Coup of 18 Brumaire
After Habsburg-controlled Austria declared war in 1799, France returned to a war footing. Emergency measures were adopted and the pro-war Jacobin faction triumphed in the election. With Napoleon and the republic's best army engaged in the Egypt and Syria campaign, France suffered a series of reverses in Europe. The Coup of 30 Prairial VII (June 18) ousted the Jacobins and left Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, a member of the five-man ruling Directory, the dominant figure in the government. As France's military situation improved, the Jacobins feared a revival of the pro-peace Royalist faction. When Napoleon returned to France in October, both factions hailed him as the country's savior.
Despite the failures in Egypt, Napoleon returned to a hero's welcome, which convinced Sieyès he had found the general indispensable to his planned coup. However, from the moment of his return, Napoleon plotted a coup within the coup, ultimately gaining power for himself rather than Sieyès. Prior to the coup, troops were conveniently deployed around Paris. The plan was, first, to persuade the Directors to resign, then, second, to get the Council of Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred (the upper and lower houses of the legislature) to appoint a pliant commission that would draw up a new constitution to the plotters' specifications.
The plan succeeded. On the morning of 18 Brumaire, Lucien Bonaparte falsely persuaded the Councils that a Jacobin coup was at hand in Paris and induced them to depart for the safety in the suburbs while Napoleon was charged with the safety of the two Councils and given command of all available local troops. On the same day, three of the five Directors resigned, which prevented a quorum and thus practically abolished the Directory. The two remaining Directors protested but they were arrested and forced to give up their resistance.
By the following day, the deputies of the Councils realized that they were facing an attempted coup rather than being protected from a Jacobin rebellion. Faced with their recalcitrance, Napoleon stormed into the chambers, which proved to be the coup within the coup: from this point, it was a military affair. Both chambers resisted but under the pressure of the events, they succumbed to the demands of the plotters.
Consolidation of Power: The Consulate
The Directory was crushed, but the coup within the coup was not yet complete. The use of military force had certainly strengthened Napoleon's hand vis à vis Sieyès and the other plotters. With the Council routed, the plotters convened two commissions, each consisting of 25 deputies from the two Councils. The plotters essentially intimidated the commissions into declaring a provisional government, the first form of the Consulate with Napoleon, Sieyès, and Roger Ducos as Consuls. The lack of reaction from the streets proved that the revolution was, indeed, over. Resistance by Jacobin officeholders in the provinces was quickly crushed. The commissions then drew up the Constitution of the Year VIII (1799), the first of the constitutions since the Revolution without a Declaration of Rights. Originally devised by Sieyès to give Napoleon a minor role, but rewritten by Napoleon and accepted by direct popular vote, the Constitution preserved the appearance of a republic but in reality established a dictatorship.
A portrait of the three Consuls, Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, Napoleon Bonaparteand Charles-François Lebrun (left to right) by Henri-Nicolas Van Gorp.
Sieyès and Ducos survived only two months as members of the Consulate. In December 1799, two new members (in the portrait above) joined Napoleon. As the years would progress, he would move to consolidate his own power as First Consul and leave the two other consuls, Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun, duc de Plaisance, as well as the Assemblies, weak and subservient. By consolidating power, Bonaparte was able to transform the aristocratic constitution of Sieyès into a dictatorship.
Bonaparte thus completed his coup within a coup by the adoption of a constitution under which the First Consul, a position he was sure to hold, had greater power than the other two. In particular, he appointed the Senate and the Senate interpreted the constitution. The Sénat conservateur (Conservative Senate, which verified the draft bills and directly advised the First Consul on the implications of such bills) allowed him to rule by decree, so the more independent Conseil d'État (Council of State, which drafted bills) and Tribunat (debated bills but could not vote on them) were relegated to unimportant roles. The legislature known as Corps législatif also partly replaced the Council of Five Hundred under the new constitution, but its role consisted solely of voting on laws deliberated before the Tribunat.
However, Napoleon, at least in theory, still shared the executive power with the two other Consuls. He now aspired to get rid of Sieyès and those republicans who had no desire to hand over the republic to one man. Military victories in the ongoing war increased his popularity and royalist plots served as an excuse to eliminate political opponents, usually by deportation, even if they were innocent. The 1801 Treaty of Lunéville with Austria restored peace in Europe, gave nearly the whole of Italy to France, and permitted Bonaparte to eliminate from the assemblies all the leaders of the opposition. The Concordat of 1801, drawn up not in the Church's interest but in that of Napoleon's own policy, allowed him to put down the constitutional democratic Church, rally round him the consciences of the peasants, and, above all, deprive the royalists of their best weapon. Finally, the 1802 Peace of Amiens with the United Kingdom, of which France's allies, Spain and the Batavian Republic, paid all the costs, gave the peacemaker a pretext for endowing himself with a Consulate, not for ten years but for life, as a recompense from the nation. The same year, a second national referendum was held, this time to confirm Napoleon as "First Consul for Life."