CHAPTER FOURTEENThe second half of I803 saw Napoleon once again on his travels, after
three Paris-bound years. On 25 June he began an extensive northern tour
lasting two months. First he toured the towns of northern France that
would be important in the coming campaign against England: Amiens,
Abbeville, Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, Lille. Then he crossed the border
into Belgium and proceeded through Nieuport, Ostend, Bruges, Ghent
and Anvers to Brussels, where he arrived on 2I July. After a ten-day
sojourn there, he made his way back to St-Cloud in a leisurely itinerary
that took in Maastricht, Liege, Namur, Mezieres, Sedan and Rheims. He
arrived back in the palace on I I August. Throughout the late summer
and autumn he seemed obsessed with the idea of a descent on England
and spoke excitedly to his family about planting the French flag on the
Tower of London. Very optimistic by now about his chances of bringing
off a Channel crossing, he made an extended visit to Boulogne from 3-I7
November.
Absurdly overconfident of his ability to vault over the Channel and the
Royal Navy, Napoleon was brought down to earth in November I803 by
the first whispers of the most serious conspiracy yet against his autocracy.
In the autumn of I803 several Chouans were arrested in Paris, taken
before a military commission and sentenced to death. One of the
condemned asked to make a statement before his death and revealed a
wide-ranging plot against Napoleon. Other condemned conspirators then
broke silence. It turned out that the ringleaders in the latest conspiracy
were General Moreau, the hero of Hohenlinden and General Pichegru
(once Napoleon's tutor at Brienne), who had been deported after the
Fructidor coup in I797 but had since returned secretly; the plot called for
the assassination of the First Consul and the return of the Bourbons.
A fu rther twist came on 29 January I8o4 when one Courson, a British
secret agent, was arrested. To save his life he revealed fu rther details of
the plot: there was to be a triumvirate consisting ofPichegru, Moreau and
Cadoudal, the Chouan leader, which would pave the way for a Bourbon
restoration; Pichegru and Cadoudal were known to be already in Paris.