19

THE SLOW DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC

1799–1804

DESPITE BONAPARTE’S AWKWARD PERFORMANCE AT SAINT-CLOUD ON THE 19th of brumaire, the coup proceeded as its plotters had planned: the browbeaten remnants of the two councils authorized them to draw up a new constitution. Like the thermidorians, who, after overthrowing Robespierre, had immediately blamed him for the extremism of the Terror, the brumairians put all the blame on those who had been in power before them. They inundated the country with propaganda insisting that, under the Directory, the country had been on the verge of catastrophe, and that only their intervention had saved it from “tyrannical disorganizers.”¹ The undeniable successes of the new regime during its early years make it easy to conclude that revolutionary republicanism was indeed bankrupt by 1799 and that an authoritarian regime suited the country much better. At the time of the brumaire coup, however, neither Bonaparte himself nor anyone else knew what kind of government was going to take the place of the Directory and what aspects of the French Revolution’s legacy it would preserve or undo. Like all the other episodes of the Revolution, the unraveling of the republic after 1799 was a story whose outcome was not determined in advance.

The victors of brumaire claimed they had acted to save the republic, not to destroy it. They referred to their coup by its date in the revolutionary calendar, and even as they denounced the Directory, they filled 90 percent of the new government’s national offices with men who had served it.² Bonaparte himself—he would not start to be referred to by his first name, Napoleon, until his power was firmly established several years later—was a “child of the Revolution,” one of the thousands of ambitious men who had reached positions they could never have dreamed of occupying before the transformations of 1789 and the political intrigues of the Directory years. He had fought under the tricolor flag and identified himself with the enlightened secularism of the Institut national, whose scientists and philosophers had eagerly welcomed him as a member. His driving ambition was clear, but what policies it would lead him to embrace—and, equally importantly, whether he could persuade political elites and the population at large to follow him—remained unknown.

The brumairians’ propaganda emphasized Bonaparte’s role in a way that had no precedent in the revolutionary era. An illustrated broadsheet included verses calling him “the immortal friend of the French,” and “the god of light.” But even his closest collaborators were not sure the young general really had the skills to become an effective political leader. Just thirty years old when he assumed power, Bonaparte had little experience in the labyrinth of French revolutionary politics; men like Sieyès, who had spent a decade mastering the art of politics, expected to outmaneuver him. Pierre-Louis Roederer, the political chameleon who had ushered Louis XVI out of power on the morning of August 10, 1792, and survived to help usher Bonaparte in seven years later, noted the general’s poor public speaking ability: “He had trouble finding resounding words, graceful expressions and the rhythm that he sought for.”³ Even Bonaparte’s influence over the military was by no means completely assured: there were other ambitious generals prepared to step forward if he should stumble.

The new men in power were able to tap into genuine dissatisfaction with the Directory. In addition to the political conflicts and rural criminality that plagued many regions, ten years of revolutionary disorder had taken their toll on the country’s physical and social infrastructures. Officials dispatched to survey conditions shortly after the brumaire coup reported bridges, canals, harbors, and public buildings everywhere in urgent need of repair. Sent to inspect Normandy’s hospitals, the scientist Antoine-François Fourcroy lamented that “the sick are without body linen or in torn rags, the beds lack blankets”; another inspector noted a large number of abandoned infants in the Provence region and estimated that 95 percent of them died.⁴ Local governments lacked the revenue to cope with these problems, and the central government’s resources were taken up by seemingly endless war. In spite of these problems, however, the Directory had been improving the efficiency of its administrative machinery, and conditions in most of the country were better than in 1795. Having survived the military crisis of 1799 and shown that it could keep the more extreme neo-Jacobins at bay, the regime would not necessarily have collapsed if it had not been deliberately undermined by its own leaders.

A Paris police report noted that “the satisfaction inspired by the revolution of 18 brumaire has nothing of the exaltation or the enthusiasm that arise and vanish almost at once,” suggesting that much of the population, including the observers themselves, were waiting to see what the new men in power would do and whether they would be any more effective than their predecessors before fully embracing them. To some, brumaire looked like a takeover by the army. “This revolution has a military character, one cannot deny it,” wrote Christine Reinhard, the wife of the ousted Directory’s last foreign minister. Others expected that the coup would open the door to a return of the Bourbon monarchy. Even Bonaparte understood that the ease with which he and his associates had overthrown the Directory did not make their own position secure. In a discussion with some of his advisers in early 1800 about modifying the law against the émigrés who had fled the country during the Revolution, he remarked, “We govern today; tomorrow, others may inscribe us on the list of émigrés.”⁵

The brumairians’ first moves reflected their own uncertainty about what course to follow. The plotters’ propaganda posters covered the walls of Paris with their version of the coup. Joseph Fouché’s police cracked down on theaters that rushed to stage unauthorized plays about the coup, but at the same time, newspapers, still operating with considerable freedom, published reports that contradicted the official account that Bonaparte’s life had been threatened. The consuls revoked the law of hostages that the councils had passed before the coup, under which relatives of émigrés and former nobles could be arrested and their property seized. They also revoked the law forcing the rich to contribute to a loan to the government that had been passed around the same time as the hostage law. These decisions indicated that the consuls wanted to dissociate themselves from the militant republicanism that had flared up during the crisis of the spring and summer of 1799. When a wallposter announced the pending publication of “the Père Duchêne’s farewell to the French,” the police moved quickly to prevent any reappearance of the mythical sans-culotte spokesman.⁶ Throughout the country, the provisional consuls carried out a drastic purge of local officials, dismissing some 70 percent of them; in general, their replacements were drawn from the wealthier and more conservative members of the local population.

All this suggested a conservative turn, but when the consuls announced that they were going to send nearly sixty Jacobins into exile in French Guyana, there was a strong backlash. “People thought it marked the return of arbitrary measures and the reestablishment of a system execrated by the public,” wrote Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, who would soon be appointed as second consul, and the idea was quickly shelved. The brumairians also took steps to counter rumors that “the deported priests are going to return, the dominant Catholic cult is going to be reestablished, and they will be able to hold solemn mass on Christmas eve.” The Idéologue Pierre Cabanis, one of the legislators involved in drafting the new constitution, promised his former colleagues that the basic achievements of the Revolution would be protected. “No, there will not be any reaction,” he insisted. “No, the properties acquired by purchasers of national lands will remain as sacred in your eyes as those of other citizens.”⁷

The public’s confusion about the brumairians’ intentions reflected the fact that Sieyès, Bonaparte, and their supporters had toppled the Directory without having agreed on what should replace it. When Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, one of Sieyès’s collaborators, remarked to him on 19 brumaire that everyone assumed “that you have a constitution all prepared,” he was surprised to discover that the man who had just demolished the Constitution of 1795 did not have a replacement ready. Sieyès insisted that he wanted to “return to the ideas of 1789,” but the original revolutionaries would hardly have recognized his ideas as a fulfillment of their program. Deeply distrustful of “brute democracy,” Sieyès adopted the principle that “no one should be named to a function by those over whom he exercises authority,” which meant abandoning the fundamental principle that citizens should choose those who made the laws under which they lived.⁸ In place of elections, he proposed that the property-owning citizens of each commune should draw up a list of “notables” eligible for office. Local notables would then meet and designate 10 percent of their number as potential officeholders at the departmental level. The departmental notables would in turn nominate 10 percent of their group as potential national officeholders, and the central government would then choose among them for the new legislative assemblies and other national offices. In Sieyès’s mind, this system, in which “confidence comes from below, authority from above,” still qualified as a form of representative government, since all those in the pool of notables would have been designated by their fellow citizens as potential officials. It would not, however, allow voters to decide who would actually hold office.

