The History of Napoleon Buonaparte

by J. G. Lockhart

The effusion of joy was the greater—because the tale of victory came on a people prepared for other tidings. About noontide on the 14th of June, when the French had been driven out of Marengo, and were apparently in full and disastrous retreat, a commercial traveller left the field, and arriving, after a rapid journey, in Paris, announced that Buonaparte had been utterly defeated by Melas. It is said that the ill-wishers of the First Consul immediately set on foot an intrigue for removing him from the government, and investing Carnot with the chief authority. It is not doubtful that many schemes of hostility had been agitated during Napoleon's absence; or that, amidst all the clamour and splendour of his triumphant reception in Paris, he wore a gloomy brow; nor has any one disputed that, from this time, he regarded the person of Carnot with jealousy and aversion.

The tidings of the great battle, meanwhile, kindled the emulation of the Rhenish army; and they burned with the earnest desire to do something worthy of being recorded in the same page with Marengo. But the Chief Consul, when he granted the armistice to Melas, had extended it to the armies on the German frontier likewise; and Moreau, consequently, could not at once avail himself of the eagerness of his troops. The negotiations which ensued, however, were unsuccessful. The emperor, subsidised as he had been, must have found it very difficult to resist the remonstrances of England against the ratification of any peace in which she should not be included; and it is natural to suppose, that the proud spirit of the Austrian cabinet revolted from setting the seal to an act of humiliation, not yet, as the English government insisted, absolutely necessary. News, meantime, were received, of the surrender of Malta to an English expedition under Lord Keith and Sir Ralph Abercrombie;[37] and this timely piece of good fortune breathed fresh spirit into the Antigallican league. In fine, insincerity and suspicion protracted, from day to day, a negotiation not destined to be concluded until more blood had been shed.

During this armistice, which lasted from the 15th of June to the 10th of November, the exiled princes of the House of Bourbon made some more ineffectual endeavours to induce the Chief Consul to be the Monk of France. The Abbé de Montesquiou, secret agent for the Count de Lille (afterwards Louis XVIII.), prevailed on the Third Consul, Le Brun, to lay before Buonaparte a letter addressed to him by that prince—in these terms: "You are very tardy about restoring my throne to me: it is to be feared that you may let the favourable moment slip. You cannot establish the happiness of France without me; and I, on the other hand, can do nothing for France without you. Make haste, then, and point out, yourself, the posts and dignities which will satisfy you and your friends." The First Consul answered thus: "I have received your Royal Highness's letter. I have always taken a lively interest in your misfortunes and those of your family. You must not think of appearing in France—you could not do so without marching over five hundred thousand corpses. For the rest, I shall always be zealous to do whatever lies within my power towards softening your Royal Highness's destinies, and making you forget, if possible, your misfortunes." The Comte D'Artois (Charles X. of France) took a more delicate method of negotiating. He sent a very beautiful and charming lady, the Duchesse de Guiche, to Paris; she without difficulty gained access to Josephine, and shone, for a time, the most brilliant ornament of the consular court. But the moment Napoleon discovered the fair lady's errand, she was ordered to quit the capital within a few hours. These intrigues, however, could not fail to transpire; and there is no doubt that, at this epoch, the hopes of the royalists were in a high state of excitement.

Meantime, among the meaner orders of both the great parties, who regarded with aversion the sovereign authority of the Chief Consul, there wanted not hearts wicked enough, nor hands sufficiently desperate, for attempts far different from these. The lawfulness, nay, the merit and the glory of tyrranicide, were ideas familiar to the Jacobins of every degree; and, during the years of miserable convulsion which followed the imprisonment and murder of Louis XVI., the royalist bands had often been joined, and sometimes guided, by persons in whom a naturally fanatical spirit, goaded by the sense of intolerable wrongs, dared to think of revenge—no matter how accomplished—as the last and noblest of duties: nor is it wonderful that amidst a long protracted civil war, when scenes of battle and slaughter were relieved only by the hardships of skulking in woods and the fears of famine, the character of others, originally both pure and gentle, had come to be degraded into a callous indifference of dark sullenness of temper, fit preparatives for deeds, the thought of which, in earlier and better days, would have been horror and loathing.

It was among the Jacobins, who had formerly worshipped Buonaparte as the "child and champion" of their creed, that the first schemes of assassination were agitated. An Italian sculptor, by name Ceracchi, who had modelled the bust of Napoleon while he held his court at Montebello, arrived in Paris, and, under pretence of retouching his work, solicited admission to the presence of the new Cæsar, whose Brutus he had resolved to be. The occupations of the Consul did not permit of this, and the Italian, having opened his purpose to Topineau, Lebrun, a painter, the adjutant-general Arena, Damerville, and others of kindred sentiments, arranged a plan by which Buonaparte was to have been surrounded and stabbed in the lobby of the opera house. But one of the accomplices betrayed the conspiracy; and Ceracchi and his associates were arrested in the theatre, at the moment when they were expecting their victim.

