6

First Consul

Though Napoleon’s propaganda machine proclaimed the Egyptian campaign a resounding triumph, it was a difficult boast to sustain in reality. He had suffered significant reverses and his thrust north into Syria had proved unexpectedly costly with the loss of around six thousand men to the enemy, plague and physical exhaustion. He had been forced to accept defeat at Acre and had retreated south, only to see the British navy land an Ottoman expeditionary force near Alexandria. The gloom was only lifted by the brilliant cavalry charge unleashed by Murat against the Ottoman army that had occupied Aboukir, an attack that scattered the enemy and delivered the city. For Bonaparte it at least meant that his campaign in Egypt had ended with a victory which would raise spirits and confirm his reputation back in Paris; as usual he made sure that the Paris newspapers buzzed with excitement about the scale of his supposed triumph. But he couldn’t fool himself. He had already concluded that this would be a long and difficult campaign, punctuated by setbacks and reverses, and this realisation may have contributed to his decision in the late summer of 1799 to return to Paris and the faction-ridden political world of the Directory. He appointed General Kléber to take military charge in North Africa, informed the Directory of his decision, and emphasised the importance of Egypt to French security. And in the most paternal language he passed his soldiers into Kléber’s care, writing to the General thus: ‘The army which I am entrusting to you is entirely composed of my children; even in the midst of their greatest sufferings I have always had marks of their affection; maintain them in these sentiments; you owe me that because of the esteem and the special friendship in which I hold you, and for the real feelings of attachment that I have for them’.¹ The message was, of course, sent on to Paris; Napoleon’s sense of publicity did not desert him. The soldiers could be excused if many of them judged his departure rather more harshly.

He set sail for France on 23 August together with his chosen companions, among them several of his future marshals, in a small flotilla of naval ships, consisting of just two frigates and two sloops, commanded by a French vice-admiral, Ganteaume.² He left behind the bulk of his army and a majority of his officers and scientific advisers. He even abandoned Pauline Fourès, his mistress during his time in Egypt (Josephine, it would appear, did not enjoy a monopoly on infidelity); it was widely rumoured that she responded defiantly to his act of desertion by transferring her affections to the new commander, Kléber.³ When they heard the news of his return and realised that he had abandoned them on the other side of the Mediterranean, many of the troops were understandably indignant, though they were soon won over to his successor, who commanded a wide degree of respect in the ranks and who many hoped might negotiate them a return to France.

But what are we to make of Bonaparte’s actions? Despite allegations that he had betrayed his men, he had done nothing wrong in terms of military etiquette, and could reasonably argue that he was now more urgently required in Europe than in Egypt, where there was little that he could now achieve. Though some historians continue to present his departure as a shameful retreat, one that salvaged Bonaparte himself but left his army at the mercy of the Egyptians, the Turks, and increasingly the British, he had other, more positive reasons to return to France in the summer of 1799. In Egypt he felt marginalised from Directorial politics and decision-making, even from regular news contact with the mainland. Indeed, during the seventeen months he spent on the campaign to Egypt, he was often dependent for news on chance encounters with foreign merchants or, after the surrender at Aboukir, on the packet of European newspapers he received from Sidney Smith, the British naval commander whose ships had supplied the besieged garrison at Saint-Jean-d’Acre.⁴ These contained worrying news about the pursuit of the war in Europe; he learned, most notably, that France faced a second coalition of hostile powers, and the gains which he had made in Italy seemed increasingly to have been put at risk. As he reported to the Directory from Aix the day after his return to French soil, it was through these papers – English papers – that he had learned of the defeats suffered by Jourdan in Germany and Schérer in Italy – defeats that left France’s sister-republics in tatters (′I left immediately, that very hour,’ he wrote somewhat melodramatically).⁵ Bonaparte was probably right to believe that he could contribute little more from Egypt and that his talents could be more usefully applied back in Europe. He found his isolation from politics increasingly insupportable, and his return was motivated less by his desire to flee the war in Africa than by ambitions that could only be satisfied in France.

His ship docked in Fréjus, along the coast from Toulon, on 9 October, having made a brief stop in Corsica to allow him to visit his relatives. It was the last time he would ever set foot on the island, a final glance at the boyhood world he had come to reject. From now on his focus would be firmly on France, its government and governability, its security and, especially, its pursuit of war.

For Napoleon had always been a political general, keenly aware of the cause in whose name he fought and of the importance of political power struggles back in Paris. Through continued propaganda and seizing opportunities for self-publicity he had ensured that his name remained on the front pages of the Paris news sheets; and his upbeat reports on his campaigns in Egypt and Syria ensured that he remained in control of the popular pulse back in France. As a consequence, he returned to France a hero, just as he had from the Italian Campaign, a conqueror who had taken the French standard to the most exotic lands of the Orient. His landing at Fréjus and his triumphant reception in Aix were only the start of a hero’s return; in Lyon, they even composed a play in his honour, titled The Return of the Hero.⁶ By the time his entourage reached Paris, the people of the capital were expectant and excited; what Jean Tulard has termed ‘the myth of the saviour’ – a myth that would sustain Napoleon through the next sixteen years – was born.⁷ The political class were drawn to him, while the workers of the Paris faubourgs sang street songs to fête his return. War had made him a national figure and supplied him with the reputation he now needed to make his mark on politics. War had elevated him to a position and a status above politics, and at the same time had helped to undo his possible rivals. Of his fellow generals, Joubert and Hoche were dead by 1799, while Moreau was severely compromised. At a time when the Directory appeared increasingly jaded and stale, the cards seemed to have been somewhat fortuitously stacked in his favour.⁸

