Scarcely had Paris recovered from this sensation when, on April 6th, Pichegru was found strangled in prison; and men silently but almost unanimously hailed it as the work of Napoleon’s Mamelukes.  This judgment, however natural after the Enghien affair, seems to be incorrect.  It is true the corpse bore marks which scarcely tallied with suicide:  but Georges Cadoudal, whose cell was hard by, heard no sound of a scuffle; and it is unlikely that so strong a man as Pichegru would easily have succumbed to assailants.  It is therefore more probable that the conqueror of Holland, shattered by his misfortunes and too proud to undergo a public trial, cut short a life which already was doomed.  Never have plotters failed more ignominiously and played more completely into the hands of their enemy.  A mot of the Boulevards wittily sums up the results of their puny efforts:  “They came to France to give her a king, and they gave her an Emperor.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER XX

THE DAWN OF THE EMPIRE

For some time the question of a Napoleonic dynasty had been freely discussed; and the First Consul himself had latterly confessed his intentions to Joseph in words that reveal his super-human confidence and his caution:  “I always intended to end the Revolution by the establishment of heredity:  but I thought that such a step could not be taken before the lapse of five or six years.”  Events, however, bore him along on a favouring tide.  Hatred of England, fear of Jacobin excesses, indignation at the royalist schemes against his life, and finally even the execution of Enghien, helped on the establishment of the Empire.  Though moderate men of all parties condemned the murder, the remnants of the Jacobin party hailed it with joy.  Up to this time they had a lingering fear that the First Consul was about to play the part of Monk.  The pomp of the Tuileries and the hated Concordat seemed to their crooked minds but the prelude to a recall of the Bourbons, whereupon priestcraft, tithes, and feudalism would be the order of the day.  Now at last the tragedy of Vincennes threw a lurid light into the recesses of Napoleon’s ambition; and they exclaimed, “He is one of us.”  It must thenceforth be war to the knife between the Bourbons and Bonaparte; and his rule would therefore be the best guarantee for the perpetual ownership of the lands confiscated during the Revolution.[305]

To a materialized society that great event had come to be little more than a big land investment syndicate, of which Bonaparte was now to be the sole and perpetual director.  This is the inner meaning of the references to the Social Contract which figure so oddly among the petitions for hereditary rule.  The Jacobins, except a few conscientious stalwarts, were especially alert in the feat of making extremes meet.  Fouche, who now wriggled back into favour and office, appealed to the Senate, only seven days after the execution, to establish hereditary power as the only means of ending the plots against Napoleon’s life; for, as the opportunist Jacobins argued, if the hereditary system were adopted, conspiracies to murder would be meaningless, when, even if they struck down one man, they must fail to shatter the system that guaranteed the Revolution.