Читать книгу Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 17

On 2 June 1793, eleven days before the Buonaparte family reached the mainland, the Revolution had entered a new phase. The extremist Jacobin faction in the Convention, known as Montagnards or La Montagne because they sat on the highest seats in the amphitheatre, had expelled the more moderate Girondins. France was plunged into what was effectively civil war. In Toulon, where the Buonaparte landed, the Jacobins were laying down the law through terror and intimidation, arresting nobles, dragging wealthy citizens out of their houses and stringing them up from lamp-posts or bludgeoning them to death in the streets.

The Buonaparte family were not immediately threatened: they were unknown and destitute, and Lucien was prominent in the local Jacobin club. But the city was in ferment, crowds could be volatile, and the Buonaparte were, after all, ci-devant nobles. In such a climate nobody was safe. They moved to the village of La Valette outside the city. Having settled Letizia and his siblings there, Joseph made contact with Saliceti, who had also fled Corsica. He had publicly distanced himself from the Buonaparte, declaring that ‘Neither of these little intriguers will ever count among my friends,’ but he was not a man to burn bridges. He too needed associates, and with his backing Lucien was given an administrative post as quartermaster in nearby Saint-Maximin, and Joseph Fesch, who had shed his ecclesiastical garb, a similar position at Chauvet. Joseph himself accompanied Saliceti to Paris, where he lobbied the Convention to provide funds for the sustenance of exiled Corsican ‘patriots’ such as the Buonaparte who had suffered in the cause of the Revolution. His efforts were rewarded, and Letizia obtained her dole. Joseph then looked around for career opportunities, and secured the lucrative post of commissary to the army.1

Napoleone had gone to Nice, where the greater part of his regiment was stationed as part of the Army of Italy. Given the dearth of officers, he was welcomed back and given 3,000 francs in back-pay. It so happened that the commander of the artillery of the Army of Italy was Jean du Teil, younger brother of Napoleone’s old friend and commander at Auxonne. He gave Napoleone the task of inspecting the coastal batteries between Nice and Marseille, as Admiral Hood’s fleet was looking for an opportunity to land troops. At the beginning of July he was ordered to Avignon where he was to organise the convoy of ordnance and powder destined for Nice. He had not gone halfway when he found himself entering a war zone.2

The events of 2 June in Paris had provoked violent reactions and an anti-Jacobin backlash around the country. Ten provinces defied the Convention, a royalist rising had taken over the Vendée in the west, and in the south Marseille, Toulon and the valley of the Rhône were in open revolt. The fédérés, as the rebels were called, overran the region, including Avignon, stopping Napoleone in his tracks. An army under General Carteaux was marching south to defeat them, and by the end of July the fédérés had been expelled from the former Papal fief. Napoleone was present, but probably played no part in the fighting.3

There is little firm evidence about his movements over the following weeks, but he probably spent them carrying out his orders of convoying powder and shot from Avignon to Nice, possibly delayed by a bout of fever at Avignon. If so, it may have given him the time to reflect on his position. France had become a dangerous place for young men like him, and he needed to assert his political stance. He did this by writing Le Souper de Beaucaire, a polemic in the form of a dialogue which may or may not have taken place over dinner shared by a group of people at an inn at Beaucaire, on Napoleone’s route from Avignon to Nice.4

It is a political diatribe against the fédérés, in which the narrator, an officer, discusses the political situation with a group of citizens of Marseille, Nîmes and Montpellier who had come to the fair at Beaucaire, and argues in support of the Convention in Paris. He admits that the Girondins are good republicans and that the Montagnards might not be perfect, but asserts that the former showed weakness and the latter strength, and their authority should therefore be acknowledged: the successful faction has right on its side. He takes the opportunity to denounce Paoli, who only feigned loyalty to the French Republic ‘in order to gain time to deceive the people, to crush the true friends of liberty, to lead his compatriots into his ambitious and criminal projects’.

