The War of Wars (48 page)

Josephine remained close to Paul Barras, still a member of the Directory, but no longer its dominant figure. Barras, formerly Josephine’s lover, regarded Napoleon almost paternally as his protégé. But Barras was widely identified as the most corrupt member of a ruling elite famous for its venality: with a reputation for reckless affairs with members of both sexes, for gambling and for selling government jobs, his reputation was not enhanced by his being a cousin of the now notorious Marquis de Sade. Moreover, the unprincipled Barras had secretly gone over to the royalists, who were working for the restoration of Louis XVIII and were now perhaps the most powerful faction in France. Barras had allegedly been bribed some 12 million francs to do so.

Napoleon had no time for the royalists: he wanted to rule himself, not restore the monarchy. So he turned to Louis Gohier, ostensibly the most powerful of the Directors and yet another lover of the astonishing Josephine, who had a remarkable ability to attract men of power. Gohier represented the interests of the Thermidoreans, the majority on the legislative council under the 1795 constitution, the Council of Elders (a kind of senate) and the Council of Five Hundred (a kind of lower chamber), who broadly favoured the status quo and opposed a return to the monarchy or a move to the left under the Jacobins. But Gohier was tainted as one of the corrupt circle around Barras and was
besides deeply suspicious of Napoleon’s ambition. At a cordial meeting he turned down Napoleon’s request to be made a Director, pointing out that he was only thirty and that the minimum age for a director was forty.

Napoleon turned back to Barras as a possible ally and bluntly asked him what he thought about ousting the Directory with a coup. Barras professed himself horrified at the idea, partly because he feared Napoleon would soon take power should such a coup take place, even with himself, Barras, leading it, and partly because of his secret new support for the monarchy.

The other two Directors being minor figures in the pay of the Abbé Sieyès, Napoleon was forced to look to this divine to further his political ambitions. Privately Napoleon detested the abbé. This sinister intellectual cleric with a bald head, long nose and reedy voice, living alone with only books by Voltaire for company, had some claim to be the instigator of the French Revolution itself, with his famous pamphlet
We are the Third Estate
and his early prominence alongside Mirabeau and Lafayette. Although a liberal by inclination, he had outlasted the tyrannies of Danton and Robespierre, and replied, when asked what he did in the Revolution, ‘I survived’: he had manoeuvred sufficiently skilfully and treacherously to avoid the guillotine.

Now at fifty-one he had ambitions to become dictator of France, and wanted to dissolve the Directory and the cumbersome existing constitution. What he needed, he confessed to friends, was ‘a sword’, by which he meant a general willing to carry out a coup and install him, Sieyès, in power. He first approached Joubert, but the general was killed in Italy. Both MacDonald and Moreau refused to take part in any such plot.

Sieyès then turned to Napoleon: the savant was sufficiently intellectually arrogant to believe he could dominate the energetic but supposedly less intelligent soldier – although he paid him a rare compliment: ‘I intend to work with General Bonaparte because of all soldiers he is nearest to being a civilian.’ Sieyès also had a cadre of impressive conspirators around him, including the devious and ruthless chief of police, Fouché, the subtle but duplicitous foreign minister, Talleyrand, and Napoleon’s own brother Lucien, who was a prominent
member of the Council of Five Hundred. Lucien began putting it about that Barras had sent Napoleon to Egypt to perish, along with the best men in the army, because he regarded them as a threat.

Sieyès approached Napoleon to ask him if he would act as the ‘sword’ in a coup. Napoleon, deeply distrustful of this intellectual-politician, nevertheless agreed. The plotters refused to let the unreliable Bernadotte in on the conspiracy, instead seeking to neutralize him; but he had the backing of a large section of the army, its Jacobin meritocrats, including generals Jourdan and Augereau. The next step was to get Barras to support the plotters, along with his protégé Roger Ducos, which would have furnished them with a majority on the Directory to legitimize their seizure of power. Barras refused.

The conspirators carefully drew up a plan: the Directors would be asked to resign and the Councils of Elders and of the five hundred would be required to appoint a committee to draw up a new constitution. The key point was that the sitting of the councillors would take place outside Paris, at the Palace of St Cloud, to prevent the Paris mob, thought to be loyal either to the Jacobins or the monarchy, staging demonstrations and intimidating the Assembly. Both Barras and Gohier, separately suspecting Napoleon, suggested he be given control of an overseas army. He refused, pretending he was ill. Barras himself approached Napoleon to ask him to join in his own plot to install the King. Napoleon said no.

