for the promotion of Jean Bernadotte. He has attracted widespread
odium, and rightly so. Frederic Masson described him as 'the most
unbearable of Jacobins and schoolmasters, a Bearnais with nothing of the
Gascon smartness and happy repartee about him, but whose calculating
subtlety always concealed a double game and who regarded Madame de
Stad as first among women because she was the first of pedants and who
spent his honeymoon dictating documents to his young wife.'
A hot -tempered, paranoid Gascon boaster, Bernadotte had ambitions
which always outran his abilities. The fiasco of his two-month
incumbency as French ambassador to Austria in 1798 was matched by the
farce of his two months as Minister of War in July 1799. The rising star
in the Directory, the Abbe de Sieyes, grew tired of his intrigues and
prima donna antics at the Ministry. The last straw came after Brune's
victory when Bernadotte delivered a gasconnade to the effect that he
would rather be in the field as a soldier than behind the Ministry desk.
Sieyes sacked him abruptly, but Bernadotte managed to have the last
word by leaking a 'resignation letter' to the press in which he thanked
Sieyes ironically 'for accepting a resignation I had not offered'.
Of his legendary hatred for Napoleon there can be no doubt. When
Napoleon arrived so unexpectedly in France, Bernadotte proposed to the
Directory that Napoleon be arrested and court-martialled, both for
deserting the army in Egypt and for evading the quarantine regulations.
He was the only one of Napoleon's former generals not to call on him at
the rue de Ia Victoire to offer congratulations for a safe return from
Egypt. He then refused to subscribe to an official dinner being arranged
by the generals for Napoleon until he explained his reasons for leaving
the army in Egypt. He added that since Napoleon had not been through
quarantine and might therefore have brought back the plague, he,
Bernadotte, had no intention of dining with a plague-ridden general.
Yet Bernadotte was only one of a host of dangerous political rivals
Napoleon had to fend off or neutralize when he arrived in Paris to take
stock of the Directory's brittle position. Fortunately for him, few of the
rest of them possessed Bernadotte's overweening ambition. Sieyes was
already engaged on a scheme of his own to topple the Directory but
needed a 'sword'. His first choice was Joubert, but he was killed in Italy.
His second choice was MacDonald but he refused to take part, as did
Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden. A reluctant Moreau was explaining
his hesitation to Sieyes on 14 October when news of Napoleon's landing
in France came in. 'There's your man,' said Moreau. 'He will make a
better job of your coup d'etat than I could.'
marcin
(Marcin)
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