Citizen Emperor (12 page)

Accompanying the glory, however, was also a touch of pathos. Bonaparte had learnt as early as the first campaign in Italy that revealing the soft side of his nature made good press. He therefore unabashedly exploited the death of Desaix for as much political advantage as he could. What his aide-de-camp Muiron had been for the first Italian campaign,
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Desaix became for the second – that is, a loyal lieutenant willing to lay down his life for his commander (and the Republic), although he was celebrated this time round with the help of the machinery of state.
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The bulletin described how Desaix, dying in the arms of his aide-de-camp, Anne-Charles Lebrun, the son of the Third Consul, said, ‘Go and tell the First Consul that I die regretting not to have done enough to live on in the memory of posterity.’
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Of course, these words were never uttered, but they echo the dying words of earlier faithful royal servants to their kings.
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Bonaparte was being portrayed as the figurehead of the nation, the symbol around which the country could unify. It also put the onus of anointing Desaix on Bonaparte. Immortality emanated, so to speak, from the First Consul.
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The autopsy carried out in Milan showed that Desaix had died instantly by a bullet to the heart; this was almost as soon as the French counter-attack began.
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Moreover, since he was not wearing his general’s uniform at the time, his death went perfectly unnoticed and his body, almost naked after being stripped by marauders, was not retrieved until two days later by one of his aides-de-camp, Anne-Jean-Marie-René Savary, and was embalmed two days after that in Milan.
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It is even possible that he was shot by friendly fire as he turned around to harangue his own troops. Bonaparte insisted that the bulletin record his own words, supposedly uttered on hearing of the death of Desaix: ‘Why am I not permitted to weep?’
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It is an interesting question, even if rhetorical. In an age when men readily cried in public,
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there are no accounts of Bonaparte ever openly weeping. This does not mean that he was not affected by Desaix’s death, but we do not know with certainty whether he even liked the general or considered him a friend.
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If he lavished praise on him, it was because he was dead and could not therefore pose a threat to his own reputation. Others who knew Desaix certainly did weep openly.
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The following day Bonaparte wrote to his fellow consuls telling them that he was ‘plunged in grief’ for a man whom he had ‘loved and esteemed’.
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These words and the paintings that captured the moment of Desaix’s death displayed at the Salon of 1806 were meant as political commentary, a kind of civic sermon that would serve to inspire others, and were recognized as ‘true’ because enveloped in a documentary style.
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Jean Broc,
Mort du général Desaix à la bataille de Marengo le 14 juin 1800
(Death of General Desaix at the battle of Marengo on 14 June 1800), 1806.

A good tale is worth telling time and again, and if told often enough it eventually becomes difficult to see the difference between the reality and fiction. In 1804, shortly before the proclamation of the Empire, Berthier, who had done so much to promote Bonaparte’s name in Italy and Egypt by the publication of exaggerated accounts of those campaigns, added to the First Consul’s aura by publishing a narrative of the battle of Marengo, placing the responsibility for the victory squarely at his feet.
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The
Relation de la bataille de Marengo
conveniently forgot the role played by Desaix and even Kellermann, and presented the retreat the French were forced into towards the end of the day as part of Bonaparte’s overall plan, so that he was portrayed as having perfect control of the situation from beginning to end.
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During the Consulate, Marengo was to become a point of reference for future Napoleonic battles, and was re-enacted on a number of occasions (at Marly in 1800, and again in 1805 when Napoleon was en route to Milan to be crowned king of Italy). It is possible that Bonaparte’s conscience was pricked by this (mis)use of a comrade’s body, but if so he never talked about it. General Kellermann believed that ‘Of all the victories carried off by Bonaparte, Marengo is the one from which he obtained the greatest profit for the least personal glory. He was tormented by it; he was weak enough to want to appropriate it all the more since it belonged to him the least. It explains the contradictory and untruthful accounts, which he told and retold again and again.’
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‘If I am a Traitor, Become Brutus’

Bonaparte left for the army in the costume of the French Institute (what is called the
habit vert
, dark-blue vest and trousers with green brocade in the form of olive leaves worn by the learned members of the Institut de France or the French Academy). On his return he was dressed in a military uniform, and it was in that uniform that he was now mostly (but not yet always) to appear in public, including when he presided over the Council of State. Not that this was unusual. Most European monarchs appeared in public in military uniform; so too did presidents like George Washington. Bonaparte, on the other hand, had until then studiously avoided doing so in order not to alienate the intellectuals associated with Brumaire. After Marengo, his uniform was a sure sign that he seemed not to care any longer about what they thought, and that the military was now at the forefront of political life.

Some took this as a sign that the Republic was dead; Bonaparte was already being called a tyrant in 1800, in the sense given to the word by Plutarch – that is, an absolute ruler. Republicans publicly demonstrated their disapproval, and were to do so throughout the Consulate. One young officer was seen ‘kissing with transport a bust of Marcus Brutus’.
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That was not as extreme, however, as the young man who shot himself in the head in front of a statue of Liberty, shortly after Bonaparte came to power.
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Of course, the implication was that Bonaparte was a despot like Julius Caesar and that another Brutus had to be found to do away with him. Another wrote that almost all the generals in the army were enemies of Bonaparte.
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There were even members of the Consular Guard who were supposed to have been heard speaking out against him.
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It is true that some of them whinged about the discipline and the dress code imposed on them, and some officers railed against what they considered to be the ‘atrocious despotism’ (
despotisme affreux
) that weighed on France, but they were probably the exception.
¹⁰⁶

After his victory at Marengo, radical elements within the royalist and Jacobin movements seemed more determined than ever to eliminate Bonaparte. The number of assassination attempts made against Bonaparte (and later Napoleon) is not known with any certainty, but somewhere between twenty and thirty plots were hatched in the course of his reign.
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To put this into perspective, plots against the life of the king during the eighteenth century were not rare. Between 1680 and 1750, about fifty assassination plots were uncovered against French kings.
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Between the years 600 and 1800, a total of 219 European kings were murdered, while another 338 met a violent end.
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During the Consulate, both republicans and royalists sought to put an end to Bonaparte’s reign through assassination. But then those dubbed the ‘exclusives’ or ‘anarchists’ by the Bonapartists – that is, those bent on overthrowing the government – did not have any other means at their disposal. Since insurrection in the
faubourgs
was a thing of the past, no longer possible after its leaders had, for the most part, been guillotined during the Terror, and since there was no longer the possibility of a parliamentary opposition within the complex system that had been established by the Constitution of the Year VIII, the only means of acting against Bonaparte’s supposed tyranny was through conspiracy or individual attacks. There was, moreover, a certain tradition, an expectation created since the Revolution, that the true defenders of liberty would stand up to those who threatened it. In 1790 a ‘Brutus Legion’ and in 1792 the ‘volunteers of tyrannicide’ were created to assassinate the sovereigns of Europe.
¹¹⁰
The killing of a man considered to have illegitimately appropriated the government, namely Bonaparte, was portrayed by the opposition as tyrannicide.

The theme of tyrannicide was taken up in a republican pamphlet written by Bernard Metge entitled
Le Turc et le militaire français
(The Turk and the French soldier). The pamphlet begins with an indictment of Bonaparte for the crimes which he was allegedly responsible for, notably spilling French blood, the murder of inhabitants of Egypt and taking public money.
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It goes on to accuse him of abandoning the army in Egypt, and concludes that in ‘my country a general who had committed the thousandth part of the crimes that your Bonaparte has sullied himself with would have paid with his head’. In essence, the pamphlet was a call for Bonaparte’s murder. Another pamphlet, the
Code des tyrannicides
(Code of the tyrannicides), expressed the same sort of sentiment. It went so far as to quote Bonaparte himself – ‘If I am a traitor, become Brutus’ – as a justification for his elimination.
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The same reasoning persisted in the royalist camp; newspaper articles and pamphlets along those lines, funded or supported by the British government and written by émigrés, began to reach France.
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Most of the assassination attempts were nevertheless badly organized. What is considered to be the last ‘Jacobin plot’ (11 October 1800), known as the ‘Conspiracy of the Opera’, or the ‘Conspiracy of the Knives’, included the Corsican malcontent Joseph Aréna (brother of the Corsican deputy Barthélemy Aréna, who was accused of wanting to stab Bonaparte during the coup of Brumaire), an Italian refugee by the name of Diana, the sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi, who had modelled a bust of Bonaparte at Montebello in Italy, the painter Topino-Lebrun, a former pupil of David’s, who designed the daggers with which they intended to assassinate the First Consul, and a former employee of the Committee of Public Safety, Dominique Demerville.
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They were arrested in the crowd waiting for Bonaparte to come out of the Opera.
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The group was infiltrated and indeed manipulated by the police, with the knowledge of Bonaparte, who wanted to profit from the public sympathy that would come his way after the plot was dramatically uncovered.
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The public, however, was never to know the extent to which the police had controlled the conspirators: they were simply told that Bonaparte had miraculously escaped a trap organized by ‘terrorists’ – read Jacobins or the far left. They were subsequently executed, while Bonaparte used the presence of Italians among the conspirators as a pretext to expel from France Italian revolutionaries whose opinions were a little too radical for his liking.
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A couple of weeks later, a slightly more serious affair led to the arrest of Bernard Metge and a dozen or so other conspirators.
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It was Metge, the police discovered, who had written
Le Turc et le militaire français
, in which he called for the birth of ‘a thousand Brutuses’ to assassinate the tyrant Bonaparte. This group planned to throw what were known as ‘red eggs’ or ‘incendiary eggs’ (
oeufs rouges
or
oeufs incendiaires
), a kind of hand grenade that would explode like a Molotov cocktail, into Bonaparte’s carriage as it passed by, but they too were arrested before the plan could be put into effect. One of the conspirators arrested was Thomas Desforges, who had been a friend of Josephine’s before her marriage with Bonaparte. Metge was later executed.