Sieyès was determined to replace the turbulent elected legislatures of the revolutionary decade with institutions insulated from popular opinion. His plan provided for a Corps législatif (Legislative Body) of three hundred members, who would vote on proposed laws but have no power to initiate or even debate them. Their votes would be cast after listening to members of a second house, the Tribunat (Tribunate), with a smaller number of members. The tribunes would be allowed to discuss draft laws submitted to them by the government but not to introduce proposals on their own. Sieyès’s constitutional plan also included a third body, ultimately named the Sénat (Senate). The senators would be responsible for deciding whether laws approved by the other two houses violated the constitution. Sieyès had proposed such a constitutional jury in 1795 and had been humiliated when the thermidorian Convention unanimously rejected the idea; this time, he only had to convince one person—Bonaparte—to accept it. In theory, the Senate, whose members would be chosen for life and given substantial endowments meant to ensure their independence, would have served a purpose similar to the US Supreme Court.

Bonaparte was for the most part ready to accept Sieyès’s ideas for the elimination of meaningful elections and his tripartite legislature. What concerned him about Sieyès’s plan, however, was the design for the executive branch of the new government. Sieyès proposed a government headed by a grand électeur (grand elector) who would have a lavish salary; his powers, however, would be limited to choosing two consuls, one to conduct foreign policy and the other responsible for domestic matters. If the grand elector exceeded his largely ceremonial authority, the Senate could “absorb” him, making him an ordinary member of their body. Bonaparte recognized that Sieyès intended to designate him as grand elector, leaving him with a fancy title but no real power. “He thought or pretended to think that this whole theory had been imagined just to make him ridiculous and dispose of him in a couple of months,” Boulay de la Meurthe recalled. An angry meeting nearly resulted in a complete break between the two men, with Bonaparte threatening to claim power on his own, even if it made him look like a dictator.⁹

Sieyès soon realized that he could not stand in Bonaparte’s way, and Bonaparte realized that it would be foolhardy to shred the veil of legality justifying the coup. “It was obvious, in reality, that it was Bonaparte whom the nation wanted to see in charge of affairs,” Boulay wrote. “It was necessary to give him enough power so that he could… employ his popularity, his energy and his genius for the good of the country.”¹⁰ Roederer, always a master at finding compromises, proposed transforming Sieyès’s grand elector into a premier consul (first consul) with power to direct the government. He was to be flanked by two other consuls to avoid making it seem as though France were reverting to one-man rule. The other two consuls, however, would have no real power.

Once the new executive structure was set, Bonaparte told Sieyès to select the consuls, knowing that his fellow-conspirator-turned-adversary would have no choice but to nominate him as first consul. He also left it to Sieyès, who knew the personalities in the Paris political scene better than he did, to choose most of the members of the new legislative bodies. Rather than accept a purely subordinate position as second consul, Sieyès agreed to become president of the Senate. Bonaparte quickly arranged to have Sieyès granted a valuable property outside of Paris; his acceptance of the gift destroyed Sieyès’s reputation as a statesman uninterested in acquiring wealth. Christine Reinhard understood Sieyès’s situation: “His hands are now tied and he cannot aspire to anything else,” she wrote. Even though she realized that the new administration would cost her husband his job, she was pleased with the outcome. “I trust in the genius of Bonaparte; he will not let us down! He would not have escaped from a thousand dangers, he would not have miraculously crossed the sea, if his destiny was not to be fulfilled.”¹¹ Her attitude was shared by much of the population.

The second and third consuls, Jean-Jacques Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun, were carefully selected. The appointment of Cambacérès, a former Convention deputy who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, reassured former Jacobins, while Lebrun, a constitutional monarchist who had been a deputy in the National Assembly, did the same for moderate royalists. Bonaparte allowed one of the Paris newspapers to underline the message of their appointments in an article that quoted him as saying, “Positions will be open to Frenchmen of all opinions, provided that they are intelligent, capable, and virtuous.”¹² The new Senate, Legislative Body, and Tribunate were composed overwhelmingly of former Directorial deputies. Men who did not find a seat in the assemblies were often appointed to administrative positions or to the newly created Conseil d’état (Council of State), a body of legal experts set up to draft legislation. The Council of State remains one of the lasting contributions of the Napoleonic regime to French political life. Despite the presence of a few former Montagnards, such as the police minister Fouché, however, the new government of the Consulate firmly closed the door to the neo-Jacobins, whose movement had enjoyed a brief revival in 1799.

On 24 frimaire Year VIII (December 15, 1799), barely a month after the brumaire coup, the new Constitution of 1800 (or the Year VIII) was published. The consuls announced that “the Revolution is settled according to the principles which started it; it is finished.” The new document differed from its predecessors of 1791 and 1795 in a number of ways. As the veteran legislator Antoine Thibaudeau pointed out, the new document “said nothing about the freedom of worship, of the press, the public nature of judicial proceedings”: in fact, it included no declaration of rights at all. The Constitution of 1795 had foreseen the possibility that specific rights might be suspended in a crisis; the new document authorized the suspension of the entire constitution in case of “troubles that threaten the security of the state.” Another significant change was the document’s announcement that “the regime of the French colonies is determined by special laws,” a clause that raised the possibility that slavery, abolished in 1794, might again be legalized. The Journal des hommes libres, still identified as a Jacobin organ but now controlled by Fouché, admitted that republicans “have the right to regret that a number of principles that were so dear to them have been passed over in silence in the new social pact.” The journal reminded its readers of “the futility of the efforts they made, in other times, to put into practice and carry out, even with their most beloved lawmakers, the most just and most accepted things.” Less committed to the new regime, the royalist Gazette de France saw no chance that the head of the government would be restrained by the constitution. “One should not delude oneself in politics,” its editorialist wrote. “The French have no safeguard against the preponderance of the executive power, and if it is just and wise, it will be so because that is in its interest.”¹³

In one respect, Bonaparte did pay homage to the dogma of popular sovereignty. Over Sieyès’s objections, he insisted that the new constitution be submitted for a vote, even demanding that almost all adult men be allowed to participate, regardless of their wealth or income. This populist gesture was not really meaningful: citizens were required to write down their vote along with their name and address, and the new institutions were put into effect even before the plebiscite was held, with members of the new legislative bodies simply named by the consuls. The government announced that over 3 million citizens had voted yes, and only 1,562 had said no. In reality, however, Lucien Bonaparte, the interior minister, intervened again, as he had at Saint-Cloud on 19 brumaire, to save his brother from embarrassment: only 1.6 million votes had actually been cast, fewer than the 1.8 million who had endorsed the Jacobin constitution of 1793. Lucien systematically padded the figures so that the new regime could claim a stronger endorsement than its democratic predecessor.¹⁴ The plebiscite allowed Bonaparte to present himself as the chosen representative of the French people, in contrast to the members of the three legislative bodies, none of whom had been elected.

From the start, Bonaparte made no effort to conceal his annoyance with any public criticism. When Benjamin Constant made a motion critical of the government in the Tribunate, “the First Consul’s anger went beyond all limits,” Christine Reinhard wrote. “He wanted to take draconian measures, annul the latest elections to eliminate the supporters of Sieyès from all the chambers.” As the new ruler’s authoritarian tendencies became apparent, even many of the men who had participated in the brumaire conspiracy began to have second thoughts about having helped him seize power. By late spring, the police were reporting that Sieyès was holding mysterious meetings with former Jacobins. “He stubbornly saw Bonaparte as an auxiliary that the moderate party could rein in whenever it wanted,” Madame Reinhard told her mother.¹⁵

On 27 nivôse Year VIII (January 17, 1800), shortly after the start of the legislative session, the consuls announced a return to the old-regime system of licensing periodicals and banned all but thirteen of the newspapers appearing in Paris. Journalists and publishers, who had survived many attempts at repression during the Revolution, tried their usual tactics, creating new papers under different titles, but this time they faced a regime determined to enforce its edicts. Within a few months, all vestiges of the republican press were suppressed. The Consulate tolerated the creation of an outspokenly counterrevolutionary daily paper, the Journal des débats, whose editors had earlier put out journals that supported the vendémiaire uprising in 1795 and the Clichy Club in 1797; it quickly became by far the most widely read publication in the country and a genuine influence on public opinion. While the Journal des débats avoided overt political commentary, its literary critic Julien-Louis Geoffroy waged a relentless campaign against the ideas of the Enlightenment. Determined to combat the influence of the Idéologues’ Décade philosophique, the Journal emphasized the value of social order and encouraged a return to religion.

