Now was the opportunity for Bonaparte to take up the rôle of Cromwell which Hoche had so awkwardly played. And how skilfully the conqueror of Italy plays it—through subordinates. He was too well versed in statecraft to let his sword flash before the public gaze. By this time he had decided to act, and doubtless the fervid Jacobinism of the soldiery was the chief cause determining his action. At the national celebration on July 14th he allowed it to have free vent, and thereupon wrote to the Directory, bitterly reproaching them for their weakness in face of the royalist plot: "I see that the Clichy Club means to march over my corpse to the destruction of the Republic." He ended the diatribe by his usual device, when he desired to remind the Government of his necessity to them, of offering his resignation, in case they refused to take vigorous measures against the malcontents. Yet even now his action was secret and indirect. On July 27th he sent to the Directors a brief note stating that Augereau had requested leave to go to Paris, "where his affairs call him"; and that he sent by this general the originals of the addresses of the army, avowing its devotion to the constitution. No one would suspect from this that Augereau was in Bonaparte's confidence and came to carry out the coup d'état. The secret was well preserved. Lavalette was Bonaparte's official representative; and his neutrality was now maintained in accordance with a note received from his chief: "Augereau is coming to Paris: do not put yourself in his power: he has sown disorder in the army: he is a factious man."
But, while Lavalette was left to trim his sails as best he might, Augereau was certain to act with energy. Bonaparte knew well that his Jacobinical lieutenant, famed as the first swordsman of the day, and the leader of the fighting division of the army, would do his work thoroughly, always vaunting his own prowess and decrying that of his commander. It was so. Augereau rushed to Paris, breathing threats of slaughter against the royalists. Checked for a time by the calculating [pg.162] finesse of the triumvirs, he prepared to end matters by a single blow; and, when the time had come, he occupied the strategic points of the capital, drew a cordon of troops round the Tuileries, where the Councils sat, invaded the chambers of deputies and consigned to the Temple the royalists and moderates there present, with their leader, Pichegru. Barthélemy was also seized; but Carnot, warned by a friend, fled during the early hours of this eventful day—September 4th (or 18 Fructidor). The mutilated Councils forthwith annulled the late elections in forty-nine Departments, and passed severe laws against orthodox priests and the unpardoned émigrés who had ventured to return to France. The Directory was also intrusted with complete power to suppress newspapers, to close political clubs, and to declare any commune in a state of siege. Its functions were now wellnigh as extensive and absolute as those of the Committee of Public Safety, its powers being limited only by the incompetence of the individual Directors and by their paralyzing consciousness that they ruled only by favour of the army. They had taken the sword to solve a political problem: two years later they were to fall by that sword.[[86]]
Augereau fully expected that he would be one of the two Directors who were elected in place of Carnot and Barthélemy; but the Councils had no higher opinion of his civic capacity than Bonaparte had formed; and, to his great disgust, Merlin of Douai and François of Neufchâtel were chosen. The last scenes of the coup d'état centred around the transportation of the condemned deputies. One of the early memories of the future Duc de Broglie recalled the sight of the "députés fructidorisés travelling in closed carriages, railed up like cages," to the seaport whence they were to sail to the lingering agonies of a tropical prison in French Guiana.
It was a painful spectacle: the indignation was great, but the consternation was greater still. Everybody[pg.163] foresaw the renewal of the Reign of Terror and resignedly prepared for it.
Such were the feelings, even of those who, like Madame de Staël and her friend Benjamin Constant, had declared before the coup d'état that it was necessary to the salvation of the Republic. That accomplished woman was endowed with nearly every attribute of genius except political foresight and self-restraint. No sooner had the blow been dealt than she fell to deploring its results, which any fourth-rate intelligence might have foreseen. "Liberty was the only power really conquered"—such was her later judgment on Fructidor. Now that Liberty fled affrighted, the errant enthusiasms of the gifted authoress clung for a brief space to Bonaparte. Her eulogies on his exploits, says Lavalette, who listened to her through a dinner in Talleyrand's rooms, possessed all the mad disorder and exaggeration of inspiration; and, after the repast was over, the votaress refused to pass out before an aide-de-camp of Bonaparte! The incident is characteristic both of Madame de Staël's moods and of the whims of the populace. Amidst the disenchantments of that time, when the pursuit of liberty seemed but an idle quest, when royalists were the champions of parliamentary rule and republicans relied on military force, all eyes turned wearily away from the civic broils at Paris to the visions of splendour revealed by the conqueror of Italy. Few persons knew how largely their new favourite was responsible for the events of Fructidor; all of them had by heart the names of his victories; and his popularity flamed to the skies when he recrossed the Alps, bringing with him a lucrative peace with Austria.
