Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès

French politician and jurist

• Born: October 18, 1753
• Birthplace: Montpellier, France
• Died: March 8, 1824
• Place of death: Paris, France

Cambacérès served France as a skilled jurist, an able legislator, and a prudent administrator during the revolutionary period. As second consul to Napoleon I, he effected a new civil code, controlled the media, and served as a moderating influence on the emperor. Without personal political ambitions, he dedicated himself to maintaining Napoleon’s power and to serving his country.

Early Life

Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès (kahn-bah-say-res) was one of eleven children of Jean-Antoine and Marie-Rose (née Vassal) Cambacérès. The Cambacérès family was a distinguished one, long active in politics. Cambacérès’s father served as mayor of Montpellier, and Cambacérès was destined for a career in law. He attended the Collège d’Aix, rather than the one at Montpellier, which was judged not good enough for the young Cambacérès. A bright and diligent scholar, he excelled and developed a reputation for exactitude and a painstaking devotion to detail—these traits were to stand him in good stead later when he was helping draft the civil code for France.

By 1769, Cambacérès was practicing law in Montpellier, where he later (in 1774) became councillor of the local fiscal court (Cour des comptes et des aides). In 1771, he renounced his estate, a political move in keeping with the tenor of the times; Cambacérès was adept at gauging political barometers. His father had suffered some financial reverses, and Cambacérès had attempted to restore the family’s financial position. He was ultimately to become a very rich man through his services to Napoleon. Because of his growing legal reputation, he was elected in 1789 president of the criminal tribunal at Hérault, and when the states-general were convened that year he was chosen as the nobility’s second representative for the Montpellier district. When Montpellier was judged to be entitled to only one representative from the nobility, he returned from Paris. That political setback did not daunt Cambacérès, who in 1790 helped found the Société des Amis de la Constitution et de l’Égalité at Montpellier.

Because of his political activity and legal reputation, Cambacérès was elected in 1792 to the National Convention. A political moderate, he attempted to steer a middle course and avoid the impending excesses of the leftists, but the trial of King Louis XVI eventually forced him to take a stand, qualified as it was. After losing the fight to have the convention judged not competent to try the king, he did find the king guilty, but he recommended that the king’s execution be effected only if France were invaded.

Cambacérès’s “moderation” was politically dangerous, and he attempted to divert suspicion by absorbing himself in legislative and judicial matters. He submitted in 1793 a plan, containing 695 articles, for a civil code, but though the code reflected the politics of the times, it was not revolutionary enough for the convention; a shorter version, with only 297 articles, was rejected as well.

When the convention became more moderate, after Robespierre’s downfall in 1794, Cambacérès emerged as one of its leaders, serving as president of the convention and later as president of the Committee for Public Safety. In that role, he helped conclude the peace treaties of 1795 with Prussia and Spain. He also called for a general amnesty and attempted to prevent vindictive behavior and new persecutions. When the convention was dissolved, he became a member of the Council of Five Hundred, but the Directory that came to power regarded his moderation with suspicion. His third draft of the civil code was also rejected, and he retired from his position as president of the Council and returned to practicing law.

Life’s Work

Cambacérès returned to the government, serving as minister of justice, in June, 1799, just prior to the coup d’état of the Eighteenth Brumaire, which overthrew the Directory and established the consulate. Although he took no active part in the revolution, Cambacérès played a typically discreet role in assisting Napoleon and Emmanuel Sieyès with the coup. In recognition of his help and of his acknowledged legal prowess, Napoleon, who was named first consul in December, 1799, named Cambacérès second consul. (Charles François Lebrun, a sixty-year-old Norman with financial experience and more conservative views than Cambacérès, was named third consul.)

