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Saturday 16 November 2019
Directorate Government
Unaware of these dark currents, Napoleon contented himself with a policy of humiliation. Alerted by letters from her son Eugene and by confidential advice from Fouche, with whom he was developing a kind of business relationship, When Lucien called the next morning he found Napoleon and Josephine in bed, beaming with seraphic expressions. The entire Bonaparte family was scandalized and furious at
this unexpected outcome, but even Letizia dared say nothing. None the less, the balance of power in the marriage had decisively shifted and from this point on Napoleon had the psychological advantage
During this honeymoon period, Josephine put him in the picture of his old love Desiree Clary. Napoleon had earmarked her as the wife of General Duphot, but he was assassinated in Rome late in 1 797, thus triggering the French occupation of the eternal city. On 17 August 1798, she married Bernadotte, apparently more for a desire to be married than because of any overpowering coup de foudre for the Gascon. The marriage was a scheme by the Bonapartist clan to neutralize or co-opt a dangerous political rival. Joseph, Lucien, and their wives had attended the wedding ceremony and Desiree now regularly passed on to her sister Julie
Joseph's wife) full intelligence on the Bernadotte household: who visited, what was discussed, what was the attitude to Napoleon. Josephine had apparently done her best to conciliate Desiree, but Desiree strongly disliked her and used to mimic her mercilessly to Julie, the only member
of the Bonaparte clan to have a soft spot for Napoleon's wife. The dynamics of the extended Bonaparte family were becoming increasingly complex. The constant was the hatred felt for Josephine by all female members of Napoleon's family - Letizia, Pauline and, especially, Elisa. Desiree's distaste is more easily explained as simple jealousy. There is even evidence that Desiree was still besotted with Napoleon and dreamed of displacing Josephine and getting him back.
When she became a mother in 1 799 she asked Napoleon to be godfather. The subtext was clear: she could bear children while Josephine could not. Napoleon asked that the boy be called Oscar after Ossian, the hero of his beloved Macpherson epic, and Desiree duly obliged. Desiree was an
important transmission belt between the ultra-Jacobin circle of Bernadotte and friends and the Bonapartes. She supported Napoleon's ambitions even to the point of spying on her own husband; Bernadotte, besotted with her, turned a blind eye. But she was the focus of sexual jealousy, with Napoleon resentful that an enemy like Bernadotte was married to 'his' Eugenie, and Bernadotte fuming that Napoleon had had his wife's virginity.
Napoleon had a talent for making mortal enemies, and no enemy was more inveterate than Jean Bernadotte. Tall, slight, with thick black hair, a colorless face and a huge hook nose, Bernadotte was reputed to have Moorish blood but, like many of Napoleon's followers, was, in fact, a Gascon. Energetic, ruthless, mendacious and treacherous, Bernadotte professed Jacobinism and had received his political 'education' in the sergeant's mess. Unlike his fellow Gascon Murat, who continued to speak with a thick country brogue, Bernadotte had polished up his accent and gone to some pains to conceal his rude origins. Bernadotte was actually an egomaniac of the first order, whose political beliefs were always a mask for the promotion of Jean Bernadotte. He has attracted widespread odium, and rightly so. Frederic Masson described him as 'the most unbearable of Jacobins and schoolmasters, a Bearnais with nothing of the Gascon smartness and happy repartee about him, but whose calculating subtlety always concealed a double game and who regarded Madame de Stad as first among women because she was the first of pedants and who spent his honeymoon dictating documents to his young wife.' A hot-tempered, paranoid Gascon boaster, Bernadotte had ambitions
that always outran his abilities. The fiasco of his two-month incumbency as French ambassador to Austria in 1 798 was matched by the farce of his two months as Minister of War on July 1 799. The rising star in the Directory, the Abbe de Sieyes, grew tired of his intrigues and prima donna antics at the Ministry. The last straw came after Brune's victory when Bernadotte delivered a gasconade to the effect that he would rather be in the field as a soldier than behind the Ministry desk. Sieyes sacked him abruptly, but Bernadotte managed to have the last word by leaking a 'resignation letter' to the press in which he thanked Sieyes ironically 'for accepting a resignation I had not offered'.
Of his legendary hatred for Napoleon, there can be no doubt. When Napoleon arrived so unexpectedly in France, Bernadotte proposed to the Directory that Napoleon be arrested and court-martialled, both for deserting the army in Egypt and for evading the quarantine regulations. He was the only one of Napoleon's former generals not to call on him at the rue de Ia Victoire to offer congratulations for a safe return from Egypt. He then refused to subscribe to an official dinner being arranged by the generals for Napoleon until he explained his reasons for leaving the army in Egypt. He added that since Napoleon had not been through quarantine and might, therefore, have brought back the plague, he, Bernadotte, had no intention of dining with a plague-ridden general. Yet Bernadotte was only one of a host of dangerous political rivals Napoleon had to fend off or neutralize when he arrived in Paris to take stock of the Directory's brittle position. Fortunately for him, few of the rest of them possessed Bernadotte's overweening ambition. Sieyes was already engaged in a scheme of his own to topple the Directory but needed a 'sword'. His first choice was Joubert, but he was killed in Italy. His second choice was MacDonald but he refused to take part, as did Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden. A reluctant Moreau was explaining his hesitation to Sieyes on 14 October when news of Napoleon's landing in France came in. 'There's your man,' said Moreau. 'He will make a better job of your coup d 'etat than I could. Nevertheless, in his bid for supreme power in October 1799 Napoleon faced a situation of frightening complexity. The only certainty was that the Directory was discredited for economic reasons. It was the Army that sustained the Directory, and a system of symbiotic corruption resulted. Army officers and war commissioners demanded the right to loot and requisition to line their pockets, while the Directory had to bow to the demands of the Army, as the government, in turn, needed the spoils of war to pay bankers, army contractors, and other creditors and to raise revenue. But inflation gnawed away at the Directors' position. In 1794 the gold franc was worth 75 paper francs, but by 1 798 the rate had soared to 80000 paper for one gold franc.
