Читать книгу The Life and Legacy of Napoleon Bonaparte: All 4 Volumes - William Milligan Sloane - Страница 27

Table of Contents

Punishment of the Terrorists—Dangers of the Thermidorians—Successes of Republican Arms—Some Republican Generals—Military Prodigies—The Treaty of Basel—Vendean Disorders Repressed—A "White Terror"—Royalist Activity—Friction Under the New Constitution—Arrival of Buonaparte in Paris—Paris Society—Its Power—The People Angry—Resurgence of Jacobinism—Buonaparte's Dejection—His Relations with Mme. Permon—His Magnanimity.

1795.

From time to time after the events of Thermidor the more active agents of the Terror were sentenced to transportation, and the less guilty were imprisoned. On May seventh, 1795, three days before Buonaparte's arrival in Paris, Fouquier-Tinville, and fifteen other wretches who had been but tools, the executioners of the revolutionary tribunal, were put to death. The National Guard had been reorganized, and Pichegru was recalled from the north to take command of the united forces in Paris under a committee of the Convention with Barras at its head.

This was intended to overawe those citizens of Paris who were hostile to the Jacobins. They saw the trap set for them, and were angry. During the years of internal disorder and foreign warfare just passed the economic conditions of the land had grown worse and worse, until, in the winter of 1794–95, the laboring classes of Paris were again on the verge of starvation. As usual, they attributed their sufferings to the government, and there were bread riots. Twice in the spring of 1795—on April first and May twentieth—the unemployed and hungry rose to overthrow the Convention, but they were easily put down by the soldiers on both occasions. The whole populace, as represented by the sections or wards of Paris, resented this use of armed force, and grew uneasy. The Thermidorians further angered it by introducing a new metropolitan administration, which greatly diminished the powers and influence of the sections, without, however, destroying their organization. The people of the capital, therefore, were ready for mischief. The storming of the Tuileries on August tenth, 1792, had been the work of the Paris mob. Why could they not in turn, another mob, reactionary and to a degree even royalist, overthrow the tyranny of the Jacobins as they themselves had overthrown the double-faced administration of the King?

A crisis might easily have been precipitated before Buonaparte's arrival in Paris, but it was delayed by events outside the city. The year 1794 had been a brilliant season for the republican arms and for republican diplomacy. We have seen how the Piedmontese were forced beyond the maritime Alps; the languid and worthless troops of Spain were expelled from the Pyrenean strongholds and forced southward; in some places, beyond the Ebro. Pichegru, with the Army of the North, had driven the invaders from French soil and had conquered the Austrian Netherlands. Jourdan, with the Army of the Sambre and Meuse, had defeated the Austrians at Fleurus in a battle decided by the bravery of Marceau, thus confirming the conquest. Other generals were likewise rising to eminence. Hoche had in 1793 beaten the Austrians under Wurmser at Weissenburg, and driven them from Alsace. He had now further heightened his fame by his successes against the insurgents of the west. Saint-Cyr, Bernadotte, and Kléber, with many others of Buonaparte's contemporaries, had also risen to distinction in minor engagements.

Of peasant birth, Pichegru was nevertheless appointed by ecclesiastical influence as a scholar at Brienne. In the dearth of generals he was selected for promotion by Saint-Just as was Hoche at the time when Carnot discovered Jourdan. Having assisted Hoche in the conquest of Alsace when a division general and only thirty-two years old, he began the next year, in 1794, to deploy his extraordinary powers, and with Moreau as second in command he swept the English and Austrians out of the Netherlands. Both these generals were sensitive and jealous men; after brilliant careers under the republic they turned royalists and came to unhappy ends. Moreau was two years the junior. He was the son of a Breton lawyer and rose to notice both as a local politician, and as a volunteer captain in the Breton struggles for independence with which he had no sympathy. As a great soldier he ranks with Hoche after Napoleon in the revolutionary time. Hoche was younger still, having been born in 1768. In 1784 he enlisted as a common soldier and rose from the ranks by sheer ability. He died at the age of thirty, but as a politician and strategist he was already famous. Kléber was an Alsatian who had been educated in the military school at Munich and was already forty-one years old. Having enlisted under the Revolution as a volunteer, he so distinguished himself on the Rhine that he was swiftly promoted; but, thwarted in his ambition to have an independent command, he lost his ardor and did not again distinguish himself until he secured service under Napoleon in Egypt. There he exhibited such capacity that he was regarded as one of Bonaparte's rivals. He was assassinated by an Oriental in Cairo. Bernadotte was four years the senior of Bonaparte, the son of a lawyer in Paris. He too enlisted in the ranks, as a royal marine, and rose by his own merits. He was a rude radical whose military ability was paralleled by his skill in diplomacy. His swift promotion was obtained in the Rhenish campaigns. Gouvion Saint-Cyr was also born in 1764 at Toul. He was a marquis but an ardent reformer, and a born soldier. He began as a volunteer captain on the staff of Custine, and rising like the others mentioned became an excellent general, though his chances for distinction were few. Jourdan was likewise a nobleman, born at Limoges to the rank of count in 1762. His long career was solid rather than brilliant, though he gained great distinction in the northern campaigns and ended as a marshal, the military adviser of Joseph Bonaparte in Naples and Madrid.