Imposing order on society was also the main motivation behind the policies Bonaparte put in place in the first months of the Consulate. Now housed in the former royal palace of the Tuileries, where he began to revive public rituals reminiscent of the royal court, he moved quickly to replace the elected departmental and local administrative bodies created during the Revolution with appointed officials called préfets and sous-préfets (prefects and subprefects). The prefects took the place of the government commissioners the Directory had appointed, but whereas the Directory’s system had still been something of an improvisation, the new top-down administrative structure quickly took on an air of permanence. Under this system “the movement of power will be rapid,” a pro-government journalist wrote. “It will find its orders carried out everywhere, with no opposition, it will always have the instruments it needs and no obstacles against it.”¹⁶ The prefects reminded many of the old regime’s intendants, against whom so much of the revolutionaries’ anger had been directed in 1789. But the intendants had always faced resistance from the parlementary courts, provincial assemblies, and other local institutions. Now that the Revolution had abolished these obstacles to centralized rule, the prefects had a much easier time enforcing the government’s orders. The prefectorial system proved so effective that every subsequent French government has maintained it, although today the appointed prefects share power with elected departmental and regional councils.

Even as the new government silenced former republicans and allowed a revival of conservative ideas in the press, it could not ignore the threat of royalist agitation. This was so especially in the western regions, where opposition to the Revolution flared up again. Bonaparte wasted no time in dealing with the problem. He dispatched troops, but also opened negotiations with rebel leaders, trying to persuade them that his regime would be an acceptable substitute for the monarchy. In other regions, where rural banditry had become endemic during the Directory, the new government extended the repressive measures already deployed by its predecessor, placing large areas under a state of siege and establishing military tribunals that did not hesitate to impose death sentences.

As the government sought to end the long-running armed conflict in western France, it also sought to find a solution that would permit many of those who had emigrated during the Revolution to return to the country. Although the Constitution of the Year VIII maintained the existing laws against émigrés, the consuls announced that no further names would be added to the list of those penalized for having fled before the brumaire coup. Sensing that the atmosphere had changed, a number of émigrés took the chance of returning, even if they were unable to get themselves officially removed from the dreaded list. Bonaparte’s own attitude on the issue was inconsistent: he wanted to promote reconciliation, but he was aware of the strong feelings in the army about aristocrats who had fought against France. The émigrés, for their part, brought their own resentments with them. Many of them discovered, as one put it, that “except in a few special or unusual cases one does not get one’s property back. The young men have to go into the army, the young women have to continue to work as they did in emigration; the old die of hunger.” François-René de Chateaubriand, a young nobleman who had fled in 1792 and spent years in Britain and America, was relieved to be able to come back to his native country, but he could not shake the memory of his family members being guillotined during the Terror. Walking in Paris, he had the feeling of “putting my foot in blood.” Bonaparte was conciliatory toward émigrés and domestic royalists, but only those who were willing to accept the new regime. When Louis XVI’s older brother Louis XVIII wrote to Bonaparte, promising a handsome reward if he used his position to reinstate the monarchy, Bonaparte’s reply was unequivocal: “You must not hope to return to France; you would have to march over 100,000 dead bodies. Sacrifice your own interest to the peace and the happiness of France. History will be grateful to you.”¹⁷

As energetic as the new government was in dealing with domestic matters, Bonaparte and his supporters knew that the key to cementing their power was to bring the war they had inherited from the Directory to a victorious conclusion. Despite the successes of the French armies in September 1799, the conquests in Italy that Bonaparte had made were now in enemy hands. Moreover, the promise of Austrian acceptance of French gains in northern Europe that he had extracted in the Treaty of Campo-Formio had been broken. As the campaigning season neared, he assembled a reserve army near Dijon, a strategic location that kept the enemy guessing whether he would march north to invade Germany or south to try to reclaim Italy. In mid-May, Bonaparte made his decision: he would lead his forces over the Alps to take the Austrian army besieging Genoa, the last French foothold in Italy, in the rear. This daring maneuver surprised the Austrians and Bonaparte quickly reoccupied Milan, the capital city of Lombardy, but the critical battle at Marengo, fought on June 14, 1800, came within a hair’s-breadth of ending in disaster. Not expecting an Austrian attack, Bonaparte had dispersed his forces and found himself badly outnumbered; he was rescued at the last minute by the arrival of General Louis Desaix, who was killed even as his troops launched a successful charge. Desaix’s misfortune meant that he was not around to contest Bonaparte’s account of Marengo as a battle won by his own strategic brilliance. The dramatic victory consolidated Bonaparte’s power at home, although it took another six months of fighting before General Jean-Victor Moreau’s victory at the Battle of Hohenlinden drove the Austrians to sue for peace.

The Treaty of Lunéville, signed in February 1801, restored all the gains that France had obtained four years earlier at Campo-Formio and even added to them. The Austrians officially recognized France’s annexation of the German territories west of its self-proclaimed “natural frontier” on the Rhine. The government in Vienna then had to convene a congress of the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire to work out compensations for the various princes whose possessions had been taken by the French. The process overturned the complicated arrangements that had governed central Europe for several centuries. Initially, it led to expanded French influence in Germany, as local rulers competed to win Bonaparte’s backing for their claims. In the long run, it opened the way for the rise of a German nationalist movement seventy years later, when Otto von Bismarck created a unified German Empire after defeating France in the war of 1870–1871, definitively ending the era of French dominance in Europe.

Together with the increasingly successful campaign to restore law and order in the countryside, the peace with Austria increased Bonaparte’s popularity and allowed him to embark on further initiatives that might otherwise have been too controversial to pursue. As the Consulate became more solidly entrenched in power, its domestic opponents were left with no method of opposing it other than conspiracy. Both royalists and militant republicans circulated clandestine pamphlets justifying assassination as a legitimate response to Bonaparte’s dictatorial behavior. The police broke up several plots, but on 3 nivôse An IX, Christmas Eve 1800, as Bonaparte’s carriage was taking him to the opera, an “infernal machine,” a horse-cart loaded with gunpowder—the revolutionary era’s version of a car bomb—exploded nearby. It narrowly missed its target but killed several passersby.

Even before the police investigation had begun, Bonaparte was convinced that the plot was the work of republican militants. He demanded immediate vengeance: “Blood must flow; we need to shoot as many guilty ones as there were victims, fifteen or twenty, deport two hundred of them, and take advantage of this opportunity to purge the Republic of them.”¹⁸ The Senate was bullied into approving arbitrary measures, including the creation of special courts to hold expedited trials of defendants accused of threatening public security. Over one hundred former Jacobins and sans-culotte activists were shipped off to Guyana or the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, where most of them died. Meanwhile, Fouché’s agents carried out one of the first modern forensic investigations, showing the remains of the horse that had been attached to the cart to Paris blacksmiths. One of them recognized it and identified the horse’s owner; he turned out to be a royalist conspirator. Several of the perpetrators were promptly arrested and executed, although the mastermind behind the plot escaped, ending his life as a Catholic priest in Charleston, South Carolina. Despite the revelation of the royalist nature of the plot, Bonaparte refused to reconsider the measure he had ordered against the Jacobins. Although the Consulate still maintained a facade of republicanism, the first consul was determined to destroy the last traces of revolutionary radicalism.