Bonaparte went out of his way to reassure the political class that his return to France was not part of a plot, that it was not premeditated, not the consequence of vaulting political ambition. His decision, as he presented it, was an immediate response to a political crisis which he had read about in the newspapers passed to him by Sidney Smith; these, he claimed, provided the catalyst that induced him to abandon North Africa. What he termed ‘extraordinary circumstances’ had persuaded him to return to Europe. The renewal of the war on the continent had turned public attention away from Egypt, while the fact that the army in Egypt risked defeat made its contribution seem suddenly peripheral. Napoleon was not slow to express his contempt for the politicians who had sent it there. He dismissed their capabilities with a single stroke of the pen: ‘Everything is ignorance, stupidity or corruption with them. I am the one, I alone, who have carried the burden, and who, through a string of successes, have given purpose to this government, which, without me, would never have been able to raise itself or to maintain itself in power. With me absent, everything would crumble. Let us not wait until that destruction is complete: the damage would be irreversible’.⁹

These words are revealing, but do they really explain the circumstances of Napoleon’s return from North Africa? What they do convey is his arrogance and his complete faith in his own abilities; they may also suggest something of his sense of his own destiny. But the idea that his return was a sudden, impulsive gesture, a decision taken in an instant on the basis of a few newspaper cuttings, is far less credible, especially given the publicity trail he had carefully laid in advance of his return and the web of plotting into which he was drawn as soon as he reached Paris.¹⁰ Once in the capital, he did not retire into private life or seek to escape the glare of public attention. He had a number of friends and allies who helped him to keep in touch with the popular mood, to feel the pulse of the nation. And that pulse told him two things: that people were tired of a politics which they increasingly equated with drift, self-interest and the abandonment of republican ideology; and, even more strongly, that they were tired of war and ready to turn to anyone who promised to restore peace and normality.

As for the political class, they still saw Bonaparte as ‘General Vendémiaire’, the military leader to whom they had turned earlier to save the conservative Republic against its radical adversaries. This of itself made him a political figure. Now, when he returned and surveyed the political scene, he found that much of the sense of purpose that had characterised the early Republic was sadly lacking. The years of the Jacobin Republic, characterised by a hatred of privilege and a ruthless desire to purge the body politic of counter-revolutionaries and political moderates, had ended in the excesses of the Terror and the Republic of Virtue; and since 1794 much of the government’s energy had been given over to establishing political stability and consolidating republican institutions, as politicians who had previously been bitter opponents united around a new constitution.

But stability was easier to talk about than to enact. The process of ending the Terror had been fraught with difficulty: memories were long and politics became enmeshed in vengeance and recrimination.¹¹ The lower house of the legislature, the Conseil des Cinq-Cents, was seriously rent by faction, with the regime once more a prey to battles between the more conservative republicans like Sieyès and neo-Jacobins like Joseph Fouché. The renewed strength of the Jacobin cause during the early months of 1799 aroused anxiety among conservatives, a change signalled in Paris by the new and central role played by a political club, known first as the Société du Manège, later (taking its name from the street where it met) as the Société de la Rue du Bac, which gave the movement greater cohesion and was a symptom of its more developed organisational capacity.¹² Neo-Jacobins were especially strong in the upper echelons of the army, where radical and often highly capable men, frustrated by political horse-trading or threatened with exclusion from the political forum after the fall of Robespierre, had sought to make a new career and serve the Republic in a different way. Their presence in the army gave them a new form of power and authority, as Napoleon was only too aware.¹³ It also threatened to destabilise still further the already stuttering Directory.

It was not Bonaparte alone who masterminded the conspiracy that overthrew the Directory in Brumaire of Year VIII. When he returned to Paris, that conspiracy was already being planned by some of the Directory’s most prominent politicians, republicans like Sieyès and Fouché and Napoleon’s old associate, Paul Barras – men who believed that change was needed to restore the authority of the government. They saw the Directory as fatally weakened by the compromises it had been forced to make after previous periods of crisis, most especially after the violent insurrections of 18 Fructidor and 30 Prairial, and believed that its claims to constitutionality were sorely flawed. As Fouché noted, the constitution of Year III had become inoperable, so that ‘from a purely constitutional regime we had moved to the dictatorship of five men: and that had not proved successful’. Worse, in his eyes, was what had followed, for ‘now that the very essence of the executive has been mutilated and weakened, everything indicated that we would pass from the despotism of a few men to the turbulence of the crowd’ if something were not done about it without delay. ¹⁴

In particular, Sieyès and his fellow plotters wanted to end the influence of the two Directors most closely associated with the neo-Jacobins, Gohier and Moulin, whose promotion had symbolised the Directory’s lurch to the left the previous year, and they were prepared to stage a coup in order to do so. The re-emergence of Jacobinism as a credible political force frightened many in the centre as well as on the right of the political spectrum, as Madame de Staël recognised, when she wrote, ‘It was not the external reverses suffered by France that produced the fatal attraction to Bonaparte in 1799, but rather the fear inspired by the Jacobins inside the country which worked so powerfully in his favour. The Jacobins had few resources at their disposal and their reappearance was no more than a spectre which stirred in the ashes; but it was sufficient to revive the panic they had generated in the past.’ As a consequence, the French nation ‘threw itself into the arms of Bonaparte, simply to escape from a phantom’.¹⁵

