1Right from the Constitution of An VIII, the jury in France was out as what they thought Napoleon was doing in government. Was he a Caesar, a Cromwell, a Dictator, a Consul, a King, or indeed a Kingmaker? These ideas were uppermost in the minds those politically orientated around the 18^th and 19^th Brumaire. Napoleon himself had a document distributed (and then printed in the Journal de Paris) denying that he was either the Roman or the Briton. [1] Public opinion apparently initially toyed with the idea that Bonaparte could be an honest broker or kingmaker, as Monk had been for Charles II. This was certainly implied by the banned (anonymous) Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monck et Bonaparte (Paris, 1800). [2] In January 1801, Rœderer however had come to the conclusion that the First Consul was a “roi républicain”, and that he was “a king in the true sense of the word: he governs a France of liberty, free from any arbitrary power, by means of the republican institutions”. [3] As if to back this up, contemporary publications on monarchical political theory Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux ([Konstanz], 1796) and De la Législation primitive (Paris: Le Clère, 1802) and Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles de l’ordre social ou du pouvoir, du ministre et du sujet dans la société (Paris, 1800) by the ex-émigré Louis de Bonald were if not appreciated at least read (and importantly not banned) by the First Consul. Bonald, the founder of modern Sociology, is usually described as a royalist and an absolutist, but his assiduous courting of the First Consul would seem to suggest a more complex intellectual makeup. And whatever his position, his ideas à priori did not shock the First Consul. Another view of the Consulate was offered by the Elder Lacretelle in his Sur le dix-huit Brumaire. A Sieyès et à Bonaparte published in Paris almost immediately after the coup. Two years later the maverick Lyonnais politician Camille Jordan had yet another take in his Vrai sens du vote national sur le consulat à vie (Hamburg, 1802). This paper aims to review these little-used but important contemporary opinions on the Consulate in an attempt to shed further light on Napoleon’s “third way government” as revealed in the Consulate. They reveal some of the zeitgeist, in other words, they give us a glimpse of what contemporaries thought Napoleon was doing.

2Pierre-Louis de Lacretelle (1751-1824), [4] “Lacretelle l’ainé”, from Metz had a successful career in the legal business before turning to philosophy and letters in the years preceding the Revolution. He became a frequent contributor (along with Garat and Laharpe) to the prestigious review Mercure français, and along with this review favourable to the new ideas Lacretelle became a supporter of the Revolution. A deputy suppléant during the Constituante and a député during the Legislative, he was a founder member of the moderate constitutionally monarchical Feuillants club (along with his younger brother [5]). Notable also is his friendship with Roederer, also from Metz. He furthermore won a prize for an essay which he jointly wrote with Maximilien Robespierre. He was not however to contribute to the new style 1799 decidedly more counterrevolutionary Mercure de France, a review which had returned to its ancien régime name (from Mercure des français), thus marking its break with the recent revolutionary past to re-attach itself to the world of before. I have included him here because of his moderation, and because he was suspected of royalism in 1791 when he defended Lafayette (and for which he was forced to leave Paris). During the Directory Lacretelle was one of the jurés of the Haute cour nationale (which famously passed judgement on Babeuf) and from 1801-1802 he sat on the Corps legislative and replaced La Harpe in the Institut in 1803. He was not active politically during the Consulate or indeed the empire, though he did publish five volumes of Œuvres diverses [6] (mostly reprints of his work at the bar) appearing in Paris in the years 1802-1807. He was not to return to writing on politics until the Restoration.

