with bread rioters and this endeared him to the bourgeoisie, now the key
class given that the Revolution had devoured its own communalist
children.
His mastery as politician was particularly evident in the analysis he
made of the roots of power. He realized that the key to stability lay in
entrenching the power of those who had benefited from the sale of
national property. And he saw clearly the consequences of support for
either of the two rival groups: to throw in his lot with the Jacobins
entailed endless external war, while to endorse the royalists meant
sparking a bloody civil war. His reading of the popular mood was shrewd.
The Paris crowd, that much-feared Behemoth of the Revolution, did not
stir a muscle, and though the Jacobins in the provinces tried to foment
trouble, the people were too weary to face civil war.
The coup of 18 Brumaire was really a dual affair. At one level it
seemed simply the recognition of necessity: the confirmation in power of
a wing of the Directory, a more sophisticated cabal of neo-Thermidorians
representing the interests of the bourgeoisie and those who had benefited
from the sale of national property. By excluding Jacobins and royalists
from national representation, Napoleon seemed merely to be consolidat
ing the bourgeois revolution and to represent continuity rather than
change. Indeed 18 Brumaire was the first coup since 1789 that
unequivocally embraced the notion of private property as the supreme
value. Thus far it can almost be bracketed under the rubric of historical
inevitability.
Yet at another level 18 Brumaire was the conduit that led Napoleon
ultimately to imperial power. It is at this level that the coup seems a
botched affair, a plot that succeeded only because of public apathy and
the Army's determination. The coup was twofold: there was Sieyes's
'structural' putsch and Napoleon's personal bid for power. This explains
why what was planned initially as a transfer of parliamentary power by
political legerdemain was finally attained only at the point of a bayonet.
Consciously, Napoleon involved the Army in a way that had never been
agreed with Sieyes. Unconsciously, particularly on 19 Brumaire, Napo
leon operated on the margin and took the risks he always liked to take, on
the battlefield and elsewhere, so that a successful outcome multiplied his
power and prestige. What seem on the surface blundering and inept
interventions in the Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred actually
answered deep drives in Napoleon's psyche. There was unconscious
method in his conscious madness.
A few specific consequences of 18 Brumaire seem worth remarking.
Bernadotte was a loser while Fouche, Talleyrand, Murat and Lucien
marcin
(Marcin)
#1