The alarm grew when he annexed Piedmont to France. That “Foot of the Mountain” had been occupied by the French in 1798; it lay beyond the “natural boundaries” that Napoleon had promised to protect; however, if restored to the King of Sardinia, it might become a hostile barrier between France and her Italian protectorates in Liguria and Lombardy. On September 4, 1802, Napoleon declared Piedmont a part of France.
In Switzerland, where he had found so many avenues to Italy, he could not proceed so confidently; those sturdy cantons, where men through centuries had counted liberty more precious than life, would have made any enemy pay heavily for conquest. However, they had for the most part welcomed the ideals of 1789, and in 1798 they had formed the Helvetic Republic under the protection of France. This met strong opposition from the owners of large estates, who, using peasants as soldiers, established a separate government at Bern, and challenged the pro-French Republic centered at Lausanne. Both parties sent agents to Napoleon to seek his support; he refused to receive the Bernese agent, who then appealed to England; England sent money and arms to the oligarchs. Napoleon sent troops to the Republicans (November, 1802); so aided, these suppressed the Bernese revolt. Napoleon pacified both parties with an Act of Mediation (February 19, 1803) which established the Swiss Confederation as nineteen independent cantons, each with its own constitution, all under the protectorate of France, all obligated to send a quota of troops to the French Army. Despite this clause, the Act of Mediation, by English testimony, “received approval from many quarters, and was undoubtedly popular among the cantons.”75
Nevertheless the English government looked upon these successive moves—in Lombardy, Piedmont, and Switzerland—as dangerous expansions of French influence, seriously disturbing that balance of Continental Powers which had become the keystone of British policy in Europe. Further resentment was aroused by the publication, in the Moniteur for January 30, 1803, of the official report submitted to the French government by Comte Horace Sébastiani, whom Napoleon had sent to examine the defenses of Cairo, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Acre; the Count estimated that “6,000 men would suffice … to conquer Egypt.”76 The document aroused suspicion, in England, that Napoleon was contemplating another expedition to Egypt. The British government felt that it could no longer think of evacuating Malta and Alexandria; these now seemed indispensable to the defense of British power in the Mediterranean.
Still another expansion of Napoleon’s influence agitated the British. The Treaty of Lunéville stipulated that the German rulers of principalities west of the Rhine, who had lost 4,375 square miles of taxable territory by the recognition of French sovereignty over that area, should be compensated with principalities east of the stream. Twenty German nobles sent representatives to Paris to urge their claims; Prussia and Russia joined in the hunt; Talleyrand collected another fortune in pourboires. Finally the distribution was made, mostly by “secularizing” city-states that had been governed by Catholic bishops for centuries. Napoleon’s aim in this process had been to promote a Confederation of the Rhine as a buffer state between France and Austria-Prussia. Austria protested that the reshuffling of statelets would prove to be another step in the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. It did.
Angered by the widening grasp of Napoleon’s arms, the ruling classes in England asked themselves might not war be less costly than such peace. The manufacturers protested that French control of the Rhine made France the arbiter of British trade with the most lucrative of European markets. Merchants complained that while the Peace of Amiens ended the British blockade of France, the French were laying prohibitive import dues on British products competitive with French industry.77 The aristocracy denounced the peace as a disgraceful surrender to the French Revolution. Nearly all parties agreed that Malta must be held. Meanwhile the British press reviled Napoleon in stories, editorials, and cartoons; he protested to the British government, which told him that the British press was free; he bade the French press to retaliate in kind.78
Communications between the governments became increasingly bellicose. Lord Whitworth, British ambassador, brusquely informed Napoleon that Britain would not leave Malta until the French government had given a satisfactory explanation of the expansionist moves it had made since the Peace of Amiens. On March 13, 1803, amid a large gathering of French and foreign dignitaries, Napoleon, confronting Whitworth as if for battle, charged the British with violating the peace treaty and arming for war; Whitworth, furious at such a transgression of diplomatic rules, thereafter preferred to deal with Talleyrand, who knew how to dress facts with courtesy. On April 25 Whitworth was instructed by his government to present an ultimatum: France must agree to English retention of Malta for at least ten years; she must withdraw from Holland, Switzerland, and Italy, and must recompense the King of Sardinia for the loss of Piedmont in the recent war. Napoleon ridiculed the proposals; Whitworth asked for, and received, his passport, and both sides prepared for war.
