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histoireettralala · 4 years

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Murat during the 18 Brumaire Coup, by Jean Tulard.

Le 9 novembre, journée plus connue sous sa date révolutionnaire du 18 Brumaire, Bonaparte est nommé commandant de la place de Paris. [...]

Au soir du 18 Brumaire, le levier militaire est en place. Bonaparte peut compter sur la fidélité des Murat, Lannes et autres Macdonald. Dans le même temps, Sieyès et Roger Ducos ont remis leur démission de directeur. Barras, convaincu par Talleyrand, les a imités après quelques hésitations. [..] Il n’y a plus de Directoire.

Restait à convaincre les conseils. [...]

On sait ce qu’il advint, le 19 Brumaire. Bonaparte fut peu convaincant devant les Anciens, pourtant acquis au complot dans leur majorité.

Les Cinq-Cents, où figurait un nombre important de jacobins, s’étaient étonnés de devoir siéger hors de Paris, au château de Saint-Cloud; ils s’étaient inquiétés aussi des mouvements de troupes qui, dès le matin, avaient conduit une partie de la garnison, dont l’unité que commandait Murat, sur les lieux mêmes des débats.

Devant eux, Bonaparte ne sait pas trouver les mots rassurants. L’assemblée est surexcitée; elle accueille fort mal le général. Les cris de “A bas le dictateur! A bas le tyran!” retentissent. On en vient aux mains dans les travées. Bonaparte est entouré, pressé, bousculé par les députés. Pas de poignards levés mais des coups de poing, des habits déchirés, la violence physique à mains nues. Devant le danger, les officiers qui forment l’escorte de Bonaparte, dont Murat, interviennent et dégagent leur chef tandis que retentit parmi les députés le cri de “hors-la-loi!” La confusion est à son comble. Lucien Bonaparte en tire habilement parti pour retarder le vote de la mise hors la loi de son frère que demandent avec de plus en plus d’insistance les membres du conseil qui ne sont pas dans le complot et ne goûtent guère l’intrusion de militaires dans le lieu de leurs débats. Il dépose finalement ses insignes de président et de représentant pour gagner du temps.

A l’extérieur, Murat, Leclerc, Sérurier sont partout, excitant les soldats: “Les députés ont voulu assassiner votre général!” Survient Lucien qui harangue les grenadiers qui gardent le Corps législatif. “Le président du Conseil des Cinq-Cents vous déclare que l’immense majorité de ce conseil est pour le moment sous la terreur de quelques représentants à stylets qui assiègent la tribune, présentent la mort à leurs collègues et enlèvent les délibarations les plus affreuses. [...] Je confie aux guerriers le soin de délivrer la majorité de leurs représentants. Généraux, et vous, soldats, et vous tous, citoyens, vous ne reconnaîtrez pour législateurs en France que ceux qui vont se rendre auprès de moi. Quant à ceux qui persisteront à rester dans l’Orangerie, que la force les expulse!”

Derrière les grenadiers se fait sentir la poussée des hommes de Lefebvre; la ligne des troupes frémit mais hésite encore tant est grand le respect de la légalité. Soudain les officiers lèvent leur sabre, les tambours battent la charge. C’est Murat qui surgit; il a formé une colonne de grenadiers et commande qu’on le suive. Il entraîne les hommes au pas de charge; il force les portes de l’assemblée, se dirige vers la tribune sous les injures des députés et déclare d’une voix forte:” Citoyens, vous êtes dissous!” La formule est reprise par les officiers qui l’entourent tandis que les tambours couvrent de leur roulement les imprécations des députés. Un nouveau groupe de grenadiers, sous le commandement de Leclerc, a rejoint Murat. “Grenadiers en avant!” s’écrie l’un des officiers et Murat de reprendre plus crûment: “Foutez-moi tout ce monde-là dehors!” Les baïonnettes ont vite raison de la timide résistance des représentants du peuple.

