There is no doubt that the First Consul realized what he had done and whither he was going. The conspiracies had seriously affected his nerves; more and more he withdrew from the society of all but a few confidants, and surrounded himself with a more rigid etiquette. Mme. Bonaparte gathered to the Tuileries ever larger numbers of the fortune-hunting nobility, who hoped that Bonaparte's elevation would yet prove a stepping-stone to restore the Bourbons. These elegant persons laughed in their sleeves at what they heard and saw. The dress and state of the monarchy were restored, but neither the chief magistrate himself, nor the late republicans who had made good their position at court, had the manners or the morals of those for whom the social institutions of royalty had been developed. The returning nobles thought it very funny that the great man liked seclusion, and found what amusement he took in ghost-stories, in the sighing of the wind, in brusque sallies of coarse wit, or in the rude familiarities of bluff intimacy with plain people; they considered it very absurd that his vices were commonplace and perhaps even worse; they thought it laughable that the newcomers slipped on the polished floors, and it seemed most entertaining that the gentlewomen of the old régime who, like Mme. de Rémusat, had accepted permanent positions as ladies of the palace, were often subjected to treatment and put into positions not foreseen in the training they had received from courtly tutors.
But, for all this, it was not merry at the Tuileries. The chief grew timid and dark before his own achievements, as he sought to master difficulties which ambition does not foresee, but with which it must reckon. No one liked less than Bonaparte to ride abroad surrounded by guards, or to muse in green alleys where, as at Malmaison, every tree was at times the post of a patrol. Yet even he could not alter the necessity, and the system of espionage was extended about him like a cage for his protection. As to friends, they grew fewer and fewer; for one of the First Consul's maxims was the cynical aphorism of Machiavelli, that friends must always be treated as if one day they might be enemies. Even the notion of duty, not to speak of its practice, was foreign to him; generosity, honesty, and sincerity were utopian conceptions of which his world and his experience had never known. The attractive visions and ideals of virtue which mingled with the speculations of Rousseau or Voltaire had become, like the mirage of the desert, empty illusions that heighten the barrenness of self-interest and ambition beneath them. Human greed, passion, vanity—such, Bonaparte declared, are the motive forces by which kings rule; the justice of governors was for him the safeguarding of comfort, of material prosperity, and of the superstitions which under the name of religion create a moral power necessary to the public order.
In the circle immediately surrounding Bonaparte there was much quarreling and jealousy. Josephine having been barren since her second marriage, would the succession go to her children or to her husband's relatives? This was becoming a serious question. Joseph Bonaparte had kept the new order in touch with the republican idea by his skilful diplomacy both in society and in foreign negotiation. He was disposed to yield to his arbitrary brother in any extremity, and his beautiful wife was a tower of strength to the family interest. The vigorous and able Lucien had risen to the height of his chances, and, having acquired a handsome fortune while occupying the post of French minister to Madrid, began to assert his old democratic independence. He was now a widower, and refusing to marry the queen regent of Etruria, espoused a wife from among the people, and this step eventually cost him the penalty of exile. Josephine was successful in making a match between her daughter Hortense and her husband's third brother, Louis; but although at a later time the Emperor contemplated bequeathing his power to their son, for the present their quarrels, instead of appeasing, intensified the Bonaparte-Beauharnais feud. It was sometimes said in loud whispers that the only solution of the impending difficulties was the divorce of the First Consul from his wife; but the question was not yet seriously discussed. The consular pair had never been married by ecclesiastical form, and many have since suggested that it was a discontented husband who had spoken in the manifest partiality for easy divorce which Bonaparte displayed in discussing the civil code. Jerome had been among the officers blockaded in the West Indies by the English fleet. Having escaped to the United States, he became desperately enamored of Elizabeth Patterson, a beautiful woman of Baltimore, and in December, 1803, married her. The pre-nuptial contract is couched in language which proves that her father understood the risks he was taking. As might have been and was expected, the First Consul was furious, refusing to recognize the marriage or the child born of it, and forbidding his sister-in-law to live in France. In a short time the unworthy object of his wrath deserted his family, and returned, with few qualms apparently, to his elder brother's fold and a share in the splendors of the Empire.
