6 May 2021
18th Brumaire
Napoleon’s coup d’état.
By Neil Tidmarsh
A coup d’état in 2021? In a democratic European country? That’s what last week’s letter from scores of retired French generals and thousands of former and serving officers and soldiers seemed to be threatening. It appeared on the 60th anniversary of the failed coup against Charles de Gaulle, but an even more significant and relevant anniversary occurred this week – the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1799 was the original and genuine, after all, the one which set the trend for all the other militarised bullies who came after him. And it tells us a great deal about the man who still divides opinion in France even after two hundred years in the grave.
It began early in the morning of 10 November 1799 (the 18th Brumaire, by the revolutionary calendar). The members of the Council of Five Hundred – the republic’s government – were woken up and mysteriously told to leave Paris ‘for their own safety’ and assemble in the Orangerie of the old Palace of Saint-Cloud six miles outside the city. It was a trap set by Napoleon (with the help of his brother Lucien, who had infiltrated the Council after lying about his age – he was 24 and the minimum age was 30); he was waiting behind the scenes at Saint-Cloud with five thousand troops. As soon as the Council had assembled, he surrounded the Orangerie and demanded the dissolution of the government. The unarmed councillors defied him, however, with shouts of “Down with the dictator!”. So he sent his sabre-wielding cavalry into the Orangerie to disperse them, with the order “Kill, kill, kill! I am the god of battles!”
The ten-year old French revolution and its democratic republic were the main casualties that day. Napoleon hi-jacked them for his personal power and glory. Following the coup, he re-wrote the constitution, creating the role of First Consul to establish himself at the head of government (initially with two other consuls, but he soon persuaded them to retire), doubling the number of legislative bodies from two to four to dilute their influence, limiting their powers and packing the Council of State with cronies. Within months he’d closed 60 of the 73 independent newspapers in France. The most infamous of his reactionary measures was the reinstatement of slavery, which the revolutionary government had made illegal (his coup had been supported by slavers and plantation owners), and he reversed the remarkably advanced and enlightened policies of racial equality which the revolutionary republic had promoted[i]. His dictatorship was literally crowned less than five years after the coup when he made himself emperor. Official art by painters such as David and Ingres portray him as not just an emperor but a god – such works have that strange mixture of the ridiculously high-camp and the chillingly scary which is the authentic badge of fascist art/propaganda.
Why did he launch his coup in November 1799? To save himself from personal ruin. He’d invaded Egypt the year before and the campaign had been a disaster. It’s less well known perhaps than his later Russian debacle, but they complement each other rather curiously; defeat in Russia was a freezing hell of snow and ice – defeat in Egypt was a burning hell of desert and sun.
It began in July 1798 with a landing at Aboukir Bay and gruelling marches through the desert under a punishing midsummer sun. Soldiers went mad with the heat and thirst, many committed suicide, others were captured by Bedouins and raped and tortured before being killed or ransomed. A victory against the medieval Mameluke army secured Cairo and Alexandria for the French but even so their soldiers risked death or worse every time they stepped outside either city. And even inside the cities they were prone to strange new diseases like the highly-contagious eye-infection which left many of them blind, and risked vengeful knives if they ventured into remote backstreets. The debacle was sealed that August when the British fleet under Nelson destroyed the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile, severing Napoleon’s supply line to France and trapping him and his army in Egypt. Turkey, as the nominal suzerain of Egypt, declared war on France a month later. Napoleon tried to punch his way out through Palestine in January 1799 but was soundly defeated at Acre by a Turkish army supported by the British navy. He retreated back into Egypt with heavy losses. By this time the plague was ravaging his troops, and despite repulsing a Turkish landing at Aboukir Bay it was clear that Napoleon and his army were doomed.
So what did Napoleon do? He deserted his army that summer, secretly and abruptly, sneaking off in the night on a boat bound for France. His generals were furious when they discovered his absence the next day. General Kléber, who assumed command, exclaimed angrily “That bugger has left us here! His breeches are full of shit – we’ll go back to Europe and rub his face in it!” But Kléber was still stuck in Egypt a year later, when he was stabbed to death by a knife-wielding Syrian in a Cairo street. And the abandoned and stranded army was still there a year after that, when its inevitable fate finally caught up with it. A British army successfully landed at Aboukir Bay and destroyed the French army at the Battle of Alexandria in March 1801.
