7

From Consulate to Empire

Though much of Napoleon’s reforming agenda as First Consul had its roots in the French Revolution, with his administrative and judicial reforms extending and codifying laws passed during the previous decade, his conception of personal liberty was strictly circumscribed. Throughout the Consulate his concern to protect the authority and the interests of the state was maintained, and there was an unmistakably authoritarian streak in his approach to government and in his response to any hint of opposition. The First Consul might speak the language of a republican; but when he found himself challenged he frequently betrayed the instincts of a dictator, silencing opponents and concentrating power on the small body of men whom he felt he could trust. He had little patience with libertarian notions, even those expressed by his friends and allies; and if the Consulate was a period marked by important measures of judicial, educational and religious reform, it would also be remembered as a regime that drastically eroded the civil liberties which had been granted in 1789 by the National Assembly.

The behaviour of the First Consul and his collaborators contributed significantly to that erosion in censoring the print media, extending the powers of the police, and making liberal use of preventive detention to contain opponents of the regime.¹ These measures made a mockery of their claims to act as defenders of ‘public liberty’, and help to explain the increasingly frequent portrayal of Bonaparte in Britain and other European countries as a usurper and a tyrant. They must also cast doubt on his claims to be a republican who was carrying forward the legacy of the French Revolution. British writers emphasised his supposed excesses of cruelty, citing his behaviour at Jaffa where he allegedly ordered the poisoning of his own plague-ridden troops to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.² He was routinely compared to Cromwell, to William the Conqueror, or to those ‘great bad men’ of Antiquity, Alexander and Caesar. The sheer difficulty they found in placing Napoleon in any single political category left pamphleteers searching for exotic ways to explain his contradictions. In a pamphlet of 1802 he was intermittently described as a ‘monster’; while for the Morning Post in 1803 he was simply ‘an unclassifiable being’, slippery, elusive and enigmatic.³

He certainly loved power, and showed little taste for delegating it to others. He had no patience with long, drawn-out discussions, or with debating the merits of individual measures or heeding the oscillations of public opinion. The Tribunate attracted particular scorn as a time-wasting talking shop, and Napoleon’s contempt was increased by the inclusion in its membership of a number of former Jacobins who were ready to defend the legislative gains of the Revolution.⁴ In place of the legislators, he turned to a small circle of trusted counsellors in whose hands he concentrated wealth and power, and who became loyal spokesmen for his policies. Several of those who would become the most powerful political figures of the Empire emerged to prominence under the Consulate, provingtheir usefulness to Bonaparte and helping maintain some pretence of pluralism in the decision-making process. They also symbolised the continuities that bound the Consulate to the revolution that preceded it, since, almost by definition, those who rose to a position of power in 1800 had served in one or other of the revolutionary administrations. Napoleon would appear to have cared little about their past affiliations as long as they offered him unswerving loyalty and brought their legal and administrative skills to the service of his regime. And there was plenty of talent to be tapped. The generation that had governed France under the Revolution was both highly talented and more mature; and individual careers, like his own, reflected the sudden explosion of opportunity that had come in 1789.

Three examples will suffice to indicate the range of their experience. Napoleon’s right-hand man, Cambacérès, was chosen for his undoubted qualities as a cautious and punctilious administrator. A lawyer from Montpellier, he had been elected to the National Convention in 1792 and went on to support each successive phase of the Revolution as a highly competent member of committees and a moderate but loyal republican. Cambacérès first supported the Girondin administration, then, when the Girondins were overthrown, he accepted their downfall and the Jacobin seizure of power.⁵ Talleyrand, who had charge of foreign affairs, was far less transparent. A nephew of the Archbishop of Reims, he had spent the months of the Jacobin Terror in exile in London, returning after Robespierre’s fall to take over the foreign ministry in 1797. It was in this capacity that he had first met General Bonaparte, with whom he corresponded at length in Italy and whose career he had helped to advance; he was among the conspirators at Brumaire,and Bonaparte rewarded him richly.⁶ Talleyrand could certainly not have been more different from the staunchly Jacobin Joseph Fouché, to whom Bonaparte entrusted overall control of policing. Fouché had enjoyed a reputation for being a ferocious terrorist, both in the Convention and on mission to Lyon in 1793, but had then helped to overthrow Robespierre and had been Minister of Police under the Directory. As a former Oratorian, educated for the priesthood, he reserved a particular dislike for the Catholic hierarchy and was happy to help the First Consul forge a largely secular state.

Looking back on a long career, the future Duke of Otranto displayed no humility in listing his many achievements. During the Revolution, he would remind readers of his memoirs, he had been ‘solely indebted for the honours and power with which he was invested, and, in short, for his distinguished fortune, to his own prudence and abilities’. Under Bonaparte, Fouché would go on to enjoy a dazzling political career as ‘an ambassador, three times a minister, a senator, a duke, and one of the principal directors of state affairs’.⁷ He was among the few in the inner circle who counselled caution at key moments, attempting to dissuade Napoleon from getting too deeply involved in Spain in 1808, from further antagonising the British in 1810, or from launching his expedition against Russia in 1812.⁸ He commanded respect for his political wisdom, but he was an opportunist who did not invite trust. Napoleon knew what he was doing in investing authority in Fouché: he was a man whose pride he could exploit for his own ends.