It was a political manifesto, calculated to establish Napoleone’s revolutionary credentials and position himself politically in a way that would shield him from the kind of accusations that had sent many an officer to the guillotine. It also aimed to represent the Buonaparte clan as the victims of the counter-revolutionary Paoli. Patriots such as they had welcomed Paoli believing him to be a good republican, and only gradually became aware of his ‘fatal ambition’ and his perfidy.5

The piece is couched in the flowery hyperbole so beloved of revolutionary France (and every totalitarian regime since), but there are few traces of the idealism that still haunted Napoleone’s recent writings, and it represents an emotional as well as an ideological coming of age. Reality had not lived up to his adolescent dreams of a Corsica reborn under Paoli, and his disappointment and sense of rejection had turned into anger, and even bitterness. He renounced Corsica; henceforth he would angrily reprove anyone who called him a Corsican and declare that he was and always had been French, since the island had already been incorporated into the kingdom when he was born. He was not bothered by the apparent inconsistencies or what might be seen as his betrayal of the Corsican and Paolist cause: it was Paoli who had betrayed him, and Corsica had let him down. In addition, he had smelt weakness in Paoli, and he had come to see that as a failing.

The riots he had witnessed over the past three years had dispelled any faith he might have had in the inherent goodness of human nature. The disgust and fear he had felt outside the Tuileries on 10 August the previous year had convinced him that the lower orders must be contained. The small-town struggles for power in Corsica had taught him that subterfuge, cheating, treachery and brute force were the only effective means of achieving a goal in politics. He had participated in several elections in which rules had been disregarded and results falsified, and had taken part in two coups. As an officer on full pay he had tried to subvert troops from under the authority of a brother officer. He still saw himself as a soldier, but the Revolution had politicised the army, and in politics the rules of chivalry did not apply. The winning side was the one to be on. The dreamy romanticism of his youth had been confronted with the seamy side of human affairs, and at the age of twenty-four he had emerged a cynical realist ready to make his way in the increasingly dangerous world in which he was obliged to live.

On his way from Avignon to Nice in mid-September Napoleone passed through Le Beausset, where Saliceti and the représentant en mission of the Convention Thomas Gasparin were staying, and he naturally called on his compatriot. ‘Chance served us well,’ Saliceti wrote of the encounter: they were in urgent need of a capable and politically reliable artillery officer.6

As well as being torn by internal dissent and civil war, France was now under attack from the combined forces of Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, the Dutch Republic, Sardinia, Naples and several other small Italian states, on five fronts. By the late summer of 1793 the Prussians had pushed back the French on the Rhine, the Austrians had taken the French fortress of Valenciennes, Spanish forces had crossed the Pyrenees and were moving on Perpignan, the Sardinians were invading from the east, and the British had laid siege to Dunkirk. The minister of war, Lazare Carnot, had ordered a levée en masse to defend the motherland, but things were not looking good.

Marseille had been retaken from the fédérés by the forces of the Convention on 25 August, but Toulon was still holding out, and retaking that was not going to be easy. Horrified by the bloody reprisals visited upon the inhabitants of Marseille, the fédérés and royalists in Toulon had opened the port to Admiral Hood’s Anglo-Spanish fleet, which had landed troops and occupied the city in the name of Louis XVII, now languishing in a revolutionary gaol. Toulon, the home of France’s Mediterranean fleet, was a natural harbour, with a large inner roadstead sheltered by land and an even larger outer one protected by a long promontory. The city was defended on the landward side by a string of forts and from the sea by batteries that could cover both the inner and outer roads. These defences were now held by nearly 20,000 British, Neapolitan, Spanish and Sardinian regulars, guarding not only the city but the roads in which Hood’s fleet was anchored. General Carteaux was not the man to dislodge them. A painter by trade who owed his command to political connections, he had 4,000 men plucked from the Army of the Alps and from among defeated fédérés who sought safety in his ranks.

On 7 September Carteaux began operations, taking the village of Ollioules but in the process losing the commander of his artillery, Lieutenant Colonel Dommartin, a former colleague of Napoleone at the École Militaire, who was gravely wounded. A replacement was required. Saliceti had mixed feelings about Napoleone, but after reading Le Souper de Beaucaire he had no doubts as to his political reliability, and even decided to publish it at government expense. And, as he put it, ‘At least he’s one of us.’ He nominated Captain Buonaparte to the vacant command and sent him off to join Carteaux outside Toulon.7

What he found on arrival was not encouraging. The besieging army’s headquarters at Ollioules were a nest of political intrigue and infighting between Carteaux and General Jean La Poype, who had joined him with 3,000 men from the Army of Italy. Anyone could see that Toulon was all but impregnable and that only bombardment could yield results, but as Buonaparte quickly realised, Carteaux had no idea how to lay siege to a city. He insisted that he would capture it ‘à l’arme blanche’, that is to say with sword and bayonet, and ignored Buonaparte’s advice.8

