Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume III.

by Walter Scott

It is an easy task to show, that even according to the law of France, jealous and severe as it was in its application to such subjects, there existed no right to take the life of the duke. It is true he was an emigrant, and the law denounced the penalty of death against such of these as should return to France with arms in their hands. But the duke did not so return—nay, his returning at all was not an act of his own, but the consequence of violence exercised on his person. He was in a more favourable case than even those emigrants whom storms had cast on their native shore, and whom Buonaparte himself considered as objects of pity, not of punishment. He had indeed borne arms against France; but as a member of the House of Bourbon, he was not, and could not be accounted, a subject of Buonaparte, having left the country before his name was heard of; nor could he be considered as in contumacy against the state of France, for he, like the rest of the royal family, was specially excluded from the benefits of the amnesty which invited the return of the less distinguished emigrants. The act by which he was trepanned, and brought within the compass of French power, not of French law, was as much a violation of the rights of nations, as the precipitation with which the pretended trial followed the arrest, and the execution the trial, was an outrage upon humanity. On the trial no witnesses were produced, nor did any investigation take place, saving by the interrogation of the prisoner. Whatever points of accusation, therefore, are not established by the admission of the duke himself, must be considered as totally unproved. Yet this unconscientious tribunal not only found their prisoner guilty of having borne arms against the Republic, which he readily admitted, but of having placed himself at the head of a party of French emigrants in the pay of England, and carried on machinations for surprising the city of Strasburg; charges which he himself positively denied, and which were supported by no proof whatever.

Buonaparte, well aware of the total irregularity of the proceedings in this extraordinary case, seems, on some occasions, to have wisely renounced any attempt to defend what he must have been convinced was indefensible, and has vindicated his conduct upon general grounds, of a nature well worthy of notice. It seems that, when he spoke of the death of the Duke d'Enghien among his attendants, he always chose to represent it as a case falling under the ordinary forms of law, in which all regularity was observed, and where, though he might be accused of severity, he could not be charged with violation of justice. This was safe language to hearers from whom he was sure to receive neither objection nor contradiction, and is just an instance of an attempt, on the part of a conscientiously guilty party, to establish, by repeated asseverations, an innocence which was inconsistent with fact. But with strangers, from whom replies and argument might be expected, Napoleon took broader grounds. He alleged the death of the Duke d'Enghien to be an act of self-defence, a measure of state policy, arising out of the natural rights of humanity, by which a man, to save his own life, is entitled to take away that of another. "I was assailed," he said, "on all hands by the enemies whom the Bourbons raised up against me; threatened with air-guns, infernal machines, and deadly stratagems of every kind. I had no tribunal on earth to which I could appeal for protection, therefore I had a right to protect myself; and by putting to death one of those whose followers threatened my life, I was entitled to strike a salutary terror into the others."[58]

We have no doubt that, in this argument, which is in the original much extended, Buonaparte explained his real motives; at least we can only add to them the stimulus of obstinate resentment, and implacable revenge. But the whole resolves itself into an allegation of that state necessity, which has been justly called the Tyrant's plea, and which has always been at hand to defend, or rather to palliate, the worst crimes of sovereigns. The prince may be lamented, who is exposed, from civil disaffection, to the dagger of the assassin, but his danger gives him no right to turn such a weapon even against the individual person by whom it is pointed at him. Far less could the attempt of any violent partisans of the House of Bourbon authorise the first consul to take, by a suborned judgment, and the most precipitate procedure, the life of a young prince, against whom the accession to the conspiracies of which Napoleon complained had never been alleged, far less proved. In every point of view, the act was a murder; and the stain of the Duke d'Enghien's blood must remain indelibly upon Napoleon Buonaparte.

With similar sophistry, he attempted to daub over the violation of the neutral territory of Baden, which was committed for the purpose of enabling his emissaries to seize the person of his unhappy victim. This, according to Buonaparte, was a wrong which was foreign to the case of the Duke d'Enghien, and concerned the sovereign of Baden alone. As that prince never complained of this violation, "the plea," he contended, "could not be used by any other person."[59] This was merely speaking as one who has power to do wrong. To whom was the Duke of Baden to complain, or what reparation could he expect by doing so? He was in the condition of a poor man, who suffers injustice at the hands of a wealthy neighbour, because he has no means to go to law, but whose acquiescence under the injury cannot certainly change its character, or render that invasion just which is in its own character distinctly otherwise. The passage may be marked as showing Napoleon's unhappy predilection to consider public measures not according to the immutable rules of right and wrong, but according to the opportunities which the weakness of one kingdom may afford to the superior strength of another.[60]

It may be truly added, that even the pliant argument of state necessity was far from justifying this fatal deed. To have retained the Duke d'Enghien a prisoner, as a hostage who might be made responsible for the Royalists' abstaining from their plots, might have had in it some touch of policy; but the murder of the young and gallant prince, in a way so secret and so savage, had a deep moral effect upon the European world, and excited hatred against Buonaparte wherever the tale was told. In the well-known words of Fouché, the duke's execution was worse than a moral crime—it was a political blunder.[61] It had this consequence, most unfortunate for Buonaparte, that it seemed to stamp his character as bloody and unforgiving; and in so far prepared the public mind to receive the worst impressions, and authorised the worst suspicions, when other tragedies of a more mysterious character followed that of the last of the race of Condé.[62]

DEATH OF PICHEGRU.

