one time both shared the concurrent favours of Mile George and that
d'Enghien used to make fr equent clandestine trips to Paris to see her.
According to the story, on one occasion he found Napoleon in her
boudoir at the mercy of one of his fainting fits and could have killed him
as he lay helpless; his murder was the thanks he got fo r his magnanimity.
However, this argument is weak in that Napoleon did not need
d'Enghien for his imperial purposes; he had what he needed in the
genuine Cadoudal/Pichegru plot. As he himself said, if he were a
convinced regicide he had had many chances and would have many more.
If it was his policy to kill Bourbons he could have had Louis XVIII and
his kinsmen the comte de Lille and the comte d' Artois assassinated with
ease, and the same was the case when Ferdinand and Don Carlos of Spain
were at Valen<;ay in r8o8. He claimed that several 'hitmen' had
approached him over the years, asking for sums of two millions to
eliminate his political opponents, but he always refused on principle. Part
of this argument may be allowed to stand. He was not in the grand league
of regicides: he had not overthrown the house of Saul like David,
overturned the Roman Republic like Caesar, executed a Stuart king like
Cromwell or a Bourbon monarch like the men of '93· Clearly Napoleon
was in no sense a killer of princes or collector of Bourbon scalps and he
had d'Enghien executed for misperceived reasons of state. There was a
conspiracy and there were British intrigues that called for a vigorous
riposte, but Napoleon's murder of d'Enghien was actually irrelevant to
these rational aims. But, like all men, Napoleon was convinced that he
never performed an evil action and once declared: 'I am not at bottom a
bad sort.'
However, there can be no denying that Napoleon used the Pichegru/
Cadoudal plot, regardless of the reality of d'Enghien's actual involve
ment, to become Emperor. If he established a dynasty with hereditary
succession, it would be pointless in the fu ture for royalists to try to kill
him. Moreover, the royalists in exile were genuinely cowed and terrified
by Bonaparte's ruthless action against their prince. If the Concordat had
given comfort to the right, the events of March r 804 silenced the outre
Republicans who had suspected Napoleon of being soft on Bourbon
aspirations. It also reassured the notables and the Thermidorians - all
who had done well fr om the sale of national property - that their
property and prosperity was safe with Napoleon: had he not now joined
them in the ranks of the regicides? By becoming Emperor he had
decisively rebutted the Jacobin canard that his role was to be that of
General Monk to the restored king. He convinced both Jacobins and
bourgeoisie that there could be no going back to 1789 and therefore that
marcin
(Marcin)
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