Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

No attempt should be made to look in the past for examples of what is happening: nothing in history resembles the end of the 18th century.’

As Napoleon rode past the Place de la Révolution that evening, where Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Danton, Babeuf, the Robespierre brothers and so many others had been guillotined, he is said to have remarked to his co-conspirators: ‘Tomorrow we’ll either sleep at the Luxembourg, or we’ll finish up here.’

When Napoleon years later asked him how he had made his fortune, he insouciantly replied ‘Nothing simpler; I bought rentes [government securities] on the 17th Brumaire and sold them on the 19th.’

Of course he got a cheer from the troops, but then a member of the Elders named Linglet stood up, and said loudly: ‘General, we applaud what you say; therefore swear obedience with us to the Constitution of Year III, that is the only thing now that can maintain the Republic.’ These words produced ‘a great silence’:

Napoleon had been caught in a trap.

He then reminded them of the Prairial coup, arguing that since the constitution had been ‘violated, we need a new pact, new guarantees’, failing to point out that one of the senior instigators of Fructidor had been himself.

When Napoleon arrived with fellow officers and other troops, the younger deputies of the Left professed themselves outraged at seeing men in uniform at the door of a democratic chamber.

‘Down with the tyrant!’ the deputies started to yell, ‘Cromwell!’, ‘Tyrant!’, ‘Down with the dictator!’, ‘Hors la loi!’ (Outlaw!)

These cries had dangerous overtones for the conspirators because during the Terror – which had only ended five years earlier – the outlawing of someone had often been a precursor to their execution, and the cry ‘À bas le dictateur!’ had last been heard when Robespierre was stepping up onto the scaffold.

Napoleon has been accused of dithering for as long as half an hour after his expulsion from the Orangery.

Napoleon knew he had botched the start of the second phase of the coup, and was in a scrape, but also that he was hardly suffering a catastrophic haemorrhage of courage.

The next stage was to win over the four-hundred-strong Corps Legislatif guard under Captain Jean-Marie Ponsard.

Ponsard’s soldiers simply cleared out the Orangery, ignoring the deputies’ cries of ‘Vive la République!’ and appeals to the law and the constitution.

When it came down to a choice between obeying these giants of their profession or the politicians baying for their arrest in the Orangery, there was simply no contest.

At the end of Day Two and late into the night, Lucien assembled as many deputies in the Orangery as he could find who supported the coup, whose numbers vary according to the sources but seem to have been around fifty, so only 10 per cent of the lower chamber.

‘The Directory is no more’, they decreed, ‘because of the excesses and crimes to which they were constantly inclined.’84 They appointed Sieyès, Ducos and Napoleon – in that order – as provisional Consuls, pointing out that the first two were former Directors, which offered a sense of constitutional continuity, however spurious.

The real question perhaps ought to be: why wasn’t even so much as a penknife pulled in defence of the constitution, if not at Saint-Cloud then at least back in Paris?

If either the Directory or the Five Hundred had had any popular support at all there would have been barricades in Paris that night and in other major French cities once the news reached them, but in fact not one was raised nor a shot fired in their defence.

The key point about Brumaire, however, is not that the Directory was abolished, since it was clearly failing and likely to fall, but that both houses of the legislature were effectively abolished too, along with the Constitution of Year III.

Army officers prize order, discipline and efficiency, each of which Napoleon considered by then to be more important than liberty, equality and fraternity, and at that moment the French people agreed with him.

The day after the Brumaire coup, in fulfilment of his own prophecy, Napoleon and Josephine did indeed sleep at the Luxembourg Palace, moving into Gohier’s apartment on the ground floor, to the right of the main palace on the rue de Vaugirard, only a hundred yards from the prison of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes where Josephine had come so close to death five years earlier.

The Consulate issued a spate of decrees aimed at making the new regime popular and, in its own phrase, ‘completing the Revolution’.

Versailles was turned over to wounded soldiers; a vicious anti-émigré law was repealed, with Napoleon going personally to the Temple prison to set hostages free; the police were ordered not to harass returning émigrés or to make them take out forced ‘loans’; and the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and 1 Vendémiaire (the republican New Year’s Day) were made public holidays.

