The rigid censorship of the press established by the First Consul at the beginning of his supremacy worked well for him. Out of a total of seventy-three corrupt and quarrelsome journals published under the Directory, only thirteen political newspapers had been left in existence. These quickly became the most subservient mouthpieces of the executive, iterating the sentiments which the public was to learn, giving such news as they were allowed to give, and edited most skilfully both to entertain and instruct their readers in all matters foreign to politics. The nation rejoiced in the calm produced by contemplating indifferent things. "Why did not Tacitus explain how the Roman people put up with the wicked emperors who ruled them?" This was a stock question of Napoleon's, his implication being that there must have been a correspondence between the social state of Rome and the character of her rulers which the historian dared not openly explain. The parallel in the case of the French was manifest. They had reveled in Jacobinism until suddenly the thing and the name alike became intolerable; they had then swung to the opposite vicious extreme of an indifference which courted a paternal hand in the government. No act, however arbitrary or violent, could disturb a people so accustomed to revolutionary shifts. When, three years later, the shameful edict was issued which forbade the printing or sale of books or plays that had not been authorized by a committee of revision, there was scarcely a protest anywhere to be heard.
But from the beginning there were, nevertheless, emphatic protests of more or less importance against the changes which were transforming the vestiges of the republic into shadowy indications of a coming monarchy. There was a single voice, that of Barnabé, lifted up at the very first from the bench to declare that Brumaire was illegal; and many foolish persons indulged to such an extent in loud seditious talk that a charge of conspiracy was with some show of reason brought against Ceracchi and Arena, two Corsicans, who were particularly violent in denouncing their compatriot. The superserviceable police pretended early in the year to discover details, but the alleged complot was a pure figment. The army, in particular that portion which had fought under Moreau, still cherished much of the republican tradition. The soldiers of the Rhine had shown an angry contempt for the Concordat, and their friends sympathized with them in the instinctive feeling that a courtly religious hierarchy, when legally restored, would lean toward a restoration of monarchy.
The First Consul, understanding that reactions must be checked in their initial stages, determined to find occupation abroad for the republican soldiers, as he had previously done for republican politicians. Among other measures for the revival of commerce made possible by the peace of Amiens, which secured the long-desired "liberty of the seas," the government had determined to revive the slave-trade, so as to populate the Antilles more densely, and create a larger market. Admiral Bruix recalled that among the ancients slavery had been consistent with the love of liberty; and argued that as negroes, when left to themselves, preferred manioc to wheat, and sweetened water to wine, they must be enslaved in order to give them civilized tastes and make them consume the surplus of the French harvests and vintage! Being natives of a burning clime, there was no cruelty in carrying them to the West Indies! In pursuance of this barbarous policy, Leclerc, the husband of Pauline Bonaparte, was commissioned to conquer San Domingo, which, taking advantage of the disorders incident to the Revolution, had asserted its independence. Bonaparte may not altogether have understood the dangers of such an expedition. If he did, he must have been willing to sacrifice his sister; for he compelled Mme. Leclerc to accompany her husband. The troops selected were mainly taken from the Army of the Rhine. Thirty-four first-rate vessels, twenty frigates, and numerous transports, with more than twenty thousand soldiers on board, sailed on December fourteenth, 1801, and arrived safely about the end of January, 1802.
But Bonaparte's plans were doomed to encounter an obstacle in the most remarkable man of negro blood known to modern history. Toussaint Louverture was the descendant, as he claimed, of an African chieftain. Highly endowed by nature, he had obtained an excellent education, and had gradually, though born a slave, cultivated his innate power of leadership until all the blacks in San Domingo regarded him with affection and awe. Asserting their liberties as men, he and his fellow-slaves then rose against their masters, and a servile war ensued. It was temporarily checked by British interference; but the unacclimatized white soldiers died in such numbers that the English were compelled to leave the fertile colony in full control of the negroes. Louverture, in imitation of Bonaparte, thereupon organized a consular government, and with consummate wisdom inaugurated a civilized rule. When summoned by Leclerc to surrender, he refused. For a time his resistance was successful, but in the end he was compelled by superior force to withdraw to the mountains. Thence he was enticed by guile, captured, and sent to France. Kept a close prisoner in the castle of Joux in Franche-Comté, the rigors of the climate speedily destroyed his health, and he died on April twenty-seventh, 1803. But the heat and mephitic vapors of his native isle revenged him. As the French soldiers sickened and died of yellow fever, the natives inaugurated a struggle for liberation, which was marked on both sides by horrible barbarity. In less than two years the task of subjugation became hopeless, and on December first, 1803, Rochambeau, having succeeded Leclerc, who had retired the year previous to die in the Tortugas, surrendered eight thousand men, the remnants of the expedition, to an English fleet. The island has since been left to its unhappy fate, and under native rule has relapsed into semi-barbarism. The magnificent French plan of American colonization, having lost the supports of both San Domingo and Louisiana, collapsed, leaving no trace. Its mere existence, however, was the strongest proof of Bonaparte's confidence in a lasting peace. Whatever his disappointment, he was at least rid of a republican general and a republican army. It was not much in comparison with his hopes, but it was something.