Although as second consul he was theoretically second in command to Napoleon, Cambacérès had no political ambitions of his own and directed his considerable abilities and energies to furthering Napoleon’s interests. Cambacérès succeeded, through negotiating with selected ministers and reducing the size of the legislative body and the Tribunate, in reducing the number of influential opponents of Napoleon and engineered the assemblies’ 1802 election of Napoleon as consul for life. Cambacérès’s strategy effectively brought an end to representative government in France, and Napoleon was free to enact the long-desired civil code and to become emperor only two years later. Napoleon’s ascension resulted in a promotion for the loyal Cambacérès, who became arch-chancellor of the empire, presiding in the emperor’s frequent absence over the senate.

Although Napoleon held all the real power, Cambacérès was the emperor’s trusted adviser and confidant, a bureaucrat who worked diligently to help him retain control of France. As his voluminous papers indicate, Cambacérès was in constant communication with Napoleon, even when the emperor was on one of his numerous military campaigns. One of Cambacérès’s primary functions was to serve as an unofficial minister of propaganda for Napoleon, who recognized the value of the press. Cambacérès not only reviewed political articles and decided the fates of individual generals but also inserted articles in selected journals. He also was involved in ordering that books be written on selected topics, and in 1806 he printed the fictitious Ms. trouvé dans le cabinet du roi de Prusse à Berlin, a book about the partition of Poland.

Although Cambacérès was primarily concerned with domestic affairs, he did oversee the publication and distribution of maps of battles and campaigns. Even the discussions of the Council of State were edited by Cambacérès before they were subsequently printed in the Moniteur, the government’s journal. This control was extended in 1811, when a special decree gave Cambacérès control over the telegraph linking Paris to major European cities—he effectively determined what messages would be transmitted.

In addition to managing the news, Cambacérès was active in the elaborate patronage system Napoleon and he devised in order to create a new supportive nobility to replace the old nobility. Because titles were not attached to land or to family but were granted by the state for service, people were encouraged to serve the state and to remain loyal to the new empire.

Cambacérès served not only as Napoleon’s second in command but also as his personal legal adviser, though Napoleon’s personal affairs certainly impinged upon his public political life. When the emperor wanted his marriage to Joséphine nullified, Cambacérès handled the intricate and delicate negotiations.

During his Napoleonic years, Cambacérès exercised considerable power over the media, the government, and the legal system, which he helped create. He also served as a moderating influence on Napoleon. However, his most important attempted interventions—to save the life of the Duc d’Enghien and to forestall the military campaigns of 1812-1813—were futile.

When Napoleon abdicated and the Bourbons were restored to power in 1814, Cambacérès survived and even endorsed the return of the monarchy, the current stabilizing force in France. When Napoleon returned to power the following year, Cambacérès was persuaded to resume his pre-Restoration duties, this time to direct the Ministry of Justice and preside over the Chamber of Peers, though he had undoubtedly had reservations about the likelihood of Napoleon’s continued success. The Hundred Days did, indeed, end with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo; upon Louis XVIII’s final restoration to power, however, Cambacérès was not as fortunate as he had been before. He was exiled and moved to Belgium. Although he was permitted in 1818 to return to France and to regain his civil and political rights, he did not again hold public office. Six years later, in March, 1824, he died in Paris.

Significance

As the titular head of the French government during Napoleon’s frequent, extensive absences, Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès theoretically had a considerable amount of power. In fact, some historians have maintained that he governed France while Napoleon was away. As his own voluminous correspondence to the emperor indicates, Cambacérès was essentially an adviser and the administrator of Napoleon’s policies, though he certainly had a hand in drafting key legislation and in coordinating and supervising the various codes that were implemented during Napoleon’s reign.

Because Napoleon would not or could not delegate authority, the power to decide significant events was his alone; yet that centralized authority caused delays in dealing with governmental affairs and produced administrators unwilling to take the initiative and assume responsibility. Napoleon’s grand schemes, including the reform of the codes, required implementation by an administrator who could handle detail, however trivial. Cambacérès, the legal technician, was the consummate lawyer, equally at home in administrative, legal, and financial matters. He also discharged some military tasks for Napoleon. Though he did not serve on the commission Napoleon appointed in 1800 to prepare a new draft of the civil code, Cambacérès’s previous three drafts and his ideas found their way into the civil code adopted in 1804.

Cambacérès was a political survivor, an administrator, and a legislator who steered a middle course between extremes in the hope of serving in a stable, efficient French government. His moderation, his vacillation, and his desire to please all parties have made him as suspect to contemporary historians as he was to his political colleagues on the far Left. During his political career he was a Republican, an antiterrorist, a regicide, a Jacobin, an enthusiast, and a sometime supporter of Napoleon and the Bourbons—in short, whatever was expedient and consonant with his advocacy of a stable government.

Given his aversion to political chaos and corruption, which were rampant from 1795 to 1799, his support of Napoleon seems almost inevitable. He seems to have been attracted by Napoleon’s authoritarianism and expediency and his desire to effect needed change. Although Cambacérès may have been more inclined to authoritarianism than Napoleon, his actions were as moderate as his views, and while he counseled Napoleon, he seems not to have urged his views with any vigor.

Richard Boulind, who has studied Cambacérès’s ties to Napoleon, sees Cambacérès’s homosexuality as the key to their productive working relationship. In a classic case of alter egos, Cambacérès, possessed with “feminine” tact, reflectiveness, and precaution, balances and is attracted to the “masculine” Napoleon, who is assertive and decisive. Regardless of how this working relationship is seen, there is no question about Cambacérès’s having been the ideal statesman to complement Napoleon and his dreams for France.

Bibliography

Bergeron, Louis. France Under Napoleon. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. Part of Bergeron’s book concerns the patronage system instituted under Napoleon’s rule. Bergeron explains the system, examines Cambacérès’s role, and shows how the system benefited both the recipients and Napoleon. Details of Cambacérès’s social and financial ascent are provided.

Boulind, Richard. Cambacérès and the Bonapartes. New York: H. P. Kraus, 1976. Boulind includes the unpublished papers of Cambacérès, both letters to Napoleon and papers on the personal and dynastic interests of Napoleon. His introductions to both provide the most extensive discussion in English of Cambacérès. Boulind provides a brief biography and a psychological reading of the relationship between Cambacérès and Napoleon.

Cronin, Vincent. Napoleon Bonaparte: An Intimate Biography. New York: William Morrow, 1972. As the title suggests, Cronin’s book mingles history with anecdotes and personal details. He is helpful in providing a comparison and contrast between Napoleon and Cambacérès and in detailing the degree to which Cambacérès advanced Napoleon’s cause.

Holtman, Robert B. Napoleon’s Propaganda. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950. Holtman examines the means by which Napoleon and Cambacérès managed the news during Napoleon’s rule. According to Holtman, Cambacérès was the primary agent of control, using such propaganda vehicles as news releases, the telegraph, and fabricated books.

Horne, Alistair. The Age of Napoleon. New York: Modern Library, 2004. This is not a conventional military or political biography of Napoleon, but an exploration of his character, lifestyle, and the social life of Paris during his years as emperor. The book includes information about Cambacérès’s role in the reconstruction of Paris; his balls, parties and dinners; his fashions and self-image; and his loyalty to Napoleon.

Marquart, Robert. “The Fortunes of Cambacérès.” Revue de l’Institut Napoléon 127 (1973): 43-52. Marquart provides a thorough discussion of Cambacérès’s acquisition of an immense fortune through prudent management and imperial generosity. Marquart’s findings attest the social and financial rise of a class that replaced the old nobility.

Thompson, J. M. Napoleon Bonaparte: His Rise and Fall. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. Thompson’s book is particularly helpful in its discussion of Cambacérès’s role in obtaining Napoleon’s canonical divorce from Joséphine. Thompson details Cambacérès’s painstaking preparation of the case and sees the divorce as evidence of the deterioration of Napoleon’s character under stress.