baehr_p_richter_m_dictatorship_in_history_and_theory_bonapar

arguments deduced from our foreign relations do not seem to me to apply at all to a State the head of which has a life tenure in his office. . . .” Berlier had not, in fact, been in favor of the Consulate for life, but in the present state of affairs he was content to entrench himself behind that measure to ward off further changes. He laid special stress upon the false position in which an hereditary and monarchical system would place all those who had contributed in any degree to the success of the Revolution; a large and important class who were now to be used in reconstructing, amid the jeering contempt of their enemies, the very edifice which they had demolished. This reflection was met by Regnaud, who said: “Have no fear on that point. The man who governs France has an arm strong enough to protect one party from triumphing over another. He is himself the child of the Revolution.”21

After Berlier’s intervention a debate began around the question of whether, when all seemed to be going so well, this was an opportune time for such a change. As Thibaudeau summarized the argument (which reflected his own view): “At the present moment the world at large will see in it ambition rather than patriotism. It is both ill timed and premature. To these considerations the partisans of the hereditary system replied that a period of calm was the best possible time to prepare for the storm and to give France the best constitution possible.” Within its narrow terms, the debate became highly animated and required four sittings, after the Council finished its ordinary business, to wind down. Finally twenty members endorsed the adoption of hereditary rule, while seven voted for postponement.22

More significantly, the seven dissenters refused to sign the address drawn up by Regnaud, claiming that they had been expressly invited to offer their individual opinions. If the majority signed Regnaud’s address, the minority would draft a counter address, which might leak and embarrass the government. When Bonaparte heard of this impasse, he asked that each member individually submit his opinion to him in writing. As with Cambacer´ es,` he showed no resentment against the members who opposed his plan since they had played by his rules, had kept their arguments in-house, and no doubt framed their reservations tactfully.

Decades later, when Berlier composed a political memoir of limited circulation intended for his descendants, he referred his readers to Thibaudeau’s previously published account of that debate in the Council of State. But Berlier lingered with pride over his act of opposition. He assumed that resistance in the Council would be fruitless, he recalled, “but it was impossible for me not to render this last homage to the Republic that I had loved so

21Thibaudeau, Bonaparte, 311–14.

22See also Pelet, Opinions, 54–60. The seven who voted for postponement included Berenger, Berlier, Boulay de la Meurthe, Dauchy, Real,´ and Treilhard; the identity of the seventh is not known.

much, that I had served with such good faith in the midst of so many vexations, and whose disappearance down to its very name I could not witness without experiencing the most painful feeling.”23

All the more necessary, then, to explain his continued collaboration with Napoleon after the Empire became a fait accompli. Berlier’s exact words give us the most explicit glimpse into the sentiments of a once-ardent republican in the service of Emperor Napoleon I:

The empire having been decreed and consecrated by the national will [in a plebiscite], it was of course necessary that I submit to it. And it was a consolation to me to think that I had done everything that my conscience prescribed to defend in legal fashion the remnant of republican government. On the other hand, looking around me I saw a host of good citizens who, initially partisans of the republic but now fatigued by the oscillations suffered for several years, ended up being persuaded that in the heart of an old and monarchical Europe, the best France could reasonably hope for definitively was a representative government under a new dynasty, whose power would be limited by liberal institutions. [Personally Bonaparte still retained Berlier’s confidence] . . . His ambition satisfied by his arrival at the acme of constitutional power, victor abroad, he would make it his principal concern to govern the interior in a liberal fashion. Finally, at bottom the man was a child of the Revolution, who could not forget his origin and who (offering every guarantee to the legal interests born of the revolution) also presented a sure support for patriots concerned about order. There was in this view plenty of plausible grounds for hope. And I was prevailed on to consider it a duty dictated by liberalism not to abandon positions from which patriots could still render service to the state and to liberty.24

In addition, Berlier acknowledged that personal considerations helped keep him in the Napoleonic fold, and the historian must be grateful for such candor. “I was without any patrimonial fortune,” he noted, and while he now enjoyed an annual income of 25,000 francs as a counselor of state, recently supplemented by 15,000 francs and free lodging as president of the Conseil des Prises (the commission that dealt with maritime seizures), he had commanded such income for only a short time and had not as yet amassed the capital necessary to support his family. Nor was the prospect of returning to the practice of law at the age of 45 appealing. Berlier felt both too old and too young for that: “It was a very advanced age for resuming pleading as a barrister, yet perhaps not sufficient to secure a comfortable existence in the simple work of a practice (travail du cabinet), which is ordinarily fruitful only for older legal consultants.”25 The pressure of family responsibility,

raised objections to particular sections of proposed laws, the government reasonably assumed that on broad political issues the Tribunate would be as tractable as the Senate or the Council of State, perhaps more so since many tribunes were eager for advancement. Unleashing the oratory of the Tribunate therefore seemed a useful way to lay the imperial option formally before the public. While hardly anyone would hear the speeches, they could read them in the Moniteur or other journals.

