he only knew about the impending coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) the
day before.^85 On the day itself, towards evening, Constant entered the capital which was
now under military control accompanied by Germaine de Staël who could hope to see an
end to her (intermittent) exile if Bonaparte did come to power. He witnessed the dramatic
events at the Orangery in Saint-Cloud where the Council of Five Hundred fled as
grenadiers entered the building, and he sent reports of what was happening to Germaine.
The next day he wrote to Sieyès warning him of the extreme danger for the Republic of
such a man as Bonaparte, unaware of Sieyès’s part in the affair: ‘In everything
[Bonaparte] does, he looks only to his own elevation. But for him he has the generals, the
soldiers, the part of the populace that has aristocratic [i.e. counter-revolutionary]
sympathies, and everyone who enthusiastically surrenders to a show of force’.^86 As
Constant recalls ruefully in his Souvenirs historiques: ‘A spectator rather than a
participant, I hurried over to Saint-Cloud, not without some pain and uncertainty, and
there I saw the collapse of representative institutions in France for the next fourteen
years.’^87
For a time there was hope that something good might emerge from 18 Brumaire, and
Constant wrote to Sieyès on 15 November:
The post of deputy was the only one I wanted, because I believed
that through it I could serve the cause of liberty. But since it is now
being said that, as of the next elections, it will be necessary to have
been the administrator of a Department or a commissaire, I have
felt obliged to apply for appointment either in the Léman [Lake of
Geneva] Department where I was born, and where I could be of
help to Geneva which suffered a great deal under the Directory, or
in that of Seine-et-Oise where I have lived for several years, and
where I have been administrateur municipal for three. I would
prefer the latter as it would not take me so far away from you.^88On 25 December 1799 a new constitution came into force, the
Constitution of Year VIII, originally the idea of Sieyès, which provided
for four separate bodies to run France under the three Consuls, Bonaparte,
Cambacérès and Lebrun: the Senate, consisting of sixty senators appointed
for life by the Consuls; the Corps législatif or Legislative body; the
Tribunate, whose members were appointed by the senators; and the
Conseil d’Etat or Council of State whose councillors were nominated by
the First Consul, Bonaparte, who would address them directly. It was soon
to become clear that this elaborate pyramid inaugurated a new age of
dictatorship, one in which the sovereign people of France were in fact to
have very little say through the electoral process. Bonaparte now had the
fullest executive authority, with the other two consuls playing a minor
auxiliary role. A popular vote on the new Constitution confirmed his
Benjamin constant 170