Coup of 18 Brumaire (1799): How Napoleon Seized Power in France

The Coup of 18 Brumaire was the seizure of power in France on 9-10 November 1799 (18-19 Brumaire, Year VIII of the revolutionary calendar) that overthrew the government of the Directory. Organised by the Director Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and carried through by General Napoleon Bonaparte, it replaced the Republic’s weak five-man executive with a Consulate dominated by Bonaparte. It is widely seen as the moment the French Revolution gave way to Napoleonic rule.

Background: a Republic in crisis

After the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Reign of Terror in 1794, France adopted the Constitution of Year III (1795). It divided power carefully: an executive of five Directors, and a legislature of two chambers, the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. The aim was to prevent any new dictatorship, but the result was a government that struggled to act.

The Directory lurched from crisis to crisis. Elections returned royalists in 1797 and radical Jacobins in 1798, and each time the government annulled results or purged deputies, often with the help of the army. Inflation, debt, banditry in the provinces and corruption damaged its reputation further.

In 1799 the War of the Second Coalition went badly. Austrian and Russian armies drove the French out of most of Italy, and there was fear of invasion. Emergency measures such as a forced loan on the rich and a law allowing the arrest of relatives of émigrés as hostages revived memories of the Terror. In June 1799 the councils forced out three Directors in a parliamentary coup known as 30 Prairial.

The plotters

Sieyès, famous since 1789 for his pamphlet “What is the Third Estate?”, became a Director in May 1799. He believed the constitution had to be rewritten to give the executive more power, and that this required a reliable general, a “sword”, to protect the change. His first choice, General Barthélemy Joubert, was killed at the Battle of Novi in August 1799.

Bonaparte was then in Egypt, where his expedition had been cut off by the British naval victory at the Nile. He left his army, sailed secretly for France, landed at Fréjus on 9 October 1799 and reached Paris a week later to a hero’s welcome. By then French armies had already halted the Coalition advance, but the public credited him with the turn of fortune.

Sieyès and Bonaparte distrusted each other but needed each other. Their circle included the second Director Roger Ducos, the former foreign minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the police minister Joseph Fouché and the justice minister Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès. Crucially, Napoleon’s younger brother Lucien Bonaparte had just been elected president of the Council of Five Hundred.

What happened: 18 Brumaire (9 November)

The plan used a legal loophole. The constitution allowed the Council of Ancients to move the legislature out of Paris in an emergency. Early on 9 November, after many likely opponents had not been told of the session, the Ancients were informed of an alleged Jacobin plot. They voted to transfer both councils to the former royal château of Saint-Cloud, west of Paris, and appointed Bonaparte commander of all troops in the capital.

That same day Sieyès and Ducos resigned as Directors, and Paul Barras, the most powerful of the five, was persuaded to resign as well and withdrew to his country estate. The two remaining Directors, Louis Gohier and Jean-François Moulin, refused, but were kept under guard at the Luxembourg Palace by troops under General Jean Moreau. With no quorum, the Directory had effectively ceased to exist.

What happened: 19 Brumaire (10 November)

The councils met at Saint-Cloud the next day, the Ancients in the Galerie d’Apollon and the Five Hundred in the Orangerie. Many deputies of the Five Hundred now understood that a coup was under way and insisted on swearing an oath to the existing constitution. Bonaparte, impatient, addressed the Ancients in a rambling speech that impressed few.

He then entered the Orangerie with a small escort. Deputies surrounded him, shouting “Outlaw!” (hors-la-loi), the cry that had doomed Robespierre in 1794, and he was jostled before soldiers pulled him out. For a short time the coup seemed close to failure.

Lucien Bonaparte saved it. As president he refused to put the motion of outlawry to a vote, left the hall and told the guards of the legislature that a minority armed with daggers was terrorising the assembly. He reportedly held a sword to his brother’s chest and swore he would kill him if he ever betrayed liberty. Grenadiers under Joachim Murat and Charles Leclerc then marched into the Orangerie with drums beating and drove the deputies out, some escaping through the windows.

That evening a small group of deputies, perhaps around a hundred, was gathered again. Together with the Ancients they abolished the Directory, expelled 61 deputies, and named three provisional consuls: Bonaparte, Sieyès and Ducos. Two commissions of 25 members from each council were set up to prepare a new constitution.

Key people

• Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821): the 30-year-old general who provided military force and emerged as the dominant figure.
• Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836): the political architect of the coup, who hoped to shape the new constitution but was outmanoeuvred.
• Lucien Bonaparte (1775–1840): president of the Five Hundred whose intervention on 19 Brumaire turned the day.
• Roger Ducos (1747–1816): Director and third provisional consul.
• Joachim Murat (1767–1815): cavalry general who led the troops that cleared the Orangerie; he later married Napoleon’s sister Caroline.

Consequences

Sieyès had drafted an elaborate constitution, but Bonaparte reshaped it to suit himself. The Constitution of Year VIII, proclaimed on 15 December 1799 and in force from 25 December, created three consuls: Bonaparte as First Consul, with Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun as Second and Third Consuls in a largely advisory role. Power to make laws was split between a Council of State, a Tribunate, a Legislative Body and a Senate, which in practice made the First Consul supreme.

The consuls’ proclamation declared that the Revolution was “fixed upon the principles which began it” and was now finished. The constitution was put to a plebiscite, and in February 1800 the government announced over 3 million votes in favour against about 1,500 against. Research by the historian Claude Langlois later showed that Lucien Bonaparte, as interior minister, had roughly doubled the yes vote, which was probably closer to 1.5 million.

The new regime quickly tackled the problems the Directory had left. Bonaparte’s victory at the Battle of Marengo in June 1800 strengthened his position, and over the next years he reorganised administration, finances and the law, and made peace with the Catholic Church. In 1802 he became Consul for life, and in 1804 Emperor.

Myths and facts

A popular story says deputies attacked Bonaparte with daggers in the Orangerie and that a grenadier was wounded protecting him. Contemporary witnesses disagree, and most historians believe the jostling was real but the dagger attack was exaggerated or invented by Bonaparte’s propaganda to justify the use of troops.

It is also sometimes said that the coup was a purely military seizure. In fact it was planned as a parliamentary manoeuvre with legal cover, supported by leading civilians, and the army was used only when that plan stumbled.

Timeline

• 1799, 16 May: Sieyès is elected a member of the Directory.
• 1799, 18 June: The parliamentary coup of 30 Prairial forces three Directors from office.
• 1799, 9 October: Bonaparte lands at Fréjus after leaving Egypt.
• 1799, 23 October: Lucien Bonaparte becomes president of the Council of Five Hundred.
• 1799, 9 November (18 Brumaire): The councils are moved to Saint-Cloud; Bonaparte takes command in Paris; the Directors resign or are confined.
• 1799, 10 November (19 Brumaire): Troops clear the Orangerie; the Directory is abolished and three provisional consuls are appointed.
• 1799, 25 December: The Constitution of Year VIII comes into force with Bonaparte as First Consul.
• 1800, 7 February: Official results of the constitutional plebiscite are announced.

Legacy

18 Brumaire became a byword for a takeover in which a strong man exploits a weak republic. When Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoléon seized power in 1851, Karl Marx called his study of that event “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, and the coup of 1851 was consciously staged on the anniversary of Austerlitz, another Napoleonic date.

The phrase “Bonapartism” also grew from these events: rule by a popular leader who claims to stand above parties, keeps some of the gains of revolution and seeks approval through plebiscites rather than free parliamentary politics.

Why it matters

The coup ended ten years of unstable revolutionary government and began fifteen years of Napoleonic rule that reshaped France and much of Europe. It also showed how easily a constitution designed to prevent dictatorship could be overturned by its own leaders with the help of a popular general.