The War of Wars (56 page)

Napoleon’s coachman was drunk, it being Christmas Eve – a piece of luck that was to save the First Consul’s life. Rounding a corner, he saw the way ahead was blocked by the cart, but instead of slowing down, he urged his horses after the grenadiers, who had veered to avoid it. The man supposed to tip off Carbon lost his nerve, so the assassin lit the fuse a split-second too late. The combination of the delay and the coachman’s drunken urgency rushed Napoleon’s carriage safely past the cart.

When the bomb went off – the world’s first example, perhaps, of a cart bomb – it blew the street to bits: nine people were killed, including the unfortunate little girl, and twenty-six were injured. The guards riding behind Napoleon’s carriage were thrown from their saddles, but the First Consul was uninjured. Josephine’s carriage was much further behind than usual. The occupants of this were shocked and she fainted, but none of them was hurt.

Suspicion fell on Napoleon’s military aides. Why, for example, did the troop of grenadiers not stop to clear the obstructing cart out of the Emperor’s way, instead of rushing past? Even Josephine was not above suspicion. For it was Josephine who had wheedled the reluctant Napoleon into going to the Opera, which he had not wished to do. Then Josephine had dawdled – which put her well to the rear of the blast. Only its late detonation had almost turned her into the victim.

Napoleon was incensed at the attempt on his life. ‘For such an atrocious crime we must have vengeance like a thunderbolt; blood must flow; we must shoot as many guilty men as there have been victories,’ he ranted. We might think it would have been history’s most celebrated assassination, eclipsing even that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo that triggered the First World War in its consequences and certainly those of Lincoln and the Kennedys. Ironically however, it would not have been recognized as such, for Napoleon by 1800 was a successful dictator and general, but not the fearsome conqueror of Europe he was to become.

Josephine was herself an intriguer with close links to many of
Napoleon’s rivals. Even so, it is hard to believe she would have gained any advantage from his death – although she was acutely conscious of the precariousness of her position until she provided him with his longed-for son and heir. More likely military insiders were in on the plot with the aim of installing one of Napoleon’s rivals in the army high command. Napoleon took advantage of the plot to launch a preemptive attack on his Jacobin enemies, who were not involved: 130 of their leaders were arrested and imprisoned or sent to Devil’s Island, the notorious prison in the Caribbean.

In fact the ostensible ringleaders were in England – their chief being Georges Cadoudal, a Breton who trained royalist guerrillas and had received financial support from Windham, head of the British secret service. Cadoudal was a strong, ugly man, who was planning to put the Comte d’Artois, the energetic younger brother of the pretender, the Comte de Provence on the throne. He was to try a second time, once more in close co-operation with two of the most powerful and exotic figures in British intelligence, Sir Sidney Smith and Captain John Wright, Smith’s former cellmate in the Temple prison in Paris.

Wright had been brought up in Minorca and spent most of his early career in the Vendée, liaising with French royalist rebels. Two years later, in 1803 he commanded a small squadron of brigs and cutters to smuggle French royalists in and out of the country. One of these landed the royalist General Cadoudal in 1803, along with the celebrated General Charles Pichegru, now a royalist but who had nevertheless served under Robespierre and been president of the lower house of parliament under the Directory.

Cadoudal and Pichegru travelled in closed carriages to the house of one of their sympathizers and finally to Paris in January 1804. There they met up with the third conspirator, General Jean Victor Moreau, the former commander of the Army of the Rhine, and victor of the spectacular battle of Hohenlinden. The plan was extensive. Cadoudal was to arrange the assassination of Napoleon, Moreau’s troops were to seize the capital and Pichegru to instal a new Bourbon King.

Cadoudal’s plan was to dress up sixty of his plotters as hussars to take part in a parade in the Place du Carrousel, where Napoleon was to pass on inspection, and then strike him down with knives. If this bore some
resemblance to the murder of Caesar, it also had distinct overtones of the recent assassination of the Tsar Paul, in which British intelligence may have played a part: it is possible that the same British minds worked on both conspiracies.