It is instructive to linger on Joseph Fouché, not because he brought a sinister or vengeful style to politics – he appears to have been suave and urbane, and to have led a blameless private life as a good family man with his wife and four children in an apartment on the rue du Bac⁹ – but rather because of the crucial role he gave to policing in Napoleonic France. He extended the manpower at the disposal of the police, especially in Paris, and supplemented them with a network of secret agents, informers and police spies who kept him informed at the first sign of disaffection or public disorder. They were drawn from across society: men of wealth and substance – when these could be induced to inform – but also a variety of people of humble stock: pedlars and hairdressers, valets and servants, bartenders and prostitutes, on whom police pressure could be brought to bear.¹⁰ Fouché’s methods earned him notoriety in the eyes of liberals and defenders of the rights of individual citizens. His spies were given official status within the police force, and from being, initially, private policemen paid for out of special funds, they were subsequently given the rank of inspector and paid by the state or by the city authority. They were authorised to shadow suspects, open private mail, and collect witness statements from passers-by; in short, they collected information on those they pursued, passing it to the ministry to be entered in the systematic and detailed filing system which Fouché constructed. These files were not just on criminals and insurgents, but on spies and ministers, radicals and royalists, army officers, state officials, even, it was alleged, on Napoleon himself.¹¹

It is unsurprising that Fouché made so many enemies, not least among rivals for power like Cambacérès and members of the Bonaparte clan, who, with the sole exception of Josephine, regarded him with a certain revulsion; his relations with Lucien Bonaparte, who as Minister of the Interior ran his own spy network, were especially strained.¹² But Napoleon’s repressive apparatus did not stop with the police. The Consulate was also the period when he made greatest use of military courts and special tribunals in a bid to crush brigandage and impose summary justice without recourse to a jury. In 1801 special tribunals were created in twenty-seven departments, largely in the badlands of the South and the West; another nine came to be added over the following two years, until they covered more than a third of the country.¹³

Napoleon’s measures to control the population and curb opposition did not pass without criticism and he needed to justify them – not least to the political class. He was conscious of the dangers of political insurrection, of the possibility of a renewed outbreak of royalist intrigue in the West, of neo-Jacobin intrigues in the capital. Recent attempted coups – Fructidor, even Brumaire itself – showed how vulnerable the government could still be to factional plots and undercover manoeuvres. But it was difficult to justify what many saw as repressive laws on the basis of mere speculation. Then, quite dramatically, the First Consul was himself the victim of an act of terrorism that killed at least eight people and injured over twenty when a huge bomb exploded after his carriage passed along the Rue Saint-Nicaise in Paris on Christmas Eve, 1800. Bonaparte was travelling to the Opera, his coach escorted by a company of mounted troops, when his way was partly blocked by a seed-merchant’s cart. The coachman did not hesitate, but continued at his usual gallop around the obstruction, a decision which almost certainly saved the First Consul’s life and rescued the Consulate from constitutional crisis. Napoleon impressed those around him by pretending that all was calm and going ahead to the performance. But there was no denying the seriousness of what had happened. The regime was confronted by a breakdown in security and the possibility that it might now face a series of assassination attempts.

The ‘infernal machine’ inspired the government to unleash a new wave of repressive measures as Napoleon turned his anger against the neo-Jacobins, ordering the closure of their remaining clubs and pressing for their prosecution. Fouché’s position, too, was undermined, both because he had failed to unearth the plot in time and on account of his own Jacobin connections. In the event, patient police work and Fouché’s files would exonerate the Jacobins and the Left from any responsibility in the bombing, which was the work of embittered royalists. The perpetrators were duly tried and executed. But the consequence of the ‘infernal machine’ was far more deep-seated. It allowed the First Consul to justify new measures to protect public order, including a full-frontal assault on the remaining neoJacobin activists who, though they had committed no crime under the Consulate, were deemed to constitute a future threat to the regime. One hundred and thirty of them were arrested and deported without trial in an unprecedented show of police power.¹⁴

The affair of the Rue Saint-Nicaise was ultimately remembered more for its legacy than for the damage it did at the time. It demonstrated that the First Consul did not hesitate to turn the law against those he perceived as his opponents, just as he was prepared to ride roughshod over legal niceties when it suited him to do so. The failed assassination attempt merely provided him with the justification he needed. It also played to his authoritarian nature, since the deportation decree was an act of absolute power – and an undisguised abuse of that power – that was clear to all. It also had more far-reaching implications for society at large, contributing to a more authoritarian atmosphere in the Tribunate and the Council of State, where it discouraged open discussion and silenced criticism of the regime. Perhaps because his victims were Jacobins, associated in the public eye with the blood-letting of the Terror, their victimisation may have caused less of an outcry abroad. But it was a significant moment in Bonaparte’s political evolution, the first time that he had acted in defiance of the law, and an act of vengeful spite against those who had dared to challenge his authority. The timid response of the deputies only proved to him that he had got away with it, a lesson which he was not slow to take to heart. The Consulate became more and more personalised, ‘a democracy’, in the words of one of its champions, Cabanis, ‘purged of all its disadvantages’.¹⁵

