Napoleon: a life

22 Caesar

THE STATE OF France is greatly changed over the past year, a perfect tranquillity and general confidence have replaced civil war and despondency,’ a former nobleman wrote to his son who was in Egypt with the Army of the Orient in September 1800. ‘I do not know whether you realise how great is the enthusiasm of the French for the First Consul. We are as tranquil as under the ancien régime.’ That was something Bonaparte would have been glad to hear; he himself was far from tranquil.^[1]

On 7 September he answered the letter he had received from Louis XVIII six months earlier, thanking him for the flattering things he had written about him, but ruling out a restoration, as that could not be achieved without civil strife and bloodshed on a vast scale. He advised him to sacrifice his interests to those of France and activated Talleyrand’s contacts with royalists and the Russian and Prussian governments to investigate the possibility of obtaining from Louis the abdication of his rights and those of his dynasty to the throne of France (Warsaw, where Louis had moved after being expelled from Mittau [Jelgava] by Tsar Paul I, was under Prussian rule). The options held out to him ranged from a generous pension and a grand residence in Russia to some minor kingdom in Italy. But Louis replied in a letter to Bonaparte which he had published in the British press, thanking him for recognising that he did have rights to the throne and rejecting the offer of a pension. The snub produced no effect in France.^[2]

The royalist insurgents in the west had been defeated earlier that year. The British agent William Wickham, who had been coordinating espionage and plots against the French government from Switzerland, had been recalled to London. The royalist agency in Augsburg had been wound up due to lack of funds, and the British had ceased to finance the royalist émigré army under the prince de Condé, which gradually disintegrated.

Yet the question of who was to rule France was not one that could be easily settled, any more than other issues raised by the Revolution, and Bonaparte realised it. During a visit to Joseph’s country house at Mortefontaine in August, he went over to the park of Ermenonville to see the tomb of Rousseau, now empty, in its picturesque setting on an island in the lake. ‘It would have been better for the peace of France if that man had never existed,’ he said to the owner, Stanislas de Girardin. ‘Why do you say that, citizen consul?’ asked the other. ‘He paved the way for the French Revolution,’ replied Bonaparte. Girardin pointed out that Bonaparte had only gained by that, to which the consul replied, ‘History will tell whether it would not have been better for the peace of the world if neither Rousseau nor I had been born!’^[3]

The younger brother of Louis XVIII, the comte d’Artois, now based in London, continued to foster plots through agents in France, supported by the British government. The first was in the spring of 1800, when Hyde de Neuville and Georges Cadoudal had planned to kidnap and assassinate Bonaparte while General Pichegru, who had escaped from Guyana, prepared to subvert elements of the army and march on the capital. Fouché had gotten wind of the plot, but proceeded slowly, hoping to find out more and, by giving the conspirators time, to catch as many as possible in the act. Lucien, who as minister of the interior had his own intelligence networks, became aware of what was going on and saw an opportunity of denouncing Fouché, whom he loathed, as a co-conspirator. Fouché was not to be caught unawares and arrested the ringleaders, revealing the plot to Bonaparte on 4 May, just before his departure for Italy. There would be more than thirty plots to kill him over the next decade, most of them by royalists.^[4]

Bonaparte regarded the Jacobins as a greater threat than the royalists, as they had more supporters in the army. He contrived to keep these as far from the capital as possible: Augereau was in the Netherlands, Brune in Italy, Joubert had been sent to Milan as ambassador to the Cisalpine Republic. Potentially more dangerous than any of them was Moreau, who allowed himself to be courted by all parties — Jacobins, royalists, and ideologues — and, by making the right noises, playing the honest soldier concerned only for the good of his country and remaining all things to all men. The officers in his entourage enhanced the image of him as a guileless patriot and a brilliant commander, and at his headquarters Bonaparte was seen as a self-seeking usurper.^[5]

