A Wilderness So Immense (35 page)

That fine morning dawned in October 1799 after Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt. While in Italy Bonaparte had realized “for the first time” that he “no longer considered [him]self a mere general, but a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples.” Sensing his resolve, aware of their own vulnerability, and relieved at the prospect of sending this dashing hero on a white horse to the far end of the Mediterranean, in February 1798 the members of the Directory had happily agreed to Bonaparte’s expedition against Egypt. His aide Louis Antoine Fauvelet Bourrienne had asked how long they would be gone. “A few months, or six years,” Bonaparte had replied, “it all depends on events”—events in Paris.
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By October 1799 Paris was a confusing snake pit of plots and intrigue. The panoply of conspirators—including royalists, British agents, former Jacobins, members of the Directory itself, and a group of self-styled communists for whom “the Revolution is not over” because “the rich still have all the money”
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—agreed only that the Directory’s days were numbered. For their part, on October 8 the five directors took what proved to be a final decisive and symbolic act when they ordered the ringing of church bells and firing of artillery salutes in celebration of a dispatch from Bonaparte announcing his final victory over the Turks at Abukir Bay near the mouth of the Nile.
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Five days later came daunting news that Napoleon Bonaparte himself had landed at the tiny harbor of Fréjus, on the Mediterranean coast midway between Toulon and Nice. He was rushing toward Paris, greeted by cheering crowds, “unanimous applause,” and “general euphoria.” The final morning of the Directory was in sight.
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The coup d’état that overthrew the Directory on November 9–10,
1799 (18–19 Brumaire, the month of fog), was the work of a wide coalition of politicians—including Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Joseph Fouché, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieves, and many others—and it is generally regarded as the end of the revolution that began with the fall of the Bastille ten years earlier. The new Constitution of the Year VIII (1799) created offices for three consuls, sixty senators, one hundred tribunes, and three hundred legislative representatives, but in fact it soon made First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte a virtual dictator.

Of approximately five million votes cast in a national referendum, the new constitution was approved by a margin of 3,011,007 to 1,562—at least according to the official tabulation made by Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, who conveniently ignored 3.5 million negative votes and double-counted 1.5 million favorable ballots. “Citizens,” the first consul proclaimed after the coup d’état of 18–19 Brumaire, “the revolution remains faithful to the principles which gave it birth. It is finished.” Two years later, with similar assistance at the polls, French voters approved a constitutional revision that made Bonaparte consul for life, and in 1804 they sanctioned yet another revision that created him Emperor Napoleon I.
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On the eve of a new century, the once reserved and studious youth of the Ecole Militaire had conquered Italy and Egypt and now ruled France. Much had changed, but that inquisitive young man who spent his evenings reading good authors had not disappeared. Napoleon enjoyed the company and conversation of learned and witty men—and in his heart he knew that the trophies and acclaim of a warrior were fleeting. “The people,” he had commented while gazing from his carriage upon throngs of admirers who filled the streets of Paris, “would crowd as fast to see me if I were going to the scaffold.” Of his many honors and triumphs, none pleased him more than his election to the prestigious National Institute of Science and Arts (now the Institut de France) in 1797.
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First proposed by the liberal statesman and bishop of Autun, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, in a report on public education delivered to the national legislature in May 1791, the National Institute was established in 1795 as the republican successor to the royal academies of the ancien regime, which had been abolished in 1792. With 144 full members and 144 associate members, the institute gathered the nation’s preeminent intellectuals into three sections—physical sciences and mathematics, moral and political sciences, and literature and the fine arts—and charged them with “improving the arts and sciences” and promoting
discovery and invention. “True conquests,” Bonaparte proclaimed on the occasion of his induction into the National Institute of Science and Arts on December 26, 1797, “are those made over ignorance…. The true power of the French Republic should consist henceforth in allowing no single new idea to escape its embrace.”
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Forced into the priesthood by a childhood injury that gave him a permanent limp, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord had risen to bishop of Autun when he embraced the French Revolution in
17S9.
He was instrumental in drafting important provisions of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, and he remained, through all the vagaries of his remarkable career, a persistent advocate of its goals. One of history’s consummate survivors, Talleyrand escaped the Reign of Terror as an exile in England and the United States. Although he disliked Philadelphia, Talleyrand admired American religious liberty and advocated toleration and colonization in the public lectures that marked his return to France and to power in 1797. He broke with Napoleon in August 1807 and subsequently helped engineer the reconstruction of Europe as Louis XVIII’s representative at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and
1S15.
Talleyrand died in Paris on May 17,
1838.
This engraving, based on an oil portrait by François Gerard, a student of Jacques-Louis David, depicts Talleyrand at the height of his powers.
(Collection of the author)