The Directory had inherited an impossible financial situation. The State was virtually bankrupt, credit was non-existent and the worthless assignats had been withdrawn. Left with nothing but taxation to finance the war, the Directors struggled manfully and even introduced worthwhile administrative reforms and improved the tax system. But there was no way to avoid inflation, and the pressing need for money explained the collaboration of Army and government in exacting revenue from the conquered territories. Meanwhile, the government steadily added to its tally of enemies. Having already alienated the Catholic Church by its anticlericalism and the Jacobins by its conservatism, by its forced levy of one hundred million francs on the rich the Directors also lost caste among the privileged. Nor was there any hope of support from the urban proletariat or the sans-culottes. Butter and cheese were already luxury items, sugar was heavily rationed, and the price of basics was astronomical: 250 grams of coffee cost z or francs, a packet of candles 625 francs, two cubic meters of wood 7,300 francs. Many families were reduced to hanging a lump of sugar from the ceiling, and this would be dipped into a cup of coffee for a few seconds.
The corruption of the Directory was legendary and the hatred entertained for the government proportional. On the opening night of the play La Caverne, a melodrama featuring four thieves as principal characters, a wag in the audience called out: 'Only four? Where's the fifth? ' The entire theatre dissolved into laughter, with the actors actually applauding the audience. Many other contemporary stories testified to the intense unpopularity of the Directors. A perfume vendor in the rue de la Loi was said to have made a fortune out of selling a fan with five lighted candles painted on one side, with the middle candle much taller than the others. On the other side of the fan were the words: 'Get rid of four of them. We must economize. ' Another story, relating to the swelling throng of Directory clients and hangers-on, concerned a Gascon said to have sent a letter to the Council of 500000; when reproved for adding three more noughts than necessary, the Gascon replied that he could not put in more than there actually were. And when news of Napoleon's victory at Aboukir reached Paris, the enemies of the Directory went about wearing a pendant, showing lancet lettuce (laitue) and a rat (rat). Spoken quickly, the rebus signified 'L 'An Sept Les tuera ('Year Seven will kill them').
Yet if the Directory seemed doomed by its inability to satisfy any significant social sector, what was to replace it? Apart from supporters of the status quo, three main groups were contending for power should the Directors lose their footing. Perhaps the most powerful were the monarchists, who had only just failed to seize power at Vendemiaire and Fructidor. Particularly strong in the south and west of France, the royalists spoiled their chances by in-fighting, split between the ultramontane supporters of the Comte d' Artois, who wanted a return to the ancien regime, and champions of constitutional monarchy. Although some saw a Bourbon restoration as inevitable, there remained the obstacle that too many people stood to lose from such an eventuality: the bourgeoisie, peasants, merchants, businessmen, war contractors, and all other profiteers.
The only members of the middle class who had been unable to buy up confiscated property (or 'national' property as it was termed in the euphemism) were those without capital, such as pensioners and members of the liberal professions. On the left were the neo-Jacobins, a powerful force in provincial electoral assemblies and supported by the petit-bourgeoisie, artisans and shopkeepers. They were influential in the Council of Five Hundred where the tempestuous Lucien Bonaparte, still theoretically a Jacobin, had been elected as president but were ill-represented in the Council of Ancients. Having learned from the failure of Gracchus Babeuf that there was no constituency for extremism, they espoused a moderate program of greater democracy, accountability by the Directors, and greater provincial autonomy. It was the Jacobins who in 1 799 had pushed through the Hostage Law, making the relations of emigres responsible for any crimes committed within France; and it was at the Jacobins' insistence that the Directors had levied the compulsory loan on the rich. The weakness of the Jacobins was that they were a mere coalition of special interests. Their power was on the wane in 1 799, as the attraction of emergency powers and committees of public safety had dimmed after the victories at Bergen and Zurich in September r 799 · A sign of the times was the ease with which Minister of Police Fouche closed down the 'Constitutional Society' - a Jacobin club which had hitherto been a bugbear for the Directory.
The third party in the ring was the Thermidoreans who wanted to end the Revolution on an 'as is' basis, leaving them as the beneficiaries of the sale of national property. They wanted neither the true social revolution of the Jacobins nor the restoration of the monarchy. These were, in essence, the people who had held power since the fall of Robespierre in 1794, the veterans of the revolutionary assemblies who now wanted a cosmetic change of regime that would allow them to emerge untarnished by the image of the Directory yet in possession of all their economic gains. These were the men who held power as a result of a whole series of illegal actions, principally the Decree of Two-Thirds against the royalists and the Florea! a coup against the Jacobins; their hallmark was the ruthless sacrifice of their weakest members to cling to power. At root the Thermidoreans wanted a Republic dedicated to the interests of the rich - rather like the U.S .A. at that time under Washington and Jefferson. Since the great personalities of the royalist movement were in exile and those of the Jacobin club were generals like Bernadotte, Jom:dan and Augereau, it was on the Thermidoreans and the five Directors that Napoleon directed most of his attention during the critical period from r 6 October to 9 November 1 799· General Moulin and Roger Ducos were the two minor Directors, basically nonentities. The three key figures were Barras, Sieyes and Gohier. Barras was still ostensibly the key man, still linked to Bonaparte through Josephine, but increasingly perceived as erratic and harboring secret royalist sympathies. Gohier and his stooge Moulin supported the status quo, but because Gohier was physically attracted to Josephine, there were obvious possibilities for Napoleon to neutralize him in any power struggle.