The plotters needed to be sure that they had military support before they launched their conspiracy. They could not risk facing the collective strength of the army, and they therefore had to win over to their side a general who commanded the respect of other officers. Some of those who would have been considered the more obvious candidates, notably Lazare Hoche, were dead; and Joubert, the man on whom they placed the greatest faith in the months before Brumaire, was killed in battle in 1799. Moreau and Pichegru were considered; Macdonald was approached, but refused. It was only then that the plotters turned to Bonaparte, the choice as much the effect of chance and circumstance as of purposeful planning.¹⁶

In this regard the timing of his return proved crucial, since it suddenly made available a general with whom some of them enjoyed good relations and who, behind a staunchly republican façade, was known to be a man of order on whom they could depend. His part in what came to be known as the insurrection of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) was intended to be quite specific: to provide military muscle in the streets of Paris and, if needed, in the two chambers of government. Indeed, on the morning of the coup Napoleon’s entourage was almost entirely military. It consisted of troops from every regiment in Paris, many of them veterans of the Italian Campaign, as well as forty adjutants of the Paris division of the National Guard.¹⁷ Their involvement was vital to the plot’s success, since they would impose emergency measures in Paris during and immediately after the coup, and so help to initiate the new regime. At that point – it was naively believed by some – Bonaparte would stand aside and the politicians would assume power. But those who thought that Bonaparte was nothing more than a military man were soon to be disillusioned. His control of the army meant that power was his to retain or relinquish as he chose; and from the moment the coup was launched he was in no doubt as to who would really be in command.¹⁸ The much-anticipated battle for influence between Bonaparte and Sieyès never took place: the former revolutionary general imposed his will on those around him, and impressed with his dynamism and energy.

Napoleon played mercilessly on his popularity during the two days of the coup, assuming an active role in both the constitutional manoeuvres of 9 November and the military uprising the following day. The gift for publicity that he had demonstrated in Italy and in Egypt did not desert him. He had the walls of Paris plastered with posters singing his praises, and urging the implementation of his solutions to what was now openly seen as a political crisis; solutions involving the resignation of four of the five Directors and leaving a gaping void at the heart of the polity. At the same time his brother Lucien, who had been elected to the Cinq-Cents the previous year and was at the time of the coup its president, provided further ammunition by distributing a pamphlet in Paris warning of a supposed Jacobin plot against the Directory and of the dangers of anarchy.¹⁹

To resolve this crisis Napoleon proposed a stronger and more compact executive, three consuls in place of five directors, but nothing that implied any weakening of republican principle. The plan was rapidly enacted, and the new constitutional arrangements put in place. On 9 November the assemblies were transferred out of Paris to the relative safety of Saint-Cloud, and Bonaparte was appointed commander of the army in the capital. The following day he was in Saint-Cloud, where he addressed the two assemblies, ordering the dissolution of the Directory and the creation of a provisional consulate. On 11 November the provisional Consulate met and a new government was formed. A new constitution, prepared in advance by Daunou, was adopted on 12 November, which established the Consulate in its definitive form.²⁰ This had all been accomplished in four days.

Napoleon was very careful to do nothing that would alienate republican opinion. He went out of his way to win support for the coup in the ranks of the army and the National Guard, two notably republican institutions, and presented the ousting of the Directors as a necessary measure to sweep away corruption and protect the founding principles of the Republic. Indeed, in a proclamation issued on 12 November, he and the other consuls went so far as to call on the French people to take an oath of loyalty to ‘the Republic, one and indivisible, founded on the principles of equality, liberty, and representative government’.²¹ Although he was allied to men of a conservative bent, or so the argument went, there was no reason for republicans to fear the new regime. He, Bonaparte, was strongly committed to the republican ideal and the coup was carried out in a mood of constitutional propriety. A few disagreed publicly and violently; Bernadotte in particular broke with Bonaparte over Brumaire and fled from the capital, threatening to return with troops at his back. ²² But he did not carry out his threat, and most Frenchmen seemed to go along with the change of government; if there were some outbursts of protest from the more radical clubs, they were quickly silenced, and the Consulate was installed without a drop of blood being spilt – a rare achievement in France’s republican history.

