling Jérôme’s marriage. He later told Cambacérès, ‘there was no more of a marriage than between two lovers united in a garden, upon the altar of love, in presence of the moon and stars’.⁹⁴ The Pope disagreed, and declared the marriage indissoluble, yet Napoleon continued to refer to Elizabeth as Jérôme’s ‘mistress’ and ‘the woman with whom he lives’ and in April 1805 he even threatened to have Jérôme arrested.⁹⁵ The following month Jérôme buckled, rejoined the navy and disowned his pregnant wife. Elizabeth fled to London and gave birth to a son before returning to America, where she was taken in by her father’s family. (In due course, her grandson became attorney-general.)

Napoleon severely reprimanded Pauline for her infidelities in Rome. ‘Do not count on me to help,’ he warned her, ‘if at your age you let yourself be governed by bad advice.’⁹⁶ Of her husband, Prince Camillo Borghese, he added: ‘If you quarrel with him it will be your fault, and France will be closed to you.’⁹⁷ He ordered their uncle Cardinal Fesch to tell the vain but undeniably sexy twenty-three-year-old, ‘on my behalf, that she is no longer pretty, that she will be much less so in a few years, and . . . she should not indulge in those bad manners which the bon ton reproves’. Despite these warnings her relations with her husband deteriorated further and she never forgave him for the death by fever of her six-year-old son Dermide Leclerc that August.⁹⁸

 • • •

The day after he was proclaimed emperor, Napoleon appointed four honorary and fourteen active ‘Marshals of the Empire’. The fourteen active marshals were Alexandre Berthier, Joachim Murat, Adrien Moncey, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, André Masséna, Pierre Augereau, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, Nicolas Soult, Guillame Brune, Jean Lannes, Édouard Mortier, Michel Ney, Louis-Nicolas Davout and Jean-Baptiste Bessières.* Between 1807 and 1815 a further eight were created. The marshalate wasn’t a military rank but an honorific one intended to recognize and reward something that Napoleon later called ‘the sacred fire’, and of course to incentivize the rest of the high command.⁹⁹ The title came with a silver and velvet baton studded with gold eagles in a box of red Moroccan leather and indicated that Napoleon considered these men to be the fourteen best military commanders in the French army.* Not everyone was impressed: when his staff congratulated Masséna, he merely snorted, ‘There are fourteen of us!’ Masséna was lucky to get his baton at all, having voted against the Life Consulate and criticized the coming Moreau trial, but his military capacity was undeniable.¹⁰⁰ Davout was appointed despite not having yet commanded a division in combat, though he did have a command in the Consular Guard; he probably wouldn’t have been elevated in the first creation if his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, had lived.¹⁰¹ Marmont felt chagrin that he wasn’t one of the original eighteen, and Junot wasn’t considered of marshal – or even sometimes martial – calibre.

Napoleon ensured a seven–seven balance between the Armies of the Rhine and Italy, which was roughly retained in the later elevations of Victor, Marmont and Suchet from the Army of Italy, and Macdonald, Oudinot, Saint-Cyr and Grouchy from the Army of the Rhine. Mortier and Soult came from the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse, and although Napoleon didn’t know them well they were clearly good fighting soldiers, and Soult had the capacity for independent command. There was an attempt at political balance too; Brune conciliated the Jacobins, Jourdan and Moncey had led important republican armies. Bernadotte was Joseph’s brother-in-law, but also a dissident whom Napoleon thought it best to tie firmly to his regime.

The saying went that every soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and the working-class origins of many of the marshals served as a powerful reminder of this. Ten of them had risen from the ranks, and they included the son of a cooper (Ney), tanner (Saint-Cyr), bailiff (Victor), brewer (Oudinot), wealthy peasant (Mortier), miller (Lefebvre), innkeeper (Murat), household servant (Augereau) and storekeeper (Masséna).¹⁰² Only Prince Józef Poniatowski and the Marquis de Grouchy (who won their batons in 1813 and 1815 respectively) were aristocrats, although Pérignon, Macdonald, Marmont, Berthier and Davout were scions of the Ancien Régime noblesse.¹⁰³ Sérurier used to boast that his father held ‘a royal appointment’, but it turned out he was mole-catcher at the royal stud at Lâon.¹⁰⁴ Whatever their social origin, Napoleon addressed all the marshals as ‘Mon cousin’ in correspondence, as he did Cambacérès and some of the senior imperial dignitaries.*

