Читать книгу The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Vol. 1-4) - William Milligan Sloane - Страница 21

Table of Contents

The Waning of Corsican Patriotism—Rise of French Radicalism—Alliance with Salicetti—Another Scheme for Leadership—Failure to Seize the Citadel of Ajaccio—Second Plan—Paoli's Attitude Toward the Convention—Buonaparte Finally Discredited in Corsica—Paoli Turns to England—Plans of the Buonaparte Family—Their Arrival in Toulon—Napoleon's Character—His Corsican Career—Lessons of His Failures—His Ability, Situation, and Experience.

1793.

Buonoparte was for an instant among the most zealous of Paoli's supporters, and, taking up his ever-ready pen, he wrote two impassioned papers whose respective tenors it is not easy to reconcile: one an appeal to the Convention in Paoli's behalf, the other a demand addressed to the municipality of Ajaccio that the people should renew their oath of allegiance to France. The explanation is somewhat recondite, perhaps, but not discreditable. Salicetti, as chairman of a committee of the convention on Corsican affairs, had conferred with Paoli on April thirteenth. The result was so satisfactory that on the sixteenth the latter was urged to attend a second meeting at Bastia in the interest of Corsican reconciliation and internal peace. Meantime Lucien's performance at Marseilles had fired the train which led to the Convention's action against Paoli, and on the seventeenth the order for his arrest reached Salicetti, who was of course charged with its execution. For this he was not prepared, nor was Buonaparte. The essential of Corsican annexation to France was order. The Corsican folk flocked to protect Paoli in Corte, and the local government declared for him. There was inchoate rebellion and within a few days the districts of Calvi and Bastia were squarely arrayed with Salicetti against Bonifacio and Ajaccio, which supported Paoli and Pozzo di Borgo. The Buonapartes were convinced that the decree of the Convention was precipitate, and pleaded for its recall. At the same time they saw no hope for peace in Corsica, except through incorporation with France. But compromise proved impossible. There was a truce when Paoli on April twenty-sixth wrote to the Convention regretting that he could not obey their summons on account of infirmities, and declaring his loyalty to France. In consequence the Convention withdrew its decree and sent a new commission of which Salicetti was not a member. This was in May, on the eve of the Girondin overthrow. The measures of reconciliation proved unavailing, because the Jacobins of Marseilles, learning that Paoli was Girondist in sentiment, stopped the commission, and forbade their proceeding to Corsica.

Meantime Captain Buonaparte's French regiment had already been some five months in active service. If his passion had been only for military glory, that was to be found nowhere so certainly as in its ranks, where he should have been. But his passion for political renown was clearly far stronger. Where could it be so easily gratified as in Corsica under the present conditions? The personality of the young adventurer had for a long time been curiously double: but while he had successfully retained the position of a French officer in France, his identity as a Corsican patriot had been nearly obliterated in Corsica by his constant quarrels and repeated failures. Having become a French radical, he had been forced into a certain antagonism to Paoli and had thereby jeopardized both his fortunes and his career as far as they were dependent on Corsican support. But with Paoli under the ban of the Convention, and suspected of connivance with English schemes, there might be a revulsion of feeling and a chance to make French influence paramount once more in the island under the leadership of the Buonapartes and their friends. For the moment Napoleon preserved the outward semblance of the Corsican patriot, but he seems to have been weary at heart of the thankless rôle and entirely ready to exchange it for another. Whatever may have been his plan or the principles of his conduct, it appears as if the decisive step now to be taken had no relation to either plan or principles, but that it was forced upon him by a chance development of events which he could not have foreseen, and which he was utterly unable to control.

It is unknown whether Salicetti or he made the first advances in coming to an understanding for mutual support, or when that understanding was reached, but it existed as early as January, 1793, a fact conclusively shown by a letter of the former dated early in that month. It was April fifth when Salicetti reached Corsica; the news of Paoli's denunciation by the Convention arrived, as has been said, on the seventeenth. Seeing how nicely adjusted the scales of local politics were, the deputy was eager to secure favor from Paris, and wrote on the sixteenth an account of how warmly his commission had been received. Next day the blow of Paoli's condemnation fell, and it became plain that compromise was no longer possible. When even the Buonapartes were supporting Paoli, the reconciliation of the island with France was clearly impracticable. Salicetti did not hesitate, but as between Paoli and Corsica with no career on the one side, and the possibilities of a great career under France on the other, quickly chose the latter. The same considerations weighed with Buonaparte; he followed his patron, and as a reward was appointed by the French commission inspector-general of artillery for Corsica.