If Toulon was impregnable on the landward side, it could not hold out unless it was resupplied by sea, and no ship could approach the harbour if the heights commanding the roads were not secured. Buonaparte was not the first to see that capturing these was the key to taking the city – it was obvious from a glance at the map, as even the governing Committee of Public Safety in Paris had pointed out. But while most of those at headquarters saw the area of La Seyne on the inner roads as the place from which to threaten the allied fleet, Buonaparte believed that it was the two forts of Balaguier and Éguillette on the promontory of Le Caire, commanding access to the outer roads, that were crucial. They were held by allied troops, and it would take artillery to dislodge them. But all Buonaparte found on arrival were two twenty-four-pounders, two sixteen-pounders and two mortars. It was not much to be going on with, but enough to enable him to chase an allied force and a frigate away from the La Seyne area and set up a battery there which he named, to stress his loyalty, La Montagne.9

Over the next weeks, Buonaparte built up his artillery park. Not bothering to seek authorisation, he scoured the surrounding area, visiting every military post as far afield as Lyon, Grenoble and Antibes and stripping them of everything that might come in useful – cannon, gun carriages, powder and shot, tools and scrap metal, horses and carts, along with any men who had ever handled ordnance. He set up a foundry to produce cannonballs, forges to supply iron fittings for gun carriages and limbers, and ovens to heat the balls to set ships on fire. He also picked men from the ranks to train as gunners.

The first attack on Fort Éguillette on 22 September was a failure. Carteaux did not share Buonaparte’s conviction about the fort’s importance and deployed too few men, while the British quickly brought up reinforcements. They realised the French had identified the military significance of the promontory, and reinforced the position with a new battery which they named Fort Mulgrave. They added two earthworks on its flanks, covering the approaches to forts Éguillette and Balaguier. Buonaparte complained to Saliceti and Gasparin that his hopes of a quick victory had been scuppered; now he would have to take Fort Mulgrave before he could get at the key positions, and that would take time. He carried on building up his batteries and stores of shot and powder, ignoring orders from Carteaux, who complained but could do nothing as Buonaparte had the ear of the representatives of the government. Saliceti passed Buonaparte’s criticisms of Carteaux to his colleagues in Marseille, Paul Barras, Stanislas Fréron and Jean-François Ricord, who wrote to Paris recommending that Carteaux be replaced and Buonaparte promoted. On 18 October he received his nomination as chef de bataillon, equivalent to the rank of major, and five days later Carteaux was removed from his command.

Buonaparte had become adept at disregarding his superiors and bypassing their instructions without giving offence, employing flattery where necessary. He also knew when to force the issue and to intimidate in order to have his way. Saliceti was now permanently at headquarters in Ollioules, and backed him up. Napoleone nevertheless had to tread carefully, as the waves of terror rippling out from Paris led people to denounce others for treason as a means of avoiding being denounced themselves, and with many officers defecting to the enemy the nobleman Buonaparte was not beyond suspicion. He nevertheless did stick his neck out to protect his former superior in the regiment of La Fère, Jean-Jacques Gassendi, who had been arrested, by insisting he needed him to organise an artillery arsenal in Marseille.10

Carteaux’s command had been given to the hardly more martial General François Doppet, a physician who dabbled in literature, and had only won high rank by finding himself in the right place at the right time. But on 15 November his nerve failed during an attack on Fort Mulgrave: he gave the order to retreat when he saw the English making a sortie, only to have a furious Buonaparte, his face bathed in blood from a light wound, gallop up and call him a jean foutre (the closest English approximation would be ‘fucking idiot’). Doppet took it well. He was aware of his limitations, and realised that chef de bataillon Buonaparte knew his business.11

Buonaparte’s orders and notes during these weeks are succinct and precise, and while their tone is commanding, he takes the trouble to explain why compliance with his demands is essential. In war, as in any other critical situation, people quickly rally to the person who gives the impression of knowing what they are about, and Buonaparte’s self-confidence was magnetic. He showed bravery and steadiness under fire, and did not spare himself, which set him apart from many of the political appointments milling around at headquarters. ‘This young officer,’ wrote General Doppet, ‘combined a rare bravery and the most indefatigable activity with his many talents. Every time I went out on my rounds, I always found him at his post; if he needed a moment’s rest, he took it on the ground, wrapped in his cloak; he was never away from his batteries.’12

