Their eyes met. Their hearts fused, and not many days were to pass before they realised that their hearts were made to love each other. His love was the most passionate and chaste that had ever moved a man’s heart . . . They felt as if their souls were one. They overcame all obstacles and were joined forever. All that is the most honourable in love, the tenderest feelings, the most exquisite voluptuousness flooded the hearts of the two enraptured lovers.41
Clisson and Eugénie marry, have children and live happily together, much admired by the poor for their generous philanthropy. But this idyllic fairy-tale is too good to last. One day a message arrives instructing Clisson that he must leave for Paris within twenty-four hours. ‘There he was to be given an important mission, which called for a man of his talents.’ Appointed to command an army, Clisson ‘was a success at everything; he exceeded the hopes of the people and the army; indeed, he alone was the reason for the army’s success.’ Seriously wounded in a skirmish, however, Clisson despatches one of his officers, Berville, to inform Eugénie, ‘and to keep her company until he had made a full recovery’. For no good reason discernible to the reader, Eugénie promptly sleeps with Berville, which the recuperating Clisson finds out about and understandably wants to avenge. ‘But how could he leave the army and his duty? The fatherland needed him here!’ The solution was a glorious death in battle, so when ‘Beating drums announced the charge on the flanks, and death stalked amongst the ranks,’ Clisson writes a suitably emotional letter to Eugénie which he hands to an aide-de-camp, ‘and, dutifully placing himself at the head of the fray – at the pointwhere the victory would be decided – and expired, pierced by a thousand blows.’42 Finis.
We should try to view Clisson et Eugénie through an eighteenth-century literary prism, rather than as a cheap romance of today. The seventeen-page short story has been described as ‘the last manifestation of an incipient Romanticism in a man who would go on to dazzle with his brilliant pragmatism’, and Napoleon clearly used the story to fantasize, in this case by making Eugénie despicably adulterous while he remained heroic, faithful and even forgiving of her infidelity at the end.43 Yet Napoleon can’t be excused the melodrama, sentimentality and cliché because his story was tossed off in a furious moment of immature resentment: Clisson et Eugénie underwent endless drafting and re-drafting.
• • •
In the second half of 1795 France’s Girondin leaders recognized that she would need a new constitution if she were to put the days of the Jacobin Terror behind her. ‘The royalists are stirring,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph on September 1, ‘we shall see how this will end.’44 Alexis de Tocqueville would write that states are never more vulnerable than when they attempt to reform themselves, and that was certainly true of France in the autumn of 1795.
On August 23 the third constitution since the fall of the Bastille, known as the Constitution of the Year III, establishing a bicameral legislature and a five-man executive government called the Directory, was approved by the Convention. It would come into effect at the end of October. A National Assembly consisting of a Council of Five Hundred and Council of the Elders would replace the Convention, and the Directory would replace the Committee of Public Safety, which had grown to be synonymous with the Terror. This moment of reform provided an opportunity for opponents both of the Revolution and the Republic to strike. As Austria returned to the Rhine in a major counter-attack on September 20, with the French economy still very weak and corruption widespread, the enemies of the Republic coalesced to overthrow the new government in the first week of October, smuggling large quantities of arms and ammunition into Paris.
Although the Terror was over and the Committee of Public Safety would be abolished when the new Directory came into being, the bitterness they had inspired was now directed against their successors. It was in the ‘Sections’, forty-eight districts of Paris established in 1790 which controlled local assemblies and the local National Guard units, that the insurrection was focused. Although only seven Sections actually rose in revolt, National Guardsmen from others joined in.
The men of the Sections were not all – or even mainly – royalists. The veteran soldier General Mathieu Dumas wrote in his memoirs, ‘The most general desire of the population of Paris was to return to the constitution of 1791’, and there was little appetite for the civil war that a Bourbon restoration would have entailed.45 The Sections included middle-class National Guardsmen, royalists, some moderates and liberals, and ordinary Parisians who opposed the government for its corruption and domestic and international failures. The very disparate nature of the rebellion’s political make-up made any central co-ordination impossible beyond establishing a date for action, which couldn’t be kept secret from the government.
The man whom the Convention had originally relied upon to put down the coming insurrection, General Jacques-François Menou, commander of the Army of the Interior, had attempted to negotiate with the Sections to avoid bloodshed. The leaders of the Convention mistook this for incipient treachery and had him arrested. (He was later acquitted.) With time running out before the anticipated attack, the Girondins appointed one of their leaders, the president of the National Assembly, Paul Barras, to command the Army of the Interior, despite his having no military experience since 1783. His instructions were to save the Revolution.
On the evening of Sunday, October 4, Napoleon was at the Feydeau Theatre watching Saurin’s play Beverley when he heard that the Sections intended to rise the following day.46 Very early the next morning – 13 Vendémiaire by the revolutionary calendar – Barras appointed him second-in-command of the Army of the Interior, and ordered him to use all means necessary to crush the revolt. Napoleon had impressed the most important decision-makers in his life – among them Kéralio, the du Teil brothers, Saliceti, Doppet, Dugommier, Augustin Robespierre and now Barras, who had heard of him from Saliceti after the victory at Toulon. Having served in the Topographical Bureau, he was known to leading government figures such as Carnot and Jean-Lambert Tallien.47 (He later recalled with amusement that the politician who had had least qualms about the spilling of blood at Vendémiaire had been the priest and political theorist Abbé Emmanuel Sieyès.) It is astonishing that there were so few other senior officers in Paris to take the job, or at least ones who were willing to fire on civilians in the streets. From Napoleon’s reactions to the two Tuileries attacks he had witnessed in 1792, there was no doubt what he would do.
This was Napoleon’s first introduction to frontline, high-level national politics, and he found it intoxicating. He ordered Captain Joachim Murat of the 21st Chasseurs à Cheval to gallop to the Sablons military camp two miles away with one hundred cavalrymen, secure the cannon there and bring them into central Paris, and to sabre anyone who tried to prevent him. The Sections had missed a great opportunity as the Sablons cannon were at that point guarded by only fifty men.
Between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., having assured himself of the loyalty of his officers and men, Napoleon placed two cannon at the entrance of the rue Saint-Nicaise, another facing the church of Saint-Roch at the bottom of the rue Dauphine, two more in the rue Saint-Honoré near the Place Vendôme, and two facing the Pont Royal on the Quai Voltaire. He formed up his infantry behind the cannon, and sent his reserves to the Place du Carrousel to defend the Tuileries where the Convention sat and the government was headquartered. His cavalry was posted in the Place de la Révolution (today’s Place de la Concorde).48 He then spent three hours visiting each of his guns in turn. ‘Good and upstanding people must be persuaded by gentle means,’ Napoleon would later write. ‘The rabble must be moved by terror.’49
Napoleon prepared to use grapeshot, the colloquial term for canister or case shot, which consists of hundreds of musket balls packed into a metal case that rips open as soon as it leaves the cannon’s muzzle, sending the lead balls flying in a relatively wide arc at an even greater velocity than the 1,760 feet per second of a musket shot. Its maximum range was rough
ly 600 yards, optimum 250. The use of grapeshot on civilians was hitherto unknown in Paris, and was testament to Napoleon’s ruthlessness that he was willing to contemplate it. He was not about to be a coglione. ‘If you treat the mob with kindness,’ he told Joseph later, ‘these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable; if you hang a few, they get tired of the game, and become as submissive and humble as they ought to be.’50
Napoleon’s force consisted of 4,500 troops and about 1,500 ‘patriots’, gendarmes and veterans from Les Invalides. