Consulate for life

By the spring of 1802 Bonaparte had settled in eighteen months what the Revolution had failed to settle in ten years: Marengo and Lunéville had pacified the continent, the Concordat had closed the religious question, the amnesty had brought back the émigrés, and the Peace of Amiens had ended the war with England. The Tribunate proposed a national token of gratitude.

The Senate, cautious, offered only a ten-year extension. Bonaparte refused the half-measure and had another question put to the people: should the First Consul hold office for life?

The plebiscite, held in public registers where each man signed openly, gave more than three and a half million yes against about eight thousand no. The vote was not secret and abstention remained massive, but the order of magnitude is not disputed: the country wanted stability.

The senatus-consultum of 2 August 1802 proclaimed the result. The Constitution of Year X that followed added to the Life Consulate the right to designate a successor, cut the Tribunate from a hundred to fifty members and gave the Senate, now appointed by the First Consul, power to amend the Constitution by senatus-consultum.

The regime now had every attribute of kingship but the title: an irremovable head, a successor who could be designated, a docile Senate able to revise the fundamental laws without going through the people. Sincere republicans understood; Lafayette voted no in public.

Only heredity was missing, and the Rue Saint-Nicaise attack and then the Enghien affair would make it politically defensible. The Empire was proclaimed twenty-two months later.