Realizing that England, controlling the seas, could at will take any French colony, Napoleon sold the territory of Louisiana to the United States for eighty million francs (May 3, 1803). England, still technically at peace, instructed its naval force to capture any French vessel they might encounter. War was officially declared on May 16, 1803, and continued for twelve years.
From that bitter moment Napoleon the administrator receded in history, and Napoleon the general, aged thirty-four, turned his soul to war. He ordered the arrest of all Britons still found on French soil. He bade General Mortier take Hanover at once, before it could be turned into a military base by the Hanoverian George III. What infuriated him was the thought that throughout a decade of conflict England had financed Continental armies against France, had blockaded French ports and seized French shipping and French colonies, and that through all these military activities she herself had remained immune from attack. So now he resigned himself to what in calmer moments he had rejected as an impracticable dream: he would try to cross that damnable ditch and make those merchants and bankers feel the touch of war upon their soil and flesh.
He ordered his generals to assemble 150,000 men and 10,000 horses along the coast at Boulogne, Dunkirk, and Ostend; he ordered his admirals to gather and equip, at Brest, Rochefort, and Toulon, powerful fleets which, when ready to sail and fight, were to find their way through a mesh of British vessels to harbors that a million workers would have prepared for them around Boulogne; and in those harbors men were to build hundreds of transport ships of all kinds. He himself repeatedly left Paris to tour the camps and docks, to mark the progress of the enterprise, and to inspire the soldiers, sailors, and laborers with an active presence that would seem to them a pledge of purpose and victory.
In the Channel, British men-of-war kept watch; and along the English coast—at Dover, Deal, and elsewhere—a hundred thousand patriots kept watch, night and day, resolved to resist to the death any attempt to invade their inviolable shores.
V. THE GREAT CONSPIRACY: 1803–04
On the night of August 21, 1803, an English frigate, commanded by Captain Wright, brought across the Channel from England eight Frenchmen under the lead of Georges Cadoudal, a fervent leader of the irreconcilable Chouans. They landed on a rocky cliff near Biville in Normandy, where natives in league with them drew them up by ropes. On December 10 Captain Wright brought from England to Biville a second group of conspirators, including the émigré noble Armand de Polignac. On a third crossing, January 16, 1804, the captain brought Jules de Polignac, and the French émigré generals Pichegru and Lajolais. Pichegru, after well-led victories with the Revolutionary armies, had plotted to restore the Bourbons, had been detected, and had escaped to England (1801). All three groups made their way to Paris, where they were concealed in the homes of royalists. Cadoudal later confessed that he had planned to kidnap Napoleon, and, if Napoleon resisted, to kill him.79 We may believe that “Cadoudal was furnished by the British Government with drafts for a million francs to enable him to organize the insurrection in th
e capital”;80 but there is no evidence that the British government consented to assassination.
