In the Museum at Liège, BelgiumNAPOLEON BONAPARTE, FIRST CONSULFrom the painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Presented to the city of Liège by Napoleon in 1806. This is claimed to be one of the few portraits for which Bonaparte posed.
In the Museum at Liège, Belgium
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, FIRST CONSUL
From the painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Presented to the city of Liège by Napoleon in 1806. This is claimed to be one of the few portraits for which Bonaparte posed.
These strained relations between the two great Western powers were the natural consequence of their antipodal interests, and of the fact that neither was yet exhausted by war. Speaking of the treaty of Amiens soon after it was signed, George III said, "I call this an experimental peace; it is nothing else." It was a double experiment. How far would Bonaparte curb his ambition? How far would England surrender her control of European commerce? It soon became clear that a conciliatory temper existed on neither side, andthat the so-called peace was merely a truce. Moreover, Bonaparte, not long after the arrival of Lord Whitworth, came to feel that the truce would be a short one. Accordingly he recalled from London the too pacific Otto, replacing him in December by General Andréossy. His conviction was assured by the language which the English ambassador used to Talleyrand in January. The interval of peace, short as it was, had so confirmed Bonaparte in the good graces of the French that he likewise felt able to dismiss three other public servants who seemed unwilling to accept the new state of absolute control by the First Consul. These were Fouché, Roederer, and Bourrienne: the first a shrewd, unscrupulous, self-seeking Jacobin; the second a wise, devoted, but fearless and sometimes troublesome adviser; the third a venal, light-headed, and often untruthful secretary, who presumed too much on early associations in order to continue an annoying intimacy. Almost at the same time Lannes was restored to favor, and the consular guard was strengthened. At the opening of what bade fair to be a struggle for life, the protagonist seemed determined to cast off every weight, to discard even his true friends when troublesome.
The landed aristocracy of Great Britain saw all its prestige endangered by Bonaparte's successes; its control of Parliament, its influence in the local governments, its hierarchy in church and state, its absurd control of the suffrage, all stood in glaring contrast to the reforms of diametrically opposed tendency established in France, where burghers and peasants had come to their own and flaunted their rights and powers before all Europe. A British revolution was imminent. The great masters of industry were equally savage and determined. There was a sudden union of all important interests. If Piedmont were annexed, Switzerland made a protectorate,Italy brought to terms, the lands of the valley and mouths of the Rhine intimidated or won to sympathetic subservience, and the treaty of Lunéville made operative, the island kingdom was isolated indeed. Such a continental combination would close the door in the face of British commerce. Yet there was a greater world than the Continent and markets quite as important. So a continental coalition would open the highways of the ocean, not one of the powers, great or small, being able to maintain an efficient army with an efficient fleet. The policy of alliances and subsidies was ever at hand, and to this again the English ministry recurred. Neither Austria, Russia, nor Prussia, antiquated as were their systems and policies, unstable as were their governments and finances, uncertain as were their very boundaries and the loyalty of their subjects; patched, darned, and frayed as were their dynastic relations; not one of them was content, nor easy, nor secure. The material was at hand for a new coalition, quite as rotten as others since the dynastic cloth was old on the garment, the growing and novel sense of nationality. To the labor of renovation George and his ministers put their hands; renovation of old stuff, old patterns, old fashions, all of which should have been thrown into the rag-bag.
The war which was imminent would in no proper sense be a war between England and France, but rather an appeal to arms concerning Bonaparte's expansion of the revolutionary system for his own purposes. Well aware that if war was inevitable it should for his own sake come quickly, Bonaparte determined to learn whether it was inevitable, and to do so in such a way as further to endear him to that class of the French people which now appeared to be his strongest support—the great middle class, or bourgeoisie. Whether general, diplomatist, or statesman, he had never sincehis entrance on French public life permitted them to forget that he was one of them. Incidentally it may be remarked that his determination to gratify the middle class whenever possible played a considerable rôle in the grandiose scheme of public works conceived and partly achieved by him. The building of great canals, the perfection of highways, the lavish expenditure of public moneys for the administrative buildings which beautified the provincial towns while distributing the appropriations for these works among the inhabitants, the general control of these enterprises from Paris—all this enormously strengthened the hold which the chief magistrate had upon the country at large. He dressed, behaved, and talked, as far as in him lay, like a French burgher, scornfully and ostentatiously using the forms of society and diplomacy as baubles necessary just so long as they were useful, but holding them up to public contempt whenever that course served his purpose.
Much of the same policy was displayed in the official receptions held in the Tuileries. In the first place, the domestic life of the Bonapartes was carefully accented by the presence of the First Consul's wife and of his sisters with their families. No mistresses were ever allowed to flaunt themselves in public under either the Consulate or the Empire. The same standards of conjugal fidelity were to be supposed valid in the first family of the land as in those of the masses. Then, too, there was displayed a genial familiarity, sometimes even brusque and rude, like that prevalent among the middle class—the good-fellowship which they admired above every other quality. On high occasions the great officers of state with the diplomatic corps were arrayed in a circle like that customary in courts from immemorial times; but grand as they were, they had to put up with much the same treatment from the First Consul whilemaking his rounds as that which his relatives, his civil and military officials, and the plain people of France generally received at his hands. These unceremonious ways afforded Bonaparte exactly the chance he needed to bring England to an explanation. On Sunday, March thirteenth, 1803, there was held a consular levee at the Tuileries. No one apparently thought it likely to be different from any other, and there was the usual attendance, Lord Whitworth being present to introduce some English ladies and gentlemen to Mme. Bonaparte. But the occasion was destined to be of the first importance historically, and what occurred has been the subject of more misrepresentation and turgid rhetoric than any single event in the life of Napoleon.
For some weeks previous, France had continued to fit out armaments in her ports, destined, it was declared, and probably with truth, to confirm her colonial power in the West Indies and America, and to make good her commercial standing in the Levant and farther Orient. These movements, as well as those of her troops, were declared by the English to be preparations solely intended for the renewal of the war. On Friday, February seventeenth, Whitworth, contrary to all diplomatic precedent, had been summoned to the Tuileries, where he was received by Bonaparte with "tolerable cordiality," to use the ambassador's own words, and seated on one side of the First Consul's table in his private cabinet, while the chief of state dropped into a chair on the other, and began without ceremony to state his views concerning the situation. Acknowledging his irritation at the mistrust shown by England in interpreting the treaty of Amiens, he categorically refused to acquiesce in the continued occupation of Malta and Alexandria by her, but disclaimed any intention of either seizing Egypt or going to war. Expatiating on the respectiveforces of England and France, he strove to prove that neither could gain anything by going to war. On many occasions antecedent to this Bonaparte had emphatically stated his conviction that the Western world was a unit, face to face with the other unit, the Oriental world. Their reciprocity is the life of the globe. On this occasion he flatly asked why the two Western powers of the first magnitude, one mistress of the seas, the other mistress of the land, should not arrange to coöperate and govern the world. But Whitworth was no philosopher, and, mindful of his instructions, he gave no sign of taking notice. In conclusion, therefore, the First Consul demanded the speedy evacuation of Malta as the event on which must turn peace or war. If he had really desired war, he said, he could have seized Egypt a month earlier without difficulty. Whitworth made the rejoinders which had been used all along, and when about to instance the territories and influence gained by France was interrupted by Bonaparte with apparent temper. "I suppose you mean Piedmont and Switzerland. Those are trifles,"—"The expression he made use of," Whitworth interrupts the quotation to say, "was too trivial and vulgar to find a place in a despatch, or anywhere but in the mouth of a hackney-coachman,"—"and it must have been foreseen," continued Bonaparte, "while the negotiation was pending. Vous n'avez pas le droit d'en parler à cette heure." ["Now you have no right to speak of it."] Napoleon said of his own temper that it never went below his neck; and as to his vulgar expression, any French scholar can supply it and see that Whitworth did right not to report it; for to translate it would have been to distort the proportions of its significance. Moreover, the English diplomat must have felt the truth of Bonaparte's reasoning, for he at once turned to the matter of Englishclaims on France, and the First Consul excused the delay by disclaiming all wrong intention. Whitworth expressly states that he brought away no other impression than that Bonaparte intended "to frighten and bully."
