Because the Napoleon movie is soon to be viewed by millions of people (including myself tonight), and I devoted a significant portion of my Thomas Paine book on Napoleon’s political ascension, I thought I would share a summary of he and Paine’s relationship.
Before he gained any political power, Bonaparte was a huge fan of Paine’s work. The Corsican showered the penman with praises, claiming he slept with a copy of the Rights of Man under his pillow. When the two first met in 1799, he told Paine that “a statue of gold should be erected to you in every city in the universe.”
Paine and Bonaparte’s paths first crossed due to a grand military plan for France to invade and overtake Britain that Paine had devised in 1798. His strategy called for a grand fleet of a thousand gunboats, each carrying a single 24-pound, front-facing cannon and eight men, which would pass through the North Sea and land on the eastern English coast, where the writer presumed their defenses would be weakest. The chief goal of the mission was to “get possession of London as soon as possible, for when this is obtained all the power, means and resources of the government are cut up.” Paine even went into detail on a potential financial arrangement through which his bold project could be funded.
Before proposing his Egyptian expedition, Bonaparte showed great interest in the strategy and held a private meeting with Paine. After sharing his affections for the author’s work, the general proposed that Paine should serve as one of five leaders of a provisional English republic after the endeavor was successful. “Only let us land,” and the plan would commence, Bonaparte told Paine.
Enamored with Paine’s invasion plans, Bonaparte called upon Paine to present his scheme to the Military Council of Paris, the government’s war ministry. At the conference, he was greeted by a group of officers that, by one account, were “already all of opinion that the measure was impracticable and dangerous.” The pitch was ridiculed especially by General Jean Claude d’Arçon, who openly laughed at the project, and contended France “might as well attempt to invade the moon as England.” Bonaparte’s advisors insisted that there was no way for an armada of small, swift-moving boats to evade the Royal Navy, even in the presence of favorable weather conditions.
When called upon to speak, Paine testified that England could only be crushed if France were to “annihilate her commerce.” He told the council that his experiences in the country led him to believe the English people were “greatly disaffected” and perhaps ripe for an internal uprising, but one major hurdle stood in France’s way. Even if the planned stealth expedition force was able to land in England, Paine warned that the forces deployed would be “cut to pieces” by the British army.
Bonaparte’s faith in Paine was shattered when the writer unexpectedly answered that the only way to subdue England—rather than the invasion plans he presented to the Directory—was through a Franco-English peace. The sudden shift in the Englishman’s position seemed to defy Bonaparte’s expectations for the meeting, causing the Corsican to distrust Paine forever. He would never speak to the man directly again, let alone seek his military or political advice.
As Bonaparte consolidated power over the next years, while also obtaining victory after victory against France’s continental adversaries, Paine still clung to the belief that the wildly popular general may still employ a modified version of the plan. In 1798, though, Bonaparte and The French Directory ultimately decided that the next military target would be Egypt rather than the English homeland. According to Paine, this decision was arrived to both by the council’s decision to shoot down his invasion plans, and for the eagerness of Bonaparte’s military rivals to “get rid of him any way they could” for the time. As they saw it, there was no better, more isolated placed in the world to contain the popularity of the ambitious general than Egypt.
In the end, Paine was totally repulsed by Bonaparte and his military government. This attitude may have been solidified by a dinner the two attended shortly after Bonaparte’s return from Egypt in late 1799, where Bonaparte glared at Paine from across a table of distinguished guests and said, “the English are all alike; in every country they are rascals.” After that point, Paine agonized with fellow republicans, including his old friend Joel Barlow, over the tyranny of Bonaparte and his new regime. In 1802, Paine told a visitor, fellow English radical Henry Redhead Yorke, that he detested and despised the general. Bonaparte was “the completest charlatan that ever existed,” he declared.
Paine’s words proved clairvoyant later that year, when Napoleon launched the coup of 18 Brumaire, where he and his brother Lucien succeeded first in spreading false rumors that a Jacobin plot threatened to undermine the French Directory, then organizing military forces to undermine the French Directory it was tasked to defend.
For Paine, the Coup of 18 Brumaire was cause for great disappointment. The writer had always condemned the centuries of conquests and usurpations that set one aristocrat above another in Europe. Furthermore, he was the world’s most tireless advocate for free elections under a republican system where the military would always be subordinate to the civil authority. Bonaparte’s ascension to power by force, then, contradicted his most hallowed maxims and caused him to reassess his feelings toward the man who shared his unique desire to free England from the shackles of monarchy.