Other plots followed. After the uncloaking of the royalists responsible for the Christmas Eve bomb, Fouché and the new Prefect of Police for Paris, Louis Dubois, concentrated their investigations on right-wing groups, royalists, Breton rebels (chouans), and others whose aim was to destroy the republican regime and restore the monarchy. There were, as always, constant rumours of conspiracy, the majority of them said to be planned from London or funded by the British government’s lavish secret service funds. These had been used throughout the revolutionary period to finance military and diplomatic missions against France, including the ill-fated expedition to Quiberon under the Directory. During the truce following Amiens, Henry Addington had sought to extend the secret service campaign, stirring up royalist discontent and offering succour to any dissident generals who could be persuaded to topple Bonaparte’s government from the inside.¹⁶ The most threatening outcome was the so-called ‘Grand Conspiracy’ of 1803, in which the King’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, was complicit, and which Britain financed to the tune of around a million francs. The Royal Navy also smuggled the conspiracy’s leaders, the dissident General Pichegru and the royalist Georges Cadoudal, across the English Channel to the French coast.

But at that point the conspiracy lost momentum. Following the bomb attack on Napoleon’s life, the French police were active in hunting down chouans, a number of whom were arrested in Paris in October 1803. They were hauled before a military commission and sentenced to death, but one of them, to save his skin, made a confession that implicated Cadoudal, with whom, he said, he had landed from a British ship at Dieppe five months earlier. The net was closing, especially once the police were given further names, among them those of two French generals, Moreau as well as Pichegru. The conspiracy, it seemed, was gaining force by the day, and it was only the sharp wits of the Paris police and the willingness of others to inform on their leaders that came to Bonaparte’s aid. He showed little mercy to those who were found guilty. Moreau, who denied any involvement, may have escaped with a two-year sentence, but he was the exception. Georges Cadoudal, Armand de Polignac, the Marquis de Rivière, with seventeen of their accomplices and several other conspirators, were sentenced to death. As for Pichegru, he was found dead in his cell, the victim, in the words of the police report, of ‘self-inflicted strangulation’, no doubt his way of escaping the clutches of the executioner.¹⁷

In demanding the punishment of the conspirators, Napoleon was unyielding, but it could be argued that he was not unjust: they had plotted his overthrow and conspired with a hostile power, so that their sentences did not seem incommensurate. During his interrogation, Cadoudal had not concealed the purpose of the conspiracy: he made it clear that he had planned to use force against Napoleon, adding that his ambition was ‘to put a Bourbon in place of the First Consul’, and identifying the Bourbon in question as ‘Louis, Xavier Stanislas, formerly known as Monsieur, recognised by us as Louis XVIII’.¹⁸ There could be no ambiguity, but the exposure of the conspiracy and the seriousness of the royalist threat raised further questions to which the First Consul demanded answers. Cadoudal had indicated to the police that he had been alone in Paris, lying low until it was time to attack, since ‘I was only to attack the First Consul once a French prince had arrived in Paris, and he is not yet there.’ But who was this mysterious ‘prince’? It was a question that consumed Bonaparte, as it did his investigators.

The Duc d’Artois himself was ruled out because he was in exile in England; and suspicion fell on the young Duc d’Enghien, the son of the Prince de Condé who had commanded the émigré army. There was little evidence to support the charge that d’Enghien was an active conspirator – little more, indeed, than vague statements of admiration from a number of condemned rebels and known royalists. One of the final acts of the Consulate, and among its least honourable, was to arrange for him to be kidnapped from Ettenheim, in the neutral territory of the Duchy of Baden, and brought back to France to face trumped-up charges of conspiracy and treason. There was no evidence that he had had any role in the conspiracies of the previous year; but he was an emblematic figure for the counter-revolution, a Bourbon-Condé on his father’s side, descended from Louis XIV’s greatest field commander, and on his mother’s from Philippe d’Orléans, who had served as regent during Louis XV’s minority. Among the Duke’s direct ancestors he could count Henri IV, and news of his birth in 1772 had been announced immediately to the King at Versailles.¹⁹ The condemnation of this man was widely seen across Europe as an act of blatant injustice, devised to show the world that even the most powerful family connections now counted for nothing.

