Citizen Emperor (26 page)

7

The End of the Revolution

The Plot to Kill Bonaparte

Victory in war was not the only means of eliminating Bonaparte from the scene.

On 23 August 1803, an English ship brought Georges Cadoudal and a number of other royalist agents to the French coast where they disembarked on the beaches of Biville-sur-Mer, not far from Dieppe in Normandy. Cadoudal was a big, corpulent, blond man, who had been dubbed ‘Gideon’ during the Chouan struggle against the Revolution.
*
Described as having ‘a short, squashed nose, blue eyes, a small mouth, a round dimpled chin, a flat face, hair à la Titus,
*
and thin sideburns’,
¹
Cadoudal was intelligent, completely devoted to the royalist cause, audacious and untiring, and he hated Bonaparte with a passion.
²
His best friend and his brother had both been killed in the struggle against the revolutionary state. He had left France in 1800 after the offensive launched by Bonaparte against the counter-revolution. Before Cadoudal left, Pitt, informed of what the group was up to, asked him to bring back Bonaparte alive – there were thoughts even at this stage of exiling him to St Helena – but whether he really believed that Bonaparte would be captured and not killed is another matter. It was not the first time that the British government had been involved in eliminating a European sovereign whose foreign policy they found to be an impediment. It had been, after all, deeply implicated in the assassination of Paul I of Russia in 1801.

When Cadoudal and his small band landed, they made their way to Paris in stages, arriving on 30 August. During the five months he was there, Cadoudal would change his place of residence as often as he could so as not to get caught, on one occasion living only a few hundred metres from the prefecture of police. His plan was to stop Bonaparte on the road to Saint-Cloud or Malmaison, occasions when the First Consul moved around with only a weak escort. Even then, however, it was obvious that a fight would be necessary, and Cadoudal would have to gather a sufficient number of men,
³
as well as weapons and horses, to overwhelm Bonaparte’s guard; this necessarily carried the risk of someone leaking the plan, inadvertently or deliberately. One response was to kill anyone who got in the way; in the second half of December 1803, a dozen executions were carried out against denunciators and government functionaries. Louis XVI’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, is meant to have assured Cadoudal before the royalist left Britain that he would appear on French soil to launch a general insurrection as soon as he received news of Bonaparte’s kidnapping. It was impractical madness, based on the notion that it was enough to eliminate one man for the whole system to crumble. The fact that the émigré press had been focusing its attacks on the head of the French state probably contributed to that illusion.
⁴
And yet Cadoudal was convinced he could pull it off.

General Charles Pichegru lent his support (he had escaped from Guiana where he had been exiled after Fructidor in 1797), and was also transported on a British vessel to France where he landed on 16 January 1804. His role was to convince Moreau to take part in the conspiracy, to overthrow the government and assume provisional control while awaiting the return of the Comte d’Artois.
⁵
The plan was puerile in its conception, not to mention the fact that the police were on the plotters’ tails from the moment they entered Paris.
⁶
We know that Pichegru met with Moreau at the beginning of 1804. One of the conspirators, General Frédéric-Michel de Lajolais, turned up at Moreau’s house announcing the arrival of Pichegru and asking for an interview.
⁷
Moreau refused, but Pichegru took advantage of a reception being held on 1 February to introduce himself into Moreau’s house. Moreau, wary of getting involved, simply declared that he did not want to participate in the restoration of the Bourbons and told him to flee to Germany. Some historians, more sympathetic towards Bonaparte, find in Moreau a small-minded, vain man who bore a grudge against Bonaparte because he considered that his own military victories had not received due attention. This was true, but personal motives do not make for sound politics, and were in any event a poor excuse to plot against a head of state. Moreau himself perhaps understood this, or perhaps had greater political ambitions than the conspirators realized; he rejected the royalist solution but seemed prepared to discuss the plot with the conspirators. In February, another meeting between Pichegru and Moreau took place, this time with Cadoudal present; several other meetings between the two generals followed.

This was imprudent, given the counter-intelligence networks that were in place. Over a period of several weeks the police cast their net wide; houses were raided and anyone slightly suspect was brought in for questioning, and more often than not thrown in jail. Those with powerful protectors could get out within a day or so; others were imprisoned for weeks on end.
⁸
At the beginning of February, Cadoudal’s servant, Louis Picot, was arrested and revealed the presence of Cadoudal and Pichegru in Paris.
⁹
On 9 February, another conspirator was arrested, Bouvet de Lozier.
¹⁰
After a failed suicide attempt – he tried to hang himself in his cell but a jailer cut the cord in time – he revealed the name of another accomplice: Moreau. ‘Monsieur [that is, the Comte d’Artois] was to arrive in France and put himself at the head of the royalist party, Moreau promised to join the Bourbon cause.’ Bonaparte was in the middle of being shaved by his valet, Constant, when the minister of justice and grand judge, Claude-Ambroise Régnier, who had personally questioned the prisoner, came to tell him the news. Bonaparte, nevertheless, acted with some caution.
¹¹

There was nothing shocking about Pichegru being implicated in a plot against Bonaparte; he had been involved with royalist plots before and was known to the authorities. Moreau was another story. What was Bonaparte supposed to do with the victor of Hohenlinden? Were other generals involved? Bonaparte must have been feeling paranoid at this point, although we have no idea what he actually thought since he never revealed himself, at least not on a level that would satisfy the curious biographer. He spoke about this event on St Helena a number of times, but without really assuming responsibility for his acts and always hiding behind the façade of ‘reasons of state’.
¹²