3It is the pamphlet published by Lacretelle on 10 Frimaire, An VIII (1 December, 1799), entitled Sur le dix-huit Brumaire. A Sieyès et à Bonaparte, which interest me here. [7] Addressed three weeks after the coup and two weeks before the constitution of An VIII to his Feuillant colleague of yesteryear and to the rising military star, the work refers to the most salutary end to the bad things of the Revolution proper and the Directory. The long pamphlet is divided up into nine sections, namely: ‘To Sièyes and to Bonaparte’, ‘A tableau of the Revolution up to 18 Brumaire’. ‘Homage to the authors of the two days, 18 and 19 Brumaire; reasons for and characteristics of this revolution’, ‘Notions on the state of dictatorship’, ‘Causes, means, and characteristics of the current revolution’, ‘What the dictatorship must do to bring the Revolution to a close’, ‘Advantages of the method established by the Law of 19 Brumaire in the provision of a constitution’, ‘Necessity for the composition of some Corps constitués fitting to the constitution so as to ensure its establishment’, and ‘Consuls of the Republic’. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the text is its general positive appreciation of the coup. You would almost say it had been commissioned by one or the other statesman, were it not for the fact that contemporaries highlighted Lacretelle’s character as honest [8] and also because of the author’s protestation that his writing was spontaneous. As Lacretelle remarks “I saw my desire fulfilled by 18 Brumaire; and my satisfied intellect turned itself with ardour to reflecting upon this event. Since there was a system, a plan which inspired great confidence, I felt it, I wanted to communicate it by explaining all that the event seemed to me to contain and promise. […] Jealous even of the honour of this national dictatorship, which awoke the expansive faculties of my soul, I thought that a writer who was independent in the midst of the parties, a man who had passed unblemished through the Revolution, ought to stand up before this great power and to demand that it fulfil all its engagements”. [9] As you have already guessed, the work is sustained eulogy of the Brumaire “Dictatorship”.

4In the section entitled ‘Notions on the state of dictatorship’ he expostulates thus: “A dictatorship! What is so disturbing or sinister about this word that people have criticised me for imprudently dinning the term into our ears and frightening our imaginations? Are we, the beaten children of revolutions, always to be more alarmed at words rather than at things? How now! Take a look at every history, and particularly at the latest days of our own, and all you will see is accredited or crypto-dictatorships”. [10] He goes on to cite Sylla and Caesar as bad examples, but “before them, an infinite number of citizens has performed the role of dictator, without ever abusing it. It is a wonderful invention, a source of power (ressort), a guarantee for the constitution itself”. Solon, Lycurgus even the Long Parliament in England, not to mention the Constituant, the Terreur, the different Directories were all dictatorships, he maintained. [11]

5However the concept of dictatorship does require special treatment he contends. Dictatorships should be rejected or accepted depending on the circumstances and the actors involved. [12] And this is not the only time in the pamphlet where he shows a partiality to a philosophy of ‘common sense’. This is a sort of non-systematic thinking which in many ways characterises Napoleon’s own casuistic, non-ideological approach to politics. In this context, the pamphlet then goes over the same ground as the banned Parallel (mentioned above) in turning around the question as to precisely what Bonaparte was. “I have carefully studied all the words that have been uttered regarding this circumstance.” he writes. “I was well disposed towards Bonaparte. He must still have the natural generosity of a young heart, despite the astonishing maturity of his head. If he is intoxicated with something, this is that he is much more than a protector [Lacretelle’s italics], more than a king; the restorer of a great revolution which was thought lost, one of the founders of a great and beautiful republic. Nevertheless, the seductions of power can assail those who have only made mistakes thinking that they were safe from such things. I have found with delight sure guarantees in his ideas. At the end of the 18^th century, he said, you cannot do what they did in the middle of the 17th. […] And again what a noble and honest guarantee can be see in the alliance he has made. He wished to engage in the undertaking only with an austere disciple of the republican system (which is nothing other than the representative system in its entirety), with the only man in Europe who has meditated so profoundly on all the parts of the organisation of society. In this alliance, it was only right that Bonaparte should be the object of attention on 18 and 19 Brumaire. When it comes to the constitution, all eyes will be on Sieyès; and thereafter, they will shine together in a single glory. So, it is not for our safety but for our honour that I call upon my fellow citizens to show proud and brave faces in this extraordinary epoch of ours.” [13]

6We know that the apparent guarantee of Sieyès – who was supposed to act as a sort of austere republican Cato, who would keep the young and enthusiastic Bonaparte on the right republican road - was to prove a dead letter. Indeed the republican safeguard was to be put to one side very early on, and surely Republican observers such as Lacretelle must have feared that the Bonapartian solution was not to be one of a purely republican nature? Indeed the last pages of his pamphlet talk guardedly about the Consulate arrêté on deportations. [14] Dark mutterings about injustice and solemn (and fearful) injunctions to the dictators to take care with the men in their court: “you have a revolutionary court,” he remarks presciently, “just like kings have a feudal one”. [15] Retribution will surely follow these men’s wrongdoing, he warns. In fact, Lacretelle’s fears were justified. The court to which he referred did exist, but it was not revolutionary but rather of the ‘feudal’ type. The Consulate was steadily to increase its use (indeed re-introduction) of monarchical symbolism and structures (the Conseil d’état replicating the Conseil du roi, the roi républicain lodging himself in the Tuileries, the second consul Cambaceres acting as an ancien regime Chancellor).

