Plot of The Rue Saint-Nicaise - Search For The Suspects and Punishments

Search For The Suspects and Punishments

Police informers believed that some extreme-left Jacobins known as "les exclusifs" plotted to kill Napoleon with a machine infernale. On 16 and 17 Brumaire Year IX of the French Republic (November 7–8, 1800) the Paris police arrested the exclusif plotters, including an agitator named Metge and a chemist named Chevalier.

Metge had published a pamphlet entitled Le Turc et le militaire français ("The Turk and the French Military"), comparing Napoleon to the despotic Roman ruler Julius Cæsar, who was killed by Marcus Brutus, and calling for “the birth of thousands of Bruti to stab the tyrant Bonaparte.” Chevalier had experimented with explosives in a hangar and was suspected of making a bomb to dispatch Napoleon, however, the machine infernale that exploded a month later in the Rue Saint-Nicaise was not Chevalier’s bomb.

Napoleon had apparently convinced himself that the attempt on his life had been made by the extreme-left Jacobin exclusifs. Fouché accused the chouans, but Bonaparte would not listen. He was “deeply shocked and very angry.” He believed that he had done wonders for France and that his would-be assassins were ungrateful. An enraged Napoleon told his Conseil d’état, “For such an atrocious crime we must have vengeance like a thunder-bolt; blood must flow; we must shoot as many guilty men as there have been victims.” Napoleon wanted his “Jacobin enemies” removed from Mother France. Even after the real culprits were apprehended by Fouché’s police, Napoleon refused to pardon the innocent ones, insisting that they be deported from France.

130 suspects, hardly any of whom reappeared, were the ransom of the infernal machine. When Fouché held the real culprits, Saint-Rejan and Carbon, when it was known that the attempt of Nivôse was the work of Chouans, it was too late. There was no pardon for the proscribed Jacobins because their proscription had been really desired. By a subtle precaution they had not been condemned for participation in the affair of the Rue Saint-Nicaise, but dealt with under a measure of public safety. Napoleon turned everything to his advantage: public anger, the annihilation of the intransigent Revolutionaries, and the indication that he had implacable enemies among the Royalists. Nor was that all. The very difficulty of making a law to meet special circumstances placed in his hands a ruler’s instrument of incomparable convenience. If the deportation of the “remains of Robespierre,” as they were called, might meet with opposition, it was in the two assemblies responsible for the manufacture of laws. The Tribunat was hostile, the Corps Législatif unfriendly.

Talleyrand suggested the idea of appealing to the Senate, a small, docile, tractable, conservative body, whose deliberations had the advantage of not being public. On the grounds that it would “preserve” the Constitution, the Senate was asked to modify it. The system of Sieyès was so perfect that it could even obliterate itself. .

On 14 Nivôse Year IX of the French Republic (January 4, 1801) First Consul Bonaparte and his two colleagues Cambacérès and Lebrun exiled 130 Jacobins from France. Their consular decree read: 130 citizens whose names are indicated, suspect of carrying partial responsibility for the terrorist attempt of 3 Nivôse, the explosion of the machine infernale, shall be placed under special surveillance outside the European territory of the Republic. On 15 Nivôse (January 5) the docile Sénat ratified this act by issuing a sénatus-consulte certifying that the consuls’ action preserved the constitution. The 130 unfortunate suspects were deported from France without trial and without the right of appeal. Napoleon increasingly acted as if he had the power to do anything he wished. Two days later, on 17 Nivôse, he named André-François Miot, the future comte de Melito, the administrateur général of the two Corsican départements of the Golo and the Liamone, where anti-bonapartiste sentiment was strong and where Bonaparte had suspended constitutional rule. The Christian date was January 7 – Joseph Bonaparte’s 33rd birthday.

Working closely with Fouché, Dubois, the police prefect, had his men collect the remnants of the dead mare and of the cart at the scene of the explosion and question all the Paris horse traders. One of them gave the description of the man who had bought her from him. On 18 Nivôse Year IX (January 8, 1801), fifteen days after the explosion in the Rue Saint-Nicaise that barely missed Napoleon, Carbon, the man who had made the bomb, was identified by Lamballe – the man who had sold (or rented) the cart to him – as well as by the blacksmith who had shod the mare hitched to the cart. Fouché – who had known the Jacobins’ innocence all along – brought solid proof to Bonaparte that the plotters were the royalist chouans rather than the Jacobin exclusifs. Fouché showed Bonaparte the evidence that the bomb made by the exclusif Chevalier, whom Dubois’ police had accused of having made the machine infernale, was quite different from the bomb that had exploded in the Rue Saint-Nicaise.

The police minister, who had plotted with Talleyrand and Clément de Ris to replace Bonaparte, appeared eager to prove his loyalty to the First Consul. Fouché wanted to prove that it was the royalist chouans, not the republican exclusifs, as Napoleon had thought, who had tried to murder his boss. But the First Consul would not listen to his police minister, vowing vengeance against the Jacobins. On 19 Nivôse (January 9) the four conspirateurs des poignards – the Jacobins, the sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi, Aréna, Topino-Lebrun and Demerville – were found guilty of plotting to murder the First Consul and condemned to death. Their desperate protestations of innocence and of being tortured into confessing went unheeded. Napoleon, who had been a fervent Jacobin himself, now turned against his former allies. He still insisted that the Jacobin exclusifs had tried to kill him. “A Royalist attempt would upset his policy of fusion. He refused to believe that; a Jacobin attempt suited him, as conforming to his system of the moment”.

Napoleon turned a deaf ear to Fouché. He would get rid of all those that wished to harm him:

It was a good pretext for annihilating the last remains of the violent factions, but a “purging” like that of Robespierre when he sent the “exagérés” to the guillotine, that of the Convention when they condemned the accomplices of the 1st of Prairial, that of the Directory when they shot Babeuf. At bottom, it was the progressive obliteration of the active Republicans which had made possible the return to order; and there too Bonaparte was carrying on rather than innovating. When their small number had disappeared, no counter-attack from the extreme Jacobins need be feared. There would be Royalist plots, military plots, domestic palace plots. There would be no further Republican conspiracies.

On 21 Nivôse Year IX of the French Republic (January 11, 1801) the unfortunate chemist Chevalier, who had not made the machine infernale, was executed by order of First Consul Bonaparte. On 28 Nivôse (January18), the chouan bomb maker Carbon was arrested. Under torture he gave the names of his fellow plotters, Limoëlan and Saint-Régeant. On 30 Nivôse (January 20), four weeks after the explosion of the machine infernale that missed him, Bonaparte executed the exclusif pamphleteer Metge and two of his friends, even though there was no proof that any of them had been involved in the plot against him.

On 1 Pluviôse Year IX of the French Republic (January 21, 1801) Napoleon named the 44-year-old scientist Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal de Chanteloup to the post of France’s interior minister. On January 25 Carbon’s fellow chouan plotter, Saint-Régeant, was arrested by Napoleon’s police. One scholar thought that “Saint-Réjant escaped to the United States and – the least the would-be assassin could do – became a priest.” In fact, Saint-Régeant was executed on 30 Germinal (April 20) at the place de Grève in Paris, where the “regicide” Robert-François Damiens had been savagely executed in 1757, and the man who escaped to the US was his fellow conspirator, Limoëlan. He had expressed feeling guilt about the death of the girl, Pensol, who had held the horse hitched to the cart. Limoëlan was ordained a priest in 1812, and died in 1826.