Brumaire taken by itself is the victory of Sieyes rather than of Bonaparte. It raised Sieyes to the position he had so long coveted of legislator for France. The constitution now introduced was really in great part his work, but his work so signally altered in one point that it resulted in the absolute supremacy of Bonaparte. We should especially notice that it is Sieyes, not Bonaparte, who practically suppresses representative institutions. The long expected scheme of Sieyes was at last promulgated and we see with astonishment that the man of 1789, the author of 'Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-Etat?' himself condemns political liberty. In this scheme the assemblies of which there are three, the Senate, the Tribunate, and the Corps Legislatif, are not chosen by popular election at all. The two latter are nominated by the Senate, and the Senate is chosen at the outset in part by the provisional consuls and in part by co-optation. The Tribunate alone has the right of public debate, which is separated from the right of voting. This latter is assigned to the Corps Legislatif. These arrangements, which caused the nullity of parliamentary institutions in the Napoleonic period, were devised not by Bonaparte but by Sieyes, who confined popular election to certain lists of notability, out of which the assemblies were required to be chosen. By this scheme Sieyes, who retained all his old hatred for the old regime and the old noblesse, passed sentence upon the whole constructive work of the Revolution: this sentence was but ratified by Bonaparte.
    But, while he absolutely condemned democracy, Sieyes did not want to set up despotism. The Senate was to be supreme; it was to be a kind of hereditary aristocracy, the depository of the tradition of the Revolution; above it, and capable of being deposed by it, was to be a Doge called Grand Elector, whose main function would consist in choosing two consuls, of whom one was to take the home and the other the foreign department. Here, again, Bonaparte acquiesced as far as he could. He adopted the consuls and the triple executive, even lowering apparently the Grand Elector of Sieyes by giving him the more republican title of First Consul. But he displayed signally the adroitness, rapid and audacious, which was always the characteristic of his diplomacy. He declaimed violently against the feebleness of the Grand Elector and the Consuls in this scheme, feigning to overlook that it concentrated power intentionally in the Senate; then instead of sending back the scheme for revision he simply strengthened immensely the attributions of the First Consul, leaving the other consuls and the assemblies as weak as before. By this stroke a strong aristocracy was turned into a strong monarchy; at the same time advantage was taken of the very peculiar character of Sieyes, who always when he met with opposition sank into an impenetrable silence. Bonaparte boasted afterwards that he had sealed his victory over Sieyes by a handsome bribe at the expense of the public.
    Perhaps, however, in his controversy with Sieyes, Bonaparte had public opinion on his side. Not only were the arrangements he attacked really absurd, but he might just at that moment plead for a strong government without being instantly found guilty of ambition. The conviction of the time was that a strong and stable executive was needed, and that this must not be many-headed; moreover, the discovery had recently been made in America that a republic must have a President, and also that such a President might be without ambition.
    The provisional consulate of Sieyes, Ducos, and Bonaparte lasted only from November 10 to December 13. Then through the promulgation of the new constitution it made way for the definitive consulate of Bonaparte, Cambaceres, and Lebrun, which lasted four years. By the constitution of 22 Frimaire, year VIII (which was never debated in any assembly, but after being devised by the two legislative committees meeting at the Luxembourg under the presidency of Bonaparte, and in the presence of the other consuls, and after being redacted by Daunou, was introduced by popular vote), Bonaparte became First Consul for ten years with a salary of half a million francs, with a sole power of nominating the council of state, the ministers, ambassadors, officers of the army and fleet, and most of the judges and local officials, and with a power, in nominal conjunction with the other consuls, of initiating all legislation and deciding war and peace.

