“the last king of France,” a new title was needed. Accordingly, just one month before Georges’s beheading, the French had voted 3,524,254 to 2,579 (by the eventual count of Napoleon’s minions, at least) in favor of making Bonaparte—a man who still spoke French with a Corsican accent—their emperor.
As first consul he’d beaten the Austrians at Marengo (with my help, though I never got proper credit), revitalized the economy, reformed the military, restored public works, reworked the law, and kept public order. Three overlapping police services spied not just on Frenchmen and foreigners but on each other. Sixty newspapers had been shuttered, plays were censored, and martial music banged in the streets. By making Napoleon’s rule hereditary, the French had made it immensely harder to overthrow him by assassination or coup, since his heirs would fill his empty throne. So while in 1789 the French had risen to eradicate royalty, in 1804 they voted to establish a brand-new one, trading freedom for stability.
I wasn’t surprised. We all balance liberty against risk, and are seduced by the safety promised by the strong. They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither and will lose both, Benjamin Franklin had warned. Like any youth, I ignored his advice while never quite forgetting it. The older I grew, the wiser the words became.
Napoleon’s coronation would take place the coming winter. With it, he hoped to be accepted by the crowned heads of Europe as a royal himself, and to bring a French-dictated peace to the Continent.
No one saw the irony clearer than Georges Cadoudal. The Breton royalist and ardent Catholic had fought the French revolutionaries and Napoleon for eleven tumultuous years before being captured, only to see his crusade turned against him. “I meant to give France a king, but I have given her an emperor,” he summed up on the way to his beheading.
The counterrevolution I’d signed on for was in tatters. Fellow conspirator General Charles Pichegru had been strangled in his cell by Napoleon’s fierce Mameluke bodyguards, or so the rumor went. The four executioners were then killed themselves so complicity could be denied.
General Jean Victor Marie Moreau, the military hero of the Battle of Hohenlinden that had finished the Austrians after Napoleon’s Marengo, and who considered himself superior in generalship, had been exiled to the Americas. He was too popular to be either killed or trusted.
In the frenzy against conspirators like me, an apparently hapless Bourbon royalist named the Duc d’Enghien had been seized across the border in Germany, dragged back to France, found guilty without proper trial, put up against the wall of a dry moat, and shot.
Eighteen others had been condemned with Cadoudal in a sensational spring show trial designed to demonstrate the peril to the government. Subtracting six pardons, the guillotine schicked this day thirteen more times, filling five wicker baskets that were shared, for economy. Some victims wept, some proclaimed final loyalty to the Bourbons, and most went with stoic silence.
I’m not a believer in last words, either, since you never get a proper reply.
Rumor held that a composer named Ludwig van Beethoven was so disturbed by Napoleon’s suppressions that he’d renamed his new “Bonaparte Symphony” the vaguer Eroica, a puzzling title I doubt will ever catch on. The cranky German songmeister believed Napoleon, once the Prometheus of Liberty, was betraying his own reforms.
No matter. Most Frenchmen had concluded Bonaparte was the best thing since the baguette. The audience sighed and applauded every time the blade dropped. It’s mesmerizing to watch a massacre.
Astiza kept Harry home at our Paris apartment while I morbidly witnessed the slaughter with Catherine Marceau. She pressed to my shoulder, one of a number of surprising intimacies that made me increasingly uncomfortable, but which I couldn’t bring myself to entirely discourage. She jerked slightly each time a head rolled, eyes wide, no doubt remembering the execution of her parents. Since we’d begun sharing an apartment, the comtesse had become inexplicably more flirtatious, as if inspired by the competition of a wife. Women forever confuse me.
“I’m sorry you have to see this, Comtesse,” I said.
“On the contrary, it reminds me of my purpose,” she murmured.
Astiza considered execution barbaric. “What if the judges make a mistake?” she asked. “The truly secure show mercy.”
“Napoleon preaches that killing a few keeps the many in line. He says executions are a mercy for the nation as a whole.”
“The creed of the hangman, not the hanged. Wait until it’s his turn.”