Under this impression the English ministry determined to meet bluster with bluster. There was, in spite of all Fox's efforts, a substantial unanimity of anti-French sentiment in Parliament. This the government inflamed by a royal message sent to that body on March eighth, which exaggerated the military preparations in the ports of France and Holland out of all proportion by stating them as a reason why additional measures should be taken for the security of England. On March tenth the militia was called out. News of the message reached Paris on March twelfth. Duroc was in Prussia on a special embassy. The paper was forwarded to him at once, with instructions to say to Frederick William that, if war was declared, France would occupy Hanover—a menace intended to make that monarch active in preserving peace. It was beyond peradventure part of this same system of bluster which made Bonaparte prepare the scene of March thirteenth, before the news of England's arming her militia could have reached him.
While the court was assembling the First Consul passed the time in chatting with the ladies of his family and familiarly joking with their attendants, in particular playing with his nephew, the little Napoleon, son of Louis. His air was unaffected, and he was even merry. Being told that the circle was formed, his manner changed, and he advanced to make his round. Whitworth and Markoff were standing side by side. Asking the former if he had news from England, and receiving an affirmative reply, he said, as Whitworth reported, "'So you are determined to go to war.' 'No, First Consul,' I replied; 'we are too sensible of the advantagesof peace.' 'We have,' said he, 'been at war already for fifteen years.' As he seemed to wait for an answer, I observed, 'That is already too long.' 'But,' said he, 'you want war for another fifteen years, and you force me to it.' I told him that was very far from his Majesty's intentions. He then proceeded to Count Markoff and the Chevalier Azara, who were standing at a little distance from me, and said to them, 'The English desire war, but if they are the first to draw the sword I shall be the last to sheathe it. They pay no respect to treaties. It will be necessary henceforth to cover them with black crape.' I suppose he meant the treaties. He then went his round, and was thought by all those to whom he addressed himself to betray great signs of irritation. In a few minutes he came back to me, to my great annoyance, and resumed the conversation, if such it can be called, by something personally civil to me. [The reader will note the words "personally civil."] He then began again: 'Why such armaments? Against whom such measures of precaution? I have not a single vessel of the line in the harbors of France: but if you wish to arm, I shall arm also; if you wish to fight, I shall fight also. You could perhaps destroy France, but never intimidate her.' 'No one would desire,' said I, 'the one or the other. The world would like to live on good terms with her.' 'Then treaties must be respected,' replied he. 'Woe to them who do not respect treaties! They shall be answerable for it to all Europe.' He was too agitated to make it advisable to prolong the conversation. I therefore made no answer, and he retired to his apartment repeating the last phrase.... I am persuaded that there was not a single person who did not feel the extreme impropriety of his conduct, and the total want of dignity as well as of decency on the occasion." Such is LordWhitworth's own account. That it is substantially accurate is proved by Bonaparte's despatch to Andréossy, dated the same night, in which the words used by the First Consul are given in almost identical form.
This is the much discussed "insult to the British ambassador," the scene in which Bonaparte has been represented as threatening to strike Whitworth, "the violent harangue," etc., which has been given as the reason why England broke the treaty of Amiens. As a matter of fact, the whole picture speaks for itself. Bonaparte's behavior was not courtly, and his conduct was a piece of bluster; for the rest, the scene was not merely, as Talleyrand explained it, the First Consul's method of calling the attention of all Europe to the political situation: it was both a means of warning England in the interest of peace and of warning France in the interest of war, if war there must be.
Five days later Whitworth himself wrote that his agent had seen nothing at Havre "which can be construed into an armament; and," adds the ambassador, "I verily believe this is the case in every port of France." He also declared that, judging from Talleyrand's note to the French envoy in London, France was not ready to declare war. The United States minister in Paris was of the same opinion. When next Bonaparte received the diplomatic corps, on April fourth, Whitworth reported that he had every reason to be satisfied with his treatment.
But the despatches of Lord Whitworth were not published in England as they were written and transmitted. They were printed with such omissions and changes as to make them serve the purpose of the ministry, which was to inflame public opinion. Negotiations were kept up for a few weeks, but without sincerity. England, refusing admission within the fortifications of Malta to the Neapolitan garrison which hadbeen stipulated for, on the ground that it could not be trusted, suggested that she should keep the island until the transfer could safely be made. Bonaparte then suggested either an Austrian or a Russian occupation, for a term of years, but this England rejected. France then proposed a joint French and English occupation, but this was likewise rejected, and Whitworth was instructed to stand on the ultimatum of a ten years' occupancy by England.
On May tenth the diplomatic rupture occurred, and on May sixteenth England formally declared war. Wilberforce asserted in opposition to the act that "the language of Bonaparte in the later stages of the negotiations" afforded reason to believe that he would have acquiesced in the independence of Malta, or even in the English retention of it for ten years. Whitworth's attitude was felt by moderate and liberal Englishmen to have been far from conciliatory.
The first appearance of William Pitt in the House of Commons after a serious illness brought together on the twenty-third a brilliant audience. It was with breathless interest that they heard him gasp forth the eloquent periods in which he denounced the lambent flame of Jacobinism embodied in Bonaparte, and satirized the Whigs who pleaded the cause of a devastator. The triple round of applause, unprecedented at Westminster, with which his speech was cheered at its close was ominous for those who were to follow. Not even Fox, whose polished oratory was heard with respectful attention, could diminish by a jot or tittle the enthusiasm for war. So therefore the struggle of centuries between France and England, orderly conservatism undismayed and turbulent liberalism afire with zeal, was again renewed. The continental powers were the pawns on the board, the players were Pitt and Bonaparte.
A Debatable Question — The Attack on English Commerce — Bonaparte Abandons his Colonial System — The Neighbors of France — The Feint against England — The Army at Boulogne — England Aroused — Enthusiasm in France.
The much debated question as to whether or not Bonaparte was victor in the diplomatic struggle, desired the rupture as it occurred and wanted war, is, in the light of the fullest information, apparently unanswerable. If he were a profound philosopher and constructive statesman disposed to abandon the struggle for mastery on the high seas and confine the expansion of France to the Continent, he was ready and his wishes were fulfilled; if, on the other hand, he intended to confront England by sea and her allies by land, he was unready, for he had no fighting navy and he had not expected war so soon. There were the beginnings of colonial empire in Australia, Decaen was on his way to Réunion with a squadron to establish a base of action against British India, the Cape of Good Hope was French, there was every prospect of a powerful Mahratta-French alliance in India itself. There were high hopes in the Ionian Isles, in Greece, and for Egypt. Malta might be wrested from England, and so forth.Ten of his battle-ships were far away, the remaining thirty-three were just available and no more; there were orders out for building twenty-three new ones, and a visit to Normandy convinced him that all sixty-six could be manned by splendid crews from western France. He indulged in much bravado about possibilities. But the hard fact is that in May, 1803, the French naval power was negligible, while the French land power was in the highest state of efficiency. Pitt had his enormous fleets and his possible coalition in hand, Bonaparte his army and his incomparable military genius.