Dans le coup d’Etat de Brumaire, Murat a joué un rôle décisif. Un moment d’hésitation, comme au 13 Vendémiaire, et tout était perdu. Il a su entraîner les grenadiers un peu intimidés par le prestige - tout relatif- des élus de la nation, et balayer les opposants, sans se soucier des cris de “hors-la-loi!” Il a chargé comme sur un champ de bataille et c’est cette charge, où il a été secondé par Leclerc et Lefebvre, qui fut déterminante quand le stratège de l’opération se contentait de se labourer le visage avec les ongles, brisé par le désespoir et l’angoisse.

Jean Tulard, Murat, Editions Hachette, P. 44, 45, 46.

*****

On November 9, a day better known by its revolutionary date of 18 Brumaire, Bonaparte was appointed commander of the Place de Paris. [...] On the evening of 18 Brumaire, the military lever was in place. Bonaparte can count on the loyalty of Murat, Lannes and Macdonald. At the same time, Sieyès and Roger Ducos have resigned as directors. Barras, convinced by Talleyrand, imitated them after some hesitation. [..] The Directoire is no longer.

Convincing the Conseils still needed to be done.

We know what happened on 19 Brumaire. Bonaparte was unconvincing in front of the Anciens, even though they were won over to the plot.

The Five Hundred, which featured a large number of Jacobins , were surprised to have to sit outside Paris, at the Château de Saint-Cloud; they were also worried about the troop movements which, in the morning, had led part of the garrison, including the unit commanded by Murat, to the very place of the debates.

In front of them, Bonaparte does not know how to find reassuring words. The assembly is overexcited; it receives the general very badly. The cries of “Down with the dictator! Down with the tyrant! ” ring out. They come to blows in the rows. Bonaparte is surrounded, pressed, jostled by the deputies. No daggers raised but punches, torn clothes, bare handed physical violence. Faced with danger, the officers who form Bonaparte's escort, including Murat, intervene and release their leader while the cry of "outlaws!" is heard among the deputies. The confusion is at its height. Lucien Bonaparte skilfully takes advantage of this to delay the vote for the outlawing of his brother, which members of the council, who are not in the plot and hardly appreciate the intrusion of soldiers into the place of their debates, are asking for with increasing insistence. He finally drops off his president and representative emblems to save time.

Outside, Murat, Leclerc, Sérurier are everywhere, getting the soldiers worked up: "The deputies wanted to assassinate your general!" Lucien appears and harangues the grenadiers who guard the Legislative Corps. "The president of the Council of Five Hundred declares to you that the immense majority of this council is for the moment under the terror of some representatives who besiege the tribune, offer death to their colleagues and come up with the most hideous deliriums. [...] I entrust the warriors with the task of delivering the majority of their representatives. Generals, and you, soldiers, and all of you, citizens, you will recognize as legislators in France only those who are going to come to me. As for those who persist in staying in the Orangerie, may force expel them! ”

Behind the grenadiers is felt the push of Lefebvre's men; the line of the troops shudders but still hesitates as the respect for legality is great. Suddenly the officers raise their sabers, the drums roll. It’s Murat who arises; he has formed a column of grenadiers and orders that they follow him. He leads the men at the double; he forces the doors of the assembly, goes to the platform under the insults of the deputies and declares with a loud voice: "Citizens, you are dissolved!" The slogan is taken up by the officers who surround him, while the drums roll over the deputies’ imprecations. A new group of grenadiers, under Leclerc’s command, joins Murat. “Grenadiers forward !” one of the officers exclaims and Murat resumes more bluntly: "Throw all these people the fuck out of here!" The bayonets quickly overcome the timid resistance of the representatives of the people.

In Brumaire's coup, Murat played a decisive role. A moment of hesitation, as for 13 Vendémiaire, and everything was lost. He knew how to lead the grenadiers who were a little intimidated by the prestige - all relative - of the elected representatives of the nation, and sweep away the opponents, without worrying about the cries of “outlaws!” He charged as on a battlefield and it was this charge, where he was seconded by Leclerc and Lefebvre, which was decisive when the strategist of the operation settled with raking his face with his nails, broken by despair and anguish.