Moreau was far more representative of the mainstream French army than Napoleon who was junior to him as an officer and had a smaller following in the army (quite apart from being a Corsican compared to Moreau’s well-established mainland background). Moreau saw himself as a potential dictator in place of Napoleon, rather than as a stalking horse for a new King. When he let this be known, the royalists Pichegru and Cadoudal were horrified.

At the end of January 1804 a double agent tipped off Napoleon’s supporters as to the arrival of the conspirators in Paris . A suspected conspirator, Dr Querelle, was arrested, tortured and threatened with execution; he broke down and revealed the addresses of the safe houses where Cadoudal had stayed, as well as confirming the existence of the plot. A servant of Cadoudal was captured at one of the safe houses and tortured, revealing his master’s current whereabouts, but the bird had flown before the police arrived.

Finally Moreau was arrested in early February, which proved easy enough as his movements were public knowledge. Pichegru was then captured in his hideout at the end of the same month, after a fierce struggle. Cadoudal himself, after a spectacular chase in a coach, shot the two policemen following him and then tried to mingle with the crowd that assembled at the spot, only to be recognized and arrested.

Oddly, however, there was a mystery over the Bourbon prince they had planned to put on the throne. Cadoudal had been visited by a mysterious figure. According to Fouché he was ‘. . . an important personage . . . extremely well dressed . . . when he was in the room . . . everybody . . . rose and did not sit down until he had retired.’ This description corresponded neither with the age of the Comte d’Artois, nor the person of the Duc de Berri . . . The Duc d’Angoulême was at Mittau . . . the Duc de Bourbon was known to be in London. Attention was therefore directed at the Duc d’Enghien. D’Enghien, aged just thirty-one, was the only son of the Duc de Bourbon, the grandson of the Prince of Condé. Fouché was certain of his complicity.
Talleyrand wrote on 8 March recommending the arrest of the young Duc, of whom Napoleon had never even heard.

On the night of 15 March a force of 300 armed men was despatched across the French border to Baden and seized the Duc in bed; his faithful dog jumped into the carriage into which he was bundled. The kidnappers reached Strasbourg, where they waited four days before being ordered to the Forest of Vincennes outside Paris . There the alleged young pretender ate a hearty meal, asking his captors what they intended to do with him. After supper he was taken to a room where a general and six colonels were waiting. There he admitted receiving 4,200 guns a year from the British who had told him to wait on the Rhine ‘where I would have a part to play immediately’. He demanded to see Napoleon. ‘My name, my rank, my manner of thinking and the horror of my situation induce me to hope he will not refuse my request.’

The following day he was summoned at six o’clock and led down a stone staircase. He asked where he was being taken and, receiving no answer, assumed he was in no danger. Instead he was led out to the dry moat of the castle, where a hole had been dug and a captain and six soldiers were waiting. ‘I gave the word to fire,’ said the quartermaster. ‘The man fell and, after the execution, I learned that we had shot the Duc d’Enghien.’ The dog was led away howling.

It had been one of Napoleon’s most characteristically brutal and decisive acts. He was determined to show he would be pitiless towards any further conspiracies and to remove the most promising pretender (the others being the bloated and idle Comte de Provence and his younger brother, the scheming and vindictive Comte d’Artois). The illegal abduction of a senior prince of the royal blood across national borders was a scandalous act of international piracy, and the royal courts of Europe reacted as though they had been struck in the chest, having lost one of their own.

Possibly Napoleon underestimated the reaction to the murder of this hitherto obscure prince. The new Tsar of Russia was appalled: Baden was ruled by his father-in-law, Joseph, who had tried to dissuade Napoleon from the act and called it a ‘barbarity’. Even Fouché was said to be aghast. The next horror was the discovery of the veteran
Pichegru’s body in his gaol cell. He had been garrotted with a neckcloth attached to a sharp stick. It was announced that he had committed suicide – something almost impossible to do with a garrotte.

