But there were still a very few sturdy men who felt that one side of the Revolution was falling into atrophy at the expense of that which Bonaparte so ably represented. In spite of his disfavor, they made themselves heard; and Carnot even dared to remonstrate in the tribunate against the adulation of this second young Augustus who was using the forms of a commonwealth to found an empire. In the senate also this little sect had a remnant, some eight members in all. Their power lay not in themselves, nor in their strict republican principles, but in the latent sympathies of many influential officers of the army. During the second campaign in Italy Moreau had smothered his discontent when the Army of the Rhine was weakened at a critical moment by the transfer of twenty-five thousand men into Italy in order to assure the glories of Marengo. An official journal falsely declared that his soldiers had been paid from the public coffers. Such was the state of public morality that the charge was considered injurious, as in fact it was intended to be. Moreau in reply boasted that he had received but eighteen million francs from Paris, that he had levied forty-four millions on Germany, and that of the total there was a surplus of seven millions which had been distributed among the soldiers and officers. This paper was pigeonholed in the ministry of war, and the newspapers were forbidden to print the copies sent to them. The writer's feelings may be imagined. If he and the others who were discontented had shown the craft which Bonaparte did, their opposition would have been dangerous; but they were so carefully watched that their every movement was known beforehand and thwarted. Still further, they were, by the wiles of their enemies, insensibly led to the commission of foolish deeds and the utterance of rash words, which put them within reach of the law. In this particular network of conspiracies, Fouché was not the principal, although he was a valued consultant.
This system was admirably illustrated in the fall of Moreau, who was not a wary man, and had permitted royalist agents to hold communication with him. One of these, the Abbé David, was seized, but no damaging evidence was obtained. Thereupon recourse was had to the services of Méhée de la Touche, a base creature who, after participation in the September massacres of 1792, and an underground career of espionage during the Terror, had opposed Bonaparte on the eighteenth of Brumaire. He was at the moment in exile for participation in the plot of Nivôse, and eagerly accepted his new employment. After many adventures, he finally won the confidence not only of the French royalists in England, but of Pelham and other members of the British government. He described to the consular government the dissensions between the Bourbon leaders and the agents of Great Britain, telling how Georges Cadoudal, the Chouan leader, had been landed in France on August twenty-first, 1803, from an English ship commanded by Captain Wright, and unfolding a plan whereby the royalists could be encouraged to bring the conspiracy of which Georges was the agent to a head. His scheme was adopted, and after writing from Altona to Louis XVIII, now in Warsaw, offering his services, he visited Munich, and probably Stuttgart, where he told the story of a Jacobin rising which was soon to occur in France, and obtained from the English resident ministers money and instructions for organizing it. The official denials of the period made by the British government as to its participation in the Cadoudal conspiracy were long accepted as true and incorporated in the standard histories. Since the opening within a few years of the British archives to investigators the proof of the contrary is patent. The connected list of despatches, letters, and reports presents conclusive and damaging evidence that whether or not the ministers were privy to the plot for assassinating the First Consul, the French conspirators were in British pay.
In order to implicate Moreau in the Cadoudal conspiracy of which they had learned, the Paris police employed another person of the same stripe, Lajolais by name, who had been an officer in the Army of the Rhine, and who, as such, succeeded in meeting Moreau and extorting from him a few words of pity for Pichegru. Thereupon the police, by means still baser, got together two committees, one of royalists and one of old-time Jacobins, and had each select Moreau as its leader. This was possible, because the Bourbon pretender had, in accordance with Méhée's letter, issued a proclamation promising constitutional government and the sale of the public lands in case of his restoration. Lajolais then started for London, where he persuaded Pichegru that France was weary of Bonaparte, that Moreau was ready, and that the time was ripe for overthrowing the Consulate. As a consequence, the dupe and the decoy, with the chief military leaders of the emigrants, landed from Captain Wright's ship on January fourteenth, 1804, at Biville, near Dieppe. Artois and his son were to follow in a few days. By further misrepresentations Moreau and Pichegru were brought together on the sidewalk of a street near the church of the Madeleine, and in Lajolais' presence they exchanged a few noncommittal sentences. Within a few days a police agent, approaching Moreau as an ambassador from Pichegru, was told that if the latter would lead a movement,—and in that case the consuls and government must be disposed of,—his friends would be protected by influence which could be secured in the senate. Moreau steadily refused either to meet Georges Cadoudal or be implicated in the plot for seizing Bonaparte, of which the Chouan was the leader.
About the middle of February everything was ready and Moreau was arrested. On examination he weakly protested too much, and, being convicted from his own papers of inconsistency, was imprisoned. A few weeks later Pichegru was discovered by the aid of an informer, and he too was thrown into prison. Finally on March ninth Georges himself was seized in the streets of Paris after a desperate and bloody resistance. Soon the most popular picture in the shop windows of the city was a colored print representing the fifty "scoundrels" who had been found to be implicated in the conspiracy against the First Consul, and among the faces was an unmistakable likeness of Moreau. After a long trial, Georges and his accomplices were condemned and shot. Pichegru was found dead in his cell: although royalists confined in that adjoining afterward declared that they had heard a scuffle during the fatal night, there is no reasonable doubt that the prisoner committed suicide. The suspicions cast upon Moreau had utterly destroyed his popularity, and numerous addresses were sent in both from the army and by civilians denouncing him. Just before his trial he made the terrible mistake of sending to Bonaparte an exculpatory letter. This he did, instigated by his silly, ambitious wife, who seems in turn to have received the suggestion from Mme. Récamier. Rumor said that the notion originated with Fouché. The fact and nature of the appeal suggested guilt, but the first decision of the court was for acquittal. Popular feeling, however, ran so high that the First Consul compelled a reconsideration of the verdict, and the prisoner was sentenced to imprisonment for two years. Bonaparte, furious at this leniency, commuted the penalty to banishment. Moreau withdrew to America, where he remained until 1813, when he returned to take up arms against Napoleon before Dresden and was killed.
