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Nor was the question purely a matter of guaranteeing Napoleon’s personal prestige in the eyes of his fellow rulers or of stamping his authority upon the Continent of Europe. Fearing the mob as he did, he seems also to have regarded war as a means of disciplining his subjects and curbing French volatility. As he said, ‘Even in the midst of war, I have never neglected the establishment of useful institutions and the promotion of peace and order at home. There still remains much to be done, and I shall certainly never rest from my labours. But is not military success still more necessary to dazzle or to content our people?’10 At the same time, although the French ruler was in no sense its prisoner, there was also the question of the army. Exactly as had been the case under the Republic, the sheer size of the French military establishment was a spur to a forward policy. Economics aside, Napoleon had to ensure that its aspirations were met, and all the more so given its rapid evolution from the Jacobin ‘army of virtue’ to an ‘army of honour’ led by senior commanders who could potentially become ‘over-mighty subjects’. To quote Pasquier:

The army necessarily became the object of his most serious concerns. It might have been thought that it would have been satisfied to see a general placed at the head of the government at last, and this ought in fact to have been the case, and yet it was in its ranks that there were to be found the greatest number of malcontents. It was impossible for such fortune not to excite the jealousy of other generals who believed that they possessed merit equal to that of the First Consul.11

Nor was Pasquier alone in this assessment of the situation. As the much-hated and utterly unscrupulous Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché, wrote:

I perceived, day by day, how much easier it was to get possession of the sources of opinion in the civil hierarchy than in the military order, where the opposition was often more serious from its being covered. The counter-police . . . was very active in this respect; the officers called malcontents were suspended, exiled or imprisoned. But the discontent soon degenerated into irritation among the generals and colonels, who, deeply imbued with Republican ideas, saw clearly that Bonaparte only trampled on our institutions in order to advance more freely to absolute power . . . At a dinner at which some twenty discontented officers had met with some old republicans and violent patriots, the ambitious projects of the First Consul were brought upon the tapis without any restraint. When their spirits had once become elevated by the fumes of wine, some of the parties went so far as to say that it was indispensable to make the new Caesar share the fate of the former . . . So great was the excitement that a colonel . . . famous at that time . . . as a good shot, affirmed that he would pledge himself not to miss Bonaparte at fifty yards’ distance.12

With two of the worst malcontents - Bernadotte, who headed the Army of the West, and Moreau, who headed the Army of the Rhine - in key positions, it could be argued that continuous warfare was essential. In the early summer of , indeed, the dangers of a state of peace had been made all too apparent by the discovery of the so-called ‘conspiracy of Rennes’. One of a number of similar intrigues that was afoot at this time, this was led by Bernadotte’s chief-of-staff and involved an attempt to whip up a revolt among the large number of troops that were being concentrated in Brittany prior to dispatch to almost certain death from yellow fever in the West Indies. Though the plot was uncovered before much more had been achieved than the distribution of two seditious handbills, it had still been frightening enough. Much alarmed, Napoleon initially threatened to have Bernadotte shot, but wisely backed away from this impulse in favour of offering ‘Sergeant Belle-Jambe’, as the Gascon general was known, the post of governor of Louisiana, and then ambassador to the United States