The Coup of 18 Brumaire

NOV 09 1799 · 12:00

General Bonaparte before the Council of Five Hundred at Saint-Cloud, 19 Brumaire Year VIII (10 November 1799). Francois Bouchot, oil on canvas, 1840. Place: Château de Saint-Cloud, near Paris Figures: Napoleon Bonaparte, general returned from Egypt · Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Director and theorist · Lucien Bonaparte, presiding over the Council of Five Hundred · Joseph Fouché, Minister of Police, neutral A Coup Dressed as a Procedure Sieyès, one of the five Directors, has concluded that the Constitution of Year III is unworkable and that France needs a stronger executive. He needs a general with a reputation. Bonaparte, just returned from abandoning his army in Egypt, is the candidate of convenience. The conspirators frame the move as a defense of the Directory against a fictional Jacobin plot. On 18 Brumaire (9 November) the legislative councils are moved out of Paris to Saint-Cloud, ostensibly for their own safety. On 19 Brumaire (10 November) Bonaparte enters the Council of Five Hundred to demand emergency powers. Deputies shout hors-la-loi, outlaw. Lucien Bonaparte, presiding, refuses to put the outlawing motion to a vote. Napoleon withdraws; grenadiers under Murat clear the chamber at bayonet point. The conspirators reassemble a rump that evening to vote a provisional Consulate of three: Sieyès, Roger Ducos, and Bonaparte. First Consul, Then Consul for Life, Then Emperor Within weeks Bonaparte sidelines Sieyès and writes the Constitution of Year VIII, which makes him First Consul with effectively monarchical powers; a plebiscite ratifies it. In 1802 he becomes Consul for Life by a second plebiscite. In 1804 he crowns himself Emperor, in Notre-Dame, in Pope Pius VII's presence (taking the crown from the Pope's hands and placing it on his own head). The Revolution's exit from chronic instability is, characteristically, into a single executive far stronger than the Bourbon king it replaced. Brumaire is a model that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will repeat without quite admitting they are repeating it. A republican constitution under stress, a war hero with administrative talents, an emergency framed to require him, a procedure dressed up to look constitutional, then a permanent revision of the system to reflect what the emergency had produced. Bonapartism enters the political vocabulary as a recognizable mode. Video: How the 18 Brumaire coup turned the Directory into the Consulate and Napoleon into First Consul.