French Consulate

• 1. Introduction

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  The French Consulate was the government of France from the 9th of November 1799 to the 18th of May 1804, a span of less than five years that changed the country permanently. On the night the coup of 18 Brumaire succeeded, a remnant of the Council of Ancients sat down and abolished the Constitution of the Year III. They replaced it with something new: a republic that placed all real executive power in a single set of hands.

  The man holding those hands was Napoleon Bonaparte. He did not call himself a king. He called himself First Consul. But the historian Robert B. Holtman would later describe those years as "one of the most important periods of all French history," and what Napoleon built during them outlasted him by generations.

  This documentary examines how a collapsing revolutionary government handed power to a general, how that general turned a three-man consulate into a personal rule, how he managed the church, the law, and public opinion, and why a royalist murder plot in a German border town ultimately pushed him from consul to emperor.

• 2. The Directory Falls

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  French military disasters in 1798 and 1799 cracked the foundation of the Directory long before November. Historians often trace the political unravelling to the 18th of June 1799, when the anti-Jacobin director Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, just one month in office, joined with Paul Barras to drive three colleagues from power. What replaced them was no improvement. The three new directors were seen by the anti-Jacobin elite as non-entities, and the reformed body still faced Chouan disturbances across a dozen departments in Brittany, Maine, and eventually Normandy, along with royalist insurrections in the south.

  Sieyès decided the Republic needed both a head and a sword. He wanted General Barthélemy Catherine Joubert as his military partner, but Joubert was killed at the Battle of Novi on the 15th of August 1799. Sieyès then turned to Bonaparte, who had just landed at Fréjus with the prestige of his eastern campaigns behind him.

  On the 9th of November 1799, Bonaparte led the coup, forcing the sitting directors to resign. The following night, the Council of Ancients abolished the old constitution, ordained the consulate, and gave legal shape to what had just happened by force.

• 3. Three Men, One Master

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  Sieyès had expected the coup to install his own constitutional vision. What he got instead was Napoleon's version of it. Bonaparte's tactic was to set Pierre Claude François Daunou's rival plan against Sieyès's, keep only the pieces useful to him, and discard the rest.

  The resulting structure looked collegial. Three consuls held executive authority, elected for ten years. Four legislative bodies handled the making of laws: a Council of State that drafted bills, a Tribunate that debated them without voting, a Corps législatif that voted without discussing them, and a Sénat conservateur that verified the bills and advised the First Consul. Popular suffrage remained, though filtered through lists of notables from which the Senate chose assembly members.

  Bonaparte's most decisive early move was to veto Sieyès's plan for a Grand Elector as supreme head of state, a position Sieyès had designed for himself. By killing that idea, Napoleon strengthened the consuls' authority, then made sure to be the only consul who mattered. The other two, Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun, were left weak and subservient.

  On the 7th of February 1800, a public referendum confirmed the new constitution with a claimed 99.9 percent approval. Bonaparte was genuinely popular after years of revolutionary strife, and his rapid disarmament of the Vendée and his offers of peace to the Second Coalition reinforced the feeling that a real statesman had finally arrived.

• 4. Crushing the Opposition

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  At the Battle of Marengo on the 14th of June 1800, France nearly suffered defeat before generals Louis Desaix and François Christophe de Kellermann secured the field. Bonaparte used the resulting surge in public enthusiasm to tighten his grip further.

  A royalist bomb plot on the rue Saint-Nicaise on the 24th of December gave him a sharper tool. Despite the innocence of the democratic republicans, they were deported to French Guiana in the aftermath. Bonaparte then annulled the Assemblies and made the Senate the supreme authority in constitutional matters, removing the one institutional body that had served as a check.

  The civilian opposition fared no better. Critics like Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël were expelled. General Moreau, Bonaparte's most credible military rival, was eventually compromised in a royalist plot and sent into exile. The Saint-Domingue expedition wore down what remained of the republican army's leadership. By steady pressure, Napoleon reduced every potential centre of opposition until, as the source records, "no suggestion of the possibility of his death was tolerated."

• 5. Church, Law, and Money

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  The Concordat of 1801 was drawn up, in Napoleon's own framing, not in the Catholic Church's interest but in his own. By satisfying the religious feeling of ordinary French people, he neutralised the constitutional democratic Church, rallied the consciences of the peasants, and stripped the royalists of their most potent appeal. The Organic Articles that followed quietly restored to a now-submissive Church her position as the religion of state, while she remained despoiled of her revenues.

  On the legal front, the Treaty of Lunéville with Austria, signed in February 1801, returned peace to Europe and gave Napoleon the political room to move against assembly opposition during debates on the Civil Code. Austria, after Moreau's victory at the Battle of Hohenlinden, yielded nearly the whole of Italy to France.

  Domestically, conditions improved in tangible ways. Paris had often suffered from hunger and scarce fuel before the Consulate; under Bonaparte, provisions became cheap and abundant, trade prospered, and wages rose. He created the Légion d'honneur, consolidated national institutions, built out universities, a judiciary, banking systems, and a professionally disciplined bureaucracy. He also restored indirect taxes, a move widely seen as a betrayal of revolutionary principles.

  The Peace of Amiens with Britain in March 1802 gave Napoleon the final justification he needed. Framing the peace as a gift from the nation, he used it to seek not a ten-year consulship but one for life. A second referendum on the 2nd of August 1802 returned a claimed 99.7 percent approval for his appointment as First Consul for Life. The Constitution of the Year X, dated the 4th of August 1802, made it official.

• 6. The Duke of Enghien

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  The plot against Bonaparte's life that began in 1804 was financed partly by the British government of William Pitt the Younger, which contributed one million pounds and naval transport to get the conspirators Georges Cadoudal and General Jean-Charles Pichegru back into France from England. The ship belonged to a Captain John Wesley Wright.

  Pichegru met General Moreau on the 28th of January 1804. The next day, a British secret agent named Courson was arrested. Under torture, he named Pichegru, Moreau, and Cadoudal as the principals. Bonaparte's police then tortured Louis Picot, Cadoudal's servant, for further details. General Joachim Murat ordered the gates of Paris closed each night from seven in the evening until six in the morning while the arrests proceeded.

  The investigation pointed toward the eventual participation of Louis Antoine de Bourbon, the Duke of Enghien, a young Bourbon prince living as an emigre in the Electorate of Baden, with a rented house at Ettenheim close to the French border. Possibly at the urging of foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord and police minister Joseph Fouché, who had warned that "the air is full of daggers," Bonaparte ordered two hundred French soldiers across the border to seize the Duke.

  At his military trial before seven colonels at Vincennes, d'Enghien stated that he was paid 4,200 pounds per year by Britain "in order to combat not France but a government to which his birth had made him hostile." He was found guilty under Article 2 of a law of the 6th of October 1791 and executed in the ditch of the fortress of Vincennes.

  The reaction in France was muted. Abroad it produced a storm of anger. Bonaparte always assumed full responsibility and continued to believe he had acted correctly. Within weeks, the path to empire was open.