In hisMémoires, Fouché affirmed that, towards mid-September 1800, a plot arose aiming at assassinating Napoleon at the operahouse. Someone named Harel, presented as one of the accomplices, worked in liaison with the war commissioner Lefebvre, to bring the revelations toLouis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Napoleon's secretary, indicating the plotters wereGiuseppe Ceracchi,Joseph Diana,Joseph Antoine Aréna (brother of the Corsican deputy who had declared against Napoleon); the painter and patriotic fanaticFrançois Topino-Lebrun, andDominique Demerville, former clerk of theCommittee of Public Safety, closely associated withBertrand Barère de Vieuzac. Harel was charged with drawing up a trap for the plotters; four armed men, laid out for the assassination of Napoleon, on the evening of 10 October, after a performance ofLes Horaces. The day of the attack, the men stationed by the police force stopped Diana, Ceracchi and their two accomplices.[2] All the others presumably retreated and were apprehended at their residences.[3]
For modern historians (Jean Tulard andThierry Lentz)[4] this was a manipulation by the police force, made possible by an agent provocateur, Harel, who had infiltrated the group. AfterPlot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise, the members of the "daggers conspiracy", presented as aJacobin plot, were judged in front of the criminal court ofThe Seine. Four of them were condemned to death 19nivôseyear IX (9 January 1801), at eleven o'clock in the evening, after three days of debates[5] and the sentence was carried out on 30 January after rejection of the appeal.
Jacques-Olivier Boudon [fr],Ils voulaient tuer Napoléon : Complots et conspirations contre l'Empereur (They Wanted to Kill Napoleon: Plots and Conspiracies Against the Emperor), Tallandier, 2022.
Pierre Marie DesmarestQuinze ans de haute police sous Napoléon (Fifteen years of policing under Napoleon), Editions A. Levavasseur, 1833, p. 37-44.
Henri Gaubert,Conspirateurs au temps de Napoléon Ier (Conspirators in the Time of Napoleon I), Flammarion, coll. « L'Histoire », 1962, p. 354
Gustave Hue,Un Complot de police sous le Consulat (A Police Plot Under the Consulate), Editions Hachette, 1909
^Jean-Baptiste Capefigue,L' Europe during the consulate and l'worsen of Napoléon, Brussels, Wouters, Raspoet and Co, 1842, volume III, p. 33.
^T. Lentz,Large Consulat, 1999, p. 255,Jean Tulard,Napoleon or the myth of the sauveur, 1987, p. 136.
^Lewis Goldsmith,Political and diplomatic course of Napoleon Bonaparte, London, at J. Booth, volume II, 1816, p. 123-125.
^Émile Marco de Saint-Hilaire, ' ' History of the conspiracies and the executions politiques' ', Paris, Gustave Havard, 1849, p. 228-235. Jules Edouard Alboise of Pujol,Auguste Maquet, ' ' Prisons of l' Europe' ', Paris, Administration of the Bookshop, 1845, p. 143-146 and 217.
Coup d'état