Salicetti had granted what Paoli would not: Buonaparte was free to strike his blow for Corsican leadership. With swift and decisive measures the last scene in his Corsican adventures was arranged. Several great guns which had been saved from a war-ship wrecked in the harbor were lying on the shore unmounted. The inspector-general hypocritically declared that they were a temptation to insurgents and a menace to the public peace; they should be stored in the citadel. His plan was to seize the moment when the heavy pieces were passing the drawbridge, and at the head of his followers to take possession of the stronghold he had so long coveted, and so often failed to capture. If he could hold it for the Convention, a career in Corsica would be at last assured.

But again he was doomed to disappointment. The former garrison had been composed of French soldiers. On the failure of the Sardinian expedition most of these had been landed at Toulon, where they still were. The men in the citadel of Ajaccio were therefore in the main islanders, although some French infantry and the French gunners were still there; the new commander was a Paolist who refused to be hoodwinked, and would not act without an authorization from his general-in-chief. The value of the seizure depended on its promptness. In order to secure a sufficient number of faithful followers, Buonaparte started on foot for Bastia to consult the commission. Learning that he was already a suspect at Corte and in danger of arrest, he turned on his steps only to be confronted at Bocognano by a band of Peraldi's followers. Two shepherds from his own estate found a place of concealment for him in a house belonging to their friends, and he passed a day in hiding, escaping after nightfall to Ucciani, whence he returned to Ajaccio in safety.[33] Thwarted in one notion, Buonaparte then proposed to the followers he already had two alternatives: to erect a barricade behind which the guns could be mounted and trained on the citadel, or, easier still, to carry one of the pieces to some spot before the main entrance and then batter in the gate. Neither scheme was considered feasible, and it was determined to secure by bribes, if possible, the coöperation of a portion of the garrison. The attempt failed through the integrity of a single man, and is interesting only as having been Napoleon's first lesson in an art which was thenceforward an unfailing resource. Rumors of these proceedings soon reached the friends of Paoli, and Buonaparte was summoned to report immediately at Corte. Such was the intensity of popular bitterness against him in Ajaccio for his desertion of Paoli that after a series of narrow escapes from arrest he was compelled to flee in disguise and by water to Bastia, which he reached on May tenth, 1793. Thwarted in their efforts to seize Napoleon, the hostile party vented its rage on the rest of the family, hunting the mother and children from their town house, which was pillaged and burned, first to Milleli, then through jungle and over hilltops to the lonely tower of Capitello near the sea.

A desire for revenge on his Corsican persecutors would now give an additional stimulus to Buonaparte, and still another device to secure the passionately desired citadel of Ajaccio was proposed by him to the commissioners of the Convention, and adopted by them. The remnants of a Swiss regiment stationed near by were to be marched into the city, as if for embarkment; several French war vessels from the harbor of St. Florent, including one frigate, with troops, munitions, and artillery on board, were to appear unexpectedly before the city, land their men and guns, and then, with the help of the Switzers and such of the citizens as espoused the French cause, were to overawe the town and seize the citadel. Corsican affairs had now reached a crisis, for this was a virtual declaration of war. Paoli so understood it, and measures of mutual defiance were at once taken by both sides. The French commissioners formally deposed the officials who sympathized with Paoli; they, in turn, took steps to increase the garrison of Ajaccio, and to strengthen the popular sentiment in their favor.

On receipt of the news that he had been summoned to Paris and that hostile commissioners had been sent to take his place, Paoli had immediately forwarded, by the hands of two friendly representatives, the temperate letter in which he had declared his loyalty to France. In it he had offered to resign and leave Corsica. His messengers were seized and temporarily detained, but in the end they reached Paris, and were kindly received. On May twenty-ninth they appeared on the floor of the Convention, and won their cause. On June fifth the former decree was revoked, and two days later a new and friendly commission of two members started for Corsica. But at Marseilles they fell into the hands of the Jacobin mob, and were arrested. Ignorant of these favorable events, and the untoward circumstances by which their effect was thwarted, the disheartened statesman had written and forwarded on May fourteenth a second letter, of the same tenor as the first. This measure likewise had failed of effect, for the messenger had been stopped at Bastia, now the focus of Salicetti's influence, and the letter had never reached its destination.

