The Sword of Honor; or, The Foundation of the French Republic

All his assurance notwithstanding, General Bonaparte fell back before the outburst produced by his and his soldiers' presence. He removed his hat and signified that he wished to speak. He made to cross the sill of the entrance, when Representative Bigonnet sprang before him, and, barring his passage and that of his armed escort, cried:

"Back – back, rash man! Leave this place at once; you violate the sanctuary of the law!"

The attitude of the Representative of the people, his forceful accents, made their impression upon General Bonaparte. He paled, hesitated, and stopped. A new outburst of indignation resounded in the hall:

"Down with the dictator!"

"Outlaw the audacious fellow!"

"Long live the Constitution!"

"Let us die at our post; long live the Republic!"

Controlling the passion which boiled within him, General Bonaparte shook his head haughtily, and seemed again, by a commanding gesture, to ask for the floor. Once more he essayed to cross the threshold of the hall, followed by his staff, when again several Representatives threw themselves in front of him, forcing him to retire; and Citizen Destrem called in a voice choked with indignation:

"General, did you, then, only conquer in order to insult the national representation?"

Anew, and with redoubled energy, the cries broke out of "Long live the Constitution! Outlaw the dictator!"

White with fear and at a loss what to do, Bonaparte recoiled before the universal reprobation displayed against him. His boldness no longer swayed the situation; he made a sign to his officers, several of whom had carried their clenched hands to their sabers, and he and they withdrew.

Lucien Bonaparte, the secret accomplice of his brother's intrigue against the liberties of the land, and who had followed with anguish the diverse incidents of the preceding scene, seemed stricken with consternation at the General's retreat. The great uproar which continued after the departure of Bonaparte gradually calmed down, and little by little peace was restored on the benches of the national representatives.

No sooner had quiet come upon the assembly, however, than a grenadier captain burst into the hall, leaving his platoon standing in the hallway. He marched rapidly towards the group in the middle of which stood Lucien Bonaparte, answering a vehement cross fire of questions from his colleagues with a vehemence no less than theirs. The captain approached Lucien, spoke a few words in his ear, and the young man hastened from the hall, followed by the captain and his escort. This new violation of the council-chamber of the Five Hundred was so sudden, the departure of their president so unexpected, that the Representatives of the people at first were dumb with astonishment. Then a full-throated cry burst forth, "We are betrayed! Our president has gone over to General Bonaparte!" The agitation of the assembly was tremendous.

Lucien Bonaparte, on the other hand, surrounded by his escort of soldiers, marched rapidly from the hall of the Five Hundred towards a large assemblage of troops drawn up in the middle of the park of St. Cloud. A great drove of people, inhabitants of the commune or arrivals from Paris, drawn thither by curiosity, crowded behind the ranks of soldiers; among these spectators were John Lebrenn and Duresnel. Bonaparte and his staff were in front of the troops. The General was pale and seemed a prey to keen anxiety; for the rumor had spread among the throng of onlookers and the soldiers that he had just been outlawed by the Council of Five Hundred. When Lucien, feigning intense indignation, ran up and spoke to his brother, his first words reassured and put new heart into the would-be dictator. Assuredly, failing of Lucien's presence of mind, the fortune of that day would have gone against the house of Bonaparte, for the youngster at once faced the troops and cried, in ringing tones:

"Citizens! Soldiers! I, president of the Council of Five Hundred, declare to you that the majority of the Council is at this moment under the terror of several Representatives armed with stilettos, who besiege the tribunal, threatening their fellow-members with death, and carrying on the most frightful deliberations.

"Soldiers," he continued, "I declare to you that these audacious brigands, who are without doubt sold to England, have set themselves up in rebellion against the Council of Ancients; they have dared to declare a sentence of outlawry against the general charged to execute its decree, just as if we were still living in the frightful times of the Reign of Terror, when that one word – 'outlaw' – sufficed to cause the dearest heads of the fatherland to fall under the knife."

The aides and generals about Bonaparte began to utter threats against the members of the Council of Five Hundred. Colonel Oliver, drawing his sword and brandishing it aloft, cried:

"These bandits must be put an end to!"

