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Saint-Cloud: The Coup That Almost Destroyed Napoleon Before It Saved Him
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Napoleon's seizure of power nearly collapsed in a drafty hall outside Paris — and only his brother saved him. Inside the chaos, fear, and political desperation of 18 Brumaire.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Paris. November ninth, seventeen ninety-nine.
To understand why the coup happened, you need to understand what France had become by seventeen ninety-nine. The Revolution had consumed itself.
He'd been away. In the months before the coup, Napoleon was in Egypt, where his army had won remarkable victories against the Mamluks but had then become marooned.
The plot that became the eighteenth of Brumaire didn't originate with Napoleon. The architect of the conspiracy was Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, one of the Directory's own directors and one of the most influential political theorists of the revolutionary era.
On November tenth, the councils reconvened at Saint-Cloud. The conspirators expected a quick resolution.
The coup succeeded for reasons beyond the chaos at Saint-Cloud. Napoleon moved fast to consolidate power, but he also understood something that pure force alone couldn't deliver: he needed the French people to accept the new arrangement, or at least stop resisting it.
The Directory was gone. In its place was a structure built around one man's judgment and will.
There's a harder question underneath all of this. The coup of the eighteenth of Brumaire ended the French Republic's experiment with genuine representative governance.
By the end of seventeen ninety-nine, Napoleon Bonaparte was the most powerful man in France. He was thirty years old.
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