#napoleonic #murat by jean tulard #18 brumaire #napoléon bonaparte #joachim murat #lucien bonaparte #citizens! you are dissolved

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napoleondidthat · 5 years

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Napoleon’s Coup d’etat; A Hot Mess

The following are excerpts from Napoleon, A Life by Adam Zamoyski. Napoleon’s heroic coup d’etat was in actuality a hot mess with comedy thrown in.

“Bonaparte took over one of the palace’s drawing rooms as his headquarters. Talleyrand had rented a house nearby in which he, Roederer, and others waited, ready to climb into a waiting carriage if things went wrong. Sieyes too had taken the precaution of parking his carriage in a discreet place nearby in case he had to make a quick getaway. It was said that some of the conspirators were carrying large sums in ready money for the same reason. Bonaparte himself seems to have had an attack of nerves shortly after his arrival and flew into a rage with an officer for no reason.

There was good reason to be nervous. As they waited for the chambers to be made ready, the deputies of the two assemblies, most of whom had been excluded from the previous day’s session, strolled about discussing the situation, joined by Parisians who had driven out to see what was going on. In the course of these discussions those hostile to any change grew firmer in their resistance, while supporters of the coup began to have second thoughts. Bonaparte had a total of about 6000 troops at hand, some sitting around their stacked weapons in the courtyard giving evil looks to the deputies, those hated ‘lawyers’ and ‘chatterboxes’, others deployed in the grounds and the surrounding streets.”

(Napoleon, A Life, Adam Zamoyski, pages 234-235)

“It was not until well after one o’clock that the Five Hundred were able to take their seats, in a flapping of scarlet Roman togas and plumed Polish caps. Lucien and his supporters were to persuade their assembly to nominate a commission to investigate the dangers threatening the Republic. But things got off to a bad start. Sensing what was afoot, the Jacobins among them began denouncing the incipient dictatorship, declaring that they would defend the constitution to the death. It was the kind of emotive language that swayed the majority in assemblies of the period, and a vot was carried to have every deputy renew their oath to it. That would take all day.

The Elders had already filed into the Gallery of Apollo in their blue togas, preceded by a band playing the Marseillaise. They were to take notice of the resignation of the three Directors, declare the government thereby dissolved, and appoint three consuls to prepare a new constitution. But the session had hardly opened when some of the deputies began questioning the legality of the previous day’s proceedings. One of the conspirators cleverly observed that the Elders could not debate anything until the Five Hundred had properly constituted themselves--which they had not, as they were still busy renewing their oaths.”

(Napoleon, A Life, Adam Zamoyski, page 235)

“In the damp room, hardly warmed by a smoking fire, where Bonaparte, his brother Joseph, Sieyes, and the other leaders sat, ‘people looked at each other but did not speak’, according to one of those present. ‘It was if they did not dare to ask and feared to reply.’ People began making excuses and slipping away. Bonaparte tried to hide his nerves by giving unnecessary orders and moving troops about. Every so often Lavalette would come and report on what was going on in the chambers.

Outside, more and more people began to drift in from Paris. Jourdan and Augereau had also turned up, alert to the possibility of exploiting the situation for themselves....Just before four o’clock he (Bonaparte) announced that he wished to speak to the Elders and, followed bu a number of aides, entered their chamber. Their session had by then been suspended, but they gathered to hear what he had to say.

