Читать книгу Napoleon - Vincent Cronin - Страница 10

NAPOLEON, with his refugee family, landed in Toulon on 14 June, 1793. That difficult summer he was to find that France had a new Government, the Committee of Public Safety. Its twelve members were mainly middle-class lawyers. The most influential, Maximilien Robespierre, was a bookish puritanical theorist, who believed that men are naturally moral and good. It is odd that he should have thought this, for among his colleagues on the Committee, Collot d’Herbois, a failed actor-playwright, had a pathological streak of violence, Hérault de Séchelles, an amoral rake, had expressed his brand of smiling egoism in a Theory of Ambition, while the young Saint-Just wrote a pornographic poem and ran off with his widowed mother’s silver. What united the twelve was a belief that goodness was republicanism, as defined by themselves, and that everything else, being evil, must go. According to Saint-Just: ‘What constitutes the Republic is the complete destruction of everything that is opposed to it.’

The twelve began with Christianity, understandably enough since their name, Comité de Salut public – Salut meaning Salvation as well as Safety – implied that politics had superseded Christianity. In November 1793 they were to suppress the Christian calendar, with its Sundays and feast-days, in favour of the décade, a period of ten days, and months named after the seasons. The Republic, not the Incarnation, became the point of reference, and 22 September 1792 – old or ‘slave’ style – was deemed the beginning of the year I.

Dechristianization was welcomed by some, including Lucien, who discarded his Christian name for Brutus – Brutus Buonaparte, he called himself – and got the name of the village where he worked in the army supply department changed from Saint-Maximin to Marathon. But for those who did not welcome it; for the Girondins, or moderate republicans; for anyone with a good word for kings; for all who resented the Committee’s dictatorial and unconstitutional powers, the ‘Twelve Just Men’ showed a hatred unparalleled since the Revolution began. Betraying the Rights of Man, they began to kill these people for their political and religious opinions, often without a trial, and without mercy, for, according to Robespierre, ‘clemency is barbarous.’

Many Frenchmen refused to accept this new wave of Terror. Ten départements, from Brittany to the Saintonge, had risen against the Committee, some protesting against the imprisonment of ‘suspects’, others against the soldiers’ desecration of statues and crosses, others against the scarcity and high price of bread. Lyon was in revolt, so was Toulon. Much of the Marseille area was up in arms. Not only was France at war with five other nations, she was at war with herself.

After installing his family safely in Marseille, Napoleon rejoined his regiment and was ordered to Pontet, seven miles from Avignon, to serve under General Carteaux. National Guardsmen from Marseille had seized Avignon, an important ammunition centre, and on 24 July Napoleon took part in Carteaux’s successful attack on the town. It was a grim lesson for Napoleon in the horrors of civil war. His own troops shot and killed National Guardsmen, and in turn were killed by them. Civilians killed also and in turn were killed: the National Guardsmen, on entering Avignon, had butchered thirty civilians in cold blood.

Napoleon was deeply upset by his experience at Avignon. All the generous impulses of the Revolution seemed to have become their opposite, and here, four years after 1789, he was shooting down his fellow Frenchmen on behalf of a terrorist Government. He was so upset that he fell ill, and went to rest at nearby Beaucaire. Here he wrote down his inner conflict in the form of a dialogue entitled Le Souper de Beaucaire.

The speakers are an army officer, obviously Napoleon, and a Marseille businessman, a moderate Republican. The businessman claims that Southerners have the right to fight for their political views, and condemns Carteaux as a murderer. Napoleon, while showing sympathy for the businessman’s moderate views, condemns the Southerners for having committed the unpardonable crime of plunging France into civil war, and for their madness in continuing it now in the face of impossible odds. Changes must take place legally, not by armed rebellion. The majority of Frenchmen are behind the Government, and only the regular army, with its discipline and loyalty, can restore order. Though personally he detests civil war – ‘where people tear one another to pieces and kill without knowing whom they kill’ – he defends Carteaux as humane and honest: in Avignon ‘not a pin was stolen.’ He ends by bidding the businessman discard his rebellious views ‘and advance to the walls of Perpignan, to make the Spaniard, who has been puffed up by a little success, dance the Carmagnole.’ This notion puts the company in a good humour; the businessman buys champagne, which he and Napoleon sit up drinking until two in the morning.

In Le Souper de Beaucaire, then, Napoleon justifies what he is doing, but it is really a plea to end civil war. As such he had copies printed, and probably distributed them where they could do good. But his pamphlet failed to make the desired impression, and civil war continued. In August Napoleon took part in a bloody attack on Marseille and was there when Stanislas Fréron arrived on behalf of the Government to purge and purify. ‘We have already discovered four gaming-houses where people address each other as Monsieur and Madame,’ wrote Fréron.

Sickened by civil war and purges, Napoleon wrote to the War Office asking to be posted to the Army of the Rhine. It was France’s enemies he wanted to fight, not Frenchmen, and before the month was out he got his chance, though not in the way he expected.

The 28,000 inhabitants of Toulon had for some time been in revolt against the Government. When Avignon and Marseille fell, they believed that France’s only hope lay with a Bourbon King, and the Bourbon King’s allies. On 27 August they raised a white flag spangled with fleurs-de-lys, proclaimed the boy Louis XVII their King, and ‘the year 1793 the first year of the regeneration of the French monarchy’. Next day they opened their port to English and Spanish ships, and their gates to English, Spanish and Italian troops.

A few days after these events Napoleon was travelling to Nice in charge of an ammunition convoy. At Beausset, eleven miles from Toulon, he ran into Saliceti, one of four Goverment commissioners responsible for the siege of Toulon. Saliceti, a tall thin lawyer aged thirty-six with a pock-marked face, was now on close terms with the Buonapartes: he and Joseph had just been initiated together into the Freemasons’ lodge, Parfaite Sincerité, at Marseille. So when Napoleon pleaded for a job fighting the English and Spaniards in Toulon, Saliceti listened sympathetically. By a second stroke of luck for Napoleon, Lieutenant-Colonel Dommartin, commanding the artillery, had just been wounded. On 16 September Saliceti appointed Napoleon, on a temporary basis, to replace Dommartin.

Napoleon’s new commanding officer was General Carteaux, whom he had served under at Avignon but only now came to know. Carteaux was by profession a Court painter, but though he painted kings, he evidently did not love them, for he threw himself into the Revolution, taught himself soldiering, and now at forty-two was a general.

Napoleon was rather amused by Carteaux. He noticed how the painter-general kept twirling his long black moustaches, how he rode a magnificent horse once owned by the Prince de Condé, on which he would pose, as though for his portrait, with one hand on his sabre, and how no matter the context he kept announcing ‘I attack in column of three.’

Next morning at dawn Carteaux led Napoleon over mountain paths to his artillery: two 24-pounders and two 16-pounders. In the kitchen of a nearby farm gunners with brass bellows were blowing on red-hot shot to make it glow. Carteaux asked Napoleon how he thought the shot should be loaded into the guns. Napoleon said the best way was with a big iron scoop, but since there wasn’t one available a wooden scoop would do. Carteaux told the gunners to load one of the 24-pounders with red-hot shot as Napoleon said, and announced the imminent burning of the English fleet. Napoleon thought this was a joke, for the English ships were at least three miles off, but Carteaux was in earnest. ‘Oughtn’t we to fire a sighting round?’ Napoleon asked. Neither Carteaux nor his staff seemed to know what a sighting round was, but they repeated approvingly, ‘Sighting round? Yes, certainly.’

The 24-pounder was loaded with an iron ball. ‘Fire!’ With a flash, a roar and a cloud of smoke, the ball sped away and landed less than a mile off: it did not even reach the sea. Carteaux’s comment amused Napoleon: ‘Those wretches in Marseille have sent us dud gunpowder!’ Carteaux then ordered a culverin, a clumsy gun with a very long barrel, to be brought into position and fired at the English ships. At the third shot it blew up. That day the burning of the English fleet did not take place.

Despite this farcical prelude, Napoleon knew that his big chance had come. In Toulon were 18,000 foreign troops, notably English. They had come to destroy the Revolution and put Louis XVII on the throne. The longer they stayed, the more heart they gave to regional insurrections and to the anarchy which, in another way, would also destroy the Revolution. A victory at Toulon could save the Revolution, the rights of man, justice under law, all the ideals in which Napoleon believed. And he was certain Toulon could be captured – with guns.

Napoleon asked Gasparin, one of the commissioners with military experience, for a free hand with the artillery. This he was granted, despite grumbles from Carteaux’s headquarters that Napoleon was one of Louis Capet’s officers and a dirty aristocrat. Napoleon then set to work with a will. He drew from the citadels of Antibes and Monaco unneeded guns; got draught oxen from as far as Montpellier, organised brigades of wagoners to bring 100,000 sacks of earth from Marseille for parapets. He employed basket-makers to make gabions, and erected an arsenal of eighty forges, as well as a workshop for repairing muskets.

As guns arrived, Napoleon dug them in on the sea edge and pounded the fleet. Four days after Napoleon took command an English officer noted: ‘Gunboats suffered considerably … Seventy men wounded or killed … Lord Hood became anxious about the shipping.’ But at Carteaux’s headquarters they grumbled that Napoleon had gone too close, that he’d had gunners killed.

On 19 October Napoleon learned that he had been promoted major, but even with this rank he could not get Carteaux to appreciate the vital role of guns. So he asked the Government commissioners to appoint a senior officer to command the artillery, at least a brigadier, ‘who if only by his rank will carry weight with a crowd of ignoramuses at headquarters’. This request was granted, but the man appointed, Brigadier Du Teil – brother of Napoleon’s old commanding officer – was elderly and unwell. Du Teil left decisions to Napoleon. Throughout the whole three months’ siege, Napoleon had de facto command of the artillery, building it up from a handful of men and five guns to sixty-four officers, 1,600 men and 194 guns or mortars.