Even Paris, so ready in the recent past to meet political protest with violence, remained singularly calm. Indeed, the salient mood would appear to have been one of unconcern and public indifference, mingled with an ill-disguised hope that the new regime would bring the political and commercial stability that could deliver economic prosperity. Above all, the people wanted peace, and the presence among the Consuls of the all-conquering general contributed, somewhat perversely, to their confidence. To the Paris masses, Napoleon was a hero, a conqueror, the protector of the Republic and, above all, someone who, by delivering a rapid victory, could bring the peace treaty they craved.²³ The many messages of support from local authorities in the provinces provided some comfort to the new regime. ‘The echoes of the Alps redouble our applause,’ gushed the departmental authorities in Gap, while other authorities greeted the Consulate as an effective defence against royalist reaction.²⁴ But these endorsements cannot be read as evidence of real enthusiasm; since the early years of the Revolution, mayors and local officials had learned that it was wise to be cautious, and many, like Elbeuf in Normandy, ensured their own survival by congratulating the organisers of every victorious coup and siding with the leaders of every incoming government.²⁵ Over the previous ten years Frenchmen had seen too many false dawns, too many constitutions and supposed guarantees, too many governments welcomed on one day only to be jettisoned the next. They were thus unlikely to suspend entirely a degree of well-tried scepticism.²⁶

The lack of widespread opposition can also be explained by the tactful way in which the new regime presented itself to the people. Continuity was emphasised, as was the essential republicanism of the Consulate, a republicanism which others had put at risk. TheConseil des Anciens had provided that continuity by accepting a move to Saint-Cloud, away from the turbulence of the Paris populace, and this move had been presented to them as one that would help guarantee constitutional government. The Conseil des Cinq-Cents had been less compliant, requiring an impassioned speech from Lucien Bonaparte and the threat of military intervention before even a rump of deputies voted for the provisional Consulate, but their stubbornness could be blamed on dangerous neo-Jacobin elements who sought anarchy and the destruction of the state. In the tense hours that followed, propaganda was everything. The Brumairians presented themselves as responsible men, anxious to avoid violence and disruption. If the institutions guaranteed under the previous constitution had been dissolved, and dissolved by force, was there anything to suggest that this was more radical than other coups of the Directorial period? The Directors themselves had either resigned or were now forced to resign – in Gohier’s case after being held against his will in the Luxembourg Palace for forty-eight hours. The deputies of the lower house were unceremoniously driven out of their meeting hall by Bonaparte’s troops, and the rump of the deputies obediently voted for the dissolution of the Directory itself.

But the government that replaced them was not so different in kind. A provisional Consulate of three was not so different from its five-man predecessor, and its membership – Bonaparte, Sieyès and Roger-Ducos, two of them former Directors – did not of itself spread alarm in the country. And the Consulate seemed to promise many of the same goals that the Directory had been trying to deliver for the previous four years, to make France’s parliamentary system work in permanently testing circumstances. The longer-term aims of the Brumairians were left unclear – always a wise tactic in moments of crisis – and the language they used did nothing to dispel this ambiguity. Bonaparte in particular showed great diplomacy and tact. So, for example, where Sieyès advocated a pre-emptive strike against some of the most prominent Jacobins as a measure of state security, he opposed it, eager both to distance himself publicly from Sieyès and to maintain a germ of consensus.²⁷ The Consulate had to appeal to more than a narrow ideological constituency if it was to win public support.

The previous government, declared Fouché in the days following, was the victim of its own shortcomings. It had been vacillating and ineffective, he said, ‘too weak to maintain the glory of the Republic against outside enemies or to guarantee the rights of citizens against domestic factions’.²⁸ This alone provided justification for regime change and, at least in the short run, the majority of the population seemed willing to accept his assessment. Bonaparte told the deputies on 19 November that the republic no longer had a government at all; to save it required intervention, and intervention backed by force.

The Consuls hammered home the same point in their proclamation two days later. ‘The Constitution of the Year III,’ they insisted, ‘was dying. It could neither guarantee your rights nor assure its own existence. Repeated assaults were robbing it of the people’s respect.’²⁹ They were determined not to repeat this mistake. Under the Constitution of Year VIII which followed, France was given two legislative chambers: a Tribunate with one hundred deputies aged at least twenty-five, and a Legislative Body with three hundred members aged at least thirty. These age restrictions were imposed to ensure responsibility and avoid the intemperate passions of youth, though – given the limited powers that were extended to the assemblies – they might seem to have been scarcely necessary. For neither the Tribunate nor the Legislature was directly elected by the population; they were nominated by the Senate, the third element established by the constitution: it was composed of sixty notables – career politicians, generals, admirals, scientists and magistrates – largely chosen by Sieyès. Through the Senate he had hoped to create an element of constructive opposition, and hence offer sufficient protection against tyranny.³⁰ But the Senate was a deeply conservative body, and the authority given to the three chambers was strictly limited. In particular, they had no power to introduce legislation, or even to propose amendments, rights that were reserved to the First Consul and the Council of State. The Tribunate might debate laws that were presented to it and offer its opinion to the Legislative Body, which would discuss that recommendation in its turn. The Legislature was to meet annually for this purpose, its session lasting for no more than four months.³¹ Cynics talked of tyranny; certainly, by any measure, it was scarcely a recipe for a robust parliamentary system.

