Plot of the rue Saint-Nicaise

• 1. Introduction

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  On Christmas Eve of 1800, a fourteen-year-old girl named Marianne Peusol was paid twelve sous to hold a horse in the rue Saint-Nicaise, in Paris. She did not know what was in the cart the horse was pulling. She did not know that the men who had hired her were royalist Chouans who had packed a wine cask with gunpowder, flammable materials, and bullets. And she did not survive what came next.

  The machine infernale plot, also called the Plot of the rue Saint-Nicaise, was an attempt to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul of France. It came less than three months after a separate Royalist conspiracy, the conspiration des poignards of the 10th of October 1800. The explosion that night on Christmas Eve killed five people and wounded twenty-six others. Napoleon's carriage had passed through that same street only seconds before.

  What follows is the story of who planned the attack, how a sleeping Napoleon experienced the blast as a dream, and how the First Consul's furious response swept up entirely the wrong people in its wake.

• 2. The Infernal Device

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  The name "machine infernale" was not invented for this plot. It reached back more than two centuries, to a siege in Flanders in 1585. During the Siege of Antwerp by the Spaniards, an Italian engineer in Spanish service had built the original device: a barrel bound with iron hoops, packed with gunpowder, flammable materials, and bullets, set off by a blunderbuss triggered from a distance by a string. That engineer called it la macchina infernale.

  The Chouans who revived the concept in 1800 adapted it for the streets of Paris. Their weapon was a large wine cask loaded onto a cart and harnessed to a mare. On the late afternoon of 3 Nivose Year IX of the French Republic, the plotter Francois-Joseph Carbon, described as a stocky man with a fair beard and a scar on his brow, drove the cart with his co-conspirator Limoëlan to the Porte Saint-Denis on the northern outskirts of Paris. There, in a deserted building, they loaded the cask with gunpowder.

  Carbon had fought in the wars of the Vendee under the rebel leader Louis-Auguste-Victor, Count de Ghaisnes de Bourmont. He was not one of the original seven planners. Limoëlan and Saint-Regeant, who had been personally charged by Chouannerie leader Georges Cadoudal with killing Napoleon, had recruited Carbon precisely because he knew how to build the thing.

• 3. The Seven Plotters

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  Georges Cadoudal, born in 1771, led the Chouannerie movement and was the architect of the assassination scheme. He had designated two men to carry out the killing: Pierre Picot de Limoëlan, born in 1768 and the son of a guillotined royalist nobleman, and Pierre Robinault de Saint-Regeant, also born in 1768, a committed supporter of Louis XVIII who had previously tried to stir revolt in western France and had publicly torn up Napoleon's offer of amnesty to the Vendeans.

  Jean-Baptiste Coster, born in 1771 and known as Saint-Victor, was one of Cadoudal's ablest lieutenants. The remaining three plotters were the noblemen Joyaux d'Assas, Jerome Petion de Villeneuve, and La Haye-Saint-Hilaire.

  Limoëlan positioned himself in the Place du Carrousel on the night of the attack, where he could see the rue Saint-Nicaise and signal to Saint-Regeant when to light the fuse. Saint-Regeant, waiting beside the cart in the street, paid Peusol her twelve sous and took his position. But Limoëlan panicked. He saw the leading grenadiers of Napoleon's cavalry escort ride past and failed to give the signal. Saint-Regeant, losing a minute or two, lit the fuse himself and fled.

• 4. A Dream of Battle

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  Napoleon had not originally intended to be out that night. At eight in the evening, believing his police had already caught the plotters against him, a tired and reluctant Napoleon drove to the Opera to attend a performance of Joseph Haydn's oratorio Die Schopfung, known in French as "The Creation," being performed in France for the first time. Riding in the carriage with him were War Minister Louis-Alexandre Berthier, General Jean Lannes, and Colonel Jacques Lauriston, his aide-de-camp.

  Based on their memoirs, a nineteenth-century French psychologist named Garnier deduced that Napoleon fell asleep in the carriage on the way to the Opera. As he slept, Napoleon is said to have dreamed he was reliving his defeat at the Tagliamento River by the Austrians three years earlier. His carriage, driven by a man named Cesar who was reportedly drunk, passed through the rue Saint-Nicaise and turned into the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore just before the explosion.