The conspirators hoped to get Moreau onside and, through him, part of the army he commanded, more loyal to its commander-in-chief than to the government. Moreau’s reputation was such that many reformed officers (officers on half-pay) considered him an alternative to Bonaparte.
¹³
During an emergency meeting of the Council of State, the First Consul read out Bouvet de Lozier’s confession. Talleyrand and Fouché did not see any proof of guilt but it was enough for Bonaparte. Ignoring their advice, he had an order for Moreau’s arrest issued. Moreau was taken on the morning of 15 February 1804, his carriage surrounded by elite gendarmes as he was crossing the bridge at Charenton, coming into Paris.
¹⁴

One should not underestimate the ruthlessness of Bonaparte. At the same time that Moreau was taken into custody, 356 other arrests were made, some of them of ultra-republican and royalist generals.
¹⁵
It was an opportune moment to purge the army once and for all of elements that opposed the regime. Nevertheless, news of Moreau’s arrest caused a tremendous stir in Paris.
¹⁶
The police reports from this period are witness to how much the public disapproved of it.
¹⁷
He was popular, and was assumed to be a republican, at least in army circles. ‘Everyone here praises and extols you,’ wrote Moreau’s brother.
¹⁸
For those in the army, Hohenlinden was considered a great victory; Moreau, regarded as the ‘son of the Revolution’, was idolized by republicans. Rather than see in his arrest proof that he had been involved in a plot against the government, people suspected Bonaparte of trying to eliminate a rival on his route to absolute power.
¹⁹
Officers who had served with Moreau considered his disgrace to have been prompted by jealousy on the part of the First Consul.
²⁰
A delegation from the Tribunate even went to Bonaparte to plead Moreau’s case.
²¹
If the people of Paris had not exactly been shaken as if by an earthquake, as one diplomat put it, many were taken aback.
²²

Almost two weeks later, sold out by a supposed friend, Cadoudal was arrested after a chase through the streets of Paris that ended in one police officer being killed and another wounded. His description had been posted on the walls of Paris, as well as in the
Moniteur
, so it was only a matter of time before he was caught. Shortly afterwards, on 28 February 1804, Pichegru was arrested, also denounced by a ‘friend’.
²³
The whole conspiracy was unravelling. Imprisoned in the Temple, where only a few short years before the royal family had been held, Cadoudal willingly admitted to wanting to ‘attack the First Consul with violence [
vive force
]’, although he denied that he had ever met Moreau. Under torture, the conspirators admitted that a Bourbon prince was expected in France.

The Kidnapping and Execution of the Duc d’Enghien

The arrest of Georges Cadoudal was a great coup for the regime; people no longer questioned whether there had been a plot to kill Bonaparte, and it led to people doubting Moreau’s innocence. If a plot really existed, and so many people had been arrested, then Moreau could not have been arrested without reason.
²⁴
In the meantime, everyone was scratching their heads trying to figure out who was the ‘prince’ Cadoudal referred to. Certainly, the Comte d’Artois came to mind and was the prince most people were talking about in the cafés in Paris. There had been, months before Cadoudal’s arrest, rumours that Artois was about to land in France.
²⁵
Bonaparte took them seriously enough to send General Savary, whom we met when he was Desaix’s aide-de-camp, in person to the cliffs of Biville-sur-Mer to watch out for his arrival. A vessel did approach the coast and Savary tried to lure it in further by lighting signal fires, but the ship sailed away.

The government was persuaded that Artois was the prince in question, but he was inaccessible, safely tucked away in England. The only Bourbon prince anywhere near French territory was the Duc d’Enghien, in Ettenheim, a small village on the Rhine in Baden about forty kilometres south of Strasbourg, where he lived ‘in great simplicity’, attending to his garden with the few friends that had remained with him.
²⁶
The only reason why Enghien, tenth in line to the throne, was living in Ettenheim in the first place was to be with the Princess Charlotte de Rohan, with whom he was in love. Rumour had it, entirely false as far as we know, that Enghien sometimes visited Strasbourg, then on French territory.
²⁷
The prince, although not involved in the plot, was in the pay of the English and was believed to be working towards an invasion of France and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. It was for that reason that Bonaparte ordered that he be kidnapped and brought back to Paris.

Rarely did Bonaparte make important decisions without first consulting his ministers and closest advisers. This is what occurred on 10 March at the Tuileries. We do not have any details about what was actually said during this meeting, and most of what we have was written by those present years after the fall of the Empire, at a time when the Bourbons were back on the throne. Their accounts were therefore an attempt to play down their involvement in the killing of a prince of the blood, and cannot be considered particularly accurate. The two other consuls supposedly raised objections, Lebrun arguing that it would make a ‘terrible noise’, and Cambacérès that public opinion would be even more worked up against them, coming as it did on top of the arrest of Moreau.
²⁸
Cambacérès was reprimanded for his trouble by Bonaparte along the lines of ‘It becomes you well [
il vous sied bien
] to be so scrupulous, to be so sparing of the blood of kings, you who voted for the death of Louis XVI.’
²⁹
We do have a document from Talleyrand, who let his views be known a couple of days before. This was, he wrote, an occasion to resolve any concerns about the stability of the government. Bonaparte had the right to defend himself. ‘If justice must punish rigorously, it must also punish without exceptions.’
³⁰
Talleyrand’s suggestion is clear – in order to allay any fears that there might be a return of the former royal House, an example had to be set. Two days after the meeting, Bonaparte was at Malmaison. It was from there that he ordered Enghien kidnapped, and held in the Château de Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris, and not in the Temple, where state prisoners were usually kept. It is difficult to know whether Bonaparte, as some claim, hesitated a good deal before ordering Enghien’s arrest,
³¹
but once the decision was made it seems likely that there was every intent to execute him.
³²