Tribune Jean-Franc¸ois Curee,´ an exconventionnel and president of the Tribunate back in 1801, was tapped for the honor, and on April 28 he moved that “Napoleon Bonaparte, currently first consul, be declared emperor of the French and that the imperial dignity be declared hereditary in his family.” Although the Tribunate had no power to enact this proposal, weeks of intrigue at last came to a head. Curee´ ’s colleagues crowded around the rostrum to support the motion as the president drew up a list of speakers. In a sea of solemn rhetoric, these “men of the revolution” (for the most part) would publicly herald the transition from an elective republic of sorts to an hereditary empire – to monarchy in a new key.

Beneath references to history and political theory, gratefulness to Napoleon dominated the discourse. The speakers invested this individual of extraordinary achievement with all the hopes and fears they had attached before 1800 to abstractions like the nation, the principles of 1789, or the Republic. In that respect, the Napoleonic Empire seems a logical culmination of Brumaire, when this psychological transposition, this escape from freedom, began.

An unscripted and discordant note, however, marred this marathon of adulation, when one tribune rose to oppose Curee´ ’s motion. Ultimately his speech had no effect on the outcome; if anything, it was invoked by Napoleonic loyalists to illustrate the hollow notion that French public life remained free. For the moment, the speech by Lazare Carnot, arguably the most renowned member of the Tribunate, exploded around his colleagues. Unlike Berlier’s stand in the Council of State, news of Carnot’s address spread quickly, although police informers claimed that it had little impact. Carnot later noted: “I received letters of congratulation from all over, I was personally astonished at the prodigious success of this speech in a city accustomed for so long to bending without resistance to all the wishes of the master.”27

27Alphonse Aulard (ed.), Paris sous le Consulat: recueil de documents (1909), IV: 769–70; M.-A. Cornet,

Souvenirs Senatoriaux´ (Paris, 1824), 27. But Cf. Marcel Reinhard, Le Grand Carnot, II: L’Organisateur de la victoire (Paris, 1952), 273.

A central figure in two regimes that preceded the Consulate, Carnot was the leading military strategist on the Committee of Public Safety in 1793–4 and a founding member of the Directory who was ousted in the Fructidor coup in 1797 and forced into hiding. Historians in the republican tradition have always celebrated Carnot as “the organizer of victory” in the Year II, and Bonaparte, too, respected the former military engineer. After Brumaire, the first consul repatriated Carnot from exile and appointed him war minister; Carnot held that post until Bonaparte, having soured on him, effectively provoked his resignation. After a brief return to private life, Carnot learned that the Senate had named him to a vacancy in the Tribunate in March 1802. Carnot stubbornly maintained his independence in that body and offered an escalating resistance to Napoleon’s ambitions. First he had opposed the Legion of Honor. Then he had ruined the Tribunate’s unanimous endorsement of the life consulate by recording a “No” vote in its official register.28

Carnot’s speech in 1804 conveyed no great articulation of republican ideology but simply a series of honest, critical observations. Carnot stated: “I am very far from wishing to attenuate the praise given to the First Consul.” As a direct beneficiary of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Carnot acknowledged the need for a temporary concentration of authority at that time to rescue the Republic from “the edge of an abyss.” The very success of Brumaire now offered the opportunity “to establish liberty on solid foundations.” The United States, he pointed out, was an example of a stable and prospering republic. In today’s favorable circumstances, he added in his most striking phrase, “it is less difficult to form a republic without anarchy than a monarchy without despotism.”29

Carnot saluted Bonaparte’s accomplishments in advancing liberty such as the civil code, but asked: “would it be the proper recompense for him to offer him the sacrifice of that same liberty?” Bonaparte had a unique opportunity “to resolve the great problem of public liberty,” but in effect turned his back on it. The whole monarchical model offended Carnot: “nothing has yet been invented to temper supreme power other than what has been called intermediary corps or privileged bodies. Is it therefore of a new nobility that one wishes to speak?” Having declared: “I will vote against the reestablishment of monarchy,” Carnot concluded that if it was adopted by the French people he would give the Empire his adherence: “I have always made it my credo to submit to existing laws.”30

