“Strong presumptions, not proofs, that the terrorists were the authors of this attempt. Chouannerie and emigration are surface ills, terrorism is an internal disease.  The measure ought to be taken independently of the event.  It is only the occasion of it.  We banish them (the terrorists) for the massacres of September 2nd, May 31st, the Babeuf plot, and every subsequent attempt."[169]

The Council thereupon unanimously affirmed the need of an exceptional measure, and adopted a suggestion of Talleyrand (probably emanating from Bonaparte) that the Senate should be invited to declare by a special decision, called a senatus consultum, whether such an act were “preservative of the constitution.”  This device, which avoided the necessity of passing a law through two less subservient bodies, the Tribunate and Corps Legislatif, was forthwith approved by the guardians of the constitution.  It had far-reaching results.  The complaisant Senate was brought down from its constitutional watchtower to become the tool of the Consuls; and an easy way for further innovations was thus dextrously opened up through the very portals which were designed to bar them out.

The immediate results of the device were startling.  By an act of January 4th, 1801, as many as 130 prominent Jacobins were “placed under special surveillance outside the European territory of the Republic”—­a specious phrase for denoting a living death amidst the wastes of French Guiana or the Seychelles.  Some of the threatened persons escaped, perhaps owing to the connivance of Fouche; some were sent to the Isle of Oleron; but the others were forthwith despatched to the miseries of captivity in the tropics.  Among these were personages so diverse as Rossignol, once the scourge of France with his force of Parisian cut-throats, and Destrem, whose crime was his vehement upbraiding of Bonaparte at St. Cloud.  After this measure had taken effect, it was discovered by judicial inquiry that the Jacobins had no connection with the outrage, which was the work of royalists named Saint-Rejant and Carbon.  These were captured, and on January 31st, 1801, were executed; but their fate had no influence whatever on the sentence of the transported Jacobins.  Of those who were sent to Guiana and the Seychelles, scarce twenty saw France again.[170]

Bonaparte’s conduct with respect to plots deserves close attention.  Never since the age of the Borgias have conspiracies been so skilfully exploited, so cunningly countermined.  Moreover, his conduct with respect to the Arena and Nivose affairs had a wider significance; for he now quietly but firmly exchanged the policy of balancing parties for one which crushed the extreme republicans, and enhanced the importance of all who were likely to approve or condone the establishment of personal rule.