Fouché foiled a number of attempts on the life of Bonaparte, most notably one to kill him at the Opéra. The plotters included Joseph Aréna, a Corsican Jacobin whose brother Barthélémy had allegedly tried to stab Bonaparte during the scuffle in the orangery at Brumaire, and Joseph Ceracchi, a sculptor and pupil of Canova. They were seized red-handed at the Opéra on 10 November, but were not brought to trial. Bonaparte believed in hushing up most attempts on his life, as news of them would only dent the image of his immense popularity and put in question the stability of his regime. In some cases the culprits were locked up for a few weeks or months and then let out. In this case, they were executed.^[6]

He paid little attention to his own safety. ‘He realised the impossibility of foreseeing an attempt on his person,’ according to one senior policeman. ‘To fear everything struck him as a weakness unworthy of his nature, to be guarded everywhere a folly.’ He gave the impression of being remarkably detached. ‘Well, see to it, it’s your job,’ he would say when informed of a threat to his life. ‘It is up to the police to take measures, I haven’t the time.’^[7]

He really did not have the time. From the moment he returned from Italy he adopted a punishing work schedule, holding a meeting with his fellow consuls nearly every day and sessions of the Council of State several times a week through the whole of July, in the course of which he only managed one visit to Malmaison and one to Mortefontaine. In August there were only three days on which he did not have a meeting with the consuls, in September only one. He managed three days at Malmaison and one at Mortefontaine in the course of August. That month saw the achievement of one of his principal objectives and the initiation of a number of others.

For one who disliked ‘men of business’ as much as he did, Bonaparte was remarkably interested in money; having reflected on the causes of the Revolution, he appreciated its importance for the security of the state. His views on economics were unsophisticated. Like everyone else in France, he had seen the dire consequences of paper currency inflation. His personal experience contributed to a fear of penury, and he liked to have cash in hand. He did not understand or like the idea of well-balanced debt and government credit, which he saw as no more than betting on a favourable outcome. He liked specie and wanted to amass as much of it as possible.

One of the first things he did on coming to power was to charge Gaudin with reorganising the collection of tax. The next was to address the problem of the Republic’s huge debt, which hindered attempts to balance the budget. Gaudin called in a friend, Nicolas Mollien, the son of a wealthy weaver of Rouen, who had started out as a barrister and who, in the course of a clandestine sojourn in England under the Directory, indulged a long-standing interest in economics. Brought down to Malmaison by Gaudin, in the course of a two-hour session in the presence of Cambacérès and Lebrun, he explained to a bewildered Bonaparte the workings of the stock market and the principle of a sinking fund, suggesting the creation of one as an agency for managing government debt. Mollien was not convinced that the first consul fully understood the concept, but Bonaparte was never slow to grasp a good idea, and Mollien was duly appointed director of the Caisse d’amortissement, the sinking fund.^[8]

In a bold move, Bonaparte decreed on 11 August that interest on government bonds would henceforth be paid in specie rather than paper money. The effect was immediate; government bonds doubled in value. The ‘men of business’ were now firmly behind him, and the return of public confidence in the state finances stimulated economic activity and paved the way for the introduction of the silver franc in March 1803 (it would remain stable until 1914).^[9]

Another measure initiated that August was the codification of the multifarious laws in existence. France had been waiting for over a century for this, and in 1790 the revolutionary National Assembly addressed the matter. A committee under Cambacérès came up with a project for a Civil Code consisting of 719 articles. This was discussed, amended, resubmitted, and rejected by the Convention in 1794. Cambacérès produced a third draft, of 1,104 articles, in June 1796, but only a few were promulgated and the commission was dissolved.

Shortly after his return to Paris, on 12 August 1800, Bonaparte appointed a commission consisting of Jean-Étienne Portalis, François-Denis Tronchet, Jacques de Maleville, and Félix-Julien Bigot de Préameneu to draw up a Civil Code of Laws. Its leading light was Portalis, a brilliant lawyer and a friend of Cambacérès. He was fifty-four, Bigot only a year younger, Maleville nearly sixty, and Tronchet seventy-four. They were products of the ancien régime (Maleville was a ci-devant marquis) and had all been active during the Revolution. They brought a wealth of experience and a heavy dose of pragmatism to the task and produced a draft which was passed for comment to the judges of the highest courts before being presented to the Council of State in January 1801, less than six months after their nomination.

Over the next year the Council of State would devote more than a hundred sessions to it, at least fifty-seven of them presided over by Bonaparte, who stamped his own views and personality on the final version. This was a marriage of Roman and common law, incorporating much of the legislative legacy of the kingdom of France but deeply marked by the spirit of the Revolution. It was in some ways more than a code of laws. As Portalis stressed in his introduction, it was a kind of rulebook for a new society, secular and modern. Bonaparte’s contribution was considerable and is particularly evident in the Code’s stress on property as the basis of social organisation, and even more so in the domestic sphere.

His background is detectable in the Code’s assumption of the family as the basis of society and of the manner in which it should function. His personal experience is detectable in the clauses governing marital relations and the rights of women. According to the Code, the husband had a duty to provide for and protect the wife, but she must obey him in everything and could not perform any legal action without his authorisation. The husband could divorce an adulterous wife, but the opposite was only possible if he moved his mistress into the family home. A woman convicted of adultery was obliged to spend between three months and two years in a house of correction. The minutes of the meetings reveal Bonaparte’s input, which is marked by his disenchantment with women caused by Josephine’s infidelities and profligacy. ‘Women need to be contained,’ he declared, explaining that they were naturally more flighty than men when it came to sex and liable to spend their husband’s money like water. ‘The husband must have the absolute power and right to say to his wife: Madame, you will not go out, you will not go to the theatre, you will not see such and such a person.’ At the same time, he was sensitive on matters such as divorce, making it easier for couples living in unhappy marriages. He also sought to elevate adoption into a secular sacrament, granting it solemnity.^[10]

The Code Civil des Français, as it was called, would not become law until 21 March 1804 and would be known as the Code Napoléon. Bonaparte was immensely proud of it. ‘Proud as he was of his military glory, he was no less so of his legislative talents,’ according to Cambacérès. ‘Nothing moved him more than the praise frequently bestowed on the merits of a code of which he liked to see himself as the creator.’ He was neither its creator nor even its editor, but he was the catalyst, and without him it would not have come into existence.^[11]

That was true of almost everything that was achieved during his consulship. In the Council of State he had gathered together the most brilliant minds and the greatest experts in the country, and he drove them like slaves. As one of them put it, ‘one had to be made of iron’ to work with him. In the course of 1800 alone, the Council of State dealt with 911 separate measures (in 1804 it would be 3,365). Over a period of not much more than five years it would create the entire framework of the state and, in its auditeurs, the young men who sat behind the councillors taking minutes and notes, a new administrative class to run it. It was not unusual for Bonaparte to keep them at it for eight or ten hours with only a fifteen-minute break for lunch. ‘Come, come, citizens, wake up,’ he would exclaim if he saw them flagging after midnight, ‘it is only two o’clock, and we must earn the money which the people of France give us.’^[12]

He would prepare himself before every session by reading up on the relevant subject. Taking his place at the head of a long table at which the councillors were seated, he would open the discussion, which he expected to be conducted without deference to him. ‘Gentlemen, it is not to be of my opinion but to hear yours that I have summoned you,’ he would say if he noticed a trace of complaisance. ‘The Council was made up of people of very diverse opinions, and everyone freely supported his,’ recalled Thibaudeau. ‘The majority view did not prevail. Far from bending to that, the First Consul would encourage the minority.’ He would listen to them attentively, toying with his snuffbox, opening and shutting the lid, occasionally taking a pinch, most of which fell on the white facings of his uniform, and, without looking, pass the snuffbox to an aide waiting behind his chair, who would hand him another. To help himself think, he would produce a pen-knife from his pocket and belabour the arm of his chair with it (this was regularly replaced by a cabinetmaker). He asked questions, demanded more precision, and sometimes applied the rules of mathematics to the process of arriving at a conclusion. He encouraged them to contradict and correct him, saying, ‘We are amongst ourselves here, we are en famille.’ Once a conclusion had been reached, however, he would close the discussion and quickly pass on to the next matter.^[13]

