3 nivôse, year ix
Paris in the year ix of the new era—1800; the third day of the month of snow. In England it was Christmas Eve, but Christmas had been abolished in revolutionary France. Wednesday, a dark night of light rain.
The beau monde of Paris was making its way to the Théâtre de la République et des Arts in the rue de la Loi for the first Paris performance of Josef Haydn’s Creation. The famous singer Pierre Garat was making a one-night return from retirement to sing the part of the Angel Gabriel; the performance had sold out and the theatre filled early. It was the custom of young people with boxes in the theatre to meet up beforehand and dine in a group at a cabaret so as to arrive at the theatre when the doors opened. Everybody who was anybody was heading to the theatre on this special night to see and to be seen, for the room was brightly lit during the performance.
Haydn’s music was already more than a year old, but tonight’s performance was to unveil a new French libretto written by the talented intellectual soldier Louis-Philippe, comte de Ségur, one of the influential noblemen that Bonaparte had charmed into his camp, his future master of ceremonies. The Creation had first been performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 19 March 1799, and earlier in 1800 it had been published in German and in English-language versions, but this French version would be bigger and better. The huge chorus of 250 singers, the Opéra chorus having been reinforced by singers from the Théâtre Feydeau, was directed by the veteran Jean-Baptiste Rey, who had first taken his post as master of music to Louis XVI.
It was time for the performance to begin, and the First Consul was late. The curtain rose without him to reveal Carat dressed in his signature style, flamboyant beyond caricature—’his collar rose above his head, and his face, not unlike a monkey’s, was barely visible amid a forest of curls’. Beside him Lavinie Barbier-Walbonne was dressed with contrasting simplicity. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the Earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep … ‘ The orchestra played twenty bars of the opening description of ‘Chaos’ before being interrupted by the noise of a huge, rumbling boom from somewhere outside.
***
At eight o’clock César had Bonaparte’s carriage ready outside the Tuileries Palace, half a mile from the theatre; as usual, the coachman had dined well. Bonaparte had been working all day and was not keen on going out, but the women were all dressed up and determined to go, and so he joined the party. At quarter past eight the First Consul and generals Lannes, Bessières and Berthier drove away towards the theatre about half a mile away in the rue de la Loi (it was in what is now the Square Louvois in the rue de Richelieu). Napoleon’s wife Josephine, her daughter Hortense and Napoleon’s sister Caroline were to follow in a second carriage, escorted by his handsome aide Jean Rapp, but they left a little later. Josephine had just been given a magnificent Ottoman shawl from Constantinople which she was wearing for the first time, and either Bonaparte or Rapp told her that she had not folded it as gracefully as she usually did. It was probably Rapp and Josephine flirting; she asked him to arrange it in the way that an Egyptian lady would wear it, which took some time. Napoleon’s carriage drove off and Caroline, anxious that they would miss the beginning of the performance, told them that they were being left behind; by the time they had settled in their carriage, Napoleon was already crossing the place du Carrousel.
***
The orchestra played twenty bars of the opening description of ‘Chaos’ before being interrupted by the noise of a huge, rumbling boom from somewhere outside.The chouans had arrived early. The name had been adopted by the royalist insurgents of western France—bandits or heroes depending on your point of view. It means silent one or owl, but the application is obscure—possibly in their own region they used owl calls as signals. There had been chouan armies in most regions of western France until Bonaparte had forced their surrender earlier in the year. Most of the leaders had made their peace with the First Consul, but the most determined chouan general, Georges Cadoudal, had fled to London, and two of these men were officers of his, who had ventured away from their native Brittany to hide out in Paris. They were waiting, with a soldier servant, in the rue Saint-Nicaise at the end of the place du Carrousel in front of the Tuileries Palace.
Wearing blue workmen’s smocks over dirty jackets, they had driven their cart with the empty barrel they had had made a few days earlier, from its shed in the faubourg—the suburb—southward to the northern gate to Paris proper, the Porte Saint-Denis. Near Louis XIV’s monumental gate two more chouans had taken away the barrel and brought it back half an hour later transformed into a bomb, filled with two hundred pounds of gunpowder mixed with sharp stones. The journey south-west along the rues Neuve-Égalité, Croix des Petits-Champs and Saint-Honoré to the rue Saint-Nicaise had gone without a hitch, and now, with time to kill, the Bretons were attempting to look inconspicuous. First they took off the rainproof tarpaulin, as if to check the load: in reality they were putting in place a fuse impregnated with saltpetre. The barrel was concealed by a load of dung, hay, straw and a sack of oats. At the front was a pile of rubble and paving slabs.
