The invasion of England was the great object of attention throughout Europe during the autumn and winter of 1803.  Early in the succeeding year Paris itself became the theatre of a series of transactions which for a time engrossed the public mind.

Even before Buonaparte proclaimed himself Consul for life, it appears that, throughout a considerable part of the French army, strong symptoms of jealousy had been excited by the rapidity of his advance to sovereign power.  After the monarchy of France was in effect re-established in him and his dynasty, by the decrees of the 2nd and 4th of August, 1802, this spirit of dissatisfaction showed itself much more openly; and ere long it was generally believed that the republican party in the army looked up to Moreau as their head, and awaited only some favourable opportunity for rising in arms against Napoleon’s tyranny.  Moreau was known to have treated both the Concordat and the Legion of Honour with undisguised contempt; and Buonaparte’s strictures on his conduct of the campaign of 1801 were not likely to have nourished feelings of personal goodwill in the bosom of him whom all considered as second only to the Chief Consul himself in military genius.  It has already been intimated that the army of the Rhine had been all along suspected of regarding Napoleon with little favour.  He had never been their general; neither they nor their chiefs had partaken in the plunder of Italy, or in the glory of the battles by which it was won.  It was from their ranks that the unhappy expedition under Leclerc had been chiefly furnished, and they considered their employment in that unwholesome climate as dictated, more by the Consul’s doubts of their fidelity to himself, than his high appreciation of their discipline and gallantry.  How far Pichegru, while corresponding with the Bourbons as head of the army of the Rhine, had intrigued among his own soldiery, no evidence has as yet appeared.  But after Pichegru’s banishment, Moreau possessed the chief sway over the minds of one great division of the armed force of the Republic.

Carnot, meantime, and other genuine republicans in the legislative bodies, had been occupied with the endeavour, since they could not prevent Napoleon from sitting on the throne of France, to organise at least something like a constitutional opposition (such as exists in the Parliament of England) whereby the measures of his government might be, to a certain extent, controlled and modified.  The creation of the Legion of Honour, the decree enabling Buonaparte to appoint his successor, and other leading measures, had accordingly been carried through far less triumphantly than could be agreeable to the self-love of the autocrat.

On the other hand, the return of so many emigrants—­(a great part of whom, not receiving back the property promised to them, were disappointed and aggrieved anew)—­could not fail to strengthen the influence of the royalists in the private society of Paris; and by degrees, as has often happened in the history of parties, the leaders of the republicans and those of the Bourbonists came together, sinking for the time the peculiar principles of either side, in the common feeling of hatred to Napoleon.