THE CONSULATE 1799 - 1804 (G3b, G3c)
xxxxxAs we have seen, The
Directory was
established in 1795
and, over the next four years, proved a weak and corrupt system of
government. To remain in power it carried out a number of purges to
rid parliament of royalists and counter-revolutionaries,
alarming the moderates, and making likely a military coup. And
Napoleon’s unsuccessful expedition to Egypt did not improve its
fortunes. Nelson’s brilliant
victory at the Battle of Aboukir Bay in 1798 encouraged the
formation of the Second Coalition against France, and the Austrians
in particular began to regain lost land in Italy. It was against
this background that Napoleon returned to Paris in August 1799 and, with much popular
support, seized control of the country. As “First Consul” in the new
Consulate, he began sweeping reforms to unite the country and
improve its administration. At the same time, he took his army into
Italy and, as we shall see, defeated the Austrians at the Battle of
Marengo in 1800,
thereby bringing about the collapse of the Second Coalition.
Including:
Napoleon Bonaparte
xxxxxAs we have seen, The
Directory had been established by the National Convention in 1795. Over the next four years
this bourgeois republic proved weak, corrupt and progressively
unpopular. Made up of a five-man executive elected by a lower
and upper house, its main concern was to safeguard its own political
and economic power, and to prevent by any means at its disposal the
return of the Bourbons. Having owed its inception to the overthrow
of a royalist uprising - ruthlessly carried out by General
Bonaparte’s famous “whiff of grapeshot” - from 1797 onwards it
carried out a series of purges to rid parliament of royalists and
counter-revolutionaries. Many were dismissed from their
appointments, and a large number were exiled to the penal colony of
French Guiana, a fate referred to as “the dry guillotine”. Such
activities deeply alarmed the moderates on the one hand, and made a
military dictatorship a distinct possibility on the other.
xxxxxAnd the threat of an army take-over became the more
likely following Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and Nelson’s
destruction of the French fleet in Aboukir Bay in 1798. This
stunning victory, putting an end to French ambitions in the Middle
and Far East, and leaving Napoleon’s expeditionary force stranded
far from home, encouraged the formation of a Second Coalition of
powers. During the spring and summer of 1799 this alliance, made up
of Great Britain, Austria, Russia, Turkey, Portugal and Naples, went
on the offensive. It aimed to drive the French back to their
national borders, and it did succeed in expelling them out of much
of Italy, despite disagreements over strategy. It was at this
juncture, however - August 1799 -
that Napoleon made his escape from Egypt and, with a few companions,
returned to France. He could not have chosen a more opportune time.
Despite his ill-fated Egyptian campaign, he was welcomed as a
hero by the masses, and hailed as a saviour by almost as many.
xxxxxThe coup d’état which made
General Bonaparte leader of France, putting an end to The Directory
and, in effect, the French Revolution itself, was engineered in the second week of November
1799 (the coup of 18th Brumaire). With the connivance of Abbé Sieyès
(a member of the Directory) and the support in particular of
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (a former foreign minister), both
the upper and lower houses were called to a meeting at the palace of
Saint-Cloud, just west of Paris. While Bonaparte addressed both
councils, his troops took over the capital for their commander.
There was no point in resisting. The Council of Five Hundred was
dismissed, and the Council of Ancients, the senior body, was obliged
to vote itself and The Directory out of existence, and then accept
the creation of The Consulate, led by the First Consul Napoleon
Bonaparte himself. By the end of the week the new leader of France
was firmly ensconced in Luxembourg Palace. Revolutionary idealists
were still to be found, but the vast majority were silenced by fear
of disorder and a return to bloodshed. His first act was to proclaim
the end of the Revolution, but, in fact, the strict, disciplined
dictatorship he established - thinly disguised as a republic -
was to spread abroad many of its ideals, carried along by his
insatiable urge to conquer and expand.
xxxxxAt home he began to
introduce a vast programme of reform aimed at quelling dissension
and improving government administration, the country’s financial
situation, and the judicial system - the so-called
Napoleonic Code. On the military front, Napoleon renewed his Italian
campaign in June 1800,
crossing the Alps and reoccupying Milan. As we shall see, his
victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo
in June, followed in December by the success of another French
army at the Battle of Hohenlinden in Germany, was to bring about the
collapse of the Second Coalition.