The most dangerous man in the Directory was the fifty-one-year-old Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, who had gradually usurped Barras's premier position on the executive while Napoleon was in Egypt. Sieyes had betrayed Danton, and later Robespierre, and when asked what he had done during the Terror, replied: 'I survived. ' This grim cynic now had Barras firmly in his sights, and to this end had constructed a loose coalition of intriguers, including Talleyrand, Fouche and Lucien Bonaparte. The hotheaded Lucien, who had brought the Bonaparte family close to disaster by his denunciation of Paoli, nearly ruined things again by shooting from the hip. He started a whispering campaign that Barras had deliberately sent Napoleon and the cream of the army into the
'deserts of Araby' to perish. To cover his tracks he bracketed Talleyrand with Barras as the two men jointly responsible. Barras knew how to deal with the insolent young cub. He brought up the subject of Lucien's illegal under-age recruitment to the Council of 500. To save face yet not
be expelled Lucien had to continue his bluster while backtracking on the accusations against Barras. The absurd result was that he ended up accusing his co-conspirator Talleyrand alone of sending his brother and his army to their deaths.
By August Sieyes felt reasonably confident that events were moving his way. A veteran of the 1 789 National Assembly, the Fructidor coup of 1 797, in which he had had a hand, and a diplomatic mission to Berlin in 1 798, Sieyes was a long-time opponent of the 1 795 Constitution of the Year Three. Supported by his minion Roger Ducos he nursed his hatred of the Constitution and had long wanted to subvert it; since there was a waiting period of nine years before the Constitution could be amended, Sieyes's only chance to achieve his aims was through a coup. The arrival of Napoleon in Paris on r 6 October added a fresh ingredient of uncertainty to this turbid stew of ideologies, policies, and personalities. Perhaps as a result of Josephine, Gohier greeted him cordially on the r 6th and scouted Bernadotte's suggestion of a court-martial. However, at a meeting next day with the full Directory the atmosphere was decidedly frosty. Dressed in a round hat, an olive cloth frock-coat, with a Turkish scimitar at his waist, Napoleon affected not to notice and assured the Directory he was on its side. But immediately afterward, at his house in the Rue de Ia Victoire, he was importuned by
rival groups of plotters and conspirators, each trying to make him over. During 1 9-20 October, he was positively besieged by visitors: Talleyrand, Roederer, Reynaud, Maret, Bruix, Boulay de Ia Meurthe, and Brueys were some of the elite names who called during a twenty-four-hour period. Napoleon affected to be interested only in the newly reconciled Josephine, and when the trio of Talleyrand, Brueys, and Roederer made an after-dinner call at the rue de Ia Victoire, they found Bonaparte playing tric-track with Josephine.
Napoleon's camouflage in the last fortnight of October 1 799 was clever. He returned to his old ploy of appearing interested only in the affairs of the Institute, meanwhile taking soundings from the principal Directors. At first, he made overtures to Gohier, intending to become one of the Directors. Gohier, who was all affability and reported a conversation in which Sieyes had recommended that Napoleon be shot, expressed his regret that there was no way around the rules stipulating a minimum age of forty for a Director. Influenced by Josephine, Napoleon then inclined towards Barras. Barras wanted to get rid of this dangerous interloper and suggested that he take the field again. Napoleon replied blandly that he had to stay in Paris for reasons of his health. The sparring continued, until at a dinner on 30 October Barras publicly insulted Napoleon by suggesting that he should return forthwith to command the Army of Italy. Napoleon decided to stop beating about the bush. On 4 November he asked Barras bluntly how he would react to a coup to replace the Directory; Barras said he had no tolerance at all for such an idea. This meant that Napoleon had no choice but to throw in his lot with Sieyes, whom he heartily disliked.Meanwhile, Napoleon tried to marginalize the dangerous maverick Bernadotte. The Gascon went to the rue de la Victoire and told Napoleon in his typical charmless manner that he was exaggerating the corruption of the Directory for his own purposes. 'I don't despair of the Republic and am convinced it will see off both internal and external enemies,' Bernadotte continued. When he spoke the word 'internal' he glared at Napoleon; an embarrassed Josephine quickly changed the subject. A few days later Napoleon tried again when he and Josephine visited Bernadotte in the rue Cisalpine. After dinner, the two families drove to Joseph's country house at Montefontaine, where there was another - violent altercation in the park between Napoleon and Bernadotte.
Detailed planning for the coup now went on. There were innumerable meetings with Sieyes and Roger Ducos in the rue de la Victoire. Fouche, also a party to the plot, made sure the police did not disturb them. Only Napoleon, Sieyes, Talleyrand, Fouche and Ducos knew the full details of the plot; others were informed on a 'need to know' basis. Sieyes, Fouche and Talleyrand, all ex-clerics, agreed with Napoleon that Bernadotte should be excluded as unreliable, a J Jacobin and an opportunistic egomaniac, but made strenuous eleventh-hour efforts to bring Barras into their camp. A key day in the preparation of the coup was 6 November. Sieyes and Napoleon finally composed their severe differences and agreed that after the coup a commission would draw up a new constitution. There would be a parliamentary strike against the Directory backed by a show of force. Meanwhile, Joseph, Talleyrand, and Fouche spent the sixth vainly trying to win over Barras. That evening a disappointing day ended in virtual farce with the subscription dinner held at the Temple of Victory (formerly the Church of St Sulpice). Napoleon and Moreau were the guests of honor, but Bonaparte attended with great reluctance and brought his own food - some bread, a pear and a bottle of winemaking it clear he trusted nobody; the Jacobin generals, Bernadotte, Jourdan, and Augereau completed the farce by refusing to attend. The coup was originally planned for 7 November, but at the last moment, some of the key conspirators lost their nerve. Napoleon gave them twenty-four hours to make a definite and final commitment, and postponed the attempt until Saturday 9 November, since he was superstitious about Fridays. On the seventh, he lulled Jacobin suspicions by dining at Bernadotte's with the other Jacobin lions, Jourdan and Moreau, taking Talleyrand, Volney and Roederer as his entourage.
