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    The Conversation
    The Conversation
    The Conversation
    Ebook54 pages45 minutes

    The Conversation

    By Jean D'Ormesson

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    Several years after the French Revolution, in the winter of 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte has to make a crucial decision: to keep the main ideals of the new France alive or to elevate the country into a powerful base by making it an empire and becoming emperor.

    One evening at the Tuileries Residence in Paris, Second Consul Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, a brilliant law scholar and close ally, listens as Napoleon struggles to determine what will be best for a country much weakened by ten years of wars and revolutions. Torn between his revolutionary ideals and his overwhelming longing for power, Napoleon Bonaparte declares that it can only be achieved by his taking the throne.

    Bonaparte attempts to rally Cambacérès to his cause and maps out in great detail why France must become an empire, with him as its Emperor. The Republican hero desires only one thing: to forge his legend during his lifetime. France has arrived at a crossroads, and Bonaparte must break many barriers to fulfill his ambition. “An empire is a Republic that has been enthroned,” he declares. And so, through the night, French history is made. With historical erudition, d’Ormesson remarkably captures the man’s vertigo of triumph, which ultimately leads to his fall.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcade
    Release dateNov 6, 2013
    ISBN9781628722970
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      The Conversation - Jean D'Ormesson

      PROLOGUE

      CROSSING THE RUBICON

      There are moments when historical events seem poised to reveal their full significance: Alexander the Great at the head of his army, on the verge of taking on the vast and inexhaustible Persian Empire; Hannibal preparing to cross the Alps with his elephants, to strike at the heart of Rome; Caesar, of course, standing on the banks of the Rubicon; dawn on June 17, 1940, in Bordeaux, that instant before General Charles de Gaulle climbed into General Edward Spears’ plane—bound for London, and for what appeared a hopeless, if glorious, act of resistance.

      The moment I will try to capture here involves Napoleon Bonaparte, at the height of his adoration by the French people, whom he has pulled back from the abyss created by years of chaos and misrule. He is on the brink of declaring himself Emperor of France.

      We must keep in mind what led up to this moment. In November 1799, the thirty-year-old Bonaparte, just returned from conquering Egypt, triumphed over the Vicompte de Barras, head of the Directory, and, with assistance from his brother, Lucien, and Abbé Sieyès, succeeded in his coup d’état on 18 Brumaire in the Revolutionary Year VIII, ending the Directory’s four-year rule. The five directors (only the first two really counted)—Barras, Sieyès, Louis-Jérôme Gohier, Roger Ducos, and Jean-François Moulin—were replaced by a Consular Committee (commission consulaire), consisting of three members—Sieyès, Ducos, and Bonaparte himself. This would itself soon be replaced, following the terms of a new Constitution, by yet another triumvirate: Bonaparte, who was to be called First Consul; Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, Second Consul; and Charles-François Lebrun, Third Consul. The First Consul held the true power. The others were mainly advisers.

      At the start of the Consulate, France was in a perilous state. Business and industry were a shambles. Industrial output had diminished by 60 percent in Paris, and by 85 percent in Lyon. The ports of Marseille and Bordeaux were effectively closed. The network of roads had been destroyed. Coach service had become completely unreliable. Everywhere, and especially in Provence and in the West, roving bands of brigands operated almost uncontested. The forests and fields were devastated. The currency had been devalued by 99 percent. The state’s coffers were empty; soldiers and government employees complained they were due a year’s-worth of salary. There were no taxes, no budget, no balance sheets. The country had lost its way and become victim to every form of excess and abuse. For four years, from Revolutionary Year VIII until XII, meaning from the end of 1799 until the beginning of 1804, Bonaparte worked tirelessly to get France back on its feet.

      In February 1800, three months after the coup of 18 Brumaire, a referendum on the Consulate resulted in more than three-million Frenchmen voicing their support for Bonaparte; a mere 1,500 opposed him. The First Consul moved into the former royal palace in the Tuileries, then into the one in Saint-Cloud. He founded the Banque de France; sealed the borders and declared amnesty for those who had already immigrated; stage-managed the Concordat of 1801, restoring to the Roman Catholic Church its civil status; revamped public education; created the lycée school system and the Légion d’honneur; and minted the first French franc—in his own image. He also crossed the

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