Not everybody was impressed by the new institutional framework, especially in those areas where Jacobin clubs had been reinstated or where the threat of a royalist revival seemed imminent. Here the anti-Jacobin tone of the Consulate did nothing to reassure local people, and there were widely held fears that the Consuls’ real aim was to subvert the Republic and its values. The first days of the new regime had to be carefully handled, and it was in those same first days that Bonaparte eclipsed the other Consuls and imposed his will on the polity. A number of the addresses that were sent to Paris were surprisingly critical of the regime, expressing their unease about the safeguards for democracy. Some initially refused to publish the decree of 19 Brumaire setting up the provisional Consulate, and one eastern department, the Jura, went as far as to denounce Napoleon as a ‘usurper’ who rode roughshod over essential civil rights guaranteed by the Assemblies of the 1790s.³²

Once in power, the Consuls did everything they possibly could to ensure that the errors of the Directors would not be repeated and that the authority of the state commanded the respect of all. To this end they sought the support of those powerful interest groups on whom stability would depend, in particular the social elites and the army. The support of the army was, as Bonaparte recognised better than most, critical to the success of the project, and establishing the loyalty of other generals was the essential first step in securing public acceptance of the regime. He realised that there would be jealousies and broken ambitions among the high command, jealousies accentuated by his own elevation, and he knew that he could not simply attack them head-on. Instead he sought to secure the loyalty of the army to his person by responding to some of the long-standing grievances of the troops: invoking the promise of better pay and pensions, raising the question of a further distribution of land to serving soldiers, and taking more severe measures against deserters and those who shirked their military duties. There was to be increased surveillance of the conduct of soldiers, too; more rapid military justice, and tighter discipline. Behind these measures was a determination to raise the morale and public image of the army, to reward bravery and inculcate a sense of honour and professionalism. It would bring its reward on the battlefield in a new surge against the Coalition powers. And of course there was a political purpose, too. ‘In cafés and on public thoroughfares,’ states Jean-Paul Bertaud, ‘the First Consul paid army veterans so that they could combat the activity of the Jacobins inside the army and act as publicists for General Bonaparte’.³³

Army officers enjoyed new influence and prestige during the Consulate, but it was not a military regime, nor yet can it be charged with militarism, since civil authorities remained firmly in charge of political decision making. The army, under the Consulate, and the Empire that followed it, was there to carry out orders and enforce policy; it was an arm of the state, and army leaders were actively discouraged from holding political views of their own. The aim was to make the army more professional and less ideologically driven than in the more radical moments of the 1790s. Government remained in the hands of politicians, not soldiers. Its legitimacy was grounded in law and one of the Consuls’ first priorities was to establish that legitimacy through a new constitution. This was quickly achieved: the constitution was short – the document consisted of ninety-five clauses where its predecessor had had nearly four hundred – and it took less than seven weeks to prepare. Gone was any reference to the rights of man, which was a constant feature of all the constitutions of the revolutionary years. The new document placed a strong emphasis on the powers of the executive at the expense of the legislative body, the objections of constitutional lawyers like Sieyès being curtly swept aside. Voting for the Legislature was to be indirect: adult males would vote for communal lists of men eligible to stand, who, in turn, would choose some of their number to sit at departmental and then at national level. This produced a list of some five to six thousand men who were eligible for election. It was a system that avoided any risk of turbulent electoral meetings and guaranteed a stable electorate.³⁴ But in practice the new legislative counted for little; its primary function was to demonstrate the legitimacy of the new regime. Power passed from the legislature to an executive of three Consuls, whom Sieyès had the honour of naming, though in reality the choice was Bonaparte’s; of the three, only the First Consul exerted real power, retaining direct control over most aspects of French foreign and domestic policy, including matters of diplomacy and war. In these tasks the First Consul was to be assisted by a Council of State. The Second and Third Consuls both had had a revolutionary past – the republican deputy Jean-Jacques Cambacérès and the moderate royalist Charles-François Lebrun – but theirs was to be a consultative role: their function was to advise, not to govern. The First Consul, of course, was Napoleon Bonaparte, who identified the institutions of the state so unequivocally with himself and his rule that the Consulate has even been described by some scholars as a step back from republicanism towards monarchical government.³⁵ Guaranteeing stability was always a more important objective than spreading democracy.

The new constitution was approved by plebiscite, a form of electoral consultation that appealed to Napoleon because it averted electoral disorder and exaggerated the appearance of popular consensus. The Consuls were eager to demonstrate the popularity of the new Constitution in order to enhance their legitimacy, and, though only one in four of those eligible chose to vote, the authorities quite openly inflated the number to demonstrate that the new order was more popular than either the Jacobin regime or the Directory. They placed great emphasis on the very small number of votes cast against the Constitution, an outcome that can occasion little surprise given that voting was not secret, and was done by individual ballot. It would have taken a brave man, or a foolhardy one, to express his opposition to the regime so openly. It was far easier to abstain, or to stay away, which they did, in their millions.³⁶ But that was not what the French people were told by their new rulers. Turnout was low: no more than about twenty per cent of the electorate endorsed the constitution, but Lucien Bonaparte published very different figures to suggest that the regime had been welcomed by six million voters. It was a lie, but a very effective one, which persuaded many Frenchmen that their government ruled with popular support. ³⁷

