The Barbed Crown by William Dietrich Read Free Book Online Page A

awkward being married to a heathen. “Mary, too,” I said quickly.
    The abbess regarded us uncertainly.
    So I gave her an extra gold piece and hoped she’d choose our side in her prayers, whichever side that was.
    Then I set out to enjoy Paris with my family.

C HAPTER 5
    T he sound of the guillotine chopping through a rebel neck is exactly that of a cleaver through cabbage, the vegetable in this instance being the head of Georges Cadoudal hitting its basket with an audible thump.
    The crowd rumbled as if a bull had been dispatched in the ring. The execution meant stability, finality, and tyranny, all at the same time. History would not reverse. It was June 25, 1804, nearly three months after my family and I had landed in France, and a royalist rebellion was as remote as the moon.
    The conspiracy and assassination attempts encouraged by the British had reminded Frenchmen not of Bourbon would-be kings waiting to be welcomed but of the chaos of revolution. The opportunistic Napoleon seized on extracted confessions from Bourbon plotters to fortify his own position. He argued France needed a return to the stability of a monarchy, but a monarchy headed by him, not the ousted heirs of Louis XVI. And since the revolutionaries had pronounced inept Louis “the last king of France,” a new title was needed. Accordingly, just one month before Georges’s beheading, the French had voted 3,524,254 to 2,579 (by the eventual count of Napoleon’s minions, at least) in favor of making Bonaparte—a man who still spoke French with a Corsican accent—their emperor.
    As first consul he’d beaten the Austrians at Marengo (with my help, though I never got proper credit), revitalized the economy, reformed the military, restored public works, reworked the law, and kept public order. Three overlapping police services spied not just on Frenchmen and foreigners but on each other. Sixty newspapers had been shuttered, plays were censored, and martial music banged in the streets. By making Napoleon’s rule hereditary, the French had made it immensely harder to overthrow him by assassination or coup, since his heirs would fill his empty throne. So while in 1789 the French had risen to eradicate royalty, in 1804 they voted to establish a brand-new one, trading freedom for stability.
    I wasn’t surprised. We all balance liberty against risk, and are seduced by the safety promised by the strong. They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither and will lose both , Benjamin Franklin had warned. Like any youth, I ignored his advice while never quite forgetting it. The older I grew, the wiser the words became.
    Napoleon’s coronation would take place the coming winter. With it, he hoped to be accepted by the crowned heads of Europe as a royal himself, and to bring a French-dictated peace to the Continent.
    No one saw the irony clearer than Georges Cadoudal. The Breton royalist and ardent Catholic had fought the French revolutionaries and Napoleon for eleven tumultuous years before being captured, only to see his crusade turned against him. “I meant to give France a king, but I have given her an emperor,” he summed up on the way to his beheading.
    The counterrevolution I’d signed on for was in tatters. Fellow conspirator General Charles Pichegru had been strangled in his cell by Napoleon’s fierce Mameluke bodyguards, or so the rumor went. The four executioners were then killed themselves so complicity could be denied.
    General Jean Victor Marie Moreau, the military hero of the Battle of Hohenlinden that had finished the Austrians after Napoleon’s Marengo, and who considered himself superior in generalship, had been exiled to the Americas. He was too popular to be either killed or trusted.
    In the frenzy against conspirators like me, an apparently hapless Bourbon royalist named the Duc d’Enghien had been seized across the border in Germany, dragged back to France, found guilty without proper trial,