Hostilities began by the seizure of many French merchantmen which were constructively in English harbors, though in many cases really at sea. The reply of the First Consul to this conduct was equally high-handed: every Englishman between the ages of eighteen and sixty within the borders of France was seized and thrown into confinement. For twelve long years these unfortunate persons were held as prisoners of war. The French embargo on hostile ships antedated England's by three days, and simultaneously with its publication Clarke was instructed to drive English ships from the harbors of Tuscany. In the last days of May an army under Mortier occupied Hanover, and, closing both Bremen and Hamburg to British commerce, exacted large contributions of money from them. In June another force under Saint-Cyr entered Naples, which in strict observance of the treaty of Amiens had been evacuated, and laid a similar embargo on the ports of Taranto, Brindisi, and Otranto. In the case of Hanover, France utterly disregarded the fine point in international law which had so far distinguished between George III as King of England and the German Elector whose patrimony was Hanover; in that of Naples she displayed a disregard for treaty obligations not entirely consistentwith Bonaparte's maledictions on those who did not observe them.
Finally, in July the famous "Continental System" was instituted by the decree which absolutely forbade the importation of all English wares into France or the sphere of her influence. In order to cut his enemy off from another quarter of the globe, to strengthen a maritime power hostile to England, and to secure new resources, Bonaparte had already extended the hand of friendship to the United States, having sold to them in April the immense territory then known by the name of Louisiana. The event was second in importance to no other in their history; for it gave them immediate control of the entire intercontinental river-system and later that of the Pacific coast, while indirectly it prepared the way for the conflict of 1812, which finally secured their commercial independence. Thenceforward Bonaparte concentrated his energies for the control of Europe. His financial condition was acute, for Barbé-Marbois had failed in his efforts to negotiate a loan of forty million francs from the Dutch bankers. It was possibly a conversation between Bonaparte and Ralph Izard of South Carolina which turned the attention of the First Consul to Louisiana as a quick asset. The United States easily secured the cash where the French had failed, in Amsterdam by the intermediation of Stephen Girard. With sixty million francs in hand as security, Bonaparte raised as much more on credit, and the purchasing power of this hundred and twenty million francs was fully equal to that of four times the sum to-day. With it he refitted his little fleet, and purchased two hundred and fifty thousand muskets, a hundred thousand cavalry pistols, thirty thousand sabers, and a hundred batteries of field artillery, all arms of improved quality and pattern, the arms usedat Austerlitz, and to which, as he told Latour-Maubourg, he owed that signal victory. The West Indies and Louisiana in one hemisphere, in the other the Cape of Good Hope, Egypt, and a portion of India, with St. Helena and Malta as ports of call—of this he had dreamed; but the failure to secure San Domingo, and England's evident intention to keep Malta, combined to topple the whole cloud castle into ruins. The Continent must be his sphere of action.
At once the states bordering on France were made to feel their position. Holland agreed to furnish five ships of the line, a hundred gunboats, eleven thousand men, and subsistence for a French army of eighteen thousand. For this France guaranteed her territorial integrity with the return of all her colonies, not even excepting Ceylon. Switzerland was to furnish half of her little army in any case, and nearly the whole of it if France were attacked. The sale of Louisiana spread consternation throughout Spain, which had always hoped to recover it, and with that end in view had included in her treaty with France a clause retaining the right of redemption for herself. Deriding her exasperation, Bonaparte despatched an army to the frontier, and demanded in place of the twenty-five ships and twenty-eight thousand men agreed upon in the treaty of 1796 a subsidy of no less than six million francs a month. Godoy, the "Prince of the Peace," who had been made chief minister of Spain, first thought of war, but his masterful opponent threatened the weak king, Charles IV, with a public exposure of the scandalous relation between his queen and that minister, and before the end of the year the demand was granted. Portugal purchased neutrality by a contribution of one million francs a month, and Genoa agreed to furnish six thousand sailors for the French fleets. In consequence England began to prey on Spanish commerce.
The second preparation for war was the much discussed equipment of an expedition to invade England. It is a commonplace of history that the British empire has ever been fortified in the separation of the kingdom from the continent of Europe by a narrow but stormy estuary. There had been repeated invasions from the days of the Anglo-Saxons themselves down to the expedition of William of Orange; but growing wealth had furnished ever increasing armaments, and made access to England's shores so much more difficult with every year that, finally, successful invasion had come to be regarded by her enemies as impossible. On the other hand, the English remained skeptical, and fell into periodic panics on the question. Even now a clever fiction like the "Battle of Dorking," or a revival of the project for tunneling below the Channel, can awaken such anxiety as to insure the passage of any grant for strengthening the navy. This distrust was well known to the French. For years the project of a descent on England had been the standard pretext of the Convention and of the Directory to extort money from office-holders and patriots. This inheritance was exploited by the First Consul to its full value. In general his preparation was doubtless a feint, but there were probably times when the scheme commended itself as an alternative. He told Whitworth that there was but one chance in a hundred of its success; he never seriously tried to execute it; and in the undiplomatic but apparently sincere effusion of October twenty-third, to Otto, the whole stress of his argument is laid on the chances of continental conquest.
Nevertheless he made enormous outlays of money. Boulogne was the spot nearest to England which was available for the gathering and drill of a mighty force. Thither were summoned to form an Army of Englandthe flower of the troops, a hundred and fifty thousand veterans and recruits, commanded by Soult, Ney, Davout, and Victor. For the first time Bonaparte could work his will in the construction of a fighting-machine. The result was the best machine so far constructed. Tactics were improved, the system of organization was reformed, equipment was simplified, discipline was strengthened, and enthusiasm was awakened to the highest pitch. Moreover, the soldiers were trained in the management of great flatboats, from which they were taught to disembark with precision and skill, both in stormy weather and in the face of opposition. Some were also instructed in the duties of the sailor in order that their services might be available if needed aboard men-of-war. In a letter to Decrès, minister of marine, dated September thirteenth, 1805, the First Consul admitted that his success in these respects had not been striking: he found that his great floats were nearly unmanageable in the currents and tides of the Channel, and that a three days' calm would be necessary for crossing. It also became clear that the attempt could not succeed without the coöperation of a fleet. The chief advantage of the camp at Boulogne, as Bonaparte then saw it, was that he could there keep from eighty to a hundred thousand men in a wholesome situation, ready at a moment's notice to be transferred to Germany.
But the effect in England at the inception of the enterprise was electrical. Her standing army was already a hundred and thirty thousand strong, the militia numbered seventy thousand, and the reserve fifty thousand. In addition there was a body of volunteers which eventually reached the number of three hundred and eighty thousand in England and of over eighty thousand in Ireland. A system of signals was arranged betweenvessels of observation in the Channel and stations on the shore, beacons were ready on every hilltop, and the whole land was turned into a camp. The navy was not less strengthened: the number of men was raised from eighty to a hundred and twenty thousand, and a hundred vessels of the line, a hundred or more frigates, and several hundreds of smaller vessels, such as cruisers and gunboats, were gathered to protect the coasts. Pitt undermined the Addington ministry by calling for ever greater means of defense, and appeared daily for a time at the head of three thousand volunteers raised on or near his own estates. Even Fox laid aside his French sympathies for a while. Parliament authorized a loan of twelve millions sterling, which was promptly taken, and raised the taxes so as to double the revenue. The "nation of traders," as the First Consul sneeringly called them, again stood at ease ready to face her hereditary foe, under a burden of expense which the people a year before had believed would crush them. These were the "slight derangements" which, as the exile of St. Helena told Las Cases, had permanently thwarted the invasion, then represented in his bitterness as having been a serious purpose. It is true that during the period of extravagant preparation a medal was struck with Bonaparte's profile on the reverse, and on the obverse Hercules strangling a Triton, and that measures were discussed for administering the conquered island and for stripping it of its art objects. But further evidence that the entire movement was in the main a pretext for assembling and drilling a great land force to be held in readiness against Austria and Russia will be given in another connection, and on the whole it seems to outweigh that which indicates a definite, uninterrupted intention to invade England. In view of the stupendous land and sea forces assembled by Great Britain, it isaltogether conceivable that the First Consul might have formed the notion of an invasion of the inverse sort, of an English army landing on the eastern shores of the Channel, and an offensive movement by English troops against the French armies. If so, he kept it deep in his mind, but for that alternative he was likewise in readiness by reason of the camp at Boulogne.