From the very beginning, the First Consul took a personal interest in the affair, reading countless despatches and sending detailed instructions about the measures to be taken. To Réal, whom he charged with the investigation of the Pichegru conspiracy, he even listed the questions which he wanted the investigators to put to their prisoner. All pointed to his involvement in treasonable activity. He was to be asked whether he had borne arms against his country; if he was in receipt of payment from the English; if he knew of payments by the English to émigrés camped along the Rhine; and whether he had proposed to raise a legion of troops by encouraging desertion among the soldiers of the Republic. There were other questions, too, in Bonaparte’s catechism, about the letters the Duke had sent and received, and about his contacts with known conspirators, all suggestive of his involvement in a conspiracy against the regime.²⁰ Bonaparte knew his man: for the Duke was notoriously impolitic, consigning too many of his thoughts to paper, dreaming of seizing Alsace and invading France from the east. He was known abroad, too, and some of his correspondence had even been quoted in the British press.²¹ Finding evidence of his counter-revolutionary sentiments, or of the awe in which he was held in royalist circles, would not be difficult, and by the time he appeared before a hastily assembled military commission, d’Enghien was already doomed.

The young prince was executed by firing squad at the military fortress of Vincennes, to the east of Paris, and almost immediately he was immortalised in romantic legend. For Chateaubriand the execution did not only offer proof of Napoleon’s cruelty, or of his despotic nature. It spread a glacial fear, he wrote in Mémoires d’outretombe, fear of a return to the reign of Robespierre. ‘Paris thought it was seeing again one of those days that only happen once, the day of Louis XVI’s execution’.²² Napoleon, of course, saw things differently. On Saint Helena he would justify his decision on the basis of national emergency and natural law, and would try to blame those who had plotted his assassination for what he seemed to admit was an act of vengeance. ‘A great nation had placed me at its head,’ he explained. ‘Almost all of Europe had accepted this choice; my blood, after all, was not made of mud; it was time to show that it was the equal of theirs.’²³

Napoleon’s critics argued that the d’Enghien affair was not just a momentary aberration, but proof of the degradation of public accountability during the Consulate, the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of one man. Indeed, there is ample evidence that the character of the regime had changed since the days after Brumaire, with the First Consul becoming less answerable to the public, and the checks and balances of Sieyès’ original constitution less respected. The state might still be republican in form, but the move to personal power was unmistakable. From the very beginning some had harboured doubts about the Consulate, perceiving its potential to turn into a dictatorship; and the replacement of the original candidates for Second and Third Consul with Caulain-court and Lebrun, known moderates and men favourable to Napoleon, confirmed the suspicion that the only voice that really counted was Bonaparte’s. Besides, the constitution gave him unprecedented authority: he was authorised to appoint the members of the legislative bodies as well as government ministers, ambassadors, and army and naval officers.²⁴ Thibaudeau, one of the most astute of his critics, recognised how far this was an assault on the principle of representative government. Since the coup of 18 Brumaire, he wrote in a note to the First Consul, ‘things have come to the point where no free constitution is possible unless you specifically want it.’ And if Napoleon were to disappear from the scene, what would remain of the brave new world they had built? ‘Nothing’, he replied. ‘Nothing of the Revolution, of liberty, of the glory of the nation, of your own glory, nothing other than bitter memories and lacerations.’²⁵

Because executive authority was strong and political factionalism discouraged, the First Consul could leave Paris with relative equanimity when he went on campaign. But he clearly still wanted more recognition, more stability, more power; and in 1802, following his military triumphs and the signing of peace, the moment seemed ripe for some expression of the nation’s gratitude. What followed is deeply instructive about Napoleon’s political ambition. The Senate, eager to please him and anxious not to lose his services, voted to extend his term of office by a further ten years, which would have kept him in office till 1820. But this did not suffice; some suggest that the First Consul even found the offer insulting. What is certain is that Cambacérès, doubtless reading Napoleon’s wishes, persuaded the Senate to withdraw its offer and, instead, to put to the people in a plebiscite the proposition that Bonaparte be made First Consul for life, the reward which he really sought. Obediently they did so, and obediently – and publicly, for there was nothing secret about the ballot – the electorate voted. The result, Cambacérès reported, was a resounding triumph. Of the 3,577,259 Frenchmen who cast their vote, 3,568,885 voted for the life consulate.

For good measure, the Senate added expressions of affection and deference. In proclaiming Napoleon Bonaparte First Consul for life, they declared that they wished to express ‘the confidence, love and admiration of the French people’; and, without any apparent sense of irony, decreed that ‘a statue of peace, holding in one hand the laurels of victory, in the other the Senate’s decree, will bear witness to posterity of the gratitude of the Nation’.²⁶ But we need not be deceived. Voting in plebiscites during the Consulate and the Empire was conducted in public, and fear played its part in harvesting votes for the regime. Soldiers’ votes also helped to boost the appearance of enthusiasm for Napoleon, while lists of voters were drawn up by prefects and sub-prefects, conscious of the need to produce figures that sustained his authority. Recent research has demonstrated that the figures were systematically manipulated, that the declared result of the plebiscite on the Constitution of the Year VIII was simply wrong, and that in some departments polling was kept open for additional days until enough people had been dragooned into voting.²⁷

