Citizen Emperor (2 page)

For Bonaparte and his collaborators, the best way to overcome the impression that his government was transitory, one more in a long line of governments, was to make sure he was seen to act, quickly and decisively. Three days after the coup, Bonaparte made a dramatic gesture towards political reconciliation by repealing the Law of Hostages. The Law, passed in June 1799, was considered to be one of the most odious edicts promulgated by the Directory and called for local authorities to round up people who were then held as political hostages. It was a means of keeping rebellious regions quiet.
¹⁸
Bonaparte personally went to the Temple Prison in Paris to release the hostages, and from there went on to other prisons, demanding the list of inmates, reportedly saying: ‘It was an unjust law that deprived you of your freedom and it was my first duty to restore liberty to you.’
¹⁹

It was a media coup; the police reports noted how much of a favourable impact it had had on the public.
²⁰
Bonaparte’s personal involvement in the release of prisoners had nothing to do with his humanity. It was also telling of the kind of regime now in place, and the kind of man heading it. The rationalization of the Penal Code in 1791 had completely eliminated the possibility of a head of state interfering in the legal process to grant pardons; it was considered a remnant of the
ancien régime
, at odds with the Revolution’s notion of equality of all before the law. Bonaparte, however (though probably inadvertently), was reclaiming the right to patrimonial justice, to the historic prerogative of the executive pardon, years before it was institutionalized in the imperial Constitution. In short, he was already acting if not quite yet as a monarch, then as though everything already devolved from his person.

A series of conciliatory measures designed to help heal the social and political rifts affecting France followed this dramatic first gesture, many of them directed towards royalists: Bonaparte freed refractory priests who had been detained on the islands of Ré and Oléron off the Atlantic coast; he began talks with the rebels in the Vendée and concluded a truce; in Calais, he freed émigré prisoners who were about to be executed; the very day the new Constitution was adopted (25 December), the law against émigrés was repealed, and those deported after the coup of Fructidor (September 1797) were allowed to return; more than 50,000 émigrés were removed from the list of the proscribed (a general amnesty followed in 1802); Sunday mass was restored; the oath of loyalty that priests had been required to take was done away with; a ceremony was held in honour of Pope Pius VI, who had died at Valence in August 1799; and the festival of 21 January, the anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution – which the revolutionaries dubbed ‘the festival of the just punishment of the last king of the French’
²¹
– was abolished, as was the oath of hatred for royalty. A decision was made to keep only two national feast days as state celebrations: the festival of 14 July and the commemoration of 10 August 1792, the days on which the monarchy was overthrown and the Republic was founded. No other revolutionary government had dared offer such generous conciliatory gestures, obviously calculated, but which nevertheless marked the determination of Bonaparte to bring civil strife to an end.

Like most government bodies, however, the left hand did not necessarily know what the right was doing. Much of the moral capital Bonaparte won through these acts of clemency was almost squandered by Joseph Fouché’s repressive machinery that went into action in the days after the coup. On 12 November, as a result of the first meeting between the provisional consuls and probably on the insistence of Sieyès, a mandate was issued for the arrest of about seventy former terrorists, Jacobins and various notorious Parisian
sans-culottes
. It may have been a reflex action based on precedent.
²²
Fouché was ordered to draw up a list of suspects that was, deliberately it seems, incoherent. Among the names one could find the hideous drunkard Gabriel Mamin who, in 1792, had bragged about having killed the Princess de Lamballe during the September Massacres and of having ripped out her heart. But one could also find the victor of the battle of Fleurus in June 1794, General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, as well as a number of deputies who had made themselves conspicuous at Saint-Cloud by their hostility towards Bonaparte. They were joined by deputies who had not even been at Saint-Cloud but who were nevertheless suspected of being hostile to the regime. Thirty-seven individuals were deported to Guiana (commonly referred to as the dry guillotine, because death was slow but certain to come), while twenty-two others were confined to the islands of Ré and Oléron where survival rates were as low as in Guiana. All the newspapers, with the exception of the royalist press, protested against measures that were obviously meant to eliminate what was left of the Jacobin faction.
²³
The outcry, not least from people who had supported the coup, made the provisional consuls realize they had made a mistake. They could not play at being above factions, law-abiding and non-violent if they immediately struck at the Jacobins.

Two weeks later, Bonaparte rescinded the deportation decree on the grounds that ‘The [Jacobin] faction that would have wished to form a state within the state no longer exists . . . To conserve public tranquillity, we no longer need to do anything but maintain a strict surveillance over those same individuals.’
²⁴
Bonaparte made sure that Sieyès was blamed for the mistake, distancing himself politically from any perceived wrongdoing, weakening his rival in the process.
²⁵
This kind of measure enabled the Brumairians to differentiate their coup from all those that had preceded them (previous coups had always ended in arrests, executions and deportations). Nevertheless, a warning shot had been fired across the bow of Jacobin dissidents.
²⁶

‘Despair of Relying on Yourselves and Rely Only on Me’

The problems facing the new regime were enormous: civil war raged in the west, brigandage, which could entail anything from highway robbery to assaults on towns by armed bands, was rife in many areas of France
²⁷
– some historians speak of a banditry psychosis
²⁸
– the treasury was empty, and the threat of an allied coalition, the second against France, loomed large. The coalition had formed while Bonaparte was in Egypt and consisted largely of Austria and Russia with British backing. By the end of 1799, it had succeeded in clawing back all the territory Bonaparte had won in northern Italy in 1796–7. The new rulers would have to work hard to win the support of a disillusioned public that had lost faith in both politicians and the democratic process. The Brumairians, therefore, not only had to make sure the army was either onside or neutralized, but they also had to convince the local administrations throughout the country to continue their work. Most importantly of all, however, they had to convince the public that the change in regime was warranted and for the good of France. Their success in all of this was by no means an easy or an assured thing. It was a gradual and uneven process that was to prove much more difficult than the actual seizure of power.