By the evening of I7 Brumaire (8 November 1799) all was finally ready. In return for forcing a change of constitution, Bonaparte had been promised by Sieyes that he would be provisional consul. He and Josephine dined early at the Ministry of Justice with Jean-Jacques Cambaceres, one of Sieyes's henchmen. Cambaceres was an eminent jurist, a Grand Master of the Freemasons and also the central figure in the Parisian gay network. Cambaceres expressed anxiety about Bernadotte, but Napoleon assured him he had found a way to marginalize him. Back at home, Napoleon made careful preparations for the next day. He aimed to force the Directors to resign; the two chambers of the Assembly would then have to decree a new constitution, and meanwhile, all potential enemies had to be neutralized. But it is important to be clear that the objectives of Napoleon and Sieyes were already divergent. Sieyes envisaged an almost peaceful transfer of power backed by a show of force, but Napoleon had in mind a more significant role for the Army.
Busy with the meticulous planning for the next day, Napoleon could not afford the time for the nightly meeting he had held with Barras for the previous week, partly to gull him, to convince waverers that Barras was with them. At I I p.m. he sent Bourrienne to inform Barras he would not be coming because of a 'headache'. According to Bourrienne, this was the moment when the truth of what was afoot first hit Barras and he allegedly replied: 'I see that Bonaparte has tricked me. He will not come back. It is finished. And yet he owes me everything.' Barras was at least more perceptive than Gohier, who suspected nothing until the very morning of I 8 Brumaire. So contemptuous were Napoleon and Fouche of him that they played an elaborate charade. Fouche one afternoon arrived while the Bonapartes and Gohier were taking tea. Fouche, who had come straight from a meeting of the conspirators, launched into a tirade to the effect that he was tired of hearing rumors of a conspiracy. Gohier reassured Josephine that there could not be any truth in the rumors, for otherwise, the Minister of Police would not have repeated such frightening intelligence in the presence of a lady!
On 9 November ( I 8 Brumaire) Napoleon rose at 5 a.m. and began to implement the coup proper. It was still dark, so first, ever superstitious, he located his 'lucky star' in the sky. Reassured, he dressed hurriedly while whistling (out of tune) a popular ditty of the time: ' Vous m 'avez jete un regard, Marinette'. Then he sent round letters to all members of the Ancients (where Sieyes had a majority of supporters), summoning them to an urgent meeting at the Tuileries at 7 a.m. on a matter of national emergency. At 6 a.m., as planned, four hundred dragoons under Colonel Sebastiani received their final orders and began making their way to the Tuileries; the clattering of the horses' hooves brought bleary-eyed citizens in nightgowns and cotton nightcaps to their windows and shutters were flung open. One of Fouche's spies claims to have jotted down a verbatim exchange at the time.
this unexpected outcome, but even Letizia dared say nothing. None the less, the balance of power in the marriage had decisively shifted and from this point on Napoleon had the psychological advantage
During this honeymoon period, Josephine put him in the picture of his old love Desiree Clary. Napoleon had earmarked her as the wife of General Duphot, but he was assassinated in Rome late in 1 797, thus triggering the French occupation of the eternal city. On 17 August 1798, she married Bernadotte, apparently more for a desire to be married than because of any overpowering coup de foudre for the Gascon. The marriage was a scheme by the Bonapartist clan to neutralize or co-opt a dangerous political rival. Joseph, Lucien, and their wives had attended the wedding ceremony and Desiree now regularly passed on to her sister Julie
Joseph's wife) full intelligence on the Bernadotte household: who visited, what was discussed, what was the attitude to Napoleon. Josephine had apparently done her best to conciliate Desiree, but Desiree strongly disliked her and used to mimic her mercilessly to Julie, the only member
of the Bonaparte clan to have a soft spot for Napoleon's wife. The dynamics of the extended Bonaparte family were becoming increasingly complex. The constant was the hatred felt for Josephine by all female members of Napoleon's family - Letizia, Pauline and, especially, Elisa. Desiree's distaste is more easily explained as simple jealousy. There is even evidence that Desiree was still besotted with Napoleon and dreamed of displacing Josephine and getting him back.
When she became a mother in 1 799 she asked Napoleon to be godfather. The subtext was clear: she could bear children while Josephine could not. Napoleon asked that the boy be called Oscar after Ossian, the hero of his beloved Macpherson epic, and Desiree duly obliged. Desiree was an
important transmission belt between the ultra-Jacobin circle of Bernadotte and friends and the Bonapartes. She supported Napoleon's ambitions even to the point of spying on her own husband; Bernadotte, besotted with her, turned a blind eye. But she was the focus of sexual jealousy, with Napoleon resentful that an enemy like Bernadotte was married to 'his' Eugenie, and Bernadotte fuming that Napoleon had had his wife's virginity.
Napoleon had a talent for making mortal enemies, and no enemy was more inveterate than Jean Bernadotte. Tall, slight, with thick black hair, a colorless face and a huge hook nose, Bernadotte was reputed to have Moorish blood but, like many of Napoleon's followers, was, in fact, a Gascon. Energetic, ruthless, mendacious and treacherous, Bernadotte professed Jacobinism and had received his political 'education' in the sergeant's mess. Unlike his fellow Gascon Murat, who continued to speak with a thick country brogue, Bernadotte had polished up his accent and gone to some pains to conceal his rude origins. Bernadotte was actually an egomaniac of the first order, whose political beliefs were always a mask for the promotion of Jean Bernadotte. He has attracted widespread odium, and rightly so. Frederic Masson described him as 'the most unbearable of Jacobins and schoolmasters, a Bearnais with nothing of the Gascon smartness and happy repartee about him, but whose calculating subtlety always concealed a double game and who regarded Madame de Stad as first among women because she was the first of pedants and who spent his honeymoon dictating documents to his young wife.' A hot-tempered, paranoid Gascon boaster, Bernadotte had ambitions
that always outran his abilities. The fiasco of his two-month incumbency as French ambassador to Austria in 1 798 was matched by the farce of his two months as Minister of War on July 1 799. The rising star in the Directory, the Abbe de Sieyes, grew tired of his intrigues and prima donna antics at the Ministry. The last straw came after Brune's victory when Bernadotte delivered a gasconade to the effect that he would rather be in the field as a soldier than behind the Ministry desk. Sieyes sacked him abruptly, but Bernadotte managed to have the last word by leaking a 'resignation letter' to the press in which he thanked Sieyes ironically 'for accepting a resignation I had not offered'.