    The campaign of 1800 is peculiar in the circumstance that throughout its course Bonaparte has a military rival with whom he is afraid to break, and who keeps pace with him in achievements—Moreau. To Moreau the success of Brumaire had been mainly due, and he had perhaps thought that the new constitution, as it did not seem to contemplate the First Consul commanding an army, had removed Bonaparte from the path of ambition. He now held the command of the principal army, that of the Rhine, in which post Bonaparte could not venture to supersede him. The problem for Bonaparte throughout the war was to prevent Moreau, and in a less degree Massena, who was now in command of the Army of Italy, from eclipsing his own military reputation. Russia had now retired from the Coalition, so that, as in 1796, Austria and England were the only belligerents. Italy had been almost entirely lost, and Massena at the head of the Army of Italy, opposed to General Melas, was almost where Bonaparte had been when his Italian campaign began. But France had retained the control of Switzerland, and Moreau, with more than 100,000 men arranged along the Rhine from Lake Constance to Alsace, stood opposed to Kray, whose headquarters were at Donaueschingen. It seemed that the campaign would be conducted by Moreau and Massena receiving instructions from Bonaparte at Paris. That the decisive campaign would have been in Bavaria, seems so evident that the Military writer Bulow conjectures that the French were afraid of alarming Europe by a too decisive victory, which would have brought them at once to the walls of Vienna, and that they therefore transferred the campaign to Italy. But Bonaparte would have sunk into a President had Moreau won Hohenlinden in the spring of 1800, while he remained ingloriously at Paris. While therefore in writing to Moreau he carefully adopts the language of one who, much to his own regret, has become a civilian, he plans the campaign so that both Moreau and Massena are confined to the task of holding the enemy in play, while an army of reserve descends from one of the Alpine passes into Italy. This army of reserve, which was so carefully concealed that few people believed in its existence, is to be commanded, he writes, by some general 'to be named by the consuls'; a little later Berthier is nominated. As late as the end of March he told Miot that he did not mean to leave Paris. Moreau is also to detach 25,000 men under Lecourbe, who are to join Berthier in Italy, in this way security was taken that Moreau should not be too successful. On April 24 the campaign in Germany began by the passage of the Rhine at a number of points at once. Up to May 10 Moreau is the hero of the war. He is victorious at Engen, at Mosskirchen, and forces Kray to retire on Ulm. By those successes Switzerland is kept clear for the operations of Bonaparte. On May 9 Bonaparte is at Geneva, and it appears at once that he is commander and Berthier only his chief of the staff. At the same time Carnot in person is sent with unusual formality to demand from Moreau the detachment of troops.
    The campaign of Marengo was astonishingly short. On May 11 Bonaparte left Geneva and he is in Paris again early in July. Since the beginning of April Massena had been struggling vainly against the superior forces of Melas. Since the 21st he had been shut up in Genoa, where Austria and England could co-operate in the siege. In Italy the affairs of France looked darker than ever, when Bonaparte threw himself on the rear of Melas by passing the Great St Bernard pass between May 15 and 20. Other divisions passed the Little St Bernard and the Mont Cenis, while the detachment from Moreau's army (under Moncey, not Lecourbe) descended the St Gothard. It seems that the Austrians had absolutely refused to believe, what nevertheless was openly discussed in the Paris journals, that Bonaparte intended to cross the Alps. Bonaparte had another surprise in store for them. Though Genoa was now suffering all the horrors of famine, he made no attempt to relieve it, but turned to the left, entered Milan on June 2, and took possession of the whole line of the Ticino and the Po. Meanwhile Genoa capitulated to General Ott. Melas was now at Alessandria, where Bonaparte sought him on the 13th. On the 14th Melas marched out, crossed the Bormida, and arrived at Marengo. He found the French widely dispersed, and fairly defeated them. He had himself retired from the field, and his soldiers were plundering the dead, when the arrival of Desaix's division gave Bonaparte a gleam of hope. Desaix himself fell, but a sudden charge of cavalry, headed by Kellerman, produced among the Austrians a panic similar to that which had been witnessed at Rivoli. A great Austrian victory was turned into a decisive Austrian defeat. Bonaparte was raised from the brink of absolute ignominious ruin to the very pinnacle of glory. On the next day Melas (having, as it seems, quite lost his head) signed a convention by which Austria sacrificed almost all North Italy, restoring something like the position of Campo Formio. 'Had he fought another battle', says Marmont, 'he would certainly have beaten us'. Bonaparte returns to Paris, victorious at once over Austria and over Moreau and Massena. He did not, however, succeed in tearing from Moreau the honour of concluding the war. Marengo did not lead to peace; this was won, where naturally it could only be won, in Bavaria by Moreau's victory of Hohenlinden (December 3), a victory perhaps greater than any of which at that time Bonaparte could boast.
