By the autumn of 1799, ten years after the storming of the Bastille, the French First Republic was exhausted, bankrupt, and cynical. Governed since 1795 by the corrupt five-man executive committee known as the Directory, France faced runaway inflation, highway banditry across the provinces, royalist uprisings in the west, and a resurgent coalition of British, Austrian, and Russian armies threatening its borders. Then, in October 1799, thirty-year-old General Napoleon Bonaparte landed back in southern France from his Egyptian campaign to wild cheering crowds. Within four weeks, he overthrew the Directory in the Coup of 18 Brumaire and established a four-and-a-half-year regime known as The Consulate (1799–1804)—arguably the most productive, brilliant period of institutional reform in modern European history, during which Napoleon built the legal, financial, and educational foundations of modern France before placing an imperial crown upon his own head.
18–19 Brumaire (November 9–10, 1799): The Coup That Almost Failed
Ironically, the man who organized the coup that brought Napoleon to power never intended for Napoleon to be in charge! Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès—the famous political theorist of 1789 and a member of the Directory—wanted to replace the weak constitution with a strong executive, and went looking for what he called “a sword” (a popular, tame army general who would intimidate the parliament on the day of the coup and then politely step aside so Sieyès could run the country). Sieyès thought young General Bonaparte was his useful pawn.
Launched on 18 Brumaire, Year VIII (November ninth, 1799), under the fake pretext of a Jacobin terrorist plot in Paris so the two legislative councils (the Council of Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred, chaired conveniently by Napoleon’s quick-thinking twenty-four-year-old younger brother, Lucien Bonaparte) could be moved outside the city to the isolated Château de Saint-Cloud surrounded by troops, the coup nearly turned into a humiliating disaster on day two (19 Brumaire / November 10):
- Napoleon Faints Under Heckling: Impatient with the slow legal speeches inside Saint-Cloud, Napoleon marched uninvited into the Orangerie hall of the Council of Five Hundred surrounded by four tall grenadiers. Instantly, furious Jacobin deputies leaped from their benches, screamed “Down with the dictator! Outlaw him (Hors la loi)!”—the exact legal death sentence that had killed Robespierre!—and grabbed the five-foot-six general by the collar, shaking him until a dizzy, overwhelmed Napoleon stumbled out of the room with his face scratched and bleeding.
- Lucien Bonaparte Saves His Brother: Outside in the courtyard, the soldiers hesitated to march against their own elected parliament—until brother Lucien Bonaparte ripped off his official parliamentary robes, jumped onto a horse, drew a sword, and pointed it Dramaticly at Napoleon’s own chest, swearing to the troops that he would stab his own brother through the heart if Napoleon ever harmed French liberty, and telling the gullible soldiers a brilliant lie: that crazy deputies armed with British-paid daggers were trying to murder their general inside! Beating their drums, Murat’s grenadiers marched in with fixed bayonets as deputies jumped out the ground-floor windows into the garden bushes in their togas, ending the French Revolution’s parliamentary era in two minutes.
Outsmarting Sieyès: The Three Consuls and First Consul Bonaparte
Borrowing the reassuring classical Roman Republican title of Consuls so the public wouldn’t think a king had returned, the plotters drafted the Constitution of the Year VIII. When Sieyès proposed a complicated pyramid where a figurehead “Grand Elector” sat at the top doing nothing while two consuls did the work, Napoleon laughed in his face, asking how any man of talent could agree to act like “a fatted pig put out to pasture on a few million livres!”
Instead, Napoleon dictated a three-man executive—the Consulate—where all real power belonged strictly to the First Consul (Napoleon Bonaparte), who appointed ministers, generals, and judges, while the Second and Third Consuls (Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun) held only advisory voices. Proclaiming to the nation on December fifteenth, 1799, “Citizens, the Revolution is fixed to the principles that began it: it is finished!”, Napoleon submitted his constitution to a nationwide plebiscite (public referendum).
The Four Pillar Reforms of the Consulate (1800–1804)
Moving into the Tuileries Palace in February 1800 and crossing the snow-covered Great St. Bernard Pass in the Alps four months later to defeat the Austrians at the dramatic Battle of Marengo (June 1800)—followed by the Treaty of Lunéville (1801) and the Treaty of Amiens with Great Britain (1802), which gave France complete peace across Europe for the first time in ten years!—First Consul Bonaparte spent four sleepless years personally chairing council sessions until two in the morning to build the “granite blocks” (masses de granit) that still govern France two centuries later:
- The Bank of France and the Franc Germinal (1800–1803): Ending a decade of worthless paper money, Napoleon founded the Banque de France in January 1800, centralized tax collection, and minted the silver-and-gold Franc de Germinal (1803)—a currency so rock-solid it kept its exact metal value without devaluation for the next 125 years, until 1928!
- The Prefect System and the Lycées (1800–1802): He placed a centrally appointed Prefect at the head of every French department (an office that still exists today), founded the elite state secondary schools called Lycées with scholarships for talented boys regardless of birth, and in 1802 created the Legion of Honour (Légion d’honneur) to reward civilian and military merit alike.
- The Concordat of 1801 With Pope Pius VII: Healing the bitter religious wound of the Revolution that had driven millions of Catholic peasants into rebellion, Napoleon signed the Concordat of 1801 with the Pope—reopening France’s churches and recognizing Catholicism as “the religion of the great majority of French citizens” while keeping the clergy on state salaries and letting buyers of confiscated Church lands keep their farms.
- The Napoleonic Code (Code Civil, March 1804): Personally attending thirty-six of the eighty-four drafting