The marshals were awarded titles, such as the Prince de Ponte Corvo (Bernadotte), the Prince de Neufchâtel (Berthier), the Duc d’Istrie (Bessières) and the Prince d’Eckmühl (Davout). As well as titles and batons, Napoleon gave dotations (cash presents) to his marshals, some of which were huge. Of the twenty-six eventual marshals, twenty-four received dotations – only the crypto-republicans Brune and Jourdan received none, although Brune became a count.¹⁰⁵ Napoleon’s favouritism was evident in the very unequal distribution of the dotations over the years. The top four marshals – Berthier with 1 million francs, Masséna 933,000 francs, Davout 817,000 francs and Ney 729,000 francs – received over half the total of 6 million francs. The next four – Soult, Bessières, Lannes and Bernadotte – got between 200,000 and 300,000 francs each. All the rest received less than 200,000 francs, with Saint-Cyr, whom Napoleon respected as a soldier but couldn’t warm to as a man, getting only 30,211 francs.¹⁰⁶

As well as founding the marshalate, on May 18, 1804 Napoleon formally constituted the Imperial Guard, an amalgamation of the Consular Guard and the unit that guarded the Legislative Body. It consisted of staff, infantry, cavalry and artillery components, with battalions of sappers and marines attached. It was later split into the Old Guard of long-standing veterans, the Middle Guard of soldiers who had fought in the 1807–09 campaigns and the Young Guard who were the cream of each year’s conscript intake. A burgeoning elite corps that numbered 8,000 men in 1804 but 100,000 by 1812, the Imperial Guard was conscious of its superiority to regular Line regiments, and was often used by Napoleon as a strategic reserve, only to be flung into battle at the critical moment, if at all. Their morale was generally considered the highest in the army, though they incurred resentment from the rest of the Grande Armée, which correctly believed that Napoleon treated them with favouritism, scoffing that their nickname, ‘the Immortals’, derived from the way that the Emperor protected them.

 • • •

The great Moreau–Cadoudal conspiracy trial of June 1804 was nearly botched by the authorities. The evidence against Moreau, who was still widely regarded as France’s greatest popular hero after Napoleon, was largely based on hearsay and circumstantial evidence, as he never wrote down anything compromising. He spoke movingly to the special tribunal of civilian judges and admitted that the conspirators ‘proposed to me (as is very well known) to put myself at the head of a popular commotion, similar to that of 18th Brumaire’, but he claimed to have rejected them because, although he was adequate to command armies, he ‘had no wish to command the republic itself’.¹⁰⁷ The tribunal, arraigned under emergency legislation, witnessed scenes of genuine popular sympathy for Moreau, and much to Napoleon’s fury it handed down the lightest possible sentence of two years’ imprisonment, which Napoleon subsequently revised to exile in the United States. When Madame Moreau visited Napoleon to plead for a remission of the sentence, he expostulated: ‘The judges have left me nothing to remit!’¹⁰⁸ Moreau’s former lieutenant in Germany, General Claude Lecourbe, who had publicly shaken hands with him during the trial, attended the Tuileries shortly afterwards, whereupon Napoleon exclaimed: ‘How dare you sully my palace with your presence?’¹⁰⁹

Although twenty-one people were acquitted, four others besides Moreau were sentenced to prison terms, while Cadoudal and nineteen others – including one of the aristocratic Polignac brothers – were sentenced to death.¹¹⁰ Two weeks later, after Moreau had left for Philadelphia, Napoleon commuted some of the death sentences, including those of Bouvet de Lozier, Polignac and another aristocrat, the Marquis Rivière. The rest, including Picot, were guillotined in the Place de Grève on June 25 in the only mass guillotining to take place in Napoleon’s reign.¹¹¹ Murat was furious that Armand de Polignac’s sentence had been commuted, he thought on class grounds, but it also might have helped that he had been at Brienne with Napoleon. ‘We have achieved more than we intended,’ Cadoudal remarked on the way to the scaffold. ‘We came to give France a king; we have given her an emperor.’¹¹² He insisted on being executed first, so that his co-conspirators wouldn’t believe a rumour that he had accepted a pardon timed to arrive after their deaths.