There were other changes, too, in the new constitution of Year X, all reinforcing Napoleon’s executive authority: the number of deputies in the Tribunate was cut and its freedom of action reduced; and the First Consul could now sign treaties without legislative ratification and exercise the prerogative of mercy. Most controversially of all, he was given the right to name his successor and thus, potentially, to found a dynasty – though, at this stage, the law did not rule the post hereditary.²⁸ For many republicans, however, this was a step too far, a step that unmistakably pointed in the direction of monarchy and represented a betrayal of the values they had fought for throughout the previous decade. Thibaudeau, in his note for the First Consul, stated tersely that the executive appeared to be arming itself at the expense of public liberties. ‘The word stability is the order of the day; I am astonished that it is not replaced by eternity.’²⁹

Napoleon paid little heed to such fears, accepting the new powers conferred on him and offering his thanks to the senators. The language of his reply on 3 August 1802 is gracious, and seemingly consistent with the ideal of the Republic. ‘The life of a citizen’, he began, ‘belongs to his country. The French people wish that mine be entirely devoted to it. I obey its will. In giving me a new pledge, a permanent pledge of its confidence, it imposes on me the duty of consolidating its system of laws on well-founded institutions. By my efforts and your cooperation, Citizen Senators, and with the assistance of all the authorities, with the confidence and will of this immense people, the liberty, equality and prosperity of France will be sheltered from the caprice of fate and the uncertainty of the future’.³⁰ There was little in his words to frighten his listeners, or imply monarchical ambitions.

There was, though, more than a suggestion of the regal about these new powers, whatever the language in which they were couched. The boy from Ajaccio had already taken a large step towards the throne, and contemporaries noted that the First Consul surrounded himself with much of the panoply of a monarch. There is little doubt that he enjoyed the pomp and luxury of office. His taste for lavish display had first aroused comment during the Italian campaign, when he sometimes seemed to act less like a republican general than a ruler in his own right, insisting on an elaborate etiquette that was redolent of court ceremonial. When he stayed at the Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan, the poet Antoine Arnault compared his drawing room to the foyer of the Paris Opera, and observed that ‘never did a military headquarters look more like a court’.³¹ At the castle of Mombello in 1797, Miot de Melito observed that he held court like a king, received diplomats and ambassadors like a king, and even dined in public like a king, drawing an adoring gaze to his person. As a consequence, remarks Philip Dwyer, ‘Italians who came to catch a glimpse of the conqueror of Italy were allowed into the galleries to watch while he ate in a remarkable public display of the self reminiscent of Louis XIV’s performances at Versailles’.³² This taste for display and his concern for the niceties of etiquette continued to mark his public appearances – his excursions in to Paris, his presence at lavish dinners at the Tuileries – during the Consulate. The household, whether at Josephine’s palace at Malmaison, or at Saint-Cloud, where the Consulate had been inaugurated, was increasingly likened to a pre-revolutionary royal court.³³

Rather in the manner of a monarch, Bonaparte showed a consistent concern to further the interests of his family and, even as First Consul, appeared to give thought to hereditary succession. His family remained important to him – not just the nuclear family that might one day produce an heir, but also the wider Bonaparte clan, while his mother, Letizia, was still frequently consulted by her son. The older brothers, Joseph and Lucien, had been among his supporters at Brumaire, and they continued to play a significant part in the politics of the Consulate. Joseph had been named Commissioner of War for the Army of Italy, a highly lucrative post that enabled him to accrue a substantial fortune and establish valuable literary and artistic contacts which he put at the service of the regime. Lucien, whose relations with Napoleon were always uncertain, was briefly rewarded for his loyalty with the post of Minister of the Interior, but after a row with his brother he found himself dismissed from his position and despatched as ambassador to Madrid.³⁴Nor did Lucien ingratiate himself with Napoleon when in 1800 he authorised the publication of Louis de Fontanes’ heavily ambiguous pamphlet offering what he termed a Parallel between Caesar, Cromwell, Monk and Bonaparte, a comparison repudiated by the First Consul in spite of Fontanes’ conclusion that, of the four, only he could be classed a true hero.³⁵

The comparison itself was, in many people’s eyes, a damning one, since to most Frenchmen Cromwell was a tyrant and usurper, and not the guarantor of English liberties,³⁶ and Napoleon viewed the publication with distaste, seeing it as further evidence of Lucien’s unreliability. Lucien did not seem unduly perturbed, and made it clear that while he was happy to work with his brother in government, he baulked at serving under him. It is doubtless not without significance that under the Empire three of Napoleon’s four brothers would be rewarded with kingdoms to rule (Joseph in Naples, Louis in Holland, and Jerome in Westphalia); only Lucien was given nothing. Napoleon was only too ready to berate him for what he deemed to be frivolity, a lack of the seriousness that his membership of the Consular first family demanded. Increasingly, he saw such failings as a reflection upon – if not a direct insult to – his own standing in the eyes of the nation.

The promotion of his brothers to positions of authority in the state, and later to the status of kings in their own right, was a flagrant instance of nepotism which demonstrated just how far he was prepared to go to further the interests of his family. But that does not mean that his brothers were without talent, or ill-suited to the high offices bestowed upon them. The problem did not lie in their reluctance to accept responsibility, nor yet in their abilities as rulers. Joseph made a decent job of two well-nigh impossible missions in Naples and Spain, while Louis could claim the remarkable achievement, for an outsider imposed on the Dutch people against their will, of protecting their interests, at times in defiance of the instructions he received from Paris. Rather, the problem lay with Napoleon, who wanted to control them, to manage their governance, and to impose policies and economic obligations on them that would almost certainly have led to their rejection by the nations they ruled. It was soon clear that Napoleon expected his brothers to reward him with their undivided loyalty. But, like Lucien, they soon followed their own instincts. They were not prepared to be mere puppets of the Emperor.