The tribunes waiting to speak after Carnot fell over themselves to undo the damage and rebut this affront to the new consensus. Several attacked the messenger as well as his message. Carnot, they declared, was hardly the man to criticize his colleagues’ political acumen. Tribune Carrion-Nisas, playwright and former classmate of Bonaparte’s at the military academy, attacked bluntly: Carnot’s first experience of democratic leadership on the Committee of Public Safety placed him among the proscripteurs, exclaimed the tribune, while during his second leadership stint, as a member of the Directory, Carnot was himself proscribed, to be rescued only by the Consulate. Lawyer Jean Albisson concluded (completely missing Carnot’s sense of himself and the judgment of posterity), “I cannot contain my astonishment at having heard the apologia for an elective and temporary magistracy coming from a mouth that ought to have been sufficiently abashed by the mere recollection of the Year II or the Year V.”31

Having disposed of Carnot, the tribunes justified the monarcho-imperial option against his aspersions. The learned financial specialist A.-H. Arnould invoked Jean Bodin on the superiority of hereditary over elective monarchy, and argued that the guarantee of liberty endured in the legislature’s power over taxation. Carrion-Nisas replied bombastically to Carnot’s warnings against despotism: “What! Do we not have law and a social compact? Eh! Who is speaking here of putting a man above the laws?” Unlike a king, the new emperor will not be the owner of the country. “He is the chief of the French, by their wish; his domain is moral and no legal servitude can arise from such a system.” Carnot had complained that a return to monarchy would not be consensual because the press was not free to debate it; CarrionNisas candidly invoked Bonaparte’s standard justification for muzzling the press: “Everyone knows how that liberty is fatal, how it promptly degenerates into license.”32

Louis Costas, formerly a scientist on Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition, rejected Carnot’s appeal to the example of the United States. No great power threatened to invade or foment upheaval in the geographically isolated United States. “The Americans have no need at all to defend themselves against the constantly reviving attempts of a family expelled from the throne.” In France, only a fixed order of succession would put an end to the Bourbon’s pretensions, he argued, as it had to those of the Stuarts in

31All the speeches are reproduced in the Moniteur, 11–15 floreal´ XII. See also Roederer, “Observations sur le discours du Cit. Carnot contre l’heredite,´ ” Journal de Paris, 12–14 Mai 1804, and other clippings in Roederer Papers, A. N. 29 AP 78.

32Moniteur, 11–15 floreal´ .

England. In a different vein, tribune Carret declared: “We are thwarting the avaricious and always bloody intrigues of elective regimes; we are precluding even the possibility of factions and the springing up of party chiefs.”33

But we have not yet arrived at the major theme in the tribunes’ apologia for the elevation of Bonaparte to hereditary emperor. This was the argument from original revolutionary intent, previously introduced in Regnaud’s abortive proposal to the Council of State, where he argued that “the Revolution had not been started by the nation, in 1789, against the heredity of the supreme magistracy . . . heredity ought [now] to be established in conformity with the principles developed at the beginning of the Revolution.”34

This reference to original revolutionary intent became a litany in the Tribunate’s discourse. Tribune Jard-Panvillier, one of the “perpetuals” of the revolutionary assemblies, explained. When the nation enjoyed its maximal freedom in 1789–90, before things began to go wrong, it chose to have a unified and hereditary executive power. By their conduct, the Bourbons forfeited their right to that role and forced the nation into a democratic government which in turn produced “scourges and anarchy.” Under Bonaparte’s “government of One,” France recovered its unity and tranquility as well as glory abroad. However, Bourbon-English plots still threatened to cause turmoil comparable to that caused by elections in the past. An hereditary emperor would definitively end that threat, return France to the path envisaged in 1789, and “preserve the advantages of the Revolution by the choice of a dynasty equally interested in maintaining them.”35

Costas, rejecting Carnot’s claim that only public functionaries were advocating the imperial title, maintained that the whole nation had expressed this kind of preference at the start of the Revolution, and that the likely plebiscite to come would represent public opinion more faithfully than “the deliberations of those tumultuous assemblies, where one voted under the knife of parties.” Albisson, too, emphasized the original design of 1789: “The Revolution attached heredity to the executive power . . . that was one of the fundamental principles with which the Revolution began, and with which it was destined to be consummated.” The goal of Eighteenth Brumaire, “to terminate the Revolution by fixing it to the principles with which it began,” was therefore about to be realized at last.36

33 Ibid.

35 Moniteur, 11–15 floreal´ XII.

36 Moniteur, 15 floreal´ . The reliance of most tribunes on original intent in 1789 as a rationale for a return to “monarchy” in 1804 ought to give pause. It suggests that in the National Assembly’s initial formulation of revolutionary ideology – the only one that mattered by now – an hereditary executive did indeed loom large as one cornerstone for stability in the new regime. It should not be so lightly

THE ARMY AND THE COMING OF THE EMPIRE

When they overthrew the Directory, the Brumaire plotters placed military units in the Paris region under General Bonaparte’s command. Actively involved in the raucous showdown at Saint Cloud on 19 Brumaire, and deployed conspicuously in the capital as well, the troops played only a supporting role in a parliamentary coup; the army did not impose its will on a helpless civilian government. Now, in the passage from Consulate to Empire, the ultimate defining act for the Napoleonic regime, the army’s role was at once less evident yet arguably even more significant.