 • • •

On June 12, 1804 the new Imperial Council (essentially the old Conseil d’État) met at Saint-Cloud to decide what form Napoleon’s coronation should take. Reims (where coronations of French kings had traditionally taken place), the Champs de Mars (turned down because of the likelihood of inclement weather) and Aix-la-Chapelle (for its connections with Charlemagne) were briefly considered before Notre-Dame was decided upon. The date of December 2 was a compromise between Napoleon, who had wanted November 9, the fifth anniversary of the Brumaire coup, and the Pope, who had wanted Christmas Day, when Charlemagne had been crowned in AD 800.¹¹³ The Council then discussed heraldic insignia and the official badge of the Empire, with Crétet’s special committee unanimously recommending the cockerel, emblem of Ancient Gaul, but if that was not accepted the eagle, lion, elephant, Aegis of Minerva, oak tree and ear of corn also had their supporters. Lebrun even suggested commandeering the Bourbons’ fleur-de-lis.¹¹⁴Miot rightly denounced the fleur-de-lis as ‘an imbecility’ and instead proposed an enthroned Napoleon as the badge.

‘The cock belongs to the farmyard,’ said Napoleon, ‘it is far too feeble a creature.’ The Comte de Ségur supported the lion as it supposedly vanquished leopards, and Jean Laumond supported the elephant, a royal beast that according to (incorrect) popular belief couldn’t bend its knee. Cambacérès came up with the bee, as they have a powerful chief (albeit a queen), and General Lacuée added that it could both sting and make honey. Denon suggested the eagle, but the problem with that was that Austria, Prussia, the United States and Poland were already represented by eagles. No vote was taken, but Napoleon chose the lion, and they moved on to the question of inscriptions on the new coinage, rather strangely agreeing to keep the words ‘French Republic’ on it, which remained the case until 1809. Shortly after the meeting broke up Napoleon changed his mind from the lion to an eagle with spread wings, on the basis that it ‘affirms imperial dignity and recalls Charlemagne’.¹¹⁵ It also recalled Ancient Rome.

Not content with having just one symbol, Napoleon also chose the bee as a personal and family emblem, which then found its way as a decorative motif onto carpets, curtains, clothes, thrones, coats of arms, batons, books and many other items of imperial paraphernalia. The symbol of immortality and regeneration, hundreds of small gold-and-garnet bees (or possibly cicada, or even mis-drawn eagles) had been found in 1653 when the tomb was opened of the fifth-century King Childeric I of France, father of Clovis, in Tournai.¹¹⁶ By thus appropriating Childeric’s bees, Napoleon was consciously connecting the house of Bonaparte with the ancient Merovingian dynasty that created the sovereignty of France itself.

The result of the plebiscite on the establishment of the hereditary Empire was announced on August 7.¹¹⁷ When the interior minister, Portalis, showed Napoleon the yes votes of the armed services – 120,032 for the army and 16,224 for the navy – he simply took out his pen and rounded the former up to 400,000 and the latter to 50,000, with nil no votes recorded.¹¹⁸ Even so in the final result – 3,572,329 in favour to 2,579 against – there were 80,000 fewer yes votes than in the plebiscite held over the Life Consulate.¹¹⁹Although there is evidence that certain officers were cashiered for voting no, they tended to be allowed back later, and one, General Solignac, reached the post of divisional commander after he personally begged the Emperor four years later ‘to be allowed the honour of going to Spain to share the honours and dangers of the army’.¹²⁰

 • • •

On July 14, 1804 the remains of the great French marshals Vauban and Turenne were transferred to Les Invalides. Napoleon chose the occasion to make the inaugural awards of a new French order, the Légion d’Honneur, to reward meritorious service to France regardless of social origin. The first medals were five-pointed crosses in plain white enamel hanging from a red ribbon, but they had financial stipends attached according to one’s ranking in the organization. The fifteen cohorts of the order comprised grand officers, commanders, officers and legionaries, and each received 200,000 francs to distribute annually to worthy recipients.