Although the Revolution had failed in giving the French their political freedom, it culminated under Bonaparte in giving them civil rights. In view of the hatred felt by the dynastic powers for a movement which shook their thrones, it may easily be argued that to protect this immense gain political centralization like that of the Consulate was essential. On whichever side of this question lies the truth, one thing is certain—that the nation as a whole felt as if moderate republicanism had triumphed; and much as they suffered in trade, industry, and agriculture by the renewal of war, they nevertheless were enthusiastic in upholding their leader and his measures. His bitterest enemies have admitted, and still admit, the national character of the support which he had in 1803. The government was popular, so much so that it even ventured to bestow a pension of thirty dollars a month on Mlle. Robespierre. Addresses which promised willing assistance were numerous. The masses, not yet free from the old sense of security created by the leadership of a powerful man or of a family trained in the management of public interests, were comforted by the presence and the work of their chief magistrate. In the tribunate a higher degree of the same spirit found expression in the significant phrase "consular majesty," with which an orator addressed the First Consul. There was no manifestation of discontent with the censorship of the press, which was regarded as a necessary war measure. Bookscould not be published until after the censors had possessed a copy for seven days and had given their permission; the newspapers could reprint no news from foreign journals, and were mercilessly controlled in the contents of their columns. When the "Moniteur" and its kindred poured contempt on English perfidy and wrote of Punic faith, when they portrayed Albion as rushing madly on her fate, the readers liked it and applauded.
Moreau and the Republicans — Royalist Conspiracies — Moreau's Fall — The Passion for Plotting — Royalist Dissensions — The Duc d'Enghien — His Plans and Conduct — The Activity of the French Police — Appearances against Enghien — The Expedition to Seize Him — His Imprisonment — Arrival at Paris — Bonaparte at Malmaison — The Commission to Try Enghien — Bonaparte's Decision — Pleas for Clemency — The Trial of Enghien — The Execution — The First Consul's Explanations — Disastrous Effects of the Deed — Revulsion of Feeling.
1803—04
But there were still a very few sturdy men who felt that one side of the Revolution was falling into atrophy at the expense of that which Bonaparte so ably represented. In spite of his disfavor, they made themselves heard; and Carnot even dared to remonstrate in the tribunate against the adulation of this second young Augustus who was using the forms of a commonwealth to found an empire. In the senate also this little sect had a remnant, some eight members in all. Their power lay not in themselves, nor in their strict republican principles, but in the latent sympathies of many influential officers of the army. During the second campaign in Italy Moreau had smothered his discontentwhen the Army of the Rhine was weakened at a critical moment by the transfer of twenty-five thousand men into Italy in order to assure the glories of Marengo. An official journal falsely declared that his soldiers had been paid from the public coffers. Such was the state of public morality that the charge was considered injurious, as in fact it was intended to be. Moreau in reply boasted that he had received but eighteen million francs from Paris, that he had levied forty-four millions on Germany, and that of the total there was a surplus of seven millions which had been distributed among the soldiers and officers. This paper was pigeonholed in the ministry of war, and the newspapers were forbidden to print the copies sent to them. The writer's feelings may be imagined. If he and the others who were discontented had shown the craft which Bonaparte did, their opposition would have been dangerous; but they were so carefully watched that their every movement was known beforehand and thwarted. Still further, they were, by the wiles of their enemies, insensibly led to the commission of foolish deeds and the utterance of rash words, which put them within reach of the law. In this particular network of conspiracies, Fouché was not the principal, although he was a valued consultant.
This system was admirably illustrated in the fall of Moreau, who was not a wary man, and had permitted royalist agents to hold communication with him. One of these, the Abbé David, was seized, but no damaging evidence was obtained. Thereupon recourse was hadto the services of Méhée de la Touche, a base creature who, after participation in the September massacres of 1792, and an underground career of espionage during the Terror, had opposed Bonaparte on the eighteenth of Brumaire. He was at the moment in exile for participation in the plot of Nivôse, and eagerly accepted his new employment. After many adventures, he finally won the confidence not only of the French royalists in England, but of Pelham and other members of the British government. He described to the consular government the dissensions between the Bourbon leaders and the agents of Great Britain, telling how Georges Cadoudal, the Chouan leader, had been landed in France on August twenty-first, 1803, from an English ship commanded by Captain Wright, and unfolding a plan whereby the royalists could be encouraged to bring the conspiracy of which Georges was the agent to a head. His scheme was adopted, and after writing from Altona to Louis XVIII, now in Warsaw, offering his services, he visited Munich, and probably Stuttgart, where he told the story of a Jacobin rising which was soon to occur in France, and obtained from the English resident ministers money and instructions for organizing it. The official denials of the period made by the British government as to its participation in the Cadoudal conspiracy were long accepted as true and incorporated in the standard histories. Since the opening within a few years of the British archives to investigators the proof of the contrary is patent. The connected list of despatches, letters, and reports presents conclusive and damaging evidence that whether or not the ministers were privy to the plot for assassinating the First Consul, the French conspirators were in British pay.
In order to implicate Moreau in the Cadoudal conspiracy of which they had learned, the Paris policeemployed another person of the same stripe, Lajolais by name, who had been an officer in the Army of the Rhine, and who, as such, succeeded in meeting Moreau and extorting from him a few words of pity for Pichegru. Thereupon the police, by means still baser, got together two committees, one of royalists and one of old-time Jacobins, and had each select Moreau as its leader. This was possible, because the Bourbon pretender had, in accordance with Méhée's letter, issued a proclamation promising constitutional government and the sale of the public lands in case of his restoration. Lajolais then started for London, where he persuaded Pichegru that France was weary of Bonaparte, that Moreau was ready, and that the time was ripe for overthrowing the Consulate. As a consequence, the dupe and the decoy, with the chief military leaders of the emigrants, landed from Captain Wright's ship on January fourteenth, 1804, at Biville, near Dieppe. Artois and his son were to follow in a few days. By further misrepresentations Moreau and Pichegru were brought together on the sidewalk of a street near the church of the Madeleine, and in Lajolais' presence they exchanged a few noncommittal sentences. Within a few days a police agent, approaching Moreau as an ambassador from Pichegru, was told that if the latter would lead a movement,—and in that case the consuls and government must be disposed of,—his friends would be protected by influence which could be secured in the senate. Moreau steadily refused either to meet Georges Cadoudal or be implicated in the plot for seizing Bonaparte, of which the Chouan was the leader.