7We alas do not have Lacretelle’s thoughts on the later Consulate and Empire. On the other hand we do have those of the maverick politician, Camille Jordan, [16] who was so roused by the plebiscite on the life consulship to pen a (half-heartedly banned) pamphlet on it. Jordan, like Lacretelle, came from a moderate background, having stood against Jacobins in Lyons in 1793, though this act of resistance led him to flee, first to Switzerland and then to Britain where he immersed himself in politics meeting both émigrés such as Malhouet and Lally-Tollendal and British statesmen such as Erskine, Fox and Holland, becoming an admirer of the British Constitution. Returning to France in 1796, Jordan was elected (almost unanimously) as député for the Rhône-Loire department in the Cinq Cents, where he became notorious for his interest in alleviating harsh treatment of priests and religion in France. He furthermore called the Directory ‘inept’ and ‘lying’ when the latter accused the town of Lyons of being a hotbed of counterrevolution. His continued criticism led to his inclusion on the list of those exiled on 18 Fructidor, An V. He once again took to the road, erring from Basel to Weimar, where he met Goethe, Schiller and Wieland, not to mention his lifelong friend Mounier, Mounier who wrote in praise of moderation in the introduction to De l’influence attribuée aux philosophes, aux francs-maçons et aux illuminés, sur la Révolution française (1801). [17] Returning to France on invitation after 1800, Jordan was put under surveillance in Grenoble. He was finally allowed to come to Paris, where he stayed with Germaine de Stael. It is said that the First Consul made him flattering offers, which he supposedly refused preferring to remain independent. In 1802 he published the following remarkable reflection inspired by the plebiscite on the life consulship entitled the “Real meaning of the national vote on the life Consulship”.

8That Napoleon was puzzled by the text is perhaps shown by the reaction of the police. When it first came out in Paris (as a note from the publisher (in fact Jordan’s cousin) informs the reader) the anonymous pamphlet was seized and orders were issued for the printer and publisher to be arrested. [18] At this point, we are told, Jordan came forward to confess his authorship of the work and to reclaim the copies. The government dropped the charges against the printers/publishers but refused to release the copies. Some unseized copies (so the note continues) circulated rapidly, and a printer/publisher in Hamburg and London had the work reprinted. [19] This ambivalence of the government to the text is perhaps a sign of its relative acceptability. Had Jordan sent a copy to the First Consul?

9The text opens with a confession; Jordan had followed the crowd and voted ‘yes’ to the life consulship. [20] He recognises that Bonaparte has brought to France all the benefits of calm “after so much agitation”. But the First Consul is just a man. He could just as easily become a Commodus as a Marcus Aurelius. [21] Is calm enough, Jordan wonders? Despite the fact that the Revolution totally debased the term, does France not also need liberty? Not the bloodthirsty type proffered during the Revolutionary decade, but “that liberty which, in my opinion, the most enlightened nations in the world possess, such as that in England, such as that which triumphs in America”. [22] Shall France disdain such liberty, asks Jordan? Who says so? The pamphlet then goes on to list the scoundrels surrounding government, those men despised by public opinion. Though they are not named, the culprits seem recognisable, namely: “some turncoats of demagogy who exaggerate today the maxims of order just as yesterday they exaggerated the principles of independence” (presumably those men in power who managed to slip from the Directorate to the Consulate without a hiccup), [23] “some courtiers, viler than those of the abolished regime” (the people of the new Consular court), “some men of pride, who talk to you with pitying disdain […] of the danger of philosophical abstractions, men who imagined themselves men of state because they were men without principle” (presumably men like Talleyrand, Fouché), “Sybarites and egoists” (Cambaceres??), “Fine thinkers, drunk on their success in the salons” (Constant, Chateaubriand?). And the person most clearly identified, the subject of the final part of this paper, is one of the “four or five political writers, who have presented us with a theory of absolute power as a philosophical system and the chaos of feudality as a masterpiece of social order; who thought themselves geniuses because they were eccentric, profound because they were obscure”, namely Bonald. [24] He too will be rejected by public opinion, because “the indestructible spirit of love of holy liberty flows in their veins”. [25] However, Jordan goes on, men of purity of action and spirit, politicians, scientists and academics, young people in the national schools, soldiers, officers “dedicated to the concept of equality”, the lower and middle classes (which Jordan lists, the farmer, the conscript’s father, the commerçant, the industrialist…) will all desire liberty. [26] However as we can see from the dislike of the revolution and the praise of Britain and America this is not left-leaning liberty. Jordan then brings in further British comparisons noting that calm could bring freedom. Did not, shortly after the English civil war, the nation there rouse itself from the torpor of Charles II’s reign to the energy of the Glorious Revolution? So France (Jordan claims) will energise itself to seek freedom. [27]