The record of military energy put forth by the liberated nation under Jacobin rule stands, as Fox declared in the House of Commons, absolutely unique. Twenty-seven victories, eight in pitched battle; one hundred and twenty fights; ninety thousand prisoners; one hundred and sixteen towns and important places captured; two hundred and thirty forts or redoubts taken; three thousand eight hundred pieces of ordnance, seventy thousand muskets, one thousand tons of powder, and ninety standards fallen into French hands—such is the incredible tale. Moreover, the army had been purged with as little mercy as a mercantile corporation shows to incompetent employees. It is often claimed that the armies of republican France and of Napoleon were, after all, the armies of the Bourbons. Not so. The conscription law, though very imperfect in itself, was supplemented by the general enthusiasm; a nation was now in the ranks instead of hirelings; the reorganization had remodeled the whole structure, and between January first, 1792, and January twentieth, 1795, one hundred and ten division commanders, two hundred and sixty-three generals of brigade, and one hundred and thirty-eight adjutant-generals either resigned, were suspended from duty, or dismissed from the service. The republic had new leaders and new men in its armies.

The nation had apparently determined that the natural boundary of France and of its own revolutionary system was the Rhine. Nice and Savoy would round out their territory to the south. This much the new government, it was understood, would conquer, administer, and keep; the Revolution in other lands, impelled but not guided by French influence, must manage its own affairs. This was, of course, an entirely new diplomatic situation. Under its pressure Holland, by the aid of Pichegru's army, became the Batavian Republic, and ceded Dutch Flanders to France; while Prussia abandoned the coalition, and in the treaty of Basel, signed on April fifth, 1795, agreed to the neutrality of all north Germany. In return for the possessions of the ecclesiastical princes in central Germany, which were eventually to be secularized, she yielded to France undisputed possession of the left bank of the Rhine. Spain, Portugal, and the little states both of south Germany and of Italy were all alike weary of the contest, the more so as they were honeycombed with liberal ideas. They were already preparing to desert England and Austria, the great powers which still stood firm. With the exception of Portugal, they acceded within a few weeks to the terms made at Basel. Rome, as the instigator of the unyielding ecclesiastics of Vendée, was, of course, on the side of Great Britain and the Empire.

At home the military success of the republic was for a little while equally marked. Before the close of 1794 the Breton peasants who, under the name of Chouans, had become lawless highwaymen were entirely crushed; and the English expedition sent to Quiberon in the following year to revive the disorders was a complete, almost ridiculous failure. The insurrection of Vendée had dragged stubbornly on, but it was stamped out in June, 1795, by the execution of over seven hundred of the emigrants who had returned on English vessels to fan the royalist blaze which was kindling again.

In the collection of Mr. Edmond Taigny.

Marie-Josephine-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie,

Called Josephine, Empress of the French.

From the design by Jean-Baptiste Isabey

(pencil drawing retouched in water-color) made in 1798.

The royalists, having created the panic of five years previous, were not to be outdone even by the Terror. Charette, the Vendean leader, retaliated by a holocaust of two thousand republican prisoners whom he had taken. After the events of Thermidor the Convention had thrown open the prison doors, put an end to bloodshed, and proclaimed an amnesty. The evident power of the Parisian burghers, the form given by the Girondists to the new constitution, the longing of all for peace and for a return of comfort and prosperity, still further emboldened the royalists, and enabled them to produce a wide-spread revulsion of feeling. They rose in many parts of the south, instituting what is known from the colors they wore as the "White Terror," and pitilessly murdering, in the desperation of timid revenge, their unsuspecting and unready neighbors of republican opinions. The scenes enacted were more terrible, the human butchery was more bloody, than any known during the darkest days of the revolutionary movement in Paris. This might well be considered the preliminary trial to the Great White Terror of 1815, in which the frenzy and fanaticism of royalists and Roman Catholics surpassed the most frantic efforts of radicals in lawless bloodshed. Imperialists, free-thinkers, and Protestants were the victims.