Of his legendary hatred for Napoleon, there can be no doubt. When Napoleon arrived so unexpectedly in France, Bernadotte proposed to the Directory that Napoleon be arrested and court-martialled, both for deserting the army in Egypt and for evading the quarantine regulations. He was the only one of Napoleon's former generals not to call on him at the rue de Ia Victoire to offer congratulations for a safe return from Egypt. He then refused to subscribe to an official dinner being arranged by the generals for Napoleon until he explained his reasons for leaving the army in Egypt. He added that since Napoleon had not been through quarantine and might, therefore, have brought back the plague, he, Bernadotte, had no intention of dining with a plague-ridden general. Yet Bernadotte was only one of a host of dangerous political rivals Napoleon had to fend off or neutralize when he arrived in Paris to take stock of the Directory's brittle position. Fortunately for him, few of the rest of them possessed Bernadotte's overweening ambition. Sieyes was already engaged in a scheme of his own to topple the Directory but needed a 'sword'. His first choice was Joubert, but he was killed in Italy. His second choice was MacDonald but he refused to take part, as did Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden. A reluctant Moreau was explaining his hesitation to Sieyes on 14 October when news of Napoleon's landing in France came in. 'There's your man,' said Moreau. 'He will make a better job of your coup d 'etat than I could. Nevertheless, in his bid for supreme power in October 1799 Napoleon faced a situation of frightening complexity. The only certainty was that the Directory was discredited for economic reasons. It was the Army that sustained the Directory, and a system of symbiotic corruption resulted. Army officers and war commissioners demanded the right to loot and requisition to line their pockets, while the Directory had to bow to the demands of the Army, as the government, in turn, needed the spoils of war to pay bankers, army contractors, and other creditors and to raise revenue. But inflation gnawed away at the Directors' position. In 1794 the gold franc was worth 75 paper francs, but by 1 798 the rate had soared to 80000 paper for one gold franc.
The Directory had inherited an impossible financial situation. The State was virtually bankrupt, credit was non-existent and the worthless assignats had been withdrawn. Left with nothing but taxation to finance the war, the Directors struggled manfully and even introduced worthwhile administrative reforms and improved the tax system. But there was no way to avoid inflation, and the pressing need for money explained the collaboration of Army and government in exacting revenue from the conquered territories. Meanwhile, the government steadily added to its tally of enemies. Having already alienated the Catholic Church by its anticlericalism and the Jacobins by its conservatism, by its forced levy of one hundred million francs on the rich the Directors also lost caste among the privileged. Nor was there any hope of support from the urban proletariat or the sans-culottes. Butter and cheese were already luxury items, sugar was heavily rationed, and the price of basics was astronomical: 250 grams of coffee cost z or francs, a packet of candles 625 francs, two cubic meters of wood 7,300 francs. Many families were reduced to hanging a lump of sugar from the ceiling, and this would be dipped into a cup of coffee for a few seconds.
The corruption of the Directory was legendary and the hatred entertained for the government proportional. On the opening night of the play La Caverne, a melodrama featuring four thieves as principal characters, a wag in the audience called out: 'Only four? Where's the fifth? ' The entire theatre dissolved into laughter, with the actors actually applauding the audience. Many other contemporary stories testified to the intense unpopularity of the Directors. A perfume vendor in the rue de la Loi was said to have made a fortune out of selling a fan with five lighted candles painted on one side, with the middle candle much taller than the others. On the other side of the fan were the words: 'Get rid of four of them. We must economize. ' Another story, relating to the swelling throng of Directory clients and hangers-on, concerned a Gascon said to have sent a letter to the Council of 500000; when reproved for adding three more noughts than necessary, the Gascon replied that he could not put in more than there actually were. And when news of Napoleon's victory at Aboukir reached Paris, the enemies of the Directory went about wearing a pendant, showing lancet lettuce (laitue) and a rat (rat). Spoken quickly, the rebus signified 'L 'An Sept Les tuera ('Year Seven will kill them').
Yet if the Directory seemed doomed by its inability to satisfy any significant social sector, what was to replace it? Apart from supporters of the status quo, three main groups were contending for power should the Directors lose their footing. Perhaps the most powerful were the monarchists, who had only just failed to seize power at Vendemiaire and Fructidor. Particularly strong in the south and west of France, the royalists spoiled their chances by in-fighting, split between the ultramontane supporters of the Comte d' Artois, who wanted a return to the ancien regime, and champions of constitutional monarchy. Although some saw a Bourbon restoration as inevitable, there remained the obstacle that too many people stood to lose from such an eventuality: the bourgeoisie, peasants, merchants, businessmen, war contractors, and all other profiteers.
The only members of the middle class who had been unable to buy up confiscated property (or 'national' property as it was termed in the euphemism) were those without capital, such as pensioners and members of the liberal professions. On the left were the neo-Jacobins, a powerful force in provincial electoral assemblies and supported by the petit-bourgeoisie, artisans and shopkeepers. They were influential in the Council of Five Hundred where the tempestuous Lucien Bonaparte, still theoretically a Jacobin, had been elected as president but were ill-represented in the Council of Ancients. Having learned from the failure of Gracchus Babeuf that there was no constituency for extremism, they espoused a moderate program of greater democracy, accountability by the Directors, and greater provincial autonomy. It was the Jacobins who in 1 799 had pushed through the Hostage Law, making the relations of emigres responsible for any crimes committed within France; and it was at the Jacobins' insistence that the Directors had levied the compulsory loan on the rich. The weakness of the Jacobins was that they were a mere coalition of special interests. Their power was on the wane in 1 799, as the attraction of emergency powers and committees of public safety had dimmed after the victories at Bergen and Zurich in September r 799 · A sign of the times was the ease with which Minister of Police Fouche closed down the 'Constitutional Society' - a Jacobin club which had hitherto been a bugbear for the Directory.