Some on the Left complained that the reintroduction of honours fundamentally violated the revolutionary concept of social equality.Moreau had sneered at a previous attempt by Napoleon to reintrodeuce honours, awarding his cook ‘the order of the saucepan’. In the army, however, the Légion was an instant success. It’s impossible to say how many acts of valour were undertaken at least in part in the hope of being awarded ‘the cross’, as it was universally known. Napoleon chose ‘Honneur et Patrie’ as its motto, the words embroidered on all French standards.¹²¹ Soldiers prized the medals, promotions, pensions and recognition that came directly from Napoleon far above the previous revolutionary concepts of self-sacrifice for the common good that the Jacobins had tried to inculcate into the army of the ‘Republic of Virtue’ in the 1790s.¹²²

The inclusion of civilians in the Légion was deliberate; the rest of society could also attain honour if it copied the military virtues, especially those of loyalty and obedience. Napoleon became grand master but he turned down General Matthieu Dumas, who had helped create the order, as its grand chancellor, ‘in order to do away with very notion of preference for the military’. Instead the naturalist, senator and vice-president of the Institut, Bernard Lacépède, was chosen to run it.¹²³ Out of the 38,000 people who received the rubans rouges (red ribbons) under Napoleon, 34,000 (or 89 per cent) were soldiers or sailors, but savants like Laplace, Monge, Berthollet and Chaptal got them too, as did prefects and several of the jurists who had helped write the Code. Napoleon also set up the Maison d’Éducation de la Légion d’Honneur at Saint-Denis, an excellent boarding school providing free education for the daughters of recipients of the medal who had been killed on active service, which still exists today, as does a Légion lycéein Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

At one of the Conseil meetings in May 1802, when the foundation of the Légion was under discussion, the lawyer Théophile Berlier sneered at the whole concept, to which Napoleon replied:

You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led. I would not say this in public, but in an assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don’t think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See how the crowd is awed by the medals and orders worn by foreign diplomats. We must recreate these distinctions. There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild. A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself – what is it? Scattered grains of sand.¹²⁴

In order to alter that, Napoleon said, ‘We must plant a few masses of granite as anchors in the soil of France.’ All too often his phrase ‘it is with such baubles that men are led’ has been quoted wildly out of context to imply that he was being cynical, whereas fuller quotation shows that he was in fact commending the ‘baubles’ as the physical manifestations of honour. At that meeting, ten of the twenty-four councillors present voted against the institution of the Légion, because of the way it reintroduced class distinctions; nine of them subsequently accepted either the cross or the title of count.¹²⁵ (Berlier himself took both.)

A magnificent ceremony was held at the Boulogne camp on Thursday, August 16, 1804, at which Napoleon distributed the first crosses of the Légion d’Honneur to the army. The medals were presented resting on the armour of Bertrand du Guesclin, a military commander during the Hundred Years War, and alongside the helmet of the sixteenth-century personification of French chivalry, the Chevalier de Bayard. Announced by the guns of Boulogne, Antwerp and Cherbourg, 2,000 members were decorated by Napoleon in front of 60,000 soldiers and 20,000 spectators. More than a thousand drummers played the ‘Aux Champs’ martial air, with cannon-fire reverberating in time to the music. One of the spectators recorded that two hundred standards taken from France’s enemies, ‘tattered by cannonballs and stained with blood, formed a canopy appropriate to the occasion’.¹²⁶ The next month Napoleon used the phrase ‘my people’ for the first time, in a letter to the Pope.¹²⁷ He also started calling Josephine ‘Madame and dear wife’ in the way Henri IV had used to address Marie de Médici.¹²⁸

 • • •

On October 2, Sir Sidney Smith made an ineffective attack on the Boulogne flotilla, worrying Napoleon about the effect of fireships in the harbour. As ever he was also thinking about other things, great and small, and he ordered Fouché four days later to lift the ban on Piedmontese theatregoers from whistling at dancers’ performances they didn’t like.¹²⁹ Three days after Smith’s abortive attack the Royal Navy had much more success when four frigates attacked the Spanish bullion fleet without a declaration of war, sinking one vessel and capturing the other three, with £900,000 worth of Spanish silver dollars and gold ingots on board. It was a blatant act of piracy, but Britain suspected that Spain – which had been allied to France since the Treaty of San Ildefonso – was planning to declare war as soon as the treasure had been safely unloaded at Cadiz.

