Bonaparte believed to the end that his victim was a guilty conspirator. For a time he had recourse to some unworthy subterfuges tending to show that the execution was the result of a blunder; but later he justified his conduct as based on reasons of state, and claimed that the act was one of self-defense. "I was assailed," he was reported to have said—"I was assailed 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 others." When on his death-bed, his maladroit attendant read from an English review a bitter arraignment of him as guilty of the duke's murder. The dying man rose, and, catching up his will, wrote in his own hand: "I had the Duc d'Enghien seized and tried because it was necessary to the safety, the interest, and the honor of the French people, when by his own confession the Comte d'Artois was supporting sixty assassins in Paris. Under similar circumstances I would again do likewise." Nevertheless he occasionally endeavored to unload the entire responsibility on Talleyrand. To Lord Ebrington, to O'Meara, to Las Cases, to Montholon, he asseverated that Talleyrand had checked his impulses to clemency.
The perpetrator of this bloody crime represented the Revolution too well to suit the new society. A shudder crossed the world on receipt of the news. But the only European monarch that dared to protest was the Czar, who broke off diplomatic relations and put his court into mourning. But he could go no further; for he could find no one on the Continent to join with him in declaring war. Prussia remained neutral and her king silent. Austria withdrew her troops from Swabia, and sent a courier to say at Paris that she could understand certain political necessities. In the autumn, however, when they had gained time to observe France and mark Bonaparte's policy, Russia and Austria began to draw together. Dynastic politics therefore rendered the public expression of popular opinion impossible; but in France, as in the length and breadth of Europe, the masses were aroused. Was the age of violence not passed? Were they merely to exchange one tyranny for another more bloody? The same men who years before had looked on in a dumb stupor, and with consenting approval, at the events of the Terror in Paris were now alert and alarmed at the possibility of its renewal. The First Consul was mortified and angry. Many of those nearest to him had opposed his course from the outset, and he felt deeply their ill-disguised disapproval. His only remedy was arbitrary prohibition of all discussion, and to this he had recourse. Intending to fix the blame of conspiracy and assassination on England and the Bourbons, he found himself regarded as little else than a murderer. A Richelieu could execute a Montmorency with impunity, but not so could a Bonaparte murder a Condé. Long afterward he dictated to Méneval, "The merited death of the Duc d'Enghien hurt Napoleon in public opinion, and politically was of no service to him." But the masses are proverbially fickle, and easily diverted. Three days after the execution Talleyrand gave a successful ball.
The Parisian world was in fact very fickle. Society had been much exercised over the execution of Enghien, but rumors of coming war furnished more interesting topics of conversation. The giddy majority had a few passing emotions, gossiped about one theme and the other alternately, and then went on with its amusements. The grave men who sincerely desired their country's welfare were profoundly moved, and whispered serious forebodings to each other. The world at large was sensitive to both currents of thought, but in the main the masses considered the coming coronation ceremonies, the splendors of empire, and the prospects for unbounded glory opened by Napoleon's unhampered control vastly more entertaining as a subject of flippant speculation than anything else.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Declaration of the Empire[29]
Bonaparte's Principles — His Comprehension of French Conditions — Meaning of Enghien's Murder — The Dynasties of Europe — The Possibilities of Hereditary Power — The New France — Desire for a Dynasty — Suggestions of Monarchy — The Empire Proposed — The New Constitution — Imperial State — The New Nobility — Device of the Empire — The New Court — The Plebiscite.
Step by step, laboriously and painfully, by guile and prudence, in the exercise of consummate genius as soldier and politician, Napoleon Bonaparte had now climbed to the pinnacle of revolutionary power. Insubordinate as a subaltern under a worn-out system, he found for his soaring ambition no fitting sphere in the country of his birth, the only fatherland he ever knew; and in that limited field he was both ineffectual as an agitator and unsuccessful as a revolutionary. But with keen insight he studied and apprehended the greater movement as it developed in France. Standing ever at the parting of the ways, and indifferent to principle, he carefully considered each path, and finally chose the one which seemed likeliest to guide his footsteps toward the goal of his ambition. Fertile in resources, he strove always to construct a double plan, and in the failure of one expedient passed easily to another. His career had been marked by many blunders, and he had often been brought to a stand on the verge of some abyss which threatened failure and ruin; yet, like the driver of a midnight train, he kept the headlight of caution trimmed and burning. Careless of the dangers abounding behind the walls of revolutionary darkness which hedged his track, he ever paused before those immediately confronting him, and sometimes retreated far to find a hazardless circuit. Brumaire was almost the only occasion of his larger life on which, unwary, he had come in full career upon an open chasm. Fate being propitious, he was saved. Lucien, with presence of mind, opened the throttle, and, by releasing the pent-up enthusiasm of the soldiers at the critical instant, safely drove the machine across a toppling bridge.
Sobered for the moment by contemplating a past danger which had threatened annihilation, and by the crowding responsibilities of the future, the First Consul put into practical operation many important revolutionary ideals. But in this process he took full advantage of the state of French society to make himself indispensable to the continuance of French life on its new path. By the parade of civil liberty and a restored social order he so minimized the constitutional side of his government as to erect it into a virtual tyranny. The self-styled commonwealth, with a chief magistrate claiming to hold his office as a public trust, was quite ready to be launched as a liberal empire under a ruler who in reality held the highest power as a possession.
1804
The murder of the Duc d'Enghien was virtually a notification of this fact to all the dynasties of Europe as well as to the French nation. Their behavior was conclusive evidence that they understood it as such. Death was the fate destined not merely for the intestine and personal enemies of the First Citizen, but for the foreign foe, prince or peasant, who should conspire against him whom the French delighted to honor. Had the continental powers been ready for war, it is quite possible that they would have made the execution of a Bourbon, and he the most popular of his line, the ground of immediate action. But they were far from ready. When a few days later the "Moniteur" made known the high probability of what is now a certainty, that Drake and Smith, British diplomatic agents in central Europe, were compromised hopelessly in the conspiracy to kill the chief magistrate of France, the bitterness of all classes, even the aristocracy, in France was assuaged. Great Britain could do nothing officially except to knit up a coalition and strengthen her forces. The Elector of Bavaria dismissed Drake, the British envoy at his court, as a base conspirator; the Duke of Würtemberg congratulated Bonaparte on his escape from assassins; the Holy Roman Emperor at Vienna kept silence while his ministers expressed sympathy for France; the King of Prussia and Alexander of Russia exchanged letters of reciprocal regard and awaited the British subventions to complete their armaments: but they gave no offense in any official way. The Pope exhibited his grief without restraint, but uttered no remonstrance, and the court of Naples was of course indifferent. There was a general putting on of mourning garb in the high circles of Europe; Louis XVIII sent back his decoration of the Golden Fleece to Madrid because Bonaparte had received and retained its insignia, and the dethroned Gustavus of Sweden returned to Frederick William the badges of the Red Eagle for a similar reason. Pretenders may indulge their sensibilities as hard-working kings dare not. It is entirely possible that Bonaparte believed himself, and a dynasty proceeding from his loins, to be the best, if not the only, conservators of the new France; that he conceived of a purely French empire which should be the depository for that land of all that had been gained by the Revolution; and that he believed he could overcome the inertia of the tremendous speed with which he had entered upon his career of single rule. But it is not probable; for no one knew the French better, appreciating as he did their patriotism and their passion for leadership among nations. It was because the Bourbons had failed to represent these qualities that reconstructed France despised the Bourbons; it was because the new France saw their incarnation in Bonaparte that it had assisted him to climb. He must have known very well that, having mounted so high, he would be compelled to mount still higher.