For a few minutes the fate of France trembled in the balance; and the conspirators knew it.[130] Bonaparte confessed it by his incoherent gaspings; Sieyes had his carriage ready, with six horses, for flight; the terrible cry, "Hors la loi!" if raised against Bonaparte in the heart of Paris, would certainly have roused the populace to fury in the cause of liberty and have swept the conspirators to the guillotine.

But, as it was, the affair was decided in the solitudes of St.Cloud by Lucien and a battalion of soldiers.
Efforts have frequently been made to represent the events of Brumaire as inevitable and to dovetail them in with a pretended philosophy of history.

But it is impossible to study them closely without observing how narrow was the margin between the success and failure of the plot, and how jagged was the edge of an affair which philosophizers seek to fit in with their symmetrical explanations.

In truth, no event of world-wide importance was ever decided by circumstances so trifling.
"There is but one step from triumph to a fall.

I have seen that in the greatest affairs a little thing has always decided important events"-- so wrote Bonaparte three years before his triumph at St.
Cloud: he might have written it of that event.