In the spring of 1804, the officer corps and the troops they commanded set up an insistent clamor for the designation of Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor. Had Napoleon encountered serious resistance to his scheme, the threat of the army’s manifest displeasure might well have been invoked to sweep it aside. In the event, Napoleon did not have to play that card. The petitions that poured into Paris from the military make the proclamation of the Empire seem an irresistible proposition. It is difficult to reconstruct with exactitude how this campaign of pen and ink was orchestrated, but a few markers survive in the archives.

Just after the minister of justice issued his preliminary report on the Cadoudal-Pichegru plot to assassinate Bonaparte, War Minister Alexandre Berthier (Bonaparte’s inseparable chief-of-staff ) swung into action. Berthier ordered commanding officers to read the minister’s report to their assembled troops, and many understood that the appropriate response would be a mass petition expressing outrage at the plot and devotion to Bonaparte. Commanders of two large military encampments established for a cross-channel invasion were especially zealous. Their petitions of “homage, veneration, and devotion” contained over 21,000 signatures!37

Since Bonaparte had not yet publicly revealed his imperial plans, this first effort to mobilize military opinion remained decidedly vague in thrust. Soon, however, the campaign of military petitions was harnessed to Curee´ ’s motion in the Tribunate for vesting Napoleon with the hereditary imperial title. As the 69th line regiment now put it: “The heredity and unity of the

dismissed as it is in Franc¸ois Furet’s account, which holds that even in 1789, the sheer radicalism of the National Assembly’s break with the past made France “a republic in everything but name,” with the king relegated to inconsequentiality from the start. [Franc¸ois Furet and Ran Halevi,´ “L’Annee´ 1789,” Annales E.S.C., 1989.] A more traditional historiographical view of 1789–90 as a compromise with the old order that fell far short of democracy and republicanism seems to find support in this unlikely setting, in this revalorization of original intent in 1804.

37 A. N. BB II 851A: Letters from generals Bourcier, Junot, and Soult to Berthier, 28–30 pluvioseˆ XII.

as a reconfiguration of the Consulate that would thwart the counterrevolution definitively and guarantee the future of liberty and equality. “Which is the family that can offer us a greater guarantee for the maintenance of public liberty and equality?” asked the Toulouse garrison. Or as the garrison in Tarbes declared with undue optimism: “The French people, having become your subjects, will not for all that lose their rights to liberty and to equality, which you yourself have cemented.” A third variant, as in petitions circulated by Divisional General Dupont, anticipated the Empire as the fi- nal burial of the Revolution’s legacy of anarchic disruption.40 We can see at once the advantage of this ambiguity in creating a broad base of acceptance for the Empire. As in Brumaire, Frenchmen still saw in Bonaparte what they hoped to see. Now the degree of wishful thinking is more obvious, and Berthier’s petition stands as the most accurate omen of what the future would hold. It also best conveys the sheer insistence on the imperial option emanating from the officer corps.

THE SENATE RESPONDS

Napoleon’s soaring ambition thus set in motion a wave of responses. While members of the Council of State argued heatedly over the imperial option behind closed doors, the tribunes drowned Carnot’s remarkable public dissent in a chorus of enthusiasm, especially by linking Napoleon’s imperial status with the Revolution’s original intent to incorporate hereditary monarchy. Army units across the country meanwhile generated a mass of petitions so intimidating that they made the transition to empire seem irresistible. This in turn influenced the response of the Senate, which alone could formally proclaim the change.

The Senate had itself initiated the movement toward hereditary government in an address to the first consul on March 27 that vaguely espoused the desirability of making Bonaparte’s achievement permanent. By early May, the Senate was more than ready to endorse the imperial transition explicitly proposed by Curee,´ with the added urgency of precluding any military demarche´ that might preempt civil authority altogether. In its official address, the Senate would add to its many justifications of an imperial dynasty the startling observation that “it alone can curb the dangerous rivalries in a country covered with numerous armies commanded by great captains.”41

40A. N. BB II B; A. N. BB II 851A.

41Moniteur No. 226, 16 floreal´ XII: “Reponse´ du Senat,´ 14 floreal´ .” For the Senate’s role in general see Thiry, Le Senat´ de Napoleon´ , 125–30.