Delmas and Simon. Yet Napoleon was always kept well informed of
Jacobin plots by his spies and made a point of se nding dissident generals
to remote foreign troublespots, excepting only Bernadotte, who as
Joseph's brother-in-law and Desiree's husband, consistently got away
with blatant disloyalty and even treason. The Jacobins' position was
difficult, for press censorship made any propaganda offensive chimerical,
and Napoleon, who detested the Jacobins far more than the royalists, did
not hesitate to mete out execution and deportation, or to open mails and
plant agents provocateurs. If ever Napoleon faced opposition from the
legislature, he would cow them with his favourite threat: 'Do you, then,
want me to hand over to the Jacobins?'
The one card the Jacobins held was that the loathsome Fouche, chief
of police, was secretly on their side. Systematically duplicitous - to the
point where, when asked by Napoleon to keep Josephine under
surveillance, Fouche secretly recruited her as an agent to report the
goings-on in the First Consul's household - Fouche covered up for his
political comrades and directed Napoleon's attention towards the
royalists.
Yet the sequel to the 'infernal machine' showed Napoleon for once
outfoxing the fox. He was determined to use the occasion to purge the
Left opposition and, despite reluctance from his colleagues, he forced
through an extraordinary measure: 130 known republicans were dubbed
'terrorist' and proscribed without legal process. They were then either
interned or sent to a slow death in Guyana and Devil's Island. An
enraged Fouche took no more than a few days to bring Napoleon
incontrovertible proof that the perpetrators of the 'infernal machine' were
royalist, not republicans. Napoleon authorized the guillotining of the new
batch of prisoners but did not free t�e deported Jacobins. His cunning
emerges in the wording of the emergency decree, which condemned the
130 Jacobins in phrases which referred to the safety of the state m
general, not to the Christmas Eve outrage.
Throughout the year r8oo Napoleon proved himself a master at
navigating the political shoals, playing off one party against another, now
appearing to incline to the Right, now to the I �eft. He leaked his
correspondence with Louis XVIII to the Jacobins to show that he had no
royalist sympathies, then purged the Jacobins to reassure the Right. The
situation after Marengo even allowed him to jettison his Thermidorian
rump of former supporters. Because Marengo was at first reported in
Paris as a defeat, the partisans of Sieyes and Barras showed their hand
openly, which allowed Napoleon to marginalize them when he returned
to Paris. More importantly, it revealed to people at large that Napoleon
marcin
(Marcin)
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