The third party in the ring was the Thermidoreans who wanted to end the Revolution on an 'as is' basis, leaving them as the beneficiaries of the sale of national property. They wanted neither the true social revolution of the Jacobins nor the restoration of the monarchy. These were, in essence, the people who had held power since the fall of Robespierre in 1794, the veterans of the revolutionary assemblies who now wanted a cosmetic change of regime that would allow them to emerge untarnished by the image of the Directory yet in possession of all their economic gains. These were the men who held power as a result of a whole series of illegal actions, principally the Decree of Two-Thirds against the royalists and the Florea! a coup against the Jacobins; their hallmark was the ruthless sacrifice of their weakest members to cling to power. At root the Thermidoreans wanted a Republic dedicated to the interests of the rich - rather like the U.S .A. at that time under Washington and Jefferson. Since the great personalities of the royalist movement were in exile and those of the Jacobin club were generals like Bernadotte, Jom:dan and Augereau, it was on the Thermidoreans and the five Directors that Napoleon directed most of his attention during the critical period from r 6 October to 9 November 1 799· General Moulin and Roger Ducos were the two minor Directors, basically nonentities. The three key figures were Barras, Sieyes and Gohier. Barras was still ostensibly the key man, still linked to Bonaparte through Josephine, but increasingly perceived as erratic and harboring secret royalist sympathies. Gohier and his stooge Moulin supported the status quo, but because Gohier was physically attracted to Josephine, there were obvious possibilities for Napoleon to neutralize him in any power struggle.
The most dangerous man in the Directory was the fifty-one-year-old Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, who had gradually usurped Barras's premier position on the executive while Napoleon was in Egypt. Sieyes had betrayed Danton, and later Robespierre, and when asked what he had done during the Terror, replied: 'I survived. ' This grim cynic now had Barras firmly in his sights, and to this end had constructed a loose coalition of intriguers, including Talleyrand, Fouche and Lucien Bonaparte. The hotheaded Lucien, who had brought the Bonaparte family close to disaster by his denunciation of Paoli, nearly ruined things again by shooting from the hip. He started a whispering campaign that Barras had deliberately sent Napoleon and the cream of the army into the
'deserts of Araby' to perish. To cover his tracks he bracketed Talleyrand with Barras as the two men jointly responsible. Barras knew how to deal with the insolent young cub. He brought up the subject of Lucien's illegal under-age recruitment to the Council of 500. To save face yet not
be expelled Lucien had to continue his bluster while backtracking on the accusations against Barras. The absurd result was that he ended up accusing his co-conspirator Talleyrand alone of sending his brother and his army to their deaths.
By August Sieyes felt reasonably confident that events were moving his way. A veteran of the 1 789 National Assembly, the Fructidor coup of 1 797, in which he had had a hand, and a diplomatic mission to Berlin in 1 798, Sieyes was a long-time opponent of the 1 795 Constitution of the Year Three. Supported by his minion Roger Ducos he nursed his hatred of the Constitution and had long wanted to subvert it; since there was a waiting period of nine years before the Constitution could be amended, Sieyes's only chance to achieve his aims was through a coup. The arrival of Napoleon in Paris on r 6 October added a fresh ingredient of uncertainty to this turbid stew of ideologies, policies, and personalities. Perhaps as a result of Josephine, Gohier greeted him cordially on the r 6th and scouted Bernadotte's suggestion of a court-martial. However, at a meeting next day with the full Directory the atmosphere was decidedly frosty. Dressed in a round hat, an olive cloth frock-coat, with a Turkish scimitar at his waist, Napoleon affected not to notice and assured the Directory he was on its side. But immediately afterward, at his house in the Rue de Ia Victoire, he was importuned by
rival groups of plotters and conspirators, each trying to make him over. During 1 9-20 October, he was positively besieged by visitors: Talleyrand, Roederer, Reynaud, Maret, Bruix, Boulay de Ia Meurthe, and Brueys were some of the elite names who called during a twenty-four-hour period. Napoleon affected to be interested only in the newly reconciled Josephine, and when the trio of Talleyrand, Brueys, and Roederer made an after-dinner call at the rue de Ia Victoire, they found Bonaparte playing tric-track with Josephine.
Napoleon's camouflage in the last fortnight of October 1 799 was clever. He returned to his old ploy of appearing interested only in the affairs of the Institute, meanwhile taking soundings from the principal Directors. At first, he made overtures to Gohier, intending to become one of the Directors. Gohier, who was all affability and reported a conversation in which Sieyes had recommended that Napoleon be shot, expressed his regret that there was no way around the rules stipulating a minimum age of forty for a Director. Influenced by Josephine, Napoleon then inclined towards Barras. Barras wanted to get rid of this dangerous interloper and suggested that he take the field again. Napoleon replied blandly that he had to stay in Paris for reasons of his health. The sparring continued, until at a dinner on 30 October Barras publicly insulted Napoleon by suggesting that he should return forthwith to command the Army of Italy. Napoleon decided to stop beating about the bush. On 4 November he asked Barras bluntly how he would react to a coup to replace the Directory; Barras said he had no tolerance at all for such an idea. This meant that Napoleon had no choice but to throw in his lot with Sieyes, whom he heartily disliked.Meanwhile, Napoleon tried to marginalize the dangerous maverick Bernadotte. The Gascon went to the rue de la Victoire and told Napoleon in his typical charmless manner that he was exaggerating the corruption of the Directory for his own purposes. 'I don't despair of the Republic and am convinced it will see off both internal and external enemies,' Bernadotte continued. When he spoke the word 'internal' he glared at Napoleon; an embarrassed Josephine quickly changed the subject. A few days later Napoleon tried again when he and Josephine visited Bernadotte in the rue Cisalpine. After dinner, the two families drove to Joseph's country house at Montefontaine, where there was another - violent altercation in the park between Napoleon and Bernadotte.