The Jacobins, therefore, in view of so dangerous a situation, and not without some reason, had determined that they themselves should administer the new constitution. They were in the most desperate straits because the Paris populace now held them directly responsible for the existing scarcity of food, a scarcity amounting to famine. From time to time for months the mob invaded the hall of the Convention, craving bread with angry, hungry clamor. The members mingled with the disorderly throng on the floor and temporarily soothed them by empty promises. But each inroad of disorder was worse than the preceding until the Mountain was not only without support from the rabble, but an object of loathing and contempt to them and their half-starved leaders. Hence their only chance for power was in some new rearrangement under which they would not be so prominent in affairs. The royalists at the same time saw in the provisions of the new charter a means to accomplish their own ends; and relying upon the attitude of the capital, in which mob and burghers alike were angry, determined simultaneously to strike a blow for mastery, and to supplant the Jacobins. Evidence of their activity appeared both in military and political circles. Throughout the summer of 1795 there was an unaccountable languor in the army. It was believed that Pichegru had purposely palsied his own and Jourdan's abilities, and the needless armistice he made with Austria went far to confirm the idea. It was afterward proved that several members of the Convention had been in communication with royalists. Among their agents was a personage of some importance—a certain Aubry—who, having returned after the events of Thermidor, never disavowed his real sentiments as a royalist; and being later made chairman of the army committee, was in that position when Buonaparte's career was temporarily checked by degradation from the artillery to the infantry. For this absurd reason he was long but unjustly thought also to have caused the original transfer to the west.

The Convention was aware of all that was taking place, but was also helpless to correct the trouble. Having abolished the powerful and terrible Committee of Safety, which had conducted its operations with such success as attends remorseless vigor, it was found necessary on August ninth to reconstruct something similar to meet the new crisis. At the same time the spirit of the hour was propitiated by forming sixteen other committees to control the action of the central one. Such a dispersion of executive power was a virtual paralysis of action, but it was to be only temporary, they would soon centralize their strength in an efficient way. The constitution was adopted only a fortnight later, on August twenty-second. Immediately the sections of Paris began to display irritation at the limitations set to their choice of new representatives. They had many sympathizers in the provinces, and the extreme reactionaries from the Revolution were jubilant. Fortunately for France, Carnot was temporarily retained to control the department of war. He was not removed until the following March.

When General Buonaparte reached Paris, and went to dwell in the mean and shabby lodgings which his lean purse compelled him to choose, he found the city strangely metamorphosed. Animated by a settled purpose not to accept the position assigned to him in the Army of the West, and, if necessary, to defy his military superiors, his humor put him out of all sympathy with the prevalent gaiety. Bitter experience had taught him that in civil war the consequences of victory and defeat are alike inglorious. In the fickleness of public opinion the avenging hero of to-day may easily become the reprobated outcast of to-morrow. What reputation he had gained at Toulon was already dissipated in part; the rest might easily be squandered entirely in Vendée. He felt and said that he could wait. But how about his daily bread?

The drawing-rooms of Paris had opened like magic before the "sesame" of Thermidor and the prospects of settled order under the Directory. There were visiting, dining, and dancing; dressing, flirtation, and intrigue; walking, driving, and riding—all the avocations of a people soured with the cruel and bloody past, and reasserting its native passion for pleasure and refinement. All classes indulged in the wildest speculation, securities public and corporate were the sport of the exchange, the gambling spirit absorbed the energies of both sexes in desperate games of skill and chance. The theaters, which had never closed their doors even during the worst periods of terror, were thronged from pit to gallery by a populace that reveled in excitement. The morality of the hour was no better than the old; for there was a strange mixture of elements in this new society. The men in power were of every class—a few of the old aristocracy, many of the wealthy burghers, a certain proportion of the colonial nabobs from the West Indies and elsewhere, adventurers of every stripe, a few even of the city populace, and some country common folk. The purchase and sale of the confiscated lands, the national domain which furnished a slender security for the national debt and depreciated bonds, had enriched thousands of the vulgar sort. The newly rich lost their balance and their stolidity, becoming as giddy and frivolous and aggressive as the worst. The ingredients of this queer hodgepodge had yet to learn one another's language and nature; the niceties of speech, gesture, and mien which once had a well-understood significance in the higher circles of government and society were all to be readjusted in accordance with the ideas of the motley crowd and given new conventional currency. In such a disorderly transition vice does not require the mask of hypocrisy, virtue is helpless because unorganized, and something like riot characterizes conduct. The sound and rugged goodness of many newcomers, the habitual respectability of the veterans, were for the moment alike inactive because not yet kneaded into the lump they had to leaven.

