Citizen Emperor (18 page)

Nor was Charles James Fox, the leading opposition figure in the British House of Commons, an admirer. He went to France accompanied by a large party that included, among others, Lord Holland, an influential Whig politician, and his wife.
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Fox hesitated over paying his respects to Bonaparte while in Paris; it was clearly in Bonaparte’s interests to be seen with Fox, a man who had pursued peace for some time, but it was not altogether in Fox’s interests to be seen with Bonaparte, for fear of being branded an apologist. In the end, he succumbed and was introduced to Bonaparte at a
lever
on a hot summer’s day, at which most of the diplomatic corps were present, as well as a number of other prominent English personalities. Bonaparte heaped praise upon Fox, calling him ‘the greatest man of one of the greatest countries in the world’. Fox, however, had always had trouble with public acclamation, indeed treated it with contempt, to the point where he could be positively rude to those who flattered him. Bonaparte was no exception. Before Amiens, Fox had always been against the war with France, but he seems to have come away with the impression that liberty was ‘asleep’.
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He took exception to the French army remaining on a war footing even after the signing of peace – Bonaparte was ‘startled, surprised and displeased’ by Fox’s reaction
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– but was especially disappointed by what he saw as the First Consul’s intellectual failings, ‘very deficient upon every subject, no powers or extent of mind – the predominance of Bonaparte [is] the greatest imposition that was ever practised upon the whole world’.
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More worrying perhaps, Fox believed that Bonaparte was acting virtually as king, and presciently predicted that he would be elevated to emperor.
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Fox was not the only one to be disenchanted. Lord Holland, who was later to criticize the British government for its decision to send Napoleon to St Helena, described him aptly as ‘impatient of contradiction, to a degree not only amounting to a blemish in his moral character, but to weakness in his understanding’.
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5

The Politics of Fusion

The Return of the Emigrés

When François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, returned to Paris from self-imposed exile on Holy Friday in the spring of 1800, he entered the city on foot by the Barrière de l’Etoile, part of the customs wall around Paris, walked down the Champs-Elysées, and then across the Place de la Revolution. He had fled the Revolution after seeing his family château in Brittany burnt down by peasants. His mother was arrested and died in prison; other members of his family were guillotined during the Terror. He walked not far from the spot where they were executed, afraid, he said with some embellishment, ‘of putting my foot in blood, of which there remained no trace. I found it impossible to take my eyes away from that place where the instrument of death had been raised. I thought I saw before me in their shirts, bound near the bloody machine, my brother and my sister-in-law; there had fallen the head of Louis XVI.’
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The sentiments were exaggerated, but Chateaubriand was nevertheless one of the many aristocrats to rally to the new regime during the months that followed Brumaire. He was ready to offer his services and had solicited the protection of Bonaparte’s sister, Elisa Bacciochi, to facilitate his return.
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Chateaubriand’s walk into Paris shows the extent to which people hoped the Consulate would reconcile the opposing factions in France to create a semblance of political harmony. ‘The government no longer wants,’ wrote Lucien, as minister of the interior, ‘no longer recognizes factions and only sees in France Frenchmen.’
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Beneath the façade of harmony deep divisions still existed, but enormous progress had been made towards healing the rifts in French society created by the Revolution. And that, in many respects, was what the Consulate was all about: a strong executive, national reconciliation and peace through military conquest. One of the most remarkable steps along the path to political reconciliation and social appeasement was the abolition of all penalties against émigrés and an invitation for them to return to France.

During the Revolution, somewhere between 180,000 and 200,000 people had fled France; not all of them appeared on the official list of émigrés, which was made up of about 100,000 names.
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As well as members of the nobility, they included domestics, priests, labourers and peasants as well as members of the bourgeoisie.
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Between October 1800 and October 1801, almost 3,500 people had been crossed off the list of émigrés, thus allowing them to return to France.
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In April 1802, a general amnesty was granted that saw thousands more come back. Even before that, émigrés like Fontanes and Chateaubriand had been secretly returning to France, something the authorities had been turning a blind eye to. All of this was perfectly in keeping with Bonaparte’s policy of reconciliation, and was part of a larger strategy of pacification.
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This was not some vain impulse to surround himself with the cream of
ancien régime
society; it was a political calculation that, at best, became an uneasy alliance. Once again, however, Bonaparte had to overcome the resistance of staunch republicans for whom a return of the émigrés was unthinkable.