A full ten days of mourning was ordained for George Washington, who died in December, despite the fact that France and America were still fighting the Quasi-War; in the public eulogies to ‘the American Cincinnatus’, analogies were drawn between Washington and Napoleon.

Financial management moved from local authorities to the finance ministry and the whole public accounting system was eventually centralized.

Napoleon quickly established a central system for the payment of the army, hitherto done through the departments, a classic example of how he was able to slice through bureaucracy and implement a much-needed reform without delay.

Napoleon’s second coup had taken a little longer than the first, but it was just as bloodless and successful.

‘Frenchmen!’ Napoleon proclaimed on December 15, ‘A Constitution is presented to you. It ends the uncertainties … [in] the internal and military situation of the Republic … The Constitution is founded on the true principles of representative government, on the sacred rights of property, equality and liberty … Citizens, the Revolution is established on the principles which began it. It is finished.’

the vast majority of French citizens wanted a republic that was neither ‘the despotism of the Ancien Régime nor the tyranny of 1793’.

‘Confidence comes from below, power from above.’

There was plenty more in the new constitution to calm the nation: authorities could enter a Frenchman’s home without invitation only in the case of fire or flood; citizens could be held for no more than ten days without trial; ‘harshness used in arrests’ would be a crime.

Frenchmen were no longer guillotined for their political views.

Two years later, partly by forcing the tax-collecting authorities to make deposits in advance of estimated yields, the finance minister Martin Gaudin had balanced the budget for the first time since the American War of Independence.

Napoleon had therefore won some kind of democratic legitimacy, but by far less than he claimed and indeed less than a plebiscite that Robespierre had won in 1793.40

Napoleon was always going to win by a huge landslide, yet the Bonapartists simply couldn’t resist exaggerating even those numbers, thereby allowing the opposition – neo-Jacobins, royalists, liberals, moderates and others – to argue in their salons and underground cells that the whole process was a fraud.

So often, when it came to manipulating battle casualties, or inserting documents into archives, or inventing speeches to the Army of Italy, or changing ages on birth certificates, or painting Napoleon on a rearing horse crossing the Alps, Napoleon and his propagandists simply went one unnecessary step too far, and as a result invited ridicule and criticism of what were genuinely extraordinary achievements.

In his bid to end some of the more symbolic aspects of the Revolution once he had declared it to be over, Napoleon ordered that the red bonnets that had been put on church steeples and public buildings during the Revolution be taken down.

Monsieur and Madame replaced citoyen and citoyenne, Christmas and Easter returned, and finally, on January 1, 1806, the revolutionary calendar was abolished.

Napoleon had always been alive to the power of nomenclature and so he renamed the Place de la Révolution (formerly the Place Louis XV) as the Place de la Concorde, and demol...

Other examples of his passion for renaming included rechristening his invention the Cisalpine Republic as the Italian Republic, the Army of England as the Grande Armée (in 1805), and the Place de l’Indivisibilité – the old Place Royale – as the Place des Vosges.

By May 1803, some 90 per cent of all émigrés had returned to France, reversing the huge drain of talent that had so weakened the country.

Napoleon also blocked the circulation of foreign newspapers within France.54 He believed that any attempt to foster national unity would be impossible if the royalist and Jacobin newspapers were permitted to foment discontent.

France had no tradition of press freedom before the Revolution.

France in January 1800 was at war with five countries, each of which had vowed to overthrow its government.

Napoleon took a deep personal interest in the strategic dissemination of news.

The departément–arrondissement–commune system is still in place today.

As First Consul Napoleon made all public officials salaried servants of the state, ensured they were properly trained, and abolished promotion through corruption and nepotism, replacing it with rewards for talent and merit.

He instructed Gaudin to borrow at least 12 million francs from the fifteen or so richest bankers in Paris.

On February 13, Gaudin opened the doors of the Banque de France, with the First Consul as its first shareholder.

On February 19, 1800, Napoleon left the Luxembourg Palace and took up residence at the Tuileries. He was the first ruler to live there since Louis XVI had been taken away to the Temple prison in August 1792, an event he had witnessed as a young officer.