 • • •

Napoleon’s dexterity in governance is well illustrated by the twenty-two letters he wrote on a single day in October 1804. These covered, among much else, the re-establishment of the Jesuits in Spain (‘I will never tolerate this happening in France’), the number of Britons in Paris (‘Have all those found there been sent away?’), a letter to his naval minister Decrès asking, ‘What exactly is the purpose of leaving admirals in Paris?’, the desirability of uniting forty Parisian convents for female education, the introduction of British-style hunting laws, and a denunciation of the legal profession (‘this heap of chatterboxes and revolution-fomenters who are inspired only by crime and corruption’).¹³⁰ His constant harrying of Decrès was interspersed with occasional flashes of charm. ‘I’m sorry you are angry with me,’ he wrote to him in December, saying of his own rages that ‘finally, when the anger has passed, nothing remains, so I hope you will not harbour any grudge against me’.¹³¹

Displaying the same disregard for international law as the Royal Navy had recently, on the night of October 24 the French kidnapped the British diplomat Sir George Rumbold at his country house near Hamburg, a free Hanseatic League city under Prussian protection, and took him to the Temple prison. He was involved, like Francis Drake in Munich and Spencer Smith in Stuttgart, in supporting émigré plots; he was released after forty-eight hours and returned to Britain. The King of Prussia complained in a measured way about the French violation of Hamburg’s sovereignty. Napoleon’s view was that an ambassador was supposed to be ‘a minister of reconciliation, his duty is always a sacred one, based on morality’, but the British government had used Rumbold as ‘an instrument of war, who has the right to do anything’. He ordered Talleyrand to ask of the British: ‘Does it take the sovereigns of Europe to be no more than a lot of Indian nabobs?’¹³²

 • • •

Preparations for the coronation were under way. ‘There’s tardiness in making the costumes,’ Cambacérès warned Napoleon. ‘However, mine’s already done.’¹³³ The Pope left Rome for Paris on November 2, though he made it known that he had wept over d’Enghien, ‘that great and innocent victim’.¹³⁴ On the 25th Napoleon met him between Nemours and Fontainebleau and they entered Paris together three days later. Napoleon ordered his officials to treat the pontiff as though he had 200,000 troops at his back, just about his greatest compliment.¹³⁵ To ensure the Pope’s officiation at the coronation he had promised to marry Josephine according to the rites of the Church, rather than continue to rely on the state ceremony they had held in 1796, so on the night of December 1 Cardinal Fesch performed the religious nuptials at the Tuileries in the presence of Talleyrand, Berthier and Duroc.¹³⁶ Josephine sent the wedding certificate to Eugène for safe-keeping, in case Napoleon ever denied it had happened.

The latent hostilities between the Bonaparte and Beauharnais families were brought to the fore by the coronation. Joseph argued against Josephine being crowned because it would mean that Hortense and Louis’ children would be the grandchildren of an empress whereas his were only the grandchildren of a bourgeois.¹³⁷ All three of Napoleon’s sisters resisted carrying Josephine’s train, Lucien refused to attend the ceremony at all, and Madame Mère supported him and decided to stay with him in Rome, despite Napoleon having given her a large house in Paris.¹³⁸ ‘There are thousands of people in France who have given greater service to the State than them,’ an infuriated Napoleon said to Roederer of his own brothers, ‘yourself among them.’¹³⁹ By contrast, he adored Eugène and Hortense. ‘I love those children, because they’re always in a rush to please me.’¹⁴⁰ Eugène’s wounding in Egypt raised him high in the Emperor’s estimation: ‘If there’s a cannon-shot it’s Eugène who sees what’s happening; if there’s a ditch to cross, it’s him who gives me a hand.’ Of his siblings’ sniping, Napoleon shrugged: ‘They say my wife is false and that the over-zealousness of her children is studied. Well, I want them to treat me as an old uncle; this makes a sweetness of my life; I’m becoming old . . . I want some rest.’¹⁴¹ He was thirty-five, but the point stands, as did his support for Josephine: ‘My wife’s a good woman who doesn’t harm them. She satisfies herself . . . with having diamonds, nice dresses and the misfortunes of her ageing. I have never loved her blindly. If I make her empress, it’s an act of justice. I am above all a fair man.’¹⁴² He insisted when she took the waters at Aix in July that a canopy be placed over her in church services and she was given a throne on the right of the altar.¹⁴³ Her visits to towns were henceforth to be accompanied by cannon-fire salutes.