Joseph Picot de Limoëlan, who drove the cart, was a former army officer whose father had been guillotined and his brother killed fighting for the chouans, after which he had joined them himself, leading a band in northern Brittany. Thirty-two years old, blue-eyed, with a long, thin nose, his blond hair was cut in the short-cropped ancient Roman style à la Titus and he normally wore a blue coat and trousers, boots and a hat with a mother-of-pearl buckle; he was the tallest of the three, being the same height as Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul. His servant was a Parisian who knew his way around, forty-five-year-old François-Jean Carbon, known as Little Francis, a former seaman, not much over five foot tall, blond, bearded, blue-eyed, with a scar over his left eye. He had been confidential servant to the chouan commander of lower Maine, but for the last two months he had been employed by Limoëlan; a week before he had bought the horse and cart from a grain merchant. Their leader was the diminutive Pierre Robinault de Saint-Régent, aged thirty-two, commander of Cadoudal’s legion of la Trinité-Porhoët, normally a dapper dresser in blue coat, black velvet waistcoat with textured stripes and grey trousers, with chestnut hair and big blue eyes. He was a former naval artillery officer, expert in explosives, who fled to England in 1794, fought at Qyiberon in 1795, was wounded at Locminé in 1796 and accompanied Cadoudal to England in 1798. Only five foot tall, he had once been captured dressed as awoman, but had broken out through the roof of his prison. He was adept at disguising himself as a peasant and living wild in the woods and had a reputation for being daring, violent and merciless. His name appears in ‘A list of Persons who receive an Allowance from the British government for their Services on the coast of France’, in the papers of the Secretary at War, William Windham, paid at the senior officer rate of 3 shillings a day.
They looked at a lemonade shop, then had a drink in the crowded café d’Apollon on the corner of the rue Marceau. A wine merchant and a grill also had many customers, for the rue Saint-Nicaise was a lively street and many of the rooms on the side facing the Carrousel were rented out to prostitutes. The church clock rang eight. They made as if to repair the road near the corner of the rue Saint-Nicaise, piling up some stones and rubble there as an obstacle, and Limoëlan walked off across the square towards the Tuileries Palace so that he could signal to Saint-Régent when the Consul’s coach was leaving, to give him time to light the fuse, which would take several seconds to burn. Saint-Régent, who had positioned the cart so that it partly blocked the road, reckoned he just had time to get round the corner of the street before the bomb went off; he offered a young girl 12 sous to hold the docile old mare for a few minutes while he stood by the barrel.
***
Leaving the Tuileries gate, César began to cross the place du Carrousel, but he could see that the entrance into Saint-Nicaise and the rue Marceau was blocked. Inside the coach, Bonaparte was dozing, but General Lannes pulled the cord to instruct César to slow down, and he did so: a cart drawn by a black horse, facing the Tuileries, was obstructing a cab that was coming out of the rue Marceau and trying to turn right towards the rue Saint-Honoré. Twenty yards ahead of the coach, the leading outrider, a horse grenadier of the Consular Guard, pushed his big, powerful horse between the two vehicles to create a gap, forcing the little black mare towards the wall, and, threatening the driver of the cab with his drawn sabre, urged him to move on fast; in the commotion his horse hurt its leg. César, who was slightly drunk, saw the gap open just wide enough, and without waiting for instruction, knowing they were late for the performance, whipped his splendidly trained horses on through the traffic at top speed, into the rue Marceau and then sharp left, northwards, towards the opera.
All this happened in seconds. In the confusion Saint-Régent lost sight of Limoëlan and failed to light the fuse before the grenadier was on top of him. Afterwards he claimed to have been knocked over by the grenadier’s horse, but, if so, the grenadier didn’t notice; possibly the cab was part of the plan and he had been intended to escape in it; at any rate, there was a slight delay before Saint-Régent lit the fuse and fled down the rue Marceau.
