[2] He returned to Corsica at the start of the Revolution, and became an outspoken orator at the Corsican chapter of the Jacobin Club in Ajaccio, where he adopted the alias "Brutus Bonaparte".

[2] After returning to mainland France, Lucien held a number of minor administrative posts from 1793 until 1795, when he was briefly jailed for his Jacobin activity, during the Thermidorian Reaction.

However, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès' influence and news of the events in Egypt led to a shift in his political stance, and Lucien became one of the main plotters of coup d'état of 18 Brumaire, in which Napoleon overthrew the government of the Directory to replace it by the Consulate.

On 9 November 1799 (18 Brumaire Year VIII on the French Republican Calendar), he had pamphlets distributed in Paris that detailed a fake Jacobin plot, which he used to justify the relocation of the Council to the suburban security of Saint-Cloud.

[1] The next day, while presiding over a heated council session, Lucien managed to buy time until Napoleon's sudden entrance into the chamber surrounded by grenadiers.

[1] Following his resignation, on 7 November 1800 Lucien was sent as ambassador to the court of King Charles IV of Spain, where his diplomatic talents won over the Bourbon royal family and, perhaps as importantly, the minister Manuel de Godoy.

With the whole of the Papal States annexed to France and the Pope imprisoned, Lucien was a virtual prisoner in his Italian estates, requiring permission of the Military Governor to venture off his property.

The government permitted Lucien to settle comfortably with his family at Ludlow, and later at Thorngrove House in Grimley, Worcestershire, where he worked on a heroic poem on Charlemagne.

He was an amateur archeologist, establishing excavations at his property in Frascati which produced a complete statue of Tiberius, and at Musignano which rendered a bust of Juno.

[7] His first wife was his landlord's daughter, Christine Boyer (3 July 1771 – 14 May 1800),[8] the illiterate sister of an innkeeper of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, whom he married on 4 May 1794 at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, and by her he had four children: His second wife was Alexandrine de Bleschamp (23 February 1778 – 12 July 1855), widow of Hippolyte Jouberthon, known as "Madame Jouberthon",[10] whom he married in a religious ceremony on 25 May 1803 at Paris and in a civil marriage on 26 October 1803 at Chamant, Plessis, and by her he had ten children: