Citizen Emperor (13 page)

These plots did a great deal to enhance the popularity of Bonaparte. Laure, Duchesse d’Abrantès, the wife of General Junot, recalled the overwhelming feelings Bonaparte inspired in people in the winter of 1800: ‘Confidence returned; everyone saw General Bonaparte with the same eyes and at that time those eyes looked on him with love . . . How he was loved then! Yes, he was loved, he was loved everywhere, and even when there was no love there was admiration and confidence in his character.’
¹¹⁹
No doubt, but then Laure may have been the dupe of propaganda after Marengo that made Bonaparte out to be a humane leader, beloved by his troops. If both royalists and terrorists were attempting to assassinate him, it meant that Bonaparte was both revolutionary and an enemy of Jacobin excesses. The idea appealed to a country that aspired to peace after ten years of internal strife.
¹²⁰
After the uncovering of these conspiracies, Bonaparte was cheered by the crowds whenever he appeared in public. Indeed, the month of October 1800 led to an outpouring of public assurances of affection for the First Consul.
¹²¹

It also provided an excellent opportunity for what some in Bonaparte’s entourage had been considering, namely, bestowing on Bonaparte the Consulate for life, and giving him the powers to name a successor. To lend support to this argument, a pamphlet by Lucien appeared at the end of October, probably written with the help of the journalist and founder of the
Mercure de France
Louis Fontanes, possibly at the instigation of Bonaparte himself, entitled
Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monck et Bonaparte
.
¹²²
Whoever the author was, he deliberately cast back to the time of the Merovingians and Carolingians to compare Bonaparte with Charles Martel
¹²³
and Charlemagne. He also harked back to ancient Rome when Caesar, as consul, had become dictator for life and was then proclaimed king, only to be assassinated by Brutus (among others) on the Ides of March.
¹²⁴
Ten years of civil war followed before Augustus triumphed and proclaimed the Empire. The author preferred this option, minus the assassination, and suggested that in order to avoid further civil unrest in France, it was best to confer a hereditary dignity on the First Consul, or at least to enable him to name his successor. The last few paragraphs in particular raised the need for a hereditary office without, however, ever mentioning the word ‘hereditary’. ‘If all of a sudden the
patrie
were to lose Bonaparte, where are his heirs, where are the institutions which could maintain his example and perpetuate his genius? The fate of thirty million men is linked to the life of one man!’

Coming less than one month after the assassination attempt against Bonaparte by Aréna and Ceracchi, the pamphlet reinforced rumours surrounding Bonaparte’s political ambitions, and led people to believe that it was nothing less than a government manoeuvre.
¹²⁵
As such, the reaction was less than favourable. Prefects from all over the country sent in complaints.
¹²⁶
Moreau let Bonaparte know personally that the impact the pamphlet had produced on the Army of the Rhine was deplorable.
¹²⁷
In short, the debate about an heir had come too soon. Bonaparte may have been testing the waters by allowing his brother to publish the text – Bourrienne, who cannot be trusted, asserts that he had seen an annotated version of it in Bonaparte’s office before it was published
¹²⁸
– but it is more likely that the initiative came from those in his entourage. A month or so later, Bonaparte admitted to Roederer that he had ‘given the idea [for the pamphlet], in order to respond to English calumnies’, but that ‘the last two pages are madness; heredity has never been instituted; it instituted itself. It is too absurd to be accepted as law.’
¹²⁹
If the pamphlet had been designed to test the waters on the question of allowing a hereditary succession based on the Bonaparte family, the response was a resounding no.
¹³⁰

As a result, Lucien was made the fall guy. The standard account of this event has Lucien being called to Paris by Bonaparte to explain himself.
¹³¹
Fouché was present at the meeting. Lucien could not deny that the pamphlet had been sent by his office and on his orders, but in his defence he claimed that Fontanes had written the piece and that he had overstepped his orders. That was, to put it mildly, an equivocation. In the scene that followed, Fouché and Lucien threw insults at each other with verve. Fouché made it personal by listing the number of mistresses that Lucien had accrued – although this would hardly have discredited him in the eyes of his brother. Lucien’s counter-accusations were much more to the point: Fouché was charged with taking some of the gaming taxes (which was true). Bonaparte had to intervene and did so in support of Fouché, his minister of police. Beside himself, Lucien threw his minister’s portfolio on to his brother’s desk and stormed out of the Tuileries.

