WARNINGS TO ROYALISTS AND REPUBLICANS[28]
[Footnote 28: References: Pasquier: Memoirs; Fauriel: Les
derniers jours du Consulat; Desmarest: Temoignages
Historiques; Mehee de la Touche: Alliance des Jacobins de
France avec le Ministere Anglais; Cadoudal: La conspiration
de Georges Cadoudal; Lecestre: Lettres inedites; Tratchefski:
Recueil de la Societe d'Histoire de Russie; Pingaud: Les
dernieres annees de Moreau (Revue de Paris, 15 Dec., 1899);
Huot de Penanster: Une conspiration en l'an XI et XII;
Caudrillier: Le complot de l'an XII (Revue Historique,
1901-1902); Rose: Napoleon, I, 406 (quotes the original
papers in British archives); Paget Papers; Castlereagh:
Letters and Despatches; Pellew: Life of Lord Sidmouth, Earl
of St. Vincent; Welschinger: Le duc d'Enghien; Boulay de la
Meurthe: Les dernieres annees du duc d'Enghien; Sorel:
Lectures Historiques.]
Moreau and the Republicans -- Royalist Conspiracies -- Moreau's
Fall -- The Passion for Plotting -- Royalist Dissensions -- The
Duc d'Enghien -- His Plans and Conduct -- The Activity of the
French Police -- Appearances against Enghien -- The Expedition to
Seize Him -- His Imprisonment -- Arrival at Paris -- Bonaparte at
Malmaison -- The Commission to Try Enghien -- Bonaparte's
Decision -- Pleas for Clemency -- The Trial of Enghien -- The
Execution -- The First Consul's Explanations -- Disastrous
Effects of the Deed -- Revulsion of Feeling.
[Sidenote: 1803--04]
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, Fouche 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 Abbe David, was seized, but
no damaging evidence was obtained. Thereupon recourse was had to the
services of Mehee 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 Nivose, 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 Mehee'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. Recamier.
Rumor said that the notion originated with Fouche. 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 denouement 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 Conde." 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 Conde but had been dismissed from the Austrian service after
the treaty of Luneville. 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 Conde arrived
from England; still worse, they declared an emigrant friend of the
duke who lived near by--the aged Marquis of Thumery, 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.
Rumors of every sort became rife. It was known that the old intriguer
General Willot was again in the South. Men declared that Berry was
coming to Brittany, that Charles of Artois was perhaps already in Paris,
that Enghien and Dumouriez were on the eastern frontier. It was a
perfect investment of plots. When Georges was captured he asserted that
he was the associate of princes, and then relapsed into a profound
silence which he did not again break. His servant deposed that he had
seen his master in communication with a distinguished-looking youth in
the suburb of Chaillot. The police remembered that in January the Duc
d'Enghien had solicited from the French ambassador at Vienna a passport
to cross France, and, recalling the festivities at Ettenheim, believed
they were but a pretext to cover the host's absence in Paris at a time
which would coincide with the mysterious interview asserted to have
taken place between Georges and the unknown stranger. This was the chain
of evidence which convinced Bonaparte of Enghien's participation in the
plot for his assassination. True, he had not been in actual danger, for
the police had been alert; but did that alter the enormity of the
Bourbon intrigues against his life? It was only too natural that the
terror, hate, and fury accumulated in the mind of the First Consul
should concentrate on an object within his reach.
Real, Fouche, and Talleyrand were all consulted. As yet their personal
interests were bound up with their ruler's welfare, and alike they
urged prompt and ruthless action to end the schemes and complots of
the time. The two former needed no credentials of faithfulness.
Talleyrand gave his in writing on March eighth; he had so dallied with
royalists that his position must be definite now. Later efforts to
discredit the note as a forgery have failed. Moreover, there is every
reason to believe that all three intended by the seizure and execution
of a Bourbon so to "marry," as the phrase ran, the First Consul to the
terrorist side of the Revolution that he could never retreat from the
position of radicalism to which they felt he had not been sufficiently
committed, even yet. On March tenth the council heard and, as a body,
approved Bonaparte's plan, although Lebrun was evasive and Cambaceres
demurred. That night one column of a double expedition was despatched
to the Rhine; it was commanded by Ordener and destined for Ettenheim.
The other, under Caulaincourt, set out next day for Offenburg with a
diplomatic note to the court of Baden. The latter commander was
utterly ignorant of what his colleague had in hand, being instructed
merely to disperse the reported company of emigrants and demand the
extradition of a notorious intriguer, the Baronne de Reich. Ordener
was to seize the Duc d'Enghien. The two columns proceeded by way of
Strasburg without delay. Finding the baronne already a prisoner, and
the police report unfounded, the generals then carried out the minute
instructions of their chief as to the other part of their task.
