night of 17-18 Fructidor (3-4 September), in concert with Barras,
Reubell and La Revelliere, he surrounded the Tuileries with troops, forced
the Councils to decree the arrest of Barthelemy and Carnot and annulled
the results of the recent elections. Carnot escaped in his nightshirt
through the garden to exile, but Barthelemy and Pichegru were arrested.
Sixty-three marked men of the Right were proscribed and deported in
iron cages to the penal colony in Guyana, that bourn from which few
travellers returned. Draconian new laws against emigres and royalists
(and incidentally against ultra-Jacobins) threatened a return of the
Terror. As justification for all this, Augereau posted up on the walls of
the city the incriminating correspondence between d'Antraigues and
Pichegru which Napoleon had been holding in reserve as his trump card.
The legend of the egregious corruption of the Directory dates from
Napoleon's masterly use of press propaganda. Naturally, the five
Directors were corrupt, venal and ineffectual, but in terms of rapacity
they were nowhere alongside the French generals in Italy, the Bonapartes
and,' it must be said, Napoleon himself. Their worst fault was to give
Napoleon carte blanche in Italy and to make no attempt to stop him when
he used his almost absolute power to intervene in internal French
politics. However, even Napoleon's enemies must accept that the
opposition in the Five Hundred to his Italian policy was either overtly
royalist or was being manipulated by monarchists whose aim was the
overthrow of the constitution. In such a context, bluster about
Bonaparte's proxy despotism at Fructidor is out of place.
Fructidor destroyed the monarchist faction and brought to a head the
latent tension between Napoleon and Barras's party. Fortunately,
perhaps, the Austrians seemed unaware of the latter nuance, and had
pinned all their hopes on the triumph of the rightists in Paris. This is the
context in which the protracted negotiations and sustained Austrian
stalling that summer should be seen. Some of the prevarications of the
foppish Austrian plenipotentiary the Marquis of Gallo at the talks that. summer in Milan reached opera bouffe proportions. Napoleon played
along, for until he had crushed the monarchists in France he did not want
a treaty signed. The result was a lazy, sensuous summer at Mombello
which many of the Bonaparte entourage remembered as the happiest time
of their lives. Josephine was in her element, for her husband indulged her
love of animals by constructing a menagerie for her in the vast grounds.
However, Napoleon did not extend this indulgence to all animals.
Josephine's friend, the poet and playwright Antoine Arnault, remem
bered the general's joy when the beloved cur Fortune was killed by a
cook's dog. Josephine ordered the culprit banned from Mombello park,