    This campaign is the culmination and close of what may be called the Bonaparte period, the period of war on a comparatively small scale and of victories won with small means. It exaggerates all the characteristics of Bonaparte's method—startling originality, cunning, and audacity. Genius is prodigally displayed and yet an immense margin is left for fortune. Marengo may be called his crowning victory. The position given him by the new constitution had hitherto been most precarious. Sieyes and the republicans were on the watch for him on the one side; Moreau seemed on the point of eclipsing him on the other. His family felt their critical position: 'had he fallen at Marengo,' writes Lucien, 'we should have been all proscribed'. Perhaps nothing but a stroke so rapid and startling as Marengo could have saved him from these difficulties. But this did more, and developed the empire out of the consulate.
    His appeal for peace at Brumaire had not been purely insincere, though he wanted victory before peace. He proposes to Rouget de L'Isle to write 'a battle hymn which shall express the idea that with great nations peace comes after victory'. After Marengo he devotes himself to giving peace to the world; he did this by three great acts, so that in 1802 for the first time for ten years under the new Augustus 'no war or battle sound was heard the world around'. These three acts are the Treaty of Luneville, February 1801, the Concordat, July 1801, the Treaty of Amiens, March 1802. It is worth noticing that the negotiator of all of them is his brother Joseph, as if he especially desired to connect his family name with the pacification of the world.
    1. The Treaty of Luneville gave peace to the Continent. Austria is now disarmed, not merely by defeat, but still more by the defection of Russia to the side of France. It is to be observed that here Bonaparte shows himself at least less rapacious than the Directory. He surrenders most of the usurpations of 1798, the Roman and Parthenopean republics, and returns in the main to the arrangements of Campo Formio—a proof of moderation which after all it might not be possible to find a modus vivendi with the Government of Brumaire.
    2. By the concordat he professed to close the religious war. In reality he crushed the national Gallican Church, which had been created by the Constitution Civile, and which had perhaps begun to take root, and restored the Papal Church, shorn of its endowments and dependent on the state, as part of the great pacification, the Concordat was perhaps mainly a stroke of stage effect, though its influence upon later history of France has been great. For Bonaparte himself it was important as severing the clerical party from the Bourbons and attaching it to himself, as giving him through the clergy an influence over the peasantry, upon whom he depended for his armies, also as in some degree welding together through the ubiquitous influence of the clergy the different states which were already subject to his government. In negotiating it with Cardinal Consalvi, Bonaparte had recourse more than once to the vulgar fraud and knavery which earned him the title of Jupiter-Scapin.
    3. It remained to make peace with England, but here the condition of peace, victory, was still wanting. For a moment, however, it seemed within reach, for the Czar had gone over to France, and had become bitterly hostile to England. This opened quite a new prospect. It enabled Bonaparte to revive against England the Armed Neutrality of 1780. Not only Russia but Prussia was thus brought for the first time, along with Sweden and Denmark, into the French alliance, and the system of Tilsit was sketched out. But this phase lasted only till April. The bombardment of Copenhagen by Nelson dissolved the combination and the murder of Paul, followed by a reconciliation between Russia and England, compelled Bonaparte to lower his pretensions. In the summer his endeavours are confined to saving the French colony in Egypt from the English, and to snatching a little territory from England's ally Portugal by means of Spain. But Cairo capitulated to the English in June, in which month also Spain made peace with Portugal. Bonaparte was at last compelled to admit in this instance the idea of a peace which should not come after a victory. Accordingly, in October, the preliminaries of London were signed, and the treaty of Amiens followed in March. The allies of France paid for her naval defeats, Spain losing Trinidad and Holland Ceylon; but France, though she lost nothing, acquiesced by this treaty in the total failure of all her designs upon the East.

    The globe was now at peace, and thanked Bonaparte for it. The equilibrium which had been destroyed by the Revolution seemed at length to be restored. Meanwhile the legislative reconstruction of France proceeded rapidly. This is the glorious period of Bonaparte's life, not, as has often been alleged, because he was as yet uncorrupted by power, but simply because a strong intelligent Government was the great need of France and repose the great need of Europe, and Bonaparte at this time satisfied both needs. The work of reconstruction which distinguishes the consulate, though it was continued under the empire, is the most enduring of all achievements of Napoleon. The institutions of modern France date, not, as is often said from the Revolution, but from the Consulate. Not that Napoleon personally was endowed with a supreme legislative genius; his principal merit was to have given France the first secure Government, the first Government capable of effective legislation, that she had had since the destruction of her ancient institutions. The task of reconstruction fell to him of necessity; his personal interference was in many respects, as we shall see, mischievous rather than beneficial; it is, however, also true that he appreciated the greatness of the work, urged it on with vigour, entered into it, impressed it with the stamp of his own personality, and left upon it the traces of his keen sagacity.