Napoleon was almost as generous to his sisters as he was to his brothers: Elisa was the first to get a principality, that of Lucca, though it didn’t stop her from complaining. Pauline, who wasn’t politically ambitious, became the ruling Duchess of Guastalla and Caroline the Grand Duchess of Berg in March 1806. None seemed grateful. At least Madame Mère, who would probably have made a better ruler than any of her daughters but had no appetite for power, thanked Napoleon when he gave her the Château de Pont near Brienne in June 1805 – ‘You have there some of the most beautiful countryside in France,’ he told her – along with 160,000 francs for its renovation and upkeep.¹⁴⁴ Over the years she built up a fortune estimated at 40 million francs.¹⁴⁵ At the same time that he was heaping titles and riches upon his family, Napoleon continued to worry more mundanely about the quality of bread his men were receiving, complaining to Berthier that poor grain was being bought by the army and ordering ‘instead of white beans, use yellow beans continually’.¹⁴⁶

 • • •

Napoleon and Josephine’s coronation at Notre-Dame on Sunday, December 2, 1804 was a magnificent spectacle, despite the somewhat last-minute organization. It was snowing when the first guests started to arrive at 6 a.m., and they entered under a wooden and stucco neo-Gothic awning designed to mask the destructive iconoclasm wrought during the Revolution. This had been blown about by a storm four nights before, breaking its fastenings and timber supports, and the final hammer strokes died away only as the pontifical procession approached at 10.30 a.m.¹⁴⁷ Representatives from the legislature, Court of Cassation (in flame-coloured togas), departments, Légion d’Honneur, Procurator-General, war commissariat, colonies, chambers of commerce, the National Guard, the Institut de France, ministries, the Agricultural Society and many other institutions – especially the army, from brigadiers upwards – handed their invitations to the ninety-two ticket collectors. Once inside they wandered around over the stands, chatting and hindering the workmen and generally creating disorder. At 7 a.m. 460 musicians and choristers began to congregate in the transepts, including the entire orchestras of the imperial chapel, the Conservatoire, the Feydeau theatre, the Opéra and the Grenadiers and Chasseurs of the Guard.* One of the chief organizers of the ceremony, Louis Fontanes, finally had to instruct soldiers to order everyone to sit down.¹⁴⁸

At 9 a.m. most of the Diplomatic Corps arrived, although the coronation came too soon after d’Enghien’s death for the ambassadors of Russia and Sweden to attend. Over at the Tuileries, fifty-seven cartloads of Seine river sand had been spread over the muddy patches of the courtyard, the workmen being paid the unheard-of rate of 4 francs each for the night’s work. That morning, the new chamberlain, Théodore de Thiard, had walked into Napoleon’s dressing room to find him ‘already wearing his white velvet trousers, sprinkled in golden bees, his lace Henri IV-like ruff, and over the top his chasseurs à cheval uniform’.¹⁴⁹ ‘Had it not been a solemn moment,’ Thiard recorded, he ‘would have burst out laughing at the incongruity of the sight.’ Napoleon took off his military uniform before leaving for Notre-Dame.

At 10 a.m. artillery salvoes announced the departure of Napoleon and Josephine from the Tuileries. ‘The Coronation carriage is very grand,’ wrote a courtier, ‘with glass and without panels . . . When their Majesties entered, they mistook the side, and placed themselves in the front; but in an instant perceiving their error, they threw themselves, laughing, into the back.’¹⁵⁰ The procession was so large that it had to stop at several points along the route as bottlenecks were negotiated. Murat, as governor of Paris, was at its head, then came his staff, four squadrons of carabiniers, then cuirassiers, horse chasseurs of the Guard, and a squadron of Mamluks in the brightest uniforms of all. Afterwards there came the heralds-at-arms on horseback, wearing violet velvet tabards embroidered with eagles and carrying staves adorned with bees.

Napoleon and Josephine’s coach was drawn by eight white horses with white plumes and was driven by the coachman César in a long green coat with gold lace. Napoleon wore a purple velvet tabard embroidered with gold and precious stones; Josephine – ‘her face so well made up that she looked like five-and-twenty’ – wore a white robe and satin mantle embroidered with gold and silver. She had diamonds in her coronet, earrings, necklace and belt. Nothing was contemporary except the grenadiers’ uniforms lining the route, otherwise everything was part classical, part Gothic and wholly extravagant. The sheer number of soldiers – some accounts estimate 80,000 – tended to block the crowds’ view, which, along with the freezing temperatures, meant that they cheered but stayed calm.¹⁵¹

The procession arrived at the archbishop’s palace adjacent to the cathedral at 11 a.m., and Napoleon dressed for the ceremony as the congregation shivered in the pews. He wore a long satin, gold-embroidered gown that reached his ankles, over which he had an ermine-lined crimson velvet mantle with a golden bee motif bordered with olive, laurel and oak leaves, which weighed more than 80 pounds, so it took Joseph, Louis, Lebrun and Cambacérès to lift it on to him.¹⁵² ‘If only Daddy [Babbù] could see us now,’ Napoleon said to Joseph in Italian as they admired each other in their finery.¹⁵³ At 11.45 a.m. Napoleon and Josephine emerged in their ceremonial costumes, ready for the Cardinal du Belloy, archbishop of Paris, to greet them at the entrance to the cathedral and sprinkle them with holy water.¹⁵⁴