This occurred towards the middle of August; and it has been said that the Jacobin conspirators, being thrown into the same prison with some desperadoes of the Chouan faction, gave to these last the outline of another scheme of assassination, which had more nearly proved successful. This was the plot of the infernal machine. A cart was prepared to contain a barrel of gunpowder, strongly fastened in the midst of a quantity of grape-shot, which, being set on fire by a slow match, was to explode at the moment when Buonaparte was passing through some narrow street, and scatter destruction in every direction around it. The night selected was that of the 10th of October, when the Chief Consul was expected to visit the opera, and the machine was planted in the Rue St. Nicaise, through which he must pass in his way thither from the Tuileries. Napoleon told his friends at St. Helena, that having laboured hard all day, he felt himself overpowered with sleep after dinner, and that Josephine, who was anxious to be at the opera, had much difficulty in at last rousing and persuading him to go. "I fell fast asleep again" (he said), "after I was in my carriage; and at the moment when the explosion took place, I was dreaming of the danger I had undergone some years before in crossing the Tagliamento at midnight, by the light of torches, during a flood." He awoke, and exclaimed to Lannes and Bessieres, who were with him in the coach, "We are blown up." The attendants would have stopped the carriage, but, with great presence of mind, he bade them drive as fast as they could to the theatre, which he alone of all the party entered with an unruffled countenance. He had escaped most narrowly. The coachman, happening to be intoxicated, drove more rapidly than was his custom.[38] The engine exploded half a minute after the carriage had passed it—killing twenty persons, wounding fifty-three (among whom was St. Regent, the assassin who fired the train), and shattering the windows of several houses on both sides of the street.

The audience in the opera-house, when the news was divulged, testified their feelings with enthusiasm. The atrocity of the conspiracy roused universal horror and indignation, and invested the person of the Chief Consul with a new species of interest. The assassins were tried fairly, and executed, glorying in their crime: and, in the momentary exaltation of all men's minds, an edict of the senate, condemning to perpetual exile 130 of the most notorious leaders of the Terrorists, was received with applause. But Napoleon himself despised utterly the relics of that odious party; and the arbitrary decree in question was never put into execution.

The Chief Consul, nevertheless, was not slow to avail himself of the state of the public mind, in a manner more consistent with his prudence and farsightedness. It was at this moment that the erection of a new tribunal, called the Special Commission, consisting of eight judges, without jury, and without revision or appeal, was proposed to the legislative bodies. To their honour the proposal was carried by very narrow majorities; for after that judicature was established, the Chief Consul had, in effect, the means of disposing of all who were suspected of political offences, according to his own pleasure. Another law which soon succeeded, and which authorised the chief magistrate to banish disaffected persons, as "enemies of the state," from Paris or from France, whenever such steps should seem proper, without the intervention of any tribunal whatever, completed (if it was yet incomplete) the despotic range of his power: and the police, managed as that fearful engine was by Fouché, presented him with the most perfect means of carrying his purposes into execution.

A singular anecdote belongs to this time—(December, 1800). During the effervescence of public opinion consequent on the affair of the infernal machine, there appeared a pamphlet, entitled, "Parallel between Cæsar, Cromwell, Monk, and Bonaparte"[39]—a production evidently designed to favour the assumption of regal dignity by the Consul. Appearing at such a moment, it could not fail to excite a vivid sensation; the confidential friends of Napoleon assured him, in one voice, that the publication was likely to injure him. He sent for Fouché, and reproached him violently for suffering such a pamphlet to appear. The minister of police heard him with perfect coolness, and replied that he had not chosen to interfere, because he had traced the manuscript to the hotel of his brother Lucien. "And why not denounce Lucien?" cried Napoleon; "he ought to have been arrested instantly, and confined in the Temple." The Consul having spoken thus, quitted the apartment, shutting the door with violence. Fouché smiled, and whispered to De Bourienne—"Confine the author in the Temple! Lucien showed me the manuscript; I found it full of corrections in the handwriting of—the First Consul!" Lucien, informed of his brother's wrath, came forthwith to the Tuileries, and complained that "he had been made a puppet and abandoned." "The fault is your own," answered Napoleon; "it was your business not to be detected. Fouché has shown himself more dexterous—so much the worse for you." Lucien resigned forthwith the office which he held in the ministry, and proceeded as ambassador to Spain.

How far these disturbances in the French capital might have contributed to the indecision of the Austrian cabinet during this autumn, we know not. Five months had now elapsed since the armistice after Marengo; and the First Consul, utterly disgusted with the delay, determined to resume arms, and to be first in the field. Between the 17th and the 27th of November his generals received orders to set all their troops once more in motion. Everywhere the French arms had splendid success. Brune defeated the Austrians on the Mincio, and advanced within a few miles of Venice. Macdonald occupied the mountains of the Tyrol, and was prepared to reinforce either the army of Italy or that of the Rhine, as might be desired. Moreau, finally, advanced into the heart of Germany, and was met by the Archduke John of Austria, who obtained considerable advantages in an affair at Haag. The Archduke, elated by this success, determined on a general engagement, and appeared in front of the French on the evening of the 2nd December, at Hohenlinden, between the Inn and the Iser.[40] At seven, on the morning of the 3rd, the conflict began. The deep snow had obliterated the tracks of roads; several Austrian columns were bewildered; and either came not at all into their positions, or came too late. Yet the battle was obstinate and severe: 10,000 Imperialists were left dead on the field: and Moreau, improving his success, marched on immediately, and occupied Salzburg.