    The institutions now created, and form the organisation of modern France, are—
(1) the restored church, resting on the Concordat;
(2) the University, resting on the law of 11 Floreal, An X (May 1, 1802);
(3) the judicial system, commenced by the law of 27 Ventose, An VIII (March 18, 1800), and completed by other laws in 1810;
(4) the Codes :- (a) Code Civil (commission nominated 24 Thermidor, An VIII, August 12, 1800; it received the name Code Napoleon on September 3, 1807), (b) Code de Commerce (promulgated on September 3, 1807), (c) Code Penal, (d) Code d'Instruction Criminelle (came into force January 1, 1811);
(5) the system of local government, resting on the law of 18 Pluviose, An VIII, (February 7, 1800);
(6) the Bank of France, established 28 Nivose, An VIII, (January 18, 1800);
(7) the Legion of Honour, established 29 Floreal, An X, (May 19, 1802).
    These institutions along with the military system, have in the main continued to the present day after the downfall of all the Napoleonic institutions which were purely political. It is rather the fortune than the merit of Napoleon that no similar mass of legislation can be ascribed to any other sovereign, since no other sovereign has ruled securely over an ancient and civilised country which has suddenly been deprived of all its institutions. It is also a matter of course that much of this legislation has been beneficial since a tabula rasa relieves the legislator of many hindrances. In several points, on the other hand, we can see that France was sacrificed to Napoleon's personal interest. Thus the Concordat restored the ancient Papal Church, shorn of its wealth, and receiving from the state a subsidy of about 2,000,000 francs. It was right to restore religion, and the Constitution Civile, which was cancelled by the Concordat, had been an insane act, the principal cause of the miseries of France for ten years. Nevertheless, a great opportunity was lost of trying some new experiment, which might have led to a genuine revival of religion; but for this Napoleon cared nothing so long as he could pose as a new Constantine, detach the Church from the cause of the Bourbons, and have the Pope at his back. In like manner the freedom of local government was sacrificed to the exigencies of his despotism. Among the most remarkable of his institutions was the University. The twenty-one universities of old France, including the great mother university of Paris, had fallen in the Revolution along with the Church; nothing of the least efficiency had been established in their place, so that in March 1800 Lucien Bonaparte could write, 'Since the suppression of the teaching corporations instruction has almost ceased to exist in France'. By the laws of May 1806 and March 1808 was founded the modern University—that is, the whole teaching profession formed into a corporation and endowed by the state, a kind of church of education. This remarkable institution still exists. It has far too much centralisation, and is in no way equal to the old system when that is intelligently worked, as in Germany; many learned men have severely condemned it; still it was an important constructive effort, and gave Napoleon the occasion for some striking and original remarks.
    From the time of the battle of Marengo the system of Brumaire began to take a development which perhaps had not been clearly foreseen. Sieyes had wished to confine Bonaparte to the War Department, Moreau perhaps had wished to keep him in Paris; in either case it had been intended to create an august monarchy. But the fabulous success of Marengo, joined to the proofs Bonaparte gave of a really superior intelligence and commanding character, turned the French mind back into that monarchical groove in which it had so long run before the revolution. Popular liberty had been already renounced by Sieyes, and the disastrous failure of republican institutions, which in four years, from 1795 to 1799, had brought the country to bankruptcy, civil war, and almost barbarism, inclined all public men to agree with him. The choice then could only lie between some form of aristocracy and the revival of the monarchy either in the Bourbon family or in another. Napoleon's personal character decided this question. By the Concordat he wrested from the Bourbons the support of the Church; by his military glory he seduced the noblesse, as is seen in the case of Segur; by the pacification of the world he half reconciled to himself the foreign cabinets. But no sooner did this new form of monarchy begin to appear than Bonaparte found himself surrounded by new dangers. He was exposed to the hatred of the republicans, who had hitherto been appeased by the title of consul, and were now thrown onto coalition with the defeated royalists, who saw themselves disappointed of restoration at the moment of the failure of republicanism. Nearer his person at the same time court parties began to spring up. His brothers and sisters with Corsican shamelessness began to claim their share of the spoils. While he doubted what form his monarchy should take, and whether some character greater and more unique than that of a hereditary king could not be invented, they urged the claims of the family. Thus arose a standing feud between the Bonapartes and the Beauharnais, who in the interest of Josephine, already dreading divorce for her childlessness, opposed the principle of heredity.