His input was considerable. ‘What he did not know he seemed to anticipate and divine,’ according to one. ‘He had a prodigious facility to learn, judge, discuss, and to retain without confusing an infinite number of things.’ His extraordinary memory, combined with an ability to pinpoint the key idea, stimulated colleagues who were more learned, wiser, and more expert but needed to be pinned down, and in the words of Mathieu Molé, ‘the most learned and most experienced legal minds would come out confounded by the sagacity of the First Consul and the illuminating insights he introduced into the discussion’. Roederer confirms that at the end of every session they would part feeling wiser. ‘Under his governance, a rather extraordinary thing happened to those who worked with him,’ he wrote. ‘Mediocrities found they had talent, and men of talent felt their mediocrity, so much did he inspire the one and unsettle the other. People hitherto thought to be incapable became useful, men who had been considered brilliant were confounded.…’ Even Lucien, who gave his brother little credit, admitted to being impressed by his brilliance when he first saw him in action at a session of the Council.^[14]

His capacity for work was extraordinary. He would on occasion preside over a Council from ten o’clock at night until five in the morning, then retire to have a bath, after which he would get back to work. ‘An hour in a bath is worth four hours’ sleep,’ he used to say. His work schedule outside the meetings of the consular council and the Council of State was equally punishing. He would sometimes wake up at one or four o’clock in the morning, summon his unfortunate secretary, and dressed in a white dressing gown with a scarf wrapped about his head, start dictating. He hardly ever wrote himself, mainly because his writing could not keep up with his thought process, but also because neither he nor anyone else could read it. He might take a break for some ice cream or sorbet, and sometimes for something more substantial, then resume where he had left off.^[15]

As a man of action with a military background and a mathematical mind, Bonaparte had a clear idea of how to proceed with the task he had set himself. Following the Brumaire coup he had provided himself with the means of getting on with it, and after Marengo he acquired even greater power. Many welcomed this. Germaine de Staël was enthusiastic about the ‘glorious dictatorship’ of ‘this great man’ who according to her had the ability to ‘uplift the world’. Lafayette too expressed his approval of the ‘restorative dictatorship’ he was exercising, seeing in it the only hope of repairing the state and safeguarding liberty. But there were many who disagreed.^[16]

A decade of debate had encouraged speculation and discussion, as well as a sense of self-importance among the intellectual elites which had dominated politics from the start of the Revolution, at the expense of pragmatism. In the interests of including representatives of the whole spectrum of French politics, Bonaparte had given seats to them in one or other of the assemblies. As soon as they took their seats his opponents began to denounce him as a tyrant, emboldening the more moderate who were alarmed at the developments. His doings were also discussed and criticised in salons and at the Institute, toward which he had cooled markedly, no longer addressing its members endearingly as ‘colleagues’. Much of it was harmless verbiage, but like many witnesses of the Revolution Bonaparte was wary of demagogy. Having got used to giving orders and brooking no discussion, he saw any dissent as a challenge to his authority. His sense of insecurity made him umbrageous, and he took obstruction or even delay personally.

There was also resistance in the army, which was highly politicised and clung to the ideals of the Revolution more tenaciously than the rest of society. Generals did not look favourably on one of their kind being placed above them, and there were some who felt equally entitled to such distinction. Bonaparte’s best hope here, as in the political field, where he reached over the heads of the political class and appealed to the nation, was to bypass the generals and capture the hearts of the soldiers. That task was not going to be made any easier by his intention of bringing about a national reconciliation involving what he called a social ‘fusion’ of those who had served the ancien régime with those wedded to the Republic, which involved the reintegration into the mainstream of royalist dissidents and émigrés. This would both eliminate a threat to the state and capture a wealth of talent for it. It also involved something which was bound to offend most soldiers as well as the entire political class.