PROPAGANDA FOR THE BRUMAIRE COUP: The plotters who overthrew the Directory made skillful use of the media to consolidate their power. This broadsheet showed the youthful Napoleon Bonaparte flanked by the older men who had agreed to serve as second and third consuls. They hold scrolls inscribed with promises to pay state debts, achieve peace, and inspire “love of the laws.” Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The increasingly arbitrary and authoritarian nature of Bonaparte’s regime widened the gap between the republican intellectuals who had helped carry out the brumaire coup and the man they had incautiously helped put into power. Objecting to the special tribunals, the tribune Pierre Daunou warned that the arguments of the government’s advocates could be used to justify “suspension of individual rights, of all the social guarantees; military taxes; arbitrary arrests; indefinite detentions; arbitrary inquisitions.” In his private meditations, Benjamin Constant now regretted that he and his friends had been so ready to sabotage the noisy public politics of the Directory in the name of order. Bonaparte, Constant lamented, was extending the principles of the army into all areas of national life. “The military spirit slips into all civil relations. One imagines that for liberty, as for victory, nothing is more appropriate than passive obedience.”¹⁹ In the face of the new realities, Constant and his friends developed the intellectual bases for a principled defense of individual liberties that would bear fruit under the less repressive regimes that followed Napoleon in the nineteenth century. For the moment, however, their protests went unheeded.

The affair of the “infernal machine” convinced Bonaparte of two things: the fragility of his regime as long as he appeared to be the only person holding it together, and the necessity of making peace with Britain in order to end that country’s support for the royalists. He was not yet in a position to deal with the first problem by making his rule hereditary, but the victory over Austria gave him the leverage to bring the British to the peace table. A preliminary agreement was signed on October 1, 1801, in which the British agreed to return almost all the overseas territories they had seized from France and its allies in exchange for French withdrawal from Egypt and the southern half of the Italian Peninsula. Great celebrations were held in Paris in early November, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the brumaire coup. A final treaty was signed in the northern French city of Amiens on March 25, 1802. For the first time since April 1792, France was no longer at war. In his memoirs, Talleyrand, Napoleon’s foreign minister, wrote, “One can say, without the least exaggeration, that, at the time of the peace of Amiens, France enjoyed in the world a power, a glory, and influence as great as the most ambitious spirit could want for his country.”²⁰

In Bonaparte’s mind, one of the most important consequences of the peace of Amiens was Britain’s agreement to let France immediately launch a naval expedition to regain full control of its Caribbean colonies. When Bonaparte took power in late 1799, Saint-Domingue was embroiled in a violent civil war between Toussaint Louverture and André Rigaud, the leader of the island’s free people of color. The Directory’s last commissioner, General Joseph Hédouville, had encouraged Rigaud to challenge the black strongman. In the smaller island of Guadeloupe, a revolt of the free population of color forced the French general Edme Desfourneaux to flee in early October 1799.

Bonaparte was determined to reimpose metropolitan control over the colonies and restore France’s status as a world power; indeed, he bargained with Spain to reclaim Louisiana—the vast territory in the Mississippi valley that Louis XV had ceded after the Seven Years’ War in 1763—in order to create an American empire. As long as the British navy prevented the dispatch of a large number of troops to the Caribbean, however, he did not specify what the “special laws” would be that the new constitution foresaw for the colonies. In December 1799, Bonaparte issued a proclamation promising the population of Saint-Domingue that “the sacred principles of the liberty and equality of the blacks will never be attacked or modified.” Louverture was not reassured. He was aware that the new French ruler had already promised that slavery would not be disturbed in colonies where the 1794 law had not been applied. He also knew that Bonaparte had appointed a number of former advocates of slavery to important government positions. Thus, Louverture told the Consulate’s representative, “We are free today because we are the strongest. [Bonaparte] maintains slavery in Martinique and the Île Bourbon; we will also be enslaved when he becomes the strongest.”²¹

As he waited for the moment when he could take action overseas, Bonaparte consulted former colonists about what policy he should adopt. Some of the responses were unexpected: the former Saint-Domingue Convention deputies Louis Dufay and Jean-Baptiste Belley, whose presence on 16 pluviôse Year II (February 4, 1794) had persuaded the Convention to pass its historic decree abolishing slavery, had turned against Toussaint Louverture and urged intervention to remove him. The former lobbyist for the white slaveowners, Pierre-François Page, however, concluded that it was now too late to overturn the policy of emancipation. Bonaparte’s personal views were not favorable to the egalitarian policies the Convention and the Directory had adopted. In 1801, when the pending return of Martinique brought the question of slavery to the fore, Thibaudeau heard him deliver a veritable racist tirade: “I am for the whites, because I am white; I have no other reason, and that one is good. How could one grant freedom to Africans, to men who have no civilization, who don’t even know what a colony is, what France is?”²² Bonaparte may have been influenced by his wife, Josephine, whose family owned land in Martinique, although he rarely let her offer him advice. In 1802, she permitted the author of The Errors of Negrophilism, a violent tract against the abolition of slavery, to dedicate his work to her.

Yet Bonaparte did not let his personal beliefs about race and slavery keep him from thinking of ways to profit from Toussaint Louverture’s successes. In early 1801, he drafted a letter appointing the black leader as captain-general of the colony. Rather than sending the letter, however, Bonaparte then changed direction, deciding to dismiss Louverture and expel him from the French army altogether. After defeating Rigaud’s forces in early 1800, the black general had defied instructions from the French government and occupied the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic), which formed the eastern half of the island of Hispaniola. In February 1801, Louverture put Philippe Roume, the last remaining French official in the colony, under house arrest, and in April he convened an assembly to draft his own constitution for Saint-Domingue. On the other side of the Atlantic, Bonaparte had already given orders for an expeditionary force to be assembled and deployed to the Caribbean before he received a copy of Louverture’s constitution, but the contents of the document confirmed his worst fears. He increased the number of troops being sent to the colony.

In his constitution, Louverture carefully avoided declaring independence, instead appropriating the language of the French constitution of 1800 to assert that he was merely establishing the “special laws” that it promised for the colonies. Whereas the consular constitution had omitted any declaration of rights, Louverture’s document used the language of liberty and equality. It declared slavery “forever abolished,” stated that “all men are born, live, and die free and French,” that men of all colors could hold “all types of employment,” and that “the law is the same for everyone, with regard to both protection and punishment.” Even as it appealed to the doctrine of natural rights, however, the Louverturian constitution also went beyond Bonaparte’s own charter in establishing an authoritarian government, to be headed by Louverture himself “for the rest of his glorious life.” The only theoretical check on his power was an assembly whose members he himself would choose. Catholicism was declared the state religion and divorce outlawed. Despite the abolition of slavery, Louverture instituted a system of forced labor; he even foresaw the possibility of the Saint-Domingue government purchasing captives brought from Africa in order to promote “the revival and expansion of agriculture.” The social conservatism underlying Louverture’s constitution was not far from Bonaparte’s own views, but the first consul was infuriated by the black governor’s disregard for his authority. Louverture’s initiative helped inspire a movement against the white governor of Guadeloupe, where a mixed-race military officer, Magloire Pélage, took power with the support of black soldiers in the army who “thought that they were going to be re-enslaved,” according to one report.²³