There was, nevertheless, a marvelous exhibition of social power in this heterogeneous mass; nothing of course proportionate in extent to what had been brought forth for national defense, but still, of almost if not entirely equal significance. Throughout the revolutionary epoch there had been much discussion concerning reforms in education. It was in 1794 that Monge finally succeeded in founding the great Polytechnic School, an institution which clearly corresponded to a national characteristic, since from that day it has strengthened the natural bias of the French toward applied science, and tempted them to the undue and unfortunate neglect of many important humanizing disciplines. The Conservatory of Music and the Institute were permanently reorganized soon after. The great collections of the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers) were begun, and permanent lecture courses were founded in connection with the National Library, the Botanical Garden, the Medical School, and other learned institutions. Almost immediately a philosophical literature began to appear; pictures were painted, and the theaters reopened with new and tolerable pieces written for the day and place. In the very midst of war, moreover, an attempt was made to emancipate the press. The effort was ill advised, and the results were so deplorable for the conduct of affairs that the newspapers were in the event more firmly muzzled than ever.

When Buonaparte had made his living arrangements, and began to look about, he must have been stupefied by the hatred for the Convention so generally and openly manifested on every side. The provinces had looked upon the Revolution as accomplished. Paris was evidently in such ill humor with the body which represented it that the republic was to all appearance virtually undone. "Reëlect two thirds of the Convention members to the new legislature!" said the angry demagogues of the Paris sections. "Never! Those men who, by their own confession, have for three years in all these horrors been the cowardly tools of a sentiment they could not restrain, but are now self-styled and reformed moderates! Impossible!" Whether bribed by foreign gold, and working under the influence of royalists, or by reason of the famine, or through the determination of the well-to-do to have a radical change, or from all these influences combined, the sections were gradually organizing for resistance, and it was soon clear that the National Guard was in sympathy with them. The Convention was equally alert, and began to arm for the conflict. They already had several hundred artillerymen and five thousand regulars who were imbued with the national rather that the local spirit; they now began to enlist a special guard of fifteen hundred from the desperate men who had been the trusty followers of Hébert and Robespierre. The fighting spirit of the Convention was unquenchable. Having lodged the "two thirds" in the coming government, they virtually declared war on all enemies internal and external. By their decree of October twenty-fourth, 1792, they had announced that the natural limits of France were their goal. Having virtually obtained them, they were now determined to defend them. This was the legacy of the Convention to the Directory, a legacy which indefinitely prolonged the Revolution and nullified the new polity from the outset.

For a month or more Buonaparte was a mere onlooker, or at most an interested examiner of events, weighing and speculating in obscurity much as he had done three years before. The war department listened to and granted his earnest request that he might remain in Paris until there should be completed a general reassignment of officers, which had been determined upon, and, as his good fortune would have it, was already in progress. As the first weeks passed, news arrived from the south of a reaction in favor of the Jacobins. It became clearer every day that the Convention had moral support beyond the ramparts of Paris, and within the city it was possible to maintain something in the nature of a Jacobin salon. Many of that faith who were disaffected with the new conditions in Paris—the Corsicans in particular—were welcomed at the home of Mme. Permon by herself and her beautiful daughter, afterward Mme. Junot and Duchess of Abrantès. Salicetti had chosen the other child, a son now grown, as his private secretary, and was of course a special favorite in the house. The first manifestation of reviving Jacobin confidence was shown in the attack made on May twentieth upon the Convention by hungry rioters who shouted for the constitution of 1793. The result was disastrous to the radicals because the tumult was quelled by the courage and presence of mind shown by Boissy d'Anglas, a calm and determined moderate. Commissioned to act alone in provisioning Paris, he bravely accepted his responsibility and mounted the president's chair in the midst of the tumult to defend himself. The mob brandished in his face the bloody head of Féraud, a fellow-member of his whom they had just murdered. The speaker uncovered his head in respect, and his undaunted mien cowed the leaders, who slunk away, followed by the rabble. The consequence was a total annihilation of the Mountain on May twenty-second. The Convention committees were disbanded, their artillerymen were temporarily dismissed, and the constitution of 1793 was abolished.