The Bulletin of 18 June from Milan had carried an unctuous account of the first consul’s attendance at the Te Deum in the Duomo, where the clergy of the city had treated him with the utmost respect. It was not a gratuitous piece of self-promotion. Bonaparte’s views on religion were influenced by the writings of the Enlightenment, and like many of his contemporaries he rejected much of Christian teaching — he found the divinity of Christ not credible, the resurrection physically impossible, and miracles ridiculous. He could not accept that, as he put it, Cato and Caesar were damned because they were born before Christ. He was also anti-clerical. But he displayed lingering attachment to the faith, making the sign of the cross at critical moments and admitting to a love of the sound of church bells. He pondered the meaning of life, seeking explanations which were not always rational, and with time even came to believe that he had a soul. ‘I do not believe in religions, but in the existence of God,’ he said to Thibaudeau in June 1801, adding, ‘Who created all this?’ ‘Everything proclaims the existence of a God, that is beyond doubt,’ he asserted to another.^[17]

More important, he valued the role of religion itself. ‘As for me, I do not see in religion the mystery of the Incarnation, only the mystery of the Social Order,’ he told his councillors. ‘How can one have order in a state without religion?’ he challenged Roederer. ‘Society cannot exist without inequality of wealth and inequality of wealth cannot exist without religion. When a man is dying of hunger next to another who is gorging, he cannot possibly accept this difference if he has not had it on good authority that: “God wishes it so: there must be poor and rich people in the world, but afterwards, and for eternity, things will be divided up differently.”’ A proper religion, he assured the Council of State, was ‘a vaccine for the imagination’, inoculating people against ‘all sorts of dangerous and absurd beliefs’. He held atheism to be ‘destructive of all social organisation, as it robs Man of every source of consolation and hope’.^[18]

He also appreciated that religious observance lay at the heart of the spiritual and temporal lives of the rural masses which made up the overwhelming majority of the population, and that by attacking it the Revolution had alienated them from the state. Attempts at introducing new, supposedly rational, substitutes such as the cult of the Supreme Being and Theophilanthropy he dismissed as inept since they lacked a numinous dimension. He was convinced that France could only be ‘restored’ (and his domination firmly established) if the state could engage the acceptance, if not the affection, of the rural masses and the old nobility, and this meant re-establishing the Church. Circumstances favoured him in one way.

The death of Pope Pius VI in August 1799 was followed by a long interregnum, and it was not until 14 March 1800 that the conclave, sitting in Venice, elected a new pope in the fifty-seven-year-old Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti, who took the name Pius VII. Not only was he an open-minded and intelligent man not averse to republican forms of government, he was locked in conflict with Austria and Naples, which both had designs on the Papal States.

A week after the Te Deum in Milan, at Vercelli on his way back to Paris, Bonaparte encountered Cardinal Martiniana, to whom he expressed the wish to open negotiations with the Pope to regularise the status of the Church and religious practice in France. It was not going to be easy to achieve; most of the political class was dogmatically irreligious, while most of the military were ‘cassock-haters’ who had only ever entered churches in order to loot.

Many in Bonaparte’s entourage were appalled when he mentioned the idea. Neither Cambacérès nor Lebrun relished it. Fouché and Talleyrand were horrified — the first had been a teacher in Oratorian schools, the second a bishop, and any reminder of their ecclesiastical past was unwelcome. Fouché argued that it would be unpopular among the people. Talleyrand, who was still technically in holy orders, did everything he could to discourage Bonaparte, but once he realised the process was unstoppable, he set about trying to get the Pope to release him from his sacerdotal vows — which Pius VII refused to do. On 5 November Monsignor Spina, Archbishop of Corinth, arrived in Paris to open negotiations. Bonaparte greeted him cordially and appointed the Abbé Bernier to prepare the ground, under the supervision of a squirming Talleyrand.^[19]