Meanwhile the commissioners removed – and threw into prison – General Carteaux, whose attacks ‘in column of three’ were proving ruinous, and replaced him by Doppet, a dentist. Doppet was a humble man conscious of his limitations, which included, surprisingly, a horror of blood. During an attack on an English fort he saw one of his aides killed at his side, sickened, panicked and gave the signal for retreat. Two days later he resigned.

Napoleon viewed all this with the utmost frustration. But at last, on 17 November, a professional soldier arrived to take command, Jacques Coquille Dugommier, aged fifty-five, a former sugar-planter. He and Napoleon took to each other at once.

Napoleon put to Dugommier a plan for capturing Toulon. The town was protected by mountains to the north, impregnable fortifications to the east, and by its port to the south. Carteaux had proposed to attack it by land from the north-east, under withering fire from English ships in the port. This was a mistake, said Napoleon. They should attack not the town but the fleet, and to do this they should seize the high ground south of the port, two miles from Toulon proper. This high ground was defended by a powerful English fort, Fort Mulgrave, known to the French as Little Gibraltar. Once Little Gibraltar fell, neighbouring forts would tumble, the fleet would come under murderous French gunfire and be forced to go, evacuating the allied troops. Toulon would then fall of itself.

‘There is only one possible plan – Buonaparte’s,’ Dugommier wrote to the Minister of War. He chose 17 December for the attack on Little Gibraltar and ordered Napoleon to pound the defences. Napoleon dug in a battery of cannon dangerously close to Little Gibraltar: ‘the battery of men without fear’, he proudly called it, and for forty-eight hours he and his men fought an artillery duel with the twenty guns and four mortars inside the Fort. Napoleon had his own staff now, including a young Burgundian sergeant, Andoche Junot, who wrote a clear hand, to pen orders. Nothing rattled Junot. Once when an English shell landed close to the battery, nearly killing Junot and covering his order-paper with earth, ‘Good,’ was all he said, ‘I shan’t need to sand the ink’ – a remark which pleased Napoleon. He himself was always at the point of danger and, as an eyewitness noted, ‘if he needed a rest, he took it lying on the ground wrapped in his cloak.’

On the evening of the 17th 7,000 troops gathered for the attack. Heavy rain was falling and a high wind shook the pine trees: difficult conditions for accurate musket-fire and demoralizing also. Dugommier, who reckoned that even in fair weather one half of his troops were unreliable, told his staff he wanted to postpone the attack twenty-four hours. The commissioners, led by Saliceti, got to hear of this. They were already suspicious of Dugommier’s ‘purity’ because he had allowed an English surgeon through the lines to dress the wounds of a captured English general. They came to Napoleon, therefore, told him they wanted an immediate attack and offered him the command.

It was a key moment for the young artillery major: one of those testing situations he had described in his essay and stories when a man must choose between personal glory and esprit de corps. Napoleon did not hesitate. He replied that he had complete confidence in Dugommier and wouldn’t accept the command. Then he went to talk to Dugommier himself, argued that rain wouldn’t prevent victory, which depended on cannon and bayonets, and convinced him that only an immediate attack could save the Revolution.

Dugommier placed himself at the head of 5,000 men in two columns, leaving Napoleon in reserve with 2,000. While Napoleon’s guns battered the enemy – his 4-pounders could fire four rounds a minute – the French advanced with fixed bayonets and quickly captured two outworks. Then they came under heavy gun- and musket-fire from Little Gibraltar. Dozens of French troops fell and the rest took fright. ‘Sauve qui pent,’ they cried and began to turn back. Dugommier managed to rally them and they charged the double-walled fort. Twice they hurled themselves against the spiked outer palisades, twice they were driven back. Then Dugommier ordered Napoleon to attack.

Mounting his horse, Napoleon led his 2,000 men through the lashing rain towards the Fort. Almost at once his horse was shot from under him, and he continued on foot. He felt calm: his theory was, ‘If your number is up, no point in worrying.’ As he approached the fort, he detached a battalion of light infantry under his chief of staff, Muiron, to launch a flanking attack at the same time as his own.

Napoleon arrived at the fort walls. Muskets slung, sabres between their teeth, he and his men clambered over the spiked timber and parapets, climbing on one another’s shoulders, and slithered through the gun recesses. Muiron was the first officer in, then Dugommier, then Napoleon. They went for the English and Piedmontese with bayonet and sabre, pike and ramrod. After a couple of hours’ bitter fighting, at three in the morning the fort fell, and at dawn Saliceti and the other commissioners arrived pompously with drawn swords, to offer solemn congratulations to the victors.

Napoleon lay wounded. He had received a deep thrust from an English sergeant’s half-pike in the inner side of his left thigh just above the knee. At first the surgeon wanted to amputate. This was usual practice with bad wounds, to prevent gangrene. But after a second examination he changed his mind. The wound became slightly septic, and when it healed was to leave a deep scar.