Bonaparte emerged during this process as the undisputed head of the French state. Given his character, his ascendancy might appear a foregone conclusion, but in the days and weeks after Brumaire that was by no means the case. The coup had enabled him to become involved in the decision-making process at the highest levels, but the guiding light behind the coup had been and still was Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès. Like the regime’s gradual consolidation of power, Bonaparte’s domination of the executive took place slowly, and has to be understood from two different perspectives. The first was bureaucratic. In this process, as we shall see, Bonaparte was able to outmanoeuvre his opponents strategically and, with the support of a number of key figures among the Brumairians, focus power on his person.

The second was political, was much more subtle and went hand in hand with the regime’s consolidation of power. It consisted of giving the country an overarching narrative the French could believe in. The narrative too was centred on Bonaparte’s person. At the end of their first meeting at the Luxembourg Palace, the provisional consuls adopted a proclamation to the French people that perpetuated the myth of the Directorial government about to collapse into general chaos and the arrival of a new government that was to bring everything back to order.
²⁹
A few days later, Bonaparte declared in the
Moniteur
, ‘I refused to be the man of one faction.’
³⁰
He thus portrayed himself as outside the circle of conspirators; they had come to him as a man above the political infighting, a theme Bonaparte had exploited ever since his days in Italy in 1796–7 and which he would constantly hammer home over the coming weeks and months. The formula used to express this – ‘neither red bonnets nor red heels’ (
ni bonnet rouge, ni talon rouge
)
³¹
– epitomized the Brumairians’ desire to be done once and for all with the bloody power struggles that had characterized the Revolution. At the time, this approach was referred to as the ‘fusion between different parties’.
³²
Bonaparte was thus portrayed as the man who could restore order after chaos.
³³

This was smart politics, although it was not the first time a revolutionary government had attempted to steer a middle course between royalism and Jacobinism. It had been the approach adopted after the fall of Robespierre, but the then government failed to find a balance. The Brumairians represented too narrow a base upon which to construct a new regime and therefore had to appeal to wider sections of French society. Bonaparte was able to do this because he was prepared to work with anybody, no matter what their past, as long as they were willing to support the regime, a radical departure from previous revolutionary governments.
³⁴
In the process, he weakened the Jacobin and royalist factions from whence these people came.
³⁵
In reality, there were very few regicides and few declared royalists among Bonaparte’s collaborators, but one should not dismiss his willingness to work with all-comers as political opportunism. Behind the rhetoric was a real desire to carry out social and political reforms that would heal the rifts brought about by the Revolution, and to attract to him men whose political opinions had a short time before made them enemies of the state.
³⁶

Anonymous,
La France avant le 18 Brumaire de l’an VIII
(France before 18 Brumaire in the Year VIII), 1800. The caption reads: ‘Grieving, destitute of everything, driven by despair and discord, France is revived by hope and delivered by Bonaparte into the hands of peace. Time traces that happy day into the annals of history.’

It is clear what Bonaparte was doing in the weeks after Brumaire, and he appears to have been fully aware of it at the time. He was sending a message – the new regime was different. It was prepared to go a long way to heal the rifts, but at the same time it would no longer tolerate political extremes. In doing so, Bonaparte was saying to the French political elite, ‘despair of relying on yourselves and rely only on me’.
³⁷
There were to be no more factions, Jacobins, terrorists or moderates. There were only Frenchmen.
³⁸
Bonaparte’s political programme was outlined in a newspaper article, which he probably wrote himself, and which appeared in the
Ami des Lois
on 6 December 1799. Relying on ‘liberal ideas’, he intended embellishing the Republic, fixing mistakes, relying on political and religious tolerance and overlooking past insults.
³⁹

‘Do You Want to be King?’

Sieyès was aware that by bringing Bonaparte into the conspiracy he risked losing control. It had been a risk he was prepared to run. The struggle for supremacy had begun almost as soon as the two men met, and could end only with one being victorious and the other eliminated as a political force.
⁴⁰
Over the coming weeks, power became centred on Bonaparte who, by the strength of his character, gained ground little by little. In the course of the meeting in the Luxembourg Palace between the three provisional consuls the morning after the coup, Bonaparte managed to get himself nominated as president of the provisional Consulate. We do not know exactly how this happened; only much later did Napoleon claim he simply took over the presidency, but one cannot place too much store in that assertion.
⁴¹
Accounts have the third provisional consul, Roger Ducos, who had been Sieyès’ man up to this point, recognize Bonaparte’s ascendancy by declaring, ‘General, it is pointless voting on the presidency, it belongs to you by right.’
⁴²
Sieyès apparently made a grimace but was obliged to concede. In an astute move, however, Bonaparte suggested that each preside for twenty-four hours at a time under the title of ‘Consul of the day’ (
Consul du jour
).
⁴³
Since Bonaparte was first in alphabetical order, his name appeared before the other two consuls on the orders issued that day.