Citizen Emperor (27 page)

Everything was quickly put into place. On 15 March, a squad of several hundred troops and gendarmes, under the command of General Michel Ordener, penetrated the neutral territory of Baden in a commando-style raid and captured Enghien in Ettenheim.
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It was indicative of the arrogance of the French, born of military superiority, that Bonaparte did not even bother to ask the Elector of Baden for approval to enter his territory. If he had done so, it is highly unlikely the Elector would have been able to refuse. Not doing so, however, caused a diplomatic storm, and a good deal of ill-will. Before being kidnapped, Enghien was going about his life, untroubled, despite a number of signs that should have put him on his guard. According to one source, he received a messenger from Paris at the beginning of March warning him that he had been discussed at the highest political levels. He at first refused to believe that he could be the subject of a kidnap, and then when he was brought around to the idea, severely underestimated the extent of the force that would be deployed against him.
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After being held in a prison in Strasbourg, Enghien was brought to Paris where he arrived in the evening of 20 March. The only thing that he had with him was his pug, Mohiloff, and only then because the pug had chased after its master all the way from Ettenheim, even swimming across the Rhine, before being allowed to get into the carriage used to escort the Duc. At the Château de Vincennes, Enghien was interrogated around midnight before appearing before a military tribunal. At the last minute, Bonaparte, who was possibly having second thoughts, sent the prefect of police, Pierre-François Réal, to interrogate the prisoner further. He arrived too late. At two o’clock in the morning, the tribunal condemned Enghien to death, a sentence that was carried out immediately. His grave had already been dug in the moat of the château, next to what is known as the Queen’s Tower, and a firing squad had been made up of elite gendarmes. At three in the morning, by the light of a lantern, Enghien fell under a hail of musket shot, his dog by his side. Before doing so, his last words were supposed to have been ‘How awful it is to die this way and at the hands of Frenchmen.’
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We are not too sure what happened next, but when his body was exhumed in 1816, it was discovered that his skull had been crushed with a rock. The pug stayed over its master’s grave howling for several days until the wife of the commander of the château adopted it.

Bonaparte intended making a very simple political statement – that his blood was as precious as that of any other head of state, and that there was nothing sacred about the Bourbons.
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He knew perfectly well therefore what he was doing; the moment the Duc was kidnapped at Ettenheim, his death was a foregone conclusion. His execution is in fact revealing of Bonaparte’s style of government. If one compares it with the trial and execution of Louis XVI, the king at least had a defence lawyer; the revolutionaries observed legal procedure. The murder of Enghien, on the other hand, was carried out with no regard for legal procedure, in front of a kangaroo court, in the dead of night. The only plausible explanation for Bonaparte’s deciding Enghien should not receive a trial, apart from the fact that his abduction was less than legal, was because he felt he might get off. There was no concrete proof of his involvement in a plot against Bonaparte’s life. This is, of course, something that Bonaparte must have been aware of even while the abduction was taking place.

At St Helena, Napoleon assumed responsibility for Enghien’s death, almost. He argued that it had been an act of self-protection, a question of ‘me or them’, although he rewrote history to say that if he had known Enghien had asked to see him, he would have pardoned him.
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On this, as on so many other points, Napoleon cannot be believed. It is unlikely that Savary would have precipitated matters without the prior consent of his master.
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And yet the memoirs of the period (all written after the collapse of the Empire, it must be stressed) recall the news of the Duc’s execution as a great shock. Armand de Caulaincourt, later Napoleon’s master of the horse, who was part of the commando raid that crossed into Baden, is supposed to have cried, angry that he might have been made use of by Bonaparte in the crime;
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Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, is said to have burst into tears;
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Josephine’s son Eugène de Beauharnais was ‘upset’ because it had sullied Bonaparte’s glory;
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there had already been a scene between Josephine and Bonaparte on the night of the execution in which she supposedly knelt before him imploring him to spare Enghien, and when Eugène arrived at Malmaison the next day he found her in tears, directing the ‘strongest criticisms’ at Bonaparte, who listened in silence;
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Talleyrand said he disapproved and is often quoted as quipping, ‘It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder,’ although this is probably apocryphal and has also been attributed to Fouché.
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At the time, though, people who may have disapproved remained silent. When Bonaparte was informed of the death of Enghien, he supposedly murmured a passage from Voltaire’s play
Alzira
:

Of the Gods that we worship the difference see:

To avenge and to kill is enjoined unto thee;