On the 18th, just as Napoleon had foreseen, the neighbouring forts were evacuated; in the words of Sidney Smith, troops ‘crowded to the water like the herd of swine that ran furiously into the sea possessed of the devil’. Napoleon’s guns pounded the English fleet into flight. That evening Admiral Lord Hood set fire to the arsenal and all French ships he could not use, embarked the allied troops, and under cover of night slipped out to sea. Next day the French entered Toulon.

The Government commissioners, who now included Stanislas Fréron and an ex-nobleman named Paul Barras, had orders from the Committee of Public Safety ‘to wreak national vengeance’ on those suspected of bringing in the English. So after the night of courage came days of cruelty. On 20 December, they shot 200 officers and men of the naval artillery. Two days later they shot 200 men and women without trial. A Government official named Fouché wrote to Collot d’Herbois of the Committee of Public Safety: ‘We have only one way of celebrating this victory; this evening 213 insurgents fall under our thunderbolt. Adieu, my friend, tears of joy flood my soul’; and, a few days later, ‘we are shedding much impure blood, but for humanity and for duty.’

Dugommier tried to stop the bloodshed, got a bad name with the commissioners and resigned his command. Napoleon, able to hobble about, also did what he could to save innocent lives in the town which had been renamed Port de la Montagne. Learning that the de Chabrillan family had been thrown into prison for no other reason than their noble birth, Napoleon arranged to have them hidden in empty ammunition boxes, which he then dispatched to Hyères, where the Chabrillans were able to catch a ship and emigrate.

The capture of Toulon was a very important victory. It expelled the combined forces of four nations from French soil; it ended rebellion in the South. As such it became the subject of patriotic songs and of ‘a heroic and historical drama’ by Pellet Desbarreaux, which was performed in Toulouse. Napoleon does not appear, but Saliceti does, exhorting the troops: ‘You are free; over there are the Spaniards and English – slaves. Liberty is watching you!’ Other characters are an American named Williams, who has been pressed into the English navy and deserts to the French: ‘I’ve thrown down my weapons in order to rush into the arms of my brothers,’ and a convict who has been shackled for defying ‘the tyranny of the nobles’; he is hailed by Saliceti as a ‘virtuous being’. No whisper of the shootings; in fact Saliceti proclaims ‘humanity towards our defeated enemies’.

For Napoleon also Toulon was a milestone. He had had his first taste of real battle; and it is noteworthy that it was fought to drive the English off French soil. He had shown powers of quick decision, judgment and boldness. Whereas the carnage at the Tuileries had sickened him, here he had kept his sensibility in check, and even given proof of toughness, that essential quality in a first-rate officer. His role had been a limited one, but he had played it well, and Dugommier wrote to the Minister of War: ‘I have no words to describe Buonaparte’s merit: much technical skill, an equal degree of intelligence and too much gallantry, there you have a poor sketch of this rare officer …’

On 22 December Napoleon was promoted brigadier general – he had risen from captain in four months. His pay was 15,000 livres a year – inflationary livres, it is true, but still a sizeable sum, and he at once set about looking after his family. He moved them from the poverty of Marseille to a pretty country house near Antibes called La Sallé, surrounded by palms, eucalyptus, mimosa and orange trees. Napoleon engaged servants, but Letizia with her high standards of cleanliness insisted on doing the washing herself in a little stream which ran near the end of the garden.

Twenty-four-year-old Brigadier Buonaparte spent a few days’ leave at La Sallé. He introduced Louis, now aged fifteen, to Paul et Virginie, a mixture of love story and travel book about the tropical island of Mauritius. Louis, already showing a scrupulous concern for minutiæ, wrote to the author, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, enquiring which parts were fact, which fiction. Louis ‘has just the qualities I like,’ wrote Napoleon, ‘warmth, good health, talent, precision in his dealings, and kindness.’ Napoleon’s other favourite, Pauline, made charming little dresses: she also stole artichokes and ripe figs from the garden next door and was chased by the owner with loud oaths and a vine prop. She was already attractive to men and had turned the head of Andoche Junot, whom Napoleon had made his aide-de-camp.

The one member of his family about whom Napoleon felt worried was Lucien, alias Brutus. Lucien was one of those angry Republicans who believe only in levelling down. To this end he had married an inn-keeper’s daughter, much beneath him socially, and though under age had not even bothered to ask Letizia’s permission. He could not brook authority, and resented the lead Napoleon took in organizing the family. To Joseph he confided, ‘I feel in myself the courage to be a tyrannicide … I have begun a song about Brutus, just a song after the manner of Young’s Night Thoughts … I write with astonishing speed, my pen flies and then I scratch it all out. I correct little; I do not like the rules that limit genius and do not observe any.’ In the same spirit he composed speeches full of rhetoric which were soon to get him into trouble. They were not to Napoleon’s taste. ‘Too many words and not enough ideas. You can’t speak like that to the ordinary man in the street. He has more common sense and tact than you think.’