The Bonaparte women were clever intriguers. Madame Mère lived quietly in her own home, where, to her son's exasperation, she continued to speak the Corsican dialect and to save money; it is said that she always distrusted the permanency of her son's elevation. Elisa, now Mme. Bacciocchi, was a shrewd woman of the world, and with Lucien's aid formed a literary coterie of which Chateaubriand was the illumination. Pauline returned from San Domingo to marry Prince Borghese, and became notorious for her conjugal infidelities. Caroline, the wife of Murat, chafed under her husband's intellectual inferiority, but used her position with skill in behalf of her family. Of all his connections none was more useful to the head of the State than Fesch, who was easily persuaded to reënter the Church, and not long after the Concordat became Archbishop of Lyons and cardinal. The republican calendar still nominally survived, but after the reconciliation of State and Church the celebration of the ten-day festival of Décadi, instituted under the republic, fell into disuse, the Church resumed the observance of Sunday, and among the diligent attendants at mass on that day was the First Consul. His near relationship with an ecclesiastical dignitary did not tend to weaken the bonds which tied his government to the religious sentiment of the common people.
In the great world outside the Tuileries there was for a moment peace. Nothing was left of Jacobinism or revolutionary ferment. Old names were restored to streets and places, just as every one now wore the garments of the ancient régime, except the impoverished aristocrats, who in mild protest continued to wear the trousers of the sansculottes. Even they, however, had got back a small portion of their properties, and the newly rich saw in the confirmation of personal government by a consul through a so-called republic the guarantee that restitution of the rest to its former owners would never be required of them. Both alike were therefore satisfied with what was sure. Thus in the same way monarchists and republicans were equally gratified, the latter with a semblance of democratic government, the former with a reality which might end in royalty, the full fruition of their yearnings. In short, public confidence was restored, and showed itself in a respectable, temperate decency of living which had been foreign to Paris under the Directory. Everything appeared as if society were performing its normal functions in commerce, trade, industry, and religion. Even art and literature revived as if upon a solid substructure of permanent organic life. Mme. de Staël had fought gallantly for notoriety and for the attention of the great, so dear to her woman's heart in spite of all its philosophy; but Bonaparte never forgave her persistent self-seeking, nor the insight into his character which she and her friends displayed, and he discovered that the air of Paris disagreed with her. Chateaubriand, a noble of high imaginative power and brilliant literary gifts, after several unsuccessful ventures as a romantic youth, had finally published in 1797 an "Essay on Revolutions," which was intended to be a peacemaker in the struggle of ideas, to mediate between the monarchy and the republic. It was imbued with atheism and the philosophy of Rousseau. Very soon after its appearance the author was the subject of a remarkable conversion, and at once began the composition of his treatise on the "Genius of Christianity," that exquisitely literary and pious work which established his fame. Although he had been hitherto unknown to Bonaparte, his book was so opportune in its far-reaching influence that men could not rid themselves of the feeling that the writer was sponsor for the Concordat. Eloquent and poetic in style, the dissertation is nevertheless arid in opinion and scanty in argument. Its life was therefore ephemeral, but its influence while it lasted was supreme; as a reward for its composition, Chateaubriand was made the French representative first in Rome, afterward in the republic of Valais.
CHAPTER XXIV
Expansion or the Revolutionary System[25]
The Interpretation of a Treaty — The Document Signed at Amiens — Addington's Policy — English Influence in Germany — Reconstruction of the German State System — Its Consequences — Lord Whitworth at Paris — Bonaparte's Attitude — Influence of the Army — English Disenchantment — Recriminations between England and France — The Trial of Peltier — Diplomatic Hostilities — Sebastiani's Report.
1802—03
The First Consul might well feel that the constitution of the year VIII had approved itself. The madness of Jacobinism was not merely checked, it was utterly crushed out; political liberty had apparently not been diminished, civil liberty had been formulated and assured as never before; finally, the renown of France had never been more brilliant, and the Consulate had used her glory to make the peace with honor so earnestly desired. Nothing was left but to secure permanency for the well-ordered life thus begun. Opinions varied widely as to how far this was possible. The diplomatists of Europe were not hopeful, knowing as they did what self-control had been exercised on both sides in negotiating the treaty of Amiens, what knotty questions had been passed over, and how easily the stipulations might be rendered of no effect by opposite interpretations of their spirit; on the other hand, Bonaparte, though aware of the strain which at such an epoch must exist in the relations between monarchies and republics, and of the warlike temper of the dynasties, believed that the pressure of public opinion would insure the observance of the treaty. For him its essential feature was the restoration of Malta to its former owners, the Knights of St. John, that is, to the sphere of French influence, or, in other words, England's surrender of absolute control in the Mediterranean. He does not appear to have recalled that others might think a corresponding diminution of French influence on the Continent equally essential to its correct interpretation.