Citizen Emperor (31 page)

The terrain had been prepared by the publication of a number of pamphlets, as well as articles in the press. One anonymous pamphlet portrayed Cadoudal in a less than flattering light, as someone who had accepted money and support from England, and who had pursued a ‘system of assassination’ against those who had thrown their support behind the Consulate.
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In addition, a list of ‘brigands’ charged by Britain with the task of assassinating Napoleon was posted on walls throughout France, Moreau’s name at the top.
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Moreau’s interrogation and the proceedings of the trial were also published in an attempt to convince the public of his guilt, but to no avail.
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The strategy backfired on Napoleon, in part because of Moreau’s reputation. Moreau and his supporters also used the press in an attempt to clear his name.
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As we have seen, the general’s innocence was not as clear-cut after the arrest of Pichegru and the execution of Enghien. The regime attempted to associate his name with the royalists, while putting him on trial with people like Pichegru made him appear guilty by association. Despite their best efforts, however, the Emperor’s men did not succeed in tarnishing Moreau’s name.

That is why the trial caused a stir in fashionable circles. The trial of celebrities always seems to find an echo in a populace avid for scandal. Moreau’s friends gathered at the Palais de Justice in the hope of turning the crowd against the regime.
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A considerable number of Moreau’s supporters congregated outside the court, unable to get in. The court itself was packed with military men. Long gone were the days, however, when the crowds of Paris could determine the course of national politics; impressive security measures had been taken to make sure nothing of the sort would happen. Six thousand troops were stationed in and around the court to keep order. Just to make sure the odds were on the government’s side, a
senatus consultum
did away with the jury the defendants would normally have been allowed. The possibility of an acquittal was not being risked. The president of the panel of judges (there were ten in all), a man by the name of Hémart, who had earned a reputation during the Terror, was ordered by the prefect of police, Réal, to find the accused guilty and to sentence them to death.
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Things nevertheless did not go terribly well for the prosecution: portraits of the accused were sold outside the Palais de Justice; Cadoudal passionately defended his cause; while public opinion in general seems to have been with Moreau. Mme de Staël, Mme Récamier, numerous officers, even the gendarmes meant to guard him displayed a marked sympathy for the general. At theatres throughout Paris, every time there was an allusion to the conflict between Napoleon and Moreau, the public demonstrated its preference for Moreau.
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One diplomat reported that the ‘army and its generals spoke against the Emperor with a freedom that makes one fear anything’.
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At four o’clock in the morning of 10 June, the verdict was read out in an overcrowded room. Moreau got off lightly – two years in prison – but even this was considered harsh by those present. In the brouhaha that followed, the room was evacuated, the convicted man taken back to the Temple, and the area around the Palais de Justice cleared by the troops. There had been no riot, just a few republicans expressing their discontent. Twenty other defendants were not as lucky as Moreau; they were condemned to death, including the Marquis de Rivière, Armand de Polignac and Cadoudal (although eight were pardoned).
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Three carts each containing four prisoners and four priests were conducted from the Conciergerie to the Place de Grève, in front of the Hôtel de Ville, where in a scene reminiscent of the days of the Terror the condemned men were executed in front of a large crowd. Windows along the way had been rented out so that people could get a better look at what had become an unusual sight. Cadoudal was offered a pardon but he rejected it and preferred to go to his death with the men who had followed him, arguing with the others at the foot of the scaffold about who was to go first. Cadoudal won. Legend has it that shortly before his execution he said, ‘We wanted a king, we have made an emperor.’
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The retraction of evidence during the trial by two witnesses, who now claimed never to have seen Pichegru and Moreau together, Cadoudal’s silence and the death of Pichegru combined to ‘save’ Moreau. Napoleon in person intervened, writing to Cambacérès asking him to intercede and to get the judges to review their initial finding.
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The Emperor is supposed to have said to Bourrienne after hearing the verdict, ‘They asserted that he was guilty and here they are treating him like a pickpocket! What am I supposed to do with him now?’
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He was perhaps that much more exasperated by the verdict since it went against the orders he had given the judges. Nevertheless, when the wife of Moreau asked permission for her husband to be allowed to leave for America, Napoleon assented. Moreau returned to Europe in 1813 in the service of the Tsar, only to be killed on the battlefield of Dresden by a cannon ball that struck his right leg, went through the horse he was riding and then shattered his left leg. He died after days of terrible suffering.

‘The Most Perfect of Men’

Once Napoleon had eagerly accepted the idea of hereditary power, representatives of the state and the army were mobilized to show their support. General Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult, commander of two large military camps at Montreuil and Saint-Omer, was asked to provide information about how the army would react to the idea of Napoleon’s becoming hereditary ruler.
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On 10 April, only weeks before the official proclamation, Soult wrote a letter to Napoleon indicating that the army ‘desired and demanded that you be proclaimed Emperor of the Gauls’ and that heredity be established in his family.
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It was shortly after this that the official petitions in favour of heredity were supported by declarations from the army. This aspect of the public relations campaign appears to have been orchestrated by the minister for war, Berthier, who first ordered that a report written by the minister of justice, Claude-Ambroise Régnier, on the Cadoudal–Pichegru plot be read to the troops,
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but it is also possible that Napoleon’s brothers, Joseph and Lucien, were behind the initiative.
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Many commanders understood what was expected of them. This was a top-down process. We know, for example, that some commanders circulated model petitions to their troops,
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and that a number of the top military brass petitioned Napoleon to adopt the ‘title of Emperor that Charlemagne carried’. ‘Does it not belong by right to the man who reminds us of it as a legislator and warrior?’
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Some historians have interpreted these expressions as an attempt to intimidate the legislature.
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However, there is nothing to suggest that the army as an institution was behaving any differently from other institutions in its demand for an emperor.

