“Napoleon’s coach turned the corner just as the bomb went off. The enormous blast shook houses on the street and threw clouds of dust, smoke and debris into the air.”

By Jonathan North

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE FAMOUSLY proclaimed himself emperor in a lavish coronation ceremony on Dec. 2 1804. But perhaps that Crown of Charlemagne would never have been set upon his head, and revolutionary France made imperial, were it not for the actions four years earlier of an obscure figure from history named Nicolas Durand.

The 28-year-old grenadier of the 4th Company, 1st Squadron, of the Grenadiers à cheval of the Consular Guard was on duty at the Tuileries Palace on Christmas Eve, 1800.

At around 7 p.m., Bonaparte’s friend and confidante General Jean Lannes sent word to ready Napoleon’s coach as the First Consul would soon be setting off for a night at the opera. After a dramatic row with Josephine, Napoleon finally appeared shortly before 8 p.m. Accompanied by Lannes and another general, Jean-Baptiste Bessières, he climbed into the coach to depart. The gates opened, the coachman Germain cracked his whip, and the vehicle along with its 12-man escort began to move.

Grenadier Durand, who was part of that escort that evening, spurred on ahead to clear the way through the Christmas Eve traffic. Passing quickly through the Carrousel, he turned into the narrow rue Nicaise. There, in his own words, he saw “a cart that seemed to be moving across the street and which was blocking about half of the way ahead.” The other side of the road was obstructed by a hackney carriage. Durand darted forwards to remove the obstacles. Flourishing his sabre at the taxi driver and using the flat of his sword and his horse, he pushed back against the cart, forcing the old mare that had hauled the wagon to recoil sharply. This seemingly innocuous incident would soon prove decisive, for the old mare was harnessed to a bomb.

That afternoon, a trio of royalists had loaded a barrel packed with explosives onto the back of the cart and had brought it into the centre of Paris. The men were enraged that Napoleon had named himself First Consul a year earlier. And now, with their rebellion in western France to revive the old Bourbon monarchy petering out, they hoped the assassination of the Corsican dictator would save France.

The first plotter, François Carbon, had already melted into the festive crowds, leaving another, Picot de Limoëlan, to serve as a lookout by the sentry box of the National Guard on the Carrousel. However, the speed at which Napoleon’s coach moved made it impossible for him send a timely signal to the conspirator tasked with detonating the bomb, Pierre Robinault de Saint-Réjant.

After carefully positioning the cart to block the street, Saint-Réjant hired a young girl to hold the mare’s bridle. He now stood ready.

Durand’s sudden appearance and unexpected shove sent the assassin reeling causing a momentous delay of a few seconds. Recovering his balance, Saint-Réjant lit the fuse and hurried to safety. He watched as Napoleon’s coach passed and rounded the corner just as the bomb went off. The enormous blast shook houses on the street and threw clouds of dust, smoke and debris into the air. Astonished passers-by recoiled in horror as timber, roof-tiles and body parts, both human and horse, rained down.

The young girl holding the bridle had been blown to pieces, as had a dozen others. As many as 60 were wounded by the blast by what was soon dubbed the Infernal Machine. Paris was appalled by its first terrorist attack.

Bonaparte escaped harm and, although shaken, continued on to the opera where, in a piece of pure Napoleonic theatre, he sat impassively through the entire performance of Joseph Haydn’s The Creation. As soon as it was over, however, he called for swift retribution.

With the press speculating and the police scouring the city for the plotters, Napoleon made full use of the opportunity to crack down on his enemies. He cynically placed the blame for the attempt on his life not onto royalists, but rather his own republican opponents. Hundreds of them, particularly those who had protested his rise to First Consul, were forced into exile in the aftermath of the attack. In one fell swoop, Bonaparte had effectively broken the republicans as a political force.

Eventually, the police hunted down the real plotters; Carbon and Saint-Réjant were both captured, tried and guillotined. The arrests exposed a wider royalist conspiracy, one involving support from Brittany and even gold from Great Britain. The ensuing trial discredited the royalist cause for years to come.

By destroying his opposition on both the left and the right, the aftermath of the tragedy on rue Nicaise would clear the way for Napoleon’s coronation in 1804 just as effectively as Grenadier Durand had cleared the way for Napoleon’s coach four years before.

Jonathan North is the author of Killing Napoleon: The Plot to Blow Up Bonaparte, published by Amberley. His other books include Napoleon’s Army in Russia and The Napoleon Options.

(Originally published on Feb 3, 2019)