Table Of Content2
For my mother,
Pat Dwyer
3
Victory is a Goddess greedy for death; her laurel is a
branch
dripping blood and soaked in tears.
Maurice de Tascher, Notes de Campagne
4
Contents
REGENERATION, 1799–1802
1 The Invention of a Saviour
2 ‘Perfect Glory and Solid Peace’
3 Italy and the Consolidation of Power
4 Peace
5 The Politics of Fusion
EMPIRE, 1802–1804
6 The Conservative Turn
7 The End of the Revolution
8 ‘The First Throne of the Universe’
9 Citizen Emperor
CONQUEST, 1805–1807
10 ‘The Rage of Conquest and Ambition’
11 The Grand Empire
12 Zenith
13 ‘The Devil’s Business’
CRUCIBLE, 1808–1811
14 The Desolate Father
15 The Tide Turns
16 Bourgeois Emperor, Universal Emperor
17 ‘A Very Stormy Year’
HUBRIS, 1812
18 The Second Polish War
19 ‘The Struggle of Obstinacy’
20 Destiny Forsaken
THE ADVENTURER, 1813–1814
21 ‘The Enemy of the Human Race’
22 The Deliverance of Europe
23 The Naked Emperor
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24 Sovereign of Elba
THE SECOND COMING, 1815
25 The Saviour Returns
26 A Parody of Empire
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
6
REGENERATION, 1799–1802
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1
The Invention of a Saviour
‘Neither Excitement nor Enthusiasm’
It was still dark, the early hours of the morning of 11 November 1799.
Bonaparte’s carriage stopped before a modest house in the rue de la
Victoire where Josephine was waiting for him in bed in a state of nervous
anxiety. They stayed up talking for a while, going over the events of the
previous day. He learnt that his mother and one of his sisters, Pauline, had
come to the house. They had been at the theatre when they heard the
rumour that Bonaparte had just escaped an assassination attempt.1 Pauline
apparently had been unable to stop crying until news arrived that all was
well. The strain the conspirators must have suffered over the last two days
would have been enormous. Bonaparte appears to have taken it in his
stride, with the exception of that little incident that had taken place amid
the Council of Five Hundred at Saint-Cloud when the epithet ‘Outlaw’ was
hurled at him by a number of deputies, furious to see a soldier enter the
chamber where they were deliberating. He had nearly fainted. A little later
that morning, when Bonaparte dismissed his secretary Bourrienne, he
supposedly said as an aside, ‘By the way, we will sleep tomorrow at the
Luxembourg [Palace].’2
Bonaparte was just thirty years old. He still cut a relatively svelte figure
although over the years he would become portly, if not obese. His dark-
brown hair was beginning to recede. He had a scar on his leg where an
English bayonet had once pierced him. His skin was sallow, and his eyes
grey. He was five feet six inches tall with a slight build. He did not have
any children, but he would eventually sire four or five, only one of them
legitimate, and none of them with his first wife Josephine. By any
standards, his had been a meteoric rise. Less than three years before, he
had been a nonentity on the political and military scene. Now he was one
of the major political contenders, and in time would become one of the
most recognized men in European history, with a hat and a pose – that is,
his right hand in his vest or his hands folded behind his back – that would
become iconic.3 No one yet knew, however, what he was truly capable of.
Newspaper accounts of the previous evening’s events had already
appeared by the time Bonaparte awoke after a few hours’ sleep. It was 20
8
Brumaire in the Year VIII (11 November 1799), a décadi, a rest day in the
revolutionary calendar. At the Château de Saint-Cloud on the western
outskirts of Paris, where the coup unfolded in the night of 10–11
November, the conspirators had formed a new provisional government –
dubbed the Consulate because headed by three consuls, Emmanuel Joseph
Sieyès, Roger Ducos and Bonaparte. The trip from Josephine’s house in the
rue de la Victoire to the Luxembourg Palace, where Bonaparte was to meet
with the other two provisional consuls, was a short one. On his way, he
would have seen people going about their daily business, taking a stroll on
what turned out to be a mild, rainy day, gazing at the troops that had been
positioned at strategic points throughout the city. Some stopped to read
the proclamations posted on the walls of Paris explaining what had taken
place, possibly relieved to discover that Bonaparte had escaped an
assassination attempt against him, smiling perhaps at the story of the
defenestration of the Five Hundred. The minister of police, Joseph Fouché,
was doing his best to spread that one around the cafés and the theatres.