    In grappling with the defeated parties Bonaparte found a great advantage in his position. The constitution of Brumaire itself gave him great powers; popular institutions had been destroyed, not by him, but by the nation itself, which was weary of them; under the Directory the public had grown accustomed to the suppression of journals and to periodic coups d'etat of the most savage violence. Bonaparte therefore could establish a rigorous despotism under the forms of a consular republic, mutilate the assemblies, and silence public opinion, he could venture occasionally upon acts of the most sweeping tyranny, without shocking a people which had so lately seen Fructidor, not to sat the Reign of Terror, and had been accustomed to call them liberty. The conspiracies began immediately after the return from Marengo, when the Corsicans Arena and Ceracchi, guilty apparently of little more than wild talk, were arrested in October 1800 at the Theatre Francais. But on December 24 of the same year, as he drove with Josephine to the opera, a sudden explosion took place in the Rue Saint-Nicaise, which killed and wounded several people and damaged about fifty houses; the carriage of Bonaparte escaped. He was still in the first fervour of his conversion from Jacobinism, and had not yet become alive to the danger which threatened him from royalism. He could therefore see nothing but Jacobinism in this plot, and proposed to meet the danger by some general measure calculated to eradicate what remained of the Jacobin party. But before such a measure could be taken Fouche convinced him that he had been in error, and that he was in the presence of a new enemy, royalism roused into new vigour by the recent change in public opinion. Upon this Bonaparte acted most characteristically. By a singular stretch of Machiavelism he made use of the mistake into which he had himself led the public to crush the enemy which for the moment he most feared. He arrested and transported one hundred and thirty persons, whom he knew to be innocent of the plot, on the general ground of Jacobinism, substituting for all legal trial a resolution passed by a servile Senate to the effect that ' the measure was conservative of the constitution'. This is Nivose, an act as enormous as Fructidor, and with a perfidy of its own.
    Making use of victory was almost more Bonaparte's talent than winning it. These lots, so far from impeding his ascent to monarchy, were converted by him into steps upon which he mounted. He drew from them an argument for heredity, which in case he should himself fall, would furnish a successor. It had already been argued in the ' Parallele entre Cesar, Cromwell, et Bonaparte' (October 1800) that heredity only could prevent the nation from falling again under the domination of the assemblies, under the yoke of the S (not Sieyes surely, but Soldats) or under that of the Bourbons. He also made the plot of Nivose the occasion of a constitutional innovation. The assemblies devised by Sieyes had hitherto been simply useless, so much idle machinery. But in Nivose the precedent was set of giving the Senate a constituent power. To guard the constitution was its nominal function; this was now converted into a function of sanctioning alterations in the constitution, since every innovation became legal when the Senate declared it to be conservative of the constitution. In the hands of Bonaparte such a principle soon became fruitful enough.
    The first open step towards monarchy was made at the conclusion of the Treaty of Amiens. As pacificator of the globe it was declared in the tribunate that Bonaparte deserved some mark of gratitude. Upon this the Senate proposed to re-elect him First Consul for a further term of ten years. Bonaparte, disappointed, declared that he could only owe a prorogation of his magistracy to the people; to them, therefore, the question was referred, but in the form, Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be elected consul for life? And in this form it was adopted.

    In 1803 it might be perceived that the French Revolution was over; Jacobinism was dead, the Church was restored, and it was plain that Bonaparte did not mean to be the first president of a republic, but the restorer of monarchy. The new monarchy was seen to be similar to the old, but considerably more imperious. France is covered with an army of functionaries, servilely dependent on the Government; a strange silence has settled on the country which under the old regime had been noisy with debate—if for the most part fruitless debate—of parliaments and estates. Europe might hope that, the volcano being exhausted, she would henceforth be free of war. With Jacobinism the source of discord was removed. All depended on Bonaparte himself, who might be supposed to be satiated with military glory, and to have enough to occupy him in the reconstitution of French Government and society.
    Alas! the new age, as it defined itself in 1803, proved even more terribly warlike than the age of unexampled discord which had just closed.