As he relaxed with his family in the garden at La Sallé, Napoleon could be well pleased with life. He had helped to drive the English out of France, thus wiping away the ‘stain of dishonour’ incurred at Maddalena. He felt a new confidence in himself, and his new job – Inspector General of Coastal Defences between Marseille and Nice – promised to be interesting. As for his family, he had got them out of Corsica just in time – a month later the English landed. They liked being in France, and he saw no reason why they should not settle there permanently.

All this was highly satisfactory. But there was a dark side to the picture. Napoleon possessed authority – but that could be dangerous under a government resentful of all authority but its own. Napoleon was a moderate – but that could be dangerous in an age of extremists. Napoleon was a brigadier – but that could be dangerous if you got on the wrong side of the Government commissioners, as Dugommier had done, and now lay in a Paris prison. Like anyone in the public eye, from now on he would be walking a tightrope. Indeed, after the victory of Toulon, Napoleon’s luck turned. For the next twenty-one months almost everything was to go dismally wrong.

Napoleon’s misfortunes began in Marseille. After the carnage in the Tuileries, the mutiny on the Fauvette, and the recent rebellion, Napoleon viewed the people of Marseille with considerable misgivings. He wanted to see a strong fortress there, and on 4 January sent to Paris a report asking for Vauban’s Fort Saint-Nicolas to be repaired against possible attack from within and without. In his report he used an unfortunate phrase: ‘I am going to position guns in order to curb the town.’

This was like flame to a powder keg. Up stood Granet, the Marseilles’ representative in Paris: ‘There is a proposal afoot,’ he boomed, ‘to rebuild the bastilles put up by Louis XIV in order to tyrannize the South. The proposal comes from Buonaparte of the artillery and a ci-devant nobleman, General Lapoype … I demand that both be summoned before the bar.’ On orders from the Committee of Public Safety Napoleon was arrested and confined to his house. He spent a few days of intense anxiety; fortunately Saliceti, working behind the scenes, was able to explain that no offence had been meant and got Granet to drop the matter.

Napoleon’s second misfortune arose from political changes in the month of Thermidor – July, 1794. At Toulon he had become friendly with one of the Government commissioners, Augustin Robespierre, younger brother of Maximilien, but quite different in character: Augustin was affable, nicknamed ‘Bonbon’ and travelled around with his pretty mistress. Augustin Robespierre informed Maximilien that Napoleon was an officer of ‘transcendent merit’ and in the summer of 1794, when Napoleon was attached to the Army of the Alps, sent him on a secret mission to Genoa, to report on Genoese fortifications and on the strength of their army. This job Napoleon carried out with his usual thoroughness.

Meanwhile the Terror had reached a climax. Sitting on Paris’s dreaded Committee of General Security, the painter Louis David had said, ‘Let us grind plenty of red,’ and his wish was granted in full. One thousand three hundred people went to the guillotine in two months, one-third of them without even the semblance of a trial; ‘heads fell like slates from the roofs.’ At last in the month of Thermidor a group of Conventionnels, partly sickened by the carnage, partly in self-defence, accused Maximilien Robespierre of conspiring against the Revolution, whereupon Augustin leapt to his feet: ‘I have shared his virtues, and I intend to share his fate.’ Next day both Robespierres were guillotined.

Everyone close to either of the brothers was now suspect, among them Saliceti, a former fellow-commissioner of Augustin Robespierre and the protector of Buonaparte, himself a friend of Augustin Robespierre. From motives that are unknown, perhaps because he was genuinely doubtful about Napoleon’s ‘purity’, Saliceti, with the two other commissioners for the Army of the Alps, signed a letter to the Committee of Public Safety on 6 August declaring that Napoleon had gone on a ‘highly suspicious’ journey to Genoa. ‘What was this general doing in a foreign country?’ they asked – there were rumours of precious French gold being placed in a Genoese bank account – and then issued a warrant: ‘Considering that General Buonaparte has totally lost their confidence by his highly suspicious behaviour … they decree that Brigadier-General Buonaparte be provisionally relieved of his duties; he will be placed under arrest by his commanding general.’

On 10 August Napoleon found himself under house arrest at his billet, 1 Rue de Villefranche, Nice, guarded by ten gendarmes. His papers were seized, sealed and forwarded for examination to Saliceti. Almost any phrase at this time was enough to send a suspect to the guillotine, and Napoleon was in grave danger. But he remained calm, doubtless applying his battlefield philosophy: ‘If your number’s up, there’s no point in worrying.’ The letter he wrote under arrest is in marked contrast to one written by Lucien, who was imprisoned not long afterwards. ‘I abandoned my belongings,’ Napoleon wrote to Saliceti, ‘I lost everything for the sake of the Republic. Since then, I have served at Toulon with some distinction … Since Robespierre’s conspiracy was discovered, my conduct has been that of a man accustomed to judge according to principles [not persons]. No one can deny me the title of patriot.’ Lucien’s letter was in quite a different vein: ‘Save me from death! Save a citizen, a father, a husband, an unfortunate son, and one who is not guilty! In the silence of night, may my pale shadow wander around you and melt you to pity!’