10Jordan then goes on to praise Bonaparte as a magnanimous chief and to list his glories: the fact that he has won all the laurels of victory so young, that he has seen the representatives of so many kings bow before him, that he is a man of such vast intellect. [28] But Jordan hopes that this young ruler can now be more relaxed in terms of state control. It is true, he notes, that certain acts of arbitrary arrest and slow justice (contrary to the Constitution) had been justified given the foreign wars and internal strife of the beginning of the Consulate. But now the time was ripe for fair justice, clear laws regarding freedom of the press, the abandonment of police surveillance. [29] And as for control of the army, Jordan argues for rewards, honours, and public recognition, such as which would bring absolute obedience “not to the man but to the constitutional power”. [30] Jordan ends his tract referring to the constitutional reform required by the alteration of the constitution to take on board the life consulship. He argues that a law was needed to regulate the manner of replacing the first magistrate. A footnote here states that “everyone knows that the Conseil d’état has discussed the giving to Bonaparte of the power to choose his successor, and that brochures and newspaper articles have openly advised heredity and that votes have been requested”. [31] Jordan even notes “can it be true, as some writings appear to indicate, that certain courtiers have meditated proposing the adoption of a title such as Emperor or Emperor of the Gauls. [32] Jordan goes on in rhetorical fashion hoping that his “speaking his mind” has not upset the Consul. And his final words run thus: “He himself [the Consul] will know how to distinguish the good in what I have said. […] Some respectable men have already been allowed to speak most of the truths I have recounted here to him, and he has simply respected them more, and has esteemed them much more than the flatterers who beset him. He will take pleasure in the generous language of the former, he will appreciate the purity of my motives.” [33]

11All this is quite remarkable for 1802. And perhaps more remarkable is the half censorship. It was still (almost) possible to speak clearly about the regime. And talk of the title of “Emperor of the Gauls” in 1802 is also quite unexpected. I shall keep my final comments on Jordan for my conclusion.