Bonaparte was not a good speaker, often having difficulty in finding the right words. He was flustered and did not have a specific case to put, only a series of slogans which had proved sufficient up until now. ‘Allow me to speak to you with the frankness of a soldier,’ he began. He had, he told them, been minding his own business in Paris when they had called on him to defend the Republic. He had flown to their aid, and now he was being denounced as a Caesar and a Cromwell, a dictator. He urged them to act quickly, as there was no government and liberty was in peril. He was there to carry out their will. ‘Let us save liberty, let us save equality!’ he pleaded. At that point he was interrupted by the shout, ‘And what about the constitution?’. After a stunned silence, Bonaparte pointed out that they themselves and the Directory they had named had violated the constitution on at least three occasions, which was not tactful, and did not lend conviction to his main theme, to which he returned, plaintively assuring them that he was only there to uphold their authority and did not nourish any personal ambitions, and exhorting them to emulate Brutus should he ever betray their trust. His friends tried to restrain him, but many of the member of the assembly had been angered, and not began asking awkward questions. He carried on, growing more and more aggressive in tone and grasping at any words and phrases that came to mind, conjuring up visions of ‘volcanoes’, of ‘silent conspiracies’, and at one point defiantly warning them: ‘Remember that I march accompanied by the god of victory and the god of war!’ He ranted on incoherently until Bourrienne dragged him away by his coat-tails.”

(Napoleon, A Life, Adam Zamoyski, pages 236-237)

“Hardly had he entered the orangery than shouts of ‘Down with the tyrant!’, ‘Down with the dictator!’, and ‘Outlaw!’ greeted him as the assembly rose to its feet in outrage at this military incursion. He was instantly assaulted by a multitude of deputies pressing in on him, shouting, shaking him by his lapels and pushing so hard that he momentarily lost consciousness. He was rescued by Murat, Lefebvre, and others, who kept the enraged deputies back with their fists, and by the grenadiers he had brought with him. The scuffle grew fierce, and a number of the members of the public in the spectators’ gallery fled through the windows. Bonaparte was eventually carried out, pale, struggling for breath, his head lolling to one side, barely conscious, pursued by cries of ‘Outlaw! Outlaw!’, which in the course of the Revolution had come to signify a condemnation to death.”

(Napoleon, A Life, Adam Zamoyski, page 237)

“Bonaparte had returned to his centre of operations. He seemed completely undone, making strange statements and at one point addressing Sieyes as ‘General’. He soon recovered himself, but for the rest of the day his words and actions remained disjointed and not entirely coherent.”

(Napoleon, A Life, Adam Zamoyski, page 238)

“Bonaparte came out of the palace followed by his suite and asked for his horse. The fiery beast lent by Bruix had been frightened by the shouting, with the result that when he mounted it began rearing and bucking. After some less than heroic tussles with it, he rode up to the bewildered grenadiers of the legislative guard, who failed to show much interest.....Riding up and down on his unruly mount he stuck a heroic pose, venting his fury at the way he had been treated by the Five Hundred, telling the troops that he had gone to them offering to save the Republic but had been attacked by these traitors, paid agents of Britain, who had brandished daggers and tried to murder him. His agitation had brought out a severe rash on his face, and while considering his next move he had scratched so hard that he had drawn blood, which now seemed to confirm the story of daggers raised against him--the rumor that he had been wounded flew through the ranks...”

(Napoleon, A Life, Adam Zamoyski, page 238)

#napoleon #bonaparte #Napoleon Bonaparte #Emperor Napoleon #Emperor Napoleon I #Emperor Napoleon Ier #Napoleon's coup d'etat #coup d'etat #Adam Zamoyski #Napoleon A Life #excerpt #book excerpt #this needs to be turned into a movie #omg #wtf #this is real life

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whileiamdying · 5 years

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IN MEMORIAM: The Marxist Emperor

Bernardo Bertolucci brought a sweeping, grand aesthetic to bear on the turmoil of history and mind.

