e, and that the Council had no powers to decide on the
proscription of individuals. Bonaparte at once assured them that he
was not consulting them about the fate of individuals, but merely to
know whether they thought an exceptional measure necessary. The
Government had only

"Strong presumptions, not proofs, that the terrorists were the
authors of this attempt. _Chouannerie_ and emigration are surface
ills, terrorism is an internal disease. The measure ought to be
taken independently of the event. It is only the occasion of it. We
banish them (the terrorists) for the massacres of September 2nd,
May 31st, the Babeuf plot, and every subsequent attempt."[169]

The Council thereupon unanimously affirmed the need of an exceptional
measure, and adopted a suggestion of Talleyrand (probably emanating
from Bonaparte) that the Senate should be invited to declare by a
special decision, called a _senatus consultum_, whether such an act
were "preservative of the constitution." This device, which avoided
the necessity of passing a law through two less subservient bodies,
the Tribunate and Corps Legislatif, was forthwith approved by the
guardians of the constitution. It had far-reaching results. The
complaisant Senate was brought down from its constitutional watchtower
to become the tool of the Consuls; and an easy way for further
innovations was thus dextrously opened up through the very portals
which were designed to bar them out.

The immediate results of the device were startling. By an act of
January 4th, 1801, as many as 130 prominent Jacobins were "placed
under special surveillance outside the European territory of the
Republic"--a specious phrase for denoting a living death amidst the
wastes of French Guiana or the Seychelles. Some of the threatened
persons escaped, perhaps owing to the connivance of Fouche; some were
sent to the Isle of Oleron; but the others were forthwith despatched
to the miseries of captivity in the tropics. Among these were
personages so diverse as Rossignol, once the scourge of France with
his force of Parisian cut-throats, and Destrem, whose crime was his
vehement upbraiding of Bonaparte at St. Cloud. After this measure had
taken effect, it was discovered by judicial inquiry that the Jacobins
had no connection with the outrage, which was the work of royalists
named Saint-Rejant and Carbon. These were captured, and on January
31st, 1801, were executed; but their fate ha