Public opinion had turned against Lucien not only because his name was associated with the pamphlet, but also because he gained the unfortunate reputation of being a spendthrift.
¹³²
Moreover, as minister of the interior he had been difficult. He had simply refused to work with the other two consuls and had exasperated them with his lack of discipline. Fouché was ordered to seize the remaining copies of the
Parallèle
. A thousand of them were burnt in front of the Invalides to appease the army.
¹³³
Tensions within the Bonaparte family were exacerbated when, during an encounter at the Tuileries, the matriarch Letizia took sides with Lucien; Joseph attempted to mediate between his two brothers; and their sister Elisa, who had become close to Lucien during his period of mourning, was reduced to tears.
¹³⁴
Talleyrand solved the problem by suggesting that Lucien be shunted off to Madrid as ambassador. The very next day, 8 November, Lucien left Paris to enter a kind of gilded exile; the man who had helped bring his brother to power was now effectively marginalized. Josephine and her daughter, Hortense, both of whom detested Lucien, were delighted.
¹³⁵

The balance of power had dramatically shifted in Bonaparte’s entourage. With Lucien out of the way, and Carnot having resigned, Fouché’s influence was more pronounced than ever. This worried the more moderate elements in Bonaparte’s circle.
¹³⁶
Fouché’s hands were covered in blood; he had been responsible for one of the worst massacres committed during the Revolution, in Lyons in 1793. More than 1,800 people had been killed during the repression of a revolt in the city.
¹³⁷
The moderates in Bonaparte’s circle were now on the lookout for an opportunity to diminish if not eliminate Fouché altogether. As for the crisis sparked by the pamphlet, it was short-lived, largely because Bonaparte had acted so swiftly to distance himself from his brother that people were inclined to believe Lucien had been acting on his own. Bonaparte emerged from the fray if not squeaky clean, then absolved from accusations of excessive ambition. What lingered in the air though was the question of a successor. It was brought to a head by an attempt on Bonaparte’s life that very nearly succeeded.

4

Peace

‘Blood Must Flow!’

On Christmas Eve 1800, little more than a year after Brumaire, Bonaparte and his party left the Tuileries on their way to the Opera.
¹
A new piece by Joseph Haydn was being performed,
The Creation
, and the boxes had been rented within twenty-four hours of its opening. All Paris had turned out.
²
The orchestra had started playing the introduction, the ‘Representation of Chaos’, when the audience heard an explosion in the distance. Jacques Marquet de Montbreton de Norvins, who had managed to get a box, emerged into the theatre to see a pale and out-of-breath Hugues-Bernard Maret, one of Bonaparte’s secretaries, talking animatedly to a friend; he had just learnt that there had been an assassination attempt against the First Consul. Within moments the whole theatre was abuzz with the news. When Bonaparte appeared, all eyes turned to him.
³
The applause was so loud and energetic that the auditorium shook. Bonaparte, visibly moved, got up several times to thank the public until, on his signal, the opera recommenced.

Bonaparte had not wanted to go to the Opera that evening; he was tired and he much preferred tragedy to opera. It was his daughter-in-law, Hortense, who insisted. When the Consular party was about to enter the carriage, Bonaparte commented on the shawl Josephine was wearing, so she went off to get another. The incident made them leave the Tuileries a little late, and possibly saved their lives. Josephine’s carriage, which carried her daughter and her pregnant sister-in-law Caroline Bonaparte, would normally have followed immediately behind the First Consul. Now it was at some distance. The First Consul’s carriage reached the nearby rue Saint-Nicaise shortly before eight o’clock. Bonaparte’s coachman, who had had a little too much to drink, managed to avoid the merchant’s cart that partially blocked the street, and then continued on his way. A few seconds later, a deafening blast rocked the coach and threw most of the mounted grenadiers accompanying Bonaparte to the ground. Josephine’s carriage, which had not yet reached the cart, was lifted off the ground, the windows broken and Hortense lightly wounded.
⁴
The cart had exploded, leaving a number of people dead – the figures range between four and ten
⁵
– twenty-odd people wounded and a dozen or so houses damaged. Some of the popular prints that followed centred on the destruction caused by the explosion. Among the dead was a fifteen-year-old girl by the name of Peusol who had been asked by the would-be assassins to hold the horse harnessed to the cart. She was found in a gutter, in the middle of the rue Saint-Nicaise. The blast had ripped off her clothes, and both arms, which were found on either side of the street. Her mother, a widow, a street vendor who sold buns, reclaimed the body two days later.

Anonymous,
Explosion de la machine infernale de la rue Nicaise, après le passage de la voiture du premier Consul
(Explosion of the infernal machine in rue Nicaise, after the passage of the First Consul’s carriage), no date. The accent in this engraving is on Bonaparte escaping death by a hair’s breadth. This was part of the narrative constructed around the assassination attempt: a few seconds earlier, and the ‘genius of liberty’, the Saviour of France, would have been killed.
⁶
The conclusion people were meant to draw was that providence was at work to protect Bonaparte.

Bonaparte escaped without so much as a scratch. In fact, he had been asleep, dreaming that he was at Arcola, crossing the Tagliamento river under the Austrian bombardment. When the bomb went off – later dubbed the
machine infernale –
he is supposed to have woken up with the cry, ‘We are undermined!’, or so goes the legend.
⁷
Bonaparte showed remarkable composure under the circumstances, at least in public at the Opera. Once back in the Tuileries, however, he began ranting against those whom he assumed were responsible for the assassination attempt – the Jacobins. The
machine infernale
was the first of its kind, a precursor of the improvised explosive device, designed to cause as much damage and to kill as many as possible. Over the coming days, Bonaparte more or less bullied the Council of State and the Tribunate into adopting extraordinary measures (rather than using the existing judicial structures) to deal with the Jacobins.
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