At first, Bonaparte actually opposed the idea of recalling them.
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He had fought against them when royalists had rebelled at Toulon in 1793 and they had been in the ranks of the Austrian army in Italy. In Syria, it had been an émigré, Phéllipeaux, who had contributed to his defeat before the walls of St John of Acre. The idea put to him by Fouché that they might be brought back in large numbers appeared dangerous. Fouché, on the other hand, considered them more dangerous outside the country than under surveillance within. The first measures allowing émigrés to re-enter the country introduced in the first half of 1800 were accompanied by a number of newspaper articles written by Fouché, designed to appease republicans. Thus, in
Le Diplomate
in January 1800, the minister of police declared that the doors were irrevocably closed to ‘traitors and parricides’.
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By the end of 1801, however, inundated with requests from émigrés, he was pushing for a general amnesty. The alternative was to have individual émigrés appear before a court of law, something Fouché feared might encourage some of them to reclaim their lost property. A simple pardon from the state, on the other hand, would not bring into question the usurpation of their property during the Revolution.
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With his hold on power increasing, Bonaparte came around to the idea. Now that war had been brought to an end, there was no reason for émigrés to continue fighting France in foreign or émigré armies, and in any event they would be demobilized. On 11 April 1802, the Council of State accepted a law granting amnesty to émigrés; a
senatus consultum
– an act voted on by the Senate that had the force of law – followed on 26 April. The amnesty was accorded to all individuals who availed themselves of it before 23 September and who were prepared to take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. Only those who had been the leaders of rebel bands or enemy armies were excluded (as well as a few other categories such as princes of the House of Bourbon, or deputies who had been declared guilty of treason – in all fewer than 1,000 people).
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To those who accepted the offer, the state agreed to restore whatever property had been seized during the Revolution, but which had not yet been sold. This lure, coupled with the nostalgia for France felt by many émigrés, had an immediate and overwhelming effect – over 40,000 émigré families crossed the Channel and the Rhine to return home.
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‘The fashion was to return’, one émigré lamented, ‘just as it once was to leave.’
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What few realized, however, was that the return was swaddled in police surveillance – up to one-third of police personnel were involved in watching returned émigrés – and that Fouché arrested dozens of them and had them imprisoned without trial.
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Emigrés had been attacked for years, held responsible for everything from inflation to famine.
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One can imagine then how much the introduction of an amnesty was a topic of general conversation.
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From police reports we know that republicans were offended and that even officers in the Consular Guard were wary that émigrés would be imposed on them. Most people, however, seem to have approved of the measure and considered it a sign of the government’s strength.
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As for officers who had emigrated and even fought in the royalist Army of Condé against France, it was now a question of deciding whether they could serve Bonaparte. The choice would have been difficult for many, but it appears that a number of former royalist officers did indeed opt for Bonaparte, some for financial reasons, others because they wanted to serve France.
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Their integration was facilitated by the fact that they kept their former ranks. This was then a pragmatic decision for some but that does not mean they necessarily hid their royalist sentiments. As we shall see, a number of them were to welcome the return of the Bourbons in 1814 and betray Napoleon in the process.

According to one police report, there were two types of returning émigrés: those who were young and found the decision on the part of Bonaparte magnanimous; and those who were ‘encrusted’ in the ways of the
ancien régime
and awaited the return of their ‘legitimate’ sovereign.
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It was no doubt a simplistic appraisal of a complex situation, but there is some evidence to suggest that a number of returning nobles ensconced themselves in their old neighbourhoods and formed a sort of royalist colony, living an alternative life with their own salons, balls and receptions.
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Moreover, some returning émigrés were convinced that their lands, confiscated and sold off during the Revolution, would be returned to them. This resulted in enormous friction between returning nobles and those who had acquired their land, which sometimes led to violence. In Normandy, for example, a number of returned émigrés were murdered, their throats cut.
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Nevertheless, the émigrés were now here to stay. They too had become part and parcel of Bonaparte’s politics of fusion. The only people not to rally were a royalist fringe living either on the margins or attached to the court of Louis XVIII in exile.

A Vaccine against Religion

One week after the amnesty of émigrés, on 18 April 1802, Easter Sunday according to the old Gregorian calendar, a mass and then a Te Deum were celebrated in Notre Dame to mark both the signing of peace with Great Britain and the Concordat with the Catholic Church.
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The aisles of the cathedral had been decked out with Gobelin tapestries, while two canopies of crimson and gold had been erected, crowned with plumes of white feathers.
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Under one canopy sat the consuls, and under the other the papal legate, Cardinal Gian Batista Caprara. The Te Deum was, according to one English witness, ‘the grandest thing I ever heard’. Mixing the two ceremonies was meant to placate public elements hostile to the Concordat – a treaty reconciling the French state with the Church – but really the ceremony was about the religious, not the diplomatic peace, and it was the former that was the subject of conversations in the cafés of Paris.
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The First Consul and his entourage left the Tuileries at about eleven o’clock to weave their way through the streets to the cathedral – described by an English visitor as a ‘dirty place, and miserable’
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– escorted by cavalry and announced by a sixty-gun salute and the pealing of the cathedral bells. It was the first time in ten years that the people of Paris had heard the bells ring out over their city and it brought tears to the eyes of those who lived close by.
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It was also the first time in many years that the crowds saw livery in the official procession to the cathedral, while old royal carriages were dragged out of storage and spruced up for use by the dignitaries. According to one English observer, on seeing the livery the crowds exclaimed how delighted they were to see a bit of colour again.
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Bonaparte’s carriage was drawn by eight horses, the number once reserved for the king. The soldiers forming the guard of honour along the route certainly let it be known what they thought of it all – not much – while old royalists muttered at the sight of Bonaparte’s carriage. There were grumblings in some of the cafés the next day, but that was probably not the sentiment of the vast majority of people; workers thought that the restoration of the churches would see them employed.
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Cambacérès later claimed that a large number of people, ‘expressing their joy by continuous acclamations’, followed the consuls from the Tuileries to Notre Dame.
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It was not so much the pomp, by now an increasingly familiar sight, that impressed the crowds as the fact that Catholicism was now being officially recognized by the regime, and could now be openly practised by the faithful.