A Prince from Neutral Ground
March 1804 · Talleyrand, Napoleon's foreign minister, asked about seizing a Bourbon prince from neutral soil
The plots are not imaginary. Three years ago a barrel of gunpowder went off in a Paris street as the First Consul's carriage passed; he lived, and several people who happened to be there did not. Since then there has been a steady traffic of royalist agents landing on the Channel coast with English money, and the last conspiracy was rolled up two weeks ago.
There is a Bourbon prince living quietly across the border, in a neutral German state. The police think he is involved. The evidence is thin and everybody in the room knows it is thin.
He can be taken. A column of dragoons crosses at night, lifts him from his own house on foreign soil, and brings him back, and then there is a trial that will reach the verdict it is meant to reach, and a wall.
What it buys is not this one man. It is every royalist in Europe understanding, in one morning, that the family is no longer protected by being the family, and that no border is far enough.
The foreign minister is being asked what he thinks.
Advise against it
Advise itOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Dragoons crossed into Baden on the night of 14–15 March 1804, seized the duc d'Enghien, and brought him to Vincennes. He was tried by a military commission after midnight, convicted, and shot in the moat before dawn; the grave had been dug before the trial ended. The evidence never connected him to the plot. Royalist conspiracy against Napoleon effectively stopped. It also permanently changed how Europe's courts saw him, and hardened the coalitions that eventually destroyed him. Talleyrand's exact role is disputed but he signed the orders that set it in motion, and stayed foreign minister until 1807, then took money from Austria and Russia until he opened his own channel to the allies ten years after this night.
The philosophers weigh in
Say no"They dug the grave before the verdict. Whatever that proceeding was for, it was not for finding anything out, and a state that discovers it can skip that step does not rediscover the need for it."
Advise it"Athens argued about Melos for a night and then did what strength does. The useful question is never whether it was just. It is whether it worked, and here it did, and it also cost him every court in Europe."