Citizen Emperor (5 page)

Any male over the age of twenty-five could vote. The polling took place from the end of December 1799 to the end of January 1800. It was the first time since the beginning of the Revolution that individuals had been able to vote directly, without having to go through primary and secondary assemblies.
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Every man could register his vote in writing, and if he chose to do so explain his reasons, followed by a signature. The procedure was meant to avoid fraud, but it was designed to put pressure on citizens to vote for the regime. It took a certain amount of courage to vote no. The registers were to be burnt after the votes had been counted, but fortunately for historians they were kept. Some of the comments that people made in voting, limited in number it is true, are revealing of what people thought of the new regime, the Constitution and Bonaparte. In Paris, for example, one voter wrote, ‘I can at last see the end of our suffering.’ He considered the new Constitution to be a ‘social act’ that would inevitably lead to the ‘happiness of France’.
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In the Aube, on the other hand, some thought they were voting not for Bonaparte but simply for a new constitution.
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In the Var, another voter accepted the new Constitution on the grounds that it would be the ‘grave of factions’ and that it would lead to ‘order, peace, and respect for people and property’. It is evident that peace, and the desire to put the Revolution to bed once and for all, were the overwhelming preoccupations expressed by those sympathetic towards the coup.

The results were not as good as the regime either expected or publicly asserted. Many thought Brumaire was just another political upheaval brought about by the same people responsible for past upheavals. The presence of Bonaparte did not change that view.
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Given the short time in which it was organized, however, the lack of information that circulated and the unusually cold weather for that time of year, the plebiscite was still a resounding success for the regime. True, only about 25 to 30 per cent of the electorate turned out, or about 1.5 million real ‘yes’ votes.
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That was not unusual, nor was the result dishonourable. In the previous ten years, the turnout had ranged from 60 per cent during the heady days of the first election of the Revolution (1789 and 1790), to between less than 10 and 30 per cent, depending on the department, for the election to the Legislative Assembly (1791), and between 4 and 27 per cent for the election to the Convention (1792). As for the previous two plebiscites (1793 and 1795), their rate of participation was, respectively, around 50 per cent (1.8 million votes), and between 14 and 17 per cent (1 million votes).
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The voting numbers were, therefore, consistent with the low participation rate of the electorate, and consistent with the general indifference to national politics that had resulted from war, economic upheaval and religious persecution. But that was not good enough for Lucien Bonaparte, who ‘corrected’ the results by systematically exaggerating the figures, and by counting the army – 500,000 votes – as a whole.
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We simply do not know the extent to which Bonaparte was involved, or if not, whether he was aware of the manipulation. By presenting the results of the plebiscite as an overwhelming endorsement of the coup, the country’s new political rulers were legitimized.

Repression and Reconciliation

The Brumairians, however, did not wait for the results to enforce the Constitution and assert their power. One of the most important and difficult problems facing the Consulate, and therefore high on Bonaparte’s agenda, was the civil war in the west of France, a conflict that had raged since 1793 and had cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The rebels, variously described as Chouans or Vendéens, often with royalist or counter-revolutionary leanings, were relatively well organized and received wide support among the local populations. It was necessary, for the sake of the future stability of the government, as well as for Bonaparte’s image as the man above factions, to bring the civil war to a speedy conclusion. There were two ways Bonaparte went about this. The first was by meeting counter-revolutionary and royalist leaders. On 26 December 1799, for example, he met the Chouan leader Baron Hyde de Neuville.
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He was accompanied by the commandant of the Vendéens in the region of Angers, Fortuné d’Andigné. In the course of the interview, Bonaparte is supposed to have urged them to rally to his banner: ‘my government will be the government of youth and talent’. At the same time, and with a smile on his lips, he threatened to exterminate all who did not come over to him.
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Two days after that meeting, Bonaparte issued a ‘Letter to the inhabitants of the departments of the west’ in which he promised a pardon to rebels willing to repent, as well as undertaking, as we have seen, a number of measures that would help appease opponents of the regime.
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This was followed, however, by a second proclamation: anyone taken with arms in hand, or found inciting rebellion, would be summarily executed.
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This was no idle threat. The violent and often brutal repression against rebels practised by the revolutionary governments was continued under the new Consular regime.
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To drive the point home, examples were made of a number of individuals. The first was a young man by the name of Henri de Toustain, in Paris to visit his brother in the Temple by virtue of the armistice. He was nevertheless arrested, dragged before a military commission and, despite no evidence being brought to bear against him other than a few white cockades (symbols of the Bourbons) found in his hotel room, condemned to death. He was shot on the Plaine de Grenelle on 25 January 1800. On another occasion, Bonaparte promised the Chouan leader Louis de Frotté a personal amnesty, but when Frotté gave himself up he was summarily executed without so much as a trial.
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The news was announced to the Legislative Corps by a member of the Council of State and fellow conspirator, Pierre-Louis Roederer, who in a melodramatic gesture also presented the deputies with the counter-revolutionary items that had been taken with the capture of Frotté’s general staff: crosses of St Louis, fleurs de lys and the daggers emblematic of every eighteenth-century conspirator.
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Bonaparte liked to set examples – ‘Every day we shoot here five or six Chouans,’ he wrote to General Brune, the commander of the Army of the West
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– and was capable of doing so at the expense of human life. After years of political upheaval and social unrest, the French appeared to be far less interested in the preservation of ‘liberty’ than in a return to law and order.
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The restrictions on the press meant that the repression was not widely reported, but there was a great deal of local support for these repressive measures.