In June the other conspirators were tried and sentenced. Napoleon had taken a considerable risk in arresting the popular hero Moreau, which could have set off a revolt in the army or a popular uprising. In the event, Moreau’s courage at his trial was applauded by the crowd. He ‘was as calm as his conscience; and, as he sat on the bench, he had the appearance of one led by curiosity to be present at this interesting trial, rather than of an accused person, to whom the proceedings might end in condemnation and death . . . The result, clear as day to all present, was that Moreau was a total stranger to all their plots, all the intrigues, which had been set on foot in London.’ The popular general was sentenced to just two years in prison because of the paucity of evidence against him and Napoleon’s fear that his condemnation might spark an uprising. Soon afterwards he was exiled to the United States.

Cadoudal and thirteen others were sentenced to death. Cadoudal was executed on 25 June, telling the gaoler, ‘We have achieved more than we intended. We came to give France a King; we have given her an Emperor.’ It was an ironic jest, as his conspiracy was indeed directly responsible for Napoleon’s decision to become Emperor. He asked to be the first to be executed.

Wright, the British liaison officer for the conspiracy, was captured on his ship off the French coast soon afterwards. He made a fight of it and was wounded in the leg. His surgeon reported: ‘Our firing almost ceased, three of the guns being dismounted and the rest encumbered with lumber from falling booms, the supporters having been shot away and the vessel nearly sinking, Captain Wright was forced to hail that he had struck [surrendered] just in time to save the lives of the few that could keep the deck, as the gunboats were rowing up alongside with numerous troops to board.’

Wright was denounced as ‘a most artful and dangerous adventurer’ and imprisoned in the Temple. He languished there as a spy, demanding to be treated as a prisoner of war, for more than a year; then just a
week after the Battle of Trafalgar he was found with his throat slit. According to the French, he had cut his throat with a razor.

The Times
wrote: ‘We fear there is no doubt of the fact of Captain Wright’s decease but we cannot believe that a gallant officer, who has so often looked death in the face and was proverbial for courting danger, fell in the manner mentioned. Those, who ordered and perpetrated the midnight murders of Pichegru and the Duke d’Enghien, can, no doubt, explain the nature of Captain Wright’s death.’

Years later in St Helena Napoleon was furious at the accusation that he was responsible. One who spoke to him then remembered:

He asked me to my great surprise if I remembered the history of Captain Wright. I answered, ‘Perfectly well and it is a prevailing opinion in England that you ordered him to be murdered in the Temple.’ With the utmost rapidity of speech, he replied, ‘For what object? Of all men, he was the person whom I could have most desired to live. Whence could I have procured so valuable evidence as he would have provided on the conspirators in and about Paris? . . . If I had acted properly, I should have ordered Wright to be tried by a military commission as a spy and shot within twenty-four hours, which by the laws of war I was entitled to do. What would your ministers, or even your parliament, have done to a French captain that was discovered landing assassins in England to murder King George? . . . They would not have been so lenient as I was with Wright. They would have had him tried and executed
sur le champ
.’

The plot had one unintended consequence, alluded to by Cadoudal. Napoleon resolved to make himself Emperor as fast as possible so as to create a dynasty, he said, which would survive in the event of his death. He had already hinted as much: ‘If I die in four or five years, the clock will be wound up and will run. If I die before then, I don’t know what will happen . . . These fanatics will end by killing me and putting angry Jacobins in power. It is I who embody the French Revolution.’

One of his backers said: ‘They want to kill Bonaparte; we must defend him and make him immortal.’ A motion was introduced in the tribunate to make Napoleon Emperor of the French: ‘The imperial destiny should be hereditary in his family.’ The honest Carnot opposed it. To establish his throne in the popular will, Napoleon held yet another referendum. This time 3,570,000 votes were counted in his favour against some 2,500 votes. The pattern by now had been established.

Napoleon’s elevation to Emperor is too often glossed over as simply a reaction to the assassination threat. In fact it was a turning point. Napoleon’s real reasons for seeking the title were many. Indeed, he could reconcile it with the notion of being a republican – as had briefly been the case in ancient Rome. It was quite distinct, in his opinion, from the crown of the Bourbon monarchy: to have called himself King would truly have been a repudiation of the Revolution, unacceptable to his remaining Jacobin supporters. By securing a mandate from the people, he could mysteriously anchor his rule in the will of the French nation, making it distinct from a King ordained by divine right from above.