On the twelfth, Enghien had been warned of his danger; but he was not
to be intimidated, and on the thirteenth he sent a messenger to
observe how immediate the danger was. On the fourteenth a French spy
was despatched from Strasburg; he was recognized as such at Ettenheim,
and was pursued, but escaped to report everything favorable. Still the
rash young duke refused to move. On the morning of the fifteenth he
awoke to find the house surrounded by French troops. Every avenue of
escape being closed, he surrendered, and all his papers were seized.
With his household and friends he was hurried to the citadel of
Strasburg, where he was detained for two days. Couriers were promptly
despatched to Paris, and the court at Karlsruhe received a formal
notification of what had been done, signed by Talleyrand. Bonaparte
learned by the despatches received on the seventeenth from both his
expeditions that Dumouriez was not on the Rhine, and on the nineteenth
he himself examined the duke's papers, which had been inventoried in
their owner's presence, and then forwarded to Malmaison.
On the night of the seventeenth there arrived in Strasburg orders,
written while Bonaparte still believed the reports concerning
Dumouriez to be true, which directed the immediate removal of the
prisoners--that is, of Enghien and Dumouriez--to Paris. In pursuance
of these the duke was awakened at midnight, placed in a post-chaise,
and driven rapidly toward his destination. He arrived at eleven in the
morning of the twentieth, and was immediately taken to Vincennes. His
seizure had created the deepest sorrow and consternation in Baden, and
Massias, the French minister at Karlsruhe, not only despatched a
letter direct to Paris declaring that the duke's conduct had always
been "innocent and moderate," but went in person to notify the prefect
at Strasburg that there was neither an assembly of emigrants nor a
conspiracy at Ettenheim. Talleyrand was afterward charged by Napoleon
with having suppressed Massias's despatch; and it is not known whether
the prefect sent a report to the same effect or not.
On the twelfth, the First Consul had withdrawn to the seclusion of
Malmaison. It was evident that under the surface there were tumultuous
feelings, but in his expression there was an icy calm. At times he
recited scraps of verse on the theme of clemency, but his chief
occupation was consulting with the police agent Real and with Savary,
his aide-de-camp. It was arranged that the castle of Vincennes should
be the prison, that the court should be military, composed of colonels
from the Paris garrison, and that the main charge against the duke
should be that he had borne arms against his country. He was to be
asked whether the plot for assassination was known to him, and if, in
case it had succeeded, he were not himself to have entered Alsace.
The court-martial was modeled on those pitiless tribunals created by
the Revolution. The statute declaring that any Frenchman taking up
arms against his country was a traitor and worthy of death had never
been repealed. The Consulate restored the activity of these military
commissions in order to tame refractory conscripts and condignly to
punish tamperers, conspirators, and spies. These courts had been
accustomed to take their cue as to severity or leniency from the
government for the time being, whatever it was. There was therefore
but little difficulty in constituting such a body expressly for the
punishment of any offender. In this instance none of the members
except the president and judge-advocate knew the station of the
accused. Preval, who had been chosen to preside, refused when he heard
the name of the prisoner, on the plea that both he and his father had
served in the royalist regiment named d'Enghien, and that he had
therefore tender memories incompatible with the service required of
him. General Hulin, an old-time Jacobin, made no excuses, and,
understanding perfectly what was expected, was invited to report the
verdict direct to the First Consul.
During these days Bonaparte had also constantly before him both the
papers of the English minister at Munich and the inflammatory,
untruthful reports of his police agents. He studied these, and
reviewed the measures taken to guard the eastern frontier against the
emigrants and their hostile sympathizers, who were making
demonstrations in Swabia. Until the evening of the seventeenth he
believed that Dumouriez had been at Ettenheim; but though informed of
his mistake, the resolution already taken became iron, and the papers
of the duke were read on the nineteenth with an evident determination
to construe them into evidence of his guilt. They afforded no proofs
of direct complicity with Georges, but they contained two phrases
which, wrested from the true sense of the correspondence, were of
awful significance--one in which the duke qualified the French people
as "his most cruel foe," the other in which he declared that during
his "two years' residence on the frontier he had established
communications with the French troops on the Rhine." These were
included in the interrogatories for the trial and intrusted to Real
for his use. If the duke were tampering with the loyalty of the
troops, what need of proof that he was in any sense a participator in
the plot?