About the middle of February everything was ready and Moreau was arrested. On examination he weakly protested too much, and, being convicted from his own papers of inconsistency, was imprisoned. A few weekslater Pichegru was discovered by the aid of an informer, and he too was thrown into prison. Finally on March ninth Georges himself was seized in the streets of Paris after a desperate and bloody resistance. Soon the most popular picture in the shop windows of the city was a colored print representing the fifty "scoundrels" who had been found to be implicated in the conspiracy against the First Consul, and among the faces was an unmistakable likeness of Moreau. After a long trial, Georges and his accomplices were condemned and shot. Pichegru was found dead in his cell: although royalists confined in that adjoining afterward declared that they had heard a scuffle during the fatal night, there is no reasonable doubt that the prisoner committed suicide. The suspicions cast upon Moreau had utterly destroyed his popularity, and numerous addresses were sent in both from the army and by civilians denouncing him. Just before his trial he made the terrible mistake of sending to Bonaparte an exculpatory letter. This he did, instigated by his silly, ambitious wife, who seems in turn to have received the suggestion from Mme. Récamier. Rumor said that the notion originated with Fouché. The fact and nature of the appeal suggested guilt, but the first decision of the court was for acquittal. Popular feeling, however, ran so high that the First Consul compelled a reconsideration of the verdict, and the prisoner was sentenced to imprisonment for two years. Bonaparte, furious at this leniency, commuted the penalty to banishment. Moreau withdrew to America, where he remained until 1813, when he returned to take up arms against Napoleon before Dresden and was killed.
"I have incurred no real danger," wrote Bonaparte to Melzi on March sixth, 1804, "for the police had their eyes on all these machinations." The verdict of history implicates that ubiquitous agency in fostering byits spies and agents many of those same machinations, but leaves no doubt of the desperate character of the ringleaders in them. What England really, and the Bourbons ostensibly, wanted was a Jacobin insurrection; many of their infuriated agents would certainly not have hesitated at assassination. The general opinion in France was not wrong in condemning the extreme measures taken by the Bourbons to gain their ends, and for the moment royalists of all three factions were silent, feeling that their cause had received a blow from which it might never recover. As to the moderate republican party, it was temporarily extinguished by the fate of Moreau. Skilful as a general and sincere as a democrat, his career had been short-sighted and contradictory. Friendship had led him to conceal his knowledge of Pichegru's dealings with the royalists of 1797. Ambition led him to assist at Brumaire, but he would not accept the consequences. Indecision led him into a trap, but even then he might have escaped, but for the letter he wrote by the advice of a proud and foolish wife.
The closing scenes of this drama of plot and counterplot, of assassination and murder, of falsehood, treachery, and execution, formed a fitting dénouement to the piece. That age had seen and condoned acts of revenge which in quieter times would have been considered unpardonable. Nelson had sanctioned the judicial assassination of Caraccioli, the Neapolitan admiral, whose crime was that in the interest of the Parthenopean Republic he had fought the English fleet. Austria's skirts were not clean of the murders perpetrated at Rastadt. A little later the Bourbons, with the assent of the allied sovereigns, ordered the execution of Ney for deserting them to support his former chief at Waterloo. Bonaparte, relying on a conviction that every oneregarded him as a harried and innocent man acting in self-defense, and apparently unconscious of how utterly the royalist agitation had been discredited by Cadoudal, determined so to stun the already prostrate Bourbons as to render them harmless for years to come.
Neither Artois nor his son Berry had entered France; the self-styled Louis XVIII was in distant Warsaw. Both these pretenders were more eloquent than courageous. Even the royalists of Paris were doubtful about the leadership of either one, and the partizans of constitutional monarchy had for some time been disposed to rally about a third Bourbon, the Duc d'Enghien, heir apparent to the glories of the house rendered so illustrious by Louis XIV's famous general known as "the Great Condé." The young duke was both fearless and clever. Burning to take arms in honorable warfare for the cause of his house, he had consulted both English and emigrant agents as to how that could best be accomplished; but he was innocent of conspiring for assassination.
For some time he had lived in close proximity to the French frontier at Ettenheim, a manor-house in Baden, some sixteen miles from Strasburg, where Cardinal Rohan had resided with his niece since his resignation of the bishopric of Strasburg after the Concordat. The duke had for some time been secretly married to this lady, the Princess Charlotte of Rohan-Rochefort, and for that reason, though repeatedly warned of his danger, would not take refuge in England. Before the treaty of Amiens he had been the friend of the Swiss reactionaries and the patron of the royalists in Alsace; after the rupture he was active in strengthening their attachment to the Bourbon cause. In response to the manifesto of the self-styled king, his relative at Warsaw, issued in March, 1803, he declared that he was still faithful.When war began he sought permission to enter the English service and repel the expected invasion by Bonaparte; but England would not permit a Bourbon to draw sword on her soil.
At this crisis the publication of the Warsaw manifesto, and of the duke's response, made his continued residence at Ettenheim a subject of still greater inquietude to his friends; but he remained, and spent much energy in forming plans to invade France through Alsace. As the probabilities of war on the Continent grew stronger, he again applied to the English court for a commission, this time through Stuart, the British envoy to Vienna. He now desired employment on the mainland, either in an allied army or with the first English troops which should disembark on the Continent. Meantime the activity of the English residents at the minor German courts intensified his purpose to raise a regiment of men from the anti-Bonaparte elements of central Europe, to be officered by the scattered veterans who had fought under the second Condé but had been dismissed from the Austrian service after the treaty of Lunéville. The news of Moreau's arrest and of Cadoudal's conspiracy came like a thunderbolt, and the duke, though conscious of no guilt, made ready to withdraw to Freiburg in the Breisgau; but in order to mask his uneasiness he instituted a hunt and other festivities which lasted a whole week.
Bonaparte's first intention had been to seize Charles of Artois on his arrival in France; but a thorough supervision of the shore made it evident that the prince's caution had again got the better of his courage. Disappointed in this quarter, the police agents began to develop an intense activity on the German frontier. They professed to have discovered in Offenburg, with which the Duc d'Enghien was in constant communication,the existence of a body of emigrants who were not there. They reported that the young prince sometimes came down to Strasburg to attend the theater; they represented two harmless visitors at Ettenheim to be officers of the Prince of Condé arrived from England; still worse, they declared an emigrant friend of the duke who lived near by—the aged Marquis of Thuméry, whose name in German mouths had a remote resemblance to that of Dumouriez—to be that dangerous general himself. This occurred a few days before March ninth, and almost simultaneously Bonaparte received from an agent in Naples an extract from one of Dumouriez's letters to Nelson, urging a concerted plan not merely of defense, but of offense. No one then doubted that Dumouriez himself was on the Rhine, busy with Enghien in perfecting this very plan.
Rumors of every sort became rife. It was known that the old intriguer General Willot was again in the South. Men declared that Berry was coming to Brittany, that Charles of Artois was perhaps already in Paris, that Enghien and Dumouriez were on the eastern frontier. It was a perfect investment of plots. When Georges was captured he asserted that he was the associate of princes, and then relapsed into a profound silence which he did not again break. His servant deposed that he had seen his master in communication with a distinguished-looking youth in the suburb of Chaillot. The police remembered that in January the Duc d'Enghien had solicited from the French ambassador at Vienna a passport to cross France, and, recalling the festivities at Ettenheim, believed they were but a pretext to cover the host's absence in Paris at a time which would coincide with the mysterious interview asserted to have taken place between Georges and the unknown stranger. This was the chain of evidence which convinced Bonaparteof Enghien's participation in the plot for his assassination. True, he had not been in actual danger, for the police had been alert; but did that alter the enormity of the Bourbon intrigues against his life? It was only too natural that the terror, hate, and fury accumulated in the mind of the First Consul should concentrate on an object within his reach.
