The Senate proclaims Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the French
On this day · 18 May 1804
A single decree of the Senate transformed France's republic into a hereditary empire — months before the famous coronation.
On May 18, 1804 (28 Floréal, Year XII), the French Senate passed a sénatus-consulte declaring that “Napoleon Bonaparte, present First Consul of the Republic, is Emperor of the French.” In a single stroke, the First French Empire was born and the throne made hereditary in the Bonaparte family.
The wording mattered. The title was Emperor of the French, not Emperor of France — sovereignty was framed as flowing from the people rather than from ownership of the land, a republican gloss over an unmistakably monarchical reality.
The empire was made on paper in May; the crown came in December.
The decree, often called the Constitution of the Year XII, was ratified by a plebiscite that summer. The pageantry everyone remembers — Napoleon crowning himself at Notre-Dame with Pope Pius VII looking on — came only on December 2, 1804.
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