No satisfaction could be given to such demands. The confusion was increased by the report made to the body that four of the Directors had resigned. Proceedings were suspended until the Council of Five Hundred could receive this report, and some action be suggested for filling the places thus made vacant.
At this point Napoleon entered the hall. He could hear the wrangle going on in the Five Hundred, but he had not expected trouble in the Ancients. The situation had begun to look dangerous. Augereau, thinking it safe to vent his true feeling, had jeeringly said to Napoleon, “Now you are in a pretty fix.”
“It was worse at Arcole,” was the reply.
Napoleon had harangued sympathetic Jacobins in small political meetings; but to address a legislative body was new to him. His talk to the Ancients was incoherent and weak. He could not give the true reasons for his conduct, and the pretended reason could not be strengthened by explanation or fact. He was asked to specify the dangers which he said threatened the Republic, asked to describe the conspiracy, and name the conspirators. He could not do so, and after rambling all round the subject, his friends pulled him out of the chamber. Notwithstanding his disastrous speech, the conspiracy asserted its strength, and the Council of Ancients was held to the Bonaparte programme. Napoleon at once went to the Council of Five Hundred, and his appearance, accompanied by armed men, caused a tumult. “Down with the Dictator! For shame! Was it for this you conquered. Get out! Put him out!” Excited members sprang to their feet shouting, gesticulating, threatening. Rough hands were laid upon him. Knives may have been drawn. The Corsican, Peretti, had threatened Mirabeau with a knife in the assembly hall: Tallien had menaced Robespierre with a dagger; there is no inherent improbability in the story that the Corsican, Arena, a bitter enemy of Napoleon, now struck at him with a knife. At all events, the soldiers thought Napoleon in such danger that they drew him out of the press, General Gardanne (it is said) bearing him backward in his arms.
“Hors la loi!” was shouted in the hall—the cry before which Robespierre had gone down. “Outlaw him! Outlaw him!”
Lucien Bonaparte, president of the body, refused to put the motion. The anger of the Assembly then vented itself upon Lucien, who vainly attempted to be heard in defence of his brother. “He wanted to explain,” cried Lucien, “and you would not hear him!” Finding the tumult grow worse, and the demand that he put the motion grow more imperative, he stripped himself of the robe of office, sent for an escort of soldiers, and was borne out by Napoleon’s grenadiers.
While the council chamber rang with its uproar, there had been consternation outside. For a moment the Bonaparte managers hesitated. They had not foreseen such a check. Napoleon himself harangued the troops; and telling them that an attempt had been made on his life, was answered by cries of “Long live Bonaparte!” It was noticed that he changed his position every moment, zig-zagging as much as possible, like a man who feared some assassin might aim at him from a window in the palace. He said to Sieyès, “They want to outlaw me!” Seated in his carriage, ready to run, but not yet dismayed, the ex-priest is said to have answered: “Then do you outlaw them. Put them out.” Napoleon, reëntering the room where the officers were sitting or standing, in dismay and inaction, struck the table with his riding-whip, and said, “I must put an end to this.” They all followed him out. Lucien, springing upon a horse, harangued the troops, calling upon them to drive out from the hall the factious minority which was intimidating the virtuous majority of the council. The soldiers hesitated. Drawing his sword, Lucien shouted, “I swear that I will stab my brother to the heart if ever he attempt anything against the liberties of the people!”
This was dramatic, and it succeeded. The troops responded with cheers, and Napoleon saw that they were at length ready. “Now I will soon settle those gentlemen!” He gave Murat the signal; Murat and Le Clerc took the lead; and to the roll of drums the file advanced. The legislators would have spoken to the troops, but the drums drowned the protest. Before the advancing line of steel, the members fled their hall, and the Bonaparte campaign was decided.
But once more Sieyès was the giver of sage advice. Legal forms must be respected. France was not yet ready for the bared sword of the military despot. The friendly members of the Council of Five Hundred must be sought out and brought back to the hall. The deputies were not yet gone, were still lingering in astonishment and grief and rage about the palace. Lucien Bonaparte, the hero of this eventful day, contrived to assemble about thirty members of the Council of Five Hundred who would vote the Bonaparte programme through. They spent most of the night adopting the measures proposed. It was past midnight when the decrees of this Rump Parliament were presented to the Ancients for ratification. In that assembly the Bonaparte influence was again supreme, and no bayonets were needed there. Napoleon, Sieyès, and Roger-Ducos having been named provisional consuls, appeared before the Five Hundred between midnight and day to take the oath of office.
The legislative councils then stood adjourned till February 19, 1800. Commissions had been selected to aid in framing the constitution. Lucien made the last speech of the Revolution, and, according to Mr. Lanfrey, it was the most bombastic piece of nonsense and falsehood that had been uttered during the entire period. He compared the Tennis Court Oath to the work just done, and said that, as the former had given birth to liberty, this day’s work had given it manhood and permanence.