How Napoleon ran a republic for four and a half years before crowning himself
Between November 1799 and May 1804, France was still officially a republic, governed by three consuls. In practice one of them, Napoleon Bonaparte, held almost all the power, and two referendums reporting approval above 99 per cent carried him from First Consul to First Consul for Life.
The Directory that ran France in the late 1790s was crumbling. Military setbacks in 1798 and 1799, royalist risings in the south and Chouan unrest across Brittany, Maine and Normandy left its leaders looking for a strongman. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, the most influential director, hoped to redesign the constitution. Bonaparte, back from campaigns in the East after landing at Fréjus, offered the muscle. On 9 November 1799, 18 Brumaire in the revolutionary calendar, he forced the directors out, and the next night a rump of the Council of Ancients legalised the takeover.
Sieyès seemed at first to have won. His plan for a supreme Grand Elector, a post he meant to hold, was vetoed by Bonaparte, who blended Sieyès's scheme with a rival draft by Pierre Daunou and kept whatever suited him. The result split lawmaking among bodies that could not act alone: the Council of State wrote bills, the Tribunate debated without voting, and the Corps législatif voted without debating. A referendum on 7 February 1800 endorsed this arrangement with a reported 99.9 per cent, a figure historians treat with suspicion, though Bonaparte was genuinely popular.
Victories cemented him. Near-defeat at Marengo on 14 June 1800 turned to triumph thanks to Desaix and Kellermann, and the Treaty of Lunéville with Austria in February 1801 handed France almost all of Italy. The Concordat of 1801 made peace with Catholic opinion on his terms, winning peasants and disarming royalists. After the Peace of Amiens with Britain in March 1802, a vote on 2 August that year, claiming 99.7 per cent approval, made him consul for life.
The period left durable institutions, from the Legion of Honour to reorganised finance, courts and universities, and Paris grew better supplied and more prosperous. The price was dissent: outspoken voices, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël among them, were pushed out, and General Moreau was exiled after being caught up in a royalist plot backed with British money. The Consulate ended when the Empire began on 18 May 1804.
Source: French Consulate