"Aye! Aye!" replied several voices from the ranks of the soldiery. "Long live General Bonaparte!"

"Soldiers, I declare to you," continued Lucien, "that this little handful of rabid Representatives has read itself outside the law by its assaults on the liberty of the Council. Well, in the name of that people which is a by-word with this miserable spawn of the Terror, I confide to you, brave soldiers, the necessity of delivering the majority of its Representatives, so that, freed by the bayonet from the stiletto, they may deliberate on the welfare of the Republic."

Prolonged acclamation on the part of the officers and soldiers greeted these words of Lucien's. Exasperation ran high against the 'Representatives of the stiletto.' "The villains," exclaimed several soldiers, "it is with poniard at throat that they have forced the others to decree our general an outlaw. They should be shot on the spot! Death to the assassins! To the firing squad with these aristocrats."

Noticing that his brother was more and more regaining his confidence, at the success of this jugglery with facts, Lucien continued, addressing him at first:

"General! And you, soldiers! You shall not recognize as legislators of France any but those who follow me. As to those who remain in the Orangery, let force be invoked to expel them. These folks are no longer Representatives of the people, but Representatives of the poniard. Let that title stick to them – let it follow them forever, and when they dare to show themselves before the people, let all fingers point them out under that well-deserved designation, 'Representatives of the poniard'! Long live the Republic!"

While Lucien was thus haranguing his brother's troops, the Representatives of the people, no longer doubting the complicity of their president in the schemes of the aspiring dictator, and beset by inexpressible anxiety, set about averting the evils which they felt impending. Motion after motion followed hard upon one another, and passed unnoticed amid the tumult.

"Let us die for liberty!" "Outlawry for the dictator!" "Long live the Constitution!" "Long live the Republic!" Such were the cries that rang within the Orangery.

All at once the roll of drums was heard approaching, then the heavy and regular tread of a marching army. The Orangery door was battered down with the butts of muskets. General Leclerc, his sword drawn, entered, followed by grenadiers. At this apparition, a death-like stillness fell as if by enchantment upon the assembly. The Representatives, calm and grave, regained their benches, where they sat immovable as the Senators of ancient Rome. Right, succumbing to the blows of brutal force, protested as it fell, and denounced Iniquity triumphant, a denunciation which will ring through the ages.

From the tribunal General Leclerc gave the word of command:

"In the name of General Bonaparte, the Council of Five Hundred is dissolved. Let all good citizens retire. Forward, grenadiers! Strike for the breast!"

The grenadiers swarmed down the length of the hall, presenting the points of their bayonets to the breasts of the elected legislators of the nation. Most of the Representatives of the people fell back slowly, step by step, still facing the soldiers and crying "Long live the Republic!" Others threw themselves upon the bayonet-blades; but the grenadiers raised their guns and dragged the Representatives out of the hall.

Caesar triumphed; but the day of Brutus will come! Execration on Bonaparte!

Such were the days of Brumaire.

CHAPTER VII

GLORY; AND ELBA

The war, immediately after the Brumaire coup d'etat, was pushed with vigor. Moreau received the commandership-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine, and Bonaparte, on the 16th Floreal of the same year (May 6, 1800), left Paris to put himself at the head of the Army of Italy. On the 25th Prairial (June 14), he achieved the brilliant victory of Marengo, which, completing the work begun under the Directorate, expelled the Austrians from Italy.

Between January 8, 1801, and the 25th of March, 1802, the various powers at war with France were one by one forced to sue for peace. The first treaty was signed by England at Amiens. The peace was to be short-lived, but Bonaparte improved his days of calm to restore a great part of the abuses overthrown by the Revolution, and to lay the foundations for his future hereditary power. Himself a sceptic, but considering religion in the light of an instrument of domination, he treated with the Pope of Rome toward the end of re-establishing Catholicism in all its splendor. He founded the order of the Legion of Honor, a ridiculous and anti-democratic body, and in so much a restoration of social inequality. Shortly thereafter the Revolutionary calendar was replaced by the Gregorian; in short, the First Consul set himself against the current of public opinion, by returning, more and more, to the traditions of the Old Regime.