As if to demonstrate the validity of Bonaparte’s sentiments, Paris was
swiftly embracing two singular ideas advanced in lectures at the National Institute by another new member on April 4 and July 3, 1797. The lecturer was Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who had survived the Terror by exiling himself first to London and then to Philadelphia. His themes, derived in large measure from his observation in England and America, were the importance of religious toleration and the benefits of colonization.
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Unlike a palace coup, Citizen Talleyrand told the audience at the National Institute on April 4, 1797, a general revolution in which “everybody took part” arouses popular hatreds and “shakes up everything.” In its wake comes “a general uneasiness in people’s souls, a vague disposition toward risky enterprises, and a craving for incessant change and destruction.” Since these feelings “cannot be muffled, they must be regulated”—controlled “not at the expense but for the benefit of public happiness.”
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Freedom of religion, the former bishop of Autun had learned in America, promoted social and political harmony. “The freedom and especially the equality of religious beliefs is one of the strongest guarantees of social tranquillity, since where beliefs are respected, the other rights are necessarily respected as well.” To enjoy the general blessings of liberty, Talleyrand declared, France must transcend its long history of violent religious wars, embrace freedom of religion, and “learn how to give up our hatreds if we do not want to forever give up our happiness.”
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Returning to the podium of the National Institute on July 3, Citizen Talleyrand offered colonization as his second prescription for social and political order in the aftermath of the revolution. Once again his advice to France reflected his experience in America, where vast unexplored territories offered restless souls and malcontents—
“cette multitude de malades politiques”
—places to seek adventure and make a fresh start in life. “The art of putting people in their places is foremost in the science of government,” Talleyrand believed, “but the art of finding a place for the malcontent is certainly the most difficult.” Colonies in “far-off places with landscapes equal to their dreams and desires,” Talleyrand suggested, were “one good solution for this social difficulty”
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Egypt and some “fertile but uninhabited” islands along the coast of Africa were the specific far-off places that Talleyrand had in mind as homesteads for French malcontents, but neither the rebellious island of St. Domingue nor the provinces of Canada and Louisiana had been forgotten by the influential crowd who attended his lectures at the National Institute. In this regard, Talleyrand knew his audience when he invoked the name of Etienne François due de Choiseul as “one of the great men of our time, who had a keen sense of the future” while serving as chief
minister during the Seven Years’ War and the last dozen years of the reign of Louis XV. It suited the purpose of Talleyrand’s lecture to remind his audience that, years before the events happened, Choiseul had predicted both American independence and the partitioning of Poland, and that he had also advocated French colonization in Egypt. Talleyrand did not need to remind his listeners that Choiseul had also been interested in regaining control of Louisiana.
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Talleyrand advocated colonization as a means of dispersing malcontents in order to achieve political and social stability in France. He invoked Choiseul’s interest in Egypt as support for his vision, while Napoleon would also embrace Choiseul’s interest in Louisiana and St. Domingue.

Since the loss of Canada and Louisiana at the end of the Seven Years’ War, the idea of regaining possession of the former French colonies in North America was a recurrent dream that blossomed whenever war or diplomacy went well for France or poorly for Great Britain. Rumors of French designs on Louisiana began with the Franco-American alliance of 1778 and spread widely after the defeat of Great Britain—so much so that in 1786 Louis XVI’s ministers directed the French envoy in New York to disavow them. “There has never been a question of an exchange of Louisiana for a French possession in the West Indies,” Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, bluntly told Louis-Guillaume Otto, “and if it is again mentioned to you, you will formally deny it.” Otto published Vergennes’s denial in the
New York Packet
on January 19, 1787,
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but vague rumors proved as persistent in America as the dream was in France.

That summer a French trader who lived in Kentucky, Barthélemi Tardiveau, revived the idea in a letter to the comte Eléonore François Elie Moustier, Otto’s successor as charge d’affaires to the United States. Moustier, in turn, incorporated Tardiveau’s information in a lengthy report, forwarded to Paris in January 1789, in which he argued that returning Louisiana to France was in the best interests of both nations.

French control of the province, Moustier contended, offered Spanish Louisiana a more effective barrier against American aggression and France a profitable and self-sufficient empire in the Caribbean. From a diplomatic perspective, possession of the Mississippi Valley would enable France to counterbalance American and British territorial ambitions on the continent of North America. Commercially, the produce of Louisiana and the American settlements—food, timber, firewood, naval stores, and “the kinds of merchandise required by negroes”—would pass through
the port of New Orleans to support the lucrative sugar, coffee, and cocoa industries of St. Domingue and the French West Indies.
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The idea of a Spanish retrocession of Louisiana alarmed Americans, but Moustier’s stay in the United States was brief. His influence was limited. And his memorandum was fated to arrive in Paris weeks before the fall of the Bastille. For several years thereafter—during the bloody Reign of Terror, the war with Spain, and Citizen Genet’s fiasco with George Rogers Clark—Moustier’s memorandum advocating negotiations for a retrocession of Louisiana gathered dust in the files while a parade of ministers passed through the foreign office.
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Back in New York, Citizen Genet’s successor, Jean Antoine Joseph Fauchet, dusted off a copy of Moustier’s report early in 1795 as he formulated a similar dispatch in the anxious moments when France and Spain worried that Jay’s Treaty would bring an alliance between the United States and Great Britain. Intercepted by the British and later presented to the American secretary of state, Fauchet’s proposal maintained that unless Spanish policies changed or France stepped in, Louisiana was sure to end up in American hands.
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While Jean Fauchet’s intercepted message was being read by British authorities, at the royal palace of Aranjuez (for it was spring) Carlos IV’s minister Manuel Godoy was reaching similar conclusions about the future of Louisiana. As he monitored the French army’s relentless advance toward Madrid in the spring of 1795 and the gloomy predictions and grandiose defensive schemes of Governor Carondelet in New Orleans, Godoy silently prepared to get the best deal he could for relinquishing Louisiana to France.
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In the secret negotiations at Basle that ended Spain’s war with France and alliance with Great Britain in August 1795, Godoy had declined French overtures about a retrocession of Louisiana. At the time, France was preoccupied with its war with Austria and Godoy was reluctant to risk war with America—especially with John Jay busy at the negotiating table in London. By October, however, after he had failed to secure from Thomas Pinckney an American pledge for the territorial integrity of Louisiana and the Floridas, Godoy was ready to let France shoulder the burden of defending Spain’s buffer zone along the Mississippi.
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