12I would now like to turn to the man whom Jordan caricatured as the one who has theoretised “the chaos of feudality as a masterpiece of social order”, Louis Gabriel Bonald, the father of modern Sociology and a political theorist of the counter revolution. He is described in the article on “Bonaparte” in the Biographie nouvelle des contemporains (1823) (edited by men relatively positive to Napoleon such as Antoine-Vincent Arnault, Jacques de Norvins, Antoine Jay, Étienne de Jouy) [34] as “le royaliste Bonald”. [35] In 1796, Bonald published in Constance his first magnum opus entitled Théorie de pouvoir politique et religieux, a particularly complex and abstract work, so much so that (as Norvins and company noted) “even those deeply versed in metaphysics have tried in vain to understand it”. [36] However the bits that could be understood (especially the tripartite definition of the ideal structure for political and religious power as Power/Minister/Subject) were recognised as so excessively counter revolutionary that the Directorial police had the 700 or so copies sent to a Parisian bookseller seized and pulped. [37] Now Bonald was keen to get a public for his ideas so not only did he send to booksellers but also private individuals. Even Joseph Sièyes got a copy on publication with a note encouraging the ardent republican to denounce his book if he didn’t like it and so bring the work the oxygen of publicity. [38] Nor was Sièyes the only politician to receive his personal copy. Napoleon got one too. Whilst the Biographie nouvelle placed this donation in the post-Campoformio euphoria, Bonald himself noted [39] that he had sent his copy of the Théorie to Napoléon in 1799, shortly after Napoleon’s return from Egypt, [40] when it was clear that he was the man of the moment. Bonald then published a condensed version of the Théorie entitled Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles de l’ordre social ou du pouvoir, du ministre et du sujet dans la société (Paris, 1800). We can imagine that Bonald’s championing of dictatorship coupled with a strong Catholic church would have been at least interesting to the First Consul. Nor should the fact that the Essai justifies the existence of a hereditary absolute monarchy and a privileged nobility lead us to imagine that Bonald looked to Louis XVIII. David Klinck in his monography on Bonald has noted how it was “part of counterrevolutionary mythology that those counterrevolutionaries who associated themselves with Napoleon after 18 Brumaire would have preferred to see Louis XVIII ruling France. Whether Bonald felt this way is unclear”. [41] In fact in the remarkable opening to the Essai, Bonald associates himself with Napoleon’s proclamation of the completion or finishing of the Revolution and provides a theoretical framework for the coming dictatorship of public safety. [42] Indeed it very much looks as if Bonald was trying to jump onto the Bonaparte bandwagon. This courting of the First Consul was also seen by contemporaries as important. Though the Biographie got the date wrong, the author of the entry on “Bonaparte” clearly thought that the event was important enough to put it in a biographical sketch. Nor did Bonald stop in 1800. His next publication was a strongly worded tract comparing the Treaty of Westphalia with Campoformio, greatly in Napoleon’s favour. [43] Bonald’s intellectual offensive was finally to come to fruition in 1803 when Napoleon finally made a gesture towards the scholar. After the émigrés had been granted an amnesty by the sénatus-consulte of 26 April 1802 (and indeed after the Concordat), Bonald swore his oath of allegiance to the Consulate in June and, Desmarest, divisional chief at the Police ministry, is said to have been commissioned by the First Consul to ask Bonald to reprint the Théorie at government expense. Whilst Frédéric Masson pours scorn on this supposed commission, [44] it is nevertheless singular that in a conversation recorded by Rœderer in 1803, the First Consul revealed his acquaintance with the scholar’s work, asking Roederer whether he had read Monsieur de Bonald’s Théorie de pouvoir politique and his De la Législation primitive, claiming that he (Napoleon) read everything that was published on such subjects. [45] Regardless of the fact that Bonald refused the offer of republication (apparently because he did not want change references in the book to Louis XVIII), [46] from now on Napoleon would regularly turn to Bonald, whether for his journalistic pen (Bonald was a regular contributor to the Mercure de France) or indeed to work for the regime. Bonaparte was clearly impressed by the academic’s legalistic prose. How could he not have been, given that Bonald was theoretising political and religious power in an absolute form, such as the empire would take post-1804? In late 1804 Napoleon was to approach Bonald via Fontanes for a detailed essay on international law and the freedom of the seas; Bonald declined. In October 1806, Bonald was offered the editorship of the Journal de l’Empire, which the scholar again passed up. As David Klinck has noted, Bonald is not refusing Napoleon for royal reasons. Bonald thought Napoleon was good enough as absolute ruler – and indeed in later publications (such as Discours sur la vie de Jésus-Christ of 1804) Bonald was to trumpet the fact that Napoleonic France was bringing political social and religious regeneration. His rejection of most of the Consul’s and later Emperor’s offers would appear to have been because the emperor wouldn’t follow him quite so far down his theoretical route.

13The three writers I have highlighted here are all linked by their position of critical support for the regime. And two out of the three were actually published (and not censored) in France during the Consulate; Jordan the most critical was the most persecuted. The texts are remarkable because they are contemporary with the Consulate and because they carry hints of the debates in salons and private houses as to what Napoleon thought he was doing, and to what certain, right-of-centre politicians thought he was doing. Two out of the three pinpoint liberty (notably of the press, but also from arbitrary arrest) as the key relaxation to be performed for the Consulate to continue its glorious path. But all three are in the main positive. The three texts are also unanimous in their attribution to Napoleon of a certain sort of kingship. Lacretelle and Jordan of course come from constitutionally monarchical backgrounds, but Bonald goes even further down the absolutist line. However, Napoleon had noted to Lacretelle that “at the end of the 18^th century, you cannot do what they did in the middle of the 17^th”, in other words following the British model was out of the question. Indeed, if Napoleon goes with any of the three here he goes with the absolutist Bonald after 1804 as he becomes “Emperor by the grace of God and according to the Constitution”.