The Duke d'Enghien's execution took place on the 21st March; on the 7th April following, General Pichegru was found dead in his prison. A black handkerchief was wrapped round his neck, which had been tightened by twisting round a short stick inserted through one of the folds. It was asserted that he had turned this stick with his own hands, until he lost the power of respiring, and then, by laying his head on the pillow, had secured the stick in its position. It did not escape the public, that this was a mode of terminating life far more likely to be inflicted by the hands of others than those of the deceased himself. Surgeons were found, but men, it is said, of small reputation, to sign a report upon the state of the body, in which they affirm that Pichegru had died by suicide; yet as he must have lost animation and sense so soon as he had twisted the stick to the point of strangulation, it seems strange he should not have then unclosed his grasp on the fatal tourniquet, which he used as the means of self-destruction. In that case the pressure must have relaxed, and the fatal purpose have remained unaccomplished. No human eye could see into the dark recesses of a state prison, but there were not wanting many who entertained a total disbelief of Pichegru's suicide. It was argued that the first consul did not dare to bring before a public tribunal, and subject to a personal interrogatory, a man of Pichegru's boldness and presence of mind—it was said, also, that his evidence would have been decisively favourable to Moreau—that the citizens of Paris were many of them attached to Pichegru's person—that the soldiers had not forgotten his military fame—and, finally, it was reported, that in consideration of these circumstances, it was judged most expedient to take away his life in prison. Public rumour went so far as to name, as the agents in the crime, four of those Mamelukes, of whom Buonaparte had brought a small party from Egypt, and whom he used to have about his person as matter of parade. This last assertion had a strong impression on the multitude, who are accustomed to think, and love to talk, about the mutes and bowstrings of Eastern despotism. But with well-informed persons, its improbability threw some discredit on the whole accusation. The state prisons of France must have furnished from their officials enough of men as relentless and dexterous in such a commission as those Eastern strangers, whose unwonted appearance in these gloomy regions must have at once shown a fatal purpose, and enabled every one to trace it to Buonaparte.[63]

A subsequent catastrophe, of nearly the same kind, increased by its coincidence the dark suspicions which arose out of the circumstances attending the death of Pichegru.

Captain Wright, from whose vessel Pichegru and his companions had disembarked on the French coast, had become, as we have said, a prisoner of war, his ship being captured by one of much superior force, and after a most desperate defence. Under pretext that his evidence was necessary to the conviction of Pichegru and Georges, he was brought to Paris, and lodged a close prisoner in the Temple. It must also be mentioned, that Captain Wright had been an officer under Sir Sidney Smith, and that the mind of Buonaparte was tenaciously retentive of animosity against those who had aided to withstand a darling purpose, or diminish and obscure the military renown, which was yet more dear to him. The treatment of Captain Wright was—must have been severe, even if it extended no farther than solitary imprisonment; but reports went abroad, that torture was employed to bring the gallant seaman to such confessions as might suit the purposes of the French Government. This belief became very general, when it was heard that Wright, like Pichegru, was found dead in his apartment, with his throat cut from ear to ear, the result, according to the account given by Government, of his own impatience and despair. This official account of the second suicide committed by a state prisoner, augmented and confirmed the opinions entertained concerning the death of Pichegru, which it so closely resembled. The unfortunate Captain Wright was supposed to have been sacrificed, partly perhaps to Buonaparte's sentiments of petty vengeance, but chiefly to conceal, within the walls of the Temple, the evidence which his person would have exhibited in a public court of justice, of the dark and cruel practices by which confession was sometimes extorted.

Buonaparte always alleged his total ignorance concerning the fate of Pichegru and Wright, and affirmed upon all occasions, that they perished, so far as he knew, by their own hands, and not by those of assassins. No proof has ever been produced to contradict his assertion; and so far as he is inculpated upon these heads, his crime can be only matter of strong suspicion. But it was singular that this rage for suicide should have thus infected the state prisons of Paris, and that both these men, determined enemies of the Emperor, should have adopted the resolution of putting themselves to death, just when that event was most convenient to their oppressor. Above all, it must be confessed, that, by his conduct towards the Duke d'Enghien, Buonaparte had lost that fairness of character to which he might otherwise have appealed, as in itself an answer to the presumptions formed against him. The man who, under pretext of state necessity, ventured on such an open violation of the laws of justice, ought not to complain if he is judged capable, in every case of suspicion, of sacrificing the rights of humanity to his passions or his interest. He himself has affirmed, that Wright died, long before it was announced to the public, but has given no reason why silence was preserved with respect to the event.[64] The Duke de Rovigo, also denying all knowledge of Wright's death, acknowledges that it was a dark and mysterious subject, and intimates his belief that Fouché was at the bottom of the tragedy.[65] In Fouché's real or pretended Memoirs, the subject is not mentioned. We leave, in the obscurity in which we found it, a dreadful tale, of which the truth cannot, in all probability, be known, until the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open.