‘The length of the ceremony seemed to weary him,’ noted Laure d’Abrantès, who, as a lady-in-waiting, was only ten paces away from Napoleon, ‘and I saw him several times check a yawn. Nevertheless, he did everything he was required to do with propriety. When the Pope anointed him with the triple unction on his head and both hands, I fancied from the direction of his eyes that he was thinking of wiping off the oil rather than anything else.’¹⁵⁵ Although the ceremony was based on those of the Bourbons, Napoleon broke with tradition in not making confession or taking communion.

Napoleon had two crowns during the coronation: the first was a golden laurel-wreath one that he entered the cathedral wearing which was meant to evoke the Roman Empire and which he wore throughout; the second was a replica of Charlemagne’s crown, which had to be specially made because the traditional French coronation crown had been destroyed during the Revolution and the Austrians wouldn’t lend him Charlemagne’s. Although he lifted the Charlemagne replica over his own head, as previously rehearsed with the Pope, he didn’t actually place it on top because he was already wearing the laurels. He did however crown Josephine, who knelt before him.¹⁵⁶ Laure d’Abrantès noted how Josephine’s tears rained onto her hands joined in prayer.¹⁵⁷ Napoleon took great care fitting her small crown behind her diamond diadem, and patting it gently until it was safely in place. When the Pope had blessed them both, embraced Napoleon and intoned ‘Vivat Imperator in aeternam’, and the Mass had finished, Napoleon pronounced his coronation oath:

I swear to maintain the integrity of the territory of the Republic: to respect and to cause to be respected the laws of the Concordat and of freedom of worship, of political and civil liberty, of the irreversibility of the sale of the biens nationaux; to raise no taxes except by virtue of the law; to maintain the institution of the Légion d’Honneur; to govern only in view of the interest, the wellbeing and the glory of the French people.¹⁵⁸

Napoleon’s crowning of himself was the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, and in one way a defining moment of the Enlightenment. It was also fundamentally honest: he had indeed got there through his own efforts. It is possible that he later regretted doing it, however, because of the vaulting egoism it suggested. When the great classical painter Jacques-Louis David, who was commissioned to commemorate the coronation, wrote to Napoleon’s senior courtier Pierre Daru in August 1806 about the ‘great moment’ that had ‘astonished spectators’ (his sketch of the self-crowning is reproduced as Plate 31), he was instead ordered to paint the moment when Napoleon crowned Josephine.¹⁵⁹ His formal painting, Sacre de L’Empereur Napoléon I^er et Couronnement de l’Impératrice Joséphine, which was exhibited at the Louvre to huge crowds in February 1808, wasn’t intended to be historically accurate: Madame Mère was included, and Hortense and Napoleon’s three sisters were depicted standing well away from Josephine’s train, which in fact they had been prevailed upon to carry at the moment of Josephine’s coronation.¹⁶⁰ Cardinal Caprara didn’t like the look of his bald head in the painting, and demanded of Talleyrand that he force David to depict him in a wig, but at that David baulked.¹⁶¹ The Bolivian dictator Manuel Malgarejo was later laughed at for his ignorance in contrasting the relative merits of Bonaparte and Napoleon, whom he thought were two separate people, but on some level he was right. The Emperor Napoleon felt the need to stand on ceremony in a way that General Bonaparte rarely had.

The Bourbons sneered, of course. A commentator likened Napoleon’s tabard to that of the king of diamonds in a pack of playing cards. ‘It was an invention worthy of a painting master in a young ladies’ academy,’ sneered another.¹⁶² Yet the occasion was intended for the soldiers and spectators rather than for Ancien Régime sophisticates, who were anyway going to hate it whatever form it took. The people of Paris enjoyed it, not least because that evening there were massive firework displays, cash distributions and public fountains flowing with wine.¹⁶³ Although Madame Mère hadn’t attended the coronation, when she was congratulated on her son’s elevation to the imperial purple her reply was replete with her natural fatalism and great common sense. ‘Pourvu que ça dur,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope that it lasts.’¹⁶⁴