The expedition that sailed from France in the fall of November 1801 was one of the largest overseas military efforts mounted by a European government up to that time. It took well over a hundred ships to transport the more than twenty thousand troops destined for the two islands. As commander of the army bound for Saint-Domingue, Bonaparte appointed his own brother-in-law Victoire Leclerc, who was married to his sister Pauline. Leclerc’s instructions laid out a three-part plan: Initially he would reassure the population about its rights and negotiate with Toussaint Louverture, “in order to take possession of the strongholds and get ourselves into the country.” Once he had secured the colony’s strategic points, Leclerc was to become “more demanding” and remove Louverture from his position; meanwhile, he would incorporate the black soldiers and officers into his own army. Finally, he would arrest the black officers, have them “shot like rebels” if they resisted, and disarm the black population, leaving them no way of opposing French authority. The plan echoed an anonymous proposal published in France several years earlier by a proslavery pamphleteer. That writer had explicitly recommended pretending that slavery would not be reintroduced until the colony had been secured militarily, when the blacks could be “defeated and kept in complete subjection to forestall new misfortunes.”²⁴

Informed of Bonaparte’s hostile reaction to his constitution and the impending arrival of the military expedition, Louverture prepared to fight back. When the French fleet reached the northern port of Cap Français, which had been rebuilt in the years since the devastating fire of 1793, he set his own plan in motion. Henri Christophe, one of Louverture’s commanders, burned the city once again and withdrew into the countryside. Leclerc was able to bring his forces ashore, but he encountered ferocious opposition from Louverture’s army and from guerrilla bands in the island’s mountains. The black forces inflicted heavy casualties on the French and massacred whites whom they feared would side with the invaders. Nevertheless, by the end of April, the French had gained the upper hand. In accordance with his instructions, Leclerc allowed Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and other black officers to keep their ranks and incorporated their men into his own army. Abandoned by his own supporters, Toussaint Louverture agreed to give up his position as governor of the colony and retire to his rural plantation.

News of these military successes in the Caribbean paved the way for one of Bonaparte’s most emphatic repudiations of the revolutionary principles of liberty and equality: on May 20, 1802, the Convention’s law of 16 pluviôse Year II was repealed, legalizing the decision to maintain slavery in the colonies where it had not been abolished in 1794. The decision aroused a certain amount of opposition: a third of the tribunes and sixty-three members of the Legislative Body voted against it. The repeal law said nothing about Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe, but the threat to black freedom was unmistakable. The re-legalization of slavery was followed by another law prohibiting “blacks, mulattoes or other people of color, of either sex,” from entering France’s European territory. Convinced that the prerevolutionary days were rapidly returning, slave-ship captains set sail for the African coast. Whites who had fled Cap Français after the 1791 slave uprising hastened to return to the colony to resume their trades. One of these, a tailor named Norbert Thoret, reopened his shop in Cap Français and was soon employing forty workers to make uniforms for French officers. “If things had remained tranquil,” he later wrote, “it is certain that I would quickly have made a great fortune.”²⁵

The sense of security among the white population in Saint-Domingue was reinforced in June 1802, when Leclerc accused Toussaint Louverture of secretly encouraging black resistance to the French. Caught off-guard on his own plantation, Louverture was arrested and hustled onboard a warship bound for France; there, he was separated from his family and imprisoned in the Fort de Joux, near the Swiss border. Bonaparte refused to read the lengthy memorandum Louverture wrote to justify his conduct. Unaccustomed to the cold, dank European climate, Louverture fell ill and died in April 1803. By that time, General Leclerc was also in his grave, along with much of his army, decimated by a deadly yellow fever epidemic. As the ranks of white soldiers dwindled, Louverture’s officers changed sides again, galvanized by reports concerning Guadeloupe: they had heard that an armed revolt there, led by the mixed-race Louis Delgrès, had been defeated by the French commander Antoine Richepance, but that the rebels, refusing to surrender, had blown up their last stronghold—committing suicide in the process—to cries of “No slavery! Long live death!”²⁶ The blacks in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and France’s Indian Ocean colonies would not gain their freedom until 1848, when another revolution finally toppled slavery in the French Empire.

In Saint-Domingue, the French effort to quash black resistance failed. In October 1802, the mixed-race general Alexandre Pétion and the black generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe launched a revolt that openly aimed at gaining independence from France. In the winter of 1802–1803, Bonaparte poured thousands more troops into the struggle. Most of them, like their predecessors, ended up dying on the island; total French losses ultimately came to around fifty thousand soldiers and sailors. The expedition’s fate was sealed after May 1803, when the fragile peace of Amiens collapsed and the British navy once again cut off French communications with the Caribbean. Leclerc’s successor, General Donatien Rochambeau, resorted to brutal tactics, importing tracking dogs from Cuba to hunt down black rebels in the mountains and asphyxiating prisoners in the holds of warships. Nevertheless, by the end of 1803, he was compelled to surrender, and what had been France’s most valuable overseas possession became the independent nation of Haiti. As the looming defeat in Saint-Domingue destroyed his dream of creating an empire in the New World, Bonaparte hastily offered the Louisiana Territory to the Americans, launching the new country on the career of expansion that would make it a world power.

The abandonment of the abolition of slavery and the experiment that had made France, from 1794 to 1802, a multiracial polity was the Consulate’s most devastating retreat from the promises of the Revolution. Of more immediate concern to the population in metropolitan France, however, was Bonaparte’s policy toward the Catholic Church. From the start of the Consulate, he had taken steps foreshadowing an end to the revolutionary campaign against the Church. Shortly after the coup, deportations of refractory priests to Guyana were stopped, and Catholics were allowed to resume Sunday worship services. Priests were still required to take an oath of loyalty to the constitution, however, which most of them refused to do, and many officials, particularly the police minister, Fouché, remained strongly hostile to the Church. “We don’t know what to say about this government,” the Savoyard priest François Molin wrote in his diary in March 1800. “They free some and imprison others.” But pressure for a broader agreement between the government and the Church was growing. After his survey of the western provinces, the scientist and official Antoine-François Fourcroy concluded that “it is an error of some modern philosophers, which I myself shared, to believe in the possibility of spreading instruction sufficiently to destroy religious prejudices.”²⁷

Bonaparte was nevertheless moving toward an agreement with the Church that would end the religious conflict that the National Assembly had started with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. When he occupied Milan in June 1800, Bonaparte had called on the local clergy to mount a public ceremony to celebrate his victory and spoke of “removing every obstacle that might hinder complete reconciliation between France and the head of the Church.”²⁸ The new pope chosen in 1800, Pius VII, had indicated, during the French invasion of Italy in 1797, that coexistence between the Church and republican ideas was possible. Informed of Bonaparte’s “glorious and fortunate decision” to open negotiations about a restoration of the Church, he responded positively. Bonaparte originally conceived of a one-sided bargain in which he would use the pope to force recalcitrant émigré clergy into line, as he explained to one member of the Council of State. “The people need a religion. That religion must be under the control of the government. At the moment, fifty émigré bishops paid by England direct the French clergy. Their influence must be destroyed; the Pope’s authority is necessary for that.” In exchange for giving the Church legal protection in France, he would have the pope order all the bishops of the French Church to resign their posts. This would include both those who had gone into exile to oppose the Revolution and those, like the constitutional church leader Henri Grégoire, who had embraced the Civil Constitution. Those who were willing to go along with the new order of things would then be reappointed. “The pope will confirm the sale of the church’s property; he will bless the Republic,” Bonaparte said to one Council of State member. He assured his listener that his determination had nothing to do with any personal attachment to Catholicism. “They will say that I am a Papist; I am nothing; I was a Muslim in Egypt, I’ll be Catholic here for the good of the people.”²⁹

The Concordat required many concessions from the Church. First, the Church would have to accept the permanent loss of the property that had been expropriated in 1789. In exchange, the government agreed to resume the payments to the clergy that had been abolished in 1795. But the government would now nominate bishops, who would still receive their religious consecration from the pope. This arrangement was basically a return to the practices of the prerevolutionary Gallican Church, but after an experience that had shown how hostile a French government could be to religion. The Concordat recognized Catholicism as “the religion of the majority of the French,” rather than granting it special status, and it guaranteed freedom of worship to the country’s Protestants and Jews. The rights of citizens who did not subscribe to any religion were also secured. After Pius VII agreed to Bonaparte’s terms and signed the agreement, the French government unilaterally added a number of so-called “organic articles” to its provisions. Among other things, these additions prohibited the Vatican from communicating directly with the French clergy and required that church services include prayers for the salvation of the republic and the consuls. In later years, priests were ordered to tell their congregants that military service was a religious obligation.