Louis turned out to have quite a talent for kingship, despite the fact that the timing and circumstances of his appointment as King of Holland did nothing to endear him to the Dutch. In the four years he was allowed to remain on the throne – before Napoleon had him removed in 1810, angry that Louis had done nothing to stop the widespread smuggling that was letting British goods enter the continent – he established a reputation as a conciliator, doing what he could to stamp out political factionalism and demonstrate that he was prepared to stand up for Dutch interests. He did not completely succeed, of course: Holland remained at peace during these years, and there were no national crusades that would have allowed him to emerge as a Dutch national hero and thus win the affection of the people. In any case, the Dutch were not accustomed to being ruled by kings, not kings with real powers and authority. But it would be harsh to adjudge his reign a total failure, since it took place against the backdrop of a much larger, pan-European war, conditions that made it impossible for him to oppose his brother’s wishes. Domestically he had real achievements to his credit. He simplified the polity, improved educational provision, strengthened and modernised the state. These were significant steps in a country where power was largely decentralised and decisions left to provinces and to commercial elites. Of course people grumbled, but if there was some popular resistance to taxes and conscription during his reign, there was no general insurrection. And the Dutch in the nineteenth century looked back on Louis’ reign without a lasting sense of grievance.³⁷

Joseph, whose gentle nature and genuine commitment to many of the ideals of the Revolution irritated the First Consul – he confessed to hating the war and seeking happiness in nature – found himself continually at loggerheads with his bellicose brother, for whom the major role of a king was to extract men and money for the French war effort.³⁸ Their differences became clear in 1802, when Napoleon had offered to place Joseph at the head of the newly created Cisalpine Republic. It was true, Joseph is quoted as saying, that he had been offered the post, ‘but at the same time he wanted to chain me to it, and – knowing my brother as perfectly as I do, knowing how heavily his yoke can weigh one down – I felt, as a man who has always preferred the obscurity of private life to the role of a political puppet, obliged to turn it down. I asked him, though, to tell me what his conditions would be had I accepted . . . I insisted that Piedmont be reunited to the Italian republic, that I be given freedom to reestablish the principal fortresses, and that he withdraw French troops from the territory, and especially General Murat’.³⁹ Joseph might be mild-mannered, but he was not spineless.

This personalisation of politics lies at the root of the move away from republican traditions and towards the declaration of the Empire in 1804. Linked to it was Napoleon’s desire for an heir, his insistence that the regime be perpetuated, and his frustration, which he made little attempt to conceal, that Josephine had not succeeded in bearing him a son. The decree granting him the Life Consulate was clearly a turning point, with the months that followed marked by a discernible emasculation of the republican symbolism and public ceremonial on which the Directory had been so insistent. Instead, public festivals became more martial in tone, celebrating victories in battle and the return of triumphant armies from war, rather than the rights of citizens or the fall of the Bastille. Cambacérès observed the alarm expressed by a number of prefects who were convinced that even the National Day of 14 July might be sacrificed, and republican opinion outraged.⁴⁰ The list of festivals celebrated in one provincial city, Nantes, gives substance to these fears. The republican themes appear to have been deliberately played down in favour of the military and the person of Bonaparte. In 1801 there were public celebrations of the proclamation of peace, both on land and at sea; in 1802 a festival to celebrate the elevation of Napoleon to the Life Consulate; in 1804 festivities to mark the uncovering of the conspiracy against his life.⁴¹ The emphasis on his victories and his person was redolent of the expressions of thanksgiving that were routinely authorised by the Bourbon monarchy, or even the public celebrations that had been part of the sustained campaign more than a century earlier to establish the authority of Louis XIV.⁴²

The Senate took steps to encourage the move to a hereditary system, sending the First Consul loyal addresses and urging him to complete his political project. Some of the senators held monarchist views, and many were advocates of a conservative social order which lent itself easily to the hereditary principle. Among them, too, were men who had seen service under the Directory; Talleyrand belonged to this persuasion; so, vociferously, did Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, who announced with satisfaction that ‘The Senate has presented an address to the First Consul, finishing with the request for a high court for the nation and for institutions that could consolidate his work, so that, having repaired the damage from the past, he might now guarantee the future.’⁴³ Those pushing for change included some of his most trusted advisers, and not all of them can be dismissed as toadying sycophants.

If Bonaparte harboured personal ambitions to be a dynastic ruler, he was given plenty of encouragement by those around him, and by the winter of 1803–04 the moment seemed ripe. The truce in the war had allowed him to regroup, his army was preparing to attack Britain, and the plots against his person had been destroyed. Within France he appeared to enjoy unparalleled popularity. The only question must be whether he did indeed harbour these ambitions: whether his coronation as emperor was carefully planned in advance. The answer must surely be yes. The obsessive detail of his political interventions, the increasingly authoritarian nature of the regime, the diminution of the powers left to elected deputies, the apparent contempt for public opinion and the vote of the life consulate: all contribute to a coherent picture of a man who, impatient with the niceties of constitutional government, was moving perceptibly to a more personal, more monarchical style of rule. Bonaparte consistently denied this, of course, and even in exile he continued to maintain that he had been following no clear plan and had no ambitions to overthrow the Republic. ‘During the Consulate’, he insisted on Saint Helena, ‘my true friends and most enthusiastic champions would ask me, with the best of intentions and for their own guidance, where I was heading. I always answered that I had not the least idea.’⁴⁴ The fact that he argued in this way does not, of course, mean that it was true.

The imperial constitution was established in May 1804, apparently in response to popular demand from around the country. In the Tribunate, speaker after speaker hailed the ‘hero’ Bonaparte and cited empire as a device to secure his power rather than as a betrayal of the Republic. Indeed, even as they conferred the imperial title on Napoleon, they seemed illogically loath to let go of their republican identity. ‘The government of the Republic,’ asserted the rather confused words of the law, ‘is entrusted to an emperor, who takes the title “Emperor of the French”.’ The creation of the Empire was entirely personal, a seamless transference of authority that was a reward to one man: ‘Napoleon Bonaparte, currently First Consul of the Republic, has become Emperor of the French.’ And unlike the Life Consulate, the imperial title was hereditary, rather as the thrones of kings were hereditary.

The second clause of the decree established dynastic succession: ‘The imperial dignity is hereditary in the direct, natural, legitimate lineage of Napoleon Bonaparte, from male to male, by order of primogeniture.’⁴⁵ In fact, for as long as he himself remained childless, his natural heirs were his brothers, though one by one he disinherited them for their waywardness, their unsuitable marriages, or their disobedience, till the decree named ‘Louis Bonaparte and his descendants’ as successors to ‘the imperial dignity’. To Louis’ dismay it then clouded the issue by leaving open another option, that Napoleon might choose his successor by adoption. ‘Napoleon Bonaparte may adopt the sons or grandsons of his brothers, providing that they have reached the age of eighteen years and that he himself has no male children of his own at the time of adoption.’⁴⁶ The law was supple enough to be adapted to Napoleon’s whims and preferences.

Surprisingly, the promise of a Bonaparte dynasty caused less trouble with the electorate than it did inside the family. Men who had previously declared their loyalty to the Republic swallowed this contradiction with apparent ease. Only Carnot, the former Jacobin who, as War Minster, had delivered the victories of 1793 and 1794, had the courage to speak out against the measure and decry the Empire as a betrayal of republican principles. As Thierry Lentz notes, the new constitution was verbally sanitised. There is no hint that sovereignty rests in the French people, a phrase that had become something of a mantra for the revolutionaries; and any words with a strongly republican connotation, like ‘nation’ and ‘people’, are no longer part of the lexicon.⁴⁷ The imperial title and the principle of heredity were put to the people in a plebiscite in June. However, as we have already noted, since votes were open and Napoleon controlled both the police and the media, it would be rash to think of this as a meaningful form of public consultation. The result confirmed this impression, with only 2569 voters recording their opposition. The Republic was allowed to die with barely a whimper.

The coronation ceremony that followed in December in Notre-Dame was lavish and sumptuous, heavy with the symbolism of state authority and personal power. It had many of the trappings of a royal coronation except that, unlike the Bourbons who were traditionally crowned in Reims, Napoleon chose Paris, at the heart of the nation. He was quite prepared to break with tradition here, for it was not to the Bourbons that he looked for precedent but further back in time, to Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, a thread of continuity which he saw as a source of legitimacy.

The décor was solemn, and the costumes of the Emperor and Empress suitably lavish.⁴⁸ Their robes were designed to recall the antique splendour of imperial Rome as well as to produce a sense of awe among onlookers. Napoleon was attired in the imperial mantle of crimson velvet, lavishly decorated with the golden bees that were his insignia; while Josephine wore a heavily embroidered robe in matching colours, its train carried by five imperial princesses, including Josephine’s daughter and Napoleon’s three sisters.⁴⁹ The procession entered Notre-Dame through a temporary portico, specially enlarged for the occasion and constructed in wood, cardboard and stucco in a neo-Gothic style to complement the cathedral’s architecture and conceal damage done to the building during the anti-clerical excesses of the Revolution.⁵⁰ In Marshal Marmont’s words, it was impossible to conceive of any scene ‘more majestic or more imposing’. Nothing, he claimed, was lacking from the ceremony. ‘The glory of arms, the triumph of civilisation, and the interest of humanity, all contributed to its magnificence and its adornment.’⁵¹