Saliceti and his colleagues examined Napoleon’s papers and found them in order, including his expenditure in Genoa. But Napoleon was still the friend of Augustin Robespierre, a declared enemy of the State; he bore an Italian name when France was at war with much of Italy. The commissioners turned their eyes to Paris. And there, doubtless to their surprise, they found that the Thermidoreans were not demanding further blood sacrifice; for the moment no further victims were required. On 20 August the commissioners wrote that ‘having found nothing to justify their suspicions … they decreed that citizen Buonaparte be provisionally released.’ And so, after a fortnight’s arrest, citizen Buonaparte, doubtless with intense relief, stepped out into the Mediterranean sunshine. Shortly afterwards his rank was restored.

After five months preparing an expedition against Corsica, which the English navy foiled, Napoleon, at the end of April 1795, received a letter from the War Office appointing him to command the artillery of the Army of the West, then engaged in suppressing rebellion in staunchly Catholic and traditionally royalist Brittany. Napoleon regarded this letter as yet another misfortune. He had had his fill of civil war; he wanted to shoot down no more Frenchmen amid heather and granite calvaries, and anyway he now considered himself, with reason, an expert on the Alpine frontier. He hurried to Paris to get the appointment rescinded.

Aubry, the War Minister, was busy purging the army of ‘political undesirables’. Augustin Robespierre had described Napoleon as an officer of ‘transcendent merit’; that was sufficient to make him suspect to a Thermidorean like Aubry. So when Napoleon applied for a different job, Aubry coolly struck his name off the list of artillery officers – the élite of the Army – and transferred him to the infantry in the Army of the West – a form of down-grading, almost an insult, which Aubry had found effective in provoking the resignation of many ‘undesirable’ officers.

Napoleon was shocked and pained but did not resign. He asked for two months’ sick leave – he was indeed sick at heart, if not in body – which was granted, and went to see Aubry, himself an old artillery man who had never risen above the rank of captain. Napoleon asked for a gunner’s job in the Army of the Alps; Aubry said he was too young. ‘Citizen representative,’ replied Napoleon, ‘the battlefield ages men quickly, and that is where I come from.’ But Aubry was unmoved. Who after all was this man Buonaparte? Just another general, with 138 generals above him on the Army List.

Napoleon thought of pulling strings. Stanislas Fréron, the loose-living journalist turned politician who had closed the Marseille gambling-houses, was now a power in the land. Napoleon knew him a little and was aware that he had fallen in love with Pauline. One day, a petition in his pocket, Napoleon went to Fréron’s fine house in Rue de Chabannais, but when he stood on the doorstep he could not bring himself to beg in person from the butcher of Toulon. He sent a friend instead, and Fréron did nothing.

Napoleon found Paris alarmingly expensive. A bushel of flour which in 1790 had cost two livres now cost 225, a decent hat, formerly fourteen livres, now cost 500. His annual pay of 15,000 livres, which he received in paper money, mostly went in supporting his mother and sisters, and in paying Louis’s fees at an expensive school in Châlons. So Napoleon sold his carriage and moved to a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, in one of Paris’s narrowest and most despised streets, Rue de la Huchette. He could not afford to replace his threadbare uniform and had to give up wearing gloves as a ‘useless expense’.

Napoleon felt thwarted and miserable. In May he had defined happiness to a friend as the greatest possible development of one’s abilities; and now Paris seemed bent on the greatest possible impeding of Brigadier Buonaparte’s abilities. ‘I have served in Toulon with some distinction …’ He considered he had been treated ‘unjustly’ and began to bore his friends with tales of his grievances. He went for dismal walks with Junot in the Jardin des Plantes. Junot wanted to marry Pauline, but he was only a lieutenant, attached to a politically undesirable brigadier on sick leave. ‘You have nothing,’ Napoleon told him. ‘She has nothing. What does that total? Nothing. Your children will be born to wretchedness. Best to wait.’

To cheer him up, Bourrienne took Napoleon to see Baptiste Cadet, a fine comedy actor, in the hit of Paris, Le Sourd. To win a bet, the hero must contrive to get a good dinner and a night’s lodging in an Avignon inn without paying a penny; he decides to pretend to be deaf and is thus able to interpret angry words as compliments, rebuffs as invitations. Finally he wins his bet and also gets the girl, who is called Josephine. Napoleon usually enjoyed the theatre but on this occasion, while everyone in the house roared with laughter, he sat in icy silence. Not only was he personally frustrated, he felt depressed by the cynicism and apathy of France’s new rulers. To Joseph he wrote that he no longer felt any taste for living. ‘If this continues, I shall end by not stepping aside when a carriage rushes past.’

If Napoleon did not step under a carriage, perhaps it was because of his hope in a brooding cosmic justice and a line from a more amusing play, for on 17 August, after three and a half months’ inactivity, he was able to write less dejectedly to a friend: ‘If you meet evil and nasty men, remember the good if farcical maxim of Scapin: “Let us be thankful for all the crimes they don’t commit.”’

