Array Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne - The Collected Works of Napoleon Bonaparte

In these troubled waters Bonaparte began forthwith to fish. He established connections with a group of politicians who for one reason and another considered a revision of the constitution desirable and necessary. The leader of the group was Sieves, a man who plumed himself in having a complete knowledge of the art and theory of government and who now wished to endow France with the perfect institutions of which he carried the secret in his brain. Sieves was a man of Olympian conceit, of oracular utterances, a coiner of telling phrases, enjoying an immoderate reputation as a constitution-maker. His phrase was now that to accomplish the desired change he needed 'a sword.' He would furnish the pen himself. The event was to prove, contrary to all proverbs, that the pen is weaker than the sword, at Bonaparte least when the latter belongs to a Napoleon Bonaparte, and Abbe Bonaparte, who really despised 'this cunning priest,' as he called him, was nevertheless quite willing to use him as a stepping-stone. Heaping flatteries upon him he said: "We have no government, because we have no constitution; at least not the one we need. It is for your genius to give us one."

The plan these and other conspirators worked out was to force the Directors to resign, willy-nilly, thus leaving France without an executive, a situation that could not possibly be permitted to continue; then to get the Council of Elders and the Council of the Five Hundred to appoint a committee to revise the constitution. Naturally Sieves and Bonaparte were to be on that committee, if all went well. Then let wisdom have her sway. The conspirators had two of the Directors on their side and a majority of the Elders, and fortunately the President of the Council of Five Hundred was a brother of Napoleon, Lucien Bonaparte, a shallow but cool-headed rhetorician, to whom the honors of the critical day were destined to be due.

Thus was plotted in the dark the coup d'etat of Brumaire which landed Napoleon in the saddle, made him ruler of a great state, opened a new and prodigious chapter in the history of Europe. There is no English word for coup d'etat, as fortunately the thing described is alien to the history of English-speaking peoples. It is the seizure of the state, of power, by force and ruse, the overthrow of the government by violence, by arms. There had been coups d'etat before in France. There were to be others later, in the nineteenth century. But the coup d'etat of 18th and 19th Brumaire (November 9 and 10, 1799) is the most classical example of this device, the most successful, the most momentous in its consequences.

But how to set the artful scheme in motion? There was the danger that the deputies of the Five Hundred might block the way, danger of a popular insurrection in Paris, of the old familiar kind, if the rumor got abroad that the Republic was in peril. The conspirators must step warily. They did so and they nearly failed and had they failed, their fate would have been that of Robespierre.

A charge was trumped up, for which no evidence was given, that a plot was being concocted against the Republic. Not an instant must be lost, if the state was to be saved. The Council of Elders, informed of this, and already won over to the conspiracy, thereupon voted, upon the 18th of Brumaire, that both Councils should meet the following day at St. Cloud, several miles from Paris, and that General Bonaparte should take command of the troops for the purpose of protecting them.

The next day, Sunday, the two Councils met in the palace of St. Cloud. Delay occurring in arranging the halls for the extraordinary meeting, the suspicious legislators had time to confer, to concert opposition. The Elders, when their session finally began at two o'clock, demanded details concerning the pretended plot. Bonaparte entered and made a wild and incoherent speech. They were "standing on a volcano," he told them. He was no "Caesar " or "Cromwell" intent upon destroying the liberties of his country.

"General, you no longer know what you are saying," whispered Bourrienne, urging him to leave the chamber, which he immediately did.

This was a bad beginning; but worse was yet to come. Bonaparte went to the Council of Five Hundred, accompanied by four grenadiers. He was greeted with a perfect storm of wrath. Cries of in the "Outlaw him, outlaw him!" "Down with the Dictator, down with the tyrant! " rent the air. Pandemonium reigned.

He received blows, was pushed and jostled, and was finally dragged fainting from the hall by the grenadiers, his coat torn, his face bleeding. Outside he mounted his horse in the courtyard, before the soldiers.

It was Lucien who saved this badly bungled day. Refusing to put the motion to outlaw his brother, he left the chair, made his way to the courtyard, mounted a horse and harangued the soldiers, telling them that a band of assassins was the day terrorizing the assembly, that his life and that of Napoleon were no longer safe, and demanding, as President of the Five Hundred, that the soldiers enter the hall and clear out the brigands and free the Council. The soldiers hesitated. Then Lucien seized Napoleon's sword, pointed it at his brother's breast, and swore to kill him if he should ever lay violent hands on the Republic. The lie and the melodrama worked. The soldiers entered the hall, led by Murat. The legislators escaped through the windows.

That evening groups of Elders and of the Five Hundred who favored the conspirators met, voted the abolition of the Directory, and appointed three Consuls, Sieves, Ducos, and General Bonaparte, to take their place. They then adjourned for four months, appointing, as their final act, committees to cooperate with the Consuls in the preparation of a new constitution.

The three Consuls promised "fidelity to the Republic, one and indivisible, to liberty, equality, and the representative system of government." At six o'clock on Monday morning every one went back to Paris. The grenadiers returned to their garrison singing revolutionary songs and thinking most sincerely that they had saved the Republic and the Revolution. No outbreak occurred in Paris. The coup d'etat was popular. Government bonds rose rapidly, nearly doubling in a week.

Such was the Little Corporal's rise to civil power. It was fortunate, we have seen, that not all the ability of his remarkable family was monopolized by himself. Lucien had his particular share, a distinct advantage to his kith and kin.

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Thus the famous young warrior had clutched at power and was not soon to let it slip. It had been a narrow escape. Fate had trembled dangerously in the balance on that gray November Sunday afternoon, but the gambler had won. His thin, sallow face, his sharp, metallic voice, his abrupt, imperious gesture, his glance that cowed and terrified, his long disordered hair, his delicate hands, became a part of the history of the times, manifesting the intensely vivid impression which he had made upon his age and was to deepen. He was to etch the impress of his amazing personality with deep, precise, bold strokes upon the institutions and the life of France.

He was, in reality, a flinty young despot with a pronounced taste for military glory. "I love power," he said later, "as a musician loves his violin. I love it as an artist." He was now in a position to indulge his taste.

Pending a wider and a higher flight, there were two tasks that called for the immediate attention of the three Consuls, who now took the place formerly occupied by the five Directors. A new constitution must be made, and the war against the coalition must be carried on.

The Constitution of the Year VIII (1799), the fourth since the beginning of the Revolution, hastily composed and put into force a month after the coup d'etat, was in its essentials the work of Bonaparte and was designed to place supreme power in his hands. This had not been at all the purpose of Sieves or of the committees appointed to draft the document. But Sieves' plan, which had not been carefully worked out but was confused and uncertain in many particulars, encountered the abrupt disdain of Bonaparte. There was to be a Grand Elector with a palace at Versailles and an income of six million francs a year. This was the place evidently intended for Bonaparte, who immediately killed it with the statement that he had no desire to be merely 'a fatted pig.' Impatient with this scheme and with others suggested by the committees, Bonaparte practically dictated the constitution, using, to be sure, such of the suggestions made by the others as seemed to him good or harmless. The result was the organization of that phase of the history of the Republic which is called the Consulate and which lasted from 1799 to 1804.