Other plots were organized, and Fouché, the police-agent of the time, was kept busy in seeking the plotters, for whom there was brief mercy when found. Even Moreau, the victor at Hohenlinden, accused of negotiating with the conspirators, was disgraced, and exiled himself from France. Napoleon dealt with his secret enemies with the same ruthless energy as he did with his foes in the field of battle. His rage at the attempts upon his life, indeed, took a form that has been universally condemned. The Duke d'Enghien, a royalist French nobleman, grandson of the Prince of Condé, who was believed by Napoleon to be the soul of the royalist conspiracies, ventured too near the borders of France, and was seized in foreign territory, taken in haste to Paris, and shot without form of law or a moment's opportunity for defence. The outrage excited the deepest indignation throughout Europe. No name was given it but murder, and the historians of to-day speak of the act by no other title. The opinion of the world had little effect upon Napoleon. He was a law unto himself. The death of one man or of a thousand men weighed nothing to him where his safety or his ambition was concerned. Men were the pawns he used in the great game of empire, and he heeded not how many of them were sacrificed so that he won the game. [=Napoleon Crowned Emperor of the French=] The culmination of his ambition came in 1804, when the hope he had long secretly cherished, that of gaining the imperial dignity was realized. He imitated the example of Cæsar, the Roman conqueror, in seeking the crown as a reward for his victories, and was elected emperor of the French by an almost unanimous vote. That the sanction of the church might be obtained for the new dignity, the Pope was constrained to come to Paris, and there anointed him emperor on December 2, 1804. The new emperor hastened to restore the old insignia of royalty. He surrounded himself with a brilliant court, brought back the discarded titles of nobility, named the members of his family princes and princesses, and sought to banish every vestige of republican simplicity. Ten years before he had begun his career in the streets of Paris by sweeping away with cannon-shot the mob that rose in support of the Reign of Terror. Now he had swept away the Republic of France and founded a French empire, with himself at its head as Napoleon I. But though royalty was restored, it was not a royalty of the old type. Feudalism was at an end. The revolution had destroyed the last relics of that effete and abominable system, and it was an empire on new and modern lines which Napoleon had founded, a royalty voted into existence by a free people, not resting upon a nation of slaves. [=The Great Works Devised By the New Emperor=]