    France indeed, had been left most dangerously strong, and yet it was not simply lust of conquest in Bonaparte that now darkened the face of affairs, it was the rivalry of England and France breaking out more fiercely than at any earlier epoch. The crisis was such as to give this old rivalry a sharper edge than ever. It was unendurable for Bonaparte in his glory to submit to the total failure of his Egyptian scheme; on the other hand, England was obliged, considering the immense and threatening ascendancy of France in Europe, to cling convulsively to every advantage she had gained. Everything turned on Malta, that all-important position, which England might have surrendered to some neutral occupancy, had Bonaparte been less powerful and dangerous; and yet was gall and wormwood to Bonaparte to imagine his darling conquest remaining in English hands. He had rather, he said, see the English in the Faubourg St. Antoine than in Malta.
    This rupture between England and France is the beginning of the Napoleonic age, and determines its whole character.
    It is somewhat difficult to understand, because in the eleven years of the war with England Bonaparte was never able to strike a single blow at his enemy, and because at the outset he candidly confessed to Lord Whitworth that he did not see what means he had of injuring England. Why did Bonaparte engage in a war in which he was condemned to be so purely passive? We are perhaps to suppose that his confidence in the favour of fortune had been vastly increased by his recent successes, particularly by Marengo, and that though to Lord Whitworth he spoke of the invasion of England as almost impossible, yet in reality he expected to achieve the impossibility, as he had achieved so many others. He had also in mind the indirect methods which he afterwards employed; he would use, if necessary, the fleets of other Powers, he would resort to the commercial blockade; in one way or another he felt certain of success. That he was really bent upon forcing a war appears from his allowing Sebastiani's report of his mission to the East, full of hints of the intention of France to re-occupy Egypt at the first opportunity, to appear in the Moniteur. This report, besides offending England, caused her to keep resolute possession of Malta, and, when Bonaparte appealed to the Treaty of Amiens, England replied by pointing to the new annexations of France, which had just divided Piedmont into departments. 'Ce sont des bagatelles', Lord Whitworth reports Bonaparte to have answered, but he adds in a parenthesis which has never been printed, 'The expression he made use of was too trivial and vulgar to find a place in a despatch, or anywhere but in the mouth of a hackney coachman!'.
    The rupture took place with extraordinary marks of irritation on the part of Bonaparte. He detained the English residents in France, he declared that he would hear of no neutrality, and indeed the Continental wars which followed, in the course of which the Napoleonic Empire was founded, had their origin mainly in this quarrel. It might perhaps have been expected that he would try to conciliate the Continental Powers until he should have settled accounts with England. But he thought himself able to summon them to his side and to make them enemies of England against their will. Indeed, since Luneville he felt himself the master of Germany. By the settlement Austria had lost her power within the empire, and the minor German princes now looked up to Napoleon, for Napoleon dispensed the mass of property, the plunder of bishoprics and townships, which had been decreed as indemnity to the princes dispossessed on the left bank of the Rhine. Hence he does not hesitate after the rupture with England to take up a position in the heart of Germany by seizing Hanover.
    All this was done while Bonaparte was still nominally only consul in the French Republic. But the rupture with England furnished him with the occasion of throwing off the last disguise and openly restoring the monarchy. It was a step which required all his audacity and cunning. He had crushed Jacobinism, but two great parties remained. There was first the more moderate republicanism, which might be called Girondism, and was widely spread among all classes and particularly in the army. Secondly, there was the old royalism, which after many years of helpless weakness had revived since Brumaire. These two parties, though hostile to each other, were forced into a sort of alliance by the new attitude of Bonaparte, who was hurrying France into a new revolution at home and into an abyss of war abroad. England too, after the rupture, favoured the efforts of these parties. Royalism from England began open communication with moderate republicanism in France. Pichegru acted for the former, and the great representative of the latter was Moreau, who had helped to make Brumaire in the tacit expectation probably of rising to the consulate in due course when Bonaparte's term should have expired, and was therefore hurt in his personal claims as well as in his republican principles Bonaparte watched the movement through his ubiquitous police, and with characteristic strategy determined not merely to defeat it but to make it his stepping stone to monarchy. He would ruin Moreau by fastening on him the stigma of royalism; he would persuade France to make him emperor in order to keep out the Bourbons. He achieved this with the peculiar