The friendly home of Mme. Permon was almost the only resort of Buonaparte, who, though disillusioned, was still a Jacobin. Something like desperation appeared in his manner; the lack of proper food emaciated his frame, while uncertainty as to the future left its mark on his wan face and in his restless eyes. It was not astonishing, for his personal and family affairs were apparently hopeless. His brothers, like himself, had now been deprived of profitable employment; they, with him, might possibly and even probably soon be numbered among the suspects; destitute of a powerful patron, and with his family once more in actual want, Napoleon was scarcely fit in either garb or humor for the society even of his friends. His hostess described him as having "sharp, angular features; small hands, long and thin; his hair long and disheveled; without gloves; wearing badly made, badly polished shoes; having always a sickly appearance, which was the result of his lean and yellow complexion, brightened only by two eyes glistening with shrewdness and firmness." Bourrienne, who had now returned from diplomatic service, was not edified by the appearance or temper of his acquaintance, who, he says, "was ill clad and slovenly, his character cold, often inscrutable. His smile was hollow and often out of place. He had moments of fierce gaiety which made you uneasy, and indisposed to love him."

No wonder the man was ill at ease. His worst fears were realized when the influence of the Mountain was wiped out—Carnot, the organizer of victory, as he had been styled, being the only one of all the old leaders to escape. Salicetti was too prominent a partizan to be overlooked by the angry burghers. For a time he was concealed by Mme. Permon in her Paris home. He escaped the vengeance of his enemies in the disguise of her lackey, flying with her when she left for the south to seek refuge for herself and children. Even the rank and file among the members of the Mountain either fled or were arrested. That Buonaparte was unmolested appears to prove how cleverly he had concealed his connection with them. The story that in these days he proposed for the hand of Mme. Permon, though without any corroborative evidence, has an air of probability, partly in the consideration of a despair which might lead him to seek any support, even that of a wife as old as his mother, partly from the existence of a letter to the lady which, though enigmatical, displays an interesting mixture of wounded pride and real or pretended jealousy. The epistle is dated June eighteenth, 1795. He felt that she would think him duped, he explains, if he did not inform her that although she had not seen fit to give her confidence to him, he had all along known that she had Salicetti in hiding. Then follows an address to that countryman, evidently intended to clear the writer from all taint of Jacobinism, and couched in these terms: "I could have denounced thee, but did not, although it would have been but a just revenge so to do. Which has chosen the truer part? Go, seek in peace an asylum where thou canst return to better thoughts of thy country. My lips shall never utter thy name. Repent, and above all, appreciate my motives. This I deserve, for they are noble and generous." In these words to the political refugee he employs the familiar republican "thou"; in the peroration, addressed, like the introduction, to the lady herself, he recurs to the polite and distant "you." "Mme. Permon, my good wishes go with you as with your child. You are two feeble creatures with no defense. May Providence and the prayers of a friend be with you. Above all, be prudent and never remain in the large cities. Adieu. Accept my friendly greetings."[49]

The meaning of this missive is recondite; perhaps it is this: Mme. Permon, I loved you, and could have ruined the rival who is your protégé with a clear conscience, for he once did me foul wrong, as he will acknowledge. But farewell. I bear you no grudge. Or else it may announce another change in the political weather by the veering of the cock. As a good citizen, despising the horrors of the past, I could have denounced you, Salicetti. I did not, for I recalled old times and your helplessness, and wished to heap coals of fire on your head, that you might see the error of your way. The latter interpretation finds support in the complete renunciation of Jacobinism which the writer made soon afterward, and in his subsequent labored explanation that in the "Supper of Beaucaire" he had not identified himself with the Jacobin soldier (so far an exact statement of fact), but had wished only by a dispassionate presentation of facts to show the hopeless case of Marseilles, and to prevent useless bloodshed.