A similar process took place in the administration, much of it orchestrated by Fouché.
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In March and April 1804, in the wake of the Cadoudal–Pichegru plot, dozens of letters from individual prefects, judges, mayors, towns and electoral colleges were published in the
Moniteur
. Most of these petitions lamented the dangers facing the First Consul, confounded the good of the nation with his personal wellbeing, and offered him their thanks, support and sometimes love.
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They expressed solidarity with Bonaparte, often portrayed him as ‘saviour’ and hero, but most of all expressed a desire to exact vengeance on those held responsible for the assassination attempt – that is, the British. ‘Do they ignore the fact’, wrote the sub-prefect of the department of the Aisne, ‘that heaven protects our
patrie
and that the vastness of faithful citizens forms an impenetrable rampart around the First Consul against the attacks of perfidy?’
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In a letter to Bonaparte from François Louis Marguet, who described himself as a ‘simple citizen’ from Besançon, the outrage against ‘perfidious England’ is palpable. He declared that Bonaparte’s death ‘would be a public calamity. The fatal day that takes you from the French people will be the last day of their liberty and their happiness.’
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This particular aspect of the petitions can be seen as an attempt on the part of the Consular regime to garner support for the coming war with Britain and, indirectly, to consolidate Bonaparte’s personal hold on power. The rhetoric used was based on two sentiments: overwhelming enthusiasm for Bonaparte and for the apparent gains that had been made in French society since his coming to power; and fear of losing those gains if he were to disappear.
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At first there was no mention of heredity or empire in any of the petitions from the country’s most important institutions.
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The only time the word ‘empire’ was mentioned, in a petition from the president of the electoral college of Sésia in Italy, was a general reference to the ‘vast empire’ that Bonaparte governed.
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One can find, however, a vague reference in the petition from the department of the Roër to Bonaparte receiving, in the country of Charlemagne, ‘the just tribute of love, respect and recognition’ which was his due, and which points to the possibility of a higher office. But that is the extent of it. Not until Jean-François Curée gave the lead in the Tribunate, his speech being published in the
Moniteur
on 1 May, demanding that Bonaparte be named emperor, was the process officially set in motion.
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This was the first time that someone in an official capacity had openly spoken out in favour of the title. Shortly after that, petitions started to appear demanding that heredity and the executive power be united. As we now know, the prompting for Curée’s declaration came from Bonaparte himself, but that does not diminish the fact that from this time on the floodgates were opened and that what followed cannot be discounted as a propaganda coup organized by a few behind the scenes.

After the declaration of the Empire, a number of these letters played on the same themes that we have already encountered among the political elite – that is, that France had been ‘lost’ since the convocation of the Estates General in 1789 because of ‘ambitious innovators’. In one letter, the commercial tribunal for the town of Soissons was convinced ‘by its own experience’ that a hereditary leader ‘can alone assure their [the French people’s] happiness in consolidating the power of the nation’.
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Some professed to having been ‘always for the government of one man’, but up until then that opinion had been fatal and they had not been able to do anything to win acceptance for the idea.
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Among ordinary citizens, one can find an open adherence to empire that cuts across socio-economic categories, and that took on emotional dimensions rarely discussed by historians.
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Once the Empire was declared, thousands of private individuals wrote to express support not so much for the idea of empire as for the idea of Napoleon – ‘the greatest of conquerors, the most perfect of men’ – as emperor.
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Some of these documents are collective petitions containing a brief letter of support and congratulations, followed by a list of signatures that may or may not have been entirely voluntary.
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Some are letters from individuals attempting to curry favour with the regime.
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The vast majority, however, are marked by an affective bond that appears to escape rationalization.

In a letter to Napoleon from a woman in Avignon named Carrié, for example, one can find the following sentence: ‘The supreme being has fulfilled my prayer, God who can do all grant that the good and perfect health of our Emperor, who is closer to a Divinity than a man, be everlasting.’ Napoleon was often compared to a divinity, as in this letter from the ‘woman Garnier’, from Ober-Ingelheim (near Mainz), who declared that ‘Your Majesty was in my eyes, and in those with tender hearts, a tutelary God actually your empire by the grace of God [sic].’
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In addition, dozens of poems, sometimes printed, often handwritten, are dedicated to Napoleon’s ascension.
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Much of this material traces the life of the Emperor in flattering terms as well as presaging his rise to power. These documents of support for him were also a spontaneous political response to the predicament facing the French nation – the threat of war with Britain and the possibility of losing through assassination the man many now considered to be the Saviour of the Revolution.