This would be the first sign among many that the First Consul had little interest in the niceties of democratic government. He was concerned to take effective action against perceived enemies and opponents, and proved to be contemptuous of established interest groups. He was also a staunch defender of property rights, which endeared him to men of substance, while his mastery of propaganda helped ensure that he enjoyed a good press in Paris – though here he took no chances, closing down opposition journals and limiting the number of newspapers published in the capital to only eight. (At the height of the Revolution they had been numbered in hundreds). At the same time he increased censorship, and control of the Paris book trade; and he showed little tolerance towards those who broke the law. In particular he turned the power of the state against banditry, condemning the high rates of crime and violence that characterised the French countryside and were endemic in many parts of the Midi. In the last months of the eighteenth century police patrols were stepped up, gendarmes sent into dissident villages, and military patrols established to round up brigands and army deserters. In an attempt to root out resistance in the badlands of the Rhône valley, Bonaparte gave special powers to General Férino to combine national guardsmen with units of the regular army to form ‘flying columns’ against outlaw bands. He authorised them to execute any brigands who fell into their hands, and set up a Special Military Tribunal at Avignon – one of thirty-two that were created in metropolitan France and across Belgium, Piedmont and the Rhineland³⁸ – where those arrested could be given military justice, without the benefit of a jury. Férino did not stamp out violence and banditry; and his excesses may have added to the government’s unpopularity in the lawless South-east. But his ruthless approach to the problem and his disregard for judicial procedures demonstrated the Consulate’s determination to impose order at almost any cost. In 1801 alone, extraordinary military commissions were responsible for two hundred and three death sentences, and within a few years even the most feared royalist brigands in the region had been rounded up and guillotined. Napoleon was unconcerned by the violence that this policy involved. Security and order had been restored, and these were his paramount considerations. ³⁹

Paramount, too, was the successful pursuit of a war in Italy and Germany, which the Directory had been in danger of losing and where the French armies seemed to have lost the initiative that had provided Bonaparte with his greatest triumphs in the months leading to Campo Formio. The First Consul was desperate for an emphatic victory that would re-establish his authority in Europe and allow him to appear to his own people as a man of peace. He succeeded in getting his victory when he encountered the Austrian army on the plain of the Po at Marengo, but in unusual circumstances, since it was one of the few battles where he allowed himself to be outnumbered and the enemy to attack. There is no doubting that he was lucky, and that for a time he ran a serious risk of defeat. In the end, he owed victory to the timely arrival of reinforcements and the bravery of younger generals like Desaix and Kellermann rather than to his own tactical awareness.

The Battle of Marengo cannot be seen as a triumph of battlefield manoeuvres. Nonetheless, it turned the war with Austria in France’s favour, especially since Moreau followed up with victory at Hohenlinden in southern Germany, which had the Austrians suing for peace. That peace was duly signed, first with Austria, then with Britain, in the treaties of Lunéville and Amiens, in 1801 and 1802 respectively. The battle quickly became a central element in the Napoleonic myth, one perpetuated in David’s painting of the General crossing the Alps on his white charger. But Napoleon’s own version of the Battle of Marengo remains largely fictional. David Chandler, in common with other modern historians of the battle, sees things rather differently, and claims that ‘the real attritional nature of the struggle, the fact that few plans survived the first minutes of battle, the parts played by sheer good luck and inspired subordinates in achieving victory, and, above all, the grave errors of Napoleon’s judgement – these features were carefully hidden beneath successive layers of myth’.⁴⁰

For the present, however, the First Consul had delivered the peace that so many Frenchmen craved, the longest period of peace that would be achieved in all the years up to Waterloo. In truth it was a fragile structure, leaving neither side satisfied, and it was always likely that the continent would again be plunged into war. But it did provide an important breathing space, to Napoleon as much as to his most persistent adversaries, Austria and Britain, and this allowed him to concentrate on a series of domestic reforms which, together, constituted the basis for the Napoleonic state. Policing, as we have seen, was part of it, the rooting out of lawlessness and internal dissent by a ruthless display of law enforcement. But it was only one element in a process by which Napoleon sought to turn the often rebellious citizens of the Directory into obedient and cooperative administrés, men and women who would be acquiescent in carrying out their legal obligations and fulfilling their responsibilities to the state. To this end he built on the achievements of the revolutionary years, the financial, administrative and judicial reforms that had gone before. But whereas the revolutionaries had felt bound by the principle of election, the accountability of public authorities to local people in towns, districts and departments across France, the First Consul was more concerned with efficiency and the smooth running of an administrative machine. And where the men of 1793 had often been forced to pass emergency measures to deal with short-term crises, adding new laws to traditional legal codes that they inherited from the Old Regime, Napoleon sought a more ambitious, more permanent, more rational reform of the law. The revolutionaries had not had the time or space even to dream of codifying the entire legal system, creating a common law code for all. Napoleon, on the other hand, dreamed in these terms, and he had both the personal authority and the bureaucratic means to carry it out.

Central to Bonaparte’s concept of efficiency was the idea that, as citizens, men had obligations, and that these could not be evaded. These obligations were quite separate from ideological commitment; they were the duties that the state had the right to expect all its citizens to perform, regardless of politics, and were imposed upon them accordingly. The payment of taxes, service on juries, military requisitions and conscription – above all, conscription – the state could impose of right. These impositions were the price the individual must pay for membership of the political community. Administrators, prosecutors, judges and public officials must be loyal to the state because of the nature of their office, not because they believed in the state’s precepts; in short, they were servants of the government, bureaucrats in the modern sense of the term. This change did not originate with the Consulate; the Directory had already begun to steer France in this direction and to rely on civil servants rather than on militant sans-culottes or Jacobin idealists to carry out its policies.⁴¹

Napoleon, however, took this principle further, building on what the Revolution had achieved, yet unafraid to incorporate elements of practice borrowed from the Old Regime where these seemed to serve him best. Thus he retained the principle of direct taxationwhich the revolutionaries had introduced, but supplemented it by less progressive indirect taxes of the kind that had been levied in the eighteenth century. He reformed the secondary school system to train an educated elite for the new regime, introducinglycées in major cities and centralising the curriculum through the new University of France. And he took the system of local government which the Revolution had created in 1790 – the system of departments, districts and municipalities that essentially remains intact to this day – and reformed it to make it more clearly answerable to central government.