On May 6, 1802, the Tribunate promulgated the suggestion that the powers of the First Consul be extended for ten years; and two months later upon motion of the Senate, the docile tool of Bonaparte, he was voted the Consulate for life. Pope Pius VII came to Paris to anoint and crown the brow of Napoleon, Emperor of the French by the grace of God.

The consequences of the restoration of hereditary monarchy in France were not long to await. One by one Napoleon forcibly seized all the budding republics of Europe which the breath of the Revolution had fanned into being, and bestowed them as benefices upon his family. Part of Italy, incorporated into France, was given into the vice-regency of Prince Eugene Beauharnais, the Emperor's brother-in-law; and one of the Emperor's sisters received the Duchy of Modena.

The 11th of April, 1803, was marked by a new coalition between England, Austria and Russia. For a moment bent on a descent upon England, Napoleon abandoned the adventurous project. Recalled from Boulogne to face a war on the continent, Bonaparte, whose military genius still attended him, gained on the 2nd of December, 1805, the wonderful victory of Austerlitz. Peace was again imposed upon Austria; on the 26th of the same month she signed the treaty of Presburg by which she surrendered enormous slices of territory.

In 1806 the King of Naples broke his treaties with France. He was summarily dispossessed of his throne to the profit of Joseph Bonaparte, brother to Napoleon. A short time thereafter, the republic of Batavia was presented to Louis Bonaparte, another brother.

Now dreaming of universal empire, and retrograding toward the era of feudal barbarism, Napoleon attached foreign duchy after foreign duchy as fiefs to his throne. His continual inroads into the neighboring territories rekindled the war. A fourth coalition was formed against the Empire. Prussia, neutral in the previous war, this time took an active part; but October 14, 1806, saw her crushing defeat at Jena; on the 26th the French army entered Berlin in triumph.

Russia, defeated at Friedland and at Eylau, begged for peace; it was concluded at Tilsitt, June 21, 1807.

At each of these new and crowning victories Napoleon's vertigo grew. Drunk with constant success, a universal monarchy now became his fixed idea, and still another of his brothers, Jerome Bonaparte, was invested with a kingdom formed out of several states of the Germanic Confederation. The single member of the Bonaparte family who took no part in the rich quarry of thrones distributed by the conqueror was Lucien. Did he seek thus voluntarily to expiate his complicity in the events of Brumaire, or was he victim to the Emperor's ingratitude? Lucien received not a single crown out of the booty.

Napoleon's return to the traditions of the Old Regime, even to those most execrated by the nation, became more and more extravagant. For instance, the right of primogeniture, abolished by the Revolution, was re-established. This iniquity, from the point of view of society and of the family, was forced upon the Emperor by the logic of his mistakes: if he reconstituted the nobility, he could not but ensure its existence by restricting the partition of property.

On March 1st, 1813, the Prussian government, yielding to the public voice of Germany, which was ever more and more hostile to Napoleon, gave the signal for treachery by breaking its alliance with the French Empire and again joining hands with England and Russia. The new coalition was reinforced by Sweden, where Bernadotte, the old general of the Republic, had become King. The victories of Lutzen and Bautzen at first seemed to assure Napoleon's success. Austria proffered its mediation to the belligerent parties, and they concluded, on June 4, 1813, the armistice of Plessewitz. A congress, in session at Prague, offered Napoleon as national limits those won by the armies of the Republic – the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Alps. But Napoleon rejected the proposal with disdain; he feared to lose by it his prestige in the eyes of the world and of France, which he believed he could hold in subjection only by the glamor of his victories.

The war recommenced, but soon, blow upon blow, began the reverses. Macdonald was defeated in Silesia, Ney in Prussia, Vandamme at Culm. The princes of the Germanic Confederation, encouraged by these checks, and yielding to the pressure of their people, abandoned Napoleon on the battle-field of Leipzig. They turned their troops against him. The French army, in full rout, retreated within its frontiers, October 31, 1813; soon the allies threatened them even there. Napoleon rushed to Paris on November 9th, and ordered new levies of troops. Thousands of families, at extortionate prices, had previously bought off their sons from conscription. This last draft took them all. The Corsican ogre devoured the whole generation.