But mine, when I fall ’neath thy murderous blow,

Only bids me feel pity and pardon bestow.
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That too smacks of literary embellishment. In any event, Bonaparte was observed by one contemporary receiving news of the execution when he was described as ‘troubled, preoccupied, sunk in thought . . . walking up and down his apartment, his hands at his back, his head bent down’.
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Despite the secrecy surrounding the execution, rumours raced immediately around Paris, spread by what the authorities called ‘Chouans and émigrés’. Apart from a few foreign diplomats who were shocked by the news, Paris remained relatively indifferent.
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But then newspapers were unable to state what they thought of the execution, so there could be no public debate on the subject. On the whole the French people were hardly moved by the death of a Bourbon, one moreover they had never heard of. Enghien’s execution was seen as part of the Consular process of suppressing the political extremism that had torn France apart during the Revolution. The judgment of the military tribunal that tried Enghien, along with a number of other documents, was quickly printed and distributed. It is believed that more than 50,000 copies were sold in two days, a bestseller even by today’s standards, and which leads one to suspect that if public opinion did not approve outright of the act, it was at the very least curious to find out about it.
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This was not the case for the rest of Europe.
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Historians often point to the reaction among the courts of Europe and the extent to which Enghien’s execution was supposed to be considered one of the most infamous public crimes of the era. It is true that Enghien’s execution heightened the mistrust that existed in Berlin, Vienna and Petersburg, but relations between these courts and Paris were already strained – in the case of Russia and Austria, to breaking point. The execution did not, therefore, have as great an impact as some historians have contended.
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News of the execution in Petersburg came on a Saturday; the next day the Tsar ordered his court to go into mourning. After mass that Sunday, as the Tsar and Tsarina passed through the room in which the diplomatic corps was in attendance, they made a point of ignoring the French ambassador.
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Admittedly, the execution of Enghien did not directly affect Russia, but the court of Petersburg, and Russian educated opinion, was nevertheless horrified.
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One should, however, take this show of outrage, this public rebuke, with a grain of salt. The court would not have gone into mourning in normal circumstances – that is, if Enghien had died while a Bourbon was on the throne. It was not entirely cold calculation on Alexander’s part but was nevertheless a convenient pretext for acting against France.
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In practical terms Russia responded with little more than a strongly worded letter sent to Bonaparte by the Tsar. He could hardly take the moral high ground. Not only had Alexander’s father, Paul I, been assassinated in a palace plot only a few years before, but Alexander himself seems to have been involved in the affair. Bonaparte publicly baited Alexander on that possibility by publishing an article in the
Moniteur
in which he defended his actions, asking whether the Tsar would not have acted to seize the English involved in the killing of his father, Paul I, if he had found them no more than a league from the frontier.
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Alexander was duly infuriated by the newspaper article. The execution of Enghien hardened Russian attitudes towards France and Bonaparte; most of the Russian gentry now came to see the First Consul as a despot – to show his contempt, one nobleman named his dogs ‘Napoleoshka’ and ‘Josephinka’ – even if attitudes were to remain profoundly ambivalent.
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In Prussia, Frederick William III was shocked by news of the execution, but was determined to hold fast to his policy of neutrality. Even when his wife, Luise, suggested imitating the Russian court by going into mourning, a number of leading ministers at court did their best to dissuade the royal couple from such an action, fearful that it might incur the wrath of Bonaparte.
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And that was the norm: those most directly touched, the Bourbons of Naples, Florence and Madrid, said very little and thought it prudent not to act. So too the court of Vienna, which kept tellingly quiet, and Pope Pius VII, who is reported to have wept copiously at the news; the King of Sweden was indignant.
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A sense of powerless outrage gripped the courts of Europe.

It has often been argued that the readiness of Europe’s political elite to come to some sort of arrangement with Bonaparte disappeared in 1804, largely as a result of the execution of Enghien (and later with the proclamation of the Empire).
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The execution may have been carried out for reasons of state, but it dealt a moral blow to the regime. Some nobles who had rallied to Bonaparte now turned their backs on him. Chateaubriand is a case in point. Convinced that Brumaire represented a turning point in French political affairs, he had become so accepting of the regime that he dedicated the second edition of his book
Le Génie du christianisme
(The genius of Christianity) to Bonaparte with the following words: ‘One cannot help but recognize in your destiny the hand of Providence who marked you from afar for the accomplishment of his prodigious designs. The people look upon you. France, extended by its victories, has placed in you its hopes.’
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He even went so far as to write to Bonaparte’s sister, Elisa, ‘You know my deep admiration and my absolute devotion to this extraordinary man.’
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But once Enghien had been executed, Chateaubriand completely repudiated the man and his regime; to him Bonaparte’s methods smacked of the Jacobin terrorist.

Six days after the execution of Enghien, echoes of a resumption of monarchical forms began to be heard.
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Bonaparte Becomes Napoleon

The possibility of introducing an empire was raised and openly discussed for the first time in a Council meeting at Saint-Cloud on 13 April 1804.
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By that stage, the groundwork had been laid. We have seen how Bonaparte’s entourage began to take on the appearances of an
ancien régime
court, displacing the few republican attitudes that had survived. The Prussian ambassador, the Marquis de Lucchesini, remarked on this, as did the English chargé d’affaires, Anthony Merry, who wrote home in May 1802 that Bonaparte would be ‘Caesar or nothing’, ‘provided he does not go towards it with too much precipitation’, while the Russian ambassador was speaking of Bonaparte having revived the ‘empire of the Gauls’.
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Bonaparte’s profile was readily available on coin by that time. That same year, the secretary of the German legation in Paris was openly referring to Bonaparte as ‘der Fürst’, or the Prince.
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The Swedish ambassador, Jean-François, Baron de Bourgoing, received at the Tuileries in 1801, gave a speech in which he pointed out that the difference between his own country’s monarchical Constitution and the Consular Constitution was nominal.
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