The negotiations with that Power had dragged on slowly through the whole summer and far into the autumn, mainly owing to the hopes of the Emperor Francis that the disorder in France would filch from her the meed of victory. Doubtless that would have been the case, had not Bonaparte, while striking down the royalists at Paris through his lieutenant, remained [pg.164] at the head of his victorious legions in Venetia ready again to invade Austria, if occasion should arise.
In some respects, the coup d'état of Fructidor helped on the progress of the negotiations. That event postponed, if it did not render impossible, the advent of civil war in France; and, like Pride's Purge in our civil strifes, it installed in power a Government which represented the feelings of the army and of its chief. Moreover, it rid him of the presence of Clarke, his former colleague in the negotiations, whose relations with Carnot aroused the suspicions of Barras and led to his recall. Bonaparte was now the sole plenipotentiary of France. The final negotiations with Austria and the resulting treaty of Campo Formio may therefore be considered as almost entirely his handiwork.
And yet, at this very time, the head of the Foreign Office at Paris was a man destined to achieve the greatest diplomatic reputation of the age. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand seemed destined for the task of uniting the society of the old régime with the France of the Revolution. To review his life would be to review the Revolution. With a reforming zeal begotten of his own intellectual acuteness and of resentment against his family, which had disinherited him for the crime of lameness, he had led the first assaults of 1789 against the privileges of the nobles and of the clerics among whom his lot had perforce been cast. He acted as the head of the new "constitutional" clergy, and bestowed his episcopal blessing at the Feast of Pikes in 1790; but, owing to his moderation, he soon fell into disfavour with the extreme men who seized on power. After a sojourn in England and the United States, he came back to France, and on the suggestion of Madame de Staël was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs (July, 1797). To this post he brought the highest gifts: his early clerical training gave a keen edge to an intellect naturally subtle and penetrating: his intercourse with Mirabeau gave him a grip on the essentials of sound policy and diplomacy: his sojourn abroad widened his vision, and imbued him [pg.165] with an admiration for English institutions and English moderation. Yet he loved France with a deep and fervent love. For her he schemed; for her he threw over friends or foes with a Macchiavellian facility. Amidst all the glamour of the Napoleonic Empire he discerned the dangers that threatened France; and he warned his master—as uselessly as he warned reckless nobles, priestly bigots, and fanatical Jacobins in the past, or the unteachable zealots of the restored monarchy. His life, when viewed, not in regard to its many sordid details, but to its chief guiding principle, was one long campaign against French élan and partisan obstinacy; and he sealed it with the quaint declaration in his will that, on reviewing his career, he found he had never abandoned a party before it had abandoned itself. Talleyrand was equipped with a diversity of gifts: his gaze, intellectual yet composed, blenched not when he uttered a scathing criticism or a diplomatic lie: his deep and penetrating voice gave force to all his words, and the curl of his lip or the scornful lifting of his eyebrows sometimes disconcerted an opponent more than his biting sarcasm. In brief, this disinherited noble, this unfrocked priest, this disenchanted Liberal, was the complete expression of the inimitable society of the old régime, when quickened intellectually by Voltaire and dulled by the Terror. After doing much to destroy the old society, he was now to take a prominent share in its reconstruction on a modern basis.[[87]]
Such was the man who now commenced his chief life-work, the task of guiding Napoleon. "The mere name of Bonaparte is an aid which ought to smooth away all my difficulties"—these were the obsequious terms in which he began his correspondence with the great general. In reality, he distrusted him; but whether from diffidence, or from the weakness of his own position, which as yet was little more than that of the head clerk of his department, he did nothing to assert the predominance of civil[pg.166] over military influence in the negotiations now proceeding.
Two months before Talleyrand accepted office, Bonaparte had enlarged his original demands on Austria, and claimed for France the whole of the lands on the left or west bank of the Rhine, and for the Cisalpine Republic all the territory up to the River Adige. To these demands the Court of Vienna offered a tenacious resistance which greatly irritated him. "These people are so slow," he exclaimed, "they think that a peace like this ought to be meditated upon for three years first."