The plotters delayed action in the expectation that the Comte d’Artois, younger brother of Louis XVI, would join them in Paris,81 ready to replace Napoleon; but he did not come. Meanwhile (January 28, 1804) Pichegru visited General Moreau and asked his cooperation; Moreau refused to join in any attempt to restore the Bourbons, but offered himself as ruler of France if Napoleon should be removed.82 About this time Bernadotte gave Juliette Récamier the names of twenty generals who, he declared, were devoted to him and were eager to restore “the true Republic.”83 “I may fairly say,” Napoleon recalled at St. Helena, “that during the months from September, 1803, to January, 1804, I was sitting on a volcano.”84
On January 26 a Chouan named Querelle, who had been arrested three months before and was soon to be executed, revealed the details of the conspiracy in return for the commutation of his sentence. Guided by his confession, the slow-moving police of Claude Régnier found and arrested Moreau on February 15, Pichegru on February 26, the Polignac brothers on February 27, and Cadoudal on March 29. Cadoudal proudly admitted that he had planned to remove Napoleon from power, and that he had expected a French prince to meet him in Paris; but he refused to name any of his associates in the plot.85
Meanwhile an English agent named Drake had been collecting another group of conspirators in or near Munich, with a plan to raise an insurrection against Napoleon in the newly French regions on the west bank of the Rhine. If we may believe Méneval, “an order of the [British] King’s Privy Council enjoined on the French exiles to betake themselves to the banks of the Rhine, under penalty of forfeiting their pensions; and a regulation fixed the amount of pay allotted to each officer, and each soldier.”86 When Napoleon’s spies notified him of these developments he concluded that the Bourbon prince whom the London conspirators had awaited was among these émigrés. The Comte d’Artois could not be located among them; but in the little town of Ettenheim, some six miles east of the Rhine in the electorate of Baden, Napoleon’s agents discovered—living in apparent quiet except for occasional but suspicious visits to Strasbourg87—Louis-Antoine-Henri de Bourbon-Condé, Duc d’Enghien, son of the Duc de Bourbon, and grandson of the Prince de Condé.
When this was reported to Napoleon he concluded that the thirty-two-year-old Duke was a leader of the conspiracy to depose him. The revelations of Querelle, and the arrests recently made in Paris, had thrown the once intrepid general into a state of excitement—perhaps of fear and wrath—that hurried him into decisions that he would always defend but (despite his protestations88) perhaps secretly regretted. He sent instructions to General Ordener to lead an armed force to Ettenheim, arrest the Duke, and bring him to Paris. The Duke was taken on the night of March 14–15, 1804, and on March 18 he was imprisoned in the Fortress of Vincennes, five miles east of Paris.
On March 20 Napoleon ordered a military court of five colonels and one major to go to Vincennes and try the Duke on charges of having, while in the pay of England, taken up arms against his own country. About the same time he sent General Savary, head of his special police, to watch over the prisoner and the trial. Enghien admitted that he had received money from English authorities, and that he had hoped to lead a force into Alsace.89 The court pronounced him guilty of treason, and condemned him to death. He asked permission to see Napoleon; the court refused this, but proposed to send a message to Napoleon, recommending mercy. Savary overruled this proposal, and ordered the sentence of death to be carried out.90
Meanwhile Napoleon and his immediate circle, at Josephine’s Malmaison, debated the fate of the Duke. They assumed that he would be found guilty—but should he be pardoned as an olive branch to the royalists? Talleyrand, who in 1814 was to chaperone the restoration of the Bourbons, advised execution as a quick way of ending the hopes and plots of the royalists; remembering his record in the Revolution, he feared for his property, perhaps his life, should the Bourbons return to power; he “wished,” wrote Barras, “to put a river of blood between Napoleon and the Bourbons.”91 Cambacérès, coolest and most legal of the consular trio, favored delay. Josephine fell at Napoleon’s feet and pleaded for Enghien’s life, and her entreaties were seconded by her daughter Hortense and Napoleon’s sister Caroline.
At some time that night, from Malmaison, Napoleon sent Hugues Maret to Paris with a message to Councilor of State Pierre Réal, bidding him to go to Vincennes, personally examine the Duke, and report the results to Malmaison. Réal received the message, but, exhausted by the day’s labor, fell asleep in his room, and did not reach Vincennes till 5 A.M., March 21. Enghien had died before a firing squad at 3 A.M. in the prison yard. Savary, apparently thinking that he had served his master well, rode to Malmaison to give Napoleon the news. Napoleon retired to his private apartment, locked himself in, and refused all appeals from his wife to let her enter.