In order to prevent the Catholic population from drifting away from the Church altogether, Pius VII accepted what was, from his point of view, a highly unfavorable agreement. As the negotiations leading to the Concordat began in 1800, the refractory priest Molin worried in his diary that “the torch of faith may finally go out in our unfortunate country.” No new priests were being trained, and after so many years of disruption, the laity were in a state of “astonishing stupidity” about their faith. One government official remarked that peasants had fallen out of the habit of going to confession, taking communion, and avoiding meat on Fridays. “Where there are no priests, the schoolteacher officiates and they are happy,” he wrote.³⁰ The Concordat gave the Church a chance to reestablish itself in national life and to restore priests’ authority over the laity. Bonaparte’s willingness to acknowledge the pope’s control over the French Catholic hierarchy in order to silence the quarreling refractory and constitutional bishops marked a major shift of power within the Church. French rulers and clergy had long resisted “Ultramontanism,” the recognition of the authority of the Vatican “beyond the mountains.” By invoking the pope’s authority to silence dissent in the French Church, Bonaparte helped set changes in motion that culminated in the First Vatican Council of 1870, which consecrated the doctrine of papal infallibility and created the modern, highly centralized Catholic Church.

The Concordat was officially put into effect on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1802, with a great ceremony at Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral. The grand medieval structure, which had been the setting for the revolutionary Festival of Reason and the celebration of the abolition of slavery, now resumed its religious function. The returned émigré writer Chateaubriand timed the release of his Genius of Christianity, an eloquent response to the critiques of religion propagated by the philosophes and the Revolution, to coincide with the ceremony; lavishly praised by the conservative press, it marked a turning point in public opinion. The promulgation of the Concordat and the ceremony at Notre Dame did not succeed in returning the whole of France to the Catholic faith, however. In his memoirs, written during the Consulate, Jacques Ménétra still lambasted the “ancient Gothic prejudices of the clergy.” When Bonaparte tried to persuade the writer Constantin Volney that the country wanted him to reestablish the Church, he was so irritated by Volney’s response—“If France asked you to bring back the Bourbons, would you do it?”—that he kicked him in the stomach, knocking him to the floor. A British visitor, Henry Redhead Yorke, did not think the sight of Bonaparte and other dignitaries at the Easter ceremony, “assembled together in one place to adore a God in whom they had no faith, and to profess a religion which they despised,” would do much to restore the people’s faith. He noted ironically how the first consul, who “had worshipped the altar of Atheism some years before in Paris,… afterwards knelt down before the Pope at Rome, and embraced the religion of Mahomet in Africa.”³¹

Many army officers were especially disgruntled about the restoration of Catholicism. One group of generals, forced to attend the Mass at Notre Dame, ousted some of the priests from their seats, “insulting them, making them flee, and taking their places.” After the ceremony, when Bonaparte asked one of the officers what he thought of it, he responded, “It is a shame that the million or so men who got themselves killed destroying what you have reestablished were not there.” A small band of writers, some of them linked to the Idéologues, kept up a dogged campaign to discredit religious belief. Marie-Joseph Chénier ridiculed Chateaubriand and his circle in his Les nouveaux saints (The new saints), and the popular author Pigault-Lebrun rushed out a work meant to show that “the edifice of religion is the costume of Harlequin, an assembly of pieces whose clashing nuances shock the eye, as the whole shocks reason.” Bonaparte knew, however, that he could ignore these critics: unlike the supporters of the Church, they were incapable of causing widespread disturbances. At the beginning of 1803, he targeted the last stronghold of the anticlerical Idéologues, the Institute’s Class of Moral and Political Sciences. The group was broken up and replaced with a conservatively oriented Class of History and Ancient Literature, whose members were told to avoid “any historical, religious, or political discussions.”³²

The reinstatement of slavery and the Concordat were two unmistakable signs that the era of the Revolution was truly drawing to a close: a government based on very different principles from those of 1789 was now in place. In March 1802, Bonaparte used the compliant Senate to carry out a purge of the Tribunate and the Legislative Body. Benjamin Constant and other Idéologues who had initially supported the brumaire coup but had then become vocal critics of the first consul’s authoritarian tendencies were ousted. “The nation’s will is that the government should not be stopped from doing good,” Bonaparte told Cambacérès. Shortly after the celebration of the Concordat, Bonaparte abandoned another of the Revolution’s hallmark policies by pushing through a law giving amnesty to the vast majority of the émigrés who had fled France during the Revolution. The Paris police reported animated debates about the measure in the streets and cafés, but Bonaparte was sure that the public would approve “as long as the sale of national lands is respected.”³³

The peace of Amiens and the Concordat increased Bonaparte’s popularity, and he was eager to use the opportunity to strengthen his already extensive powers. According to the Constitution of 1800, his appointment as first consul was only for ten years, but many of his supporters wanted to declare him consul for life. Bonaparte, concerned about appearances, avoiding making the request himself, but when the legislators hesitated to take the initiative, he outmaneuvered them by calling for another plebiscite: the population could decide whether he should be named first consul for life. His loyal supporter Pierre-Louis Roederer argued that Bonaparte deserved “a gift worthy of his devotion: that of the time necessary to assure the happiness of France.”³⁴ The results of the election were announced at the beginning of August 1802, giving Bonaparte a resounding victory: 3,568,885 voters said yes and 8,374 said no. In contrast to the 1800 referendum, the vote count in 1802 was relatively honest and reflected a genuine endorsement of the regime.

Bonaparte further underlined his determination to break with the ideas of the Revolution by creating the Legion of Honor, an award recognizing those who had rendered outstanding service to the country and to ensure their loyalty to the regime. Defenders argued that the Legion did not contradict the dogma of equality because all male citizens could earn membership, which carried no legal privileges and was not hereditary. To many former revolutionaries, however, the Legion looked like a revival of the monarchy’s practice of giving out titles and decorations rather than relying on citizens’ selfless love of their country. In the Council of State, a former Convention deputy objected to this handing out of “baubles.” Bonaparte shot back, “It is with baubles that men are led.”³⁵ Despite the purge carried out earlier in the year, there was vociferous opposition to the Legion of Honor in the Tribunate and 110 no-votes in the Legislative Body, the highest number cast against any of Bonaparte’s measures. Like many of the Consulate’s innovations, however, the Legion of Honor became a permanent feature of French life, surviving even under democratic regimes.

Just as the revolutionaries had tried to remodel civil society according to their ideas about liberty and equality, Bonaparte and his supporters sought to instill certain values; however, now it was to make sure the principles of order and respect for authority pervaded all aspects of French life. Their most powerful tool for achieving their goals was the unified civil law code, which the Council of State hammered out in hundreds of sessions starting in 1800, often with Bonaparte in attendance. It was finally completed in 1804. The new Code civil des Français (Civil Code of the French) showed how key concepts of the Revolution could be interpreted in ways that served very different purposes than those the revolutionaries of 1789 had had in mind. The new set of laws did reflect the revolutionaries’ determination to make the independent male individual the basic unit of society: all adult men now had the same legal rights. The code’s definition of property consolidated the abolition of the old regime’s panoply of feudal, seigneurial, and communal rights and erected safeguards against the limitations on economic individualism proposed by revolutionary radicals. The drafters accepted the view of Jean-Baptiste Say, whose Treatise on Political Economy, destined to shape economic thinking for decades afterward, appeared in 1803. Say insisted on “the freedom that men should have to dispose of their persons and their goods; freedom without which social happiness and property are meaningless words.”³⁶ The code’s provisions were framed to favor property-owning patriarchs, who were to rule over their families and their employees as Bonaparte now ruled over France.