mastery which he always showed in villainous intrigue. Moreau had in 1797 incurred blame by concealing his knowledge of Pichegru's dealings with the royalists. That he should now meet and hold conversation with Pichegru at a moment when Pichegru was engaged in contriving a royalist rebellion, associated his name still more closely with royalism, and Pichegru brought with him wilder partisans such as Georges the Chouan. No doubt Moreau would gladly have seen and gladly have helped an insurrection against Bonaparte; any republican, and, what is more, any patriot, would at that moment have risked much to save France from the ruin that Bonaparte was bringing on her. But Bonaparte succeeded in associating him with royalist schemes and with schemes of assassination. Controlling the Senate, he was able to suppress the jury; controlling every avenue of publicity, he was able to suppress opinion; and the army, Moreau's fortress, was won through its hatred of royalism. In this way Bonaparte's last personal rival was removed. There remained the royalists, and Bonaparte hoped to seize their leader, the Comte d'Artois, who was expected, as the police knew, soon to join Pichegru and Georges in Paris. What Bonaparte would have done with him we may judge from the course he took when the Comte did not come. On March 15, 1804, the Duc d'Enghien, grandson of the Prince de Conde, residing at Ettenheim in Baden, was seized at midnight by a party of dragoons, brought to Paris, where he arrived on the 20th, confined in the castle of Vincennes, brought before a military commission at 2 o'clock the next morning, asked whether he had not borne arms against the republic, which he acknowledged himself to have done, conducted to a staircase above the moat, and there shot and buried in the moat.
    This deed was perfectly consistent with Bonaparte's professed principles, so that no misunderstanding or passing fit of passion is required to explain it. He had made, shortly before, a formal offer to the pretender through the king of Prussia, by which he had undertaken to pay him a handsome pension in return for the formal abdication of his rights. This had been refused, and Bonaparte felt free. That the best course was to strike at the heads of the family was a shrewd conclusion. Neither Louis nor Charles were precisely heroes; and then the whole revolutionary party in France would applaud a new tragedy like that of January, 1793. Accordingly Bernadotte and Curee were delighted with it. That the Duc d'Enghien was innocent of the conspiracy was nothing to the purpose; the act was political, not judicial; accordingly he was not even charged with complicity. That the execution would strike horror into the cabinets, and perhaps bring about a new Coalition, belonged to a class of considerations which at this time Bonaparte systematically disregarded.
    This affair led immediately to the thought of giving heredity to Bonaparte's power. The thought seems to have commended itself irresistibly even to strong republicans and to those who were most shocked by the murder. To make Bonaparte's position more secure seemed the only way of averting a new Reign of Terror or new convulsions. He himself felt some embarrassment. Like Cromwell, he was afraid of republicanism of the army, and heredity pure and simple brought him face to face with the question of divorcing Josephine. To propitiate the army he chose from the titles suggested to him—consul, stadtholder, etc.—that of emperor, undoubtedly the most accurate, and having a sufficiently military sound. The other difficulty, after much furious dissension between the two families of Bonaparte and Beauharnais, was evaded by giving Napoleon himself (but none of his successors) a power of adoption, and fixing the succession, in default of a direct heir natural or adoptive, first in Joseph and his descendants, then in Louis and his descendants. Except abstaining from the regal title, no attempt was made to conceal the abolition of republicanism. Bonaparte was to be called Napoleon, and 'sire' and 'majeste'; grand dignitaries with grand titles were appointed, the second and third consuls becoming now arch-chancellor and arch-treasurer respectively; and 'citoyen' from this time gave way to 'monsieur'. The change was made by constituent power of the Senate, and the senatus consulte is dated May 18, 1804. The title of Emperor had an ulterior meaning. Adopted at the moment when Napoleon began to feel himself master both in Italy and Germany, it revived memories of Charles the Great. To himself it was the more satisfactory on that account, and, strange to say, it gave satisfaction rather than offence to the head of the Holy Roman Empire, Francis II. Since Joseph the Hapsburg Emperors had been tired of their title, which, being elective, was precarious. They were desirous of becoming hereditary emperors in Austria, and they now took this title (though without as yet giving up the other). Francis II, bartered his acknowledgement of Napoleon's new title against Napoleon's acknowledgement of his own.
    It required some impudence to condemn Moreau for royalism at the very moment that his rival was re-establishing monarchy. Yet his trial began on May 15. The death of Pichegru, nominally by suicide, on April 6, had already furnished the rising sultanism with its first dark mystery. Moreau was condemned to two years imprisonment, but was allowed to retire to the United States.