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French Consulate
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==Duke of Enghien affair== [[File:Louis-Antoine de Bourbon-Condé.png|thumb|Portrait of Louis Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien, by [[Jean-Michel Moreau]]]] Because Bonaparte's hold on political power was still tenuous, French royalists devised a plot that involved kidnapping and assassinating him and inviting [[Louis Antoine, Duke of Enghien|Louis Antoine de Bourbon]], the [[Duke of Enghien]], to lead a ''coup d'état'' that would precede the restoration of the [[Bourbon monarchy]] with [[Louis XVIII]] on the throne. The British government of [[William Pitt the Younger]] had contributed to this royalist conspiracy by financing one million pounds and providing naval transport (with the ship of Captain [[John Wesley Wright]]) to the conspirators [[Georges Cadoudal]] and General [[Jean-Charles Pichegru]] for their return to France from England. Pichegru met Moreau, one of Bonaparte's generals and a former protege of Pichegru, on 28 January 1804. The next day, a British secret agent named Courson was arrested and he, under torture, confessed that Pichegru, Moreau, and Cadoudal were conspiring to overthrow the consulate. The French government sought more details of this plot by arresting and torturing Louis Picot, Cadoudal's servant. General [[Joachim Murat]] ordered the city gates of Paris to be closed from 7 pm to 6 am while Pichegru and Moreau were arrested during the next month. These further arrests revealed that the Royalist conspiracy would eventually involve the active participation of the Duke of Enghien, who was a relatively young Bourbon prince and thus another possible heir to a restored Bourbon monarchy. The Duke, at that time, was living as a French ''[[French emigration (1789–1815)|émigré]]'' in the [[Electorate of Baden]], but he also kept a rented house in [[Ettenheim]], which was close to the French border. Possibly at the urging of [[Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord|Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périogord]], Bonaparte's foreign minister, and [[Joseph Fouché]], Bonaparte's minister of police who had warned that "the air is full of daggers", the First Consul came to the conclusion that the Duke must be dealt with. Two hundred French soldiers crossed the border, surrounded the Duke's home in Baden and arrested him. On the way back to France, d'Enghien stated that "he had sworn implacable hatred against Bonaparte as well as against the French; he would take every occasion to make war on them."<ref>Cronin 1994, p. 242</ref> After three plots to assassinate him and the further financing of a supposed insurrection in [[Strasbourg]], Bonaparte had enough. Based on d'Enghien's{{clarify|date=August 2023}} who were seized at his home in Germany and the material from the police, d'Enghien was charged as a conspirator in time of war and was subject to a military court. He was ordered to be tried by a court of seven colonels at [[Château de Vincennes|Vincennes]]. D'Enghien during his questioning at the court told them that he was being paid 4,200 pounds per year by Britain "in order to combat not France but a government to which his birth had made him hostile." Further, he stated that "I asked England if I might serve in her armies, but she replied that that was impossible: I must wait on the Rhine, where I would have a part to play immediately, and I was in fact waiting."<ref>Cronin 1994, pp. 243–44</ref> D'Enghien was found guilty of being in violation of Article 2 of a law of 6 October 1791, to wit, "Any conspiracy and plot aimed at disturbing the State by civil war, and arming the citizens against one another, or against lawful authority, will be punished by death." He was executed in the ditch of the fortress of Vincennes. The aftermath caused hardly a ripple in France, but abroad, it produced a storm of anger. Many of those who had favoured or been neutral to Bonaparte now turned against him, but Bonaparte always assumed full responsibility for allowing the execution and continued to believe that, on balance, he had done the right thing.
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