Réal, Fouché, and Talleyrand were all consulted. As yet their personal interests were bound up with their ruler's welfare, and alike they urged prompt and ruthless action to end the schemes and complots of the time. The two former needed no credentials of faithfulness. Talleyrand gave his in writing on March eighth; he had so dallied with royalists that his position must be definite now. Later efforts to discredit the note as a forgery have failed. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that all three intended by the seizure and execution of a Bourbon so to "marry," as the phrase ran, the First Consul to the terrorist side of the Revolution that he could never retreat from the position of radicalism to which they felt he had not been sufficiently committed, even yet. On March tenth the council heard and, as a body, approved Bonaparte's plan, although Lebrun was evasive and Cambacérès demurred. That night one column of a double expedition was despatched to the Rhine; it was commanded by Ordener and destined for Ettenheim. The other, under Caulaincourt, set out next day for Offenburg with a diplomatic note to the court of Baden. The latter commander was utterly ignorant of what his colleague had in hand, being instructed merely to disperse the reported company of emigrants and demand the extradition of a notorious intriguer, the Baronne de Reich. Ordener was to seize the Duc d'Enghien. The two columns proceeded by way of Strasburg without delay. Finding the baronnealready a prisoner, and the police report unfounded, the generals then carried out the minute instructions of their chief as to the other part of their task.
On the twelfth, Enghien had been warned of his danger; but he was not to be intimidated, and on the thirteenth he sent a messenger to observe how immediate the danger was. On the fourteenth a French spy was despatched from Strasburg; he was recognized as such at Ettenheim, and was pursued, but escaped to report everything favorable. Still the rash young duke refused to move. On the morning of the fifteenth he awoke to find the house surrounded by French troops. Every avenue of escape being closed, he surrendered, and all his papers were seized. With his household and friends he was hurried to the citadel of Strasburg, where he was detained for two days. Couriers were promptly despatched to Paris, and the court at Karlsruhe received a formal notification of what had been done, signed by Talleyrand. Bonaparte learned by the despatches received on the seventeenth from both his expeditions that Dumouriez was not on the Rhine, and on the nineteenth he himself examined the duke's papers, which had been inventoried in their owner's presence, and then forwarded to Malmaison.
On the night of the seventeenth there arrived in Strasburg orders, written while Bonaparte still believed the reports concerning Dumouriez to be true, which directed the immediate removal of the prisoners—that is, of Enghien and Dumouriez—to Paris. In pursuance of these the duke was awakened at midnight, placed in a post-chaise, and driven rapidly toward his destination. He arrived at eleven in the morning of the twentieth, and was immediately taken to Vincennes. His seizure had created the deepest sorrow and consternation in Baden, and Massias, the French ministerat Karlsruhe, not only despatched a letter direct to Paris declaring that the duke's conduct had always been "innocent and moderate," but went in person to notify the prefect at Strasburg that there was neither an assembly of emigrants nor a conspiracy at Ettenheim. Talleyrand was afterward charged by Napoleon with having suppressed Massias's despatch; and it is not known whether the prefect sent a report to the same effect or not.
On the twelfth, the First Consul had withdrawn to the seclusion of Malmaison. It was evident that under the surface there were tumultuous feelings, but in his expression there was an icy calm. At times he recited scraps of verse on the theme of clemency, but his chief occupation was consulting with the police agent Réal and with Savary, his aide-de-camp. It was arranged that the castle of Vincennes should be the prison, that the court should be military, composed of colonels from the Paris garrison, and that the main charge against the duke should be that he had borne arms against his country. He was to be asked whether the plot for assassination was known to him, and if, in case it had succeeded, he were not himself to have entered Alsace.
The court-martial was modeled on those pitiless tribunals created by the Revolution. The statute declaring that any Frenchman taking up arms against his country was a traitor and worthy of death had never been repealed. The Consulate restored the activity of these military commissions in order to tame refractory conscripts and condignly to punish tamperers, conspirators, and spies. These courts had been accustomed to take their cue as to severity or leniency from the government for the time being, whatever it was. There was therefore but little difficulty in constituting such a body expressly for the punishment of any offender.In this instance none of the members except the president and judge-advocate knew the station of the accused. Préval, who had been chosen to preside, refused when he heard the name of the prisoner, on the plea that both he and his father had served in the royalist regiment named d'Enghien, and that he had therefore tender memories incompatible with the service required of him. General Hulin, an old-time Jacobin, made no excuses, and, understanding perfectly what was expected, was invited to report the verdict direct to the First Consul.
During these days Bonaparte had also constantly before him both the papers of the English minister at Munich and the inflammatory, untruthful reports of his police agents. He studied these, and reviewed the measures taken to guard the eastern frontier against the emigrants and their hostile sympathizers, who were making demonstrations in Swabia. Until the evening of the seventeenth he believed that Dumouriez had been at Ettenheim; but though informed of his mistake, the resolution already taken became iron, and the papers of the duke were read on the nineteenth with an evident determination to construe them into evidence of his guilt. They afforded no proofs of direct complicity with Georges, but they contained two phrases which, wrested from the true sense of the correspondence, were of awful significance—one in which the duke qualified the French people as "his most cruel foe," the other in which he declared that during his "two years' residence on the frontier he had established communications with the French troops on the Rhine." These were included in the interrogatories for the trial and intrusted to Réal for his use. If the duke were tampering with the loyalty of the troops, what need of proof that he was in any sense a participator in the plot?
Mme. Bonaparte learned with intense sorrow of thedetermination taken by her husband. In the main his measures and his convictions had been kept a secret, but she confided both to Mme. de Rémusat, and the First Consul himself had told them to Joseph. On the twentieth the decree for the duke's trial and the questions to be put were dictated by the First Consul from the Tuileries, and in the early afternoon he returned to Malmaison, where at three o'clock Joseph found him strolling in the park, conversing with Talleyrand, who limped along at his side. "I'm afraid of that cripple," was Josephine's greeting to her brother-in-law. "Interrupt this long talk if you can." The mediation of the elder brother was kindly and skilful, and for a time the First Consul seemed softened by the memories of their boyhood, among which came and went the figure of the Prince of Condé. But other feelings prevailed: the brothers had differed about Lucien's marriage, and also about the question of descent if the consular power should become hereditary; the old coolness finally settled down and chilled the last hopes in the tenderhearted advocates for clemency. To Josephine's tearful entreaties her husband replied: "Go away; you're a child; you don't understand public duties." By five it was known that the duke had arrived at Vincennes, and at once Savary was despatched to the city for orders from Murat, the military commandant. On his arrival at Murat's office, from which Talleyrand was in the very act of departing, he was informed that the court-martial was already convened, and that it would be his duty to guard the prisoner and execute whatever sentence was passed.
