Sénat conservateur

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sénat conservateur was born in the wreckage of revolution. On the 13th of December 1799, just weeks after Napoleon Bonaparte toppled the Directory in the Coup of 18 Brumaire, a new constitution quietly created a body whose very name told you its purpose: to conserve. Not to debate, not to legislate in the ordinary sense, but to guard the constitution itself. Napoleon understood immediately what such a body could become. A senate that watched over the rules of government was also a senate that could be made to rewrite them. How did an institution designed as a constitutional safeguard end up as a tool of imperial ambition? And how did those same senators, showered with palaces and annual revenues, finally turn on the man who had enriched them?

• 2. A Senate That Recruited Itself

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  Sieyès and Roger Ducos, the two outgoing consuls who had helped Napoleon seize power, were written directly into the new body as members by right. From there, the Constitution let them and the incoming consuls Cambacérès and Lebrun choose 29 additional senators. Those 29 then chose the rest. No election, even an indirect one, had any role. The Sénat conservateur recruited itself.

  The founding membership reflected a remarkable cross-section of revolutionary-era France. Former assembly members such as Lanjuinais and Garat sat alongside scientists of international standing: Monge, Lagrange, Lacépède, and Berthollet. The philosopher Cabanis held a seat. So did the explorer Bougainville and the painter Vien, a member of the Institut. The original body was capped at 60 inamovible members, a word meaning permanent and literally immoveable, each at least 40 years old. Two supplementary members were to join annually for a decade, adding 20 over time.

  The Senate met at the Luxembourg Palace, where the architect Chalgrin had fitted a semicircle of seats into the central part of the building. The Constitution was explicit on one point: sittings were not to be public. When a member died, the Senate chose a replacement from three candidates put forward by the First Consul, the Tribunat, and the Corps législatif. Napoleon held the first move every time.

• 3. The Sénatus-Consulte Instrument

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  By year X, which the calendar of the time placed in 1802, Napoleon had revised the Constitution to give the Senate something it had originally lacked: the power to act with the force of law. These acts were called sénatus-consultes, and they covered all matters the Constitution had left unaddressed. The number of senators rose to 120. Napoleon convened the body, presided over it, and personally designated three candidates from lists produced by electoral colleges, while retaining the right to name senators on his own initiative as well.

  The practical reach of the sénatus-consulte was wide. On the 26th of April 1802, one granted amnesty to the émigrés who had fled revolutionary France. On the 2nd of August that same year, another proclaimed Napoleon First Consul for life. A sénatus-consulte of the 26th of August 1802 reunited the island of Elba into the territory of the French Republic. Others designated which town mayors would attend oath-taking ceremonies for any successor to the First Consul, naturalized foreigners who had rendered services to the Republic, and suspended jury functions in several departments during years XI and XII.

  By the 9th of September 1805 the instrument was being used to reestablish the Gregorian calendar, which revolutionary France had abandoned. On the 27th of March 1805, a sénatus-consulte granted French citizenship to prince Camillo Filippo Ludovico Borghese. The Senate that had been charged only with watching over constitutional survival was now quietly reshaping the empire's geography, its calendar, and its law.

• 4. The Sénatorerie System

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  Napoleon did not rely on ideology alone to keep his senators compliant. In January 1803 he created the sénatoreries, a system that tied senators' material comfort directly to his favour. From June 1804 onwards, 36 senators received these grants, becoming in effect regional super-préfets with lifetime rights to a residential palace and an annual revenue ranging from 20,000 to 25,000 francs, roughly double the ordinary senatorial salary.

  The chemist Berthollet offers a precise illustration. He received the sénatorerie of Montpellier, took up residence in the bishop's palace at Narbonne, and drew an annual income of 22,690 francs. The arrangement was not subtle. Senators were wealthy, housed in former episcopal palaces and châteaux, and dependent on the emperor's continuing goodwill for their income. Compliance was the natural result.

  On the 1st of January 1806, Napoleon staged a ceremony in honour of these "sages de l'Empire" - wise-men of the Empire - and granted the senators 54 captured enemy flags. The senator and marshal Catherine-Dominique de Pérignon then proposed building a triumphal arch to honour the emperor, a suggestion warmly supported by his colleagues, including Lacépède. The palace at the Luxembourg, the revenues, the flags, the triumphal arch: each gesture tightened the bond between the Senate and Napoleon's personal glory.

• 5. Allegiance Reversed

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  The Constitution of the Year XII, which corresponds to 1804, proclaimed the First French Empire and deepened the Senate's formal dependence on Napoleon. Into the chamber Napoleon summoned the French princes, the Great Dignitaries, and his closest associates without any cap on numbers. His brother Joseph received a seat, as did Cambacérès, Chaptal, Fouché, Fontanes, and Tronchet, alongside generals including Caulaincourt and Duroc.

  Yet on the 3rd of May 1814, the body that had conferred lifetime power on Napoleon and then imperial title, that had been fed enemy flags and housed in episcopal palaces, voted to proclaim his fall. The senators then summoned Louis XVIII to take the throne. Louis XVIII, once restored, abolished the Senate entirely. The institution that had guarded the Consulate's constitution from 1799 lasted until the Bourbon restoration in 1814, when its final act was to dissolve the political order it had spent fifteen years upholding. Lacépède, who had enthusiastically backed the triumphal arch proposal and served two terms as the Senate's president between 1807 and 1813, was among those who survived the transition.