At this point, the venal collective leadership of the five Directors, jostling for power, hardly gave the impression of a firm hand. Yet France was not in the throes of national disintegration: its political system was perfectly adequate, although imperfect. In place of absolute monarchy, the incompetence and disturbances of the initial liberal Revolution and the monstrous tyranny of Danton, Marat and Robespierre which had created a bloodbath, government by the Directory had been moderate, had curbed revolutionary excesses and had supervised the war effort brilliantly under the gifted Carnot, then less ably after his eclipse.

True, the Directory was deeply corrupt. But corruption under the monarchy had been institutional on a completely different scale; and successive governments had been incompetent as well as corrupt – with
the exception of the ‘sea-green incorruptible’ Robespierre’s rule by mass murder. Napoleon himself was certainly no sea-green incorruptible. The Napoleon of Italy and Egypt had looted on a par with the ancients, and distributed patronage lavishly to his family and friends, with Josephine in the forefront; he had no scruples about helping himself and amassing fortunes. Corruption was simply part of the politics of rulers of the day across Europe – Napoleon helping himself on a bigger scale than anyone else.

A further charge brought against the Directory was that of economic incompetence; and it is true that France at the time was in dire economic straits, although not so serious as had existed under the Jacobins, when much of the population was on the brink of starvation. In 1794 the gold franc was worth 75 paper francs; four years later the exchange rate was 80,000 – hyper-inflation. Coffee cost around a franc a grain, a plank of wood some 7,000 francs while sugar was rationed and bread and cheese were almost out of the reach of the ordinary person. The Directory had addressed the problem by raising taxes, levying 100 million francs from France’s most powerful political class, the new rich. Progressive taxation and improved administration only made more enemies, as, less defensibly, did its violent anticlericalism.

But it is instructive to look at the real cause of France’s inflation, which can be summarized in two words: military expenditure. The French Revolution had spawned a monster with a seemingly inexhaustible appetite – the French army. This huge institution simply absorbed money like a sponge, much of it expended in bribing officers to stay loyal to governments. The cost of foreign wars was enormous, and required further conquests to generate the spoils needed to provide the money to further finance the occupying forces. The problem with the Directory was that it was too weak to rein in the army: if it had been stronger it might have been able to conclude peace with its neighbours, now that most of France’s territorial demands and the concerns for its security were satisfied.

Napoleon’s solution to France’s economic problems was relentless continued expansion and plunder to pay for France’s needs and to finance yet more foreign wars. France was becoming a perpetual war machine, financing itself by gobbling up yet more territory, which in
turn required yet more war and finance. The establishment of a military dictatorship was not only no solution, but a further ratcheting up of the problem. Ultimately there was a call for a strong leader in France, as there always is in times of economic discontent.

The prime reason for Napoleon’s plotting was ambition, pure and simple. He wanted to become dictator of an expansionary France. His problem at this stage was that he was only one of several senior generals who qualified for this role, and he had to find some sort of constitutional figleaf for his putsch: this was provided by the over-clever Abbé Sieyès. Through the use of naked force, the abbé sought to use Napoleon to bring himself to power unconstitutionally. Little did the wily ex-priest realize the contempt in which the crude little general held him, or that within a matter of weeks he would be discarded by Napoleon as so much surplus civilian baggage.

Napoleon’s hagiographers, and even his detractors, have always portrayed the coup itself – known as 17 Brumaire (19 November) under the Revolution’s absurd calendar – as a masterpiece of skill and political planning. In fact by the standards of an effective Latin American coup, for example, it was no more than a half-botched affair that very nearly went spectacularly wrong. First, Napoleon abruptly cancelled a meeting with Barras the night before on the grounds that he had a headache. Barras guessed exactly what was afoot: ‘I see that Bonaparte has tricked me . . . and yet he owes me everything.’

Napoleon rose early the following morning and sent a letter to the Council of Elders summoning them to an urgent meeting. Then he invited all the top generals to secure their support or at least their neutrality. Bernadotte alone came in civilian clothes and told him he wanted no part in the conspiracy. The military governor of Paris, General Lefevre, who had the key control of the army units stationed in the capital, asked whether Barras was part of the coup; Napoleon lied that he was. Gohier however refused to be summoned by Napoleon, who intended to place him under arrest.