Aubry was replaced as War Minister by Pontécoulant, a former nobleman aged thirty-one, as open-minded as Aubry had been prejudiced. Napoleon went to see him, asked for a job on the Italian frontier and outlined a plan of attack. ‘General,’ said Pontécoulant, ‘your ideas are brilliant and bold, but they need to be examined calmly. Take time and draw me up a report.’ ‘Half an hour is enough,’ Napoleon replied and asked for a pen and two sheets of paper. There and then he drew up a plan for invading Piedmont. The Committee of Public Safety thought well of the plan, but instead of a command in the field, they gave Napoleon a desk job in Paris, in their important Planning Centre.

Napoleon felt more frustrated than ever. Desk work was even further from guns than drilling infantry in a Breton garrison town. He was a gunner, an expert in ballistics and trajectories and the mathematics of warfare, and it was as a gunner he wanted to serve. Since France would not employ his talents, why should he not be seconded to the artillery of some other country? First he thought of Russia. He wrote to General Tamara, but although the Russians were interested they would not give Napoleon the rank of Major on which he insisted.

Napoleon next thought of Turkey, probably because in Ajaccio he had met and become friendly with Admiral Truguet, who had for a time been seconded to Constantinople to reorganize the Turkish fleet. The Turkish artillery was notoriously weak and ill-organized, and there was talk in Paris of sending a small mission to modernize it. Napoleon took up the idea, pressed for it, and applied to be made head of the mission. He got the job. In early September his passport was made out: Napoleon was all set to leave France and go to Turkey.

Once again politics intervened to upset Napoleon’s carefully laid plans. The Convention, having renounced the guillotine, found themselves unable to govern. They decided France needed a two-chamber Government, and to prevent the excesses committed by the old Committee of Public Safety, an executive separate from the legislature, this executive to be composed of five Directors. They drafted a new Constitution on these lines and promised to dissolve themselves, with the proviso that two-thirds of the members of the new legislative chamber, the Council of Five Hundred, should be chosen from among their number. In this way the principles of the Revolution would be given continuity and a new effectiveness.

Napoleon warmly welcomed the new Constitution; and so did most Frenchmen, who approved it overwhelmingly by plebiscite; though they were less enthusiastic about the ‘two-thirds’ clause. But many Parisians bitterly opposed the Constitution: extremists opposed in principle to any strong middle-of-the-road government, and royalists, who, sick of the Revolution, wished to bring ‘Louis XVIII’ to the throne, if necessary with English help. Paris swarmed with royalists, notably certain ‘Incoyables’, men who affected a lisp and dandified airs thought to be English. Angrily Napoleon used to watch them in the Boulevard Italien eating ices: once he rose exasperated, pushed back his chair so that it fell on the legs of a noisy ‘Incoyable’, and stalked off.

In September the royalists were cock-a-hoop when Louis XVIII’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, was landed from an English warship in the Ile d’Yeu, off Vendée, and was expected at any moment to join the 80,000 Chouans – guerrillas who wore white cockades – in armed rebellion across Brittany and Vendée. In anti-republican grey suits with black collars Parisians marched through the streets shouting ‘Down with the two-thirds’. Tempers flared and it soon became clear that Paris was fatally divided between Constitutionalists on the one hand, royalists and extremists on the other.

The leader of the Constitutionalists was Paul Barras. The fourth son of a Vicomte from near Toulon, after serving as a second lieutenant in India, he entered politics as a moderate and friend of Mirabeau, voted for Louis XVI’s death and during Thermidor led the march on the Hôtel de Ville which overthrew Robespierre. In a Convention composed of second-rate men Barras stood out as the one best qualified to contain the increasingly angry Paris crowds.

The night of 12 Vendémiaire – 4 October – was windy and wet. Napoleon’s departure for Turkey had been delayed by the crisis, and he walked through the rain to see a sentimental play, Le Bon Fils. Outside the theatre he saw National Guardsmen beating their drums, calling the people to arms against the Convention.

From the theatre Napoleon walked to the public gallery of the Convention. Frightened members had just appointed Barras commander-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, and sat listening to a vigorous speech from Stanislas Fréron. Fréron knew that Barras was not much of a soldier – in seven years he had never risen above second lieutenant – and would need an expert to help him. After his speech Fréron had a few words with Napoleon and, perhaps recalling his energy at Toulon, asked him to come to Barras’s headquarters at the Carrousel.

Napoleon went. It was around midnight, still windy and wet. Barras was in uniform, a tall handsome man of thirty-nine, with greenish eyes and a sensual, somewhat uncertain mouth. Fréron presented Napoleon and Barras greeted him in his usual brusque manner. ‘Will you serve under me? You have three minutes to decide.’

To Napoleon the issue presented itself in clear terms. Barras stood for the Convention, the Convention for the Constitution, and the Constitution for the principles of the Revolution. On the other side were royalists and anarchists, men who defied a Constitution freely voted for by an overwhelming majority of Frenchmen. He disliked civil strife and had tried to avoid it. But this was different: this was a clear case of saving the endangered Revolution. ‘Yes,’ he answered Barras.