CHAPTER XXII
The Life Consulate[23]
Conspiracies against Bonaparte — The Plot of Nivôse — Bonaparte's Ingenuity — Blunders of the Moderate Republicans — The Tribunate and Legislature Purged — Power of the Senate — Bonaparte's Reticence — The Life Consulate Proposed — Complacency of the Chambers — The Legion of Honor — Lafayette's Withdrawal — Amendments to the Constitution — The Nation Content — Change in the Character of the Army.
The Consulate was scarcely inaugurated before a dastardly attempt was made to assassinate its head. Early in the year 1800 a remnant of Jacobins, terrorists, and anarchists had formed a conspiracy for this purpose. Their doings, however, were betrayed to Fouché, who watched them in such a way that their organization, though not broken up, was reduced to impotence. Many persons have since believed that the wily minister was holding the pack in hand for his own purposes, and that this notorious Arena-Ceracchi conspiracy, as it was called, had been his own creation for use in case the First Consul should be killed in Italy. It is certain that during the long career of Fouché as minister he never failed to have in readiness some kind of a complot for the eve of each decisive battle in which Napoleon Bonaparte must expose his person and risk his life. This, therefore, might well have been the first of them. The royalists had persistently negotiated with Bonaparte while he was yet a rising soldier. He seemed now to have reached the summit of power, and alone could open or bar the way to the restoration of Louis XVIII. Having toyed with their offers, it is claimed that he gave the pretender to understand that his own highest ambition was an Italian principality. Hopes, thus awakened, had strengthened the royalist party; but as its ranks grew in number dissension kept equal pace, until, while one faction, the strongest, standing on the strictest legitimacy, remained true to the so-called King, who was now living in Mittau, another, under the leadership of Artois, was scheming in England for that prince, and a third, weary of the petulant and quarrelsome feebleness of the other two, favored the young Due d'Enghien, and grew daily stronger in Paris by desertions from both. The members of the Enghien faction were indefatigable, and at last from among their Vendean supporters was formed a secret junta which, on the evening of December twenty-fourth, 1800, placed an infernal machine in front of the First Consul's carriage as he drove to the opera through the narrow street of St. Nicaise. His coachman, catching sight of the strange obstacle in time, swerved, and drove swiftly past, barely saving his passengers from the effects of a terrific explosion which occurred the moment after, killing outright several innocent persons, wounding sixty, and destroying about forty houses. The First Consul and his wife drove on, and, pale with excitement, appeared for a few moments in their box before the expectant audience, which had already heard the news. They then quietly withdrew. The effect on the public was electrical, and the measures subsequently taken by the government were heartily applauded.
From this circumstance Bonaparte reaped a rich harvest, his perfidy being comparable to that of the plotters themselves. The shameful deed was first charged on the radicals, and by decree of the senate a hundred and thirty of them were deported to the slow torture of places like the Seychelles, tropical islands in the Indian Ocean. Fouché, suspected of lingering Jacobinism, was on a trifling pretext temporarily deprived of his portfolio, and was not ostensibly restored to favor until 1804. Appointed senator, however, and enjoying high consideration, his treatment did not please the brothers of the First Consul. Their irritation was further increased by their knowledge of confidential relations between Napoleon and the senator. During the latter's retirement from his ministry he seems to have been quite as influential secretly as he was openly and manifestly when he resumed office. In the interim Ceracchi, Arena, and their fiery-tongued companions were falsely condemned and executed. It was soon known that the true culprits were the Vendeans, but Bonaparte declared that the banished radicals would not be allowed to return because their absence was a guarantee of the public safety. Only two of the real criminals were eventually captured and executed. But the most disgraceful consequences of this conspiracy, known in French history as the Plot of Nivôse, were the fall of Moreau and the murder of the Duc d'Enghien, the remoter causes of which lie as far back as the First Consul's determination, formed at this time, that he would diminish the chance of such murderous attacks by striking terror to the hearts of all his enemies.
In the rearrangement of powers consequent to the eighteenth of Brumaire and the adoption of the constitution of the year VIII, the able men of the republic had been provided for, partly in lucrative offices connected with administration, partly in the tribunate and the legislature. The greatest were in the former, and their acknowledged leader was Benjamin Constant, the friend of Mme. de Staël. They represented in a measure the courage and the idealism of the Revolution, but they were in a false position, and showed neither wisdom nor prudence. Accordingly, they made a serious tactical blunder, and fixed upon certain doubtful paragraphs introductory to the civil code in order to manifest their discontent with Bonaparte's self-assertion. They resisted not only the reintroduction of such antiquated barbarisms as the confiscation by the state of property belonging to those who for any reason were deprived of their civil rights, and of the goods of unnaturalized strangers who died within its limits, but attacked likewise provisions of the judicial and financial statutes which were wisely conceived, and were of great utility to the country, some of them being in part their own work. As they talked, their friends in the legislature voted.