Through effort and resourcefulness, Buonaparte had built up an artillery park of nearly a hundred guns and set up a dozen batteries, provided the necessary powder and shot, and trained the soldiers to man them. For his chief of staff he had picked the apparently vain and frivolous Jean-Baptiste Muiron, who had trained as an artillery officer and quickly became an enthusiastic aide. In the twenty-six-year-old Félix Chauvet he identified a brilliant commissary who earned and returned his affection as well as serving him efficiently. During an attack on one of the batteries, Buonaparte had noticed the engaging bravery under fire of a young grenadier in the battalion of the Côte d’Or named Andoche Junot. When he saw that the man also had beautiful handwriting he appropriated him as an aide, only to discover that he had trained for the artillery in the school at Châlons. A couple of weeks later, another young man joined Buonaparte’s entourage. He was the handsome nineteen-year-old Auguste Marmont, a cousin of Le Lieur de Ville sur Arce, who had trained for the artillery at Châlons with Junot.13

On 16 November a new commander arrived to take over from Doppet. He was General Jacques Dugommier, a fifty-five-year-old professional soldier, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence who knew how to call the troops to order. He had brought General du Teil and a couple of artillery officers with him, but quickly realised that Buonaparte had the situation in hand, and he did little more than endorse his decisions. ‘I can find no words to describe the merits of Buonaparte,’ he wrote to the minister of war. ‘Much technical knowledge, as much intelligence and too much bravery is only a faint sketch of the qualities of this uncommon officer.’14

On 25 November Dugommier held a council of war, attended by Saliceti and, in place of Gasparin, who had died, a newly-arrived représentant, Augustin Robespierre, younger brother of one of the leading lights of the Committee of Public Safety. They considered Dugommier’s plan, then that drawn up in Paris by Carnot. Both involved multiple attacks. Buonaparte argued that this would disperse their forces, and put forward his own plan, which consisted of a couple of feint attacks and a massive assault on forts Mulgrave, Éguillette and Balaguier, whose capture he was confident would precipitate a rapid evacuation of Hood’s fleet and the fall of the city. The plan was accepted and preparations put in hand.15

On 30 November the British commander in Toulon, General O’Hara, made a sortie and succeeded in capturing a battery and spiking its guns before moving on Ollioules. Dugommier and Saliceti managed to rally the fleeing republican forces and lead up reinforcements. They retook the battery, a battalion led by Louis-Gabriel Suchet taking O’Hara prisoner in the process, and Buonaparte unspiked the guns and opened up on the fleeing allies. He had been in the thick of the fighting and earned a mention in Dugommier’s despatch to Paris.16

The day’s fighting had nevertheless demonstrated the lack of mettle and experience of the French troops. The worsening weather combined with food shortages to sap morale. Despairing of their ability to take Toulon, Barras and Fréron considered raising the siege and taking winter quarters. Saliceti pressed Dugommier to attack, but the general hesitated, as a failed assault might cost him his head. As it was, they were being accused in Paris of lack of zeal and of living in luxury.17

Dugommier resolved to act on Buonaparte’s plan, and the batteries facing Fort Mulgrave began bombarding it on 14 December. The British batteries responded vigorously, and Buonaparte was thrown to the ground by the wind of a passing shot. The attack, by a force of 7,000 men in three columns, began at 1 a.m. on 17 December. A storm had broken and Dugommier hesitated, but Buonaparte pointed out that the conditions might actually prove favourable, and the impatience of Saliceti carried the day. The French infantry went into action in pouring rain, the darkness lit up by flashes of lightning, the sound of the guns drowned out by peals of thunder. Two of the advancing columns strayed from their prescribed route and lost cohesion as many of the soldiers fell back or fled. Other units reached Fort Mulgrave and began escalading its defences. The fighting was fierce – the attack on the fort would cost the French over a thousand casualties – but Muiron eventually forced his way into the fort, closely followed by Dugommier and Buonaparte, who had his horse shot under him at the beginning of the attack, and was wounded in the leg by an English corporal’s lance as he stormed the ramparts.