BY NICK PINKERTON

“The padrone is alive.” Robert De Niro’s wealthy landowner, speaking in the third person, has been kicked, spat on, and stripped of his title by the celebrating peasant partisans who’ve run the fascists that he tacitly supported out of town, but he gets these defiant, triumphant and ultimately true last words of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, 317 minutes of magnificent, coruscating filmmaking in its original version. A child of Marx, Freud, and the Holy Trinity, Bertolucci was to a singular degree focused on the figure of the patriarch and the concept of the patriarchy, as found at work in both the individual family and in larger society. It is perhaps fitting then that, fallen out of fashion and in some corners “canceled” due to the recirculation of accounts by the late Maria Schneider of her treatment as a 19-year-old on the set of Last Tango in Paris (1972), Bertolucci has become a very symbol of the dictatorial director-as-patriarch, a figure we’d do well to move beyond.

As an artist, Bertolucci cultivated contradiction. Taking up again the case of 1900, the summit of his work, we find a film resolutely proletarian in its sympathies—its opening credits play over a slow zoom out from the image of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s painting The Fourth Estate, depicting striking workers, and it portrays at great length the manner in which the ruling classes enabled the rise of fascism, either directly or through decadent indifference and willful blindness. And yet, and yet… Bertolucci was by nature a sensualist, with an affinity for the sleek surfaces in which we find the upper classes ensconcing themselves, the chrome-and-marble luxury of Art Deco or the telefono bianco films of the 1930s, which provided a backdrop for Mussolini’s rise and an advertisement for the terrible modernity of his Italy. The Last Emperor (1987), Bertolucci’s biopic of Pu Yi, the last supreme ruler of the Qing Dynasty who, after imprisonment and Communist rehabilitation, spent his final years as a humble gardener, was considered sufficiently ideologically correct to gain permission to shoot inside the Forbidden City with the blessing of Deng Xiaoping, though what one remembers of the film are not the pleasures of Pu Yi’s simple life, but the wasteful and undeniably magnificent pomp of imperial court protocol during his youthful enshrinement, the cold elegance of his playboy years in international Tianjin. Bertolucci’s second film, Before the Revolution (1964), depicts a young man who, like himself, is a native of Parma and a supporter of the Italian Communist Party, though somewhat paradoxically it takes its title from a quote by that old reactionary Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, which also serves as the movie’s epigram: “Only those who lived before the revolution knew how sweet life could be.”

Bertolucci was born into a world in turmoil, into a country choked on castor oil and under the jackboot. It was 1941 in the city of Parma, where some years earlier Benito Mussolini gave a speech including a maxim that the director of 1900 and The Conformist might very well have been inclined to agree with: “Blood alone moves the wheels of history.” His father, Attilio, was a poet—an intimate of both Cesare Zavattini, the screenwriter and theoretical proponent of Neorealism, and Pier Paolo Pasolini—and young Bernardo aspired to be one as well, studying at the University of Rome. It was there that his attentions shifted to the cinema, acting as assistant director on Pasolini’s debut film, Accattone (1961), at age 20. Less than a year after Accattone had premiered at Venice, Bertolucci had completed his first feature, La commare secca (1962).

It is one of cinema’s great debuts, though at least some credit lies with Pasolini, whose presence is felt in the subject matter—the murder of a Roman prostitute, as recounted by a handful of police suspects found near the scene—as well as the almost sacerdotal dignity that he grants to material that would normally be treated as sordid. Bertolucci, however, is very far from imitating Pasolini’s flat, fresco-like compositions. Already here one sees him experimenting in the Italian tradition of sinewy, untethered camerawork, made possible by a uniformly high level of native technical genius and a national tradition of post-dubbing, shooting without the encumbrance of synch sound, and on Before the Revolution he emerges a full-blown virtuoso. It is a young man’s film, emboldened by the spirit of the French New Wave, chockablock with capering invention: tracking Allen Midgette while recklessly wheeling about and crashing on his bicycle, iris effects, a color interlude in the black-and-white film shot inside a camera obscura.

