Consolidation of Power 487

to arrest him. The duke was hurriedly tried and executed near Paris, despite
the lack of any evidence of his involvement in plans to assassinate
Napoleon. Public opinion throughout much of Europe was outraged. The
German composer Ludwig van Beethoven crossed out the dedication to
Napoleon of his Third Symphony (“Eroica,” meaning “heroic”) shouting, “So
he is also nothing more than an ordinary man? Now he will trample on the
rights of mankind and indulge only his own ambition; from now on he will
make himself superior to all others and become a tyrant!” One of the royalist
conspirators, before his own execution, lamented, “We have done more than
we hoped to do; we meant to give France a king, and we have given her an
Emperor.”
The Tribunate, Senate, and another plebiscite quickly approved the
change from the Consulate to an empire. On December 2, 1804, Napoleon
was anointed emperor by Pius VII. Instead of waiting for the pope to crown
him, Napoleon snatched the crown from the pontiff and placed it on his
own head. A new constitution presented a telling contradiction: “The gov­
ernment of the republic is entrusted to an emperor.” Once an unknown offi­
cer who had scraped by with little money amid the spendthrift glitter of
Thermidor, Bonaparte began to wear a coat of red velvet that would have

been fit for Louis XIV.

Napoleon was no more temperamentally suited to live with peace than

with defeat. Jealous of Britain’s naval and commercial supremacy in the

Jean-Louis David’s Emperor Napoleon Crowning the Empress Josephine in the Cathe

dral of Notre Dame (1805-1808).