Bitter denunciation came from royalists and royalty. They were appalled at the idea of a commoner killing a Bourbon. The cabinets of Russia and Sweden sent protests to the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire at Ratisbon, and proposed that the invasion of Baden by the armed forces of France be made the subject of an international inquiry. The Diet made no answer, and the Elector of Baden refused to offend France. Czar Alexander I instructed his ambassador in Paris to demand an explanation of the execution; Talleyrand replied with an argumentum ad hominem: “If, when England was planning the assassination of Paul I, the authors of the plot had been known to be lurking at a stone’s throw from the frontier, would they not have been seized with all possible speed?”92 William Pitt was much comforted by the news of the execution; “Bonaparte,” he said, “has now done himself more mischief than we have done him since the last declaration of war.”93
The reaction in France itself was milder than many had expected. Chateaubriand resigned a minor appointment in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; but when the head of that ministry, the imperturbable Talleyrand, gave a ball on March 24—three days after the death of Enghien—twenty members of the old French nobility, and representatives of all the European courts, attended.94 Three months after the affair it had apparently disappeared from the public mind. Fouché, however, usually a keen observer, remarked of the execution, “C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute” (It is more than a crime, it is a blunder).95
Napoleon may have felt some remorse, but he never admitted it. “These people,” he said, “wanted to throw France into confusion, and to destroy the Revolution by destroying me; it was my duty both to defend and to avenge the Revolution. … The Duc d’Enghien was a conspirator like any other, and he had to be treated as such. … I had to choose between continuous persecution and one decisive blow, and my decision was not doubtful. I have forever silenced both royalists and Jacobins.”96 He would let them know that he was “not to be trifled with,”97 that neither was his “blood ditch-water.”98 He thought, with some reason, that he had put the fear of death into the hearts of royalist plotters, who could now see that Bourbon blood would not save them. Actually, there were no further royalist plots to take Napoleon’s life.
In the case of the conspirators who had been arrested in Paris he conducted himself with more caution and publicity. The trials were to be open, and the press was allowed to report them in detail. Though Bourrienne had opposed the execution of Enghien, Napoleon asked him to attend the trials and to give him an account of the proceedings. Pichegru did not wait to be tried; on April 4 he was found dead in his cell, strangled by his own cravat. In other cases the guilt was admitted or evident; but of Moreau no more was proved than that he had been openly hostile to Napoleon, and had concealed from the authorities his knowledge that Pichegru and others were proposing to unseat him by force. On June 10, 1804, the court pronounced sentence: nineteen conspirators were condemned to death, Moreau to two years’ imprisonment. Cadoudal died impenitent on June 28. Of the remaining eighteen Napoleon pardoned twelve, including the two Polignacs. Moreau asked if his sente
nce might be changed to exile; Napoleon agreed, though he predicted that Moreau would continue to plot against him.99 Moreau took ship to America, stayed there till 1812, returned to take service with the Russian Army, fought against Napoleon at Dresden (August 29, 1813), died of his wounds (September 2), and was buried in Russia.
VI. THE ROAD TO EMPIRE: 1804
Brooding over the conspiracy, Napoleon wondered why he had to do his work under constant threat of assassination, while the rulers who were repeatedly leagued against France—George III of England, Francis II of Austria and the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick William III of Prussia, and Alexander I of Russia—could expect to maintain their supremacy till their normal death, and could rely on the orderly transference of their sovereignty to their natural or designated heirs. It could not be because they had submitted their policies and appointments to democratic controls; they had not. Apparently the secret of their security lay in their “legitimacy”—the sanction of heritable rule by a public opinion formed to habit through generations and centuries.
Privately—ever less privately—Napoleon dreamed of absolute, consecrated, transmissible authority, even of a dynasty that might acquire the seal and aura of time. He felt that the tasks he longed to accomplish required the stability and continuity of absolute rule. Consider Caesar—how he had brought Roman laws and civilization to Gaul, had driven the Germans beyond the Rhine, and had won the title of imperator, the commander in chief; well, had not he, Napoleon, done these? What might Caesar have accomplished had he been spared assassination? Think of how much Augustus achieved in his forty-one years of imperial power, freed from the plebeian chaos that Caesar had ended, and supported by a Senate wise enough to subordinate palaver to genius. Napoleon, the son of Italy, the admirer of the ancient Romans, longed for such untrammeled continuity, and for the privilege, enjoyed by the second-century emperors, of choosing and training a successor.