Just after César turned right into the rue de la Loi the bomb exploded. Saint-Régent, running for his life, was thrown into the air and landed against the wicket-gate to the Louvre. The horse and the girl holding it were blown to pieces by the explosion; only the legs of the girl and the front half of the horse were found intact. The landlady of the café d’Apollon, who had rushed to her door to see the First Consul pass, had both her breasts ripped off by a piece of flying debris; she died three days later. One of her waiters was killed, the other wounded. Pieces of cart and stone and horse shot into the air and fell on the rooftops, bringing down a shower of tiles. The buildings in nearby streets shook as if in an earthquake – those closest to the explosion were gutted and windows smashed as far away as the Tuileries. Forty-five houses were so badly damaged that they were no longer inhabitable. Almost nobody who was in the rue Saint-Nicaise escaped uninjured: seven people were killed and twenty seriously injured. Several were blinded; those who could still walk tried to get away from the shrieks and wailing and the smoke and dust.
***
The machine infernale detonated in the rue Saint-Nicaise on 24 December 1800 in an attempt to kill Napoleon Bonaparte was the first of its kind — the first terrorist act of mass killing, targeted at an individual but indiscriminate in its effect, the first ‘IED’ (improvised explosive device), the first time a bomb had been used for assassination.Bonaparte’s carriage was thrown onto one wheel and the windows smashed. César’s horses bolted momentarily, but he regained control and reined them in at the Théâtre de la République on the corner of the rue Saint-Honoré. The Consul called over the commander of his escort to ask if there had been casualties, but only one horseman had been hurt by a falling tile. He sent someone back to find out what had happened to Josephine and, if she was still alive, to reassure her that he too had survived, and they drove on to the performance.
Josephine’s coach had only just reached the palace gate when the bomb went off: flirtation had saved her life. Its windows also broke as the ground shook, the women screamed and a shard of glass cut Hortense’s hand. Rapp jumped from the coach to find the street ahead a chaos of smoke, dust, corpses and debris from ruined walls and houses. Bonaparte’s coach was nowhere to be seen. Uncertain what to do, he ran back to Josephine’s coach, but one of the out- riders cantered up to summon them on to the opera, saying that the Consul was unhurt. They drove on, anxious, wondering what had really happened and what would happen next.
***
When Rapp reached the royal box above the left of the stage, Bonaparte, impassive, was calmly surveying the audience through his lorgnette. The audience was applauding wildly. Seeing Rapp, he asked: ‘Josephine?’ She appeared at that moment and his question tailed off. ‘Those bastards tried to blow me up,’ he remarked calmly. ‘Have someone bring me the libretto of Haydn’s oratorio.’
***
The machine infernale detonated in the rue Saint-Nicaise on 24 December 1800 in an attempt to kill Napoleon Bonaparte was the first of its kind — the first terrorist act of mass killing, targeted at an individual but indiscriminate in its effect, the first ‘IED’ (improvised explosive device), the first time a bomb had been used for assassination. It was called a terrorist bomb at the time, but that was because at first everybody thought it had been planted by Jacobins responsible for the Terror; in fact, it had been detonated by royalists secretly sponsored by the British government. This had been a French bomb, placed by French royalists, to blow up the man who was head of state in France, but William Pitt’s British government paid for the operation and naval vessels transported most of the conspirators from Britain to France. Three years later there was a second and far larger-scale plot to assassinate Bonaparte and overturn his government. The unscrupulous people who directed these operations believed that this was a new kind of war, that French innovation must be met with an unprecedented ruthlessness whose full extent remains relatively unexplored and remarkably little known.
During the same period, and partly in order to justify their unscrupulous schemes, figures in or allied to the British government developed sophisticated propaganda directed against Napoleon Bonaparte personally, using techniques that survive and flourish today. It is to these efforts that we owe our enduring perception of Napoleon as a dwarfish megalomaniac who could not rest content unless he was fighting a war.
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Excerpted from THE SECRET WAR AGAINST NAPOLEON: BRITAIN’S ASSASSINATION PLOT ON THE FRENCH EMPEROR by Tim Clayton. Copyright © 2019 by Tim Clayton. Excerpted by permission of Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
