Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/218

Rh NAPOLEON [1800- Gradual had not been clearly foreseen. Sieyes had wished to progress confine Bonaparte to the war department, Moreau per- towards ^aps ^ad w i s h ec i to keep him at Paris ; in either case it o^chy had not been intended to create an august monarchy. But the fabulous success of Marengo, joined to the proofs Bonaparte gave of a really superior intelligence and com manding character, turned the French mind back into that monarchical groove in which it had so long run before the Revolution. Popular liberty had been already renounced by Sieyes, and the disastrous failure of republican institu tions, which in four years, from 1795 to 1799, had brought the country to bankruptcy, civil war, and almost barbarism, inclined all public men to agree with him. The choice then could only lie between some form of aristocracy and the revival of monarchy either in the Bourbon family or in another. Napoleon s personal character decided this question. By the Concordat he wrested from the Bourbons the support of the church ; by his military glory he seduced the noblesse, as is seen in the case of S6gur ; by the pacification of the world he half reconciled to himself the foreign cabinets. But no sooner did this new form of monarchy begin to appear than Bonaparte began to find himself surrounded by new dangers. He was exposed to the hatred of the republicans, who had hitherto been appeased by the title of consul, and were now thrown into coalition with the defeated Jacobins, and also to the despair of the royalists, who saw themselves disappointed of restoration at the moment of the failure of republicanism. Nearer his person at the same time court-parties began to spring up. His brothers and sisters with Corsican shame- lessness began to claim their share in the spoils. While he doubted what form his monarchy should take, and whether some character greater and more unique than that of a hereditary king could not be invented, they urged the claims of the family. Thus arose a standing feud between the Bonapartes and the Beauharnais, who in the interest of Josephine, already dreading divorce for her childlessness, opposed the principle of heredity. In grappling with the defeated parties Bonaparte found a great advantage in his position. The constitution of Brumaire itself gave him great powers ; popular institutions had been destroyed, not by him, but by the nation itself, which was weary of them ; under the Directory the public had grown accustomed to the suppression of journals and to periodic coups d etat of the most savage violence. Bonaparte therefore could establish a rigorous despotism under the forms of a consular republic, mutilate the assemblies, and silence public opinion; he could venture occasionally upon acts of the most sweeping tyranny with out shocking a people which had so lately seen Fructidor, not to say the Reign of Terror, and had been accustomed to call them liberty. The conspiracies began immediately after the return from Marengo, when the Corsicans Arena and Ceracchi, guilty apparently of little more than wild talk, were arrested in October 1800 at the Theatre Fra^ais. Plot of But on December 24th of the same year, as he drove with Nivose. Josephine to the opera, a sudden explosion took place in the Rue Saint-Nicaise, which killed and wounded several people and damaged about fifty houses ; the carriage of Bonaparte escaped. He was still in the first fervour of his conversion from Jacobinism, and had not yet become alive to the danger to which he was exposed from royalism. He could therefore see nothing but Jacobinism in this plot, and proposed to meet the danger by some general measure calculated to eradicate what remained of the Jacobin party. But before this measure could be taken Fouche convinced him that he had been in error, and that he was in the presence of a new enemy, royalism roused into new vigour by the recent change in public opinion. Upon this Bona parte acted most characteristically. By a singular stretch of Machiavelism he made use of the mistake into which he had himself led the public to crush the enemy which for the moment he feared most. He arrested and transported one hundred and thirty persons, whom he knew to be innocent of the plot, on the general ground of Jacobinism, substituting for all legal trial a resolution passed by the servile senate to the effect that &quot; the measure was conservative of the constitution.&quot; This is Nivose, an act as enormous as Fructidor, and with a perfidy of its own. Making use of victory was almost more Bonaparte s talent than winning it. These plots, so far from impeding his ascent to monarchy, were converted by him into steps upon which he mounted. They were so many argu ments for heredity, which, in case Bonaparte should fall a prey to them, would furnish a successor. It had already been argued in the Parallele entre Cesar, Cromwell, et Bonaparte (October 1800) that heredity only could prevent the nation from falling again under the domina tion of the assemblies, under the yoke of the S (not Sieyes surely but Soldats) or under that of the Bourbons. He also made the plot of Nivose the occasion of a constitutional innovation. The assemblies devised by Sieyes had hitherto been simply useless, so much idle machinery. But in Nivose the precedent was set of giving the Senate a con stituent power. To guard the constitution was its nominal function ; this was now converted into a function of sanctioning alterations in the constitution, since every innovation became legal when the Senate declared it to be conservative of the constitution. In the hands of Bona parte such a principle soon became fruitful enough. The first open step towards monarchy was made at the conclusion of the treaty of Amiens. As pacificator of the globe, it was declared in the tribunate that Bonaparte deserved some mark of public gratitude. Upon this the Senate proposed to re-elect him First Consul for a further term of ten years. Bonaparte, disappointed, declared that he could only owe a prorogation of his magistracy to the people ; to them therefore the question was referred, but in the form, Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be elected consul for life 1 and in this form it was adopted. Before the final step was taken and the First Consul transformed himself into the Emperor Napoleon, a great and portentous change had taken place in the spirit of his government. Before the year 1803 there was no fair reason to conclude that Bonaparte was too fond of war. For the two wars of the Revolution he had not been responsible : the first broke out when he was in Corsica, the second when he was in Egypt. But both wars had been brought to an end by him ; he had closed the Temple of Janus, he was the great pacificator. In construc tive legislation he had shown such zeal that it was easy to imagine him, though a great commander, as one who was capable of feeling the blessedness of the peacemaker. These illusions began to vanish in 1803 at the rupture of the peace of Amiens. This year 1803 is the turning-point in his life, and a great turning-point in French history. It may be considered the first year of modern France. The Revolution is at last over ; the new organization begins to work regularly. The old noblesse is gone, and in place of the old Church there is the humbled Church of the Con cordat. France is covered with an army of functionaries, servilely dependent on the Government ; a strange silence has settled on the country which under the old regime had been noisy with the debate if for the most part fruitless debate of parliaments and estates. The Government is tenfold more imperious than it had been before 1789. And now it appears that Bonaparte had desired only the glory of having made peace, not peace itself, just as earlier, after making the peace of Campo Formio, he had taken measures by the Egyptian expedition to embroil Europe