page_title: Assassination attempts on Napoleon Bonaparte
section_title: Poisoning and other attempts at Malmaison
hierarchical_section_title: Assassination attempts on Napoleon Bonaparte / Poisoning and other attempts at Malmaison
context_page_description: Historian Philip Dwyer claims Napoleon faced between 20 and 30 assassination plots during his reign over France.
context_section_description: After Napoleon became First Consul, Malmaison – an estate west of Paris, owned by Napoleon’s wife Josephine – became the site of several alleged assassination plots. According to Napoleon’s valet Constant, this included a poisoning attempt.
  Sundry alterations and repairs had to be made in the chimney-piece of the First Consul’s apartments at La Malmaison. The person superintending this work sent certain stone-cutters, some of whom were in league with the conspirators. … Just as the First Consul was about to take up his residence in the newly-prepared apartments, upon a desk at which he sat a snuff-box was found, precisely similar to one which he was in the habit of using. At first they supposed that it actually belonged to him, and that it had been left there by his valet-de-chambre. But the suspicions aroused by the strange appearance of some of the workmen took deeper root. The snuff was taken out and analysed. It was poisoned.
  Constant continues:
  The perpetrators of this dastardly outrage were at that time in league…with other conspirators, who intended to resort to other means in order to get rid of the First Consul. They thought of attacking the Malmaison guards, and of forcibly abducting the head of the Government. For this purpose they had uniforms made exactly like those of the Guides Consulaires, who, night and day, were in attendance on the First Consul. In this disguise, and with the help of their confederates, the sham stone-cutters, they might easily have mixed with the guards who were lodged and boarded at the castle. They could even have got at the First Consul and carried him off. This first scheme, however, was abandoned as too risky, and the conspirators flattered themselves that they would gain their ends in a surer, less perilous way, viz., by taking advantage of the General’s frequent journeys to Paris. In such disguise they could join the escort, unnoticed, and murder him on the highway. Their meeting-place was to be the Nanterre quarries. But their plot was again discovered, and, as in the Malmaison park there was a rather deep quarry, it was feared that they might hide here and do the General some injury when he walked out by himself. So the entrance to this place was closed with an iron gate.
  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.
caption: The Château de Malmaison
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