  Sigmund Freud later wrote about this dream at length. Freud argued that Napoleon was an extremely sound sleeper and that the explosion had intruded into his dream rather than woken him immediately. According to Freud, Napoleon woke up crying "Nous sommes mines!" which translates as "We have been mined!" Freud considered this an example of what he called an alarm-clock dream: one that weaves an external sound into its narrative to allow the dreamer to keep sleeping. Freud acknowledged that his two sources, Garnier and an unnamed second account, did not fully agree with each other.

• 5. Blame Aimed the Wrong Way

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  Napoleon arrived at the Opera shaken but physically unscathed, and the audience rose to greet him with a standing ovation. The blast had killed bystanders on the rue Saint-Nicaise, including young Peusol, though scholars dispute the exact count: one put the dead at roughly a dozen with twenty-eight wounded; another counted nine dead and twenty-six injured; a third estimated two killed outright with six gravely wounded.

  Police informers pointed Napoleon toward an extreme-left faction known as the exclusifs, or Jacobin hardliners. The Paris police had already, on the 16th and 17th of Brumaire, arrested suspects from this group, including an agitator named Metge and a chemist named Chevalier. Metge had published a pamphlet calling for thousands of assassins to kill the tyrant Bonaparte. Chevalier had been experimenting with explosives in a hangar.

  Minister of Police Joseph Fouche accused the royalist Chouans instead, and was correct. But Napoleon, deeply shocked and very angry, would not listen. He told his Conseil d'Etat that vengeance must fall like a thunderbolt and that blood must flow. He wanted his Jacobin enemies removed from France. On the 14th of Nivose Year IX, the 4th of January 1801, Napoleon and his fellow Consuls Jean-Jacques-Regis de Cambaceres and Charles-Francois Lebrun exiled 130 Jacobins from France without trial and without right of appeal. Two days later, on the 15th of Nivose, the Senat ratified this act with a senatus-consulte asserting that the consuls had preserved the constitution.

• 6. Arrests, Executions, and a Priest

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  Fouche had his police prefect Dubois collect the scattered remnants of the dead mare and the cart from the blast site and question every horse trader in Paris. On the 18th of Nivose, the 8th of January 1801, fifteen days after the explosion, Carbon was identified by two separate witnesses: a man named Lamballe, who had sold or rented the cart to him, and the blacksmith who had shod the mare.

  Under torture, Carbon gave the names of Limoëlan and Saint-Regeant. Fouche brought Napoleon solid proof that the true bombers were the royalist Chouans, not the Jacobins. He demonstrated that the bomb built by Chevalier was quite different from the one that had exploded in the rue Saint-Nicaise. Napoleon still refused to pardon the innocent Jacobins.

  On the 21st of Nivose, the 11th of January 1801, Chevalier was executed, having not made the machine infernale at all. On the 30th of Nivose, January 20, Napoleon executed the pamphleteer Metge and two of his associates despite no proof of their involvement. Carbon was arrested on the 28th of Nivose, January 18. Saint-Regeant was arrested on January 25 and executed on the 30th of Germinal, April 20, at the Place de Greve in Paris, the same location where Robert-Francois Damiens had been executed in 1757 for attempted regicide.

  Limoëlan escaped to the United States. He had expressed guilt over the death of Peusol, the girl who had held his horse. He was ordained a priest in 1812 and died in 1826.

• 7. Napoleon's Calculations

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  The political journalist Pierre Louis Roederer recorded Napoleon telling him: "If I die in four or five years, the clock will be wound up and will run. If I die before then, I don't know what will happen." The comment captured a man who had absorbed the threat against his life and was already thinking past it.

  On the 10th of Pluviose Year IX, the 30th of January 1801, the four conspirateurs des poignards, Ceracchi, Arena, Topino-Lebrun and Demerville, who had been condemned for plotting to murder Napoleon, were guillotined. Their protestations of innocence and claims of having been tortured into confessing had gone unheeded.

  Fouche himself was not simply a loyal servant in this episode. He had been plotting with Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord and Clement de Ris to replace Napoleon. His eagerness to prove the Chouans guilty, rather than the Jacobins, served his own interests as much as the state's. One biographer observed that so many Frenchmen feared for Napoleon's life that this fear itself made it possible for him to become Emperor of the French within three years of the rue Saint-Nicaise explosion.