Whereas the Revolution’s civil legislation, especially the laws concerning the family, had tended to equalize the rights of men and women, the Civil Code gave husbands authority over wives and fathers authority over children. Husbands now had full control of the family’s property, and married women could only work or conduct businesses with their permission. The authority of fathers over children was enhanced by a revision of the Revolution’s egalitarian law on inheritance giving them the right to award a part of the family estate as they wished, meaning that they could privilege favored heirs. “Natural” children and unwed mothers were deprived of the rights that had been granted to them under revolutionary legislation; in the interest of protecting family property, paternity suits were prohibited, and such children could not claim any inheritance, even if their fathers acknowledged them.

Marriage remained a civil contract, but it was no longer an agreement between equal partners. The Civil Code stated that “the husband owes protection to his wife, the wife owes obedience to her husband,” a provision that Jean-Étienne Portalis, the spokesman for the code, justified on the grounds that “conjugal society… can only exist if one spouse is subordinate to the other.”³⁷ Bonaparte, already thinking about ending his childless marriage with Josephine in the interest of founding a dynasty, made sure that divorce remained legal, although a majority of the Council of State favored abolishing it. Under the Civil Code, the husband could bring divorce proceedings much more easily than the wife, who could only initiate a suit in cases of extreme cruelty, or if her spouse brought another woman into the family home. The egalitarian “family councils” established by the revolutionary law of 1792 were abolished, and the number of divorce cases dropped sharply. Women who married foreigners lost their French citizenship.

Women were shut out of the Council of State’s discussions about their status under the new Civil Code. Madame de Staël, whose circle of friends had included many participants in the brumaire coup, initially hoped that her salon would become the intellectual center of the new regime, but she quickly realized that the first consul had no tolerance for her. “Advise her not to block my path, no matter what it is, no matter where I choose to go, otherwise I will break her,” Bonaparte warned one intermediary. The prominent women militants from the Revolution’s radical years were mostly dead by this time, but a few new voices still spoke out on behalf of their sex. In 1801, in the midst of the Civil Code debates, Fanny Raoul wrote, “For the same reason that I don’t want women to dominate, I also don’t want them to be dominated.… Civil liberty and equality; that is what I ask for them. Isn’t there some middle point between sovereign authority and absolute nullity?” Although Raoul stopped short of demanding political rights for women, as the radicals of 1793 had, she wanted women to be allowed to pursue the full range of professional careers and not to be confined to poorly paid manual occupations and domestic service.³⁸ Her protest showed that some women still remembered the issues that had been raised about women’s rights during the revolutionary decade, but her pamphlet had no immediate impact.

In addition to coming down strongly on the side of patriarchal authority, the Civil Code and other laws gave employers advantages over their workers: in case of disputes, for example, the testimony of the employer was automatically accepted. In addition, a prerevolutionary law requiring workers to have a livret, or work passport, was reinstated. Workers could not leave a job unless they had permission from their previous employer. Employers were thus given a powerful weapon over their workforce; they were expected to assist the government in keeping the urban lower classes under control. Peasants, still the overwhelming majority of the population, retained more independence under the new law code. Its provisions on property safeguarded the landholdings that many of them had acquired or expanded as church lands and émigré properties were sold off, and they were no longer beholden to seigneurs. Thomas Holcroft, one of the many British visitors who hastened to visit after the peace of Amiens ended the rupture between the two countries, wrote that “although there are still many wretched cottages, the peasants are in general better dressed and they seem to be, if not in good humor, at least calmer and better disposed.”³⁹

The Consulate eliminated the election of village mayors, but in exchange it provided a consistent and relatively efficient system of local administration that peasants largely accepted. Bonaparte hoped that rural society would be dominated by wealthy landowners, the “masses of granite” on whom he counted to hold together a society that he feared was otherwise nothing more than “grains of sand.” Unlike the seigneurs of the old regime, however, wealthy landowners no longer had any legal authority over the rest of the population.⁴⁰ Despite its masculinist and authoritarian coloration, the Civil Code was perhaps the most successful achievement of Bonaparte’s Consulate. Compared to the tortuous complexities of old-regime civil law, the new law code, renamed the Code Napoléon (Napoleonic Code) in 1807, was clear and consistent. With its biases against women and workers considerably modified, it remains the basis of French society today. Introduced in territories under French control during the Napoleonic period, it also remains the basic legal framework in neighboring countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, western Germany, and Italy, as well as in the American state of Louisiana.

By the time the Civil Code was completed in 1804, the regime’s evolution from an authoritarian republic to a new form of monarchy was nearly complete. Bonaparte’s decision to take the final steps in that direction was hastened by the resumption of the war with Britain in May 1803. The ostensible pretext for the renewal of the conflict was the British refusal to remove their forces from the Mediterranean island of Malta, as promised in the Treaty of Amiens; in reality, neither side had been truly committed to the terms of the agreement. British manufacturers were disappointed when they discovered that Bonaparte had no intention of opening the French market to their products; his advisers remembered how unpopular Calonne’s free trade treaty of 1786 had been, and they intended to make Europe a protected sphere for France’s own industries. On his side, Bonaparte complained that the British refused to extend official recognition to the sister republics France had reestablished in Italy and Switzerland after the Treaty of Lunéville with Austria. He also objected to the protection the British continued to extend to émigré bishops who refused to accept the Concordat, as well as to the comte d’Artois, Louis XVIII’s younger brother, and other royalist exiles. He was incensed by the vitriolic attacks on him in the British press and refused to accept that the British tradition of press freedom made it impossible for the government to prevent them. The British ambassador told his government, “I am persuaded that the First Consul, if he makes war on us, will be motivated more by the irritation our journals cause him than by the dispute itself.”⁴¹

The resumption of hostilities led the British government to give the green light for a new royalist plot against Bonaparte’s life. The chouan conspirator Georges Cadoudal, who had helped organize earlier attempts, joined with General Jean-Charles Pichegru, who had been exiled after fructidor, to recruit a network of agents; their plan was to seize the first consul on the route to his wife Josephine’s country estate at Malmaison. With Bonaparte out of the way, the comte d’Artois would land in France and announce the restoration of the monarchy. The plotters made contact with General Jean-Victor Moreau, who was still popular in the army. Moreau’s resentment of Bonaparte’s predominance was well known. The French police caught wind of the conspiracy but had difficulty tracking down the main participants, especially Cadoudal. Moreau was arrested, but the potential assassins were still at large. By February 1804, Bonaparte’s nerves were on edge as rumors about an impending attack swirled. “Some master, who for five months has not been able to sleep for more than two hours at a time!” a royalist spy wrote.⁴² On February 28, 1804, Paris was declared in a state of siege.

Finally, in early March, Pichegru and Cadoudal were caught in Paris. Bonaparte decided that it was not enough to punish the conspirators who had planned to kill him: he wanted to strike back at the Bourbon family. He suspected that the duc d’Enghien, the son of the prince of Condé, who had been living in exile in the German state of Baden, had been involved in the plot. On March 15, 1804, French soldiers, violating Baden’s neutrality, staged a raid and captured him. He was brought to Paris, where a military tribunal, convened in the middle of the night, sentenced him to death, even though there was no evidence that he had known anything about the assassination plot. The police minister Fouché later claimed to have said, “It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.” Many royalists who had accepted Bonaparte’s rule nevertheless condemned this direct blow against the Bourbon family. From Bonaparte’s point of view, the execution was an exercise of raison d’état. “It was necessary to show the Bourbons, the cabinet of London, all the courts of Europe, that this is not a children’s game,” he told a senator.⁴³

In Bonaparte’s mind, the execution of the duc d’Enghien was also a necessary step to justify his decision to convert the Consulate into a hereditary empire. In her history of the Revolution, written after Bonaparte’s fall, Madame de Staël deciphered the logic of his actions. “He thought it was necessary, on the one hand, to reassure the revolutionaries that the Bourbons would not return, and to prove to the royalists, on the other, that by supporting him, they were definitively breaking with the old dynasty.”⁴⁴ With Bonaparte’s encouragement, a campaign began to urge him to found a new dynasty, a step that would assure the survival of the regime even if something happened to him. The Senate passed a resolution asking him to consider “what would happen to the ship of the Republic if it had the misfortune to lose its pilot.… You have saved us from the chaos of the past, you have allowed us to enjoy benefits in the present, guarantee us for the future.”⁴⁵ Only a few legislators—including Carnot, the former “organizer of victory,” now in the Tribunate, and, in the Senate, the former constitutional bishop Grégoire—withheld their approval. On May 18, 1804, the Senate voted that Bonaparte, who promptly followed the precedent of other royal families by calling himself “Napoleon” rather than using his family name, would be declared “Emperor of the French.” Condemned to death along with nineteen of his accomplices, the conspirator Cadoudal remarked, “We wanted to establish a king, we established an emperor.” As in 1800 and 1802, a plebiscite was held to legitimate the change in the constitution. The approval rate was substantial—with 3,572,329 voting in favor and only 2,569 against—but more than half the eligible voters did not participate.

On December 2, 1804, a grand coronation ceremony at Notre Dame marked the end of the republic that had been born out of the revolutionary movement twelve years earlier. A reluctant Pius VII was pressured into coming from Rome to bless the ceremony. Nevertheless, to underline the subordinate role of the Church, Napoleon crowned himself, rather than following precedent by letting the pope do so. The gesture was somewhat awkward: the artist Jacques-Louis David, commissioned to create a huge painting of the ceremony, chose instead to highlight the moment when Napoleon crowned Josephine as empress. Crowds lined the Paris streets, but one observer later wrote that “little enthusiasm was shown.” Others agreed. One onlooker remarked that those who were present did not express the “élan that a sovereign jealous of receiving the testimony of love for these subjects might have desired.”⁴⁶

One of the emperor’s first official acts was to abandon the republican calendar and its implicit message that the French Revolution had marked a new era in the history of the world. Napoleon swore an oath “to maintain the integrity of the territory of the Republic; to respect and cause to be respected the laws of the Concordat and of freedom of worship, of political and civil liberty, and the sale of nationalized lands; to raise no taxes except by virtue of the law; to maintain the institution of the Legion of Honor; to govern only in view of the interests, the wellbeing and the glory of the French people.”⁴⁷ Aside from the vague reference to political and civil liberty, the only outcomes of the Revolution that he explicitly promised to uphold were religious freedom and security for purchasers of church and émigré properties. Louis XVI could have subscribed to most of the oath: he, too, had considered himself obligated to defend French territory, to impose only legal taxes, and to look after the welfare and glory of his subjects. Five years after the coup d’état of 18 brumaire, France did indeed seem to have returned to its point of departure; Napoleonic propagandists had already begun to cast him as the founder of a fourth dynasty, following in the footsteps of the Merovingians, the Carolingians, and Capetians.

Although the inauguration of the Napoleonic Empire did mark a turning away from many of the fundamental ideas of the Revolution, it was not simply a return to the past. Napoleon abolished the celebration of the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, but the memory of the events of the Revolution remained in people’s minds. However manipulative it may have been, the plebiscite held to endorse the change was a concession to the principle of national sovereignty: unlike Louis XVI, Napoleon claimed to rule by the will of the French people, not “by the grace of God.” He would, within a few years, begin to establish a new nobility, peopled primarily by his leading generals and civil officials, but its members did not enjoy the legal privileges that had set the old aristocracy apart from the rest of the population. Members of the clergy were acutely aware that they no longer held the special position they had occupied before 1789. Within a few years, relations between the emperor and the pope deteriorated to the point that Napoleon had Pius VII seized and held as a prisoner. The army of the old regime had gone into battle under the white flag of the Bourbon dynasty; that of the Napoleonic Empire fought and died for the tricolor flag created by the revolutionaries.

Even though the Napoleonic Empire differed in important ways from the absolute monarchy overthrown in 1789, its principles were equally far removed from those articulated by the revolutionaries of the 1790s. Liberty was now reduced to the right of adult men to conduct their private affairs as they chose; the radical idea that women might also deserve such freedom was firmly rejected, and the blacks in France’s colonies were deprived of the freedom they had gained in 1794. Equality was also defined in narrow terms that reinforced hierarchical authority structures in the family and the workplace. The idea that citizenship implied a right to a voice in government and lawmaking was abandoned, as was any notion that a free constitution required a balance of powers. Freedom of expression was sharply curtailed, and critics like Madame de Staël were forced into exile. Napoleon’s exaltation of military success continued a tradition rooted in the aggressive nationalism of the revolutionary wars, and the population tolerated the high human toll of his wars, although the impact of that toll was diluted in France as his army recruited more troops from its non-French-speaking territories.

Above all, Napoleon broke with the Revolution by imposing a system of one-man rule on France. His power was not restrained by the traditional institutions that had limited the authority of the old regime’s absolute monarchs, and he paid only the merest of lip service to the revolutionary notion that power should ultimately be based on the consent of the people. As dictatorships go, the Napoleonic regime was fairly benign: the number of those held as political prisoners was never very large, and ordinary people were able to go about their lives without constantly fearing arrest. Compared to the Reign of Terror or the twentieth-century dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler, Napoleon’s actions were much more predictable. Capable of harshness when he thought it was necessary, as the executions of the Turkish prisoners at Jaffa and of the duc d’Enghien showed, the emperor was not a sadist.

For much of his reign, Napoleon was genuinely popular: there is little reason to doubt that the majority of the population preferred his rule to the tumult of the Revolution. Onetime Jacobins as prominent as the former Committee of Public Safety members Carnot and Barère accommodated themselves to his rule, as did royalists who had opposed the Revolution. Jacques Ménétra, retired from his trade, was free to write his memoir, recalling, in his unpunctuated style, “the good and the evil that the Revolution has done all the assaults the days the nights the punishments and the fate of our unfortunate friends who perished in the time of Terror when good men feared for their lives.”⁴⁸ In 1810, determined to provide himself with a male heir to perpetuate his dynasty, Napoleon divorced Josephine. Like Louis XVI, he married a Habsburg princess, and the match showed that Europe’s monarchs were prepared, however reluctantly, to accept his legitimacy. The fatal flaw of Napoleon’s regime was its dependence on military success. His inability to restrain his ambition, already evident in the catastrophic expedition to Saint-Domingue under the Consulate, led him into other disastrous adventures, first in Spain and then in Russia. Without those defeats, it is not inconceivable that his regime would have consolidated itself successfully.

When Napoleon returned from the exile he had accepted after his defeat in 1814 and launched his dramatic “Hundred Days,” he tried to rally the population by reviving the spirit of 1789: he roused volunteer units, made up of men called fédérés like the soldiers of 1792, and had the liberal political philosopher Benjamin Constant draft an “Additional Act” to the imperial constitution, telling him, “Bring me your ideas: public debate, free elections, ministers with real responsibility, freedom of the press.”⁴⁹ Napoleon’s appeal to the principles of the Revolution was not enough to overcome the foreign coalition aligned against him, but it was a sign that those principles were now deeply ingrained in the minds of much of the French population. Even Napoleon realized that the ideals of the Revolution lived on.