Mme. Bonaparte learned with intense sorrow of the (p.~308)
determination taken by her husband. In the main his measures and his
convictions had been kept a secret, but she confided both to Mme. de
Remusat, and the First Consul himself had told them to Joseph. On the
twentieth the decree for the duke's trial and the questions to be put
were dictated by the First Consul from the Tuileries, and in the early
afternoon he returned to Malmaison, where at three o'clock Joseph
found him strolling in the park, conversing with Talleyrand, who
limped along at his side. "I'm afraid of that cripple," was
Josephine's greeting to her brother-in-law. "Interrupt this long talk
if you can." The mediation of the elder brother was kindly and
skilful, and for a time the First Consul seemed softened by the
memories of their boyhood, among which came and went the figure of the
Prince of Conde. But other feelings prevailed: the brothers had
differed about Lucien's marriage, and also about the question of
descent if the consular power should become hereditary; the old
coolness finally settled down and chilled the last hopes in the
tenderhearted advocates for clemency. To Josephine's tearful
entreaties her husband replied: "Go away; you're a child; you don't
understand public duties." By five it was known that the duke had
arrived at Vincennes, and at once Savary was despatched to the city
for orders from Murat, the military commandant. On his arrival at
Murat's office, from which Talleyrand was in the very act of
departing, he was informed that the court-martial was already
convened, and that it would be his duty to guard the prisoner and
execute whatever sentence was passed.
The scenes of that fateful and doleful night defy description. The
castle of Vincennes was beset with guards when finally, at about an
hour before midnight, the various members of the court assembled.
Their looks were dark and troubled as they wondered who the
mysterious culprit might be. None knew but Hulin, the president; the
judge-advocate; and Savary, the destined executioner. In a neighboring
room was the duke, pale and exhausted by his long journey, munching a
slender meal, which he shared with his dog, and explaining to his
jailer his dreary forebodings at the prospect of a long imprisonment.
He thought it would be ameliorated if only he could gratify his
passion for hunting, and surely they two, as prisoner and keeper,
might range the forest in company. But at last he fell asleep from
sheer fatigue. The jailer could not well encourage the expectations of
his new prisoner, for he had that very morning supervised the digging
of a grave in the castle moat. At midnight the duke was awakened and
confronted with the judge-advocate. Real was unaccountably absent, and
the interrogatory so carefully prepared by Bonaparte was not at hand.
To the rude questions formulated by Hulin, with the aid of a
memorandum from Murat, the prisoner, in spite of repeated hints from
the members of the court-martial as to the consequences, would only
reply that he had a pension from England, and had applied to her
ministers for military service; that he hoped to fight for his cause
with troops raised in Germany from among the disaffected and the
emigrants; that he had already fought against France. But he stoutly
denied any relations with Dumouriez or Pichegru and all knowledge of
the plot to assassinate the First Consul. He was then called to the
bar in the dimly lighted sitting-room where the commission sat. To the
papers containing questions and answers he was ironically permitted to
affix a demand for an audience with the First Consul. "My name, my
station, my mode of thought, and the horror of my situation," he said,
"inspire me with hope that he will not refuse my request." The
tribunal followed its instincts: its members, knowing well the
familiar statutes under which such bodies had acted since the days of
the Convention, but not having at hand the words or forms of a verdict
as prescribed by the pitiless laws concerning those who had borne arms
against France, left in the record a blank to be filled out later, and
pronounced their judgment that the "regular sentence" be executed at
once. They were actually engaged in composing a petition for clemency
to the First Consul when Savary burst into the room, demanding what
had been done, and what they were then doing. Snatching the pen from
Hulin's hand, he exclaimed, "The rest is my affair," and left the
room.
It was now two in the morning of the twenty-first. "Follow me," said
the taciturn Harel to Enghien, "and summon all your courage." A few
paces through the moat, a turn of a corner, and the flare of torches
displayed a file of troops not far from an open grave. As the adjutant
began to read the sentence, the victim faltered for a moment and
exclaimed, "Oh, God! what have I done?" But immediately he regained
the mastery of himself. Calmly clipping a lock of his hair, and
drawing a ring from his finger, he asked that they might be sent to
the Princess Charlotte. A volley--and in an instant he was dead.
Savary put spurs to his horse to carry the news to Malmaison. At the
gate of Paris he met the carriage of Real, who seemed almost
overpowered by what he heard in reply to his eager questions, and
terrified by his own remissness. If it really were such, it must be
attributed to a misunderstanding and not to lack of zeal.
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 Conde. Long afterward he dictated to Meneval, "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.