As soon as he had taken possession of the fort, Buonaparte turned its guns on those of forts Éguillette and Balaguier, and ordered Marmont to start bombarding them. The British mounted a counter-attack, but it was repulsed and they were forced to evacuate the two remaining forts. By then it was light, and Buonaparte began firing incendiary shells and red-hot cannonballs at the nearest British ships, blowing up two. He told anyone who would listen that the battle was over and Toulon was theirs, but Dugommier, Robespierre, Saliceti and others were sceptical, believing the town would only fall after a few more days’ fighting. They were wrong – the explosions of the two ships were a signal the allies could not ignore, and that morning they decided to evacuate; they began moving men out while the ships struggled in a strong wind to pull out of range of the French guns.

The evacuation proceeded through that day and the next, with the allies towing away nine French warships and blowing up a further twelve, setting fire to ships’ stores and the arsenal, and taking on board thousands of French royalists. Anyone who could get hold of a boat was rowing out to the allied ships, and some even tried swimming. They were under constant fire from batteries newly set up by Buonaparte on the promontory and the heights above the city. That night the burning ships lit up the scene, revealing what Buonaparte described as ‘a sublime but heart-rending sight’.18

The French entered the city on the morning of 19 December, looting, raping and lynching anyone they pleased to label as an enemy of the Revolution. On the quayside people were throwing themselves into the water to reach the departing British ships. Those who did not drown were subjected to the fury of the republican soldiery. Over two decades later, Buonaparte recalled the revulsion he had felt at the sight, and according to some sources he managed to save a number of lives.19

Barras, Saliceti, Ricord, Robespierre and Fréron carried out a purge of the population of Toulon. ‘The national vengeance has been unfurled,’ they proclaimed, listing those categories which had been ‘exterminated’. Barras suggested it would be simpler if they removed all those who were proven ‘patriots’, that is to say revolutionaries, and killed all the rest. The population of the city, which would be renamed Port-de-la-Montagne, fell from 30,000 to 7,000.20

On 22 December 1793 Buonaparte was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. He was only twenty-four years old, but this did not make him an exception. Over 6,000 officers of all arms had emigrated since 1791, and another 10,000 would have done so by the summer of 1794. Generals and higher-ranking officers were guillotined by the hundred as suspected traitors. In consequence, the Republic had been obliged to nominate no fewer than 962 new generals between 1791 and 1793. But in the case of Buonaparte, the promotion was merited, and he knew it.21

‘I told you we would be brilliantly successful, and, you see, I keep my word,’ he wrote banteringly from Ollioules to the deputy minister of war in Paris on 24 December, using the familiar ‘tu’ form, no doubt to stress his revolutionary attitude. He had already noted that in the current climate the story that was told first was the one that stuck in the mind, and he informed the minister that thanks to his action, the British had been prevented from burning any of the French ships or naval stores, which was a blatant lie.22

He had proved not only that he was a capable and resourceful officer, but also that he was a leader of men. He had won the admiration of all the real soldiers present, starting with Dugommier. More than that, he had revealed a charisma that many of his young comrades found hard to resist.23

‘He was small in stature, but well proportioned, thin and puny in appearance but taut and strong,’ noted Claude Victor (another who had distinguished himself at Toulon and had also been made a general), noting that ‘his features had an unusual nobility’ and his eyes seemed to send out shafts of fire. His gravity and sense of purpose impressed those around him. ‘There was mystery in the man,’ Victor felt.24

Buonaparte was exhausted. Three months of intense activity, poor diet, frequent nights spent sleeping on the ground wrapped only in his cloak, and that during the winter months, must have placed a heavy strain on his constitution. He had a deep flesh wound and had also caught scabies, which was then endemic in the army. That may be why, at a moment when he could have obtained a posting to one of the armies actively engaged against the enemy, he was content to accept that of inspector of the coastal defences along the stretch between Toulon and Marseille. Another reason may have been a desire to lie low. He had seen how easily people could lose their commands, and he had probably made a number of enemies.25

It may just have been that he wished to be close to his family, which had moved further away from Toulon, first to Beausset, then Brignoles and finally Marseille, where he joined them on 2 January 1794. His general’s pay of 12,000 livres plus expenses would have been welcome, as the cost of living had risen dramatically in the course of 1793. The family had lived through lean times, with Letizia taking in washing, and the daughters, as gossip had it, resorting to prostitution. Maria Paolina, now Paulette, who had grown into a rare beauty, had been caught stealing figs from a neighbour’s garden.26