Spina’s arrival was overshadowed by another event, which caused a sensation: the publication on 1 November of an anonymous pamphlet titled Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monck et Bonaparte. ‘There are men who appear at certain epochs to found, destroy or repair empires,’ it proclaimed. ‘For ten years we have been seeking a firm and able hand which could arrest everything and sustain everything […] That man has appeared. Who can fail to recognise him in Bonaparte?’ The author went on to say that where Cromwell destroyed, Bonaparte repaired, where Cromwell had made civil war, Bonaparte had united Frenchmen. As for Monck, how could anyone believe that Bonaparte would be happy with a dukedom and retirement under some indolent monarch? ‘Bonaparte is, like Caesar, one of those characters before whom all obstacles and all opposition give way: his inspiration seems so supernatural that in ancient times when the love of the wondrous filled people’s minds they would not have hesitated to believe him to be protected by some spirit or god.’ By suggesting the parallel with Caesar, the pamphlet suggested Bonaparte’s elevation to the ultimate authority, but also raised fears (the Aréna-Ceracchi conspiracy was fresh in people’s minds). ‘Happy republic if he were immortal. […] If suddenly Bonaparte were lost to his country, where are his heirs?’ The author feared that if he were to be killed they would find themselves back under either the ‘tyranny of the assemblies’ or a ‘degenerate race’ of kings. Without proposing anything, he suggested the need to give permanence to Bonaparte’s authority and ensure its perpetuation.^[20]

The author was Lucien, possibly encouraged by Bonaparte, in the interests of testing public opinion. This reacted with a predictable degree of outrage. The first consul affected to share it, ordering a thousand copies to be publicly burned. For the benefit of insiders who knew or suspected the identity of the author, he staged a dressing-down of his younger brother which culminated in Lucien throwing his ministerial portfolio onto the desk and flouncing out of the room. On 5 November Lucien was relieved of his post and replaced by a favourite of the ideologues, Jean-Antoine Chaptal. Letizia attempted to intervene on behalf of her favourite son, and Joseph tried to mediate, but Bonaparte was intractable. Lucien’s wife had died, and he was leading a rackety life of promiscuity ill-suited to a leading minister (he would as good as rape any woman unwise enough to call at the ministry), which Fouché was avidly recording and publicising. Talleyrand suggested sending the delinquent to Madrid as ambassador, and he duly left Paris. Josephine and Fouché were exultant — Fouché because he hated Lucien, Josephine for even weightier reasons.^[21]

Whatever the public reaction, Lucien’s pamphlet had provoked discussion on how to ensure the survival of the stability achieved over the past year. It had made the connection between that and the person of the first consul and pointed the discussion in the direction along which he was thinking. What Bonaparte, and the country, needed above all was an end to the war. Whether he believed it or not, he argued that a republic by its very nature represented an affront to the hereditary monarchies of Europe, and therefore a fundamental casus belli. The only way of removing this source of conflict was to give the French state’s political institutions a ‘form’, as he put it, ‘a little more in harmony’ with theirs. The Revolution’s primary achievement had been to overthrow the feudal aspects of the ancien régime and establish a constitutional monarchy. The Republic had come into being as a result of untoward events which the majority of the population did not endorse. Turning the state back into a monarchy was unthinkable only to the relatively small number of dedicated republicans. ‘The party which longs for a king is immense, enormous, although it is united by nothing other than the deep feeling that there should be one,’ reported an informer in Paris to the court of Naples in the spring of 1798, adding that nobody wanted Louis XVIII, only a warrior king and a constitutional monarchy.^[22]

The institution of monarchy may have still surrounded itself with anachronistic pomp, but it no longer required the kind of sacral aura it had in the days of divine right. Whereas the Bourbons had been on the throne of France for 300 years, the house of Hanover had reigned in Britain for only eighty-six, the same as the Bourbons in Spain, those of Naples only sixty-six, and the Habsburgs had entrenched themselves on the imperial throne as late as 1745. The elector of Brandenburg had decided to call himself king in Prussia less than a hundred years before, and the tsar of Muscovy emperor of Russia in 1721.

In the circumstances, there was no reason why France should not acquire a new dynasty. The question was who was to found it. There were potential candidates among the cadet branches of the French royal house, but they were too closely associated with the ancien régime. They were also unlikely to possess the qualities requisite to deal with the dangers of the French political scene. The man who had those was currently in charge, so there seemed little point in getting rid of him. But he had no heir. And since he had no ancient lineage, or other assets beyond his talents, military and administrative, there was no a priori reason to differentiate between him and any other capable general.