It was probably in this interval that Paoli finally adopted, as a last desperate resort, the hitherto hazy idea of putting the island under English protection, in order to maintain himself in the mission to which he felt that Providence had called him. The actual departure of Napoleon's expedition from St. Florent gave the final impulse. That event so inflamed the passions of the conservative party in Ajaccio that the Buonaparte family could no longer think of returning within a reasonable time to their home. Some desperate resolution must be taken, though it should involve leaving their small estates to be ravaged, their slender resources to be destroyed, and abandoning their partizans to proscription and imprisonment. They finally found a temporary asylum with a relative in Calvi. The attacking flotilla had been detained nearly a week by a storm, and reached Ajaccio on May twenty-ninth, in the very height of these turmoils. It was too late for any possibility of success. The few French troops on shore were cowed, and dared not show themselves when a party landed from the ships. On the contrary, Napoleon and his volunteers were received with a fire of musketry, and, after spending two anxious days in an outlying tower which they had seized and held, were glad to reëmbark and sail away. Their leader, after still another narrow escape from seizure, rejoined his family at Calvi. The Jacobin commission held a meeting, and determined to send Salicetti to justify their course at Paris. He carried with him a wordy paper written by Buonaparte in his worst style and spelling, setting forth the military and political situation in Corsica, and containing a bitter tirade against Paoli, which remains to lend some color to the charge that the writer had been, since his leader's return from exile, a spy and an informer, influenced by no high principle of patriotism, but only by a base ambition to supplant the aged president, and then to adopt whichever plan would best further his own interest: ready either to establish a virtual autonomy in his fatherland, or to deliver it entirely into the hands of France.[34]

In this painful document Buonaparte sets forth in fiery phrase the early enthusiasm of republicans for the return of Paoli, and their disillusionment when he surrounded himself with venal men like Pozzo di Borgo, with relatives like his nephew Leonetti, with his vile creatures in general. The misfortunes of the Sardinian expedition, the disgraceful disorders of the island, the failure of the commissioners to secure Ajaccio, are all alike attributed to Paoli. "Can perfidy like this invade the human heart? … What fatal ambition overmasters a graybeard of sixty-eight? … On his face are goodness and gentleness, in his heart hate and vengeance; he has an oily sensibility in his eyes, and gall in his soul, but neither character nor strength." These were the sentiments proper to a radical of the times, and they found acceptance among the leaders of that class in Paris. More moderate men did what they could to avert the impending breach, but in vain. Corsica was far, communication slow, and the misunderstanding which occurred was consequently unavoidable. It was not until July first that Paoli received news of the pacificatory decrees passed by the Convention more than a month before, and then it was too late; groping in the dark, and unable to get news, he had formed his judgment from what was going on in Corsica, and had therefore committed himself to a change of policy. To him, as to most thinking men, the entire structure of France, social, financial, and political, seemed rotten. Civil war had broken out in Vendée; in Brittany the wildest excesses passed unpunished; the great cities of Marseilles, Toulon, and Lyons were in a state of anarchy; the revolutionary tribunal had been established in Paris; the Committee of Public Safety had usurped the supreme power; the France to which he had intrusted the fortunes of Corsica was no more. Already an agent was in communication with the English diplomats in Italy. On July tenth Salicetti arrived in Paris; on the seventeenth Paoli was declared a traitor and an outlaw, and his friends were indicted for trial. But the English fleet was already in the Mediterranean, and although the British protectorate over Corsica was not established until the following year, in the interval the French and their few remaining sympathizers on the island were able at best to hold only the three towns of Bastia, St. Florent, and Calvi.

After the last fiasco before the citadel of Ajaccio, the situation of the Buonapartes was momentarily desperate. Lucien says in his memoirs that shortly before his brother had spoken longingly of India, of the English empire as destined to spread with every year, and of the career which its expansion opened to good officers of artillery, who were scarce among the British—scarce enough everywhere, he thought. "If I ever choose that career," said he, "I hope you will hear of me. In a few years I shall return thence a rich nabob, and bring fine dowries for our three sisters." But the scheme was deferred and then abandoned. Salicetti had arranged for his own return to Paris, where he would be safe. Napoleon felt that flight was the only resort for him and his. Accordingly, on June eleventh, three days earlier than his patron, he and Joseph, accompanied by Fesch, embarked with their mother and the rest of the family to join Lucien, who had remained at Toulon, where they arrived on the thirteenth. The Jacobins of that city had received Lucien, as a sympathetic Corsican, with honor. Doubtless his family, homeless and destitute for their devotion to the republic, would find encouragement and help until some favorable turn in affairs should restore their country to France, and reinstate them not only in their old possessions, but in such new dignities as would fitly reward their long and painful devotion. Such, at least, appears to have been Napoleon's general idea. He was provided with a legal certificate that his family was one of importance and the richest in the department. The Convention had promised compensation to those who had suffered losses.