"I have incurred no real danger," wrote Bonaparte to Melzi on March sixth, 1804, "for the police had their eyes on all these machinations." The verdict of history implicates that ubiquitous agency in fostering by its spies and agents many of those same machinations, but leaves no doubt of the desperate character of the ringleaders in them. What England really, and the Bourbons ostensibly, wanted was a Jacobin insurrection; many of their infuriated agents would certainly not have hesitated at assassination. The general opinion in France was not wrong in condemning the extreme measures taken by the Bourbons to gain their ends, and for the moment royalists of all three factions were silent, feeling that their cause had received a blow from which it might never recover. As to the moderate republican party, it was temporarily extinguished by the fate of Moreau. Skilful as a general and sincere as a democrat, his career had been short-sighted and contradictory. Friendship had led him to conceal his knowledge of Pichegru's dealings with the royalists of 1797. Ambition led him to assist at Brumaire, but he would not accept the consequences. Indecision led him into a trap, but even then he might have escaped, but for the letter he wrote by the advice of a proud and foolish wife.
The closing scenes of this drama of plot and counterplot, of assassination and murder, of falsehood, treachery, and execution, formed a fitting dénouement to the piece. That age had seen and condoned acts of revenge which in quieter times would have been considered unpardonable. Nelson had sanctioned the judicial assassination of Caraccioli, the Neapolitan admiral, whose crime was that in the interest of the Parthenopean Republic he had fought the English fleet. Austria's skirts were not clean of the murders perpetrated at Rastadt. A little later the Bourbons, with the assent of the allied sovereigns, ordered the execution of Ney for deserting them to support his former chief at Waterloo. Bonaparte, relying on a conviction that every one regarded him as a harried and innocent man acting in self-defense, and apparently unconscious of how utterly the royalist agitation had been discredited by Cadoudal, determined so to stun the already prostrate Bourbons as to render them harmless for years to come.
Neither Artois nor his son Berry had entered France; the self-styled Louis XVIII was in distant Warsaw. Both these pretenders were more eloquent than courageous. Even the royalists of Paris were doubtful about the leadership of either one, and the partizans of constitutional monarchy had for some time been disposed to rally about a third Bourbon, the Duc d'Enghien, heir apparent to the glories of the house rendered so illustrious by Louis XIV's famous general known as "the Great Condé." The young duke was both fearless and clever. Burning to take arms in honorable warfare for the cause of his house, he had consulted both English and emigrant agents as to how that could best be accomplished; but he was innocent of conspiring for assassination.
For some time he had lived in close proximity to the French frontier at Ettenheim, a manor-house in Baden, some sixteen miles from Strasburg, where Cardinal Rohan had resided with his niece since his resignation of the bishopric of Strasburg after the Concordat. The duke had for some time been secretly married to this lady, the Princess Charlotte of Rohan-Rochefort, and for that reason, though repeatedly warned of his danger, would not take refuge in England. Before the treaty of Amiens he had been the friend of the Swiss reactionaries and the patron of the royalists in Alsace; after the rupture he was active in strengthening their attachment to the Bourbon cause. In response to the manifesto of the self-styled king, his relative at Warsaw, issued in March, 1803, he declared that he was still faithful. When war began he sought permission to enter the English service and repel the expected invasion by Bonaparte; but England would not permit a Bourbon to draw sword on her soil.
At this crisis the publication of the Warsaw manifesto, and of the duke's response, made his continued residence at Ettenheim a subject of still greater inquietude to his friends; but he remained, and spent much energy in forming plans to invade France through Alsace. As the probabilities of war on the Continent grew stronger, he again applied to the English court for a commission, this time through Stuart, the British envoy to Vienna. He now desired employment on the mainland, either in an allied army or with the first English troops which should disembark on the Continent. Meantime the activity of the English residents at the minor German courts intensified his purpose to raise a regiment of men from the anti-Bonaparte elements of central Europe, to be officered by the scattered veterans who had fought under the second Condé but had been dismissed from the Austrian service after the treaty of Lunéville. The news of Moreau's arrest and of Cadoudal's conspiracy came like a thunderbolt, and the duke, though conscious of no guilt, made ready to withdraw to Freiburg in the Breisgau; but in order to mask his uneasiness he instituted a hunt and other festivities which lasted a whole week.
Bonaparte's first intention had been to seize Charles of Artois on his arrival in France; but a thorough supervision of the shore made it evident that the prince's caution had again got the better of his courage. Disappointed in this quarter, the police agents began to develop an intense activity on the German frontier. They professed to have discovered in Offenburg, with which the Duc d'Enghien was in constant communication, the existence of a body of emigrants who were not there. They reported that the young prince sometimes came down to Strasburg to attend the theater; they represented two harmless visitors at Ettenheim to be officers of the Prince of Condé arrived from England; still worse, they declared an emigrant friend of the duke who lived near by—the aged Marquis of Thuméry, whose name in German mouths had a remote resemblance to that of Dumouriez—to be that dangerous general himself. This occurred a few days before March ninth, and almost simultaneously Bonaparte received from an agent in Naples an extract from one of Dumouriez's letters to Nelson, urging a concerted plan not merely of defense, but of offense. No one then doubted that Dumouriez himself was on the Rhine, busy with Enghien in perfecting this very plan.