Acknowledgements
Council of Five Hundred:
by the French painter and engraver François Bouchot (1800-1842),
1840 – Château de Versailles, France. Birthplace:
by the French painter Léonard-Alexis Daligé de Fontenay
(1813-1892), c1850. Napoleon: by
the French artist Antoine Jean Gros (1771-1835) – Hermitage
Museum, St. Petersburg. First Consul:
detail, by the French Neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique
Ingres (1780-1867), 1804 – Musée d’Art Modern et d’Art
Contemperain, Liège, Belgium. Josephine:
by the French painter Jean Louis Victor Viger de Vigneau (1819-1879)
– Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Map
(Europe): from www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history.
G3b-1783-1802-G3b-1783-1802-G3b-1783-1802-G3b-1783-1802-G3b-1783-1802-G3b
xxxxxNapoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), the new able and charismatic leader
of France, was born in Ajaccio, Corsica (birthplace
illustrated). He attended the French
military school at Brienne, and then studied for a year at the
Military Academy in Paris, being commissioned in the artillery in
1785. He first came to the notice of his superiors at the siege of
Toulon in 1793, where he was in command of an artillery brigade.
Here, by seizing ground overlooking the harbour, he played a
prominent part in driving out the British, who had been welcomed
into the city by royalist leaders earlier that year.
xxxxxThen two years
later, in October 1795, he swiftly crushed a royalist uprising in
Paris, enabling The Directory to begin its four-year term of
office. In recognition of his services to the new constitution he
was put in charge of the Army of the Interior, and then chosen to
command the fight against the Austrians and Sardinians in Italy.
This theatre of operation was seen as something of a side-show,
mainly employed to divert Austrian forces to a second front while
two large, well equipped French armies made straight for the capture
of Vienna. But Napoleon made a first class fighting unit out of his
bedraggled force, and won a series of telling victories against the
Austrians, notably at the Battles of Lodi, Arcole and Rivoli in 1796
and 1797. As a consequence the Sardinians, Neapolitans and the Pope
were obliged to make peace on his terms, and he personally
negotiated the Treaty of Campo Formio in October 1797, ending the
war against the First Coalition.
xxxxxIn this campaign he showed not only outstanding ability
as a military tactician and a leader of men, but also consummate
skill as a diplomat, rearranging the map of Italy with little if any
recourse to the government in Paris. In addition, he contributed
substantially to the coffers of The Directory, and the contents of a
number of French museums by purloining vast amounts of money and
confiscating priceless works of Italian art. And such was the
measure of his military success in this secondary theatre that,
having accomplished his task and learnt that the two other French
armies had failed to achieve theirs, he crossed the Alps and
advanced upon the Austrian capital. It is quite possible that he
would have captured the city had not Austria sued for peace!
xxxxxHe returned to Paris to a
hero’s welcome, but with some apprehension on the part of the
government itself. Thus in 1798, The Directory, being wary of this
highly ambitious republican soldier, willingly gave their consent
when he suggested that he should invade Egypt to strike at the
colonial power of Great Britain, France’s remaining enemy. At first
all went well for him. He captured Malta on route, defeated the
Egyptian army at the Battle of the Pyramids, and then went on to
capture Cairo. In August, however, a British fleet commanded by
Admiral Horatio Nelson, attacked and virtually destroyed his naval
force at the Battle of the Nile. Apart from ending his grandiose
schemes for colonial conquest, it left his army stranded in Egypt.
After leading an unsuccessful invasion into Syria, he managed to win
a further battle against the Egyptians at the Battle of Aboukir
before evading the British naval blockade and making his way back to
France, arriving in October 1799. Here (as we have seen above), he
was in time to seize power from The Directory, by then in the throes
of disintegration, and establish his own regime, The Consulate. “I
found the crown of France lying on the ground”, he later remarked,
“and I picked it up with a sword.”
xxxxxOnce firmly in office and wielding dictatorial powers
behind a republican façade (illustrated), Napoleon turned his
attention to internal as well as external matters. In the interests
of greater harmony at home, for example, he reconciled the
royalists, pacified regions still harbouring grievances, and, in
1801, ended the breach with the Roman Catholic Church by a Concordat
reached with Pope Pius VII. At the same time, he began a thorough
overhaul of the country’s administration, balancing the budget,
introducing a fairer method of taxation, centralising local
government, and providing the means for higher education. And to
this period belonged the drafting of the Napoleonic Code - a
standardisation of the civil law -, the order of the Legion of
Honour, created to reward civil and military achievement, and the
introduction of a number of vast public works, such as a road
building programme which included the Simplon pass and a way over
Mount Cenis. And contained within his administrative reforms, on
paper at least, were the tenets of the Revolution - individual
liberty, freedom of conscience, and equality before the law.
xxxxxOn the military
front (see map below), he set out to reassert French supremacy. As
we shall see, his defeat of the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo
in June 1800,
together with the success achieved by a French army serving in
Germany, brought about the collapse of the Second Coalition. By the
Treaty of Luneville
in February 1801 Austria was obliged to recognise France’s natural
boundaries - the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees - and a
year later Great Britain, weary of the conflict, agreed to end
hostilities by the Treaty of Amiens.
xxxxxThat same year he was made
First Consulate for life and then, as we shall see, was crowned Emperor of
the French in 1804 (G3c)
with the overwhelming support of the people. Having founded a royal
dynasty, he then embarked on the conquest of Europe by means of the
aptly-named Napoleonic Wars. It was to be more than ten years
before he met his Waterloo.
xxxxxIncidentally, for a time
Napoleon’s father, Carlo supported the nationalist leader Pasquale Paoli in his bid to
gain independence for Corsica, then ruled by Genoa, but gave his
allegiance to the French when they took over the island in 1769.
Later, Napoleon himself opposed Paoli when, leading a revolt against
the French in the early 1790s, he managed to turn the island over to
the British, though only for a couple of years. You might recall
that the Scottish biographer James Boswell, visited Corsica during
his tour of the continent and, after meeting Paoli, published his Account of Corsica in 1768 to rally support
for the nationalist cause. ……
xxxxx…… Napoleonxmarried Josephine de
Beauharnais in 1796. Widow of General de
Beauharnais, and the then mistress of Vicomte de Barras, (a member
of the Directory), she was an ambitious, attractive woman, well
known in Parisian society. She possibly married Napoleon to gain a
degree of security. At first, she seems to have regarded him as a
quaint little Corsican, but she had to make a quick reappraisal when
he returned from his triumphant Italian campaign. Their married life
together appears to have been quite a happy one and, as we shall
see, she was eventually crowned Empress of the French in 1804 (G3c). Five years later,
however, failing to produce an heir for the new dynasty, Napoleon
was obliged to divorce her. He then married into the prestigious
Austrian House of Habsburg and begot the son he so badly needed. ……
…… In 1802 Napoleon instituted
the Order of the Legion of Honour, to be conferred upon any man,
woman (including foreigners) for meritorious service to the state in
civil as well as military life. When awarded in connection with war
service, it carries with it the Croix de Guerre,
the highest military medal. ……
xxxxx……
The above portrait of Napoleon as the First Consul was the work of
the French neo-classical artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.
He completed it in 1804 and, two years later, produced his famous
portrait of the Emperor, sitting on his ceremonial throne and
wearing ermine robes and a Roman-style crown. As we shall see,
in 1824 (G4)
Ingres gained fame with his The Vow of Louis
XIII, and became universally recognised as the leading
exponent of Classicism.
xxxxxNapoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), the new, charismatic leader of
France, was born at Ajaccio in Corsica, and was commissioned in the
artillery in 1785. He became noticed in 1793 for the part he played
in expelling the British from the port of Toulon, and two years
later made possible the creation of The Directory by swiftly
crushing a royalist revolt. Appointed commander of the French forces
in Italy in 1796, he won a series of brilliant victories over the
Austrians - notably at Lodi, Arcole and Rivoli - thereby
gaining much territory in Italy - and, by the Treaty of Campo
Formio, put an end to the First Coalition of nations formed against
France. He returned home to a hero’s welcome, and in 1798 led an
expedition to Egypt, seizing Malta en route. He roundly defeated the
Egyptians at the Battle of the Pyramids and went on to occupy Cairo,
but in August of that year the British admiral Horatio Nelson
destroyed Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of Aboukir Bay. This left
his army stranded in Egypt. Undaunted, he returned to Paris in 1799
where the corrupt and inefficient Directory
was in the throes of losing land in Italy to
members of a Second Coalition. He seized power and, setting up The
Consulate, became the First Consul. As a virtual dictator, he
embarked upon a series of sweeping reforms to stabilise the country,
and by his victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo in 1800, he brought about the
collapse of the Second Coalition. He obtained an advantageous peace
settlement by the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 and then, as we shall
see, had himself crowned Emperor of the French in 1804
(G3c). Having founded a royal dynasty, he
then embarked on the conquest of Europe via the aptly-named
Napoleonic Wars.