The principle of election was played down, and the new office of prefect created to ensure that provincial governance reflected the wishes of Paris, not pressures from local people. A decree of 1800 replaced elected representatives in the departments with co-opted members, whose function was then reduced from administration to simple deliberation. Some have seen the institution of the prefect as a return to the Old Regime’s royal intendants, but the new system – where the sub-prefects were chosen locally so as to have inside knowledge of the department, whereas the prefect always came from outside, bringing the objectivity which that guaranteed – was a much more effective tool of centralisation. The institution lay at the heart of the Napoleonic system. As Nicholas Richardson writes, ‘Authoritarian and highly centralised, the prefectoral corps was a typically Napoleonic innovation: indeed, if government was to mean not only Paris but the provinces, it was the essential innovation.’⁴² Napoleon applied the prefectoral system to the sister republics created under the Directory, and in the years that followed to further territories that France came to occupy across Europe.

Administrative and judicial reforms went hand in hand as the First Consul sought to codify the rights and obligations of citizenship. Perhaps the greatest single initiative of the Consular period – and certainly the one of which Bonaparte himself was most proud – was the Civil Code, which was the principal legal reform of the Consulate, though it only came into law in March 1804. Napoleon was not the first to dream of codifying the laws of the new Republic, or of bringing some coherence to the mass of Roman and common law, constitutional law and statute law which the First Republic had amassed. As early as 1792 a commission of jurists – on which Bonaparte’s future allies, Cambacérès and Merlin de Douai, were already prominent – had been established to codify civil laws, and there had been repeated attempts, right up to Brumaire, to bring order to the legal code. Once in power, the First Consul appointed a committee of four legal luminaries to draft a comprehensive code of laws, a draft of which was produced within four months. It was stalled, however, by discussions in the Tribunate, delays which angered Bonaparte and led him to purge its membership, before the Code was finally passed into law.⁴³

Hereafter, the Code would be central to everything that Napoleon did, and would be imposed on all peoples who were integrated into his Empire. It was a substantial achievement: it confirmed property rights, announced the disappearance of the feudal aristocracy, and placed great value on the family and on the interests of the state. It also adopted the social principles of 1789, such as individual liberty, equality before the law and the secularisation of the polity. That in turn explains the immediate impact it made, both in France and beyond its frontiers. For Georges Lefebvre, it was a landmark moment; it ‘swept through Europe as the symbol of the Revolution, and heralded, wherever it was introduced, the fundamental laws of modern society’.⁴⁴

Behind the First Consul’s reforms lay a double objective – the desire to control and administer effectively, and the ambition to unify the people behind him and thus end some of the ideological splits that had dogged the revolutionary years. In 1800 rebellion broke out again in the Vendée, and his response was telling – a decisive military intervention to suppress the rising and a refusal to tolerate armed rebellion, combined with his desire to end any further threat of religious schism. He recognised that the Revolution’s attempts to curb the Catholic Church had helped to mobilise the deeply religious West against its policies and had been one of the primary causes of rebellion. This was a political, not a spiritual, decision, and the Concordat which he signed with Rome was at heart a political treaty, delivering peace with Rome while bestowing the government of the French Church on a carefully selected administrative elite of bishops and archbishops, responsible for clerical recruitment, pastoral oversight, administration, and clerical finances.⁴⁵

Bonaparte himself gave little hint of religious belief; his eternal soul was not in danger, and he could afford to regard the Church, and indeed the Papacy, as pieces on his political chessboard. But his political instincts told him that there was much to gain from reconciliation with Rome, and Pius VII appeared gratifyingly willing to make concessions to regain for the Church the richest country in Catholic Christendom. When agreement was finally announced, after eight hard months of negotiations, Pius achieved his most important aim: Catholicism was recognised as ‘the religion of the great majority of the French people’, and French Catholics could again worship freely. But the Pope paid a high price. The number of bishoprics and parishes was severely reduced, and the bishops who had embraced counter-revolution were left out in the cold while some of those who had sworn the oath to the Civil Constitution were retained. Above all, Bonaparte enjoyed the loyalty of this new clergy, a loyalty he would exploit brutally in the years ahead. Royalists were at a stroke deprived of their most powerful ideological support, while anti-clericals – still a large majority of the French population – were appeased. Besides, Napoleon could now count on support from the Papacy in those Catholic territories that France annexed or occupied.⁴⁶