The scenes of that fateful and doleful night defy description. The castle of Vincennes was beset with guards when finally, at about an hour before midnight, the various members of the court assembled. Theirlooks were dark and troubled as they wondered who the mysterious culprit might be. None knew but Hulin, the president; the judge-advocate; and Savary, the destined executioner. In a neighboring room was the duke, pale and exhausted by his long journey, munching a slender meal, which he shared with his dog, and explaining to his jailer his dreary forebodings at the prospect of a long imprisonment. He thought it would be ameliorated if only he could gratify his passion for hunting, and surely they two, as prisoner and keeper, might range the forest in company. But at last he fell asleep from sheer fatigue. The jailer could not well encourage the expectations of his new prisoner, for he had that very morning supervised the digging of a grave in the castle moat. At midnight the duke was awakened and confronted with the judge-advocate. Réal was unaccountably absent, and the interrogatory so carefully prepared by Bonaparte was not at hand. To the rude questions formulated by Hulin, with the aid of a memorandum from Murat, the prisoner, in spite of repeated hints from the members of the court-martial as to the consequences, would only reply that he had a pension from England, and had applied to her ministers for military service; that he hoped to fight for his cause with troops raised in Germany from among the disaffected and the emigrants; that he had already fought against France. But he stoutly denied any relations with Dumouriez or Pichegru and all knowledge of the plot to assassinate the First Consul. He was then called to the bar in the dimly lighted sitting-room where the commission sat. To the papers containing questions and answers he was ironically permitted to affix a demand for an audience with the First Consul. "My name, my station, my mode of thought, and the horror of my situation," he said, "inspire me with hope thathe will not refuse my request." The tribunal followed its instincts: its members, knowing well the familiar statutes under which such bodies had acted since the days of the Convention, but not having at hand the words or forms of a verdict as prescribed by the pitiless laws concerning those who had borne arms against France, left in the record a blank to be filled out later, and pronounced their judgment that the "regular sentence" be executed at once. They were actually engaged in composing a petition for clemency to the First Consul when Savary burst into the room, demanding what had been done, and what they were then doing. Snatching the pen from Hulin's hand, he exclaimed, "The rest is my affair," and left the room.
It was now two in the morning of the twenty-first. "Follow me," said the taciturn Harel to Enghien, "and summon all your courage." A few paces through the moat, a turn of a corner, and the flare of torches displayed a file of troops not far from an open grave. As the adjutant began to read the sentence, the victim faltered for a moment and exclaimed, "Oh, God! what have I done?" But immediately he regained the mastery of himself. Calmly clipping a lock of his hair, and drawing a ring from his finger, he asked that they might be sent to the Princess Charlotte. A volley—and in an instant he was dead. Savary put spurs to his horse to carry the news to Malmaison. At the gate of Paris he met the carriage of Réal, who seemed almost overpowered by what he heard in reply to his eager questions, and terrified by his own remissness. If it really were such, it must be attributed to a misunderstanding and not to lack of zeal.
Bonaparte believed to the end that his victim was a guilty conspirator. For a time he had recourse to some unworthy subterfuges tending to show that the executionwas the result of a blunder; but later he justified his conduct as based on reasons of state, and claimed that the act was one of self-defense. "I was assailed," he was reported to have said—"I was assailed on all hands by the enemies whom the Bourbons raised up against me. Threatened with air-guns, infernal machines, and deadly stratagems of every kind, I had no tribunal on earth to which I could appeal for protection; therefore I had a right to protect myself, and by putting to death one of those whose followers threatened my life I was entitled to strike a salutary terror into others." When on his death-bed, his maladroit attendant read from an English review a bitter arraignment of him as guilty of the duke's murder. The dying man rose, and, catching up his will, wrote in his own hand: "I had the Duc d'Enghien seized and tried because it was necessary to the safety, the interest, and the honor of the French people, when by his own confession the Comte d'Artois was supporting sixty assassins in Paris. Under similar circumstances I would again do likewise." Nevertheless he occasionally endeavored to unload the entire responsibility on Talleyrand. To Lord Ebrington, to O'Meara, to Las Cases, to Montholon, he asseverated that Talleyrand had checked his impulses to clemency.
The perpetrator of this bloody crime represented the Revolution too well to suit the new society. A shudder crossed the world on receipt of the news. But the only European monarch that dared to protest was the Czar, who broke off diplomatic relations and put his court into mourning. But he could go no further; for he could find no one on the Continent to join with him in declaring war. Prussia remained neutral and her king silent. Austria withdrew her troops from Swabia, and sent a courier to say at Paris that she could understand certain political necessities. In the autumn, however,when they had gained time to observe France and mark Bonaparte's policy, Russia and Austria began to draw together. Dynastic politics therefore rendered the public expression of popular opinion impossible; but in France, as in the length and breadth of Europe, the masses were aroused. Was the age of violence not passed? Were they merely to exchange one tyranny for another more bloody? The same men who years before had looked on in a dumb stupor, and with consenting approval, at the events of the Terror in Paris were now alert and alarmed at the possibility of its renewal. The First Consul was mortified and angry. Many of those nearest to him had opposed his course from the outset, and he felt deeply their ill-disguised disapproval. His only remedy was arbitrary prohibition of all discussion, and to this he had recourse. Intending to fix the blame of conspiracy and assassination on England and the Bourbons, he found himself regarded as little else than a murderer. A Richelieu could execute a Montmorency with impunity, but not so could a Bonaparte murder a Condé. Long afterward he dictated to Méneval, "The merited death of the Duc d'Enghien hurt Napoleon in public opinion, and politically was of no service to him." But the masses are proverbially fickle, and easily diverted. Three days after the execution Talleyrand gave a successful ball.
The Parisian world was in fact very fickle. Society had been much exercised over the execution of Enghien, but rumors of coming war furnished more interesting topics of conversation. The giddy majority had a few passing emotions, gossiped about one theme and the other alternately, and then went on with its amusements. The grave men who sincerely desired their country's welfare were profoundly moved, and whispered serious forebodings to each other. The world at large was sensitiveto both currents of thought, but in the main the masses considered the coming coronation ceremonies, the splendors of empire, and the prospects for unbounded glory opened by Napoleon's unhampered control vastly more entertaining as a subject of flippant speculation than anything else.
Bonaparte's Principles — His Comprehension of French Conditions — Meaning of Enghien's Murder — The Dynasties of Europe — The Possibilities of Hereditary Power — The New France — Desire for a Dynasty — Suggestions of Monarchy — The Empire Proposed — The New Constitution — Imperial State — The New Nobility — Device of the Empire — The New Court — The Plebiscite.
Step by step, laboriously and painfully, by guile and prudence, in the exercise of consummate genius as soldier and politician, Napoleon Bonaparte had now climbed to the pinnacle of revolutionary power. Insubordinate as a subaltern under a worn-out system, he found for his soaring ambition no fitting sphere in the country of his birth, the only fatherland he ever knew; and in that limited field he was both ineffectual as an agitator and unsuccessful as a revolutionary. But with keen insight he studied and apprehended the greater movement as it developed in France. Standing ever at the parting of the ways, and indifferent to principle, he carefully considered each path, and finally chose the one which seemed likeliest to guide his footsteps toward the goal of his ambition. Fertile in resources, he strove always to construct a double plan, and in the failure ofone expedient passed easily to another. His career had been marked by many blunders, and he had often been brought to a stand on the verge of some abyss which threatened failure and ruin; yet, like the driver of a midnight train, he kept the headlight of caution trimmed and burning. Careless of the dangers abounding behind the walls of revolutionary darkness which hedged his track, he ever paused before those immediately confronting him, and sometimes retreated far to find a hazardless circuit. Brumaire was almost the only occasion of his larger life on which, unwary, he had come in full career upon an open chasm. Fate being propitious, he was saved. Lucien, with presence of mind, opened the throttle, and, by releasing the pent-up enthusiasm of the soldiers at the critical instant, safely drove the machine across a toppling bridge.
Sobered for the moment by contemplating a past danger which had threatened annihilation, and by the crowding responsibilities of the future, the First Consul put into practical operation many important revolutionary ideals. But in this process he took full advantage of the state of French society to make himself indispensable to the continuance of French life on its new path. By the parade of civil liberty and a restored social order he so minimized the constitutional side of his government as to erect it into a virtual tyranny. The self-styled commonwealth, with a chief magistrate claiming to hold his office as a public trust, was quite ready to be launched as a liberal empire under a ruler who in reality held the highest power as a possession.