Following the Concordat, the Catholic Church, too, was present in all its pomp, to give its blessing to the Emperor. The fact that the Pope himself attended made a deep impression on onlookers, since it was a rare honour for a pope to attend a coronation, still less to travel out of the Vatican to do so. Charlemagne himself had had to go to Rome in 800 to be crowned; yet here, before their eyes, was Pius VII, passing through Paris at the head of a cortège of carriages glowing with the bright clerical robes of archbishops and cardinals – a sight many had believed unthinkable during the anti-clerical fervour of the Revolution.⁵²

The Pontiff’s presence was a diplomatic triumph for Napoleon, the result of months of hard negotiation and, at times, brutal threats. It was a moment heavy with symbolic power, its political message carefully tailored to its intended audiences. Internally, it was conceived of as a gesture of reconciliation. For France’s millions of Catholics, and for the rebel departments of the west, it demonstrated papal approval for the new regime and conferred the blessing of the Church on the person of the Emperor. For foreign rulers, especially those of Catholic Europe, it was calculated to offer a degree of legitimacy to a regime that remained, in their eyes, founded on a regicide. But it did not convey any spirit of submission or allegiance. Just as the Concordat had been a political agreement, drawn up between two unequal partners, in which the state’s interest was paramount, so the coronation ceremony was a symbolic affirmation that power was now Napoleon’s. Famously, he did not allow the Pope to place the crown on his head; the Church’s role in the ceremony was restricted to that of blessing the Imperial couple. Napoleon refused both Confession and Holy Communion for himself, and kept Pius waiting for a whole hour in the church before he and Josephine arrived for the ceremony. Nor did he kneel before the altar in Notre-Dame. That would have implied acceptance of the authority of the Church, which he had no wish to acknowledge.⁵³

Throughout Pius’ extended stay in Paris – he did not leave his assigned quarters at the Tuileries until April 1805 – Napoleon treated his guest with a studied lack of respect, constantly reminding him that he, not the Papacy, now commanded temporal authority, and that temporal power always took precedence. In truth, Pius managed to extract few concessions from his host on the matters which he considered important, most notably the continued employment of ex-constitutional bishops and revolutionary laws on secular marriage and divorce.⁵⁴ Napoleon was careful to give little away, for his view of the world remained fundamentally irreligious. He was a son of the Enlightenment, a man forged in the spirit of the Revolution, and in his coronation oath he went out of his way to confirm many of the gains of the Revolution. He swore on the Gospel ‘to maintain the integrity of the territory of the Republic; to respect and to impose respect for the laws of the Concordat and the freedom of religious worship; to respect and impose respect for the equality of rights, for political and civil liberty, for the irreversibility of the sales of national lands; to raise taxes and impose duties only in accordance with the law; to maintain the institution of the Legion of Honour, and to govern to advance the interests, the happiness and the glory of the French people’.⁵⁵ Nowhere among his priorities was there any special status for the Church of Rome.

For all this, the steps he was beginning to take made many ask themselves where Napoleon’s real aims lay. Had he really turned his back on the founding principles of the French Revolution in the pursuit of personal glory and dynastic ambition? Back in 1799, in a proclamation to the French people, the three Consuls had recommended their new constitution, claiming that it was ‘founded on the true principles of representative government, on the sacred rights of property, equality and liberty’. They had concluded with the highly ambiguous claim that ‘the Revolution is established upon the principles which began it. It is ended’.⁵⁶ Historians have long discussed the meaning of these seemingly portentous words. Did they imply that their purpose was to overturn the Revolution and revert to a more stable, more authoritarian regime? Or did they see the Revolution as being complete, its gains acquired, allowing France to end its long years of turmoil and disruption? Their ambiguity allowed many of those present to be persuaded, once more, to go along with measures with which they profoundly disagreed or of which they were deeply suspicious.

For one deputy, however, the meaning of the new powers bestowed on Napoleon and of the monarchical grandeur of the coronation ceremony was clear. Lazare Carnot had known Napoleon long enough to feel that he understood his ambitions, and they were not for the Republic. Addressing his colleagues in the Tribunate on 1 May 1804, Carnot expressed the fears that many of them must surely have felt. They had, he reminded them, witnessed the creation of a host of institutions, one after the other, that were quite obviously ‘monarchical’ in spirit, but on each occasion they had been reassured that they had been devised to protect liberty. And now, he declaimed, ‘we are being called upon to pronounce on the formal proposition to restore the system of monarchy and to confer the hereditary imperial title on the First Consul’. For a republican like himself this was one step too far. While carefully expressing no desire to return to a world of political parties and factions, he had had enough; he preferred to go into political exile rather than serve the Empire. ‘At the time, I voted against the life consulate; and in the same way I shall vote against the re-establishment of monarchy, as I believe my position as a member of the Tribunate obliges me to do.’ He added a note of perceptive regret as he surveyed the way in which the revolutionary decade had disintegrated. The previous dynasty, he reminded his listeners, had lasted for eight hundred years. Now a new one was being born. His main regret was that ‘we have not been able to establish the republican regime among us, however hard we have tried in a succession of more or less democratic forms’.⁵⁷ With these words the former Minister of War cast his vote against the imperial constitution and brought down the curtain on a remarkable political career.