The Directory privately had to decide whether to arrest Napoleon for desertion (he had left his army in Egypt without orders) and quarantine-breaking, or to congratulate him for winning the battles of the Pyramids, Mount Tabor and Aboukir, conquering Egypt, opening up the East and establishing a vast new French colony, as his propagandists were putting out.
[…]
‘Brumaire’ means ‘season of mists and fog’, and it is appropriately hard to piece together the mechanics of what took place next because Napoleon deliberately committed nothing to paper; only two letters of his survive for the twenty-three days between his arrival in Paris on October 16 and the 18 Brumaire when the coup was launched, neither of them compromising.
For a man who wrote an average of fifteen letters a day, this time everything was to be done by word of mouth. He had already once in his life had his correspondence ransacked for evidence with which to guillotine him, and he wasn’t going to allow it to happen again.
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There may have been as many as ten active plots to overthrow the Directory being secretly discussed in these months.
None of the myriad failures of the Directory over the previous four years could credibly be laid at the door of the absent Napoleon. Defeats abroad had stripped France of the territories he had won in 1796–7 and had cut her off from German and Italian markets. While Russia, Britain, Portugal, Turkey and Austria had joined the War of the Second Coalition against her, there was also a so-called ‘Quasi-War’ with America over the repayments of debts that the United States argued she owed the French Crown and not the French state.
There had already been no fewer than four French war ministers in eight months that year, and with army pay so deeply in arrears, desertion, brigandage and highway robbery were rampant in the countryside.
Royalist revolts in Provence and the Vendée had reignited.
A Royal Navy blockade had wrecked overseas trade and the paper currency was next to worthless.
The taxation of land, doors and windows, the seizure of suspected pro-Bourbon hostages, and the Jourdan Law of 1798 that turned the earlier emergency levées en masse into something approaching universal military conscription, were all deeply unpopular.
Corruption over government contracts was even more rife than usual, and was correctly assumed to involve Directors such as Barras.
Freedom of the press and association were heavily restricted.
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Few blights undermine a society more comprehensively than hyperinflation, and great political prizes would go to anyone who could defeat it. (The deputies of the legislature paid themselves in an inflation-proof way, by index-linking their salaries to the value of 30,000 kg of wheat.) The Directory had abolished the Law of the Maximum, which kept prices down on staples such as bread, flour, milk and meat, so the bad 1798 harvest had led to a pound of bread reaching above 3 sols for the first time in two years, leading to hoarding, riots and genuine distress. Perhaps worst of all, people couldn’t see how anything could improve, because revisions of the constitution had to be ratified three times by both chambers at three-year intervals and then by a special assembly at the end of the nine-year process.
[…]
By contrast, the constitutions that Napoleon had recently imposed on the Cisalpine, Venetian, Ligurian, Lemanic, Helvetian and Roman republics, along with his administrative reforms of Malta and Egypt, made him look like a zealous, efficient republican who believed in strong executives and central control, solutions that might also work well for metropolitan France.
[…]
Yet none of this was enough to dispel the overall impression among Frenchmen that the Directory had failed and, as Napoleon put it at the time, ‘the pear was ripe’.
Nor was there a place for Napoleon within the existing political structure, as the minimum age for Directors was still forty, whereas Napoleon was thirty, and Gohier hadn’t seemed keen to alter the constitution for him.
[…]
‘A nation is always what you have the wit to make it,’ he said. ‘The triumph of faction, parties, divisions, is the fault of those in authority only … No people are bad under a good government, just as no troops are bad under good generals … These men are bringing France down to the level of their own blundering. They are degrading her, and she is beginning to repudiate them.’
[…]
‘Well, what can generals expect from this government of lawyers?’
[…]
Two separate stages of the coup were planned. On Day One, which was originally intended to be Thursday, November 7 (16 Brumaire), 1799, Napoleon would attend a specially called session of the upper house, the Elders, where it sat at the Tuileries, to inform them that because of British-backed plots and neo-Jacobin threats, the Republic was in danger, so they must authorize that the next day’s meeting of both the Elders and the lower house, the Five Hundred, should be held 7 miles west of Paris in the former Bourbon palace of Saint-Cloud. Primed by Sieyès, the Elders would appoint Napoleon as commander of all the troops in the 17th military district (i.e. Paris). That same day Sieyès and Ducos would resign from the Directory, and Barras, Gohier and Moulin would be prevailed upon to resign also by a judicious mixture of threats and bribery, leaving a power vacuum. Then, on Day Two, Napoleon would go to Saint-Cloud and persuade the legislature that in view of the national emergency, the Constitution of the Year III must be repealed and a new one established replacing the Directory with a three-man executive government called – with fittingly Roman overtones – the Consulate, comprising Sieyès, Ducos and himself, with elections to be held thereafter for new representative assemblies that Sieyès had been formulating. Sieyès believed he had the Elders under control. If the Five Hundred baulked at abolishing themselves, their newly elected president, Lucien, would dissolve the body.
The flaws in the plan were glaring. A two-day coup might lose the conspirators the all-important initiative,
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The second problem was to keep the coup secret
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Those members of the Elders likely to oppose the decree simply weren’t given proper notice of the extraordinary (and extraordinarily early) meeting, one of the oldest tricks in politics.