In his domestic reforms Bonaparte could present himself as a moderniser, as the one man capable of giving France a new and stable polity that would deliver good laws and institutional stability at home, and earn esteem abroad. Those who had emigrated or fled from France during the Revolution were pardoned and allowed to return – on condition, of course, that they now swore loyalty to the new order; those who continued to plot and campaign for a royalist restoration could expect, and received, little mercy. Consular France was a meritocracy, where men could make their fortunes and be richly rewarded, but where the highest honours were reserved for service to the state. It was in this spirit that, in 1802, the First Consul instituted the Legion of Honour for those who had provided the most meritorious service or who had distinguished themselves in the pursuit of national objectives. The award could be made equally to civilians and soldiers, though in practice it is true that most of the first recipients were army officers, and that most of the adjudged merit took the form of military valour. To that degree it can be seen that the Légion d’Honneur built upon the earlier award of the armes de récompense to men serving in the armies of the Directory, or the armes d’honneur which the Consuls themselves established in 1800. The real difference lay in its prestige: the Legion of Honour was instantly recognised as the most important acknowledgement of merit in any field, whereas the other orders that Napoleon would create subsequently, like the Couronne de Fer, commanded far less prestige and passed into almost instant oblivion.⁴⁷ These things mattered to Bonaparte. He believed that men could be lured and inspired by such symbols of esteem, and saw them as necessary if the France of the Revolution was to be nudged towards stability and order.

There was one policy of these years, however, which marred his reputation as a moderniser and seemed to pull France back to its pre-revolutionary past. In 1801, after years of war and insurrection, the black leader and former slave Toussaint Louverture seized control in the French West Indian colony of Saint-Domingue, known today as Haiti, and promulgated a new constitution in defiance of the French. Many of the French planters on the island fled, either back to France or to the United States – Philadephia or New Orleans – or to other sugar islands in the Caribbean where they could establish new plantations, notably Cuba, where the slave economy continued to flourish across much of the nineteenth century. The question Napoleon faced was how to respond to an insurrection that threatened to destroy France’s most valuable colonial possession and to leave Britain with an unchallengeable position in the Caribbean. He planned a new trans-Atlantic strategy that would allow France to regain something of her former power in the region, and in 1802 he mounted an expedition to recapture the island for France.

He ordered a sizeable fleet and around nineteen thousand soldiers to the Caribbean, with instructions to impose French rule on the colony, using whatever force was needed, capture Toussaint and the other Haitian leaders, and to bring them back as prisoners. He also let himself be persuaded by the powerful colonial lobby that this was an opportunity to restore both slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, both of which had been abolished eight years earlier by the Convention.⁴⁸ It proved a misguided decision. His troops were decimated, both by fever and in battle against the former slaves, while the threat to restore slavery spread havoc and disorder across the French Antilles. Toussaint was duly captured and taken back to France to die, but little else was achieved. The French cause was lost on the island until, on 1 January 1804, Jacques Dessalines published a declaration of independence that abolished the French name and brought into being the world’s first black republic, Haiti.⁴⁹ In neighbouring Guadeloupe, where France didrestore order, slavery was reinstituted in 1802, but any French dream of a new conquest of Haiti was doomed to fail as Bonaparte turned his back, not just on the Caribbean but on the whole of the American hemisphere. The sale of Louisiana to the United States was the logical next step, one that not only avoided a new war in America but helped to disguise the extent of France’s failure in the sugar islands.⁵⁰ It represented, however, something of a volte-face for Napoleonic foreign policy, a quick and radical change of direction that took even the American negotiators by surprise. The sale brought France some eighty million francs and left Napoleon to focus his ambitions on the European continent.⁵¹

The years from 1799 to 1803 were critical for Napoleon. It was in those years that he laid down the broad lines of policy which he would pursue, both at home and abroad. In spite of continued royalist agitation, he entrenched his authority over domestic politics,and in 1802 another plebiscite confirmed him as First Consul for life, a change that proved one step too far for some of the more committed republicans. They were also critical years for Napoleon personally: he was reunited with Josephine and at last seemed to find some stability and fulfilment in his relationship with her. In Egypt it had seemed that his expressions of affection were unrequited and that Josephine was a free spirit who could not be reined in. But his fortunes in love changed dramatically after his return to France and his rise to political power in Paris. Josephine, who had thrown herself with such abandon into the high life of Directorial Paris, and whose affair with Hippolyte Charles had been the stuff of gossip in all the salons of the capital, now lived a more retiring – though far from chaste – existence. She was deeply in debt, however, in part due to the three hundred and twenty-five thousand francs she had lavished on the château of Malmaison, near Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a debt she tried desperately to hide from her husband. But at least she seemed pleased to see him, was at his side during the events of Brumaire, and showed suitable alarm at the supposed attempt on his life at the time of the coup, an event, in the very chamber of the legislature, which was probably invented, like other attempts on deputies’ lives in the years since Robespierre’s fall.⁵² They were apart again, of course, during Napoleon’s enforced absence with the army; but after Marengo, when he returned to Paris they lived in apparent harmony, first in the Luxembourg palace, then at Malmaison.

Napoleon’s secretary, Bourrienne, paints an idyllic picture of this period of his master’s life, lived in tasteful surroundings, with a wife with whom he was clearly deeply in love. He lavished attention on the chateau, buying art works and ordering rare plants to pander to Josephine’s tastes. He even bought around five thousand acres of surrounding farmland and improved the estate. ‘Except on the field of battle’, wrote Bourrienne, ‘I never saw Bonaparte as happy as he was at Malmaison.’⁵³ Of course, it would not last. As Josephine became aware of her infertility and realised that this must put the future of their marriage at risk, she began suffering deep attacks of depression. For Napoleon this was an enchanted period in time, but those close to him realised that even as he cavorted with his family on the lawns, the storm clouds were already gathering.