Coup of 18 Brumaire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Coup of 18 Brumaire took place on the 9th of November 1799, and by the end of that single night, the French Revolution was over. A man who had been fighting wars in Egypt weeks earlier now stood as First Consul of France. The Directory, the five-man governing body that had ruled the republic, was gone. What replaced it would eventually become an empire.

  How did Napoleon Bonaparte go from returning general to supreme ruler in just two days? How did a plot designed by someone else end up serving Napoleon's interests entirely? And what happened inside the legislative chambers when Napoleon tried to speak and nearly fainted from the fury of the crowd?

• 2. A Republic Under Strain

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  Habsburg-controlled Austria declared war on France on the 12th of March 1799, triggering a cascade of emergency measures that reshaped French politics. The pro-war Jacobin faction, known as the Montagnards, swept the French legislative elections held that April. France's best army and its most celebrated general were thousands of miles away, engaged in the invasion of Egypt and Syria, and the republic suffered a string of military setbacks through the spring and summer.

  The Coup of 30 Prairial VII, on the 18th of June, broke the Jacobins' grip and elevated Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, one of the five Directory members, to the dominant position in government. France's fortunes on the battlefield recovered after the Second Battle of Zurich. As the threat of foreign invasion faded, the Jacobins grew anxious about a resurgence of the royalist faction, which had always favored peace.

  When Napoleon landed back in France on the 9th of October, both the Jacobins and the royalists greeted him as the country's savior. Sieyès, who had already been planning a coup, saw in Napoleon the military muscle his scheme required. What Sieyès could not have anticipated was that Napoleon had already begun planning a coup against the coup itself.

• 3. The Plot Within the Plot

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  Sieyès believed he had found a compliant general who would front his constitutional redesign. Napoleon believed something different entirely. From the moment he returned to Paris, he worked quietly to steer the conspiracy toward his own ends rather than Sieyès's.

  The army posed the most serious obstacle. General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan was a committed republican who would not easily side with conspirators. General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte harbored his own ambitions and considered himself fit to govern France. Napoleon handled each man carefully, concealing his true intentions while keeping them off balance. Troops were moved into positions around Paris before either legislative chamber had any reason for alarm.

  The plan, as Sieyès conceived it, had two steps. First, persuade the five Directors to resign voluntarily. Second, convince the Council of Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred to appoint a commission that would draft a new constitution favorable to the plotters. It was a parliamentary maneuver, not a military one. The general was supposed to be scenery. He had other ideas.

• 4. Day One: The Councils Depart

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  On the morning of the 18th of Brumaire, Lucien Bonaparte stood before the Council of Five Hundred in his role as its president and delivered a fabrication. He told the assembled deputies that a Jacobin coup was already under way in Paris, and persuaded them to relocate to the Château de Saint-Cloud, a suburban palace safely outside the city. Napoleon was formally entrusted with the protection of both legislative councils and given command of all available local troops.

  Later that same morning, Sieyès and Roger Ducos resigned from the Directory. The former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who was a close ally of Napoleon's, applied pressure on Director Paul Barras until he too resigned. Three resignations from a five-man body meant no quorum was possible. The Directory effectively ceased to function.

  The remaining two Directors, Louis-Jérôme Gohier and Jean-François-Auguste Moulin, both Jacobins, refused to go quietly and continued to protest. They were arrested the following morning by General Jean Victor Marie Moreau, one of Napoleon's allies, and by the day after that, they had been compelled to give up entirely. The legislative councils, however, proved far more resistant than the plotters had expected.

• 5. The Chamber Turns Violent

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  By the morning of the 19th of Brumaire, the deputies had worked out what was actually happening. They were not being sheltered from a Jacobin rebellion. They were being herded into a coup. Napoleon walked into their chambers with a small escort of grenadiers, perhaps hoping that his presence alone would settle things.

  He was heckled from the moment he began speaking. When he told the Council of Ancients that the Republic had no government and that the Revolution was over, one deputy called out: "And the Constitution?" Napoleon's reply cited three earlier parliamentary coups by their Republican calendar dates: the 18th of Fructidor, the 22nd of Floreal, and the 30th of Prairial. He declared that the deputies themselves had destroyed the constitution and that it no longer commanded anyone's respect.

  The Council of Five Hundred received him with outright hostility. His grenadiers entered just as the Jacobins were challenging the legality of Barras's resignation. Napoleon was jostled and then physically assaulted. By some accounts, he nearly fainted. It was Lucien, still president of the council, who intervened by calling on the soldiers to protect their commander. Napoleon escaped, but only because soldiers removed him by force.

  A motion was raised to declare Napoleon an outlaw. Lucien then slipped outside and told the guards that a faction of deputies inside was terrorizing the majority, brandishing daggers. He pointed to Napoleon's bloodied, pallid face as evidence, though at least one account suggests Napoleon had scratched his own face in frustration until he drew blood. Lucien then drew a sword and theatrically swore he would run it through his own brother's heart if Napoleon proved a traitor to France. General Joachim Murat led grenadiers into the Orangerie and dispersed the council by force.

• 6. Constitution of the Year VIII

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  With the Five Hundred scattered, the plotters assembled two commissions, each drawing twenty-five deputies from the two councils. These commissions were effectively intimidated into declaring a provisional government, the consulate, with Napoleon, Sieyès, and Ducos as its three consuls. The streets of Paris produced no uprising. The Revolution, as one observer put it, was indeed over.

  A contemporary account, quoted widely since, captured the national mood: "A shabby compound of brute force and imposture, the 18th Brumaire was nevertheless condoned, nay applauded, by the French nation. Weary of revolution, men sought no more than to be wisely and firmly governed."

  Resistance from Jacobin officeholders in the provinces was suppressed quickly. Twenty Jacobin deputies were sent into exile and others were arrested. The commissions drafted what was called the short and obscure Constitution of the Year VIII, the first French constitution since the Revolution to carry no Declaration of Rights.

  Napoleon's final stroke was in the constitution itself. The document gave the First Consul, the position he was certain to occupy, more power than either of the other two consuls. He controlled appointments to the Senate, and the Senate controlled interpretation of the constitution. A body called the Sénat conservateur allowed him to rule by decree. The more independent Conseil d'État and Tribunat were reduced to negligible roles. Sieyès had designed a system to constrain a general. Napoleon had used it to crown himself in all but name, a step that would become formal when the First French Empire was proclaimed.

• 7. What Marx Made of It

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  In 1852, Karl Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a work provoked not by the original coup but by the 1851 seizure of power by Napoleon's nephew, Napoleon III. Marx regarded Napoleon III as a small figure attempting to repeat a world-historical event, and he opened the essay with one of his most quoted observations. He cited Hegel's remark that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice, then added what Hegel had forgotten: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

  In 1931, the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte returned to the original coup in his book Coup d'État: The Technique of Revolution. Malaparte devoted a chapter to the 18th of Brumaire and offered a sharply deflating portrait: in his reading, Napoleon was an awkward and cautious man whose victory owed more to the quick thinking of those around him than to any brilliance of his own. Lucien Bonaparte's theatrical sword vow and Murat's march into the Orangerie fit that reading well enough. The man who ended the French Revolution may have been saved, at the decisive moment, by his brother.