From a reading of the official explanations, plus the accounts given in
some of the newspapers, it would have been apparent even to the most
heedless observer that the coup had been Bonaparte’s, or that he was at
least the central figure, and that therefore he was now nominally holding
the reins of government. That is why reaction to the coup varied according
to what one thought of Bonaparte, or conversely according to how much
one detested the ousted regime that had been in power since the fall of
Robespierre, the Directory. In Paris, Christine Reinhard talked of how the
people were jubilant, and of how, even a week later, the enthusiasm for
the new regime had not waned – ‘you would think that we had returned to
the first days of liberty’.4 Given that her husband was minister for foreign
affairs, she may have portrayed things in a somewhat rosier light than they
actually were. Paris, by other accounts, appears to have been relatively
indifferent. A curious police report stated that the coup was met with
‘neither excitement nor enthusiasm’ (ni l’exaltation ni l’enthousiasme).5 This
was portrayed as a positive thing. ‘It is at the bottom of people’s hearts
that this contentment resides.’
Paris was not France, and for the moment nothing was certain. The
Brumairians, as the conspirators were called (named after the month of
Brumaire in the revolutionary calendar, the month in which the coup took
place), did not know how the rest of the country was going to react, and
that included the army.6 More than sixty generals had been involved in the
coup,7 but the troops belonged to the garrison of Paris, were personally
loyal to Bonaparte and had been well prepared in advance. It was normal
that they should publish a declaration of support in the newspaper the
Moniteur universel, but reactions within the rest of the army were far from
9
uniform.8 General André Masséna, for example, at the head of about
35,000 demoralized troops in Italy, wrote that opinion was generally not
favourable, while some divisions and a number of officers were openly
opposed to it.9 Officers in the Army of the North (based in Holland)
expressed some reservations, as did the commanding general of
Marseilles.10 One cannot assume that because Bonaparte was a renowned
general the army was completely swayed by him. On the contrary, the
army was home to enough oppositional elements to make it a potentially
dangerous institution.11 Eventually, the officer corps was purged, but that
would come later.12
The reactions in the administration were mixed too. A number of local
authorities took the initiative and sent messages of adherence to the new
authorities – this was the case in the north and east of the country, that is,
those areas under direct threat from invasion13 – but at Toulouse there was
talk of a Jacobin uprising. At Grenoble the National Guard refused to swear
an oath of loyalty to the new regime. At Metz the commander of the town
had to establish order by force and impose martial law in several
surrounding areas. In 1789, the revolutionaries had divided France into
eighty-nine departments. One week after the coup, the regime could count
on the adhesion of only thirteen departments. The departmental
administration of the Jura, for example, characterized Bonaparte as a
‘usurping tyrant’.14
This is why, ten days after the coup, the consuls decided to send one
delegate to each military division (there were twenty-six in all), to carry the
‘good news’ and to nip in the bud any signs of resistance to the
changeover. The delegates, all officers, had far-reaching powers to
suspend or replace public functionaries, to close political clubs and to post
proclamations. Three weeks later, however, twenty departments had still
not sent in congratulations. Even then, the letters received did little more
than mirror the propaganda the new regime had already sent to the
provinces. It has to be said, though, that most officials in the departments
appear to have welcomed the coup, happier to be rid of the Directory than
to see Bonaparte’s arrival on the political scene. Few were downright
hostile.15 Even those individuals who had opposed the coup eventually had
to face the political reality and come round to the new regime.16
In view of the rapid turnover of political personalities since 1789, many
people did not expect the new regime to last very long. In the last ten
years, there had been five governments – the National Assembly (1789),
the National Constituent Assembly (1789–91), the Legislative Assembly
(1791–2), the National Convention (1792–5) and the Directory (1795–9) –
and the country had swung from absolute monarchy to a republic when the
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