So Napoleon sacrificed the revolution, the republic and an army to save himself and to satisfy his personal ambitions for glory and power. He moved quickly on his return to France, before the full picture of his Egyptian debacle could reach Paris and because his achievements were unravelling elsewhere. Even his conquest of Italy had come to nothing; with such a big army tied down in Egypt, the French forces had been driven out of all of Italy but a tiny strip of the Ligurian coast. These failures would have destroyed him if he’d allowed them to catch up with him. No wonder he was in such haste to make himself dictator/emperor/god in France while his abandoned soldiers in Egypt were being ravaged by fatal diseases, killed in battle or captured as prisoners of war.
This wasn’t the last time he would lead an army to disaster and then abandon it, of course. He would do the same thing in Russia, leaping into his carriage and whipping the horses towards Paris as soon as defeat and winter loomed, leaving his troops behind to face both without him. And at Waterloo, too; he was off to Paris again as soon as he saw his Imperial Guards falling back from the volleys of Maitland’s Guards Brigade but before Blucher’s cavalry had completely swept the French from the field. The mess always landed in the laps of more heroic but less cunning generals like Marshal Ney, who never seemed to learn.
But the dire consequences of that coup d’état of 10 November 1799 didn’t stop at Russia or Waterloo or the horrors of war in Spain as depicted by Goya. It established a toxic tradition in France for the next century and a half. Napoleon’s nephew Louis Napoleon grew up in exile, intoxicated by the legend of his uncle’s power and glory and determined to follow the same route. He attempted a coup d’état in 1836, at Strasbourg, against King Louis Philip, but it was a failure, a true fiasco. He tried again in 1840, in Boulogne, but that was even worse, a farce which ended with a dripping Louis being hauled out of Boulogne harbour by the authorities. He was ridiculed throughout Europe.
Eight years later, in February 1848, an authentic revolution overthrew the king without any help from Louis Napoleon. He got himself elected to the new republic’s National Assembly in September, nevertheless, and in December he was even elected President, swearing an oath of allegiance to the Republic. So was he a reformed man, a convert to the ideals of legality and democracy? No. Three years later, on 2 December 1851 ( a significant date – December 2nd was the date of his uncle’s victory at Austerlitz and also of his coronation as emperor) he launched yet another coup d’état and this time he succeeded. He abolished the republic’s constitution (so much for that oath) and established a dictatorship. Hundreds of people were killed at the barricades opposing the coup, ten of thousands were arrested and imprisoned and either sent to penal colonies in Algiers and French Guiana or exiled or kept under police surveillance. Newspapers were censored and suppressed. A year later, on 2 December (that date again) 1852, he had himself crowned emperor as Napoleon III.
Like his uncle, he’d hi-jacked the revolution and sacrificed it for his personal power and glory. The Bonaparte play-book was to be followed to the bitter end, however. This Second Empire lasted only a few years longer than his uncle’s short-lived First Empire. Napoleon III’s Waterloo was a dismal affair. He was tricked by Bismarck into declaring war on Prussia in 1870, and France’s defeat was swift and devastating. Napoleon III went into exile in England after his shattered army surrendered at Sedan. The citizens of Paris filled the power vacuum in their city by declaring a commune in 1871; it was brutally crushed by government troops later that year (somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 working class Parisians were slaughtered).
So, the year 2021 presents France with as many as four problematic anniversaries (even Mr Macron is somewhat at a loss in trying to find an appropriate way of marking them): 60 years since the attempted coup against de Gaulle; 150 years since the Paris Commune and its bloody suppression; 170 years since Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état; and 200 years since the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, the man who set all these tragic events in train with his coup of 1799.
Hot on the heels of Louis Napoleon’s 1851 coup, Karl Marx wrote a book-length comment – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon – comparing it to the uncle’s coup of 1799. The book begins:
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all the facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
He was writing before the farce had turned to tragedy again with the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune, but he has a point. Those generals who wrote last week’s letter obviously don’t read Marx – they’d have realised how ridiculous their battle-cry was if they had. But the black farce of that letter – coming as it did on the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of the man whose 18th Brumaire launched all these tragi-comedies – must have left Marx laughing bleakly in his grave up in Highgate Cemetery this week.
[i] See The Black Count by Tom Reiss – a brilliant, gripping and revelatory biography of General Dumas (father of Alexander The Count of Monte Cristo Dumas) – for more about this fascinating aspect of the French revolution. General Dumas was the son of a black slave and genuinely devoted to the ideals of liberty, fraternity and democracy; inevitably he was stabbed in the back by his self-serving rival, General Bonaparte.
Cover page image: Ingres. Napoleon as Jupiter/Zeus/God. High-camp neo-fascist art – hilarious and frightening.