At the Council of Elders, Sieyès persuaded the majority to move to the Palace of St Cloud, which he knew could be surrounded and intimidated by Napoleon’s soldiers. Napoleon himself went to the
Council of Elders and solemnly swore to uphold the Republic: he was appointed commander-in-chief of all units in the Paris area. He immediately went to address the troops and furiously attacked the Directory for undermining the army.

Gohier, the leader of the Directory and Jean Moulin, the fifth member, who was loyal to him, went to the Tuileries to confront Napoleon. The general bluntly told them that Sieyès and Ducos had resigned, as well as Barras, another lie, so that the Directory had been dissolved. When Gohier refused to resign he ordered both men placed under house arrest. Meanwhile two other conspirators, Talleyrand and Admiral Bruix, arrived at Barras’s house to inform him that all the other members of the Directory had resigned, and demanded his own resignation. Talleyrand had been given 2 million francs to bribe Barras to resign. There are conflicting accounts as to whether the money was paid, or whether Talleyrand simply pocketed it (or paid Barras half a million and took the rest, as some suggested). Barras resigned without a fuss.

So far the conspiracy had worked like clockwork. But on the following day Napoleon travelled to St Cloud to find the palace still being prepared for the crucial sitting of the Assembly. Desperately worried, he paced up and down in an upstairs room. Outside, a handful of veterans formed a palace guard to protect the parliamentary sitting. Before them, Murat had drawn up 6,000 men loyal to Napoleon.

The Elders did not meet until 3.30, when the resignation of the Directors was announced. It was proposed that a new Directory be elected. Napoleon was appalled: he had been counting on the Elders to set up a committee to draw up a new constitution. It seemed the representatives were beginning to understand that a coup was in the making – and that it was being organized by their supposed saviour, Napoleon himself. Napoleon could stand their prevarications no longer, and illegally broke into the sitting. He declared: ‘You are at the edge of a volcano. Let us save at all costs the two things for which we have sacrificed so much, liberty and equality.’

‘What about the constitution?’ heckled one of the Elders.

The constitution, Napoleon told them, was no longer required. Conspiracies were being hatched in its name. ‘I know all about the
dangers that threaten you.’ ‘Name the conspirators,’ shouted another delegate. Napoleon blurted out another falsehood, that Barras and Moulin had been inviting him to place himself at the head of their conspiracy. He was now thrashing around, red-faced with the effort of lying as the parliamentarians interrupted him: he was no orator, except to obediently silent troops.

He began to bluster angrily and almost incoherently: ‘I shall preserve you from dangers surrounded by my comrades in arms. Grenadiers, I see your bearskins and bayonets . . . With them I have founded republics . . . If some orator in the pay of a foreign power should propose to outlaw me, may the lightning of war instantly crush him! If he proposed to outlaw me, I should call on you, my brave companions in arms! Remember, that I march accompanied by the god of victory and the god of fortune.’ An angry murmur of dissent spread through the room and Napoleon strode out, having made a fool of himself and endangered his coup.

He strode over to the chamber in which the popular assembly, the Five Hundred, were sitting. As soon as he arrived his arm was grabbed by a Jacobin member. ‘How dare you. Leave at once. You are violating the sanctuary of the law.’ There were shouts of ‘Kill him’ and ‘Get out’. Then a general cry arose, ‘
Hors la loi!
’ – ‘Outlaw’ – a charge which if it stuck would condemn Napoleon to death. The two guards accompanying Napoleon were seized and held and Napoleon himself shaken as the deputies surged towards him. It was a scene that recalled the fall of Robespierre.

Pale and trembling with shock, Napoleon was rescued by five guards who broke into the chamber. When he emerged his face was streaked with blood, allegedly from the attacks of his assailants, although it seems more likely that Napoleon himself scratched his face, which was pockmarked with acne sores, for dramatic effect. Lucien Napoleon as president of the Assembly succeeded at last in getting the Five Hundred to quieten down. Meanwhile Napoleon, frustrated in his attempt to secure a constitutional coup, had now decided that brute force was his only solution. He mounted his horse and rode to Murat’s troops, the blood still on his face, and ordered a detachment to bring Lucien to him.