As had been hoped, on their arrival the Buonapartes were treated with every mark of distinction, and ample provision was made for their comfort. By act of the Convention, women and old men in such circumstances received seventy-five livres a month, infants forty-five livres. Lads received simply a present of twenty-five livres. With the preliminary payment of one hundred and fifty livres, which they promptly received, the Buonapartes were better off than they had been at home. Lucien had appropriated Napoleon's certificate of birth in order to appear older than he was, and, having now developed into a fluent demagogue, was soon earning a small salary in the commissary department of the army. Fesch also found a comfortable berth in the same department. Joseph calmly displayed Napoleon's commission in the National Guard as his own, and received a higher place with a better salary. The sovereignty of the Convention was everywhere acknowledged, their revolutionary courts were established far and wide, and their legations, clothed with dictatorial power, were acknowledged in every camp of the land as supreme, superior even to the commanders-in-chief. It was not exactly a time for further military irregularities, and Napoleon, armed with a certificate from Salicetti that his presence in Corsica for the past six months had been necessary, betook himself to the army headquarters at Nice, where a detachment of his regiment was now stationed. When he arrived, no awkward questions were asked by the authorities. The town had but recently been captured, men were needed to hold it, and the Corsican refugee was promptly appointed captain of the shore battery. To casual observers he appeared perfectly content in this subordinate position. He still cherished the hope, it seems, that he might find some opportunity to lead a successful expedition against the little citadel of Ajaccio. Such a scheme, at all events, occupied him intermittently for nearly two years, or until it was banished forever by visions of a European control far transcending the limits of his island home.

Not that the outcast Buonaparte was any longer exclusively a Corsican. It is impossible to conceive of a lot more pitiful or a fate more obdurate than his so far had been. There was little hereditary morality in his nature, and none had been inculcated by training; he had nothing of what is called vital piety, nor even sincere superstition. A butt and an outcast at a French school under the old régime, he had imbibed a bitter hatred for the land indelibly associated with such haughty privileges for the rich and such contemptuous disdain for the poor. He had not even the consolation of having received an education. His nature revolted at the religious formalism of priestcraft; his mind turned in disgust from the scholastic husks of its superficial knowledge. What he had learned came from inborn capacity, from desultory reading, and from the untutored imaginings of his garden at Brienne, his cave at Ajaccio, or his barrack chambers. What more plausible than that he should first turn to the land of his birth with some hope of happiness, usefulness, or even glory! What more mortifying than the revelation that in manhood he was too French for Corsica, as in boyhood he had been too Corsican for France!

The story of his sojourns and adventures in Corsica has no fascination; it is neither heroic nor satanic, but belongs to the dull and mediocre realism which makes up so much of commonplace life. It is difficult to find even a thread of continuity in it: there may be one as to purpose; there is none as to either conduct or theory. There is the passionate admiration of a southern nature for a hero as represented by the ideal Paoli. There is the equally southern quality of quick but transient hatred. The love of dramatic effect is shown at every turn, in the perfervid style of his writings, in the mock dignity of an edict issued from the grotto at Milleli, in the empty honors of a lieutenant-colonel without a real command, in the paltry style of an artillery inspector with no artillery but a few dismantled guns.

But the most prominent characteristic of the young man was his shiftiness, in both the good and bad senses of the word. He would perish with mortification rather than fail in devising some expedient to meet every emergency; he felt no hesitation in changing his point of view as experience destroyed an ideal or an unforeseen chance was to be seized and improved. Moreover, repeated failure did not dishearten him. Detesting garrison life, he neglected its duties, and endured punishment, but he secured regular promotion; defeated again and again before the citadel of Ajaccio, each time he returned undismayed to make a fresh trial under new auspices or in a new way.

He was no spendthrift, but he had no scruples about money. He was proud in the headship of his family, and reckless as to how he should support them, or should secure their promotion. Solitary in his boyhood, he had become in his youth a companion and leader; but his true friendships were not with his social equals, whom he despised, but with the lowly, whom he understood. Finally, here was a citizen of the world, a man without a country; his birthright was gone, for Corsica repelled him; France he hated, for she had never adopted him. He was almost without a profession, for he had neglected that of a soldier, and had failed both as an author and as a politician. He was apparently, too, without a single guiding principle; the world had been a harsh stepmother, at whose knee he had neither learned the truth nor experienced kindness. He appears consistent in nothing but in making the best of events as they occurred. So far he was a man neither much better nor much worse than the world into which he was born. He was quite as unscrupulous as those about him, but he was far greater than they in perspicacity, adroitness, adaptability, and persistence. During the period before his expulsion from Corsica these qualities of leadership were scarcely recognizable, but they existed. As yet, to all outward appearance, the little captain of artillery was the same slim, ill-proportioned, and rather insignificant youth; but at twenty-three he had had the experience of a much greater age. Conscious of his powers, he had dreamed many day-dreams, and had acquired a habit of boastful conversation in the family circle; but, fully cognizant of the dangers incident to his place, and the unsettled conditions about him, he was cautious and reserved in the outside world.