1804
The murder of the Duc d'Enghien was virtually a notification of this fact to all the dynasties of Europe as well as to the French nation. Their behavior was conclusive evidence that they understood it as such. Death was the fate destined not merely for the intestineand personal enemies of the First Citizen, but for the foreign foe, prince or peasant, who should conspire against him whom the French delighted to honor. Had the continental powers been ready for war, it is quite possible that they would have made the execution of a Bourbon, and he the most popular of his line, the ground of immediate action. But they were far from ready. When a few days later the "Moniteur" made known the high probability of what is now a certainty, that Drake and Smith, British diplomatic agents in central Europe, were compromised hopelessly in the conspiracy to kill the chief magistrate of France, the bitterness of all classes, even the aristocracy, in France was assuaged. Great Britain could do nothing officially except to knit up a coalition and strengthen her forces. The Elector of Bavaria dismissed Drake, the British envoy at his court, as a base conspirator; the Duke of Würtemberg congratulated Bonaparte on his escape from assassins; the Holy Roman Emperor at Vienna kept silence while his ministers expressed sympathy for France; the King of Prussia and Alexander of Russia exchanged letters of reciprocal regard and awaited the British subventions to complete their armaments: but they gave no offense in any official way. The Pope exhibited his grief without restraint, but uttered no remonstrance, and the court of Naples was of course indifferent. There was a general putting on of mourning garb in the high circles of Europe; Louis XVIII sent back his decoration of the Golden Fleece to Madrid because Bonaparte had received and retained its insignia, and the dethroned Gustavus of Sweden returned to Frederick William the badges of the Red Eagle for a similar reason. Pretenders may indulge their sensibilities as hard-working kings dare not. It is entirely possible that Bonaparte believed himself, and a dynasty proceeding from hisloins, to be the best, if not the only, conservators of the new France; that he conceived of a purely French empire which should be the depository for that land of all that had been gained by the Revolution; and that he believed he could overcome the inertia of the tremendous speed with which he had entered upon his career of single rule. But it is not probable; for no one knew the French better, appreciating as he did their patriotism and their passion for leadership among nations. It was because the Bourbons had failed to represent these qualities that reconstructed France despised the Bourbons; it was because the new France saw their incarnation in Bonaparte that it had assisted him to climb. He must have known very well that, having mounted so high, he would be compelled to mount still higher.
He also understood the dynastic exclusiveness of Europe. In a sense the houses of Hanover, of Hohenzollern, and of Savoy were parvenus in the councils of royalty; yet they were ancient princely stocks, and their accession to supreme power had not shocked popular feeling; the dubious and blood-stained title of the Czar did not diminish his influence, for his succession was not more irregular than that of many of his predecessors on the semi-oriental Russian throne. But to substitute for the Bourbons, the oldest divine-right dynasty of Europe, and in the enlightened West, a citizen king of low descent, who based his claims on popular suffrage, was to hurl defiance at a system than which to millions of minds none other was conceivable. To reach the goal fighting was not a voluntary choice, but an absolute necessity; for the French must be left in no doubt but that their popular sovereign was quite as able to assert his peerage among kings as any one of royal lineage and ecclesiastical unction would be.
These were the conditions under which the bark ofliberal empire was to set sail. It does not seem possible that any pilot could have saved her amid such typhoons as she must encounter. Bonaparte was more likely to succeed than any other, and for years his craft was taut and saucy; but she had no friendly harbors in which to refit, she rode out one storm only to enter another more violent, and at last even the supernal powers of the great captain failed him. Even at the outset the omens were not as propitious as they appeared to be, since the defiance contained in Enghien's murder was better understood abroad than at home. For the moment the mistake, which in the long run was an element in Napoleon's undoing, appeared of little importance. The French public began almost immediately to discuss whether the consular power should not be made hereditary, and, within a week after its occurrence, relegated the "Enghien affair" to apparent oblivion.
For this there were numerous reasons. The discontent in the army virtually disappeared with Moreau's disgrace, and for long thereafter both generals and men were entirely docile. The Bourbons returned to their conspiracies, but so ineffectively that neither the cabinets of Europe nor the French people felt any active interest. Royalism in France was thus temporarily crushed. The France of 1803 was the new France. Her church had been reconstructed; her army was devoted to Bonaparte as the man of the nation; her revolution had been partly pruned and partly warped into the forms of a personal government, her laws revised and codified, her old orders of chivalry replaced by a new one, her financial administration purified and strengthened, her educational system renovated, her social and family life given new direction by the stringent regulation of testamentary disposition, her government centralized—in short, the whole structure, from foundationto turret, had been repaired, restored, strengthened, and given its modern form.
The people, composed of successive alluvia of immigrants and conquerors since the days of Julius Cæsar, had been thoroughly unified by the spirit of the French Revolution. They were convinced that the gains of the Revolution would be better secured by making hereditary the power of a house which must represent the principles of that event. All but a few sincerely believed that patriotism for the new France was in large measure only another name and form for devotion to the man who presided at its birth and claimed to be its progenitor. For some time past the phrase "French empire" had been used by orators and writers to designate the majesty of its institutions. As early as May, 1802, the Austrian ambassador heard the First Consul spoken of as "Emperor of the Gauls," and in March, 1803, an English gentleman in Paris recorded the same expression in his journal. There was, therefore, neither shock nor surprise anywhere in the nation when on March twenty-seventh, 1804, the senate presented to the First Consul an address proposing in the name of the people that he should take measures "to keep for the sons what he had made for the fathers." This was the moment, presumably, of Bonaparte's greatest unpopularity—not a week after the execution of the Duc d'Enghien; while yet the blundering trial of Moreau was incomplete, and his friends were representing their hero as the victim of Bonaparte's hate; before Georges had been condemned, and while Pichegru was yet alive. Yet all expected the event, most desired it, partly for the reason given by the senate, partly for the dramatic effect, partly because they wanted neither the Bourbons nor the Terror again. The senate was now known as the tool of the First Consul; Fouché was second to none of his colleaguesin power and he thirsted for a renewal of favor, imperial if that was the desired label. In spite of changes, the tribunate still retained the national respect: it was desirable that the formal initiative should come from this body. During the weeks which elapsed between the address of the senate and the end of April, Bonaparte had made certain that neither Austria nor Prussia would oppose, and that army and people were willing. Indeed the fate of Moreau had, as the officers all felt, cast a limelight on the chances of insubordination, and had illuminated into a dazzling brilliance the possibilities of complaisance. The efforts of historians to prove that France did not want the empire are all failures. Every new contemporary document which sees the light of day contains more or less to prove the contrary. The French of any intelligence understood the Roman meaning of empire and indeed it was easily comprehensible. They had had long experience of the interests of all in the charge of an oligarchy; that type of democracy had brought them to the verge of ruin since nowhere could responsibility be fixed or penalties be inflicted. But the interests of all in the charge of one supernal man was a conception so plain as to be almost tangible, and to a nation distracted by revolution, most attractive. It was an imperial democracy which they desired, which they got, and which for a time retained its character. On the twenty-fifth, therefore, the First Consul seized once more the shield of the Revolution, and told the senate that he had heard with interest their plan "to insure the triumph of equality and public liberty," and would be glad to know their thoughts without reserve. "I should like on July fourteenth of this year to say to the French people: 'Fifteen years ago by a spontaneous movement you ran to arms, you secured liberty, equality, glory. To-day these chiefest treasures of the nation,assured beyond a doubt, are sheltered from every storm; they are preserved for you and your children.'"