October to December 1799
Brumaire
Bonaparte lands at Fréjus on 9 October 1799 and reaches Paris on 16 October. The Directory has lost support through new taxes and rising prices, and the director Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, who wants to replace the Constitution of 1795, is looking for a general to back a change of regime. After Joubert’s death at Novi he turns to Bonaparte, and with Talleyrand, Fouché and Roger Ducos they plan a coup.
On 18 Brumaire of the Year VIII, 9 November, the Council of Elders, told of a Jacobin plot, moves both councils to the château of Saint-Cloud outside Paris and gives Bonaparte command of the troops in and around the city. Sieyès and Ducos resign as directors, Barras is persuaded to follow, and the two directors who refuse are held in their residences, so the Directory ceases to exist.
At Saint-Cloud on 10 November Bonaparte addresses the Elders and then the Council of Five Hundred, where deputies shout and lay hands on him, and Murat and Lefebvre bring him out. His brother Lucien, president of the Five Hundred, tells the guards that the general has been attacked, and the soldiers clear the chamber. That night a rump of both councils dissolves the Directory and names Bonaparte, Sieyès and Ducos provisional consuls.
Bonaparte at the Council of Five Hundred at Saint-Cloud, painting by François Bouchot, 1840Wikimedia Commons, François Bouchot, Public domain (Bouchot - Le general Bonaparte au Conseil des Cinq-Cents.jpg)
The Constitution of the Year VIII, adopted in December, sets up four assemblies and three consuls. Bonaparte becomes First Consul on 25 December, with Jean-Jacques Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun as second and third consuls. A plebiscite approves the constitution by 3,011,007 votes to 1,562, a result inflated by about 900,000 votes that Lucien Bonaparte adds.
Bonaparte as First Consul, detail of a painting by Antoine-Jean Gros, about 1802Wikimedia Commons, Antoine-Jean Gros, Public domain (Gros - First Consul Bonaparte (Detail).png)
Sources
- Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution, volume 2: From 1793 to 1799 (1964).
- William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989).
- Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life (2014).
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