The situation was desperate. The Austrians advanced by way of Italy and through Switzerland; the English, masters of Spain and Portugal, poured over the Pyrenees, under the command of Wellington; the Prussians, led by Bluecher, invaded Frankfort; and the army of the North, with Bernadotte at its head, penetrated France by way of Belgium. In vain the French soldiers performed miracles of valor; in vain were the Prussians annihilated at Montmirail, at Champaubert, and at Chateau-Thierry, and the Austrians overthrown at Montereau. These sterile victories were the final effort of Napoleon's warrior genius.

On the 30th of March, 1814, the foreign armies entered the capital, a shame which France had undergone but once before across the ages, under the monarchy, in the reign of King John. Talleyrand and Fouché, so long the servile tools of their master, were the first to betray him. On April 11, 1814, Napoleon abdicated the Empire after a reign of ten years.

The Senate, whose conduct during the Empire had been marked with abject servility, put the final touches to its ignominy by decreeing with the following justifications the deposition of the man of whom its own members had been the accomplices:

The Senate Conservator,

Considering, That under a constitutional monarchy the monarch exists only in virtue of the Constitution, or the social contract;

That Napoleon Bonaparte, for some time head of a firm and prudent government, gave to the nation and his subjects reason to depend for the future upon his wisdom and justice; but thereupon he sundered the pact which bound the French people, notably by levying imposts and establishing taxes not warranted by the law, and against the expressed tenor of the oath which he swore to before his ascension to the throne, according to Article 43 of the Act of Constitution of the 28th Floreal, year XII;

That he committed this assault upon the rights of the people just when he had without necessity adjourned the legislative body and had caused to be suppressed as criminal a report of that body in which it contested his title and his part in the national representation;

That he undertook a series of wars in violation of Article 50 of the Constitutional Act of the 22nd Frimaire, year VIII, which states that declarations of war must be moved, discussed, decreed and promulgated the same as laws;

That he unconstitutionally rendered several decrees carrying the penalty of death, namely the decrees of the 5th of March, last; that he presumed to consider national a war which he entered upon in the interest alone of his own unbridled ambition;

That he violated the laws and the Constitution by his decrees on State Prisons;

That he has abolished ministerial responsibility, confounded all powers, and destroyed the independence of the judiciary;

Considering, That the liberty of the press, established and consecrated as one of the rights of the nation, has been constantly subjected to the arbitrary censorship of the police, and that at the same time he has made use of the press to fill France and all Europe with contradicted facts, false maxims, doctrines favorable to despotism, and outrages against foreign governments;

That acts and reports rendered by the Senate have been caused to be garbled in publication;

Considering, That, in place of reigning with an eye singly to the interest, the happiness and the glory of the French people and in accordance with the words of his oath, Napoleon has heaped high the woes of the fatherland by his refusal to treat upon conditions which the national interests bade him accept, and which would have compromised neither French honor nor the interests of the nation;

By the abuse he has made of all the resources of men and of money that have been confided to him;

By his abandoning of the wounded without medical attention, without assistance, and without food;

By various measures, the result of which has been the ruin of cities, the misery and depopulation of the country districts, famine and contagious diseases;

Considering, That, by all these causes, the Imperial Government, established by the Senate-Consulate on the 28th Floreal, year XII, has ceased to exist, and that the manifest will of all the French calls for an order of things whose first result shall be the re-establishment of general peace and which may be also an epoch of solemn reconciliation among all the states of the great European family,

The Senate declares and decrees as follows:

Article 1. – Napoleon Bonaparte is deposed from the throne, and the hereditary right set up in his family is abolished. The French people and the army are released from their oath of fidelity towards Napoleon Bonaparte, who has ceased to be Emperor.

The heart rises with indignation and disgust at the thought of the shamefulness of these miserable senators. Not alone did not one among them dare to protest, even by his silence, against these acts which they now condemned, but these very acts in their time had had no more vociferous upholders than they themselves.