Detailed planning for the coup now went on. There were innumerable meetings with Sieyes and Roger Ducos in the rue de la Victoire. Fouche, also a party to the plot, made sure the police did not disturb them. Only Napoleon, Sieyes, Talleyrand, Fouche and Ducos knew the full details of the plot; others were informed on a 'need to know' basis. Sieyes, Fouche and Talleyrand, all ex-clerics, agreed with Napoleon that Bernadotte should be excluded as unreliable, a J Jacobin and an opportunistic egomaniac, but made strenuous eleventh-hour efforts to bring Barras into their camp. A key day in the preparation of the coup was 6 November. Sieyes and Napoleon finally composed their severe differences and agreed that after the coup a commission would draw up a new constitution. There would be a parliamentary strike against the Directory backed by a show of force. Meanwhile, Joseph, Talleyrand, and Fouche spent the sixth vainly trying to win over Barras. That evening a disappointing day ended in virtual farce with the subscription dinner held at the Temple of Victory (formerly the Church of St Sulpice). Napoleon and Moreau were the guests of honor, but Bonaparte attended with great reluctance and brought his own food - some bread, a pear and a bottle of winemaking it clear he trusted nobody; the Jacobin generals, Bernadotte, Jourdan, and Augereau completed the farce by refusing to attend. The coup was originally planned for 7 November, but at the last moment, some of the key conspirators lost their nerve. Napoleon gave them twenty-four hours to make a definite and final commitment, and postponed the attempt until Saturday 9 November, since he was superstitious about Fridays. On the seventh, he lulled Jacobin suspicions by dining at Bernadotte's with the other Jacobin lions, Jourdan and Moreau, taking Talleyrand, Volney and Roederer as his entourage.
By the evening of I7 Brumaire (8 November 1799) all was finally ready. In return for forcing a change of constitution, Bonaparte had been promised by Sieyes that he would be provisional consul. He and Josephine dined early at the Ministry of Justice with Jean-Jacques Cambaceres, one of Sieyes's henchmen. Cambaceres was an eminent jurist, a Grand Master of the Freemasons and also the central figure in the Parisian gay network. Cambaceres expressed anxiety about Bernadotte, but Napoleon assured him he had found a way to marginalize him. Back at home, Napoleon made careful preparations for the next day. He aimed to force the Directors to resign; the two chambers of the Assembly would then have to decree a new constitution, and meanwhile, all potential enemies had to be neutralized. But it is important to be clear that the objectives of Napoleon and Sieyes were already divergent. Sieyes envisaged an almost peaceful transfer of power backed by a show of force, but Napoleon had in mind a more significant role for the Army.
Busy with the meticulous planning for the next day, Napoleon could not afford the time for the nightly meeting he had held with Barras for the previous week, partly to gull him, to convince waverers that Barras was with them. At I I p.m. he sent Bourrienne to inform Barras he would not be coming because of a 'headache'. According to Bourrienne, this was the moment when the truth of what was afoot first hit Barras and he allegedly replied: 'I see that Bonaparte has tricked me. He will not come back. It is finished. And yet he owes me everything.' Barras was at least more perceptive than Gohier, who suspected nothing until the very morning of I 8 Brumaire. So contemptuous were Napoleon and Fouche of him that they played an elaborate charade. Fouche one afternoon arrived while the Bonapartes and Gohier were taking tea. Fouche, who had come straight from a meeting of the conspirators, launched into a tirade to the effect that he was tired of hearing rumors of a conspiracy. Gohier reassured Josephine that there could not be any truth in the rumors, for otherwise, the Minister of Police would not have repeated such frightening intelligence in the presence of a lady!
On 9 November ( I 8 Brumaire) Napoleon rose at 5 a.m. and began to implement the coup proper. It was still dark, so first, ever superstitious, he located his 'lucky star' in the sky. Reassured, he dressed hurriedly while whistling (out of tune) a popular ditty of the time: ' Vous m 'avez jete un regard, Marinette'. Then he sent round letters to all members of the Ancients (where Sieyes had a majority of supporters), summoning them to an urgent meeting at the Tuileries at 7 a.m. on a matter of national emergency. At 6 a.m., as planned, four hundred dragoons under Colonel Sebastiani received their final orders and began making their way to the Tuileries; the clattering of the horses' hooves brought bleary-eyed citizens in nightgowns and cotton nightcaps to their windows and shutters were flung open. One of Fouche's spies claims to have jotted down a verbatim exchange at the time.
Problems napoleon faced in his strugle to archive colonies
The first problem was that of men, money, and materiel. Napoleon had originally projected a total army of 60000, for his ultimate advance into India: these were to comprise 30,000 Frenchmen and 30,000 recruits he hoped to find in Egypt, conveyed on 10000 horses and 50000 camels, together with provisions for sixty days and water for six. With these, a train of artillery, 150 field-pieces and a double issue of ammunition, he estimated he could reach the Indus in four months. The very mention of the Indus, with its association with Alexander the Great, is suggestive.
Napoleon faced the next problem, that of persuading the French people that their hero had embarked on a worthwhile, prestigious and glorious venture. His ploy was to surround the expedition with the aura of scientific discovery. Without telling his chosen candidates exactly where they were going, Napoleon invited scores of eminent scientists to accompany him on a tropical voyage of adventure. Given that they were taking a leap into the unknown, it is surprising how few of the savants turned him down; it was doubtless his role and status at the Institute that persuaded them. If the British had intercepted and sunk Napoleon's Egyptian flotilla, much of France's intellectual talent would have gone to the bottom.
Napoleon had to keep his destination secret. This he did with remarkable success, aided by the undoubted fact that troops continued to collect in Channel ports; they would eventually be used in the ill-fated Hardy-Humbert expedition to Ireland in August. Only the English agent at Leghorn correctly guessed the true destination of Napoleon's men but his view was dismissed skeptically at the Admiralty. Another factor helping Napoleon was that at the very time he set out for Egypt, a great rebellion broke out in Ireland, which occupied a good deal of English attention. The one serious miscalculation - it was nearly fatal - that Napoleon made was to assume that the Royal Navy would not re-enter the Mediterranean. Some instinct - or was it merely the Jeremiah laments of his right-hand man Henry Dundas ? - led the warmongering and ferocious Francophobe William Pitt to send a strong naval squadron under Nelson into the Mediterranean, when the obvious course would have been simply to bottle up the exit from the Straits of Gibraltar.
Napoleon faced the next problem, that of persuading the French people that their hero had embarked on a worthwhile, prestigious and glorious venture. His ploy was to surround the expedition with the aura of scientific discovery. Without telling his chosen candidates exactly where they were going, Napoleon invited scores of eminent scientists to accompany him on a tropical voyage of adventure. Given that they were taking a leap into the unknown, it is surprising how few of the savants turned him down; it was doubtless his role and status at the Institute that persuaded them. If the British had intercepted and sunk Napoleon's Egyptian flotilla, much of France's intellectual talent would have gone to the bottom.
Disire to aquire colonies
In July of 1797, Talleyrand arrived from the U.S.A and became the Directory's Foreign Minister, lectured to the Institute of Sciences and Arts in Paris on 'The Advantages of Acquiring New Colonies'. Talleyrand argued that Egypt was an ideal colony, as it was closer to France than her possessions in Haiti and the West Indies and not so vulnerable, either to the Royal Navy or the rising power of the U.S.A. He pointed out that the great eighteenth-century French statesman the due de
Choiseul had wanted to buy Egypt from Turkey. The idea had been in the air from other sources too: n Cairo who stressed that this was the obvious gateway to India; and from Volney's Considerations Sur Ia Guerre actuelle des Turcs ( 1 788). It was perhaps no coincidence that Talleyrand was appointed Foreign Ministerfifteen days after making this speech.
Whether prompted by Talleyrand or not, on 6 August 1 797 Napoleon wrote from Mombello to the Directors as follows: 'The time is not far distant when we shall feel that, to destroy England once and for all we must occupy Egypt. The approaching death of the vast Ottoman Empire forces us to think ahead about our trade in the Levant. ' Soon he and Talleyrand were deeply involved in the project, at least at a theoretical level. On 13 September Napoleon wrote to the Foreign Minister to suggest that as a prelude to the conquest of Egypt France should invade Malta: the island had population of 100000 who were disgusted with their hereditary rulers, the Knights of St John, while the Knights were a shadow of their former military selves and could easily be suborned from the Grand Master. Through his secret agents on the island, Napoleon had already learned that the Order was in a terminal state of decline. When the French Revolution swept away feudal dues and benefices and confiscated Church property it unwittingly signed a death sentence on the Knights. Besides most of them were French.
After the debacle in the Directory on 24 February, Napoleon went away to compose a memorandum, stressing the advantages of an Egyptian expedition and setting out the minimum requirements in men and materiel. The Directors balked at the size of the expedition Napoleon proposed, especially as it would divert military resources from the European front, but they desperately wanted to be rid of Bonaparte so agreed to the enterprise on 5 March. The much-touted idea that the Directors opposed the adventure vehemently is false. Secret preparations were at once put in hand. Napoleon meanwhile ostentatiously attended the Institute daily, as if he were intending to withdraw into private life; as a further blind he was renamed commander of the descent on England with much public trumpeting.
Napoleon's motives for going to Egypt were a curious mixture of the rational and the irrational, in which expediency and cold calculation went hand in hand with his 'Oriental complex'. Some of the ideas in the memorandum were highly attractive to the Directory, though it is not clear how practical they were. The most tantalizing notion was that of establishing a French colony without slaves to take the place of Santo Domingo and the sugar islands of the West Indies, which would provide France with the primary products of Africa, Syria, and Arabia while also providing a huge market for French manufactures. In the short term, there were cogent military arguments, even if based on rather too many imponderables. If the conquest of Egypt was wholly successful, it could be used as a springboard for reinforcing Tippoo Sahib, sultan of Mysore, and the Mahrattas and ultimately expelling the British from India; links with Tippoo had been all but severed when the British captured the Cape of Good Hope. If a Suez canal could be dug, this would destroy the efficacy of the route round the Cape and neutralize British seapower. An immediate consequence of the conquest of Egypt
might be that France could use the country as a bargaining counter against Turkey. Certainly, the threat to India would pressurize Pitt towards peace. Above all, the invasion of Egypt would be easier to achieve and less expensive than a descent on England. These points could be argued for and against and were well within the realm of the feasible. But some of Napoleon's utterances suggest an
unassimilated obsession with the Orient, where the motives cannot be integrated into a rational framework. His reading of Plutarch, Marigny and Abbe Raynal had augmented his desire to emulate Alexander the Great and Tamerlane. He was always interested in the Turkish empire and, even if we did not know of his early hankering to serve the Porte, we would be alerted to the romantic side of his perception of the Orient by his many asides to Bourrienne. 'We must go to the Orient; all great glory
has been acquired there. ' On 29 January 1 798, two days after protracted talks with Talleyrand about all the implications of an Egyptian adventure, he remarked to Bourrienne: 'I don't want to stay here, there's nothing to do . . . Everything's finished here but I haven't had enough glory. This tiny Europe doesn't provide enough, so I must go east. '
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