Empress Josephine: An Historical Sketch of the Days of Napoleon

by L. Mühlbach

Bonaparte shrugged his shoulders. “What of it, my love?” said he; “it is not my fault if he is pushed aside. Why has he not wished it otherwise? He is a good-natured man, but a blockhead. He does not understand me.... I would do much better to have him transported. He wrote against me to the Council of the Elders, but his letter fell into my hands, and the council has heard nothing of it. The unfortunate man!... Yesterday he expected me to dinner.... And that is called statesmanship.... Let us speak no more of this matter.” [Footnote: Bonaparte’s own words.—See Bourrienne, vol. iii., p. 106.]

Then he began to relate to his Josephine how Bernadotte had acted, refusing to take any part in the events of the day, and how, when Bonaparte had requested him at least to undertake nothing against him, he answered: “As a citizen, I will keep quiet; but if the Directory gives me the order to act, I will fight against every disturber of the peace and every conspirator, whoever he may be.”

Bonaparte then suddenly turned to Bourrienne to dismiss him, that he might himself take some rest; and when he extended his hand to bid him farewell, he added, carelessly:

“Apropos, to-morrow we sleep in the Luxemburg.” It was decided!—the long-premeditated deed was done! With the 18th Brumaire, Bonaparte had made an important step forward on the path of fame and power whose end was seen by him alone.

Bonaparte was no longer a general receiving orders from a superior authority; he was no longer the servant of the Directory; but he was now the one who would give orders—he was the master and ruler; he stood at the head of the French nation; he made the laws, and his deep, clear eye looked far beyond both consuls who stood at his side, into that future when he alone would be at the head of France; when, instead of the uprooted throne of the lilies, he would sit in the Tuileries, in the chair of the First Consul, this chair of a Caesar, which could so easily become an emperor’s throne!

On the 20th Brumaire, Napoleon occupied the residence of the Directory in the palace of the Luxemburg, after he had, through his brother Louis, made Gohier prisoner, the only one of the directors who still lingered there, and whom he afterward released. Josephine’s intercession procured the liberty of the husband of her friend, and this generous pardon of the furious letter which Gohier had written against him was the thank-offering which Bonaparte presented to the gods as he made his entrance into the Luxemburg.

The Luxemburg itself was, however, but a relay for a change of horses in the wondrous journey which Bonaparte had to travel from the lawyer’s house on the island of Corsica to the throne-room of the Bourbons in the palace of the Tuileries.

In simple equipage, he with Josephine made his entrance into the Luxemburg, but after the rest of a few weeks he left this station, to make his entrance into the Tuileries in a magnificent carriage, drawn by the six splendid grays which the Emperor of Austria had presented to General Bonaparte in Campo Formio. For already another change had taken place in the government of France, and the trefoil-leaf of the consuls had assumed another form.

The two consuls, who had stood at the side of Bonaparte, invested with equal powers, had been set aside by the new constitution of the year VIII., which the people had adopted on the 17th of February, 1800 (18th Pluviose, year VIII.). This constitution named Bonaparte as consul for ten years, and with him two other consuls, who were more his secretaries than his colleagues. Next to him was Cambaceres, as second consul for ten years, and then Lebrun, as third consul for five years.

With these two consuls, Bonaparte, on the 19th of February, 1800, made his solemn entry into the Tuileries. The old century, with its Bourbon throne, its bloody revolution, its horrors, its party passions, had passed away, and the new century found in the Tuileries a hero who wanted to crush all parties with a hand of iron, and to place his foot on the head of the revolution, so as to close the abyss which it had opened, in order to build himself an emperor’s throne over it.