Later in the 1960s, Bertolucci was sidetracked by nonfiction—the three-part La via del petrolio (1967), made for television, is perhaps the least known of his major works—and by the graphic influence of the contemporary films of Jean-Luc Godard, deeply felt on his Partner (1968). By 1970, however, he had arrived at his mature style with The Conformist and The Spider’s Stratagem, two films shot by Vittorio Storaro—a camera operator on Before the Revolutionand among the visually voluptuary Bertolucci’s most crucial collaborators, along with art director Ferdinando Scarfiotti—and two films directly concerned with the legacy of Italian fascism and, yes, patrilineal paranoia. In The Conformist, Jean-Louis Trintignant’s right-wing lickspittle’s obsequiousness to power is seen to be partly inspired by a desire to distance himself from his institutionalized father, while The Spider’s Stratagem follows a son’s investigation into his father’s legendary, and suspect, resistance heroism—both father and son are played by Giulio Brogi. (Family ties are a suffocating force in Bertolucci’s films, and incest features prominently in both Before the Revolution and 1979’s La Luna.)

The impact of Bertolucci and Storaro’s work together drove through contemporary film culture with the force of that forbidding wind bearing dead leaves in one of The Conformist’s most cited shots. Bertolucci moved the camera with a fluidity, poise, and grace that had the aspect of choreography; he never directed a musical, but he shot some of the most evocative filmed dance sequences of the latter half of the 20th century, some of them without music—here I’m thinking here of De Niro’s coked-up clowning in a posh Naples hotel room in 1900. To this we can add Francesco Barilli and aunt Adriana Asti’s too-intimate nuzzle in front of his oblivious parents in Before the Revolution, Dominique Sanda’s sapphic spin with Stefania Sandrelli in The Conformist, Matthew Berry’s Bee Gees–scored channeling of John Travolta in La Luna, the frantic frugging to an obscure New Wave slab by Linda and the Dark that concludes Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), and Marlon Brando and Schneider’s inebriated, flailing parody of ballroom dignity in Last Tango in Paris.

Blood moves the wheels of history in Bertolucci’s telling, but other bodily secretions do their part as well—and it’s in Last Tango in Paris that the eroticism already evident in his films to date moved to the fore. It was the film that made Bertolucci internationally famous, outgrossing the James Bond film Live and Let Die at the 1973 box office, presumably by virtue of salacious interest, and certainly it must be one of the strangest movies that some Americans ever saw, with its image of sexual liberation as a kind of regression to childhood and its dissonant performance styles—an unavoidable feature of working with international casts that Bertolucci tended to exacerbate rather than smooth over. Brando, in a peculiar piece of inspiration, seems to have had his hair styled so that he resembles a priapic George Washington, and he terrorizes Schneider’s sullen baby-faced kewpie, a character that Angela Carter later wrote, not without cause, “functions only as Brando’s externalized id.” Given Schneider’s statements about the brutalizing shoot it is tempting to have done with the movie altogether—yet there is something harrowing and true in its visceral depiction of grief, from the very opening moment that the camera dives upon Brando like a bird of prey, that I would not give away.

Last Tango in Paris’s success granted Bertolucci the clout required for 1900, that fierce folly of a film. It is a mark of Bertolucci’s rapid rise that the movie, made when he was only 35, could feel like a kind of summation, a sprawling work unpacking the full measure of his talent, boasting lyric moments in an enchanted wood that recall Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood canvases, fired throughout by a sense of political desperation that suggests he might have been the only filmmaker who could properly tackle Zola’s Germinal. It is tempting to say that the scale of the undertaking broke something in Bertolucci, for he never made a greater film, but this shouldn’t discredit the many fine ones to follow—La Luna is a work of infectious hysteria, the father-son dynamic in Tragedy of a Ridiculous Manfinds a balance between Bertolucci the Catholic and Bertolucci the Freudian, and The Dreamers (2003) is to the art film what Blink 182 is to punk rock, which I mean as a compliment. His output slowed to a trickle in his later years, plagued by ill health—and now the Padrone is dead, living on in mighty works buttressed by their internal conflicts, works that will stand for as long as they continue to agitate, to defy resolution.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Film Comment and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.

#bernardo bertolucci #Film Comment #in memoriam #in english #marlon brando #maria schneider

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