‘Where are the guns?’ was Napoleon’s first question. At the plain of Sablons, he was told, six miles away, but it would be too late to get them – the rebels had already sent a column. Napoleon called Murat, a dashing young cavalry officer of proved loyalty – he had even tried to change his name to Marat. ‘Take 200 horsemen, gallop to the plain of Sablons, bring back the forty guns you find there, and ammunition. Use your sabres if you have to, but get the guns.’

At six in the morning Napoleon had his forty guns: Murat reached them minutes before the rebels. His task was to defend the seat of government – the Tuileries – from attacks expected to come from the north. The rebels numbered 30,000, the Government 5,000 regular troops, plus 3,000 militiamen. So everything depended on the guns. Napoleon took eight of them and disposed them carefully north of the Tuileries. Two 8-pounders he positioned at the end of Rue Neuve Saint-Roch, pointing up the street towards the church of Saint-Roch. Loading these guns with case-shot, Napoleon took up his post beside them. He was on foot, Barras on horseback.

All morning Napoleon waited for an attack which did not come. Light rain began to fall. Then came the sound of drums, shouts and musket-fire. At three in the afternoon the rebels attacked. Muskets blazing, bayonets fixed, they broke through the barricades erected by Barras to protect the Rue Saint-Honoré. Government troops fired on them. To Napoleon, watching, it doubtless seemed Ajaccio all over again. For an hour the battle swayed, then the rebels broke through by force of numbers. They swept up the Rue Saint-Honoré into the Rue Neuve Saint-Roch, and past the church. Barras gave the order to fire.

Napoleon’s two 8-pounders blazed. Accurately aimed, their case-shot blasted into the rebels, round after round, some of it cutting into the stone of the church façade. Men fell, but more came on. Napoleon kept on firing. The rebels fell back and tried other routes, only to be met by case-shot from Napoleon’s six other guns. The whole action lasted only a few minutes. Then the rebels began to retreat towards the Place Vendôme and Palais Royal, pursued by 1,000 Government troops. Half an hour later, with losses of 200 killed or wounded on each side, the rebellion was over.

‘The Republic has been saved,’ Barras reported proudly to the Convention, and Fréron made a speech. ‘Citizen Representatives, don’t forget that General Buonaparte … who had only the morning of the thirteenth to make his clever and highly successful arrangements, had been posted from the artillery to the infantry. Founders of the Republic, will you delay any longer to right the wrongs to which, in your name, many of its defenders have been subjected?’ The representatives cheered Napoleon and some tried to edge him up on to the platform. But Napoleon was still a believer in principles, not persons, and according to a young lawyer named Lavalette, who was in the hall: ‘He pushed them aside with a look of annoyance and diffidence which pleased me.’

Why was Napoleon, who had been a failure in Corsica, a success now? The answer lies in his technical skill. In the alleys of Ajaccio Napoleon had been just another officer; in Paris he was a rare specialist at a time when a majority of artillery officers had emigrated: a man who could make every precious shot count. In Corsica he had been just another ardent patriot; in Paris – as at Toulon – he had filled a specific need. He could dominate a situation through his knowledge of guns.

Napoleon’s energy and skill on 13 Vendémiaire had a more distant effect. The Comte d’Artois, instead of stepping ashore to lead the Chouans, decided to sit tight in the Ile d’Yeu – a piece of cowardice which Napoleon found inexcusable and which confirmed his disgust with the Bourbons.

On 26 October 1795 the Convention held its last sitting and next day the Directory began. Barras had been chosen one of the Directors. In donning his Henri IV dress, with three-plumed hat, silk stockings and gold-fringed sash, he had to lay down his Army command. He and his fellow Directors decided that Napoleon, the expert with guns, should succeed him. And so, at twenty-six, Napoleon put on the gold-laced uniform of a full general and assumed command of the Army of the Interior.

From his sordid Left Bank hotel Napoleon moved into a decent house in Rue des Capucines, which went with his new job. Forgotten were his disappointments and plans for Turkey. ‘Now our family shall lack nothing,’ he wrote home. To Letizia he sent 50,000 louis in coin and paper. For Joseph he got an appointment as consul in Italy, for Lucien a post as commissioner with the Army of the North. Louis became a lieutenant in Napoleon’s old regiment and a month later his aide-de-camp. Jerome was sent to a good boarding-school. ‘You know,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph with pardonable exaggeration, ‘I live only for the pleasure I can give my family.’

In fact he had two equally great pleasures. First, he was beginning to fulfil his abilities – his own definition of happiness. Secondly, the course of the Revolution had been turned from its bloody aberration: indeed, one of the Convention’s last acts had been to abolish the death penalty and to change the name of the square where so many had been guillotined from Place de la Révolution to Place de la Concorde. Napoleon summed up his new hopes in a letter to Joseph: ‘People are very satisfied with the new Constitution, which promises happiness, tranquillity and a long future for France … No doubt there will gradually be a complete recovery; only a few years are needed for that.’