If the politics of reconciliation was sometimes little more than rhetoric, the repression of unrest in France, whether counter-revolutionary or plain criminal, was ruthless. Bonaparte ordered General Brune to clean up the Vendée, and to ‘let the rebels of Morbihan begin to feel the whole weight and the horrors of war’.
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Brune’s tactics were brutal. On 25 January, republican troops took control of Pont-du-Loch, killed 500–600 rebels and were then unleashed on the surrounding villages.
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It was enough to decide an already flagging, dispirited resistance to abandon the royalist cause, for the moment, and begin to surrender. Bonaparte specified in a letter to one of his generals fighting in the west that any rebels caught should be ‘exterminated’.
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It was a word he had used before.
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Those under his command knew what was expected of them. Any town or village that harboured brigands would be burnt and reduced to cinders.
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Suspects were arrested, interrogated (that is, tortured) and secretly imprisoned, not only in the west of France, but in any region that resisted the centralizing, modernizing impulse from revolutionary Paris.

The violence in the west of France was by far the worst, but in at least ten other departments brigandage and assassinations (political or otherwise) continued through the months of March and April 1800, with varying degrees of intensity. In the south-east of France, for example, Catholic and royalist brigands were particularly active between 1796 and 1802, bringing the region to the verge of anarchy.
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The response from the Consular regime was to use repressive tactics similar to those that had been used by other revolutionary governments. Seven flying columns were formed – four in the Midi, three in Brittany – made up of gendarmes, National Guard and regular troops, attached to which were military commissions, whose task it was to arrest, try and execute any brigands caught.
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Thousands were arrested, and hundreds were executed by firing squad.

In Brittany, between September 1800 and February 1801, in the first six months of their existence the military commissions tried more than 1,200 people, a third of whom were condemned to death, mostly for criminal offences like armed robbery.
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Another 150 were killed while ‘resisting arrest’. The trials and executions were widely publicized and often occurred on powerful local sites of memory, places where counter-revolutionaries had committed atrocities. The regime was making a point. Violence against the state and its citizens would no longer be tolerated. While the number of executions between 1800 and 1802 was around 2,300, it is an exaggeration to assert that Bonaparte unleashed a veritable ‘Consular Terror’.
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By comparison, at the height of the Terror in 1793, some 1,900 people were executed in Lyons for participating in a revolt against Paris.
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The repression of ‘banditry’ under Bonaparte was harsh, but entirely in keeping with
ancien régime
notions of the rule of order.

One cannot underestimate the success of this mixture of repression and reconciliation in consolidating the new regime.
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Bonaparte succeeded where other revolutionary governments did not because he deployed larger numbers of regular troops to quash resistance, and he consistently used an apparatus of repression (flying columns, military commissions and the regular imposition of a state of siege on hundreds of towns and villages). The royalist cause was going to be weakened even further when Bonaparte concluded peace with Britain in 1802. By then, his policies had started to pay off; counter-revolution and banditry in the departments where they had once been rife were under control. The politics of reconciliation coupled with extraordinarily brutal measures was a winning combination that brought the regime acceptance and, more importantly, followers. Bonaparte knew how to take the credit for all these successes.

2

‘Perfect Glory and Solid Peace’

The Seat of Power

The day after the results of the plebiscite were announced (19 February 1800), Bonaparte vacated the Luxembourg for the Tuileries Palace, redubbed the Palace of the Government (
Palais du gouvernement
). The transfer of the executive to the palace of a former king, a king executed by the ‘nation’, was the occasion for the first large-scale public manifestation of the new regime.
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One police report referred exaggeratedly to the ‘rejoicing’ (
allégresse
) of the people and the acclamations from the crowds lining the streets to watch the procession.
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The repossession of the former royal palace was supposed to respect republican forms. There was nothing remarkable about the procession of carriages that drove that day through the streets of Paris from the Luxembourg to the Tuileries: the servants were dressed in hand-me-downs from the Directory, and there was as yet no return of powdered hair or livery.
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And yet the procession took on the appearance of a royal entry.
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Cavalry headed the procession, followed by the Council of State in carriages that looked a little worse for wear, as did the horses drawing them. Then fifty musicians preceded the general staff of Paris, followed by ministers in various carriages, the guides brought over from Egypt, transformed into the Chasseurs de la garde, the aides-de-camp and, finally, the carriage with the three consuls, drawn by six white horses, a gift from the Holy Roman Emperor. The procession closed with the horse guard.
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