One last test was reserved for France and Napoleon. The latter was furnished later (in 1815) with the opportunity to expiate and redeem the past. His monarchical pride, his hatred for the Revolution both contrived to render impossible this supreme expiation, and a terrible chastisement fell upon him. In 1814 Bonaparte, although his throne was forfeit, was recognized sovereign of the island of Elba. The coalized Kings assigned him that place as a residence, and thither, attended by several officers and soldiers faithful to him in his misfortune, he repaired.

So great was the need felt by France for peace, repose, and independence, after these ten years of warfare and hard service, that in spite of her profound aversion for the Bourbons, their return was hailed with joy. The kingdom of 1814, a new usurpation of the sole, indivisible, indefeasable and inalienable sovereignty of the people, consecrated again the iniquitous principle of monarchy, against which the republican minority in vain protested.

Louis XVIII, accordingly, made his solemn entry into Paris on the 3rd of May, 1814, in the midst of the princes of his family, escorted by the greater part of the Marshals of the Empire, among whom mingled Emigrants and foreign generals: legitimate punishment to Napoleon!

The Bourbons deeply wounded the sentiment of the nation by a return to the usages of the Old Regime and by outrages against the acts of the Revolution. Decrees restored to the Emigrants the estates and property that had not yet been sold; the loans contracted by Louis XVIII in various countries were placed among the debts of the state. Ordinances prescribed the observation of church days and Sundays; the censorship was retained almost as rigorous as under the Empire. Processions commenced again to circulate about the churches. Thus the royal government in a short space became as odious as the imperial government had been. Several military conspiracies were organized. One faction of the bourgeoisie thought of calling to the throne the Duke of Orleans, while the republican party thought, on its part, to turn the trend of events to its own profit. But, as has well been said, the fate of France lay in the hands of the army, attached to Napoleon by the privileges he had showered upon it, and by the memories of its glory. The people, long grown disused to political life, switched off by Napoleon, and wounded by the Bourbons in its revolutionary instincts, lay inert, all save a few old patriots of the illustrious days of the Revolution. The army alone, then, was the deciding factor in the fate of the Restoration. Such was the state of mind in France from the 3rd of May, 1814, the day of Louis XVIII's entry into Paris, up to the beginning of the month of March, 1815, at which period begins our next chapter.

CHAPTER VIII

RETURN OF NAPOLEON

It was ten o'clock in the morning of the 20th day of March, of the year 1815. Monsieur Desmarais and his brother-in-law, Monsieur Hubert, were awaiting in a chamber of the Tuileries an audience which they had requested with the Duke of Blacas, minister to Louis XVIII, and his most intimate favorite. They had anticipated the hour of the interview, in order to arrive among the first; for great was the throng of solicitants which sought Monsieur Blacas, whose recommendation was all-powerful with the King. Desmarais and Hubert were dressed in the costume of peers of the realm of France. The former, first senator under the Consulate, then under the Empire, had been besides created a Count by Napoleon. Thus, turned royalist, just as he had been Bonapartist (and, to retrace his political career, Thermidorean, Terrorist, Jacobin, and first of all Constitutional), Count Desmarais owed to his recent royalist devotion the fact that he had been included in the list of senators who were made peers of France since the Bourbon return. He was now in his sixty-ninth year; his careworn, bitter features began to show the weakening hand of age. Hubert, on the contrary, seemed lively and brisk as ever. He had become the possessor of an enormous fortune, thanks to his purveyorship under the Directorate, while he was a member of the Council of Ancients. He had curried no favors at the hand of the Empire, whose absolutism conflicted with his political principles; his ideal government had always been a constitutional King, subordinated to an oligarchy of bourgeois. Hubert had been one of a batch of large proprietors whom Louis XVIII had in one day admitted to the Chamber of Peers; but he had not been long in alienating himself from the government of the Restoration, which was piling fault upon fault; he accordingly attached himself to the Orleanist faction.

While awaiting their audience with Minister Blacas, the two were engaged in a political discussion. Soon there entered Fouché, in tow of an usher. "You will inform his Excellency that the Duke of Otranto begs an audience with him," said Fouché to the usher. The usher bowed and disappeared into the ante-room, while the new Duke exclaimed: