The Hall at Saint-Cloud
November 1799 · Napoleon, just back from Egypt, with France's Directory bankrupt and unpopular
The government is a joke and everyone knows it. Ten years after the revolution the country is governed by five men nobody voted for in any way that meant anything, the currency is finished, and there are royalist risings in the west and an army in Italy that has not been paid.
He is thirty, he has just come back from Egypt having abandoned an army there, and he is the most popular man in France.
He can wait. He is thirty years old and the constitution has a minimum age of forty for the office he wants. In ten years he would be legitimate, elected, unarguable (if France lasts ten years, and if somebody else does not do this first), and there are three other generals who could.
Or he can walk into the chamber tomorrow with soldiers outside, and take it, and spend the rest of his life being a man who took it.
His brother is president of one of the two councils. That is the part that makes it possible.
Wait for it to come to you
Walk in and take itOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
He took it. The coup of 18–19 Brumaire nearly failed: he lost his nerve in front of the Council of Five Hundred, was shouted down as an outlaw, and was hustled out; it was his brother Lucien who saved it by walking outside and telling the grenadiers the deputies had tried to assassinate him. The soldiers cleared the hall. Within five years he had crowned himself emperor in front of the Pope. He also gave France the Civil Code, which outlived everything else he did and is still the skeleton of the law across much of the world; and in 1802 he reinstated slavery in the colonies, eight years after the revolution had abolished it.
The philosophers weigh in
Wait"When names are not correct, speech does not follow, and nothing that is undertaken can be completed. He will spend fifteen years making everyone in Europe agree to call him something he took."
Take it"Fortune is a river and it floods when it floods. He was in the room, the government was already dead, and the objection is that he did not have a certificate. Certificates are issued afterwards, by whoever is standing."