At the beginning of December, news reached Paris of a brilliant victory over the Austrians at Hohenlinden by Moreau. Bonaparte heaped praise on his general’s military skills and presented him with a magnificent pair of pistols. But he was not impressed, or pleased. He had attempted to neutralise him, even going so far as suggesting he marry his sister Caroline, but Moreau was ruled by his mother-in-law, Madame Hulot, a harridan who hated Bonaparte and particularly Josephine. The feeling was mutual, and Bonaparte’s cup overflowed when she made a snide remark about his alleged incestuous affair with Caroline.^[23]

Following his victory, Moreau’s reputation rode high, and while he was far from eclipsing Bonaparte, he was a reminder that there were alternatives, and his very existence heartened ideologues frightened by Bonaparte and royalists still searching for a ‘Monck’. He might well have found himself playing that role if things had turned out differently on the night of 24 December.

That evening, Bonaparte went to the Opéra to listen to Haydn’s Creation. As his carriage trundled down the rue Saint-Nicaise, it passed a stationary cart loaded with a large barrel. This was filled with gunpowder and exploded just after his carriage had passed it, devastating the street, killing four bystanders and wounding another sixty, some of whom would die, but inflicting no harm on Bonaparte. He carried on to the Opéra, where he was deliriously greeted by an audience who had heard the explosion and feared the worst.

On his return to the Tuileries after the performance, he found the palace teeming with concerned generals and officials. When Fouché turned up, Bonaparte taunted him for failing to forestall the attempt on his life, which he attributed to Fouché’s Jacobin ‘friends’. The minister assured him that it had been the work of royalist conspirators and promised to prove it within a week.

With his colleague Réal, Fouché carried out a forensic examination of the scene and what remained of the horse that had drawn the ‘infernal machine’ into position. Réal noticed that one of its legs was newly shod. They showed the shoe to every farrier in Paris, until one recognised it and was able to give a description of the men who had brought the horse to him. They took the nag’s head to every horse-dealer, which led them to the man who had bought it. The arrests that followed established a direct link to Georges Cadoudal and to the British government.^[24]

It was all of a piece with Hyde’s earlier plan to kidnap Bonaparte, and his more recent one, uncovered by the police, of landing a force at Saint-Malo. But Bonaparte feared the Jacobins more than the royalists. ‘The [royalist rebels] and the émigrés are a disease of the skin,’ he said to Fouché a couple of days after the attempt, ‘while [the Jacobins] are a malady of the internal organs.’ He ordered Fouché to draw up a list of active Jacobins, whom he intended to have deported to the penal colonies of Cayenne and Guyana. It came to about a hundred names. The assemblies baulked at proscribing so many, some of them colleagues. In order to bypass them, Cambacérès and Talleyrand devised a legal ploy whereby the Senate, acting in its capacity as guardian of the constitution, issued a senatus-consulte, an edict dressed up as a constitutional safeguard, enacting the contested measure.^[25]

The event had proved a godsend to Bonaparte. A number of royalists were shot, as were some Jacobins. A larger number of those were deported, including what Bonaparte called the sergeants of revolution, those capable of rousing the masses. ‘From then on, I began to sleep peacefully,’ he confided. More important, the episode had led to the invention of the senatus-consulte, a mechanism for making law on the hoof, which he would soon be using to force through a measure establishing special tribunals without juries to deal with certain categories of criminal activity.^[26]

Most important of all, the attempted assassination had shocked public opinion, not only by its violence. It was seen as an attempt not just on Bonaparte’s life, but on the future of the state just as it was emerging from ten years of anarchy and violence. It drew to Bonaparte all the sympathy a victim elicits, and at the same time brought home how fragile was the newfound stability, and how closely it was tied up with his person. It thereby bound the future of the country more closely to him and to his survival. After little more than a year in power, he had become the repository of the hopes of many, and he was about to make the dearest of these come true.