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On receiving the news of his appointment by the Elders, Napoleon changed into his general’s uniform and rode to the Tuileries, arriving at 10 a.m., where he found Sébastiani and his dragoons.
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‘You are the wisdom of the nation,’ he flattered them, ‘it’s up to you to indicate the measures in these circumstances that can save our country. I come here, surrounded by all the generals, to promise you all their support. I name General Lefebvre as my lieutenant. I will faithfully carry out the mission you have entrusted to me. 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.’
[…]
At Saint-Cloud Napoleon addressed the Elders, but it was an unimpressive oratorical performance which reads better than it apparently sounded:
You are on a volcano. The Republic no longer has a government; the Directory has been dissolved, the factions are agitating; the time to make a decision has arrived. You have summoned me and my companions-in-arms to aid your wisdom, but time is precious. We must decide. I know that we speak of Caesar, of Cromwell, as if the present time could be compared to past times. No, I want only the safety of the Republic, and to support the decisions that you are going to take.
He referred to his grenadiers, ‘whose caps I see at the doors of this chamber’, and called on them to tell the Elders ‘Have I ever deceived you? Have I ever betrayed my promises, when, in the camps, in the midst of privations, I promised you victory and plenty, and when, at your head, I led you from success to success? Tell them now: was it for my interests or for those of the Republic?’ 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.’
[…]
The interval between Day One and Day Two had given the opposition time to organize to try to block the provisional Consulate that Napoleon and Lucien were about to propose. The Five Hundred included many more neo-Jacobins than the Elders and was twice the size; it was always going to be far harder to convince.
[…]
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. Napoleon entered on his own and had to stride half-way into the room to reach the rostrum, in the course of which deputies started to shout at him. An eyewitness, the neo-Jacobin Jean-Adrien Bigonnet, heard Napoleon shouting back: ‘I want no more factionalism, this must finish; I want no more of it!’
[…]
‘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.
Lucien tried to establish order, banging his presidential gavel and shouting for silence, but by then several of the deputies had come down from their seats into the main body of the Orangery and had started to push, shake, boo, jostle and slap Napoleon, some grabbing him by his high brocaded collar, so that Lefebvre and the grenadiers had to place themselves between him and the outraged deputies.
[…]
‘He managed to get down to the courtyard,’ recalled Lavalette, ‘mounted his horse at the foot of the staircase, and sent an order for Lucien to come out to him. At this point the windows of the chamber were flung open and members of the Five Hundred pointed at him still shouting “Down with the dictator!” and “Outlaw!” ’
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The next stage was to win over the four-hundred-strong Corps Legislatif guard under Captain Jean-Marie Ponsard. This was achieved not by Napoleon alone but instead by a piece of pure theatre that one suspects might have been stage-managed, possibly even practised beforehand. It bears an uncanny resemblance to a remark Napoleon had made to the French consul in Genoa, Tilly, just before his arrest in 1794, when he wrote of Augustin Robespierre, ‘Had he been my own brother, if he’d aspired to tyranny I’d have stabbed him myself.’
Now, five years later, Lucien made precisely the same point when he leaped onto a horse to harangue the guards about how the majority of the Five Hundred were being terrorized by a minority of fanatics in the pay of English gold. He then drew his sword, held its point against Napoleon’s breast, and cried: ‘I swear that I will stab my own brother to the heart if he ever attempts anything against the liberty of Frenchmen.’ It was a promise as disingenuous as it was histrionic, but it worked. (It was also the last time that any of Napoleon’s brothers proved anything other than a complete liability to him until the battle of Waterloo itself.)
‘Captain,’ Napoleon told Ponsard, at least according to one much later account, ‘take your company and go right away to disperse this assembly of sedition. They are not the representatives of the nation anymore, but some scoundrels who caused all its misfortunes.’ Ponsard asked what to do in case of resistance. ‘Use force,’ Napoleon replied, ‘even the bayonet.’ ‘That will suffice, mon général.’
With General Charles Leclerc (who was married to Napoleon’s sister Pauline) and Murat (who was engaged to Napoleon’s other sister Caroline), Bessières, Major Guillaume Dujardin of the 8th Line and other officers, including Lefebvre and Marmont, denouncing the lawyer-politicians who had supposedly been bought by English gold, Ponsard’s soldiers simply cleared out the Orangery, ignoring the deputies’ cries of ‘Vive la République!’ and appeals to the law and the constitution.
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Fearing arrest, many deputies then fled, according to legend some of them jumping out of the Orangery’s ground floor windows. Lavalette recorded them ‘doffing their Roman toga and square cap costumes, the easier to flee incognito’.
[…]
‘The Directory is no more’, they decreed, ‘because of the excesses and crimes to which they were constantly inclined.’
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.
[…]
After a decade of Revolution, many Frenchmen were desperate for leadership and recognized that the parliamentary process inhibited that, as did a constitution that was next to impossible to amend.
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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.
[…]
Brumaire was not described as a coup d’état at the time, though of course it was one and the term was very much in the political vernacular (it had been used to describe the Thermidor purge). To contemporaries these were simply les journées (the days).
