Assassination attempts on Napoleon Bonaparte

Historian Philip Dwyer claims Napoleon faced between 20 and 30 assassination plots during his reign over France.
According to Napoleon;
There is doubt as to whether a dagger was raised as such, but it served to justify the coup.
After Napoleon became First Consul, Malmaison – an estate west of Paris, owned by Napoleon’s wife Joséphine – became the site of several alleged assassination plots. According to Napoleon’s valet Louis Constant, this included a poisoning attempt.
Constant continues:
Constant may have been referring to an alleged plot by a man named Juvenot, a former aide-de-camp to the executed Jacobin leader François Hanriot. According to Napoleon’s Minister of Police Joseph Fouché, Juvenot was conspiring in mid-1800 with “some twenty zealots” to attack and murder Napoleon near Malmaison. The plan was to block the road to Malmaison with carts and bundles of firewood; when Napoleon’s carriage was forced to stop, the conspirators would shoot him. They also thought of setting fire to cottages near Malmaison, expecting that Napoleon’s staff would run to put out the flames, leaving the First Consul unguarded. Fouché had Juvenot and his accomplices arrested, but was unable to extract a confession.
In September 1800, Napoleon’s private secretary Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne was contacted by an out-of-work soldier named Harrel, who said he had been approached to take part in a plot against Napoleon’s life. Bourrienne took the matter to Napoleon, who directed the police to supply Harrel with money so the guilty parties could carry on and be caught in the act. The conspirators planned to approach Napoleon at the opera in Paris and stab him to death. The date fixed for the assassination was October 10, 1800, at the premiere of Les Horaces. According to Bourrienne:
According to Fouché, the would-be assassins were Jacobin extremists. The accused, however, blamed Harrel and other agents provocateurs.
A recent study by Jonathan North points out that this plot had all the hallmarks of a police entrapment. Nevertheless, four of the men arrested – painter François Topino-Lebrun, sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi, adjutant Joseph Antoine Aréna, and Dominique Demerville, a former clerk to the Committee of Public Safety – were executed on January 30, 1801.
Perhaps the best-known assassination attempt against Napoleon occurred in Paris on the evening of December 24, 1800. Napoleon was heading to the opera to see the French premiere of Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation when a cart exploded in the street shortly after his carriage had passed.
The attack was carried out by royalists linked to the Chouan leader Georges Cadoudal, who was in the pay of the British government. The conspirators bought a horse and cart from a Parisian grain dealer, attached a large wine cask to the cart, and loaded the cask with shrapnel and gunpowder. They drove this “infernal machine” to Rue Saint-Nicaise (which no longer exists), near the intersection with rue Saint-Honoré, on Napoleon’s route to the opera. One of the plotters paid 14-year-old Marianne Peusol, whose mother sold buns nearby, twelve sous to hold the horse and guard the cart while the would-be assassin stood at some distance with the fuse.
The conspirators expected Napoleon’s carriage to be preceded by a cavalry escort. The escort’s appearance would be the signal to light the powder. However, Napoleon’s coachman was driving very fast (some accounts say he was drunk), and the carriage appeared without warning. As noted in evidence at the subsequent trial:
The explosion killed the horse, young Marianne, and as many as a dozen bystanders. Some 40 others were wounded, and several buildings were damaged or destroyed. Napoleon’s wife Joséphine, her daughter Hortense de Beauharnais, and Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat (pregnant with her son Achille) were travelling in a carriage behind Napoleon’s. They might have been killed had they not been delayed by fiddling with Joséphine’s shawl, as described by General Jean Rapp, who accompanied the women.
Though Fouché believed that royalists were behind the attack, Napoleon was initially convinced that his Jacobin enemies were responsible. He used the explosion as an excuse to exile 130 Jacobins from France. Meanwhile, police assembled the remains of the cart and horse and appealed for information. The man who had sold the horse and cart came forward, as did the blacksmith who shoed the horse, and described the suspect. Information provided by General Girardon provided a name to the police, and gave an idea as to the whereabouts of a certain Corbon [sic]. This led them to François Carbon, the man who made the bomb. Carbon confessed the names of fellow conspirators Pierre Robinault de Saint-Régent and Joseph de Limoëlan, as well as others. Carbon and Saint-Régent were executed on April 20, 1801. Limoëlan fled to the United States where he became a priest and died in Charleston in 1826.
Georges Cadoudal, the Breton Chouan leader who was financed by the British government, wanted to overthrow Napoleon and put the Bourbon heir Louis XVIII on the French throne. He was supported by Jean Pichegru, a general of the Revolutionary Wars who had been exiled from France. The Count of Artois (Louis XVIII’s brother and the future Charles X of France) also gave his blessing to the plan. In August 1803, Cadoudal and other conspirators left London, landed near Dieppe, and travelled to Paris. Their aim was to assassinate Napoleon and pave the way for a Bourbon restoration. Though Pichegru claimed he had the full support of General Jean Moreau (a military rival of Napoleon), when the two met secretly in January 1804, it became clear that Moreau, a republican, would not support the Bourbons on the throne.
Around the same time that this was putting a dent in Cadoudal’s plan, the French arrested a British secret agent who had participated in Cadoudal’s landing. He revealed some details of the plot, including the involvement of Cadoudal and the two generals. Napoleon ordered their arrest. Moreau was picked up on February 15, Pichegru on February 26, and Cadoudal on March 9. Napoleon thought a minor Bourbon prince, the Duke of Enghien, was in league with the conspirators. He had him arrested on March 20 and executed early the next morning. On April 5, Pichegru was found strangled by his own tie in his prison cell. According to the police, it was a case of suicide.
Cadoudal, Moreau, and the other conspirators were brought to trial at the end of May. Cadoudal and 11 accomplices were executed on June 25, 1804. Moreau – for whom there was great popular sympathy – was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Napoleon changed the sentence to exile in the United States. Moreau later returned to Europe to join the Coalition forces again Napoleon. He was fatally wounded in the Battle of Dresden in 1813.
In 1809, Napoleon and his troops occupied Vienna. On October 12 of that year, a German university student named Friedrich Staps attempted to assassinate Napoleon during a military parade at Schönbrunn Palace. Staps approached Napoleon on the pretense of presenting him with a petition. General Rapp became suspicious of the young man, whose right hand was thrust into a pocket under his coat. Staps was arrested and found to be carrying a large carving knife. When Rapp asked whether he had planned to assassinate Napoleon, Staps answered in the affirmative.
Napoleon wanted to speak to Staps directly, so the prisoner was brought to the Emperor’s office with his hands tied behind his back. Using Rapp as an interpreter, Napoleon asked Staps a series of questions.
After a doctor examined Staps and pronounced him in good health, Napoleon offered the young man a chance for clemency.
Staps was executed by firing squad on October 17, 1809. His last words were: “Liberty forever! Germany forever! Death to the tyrant!”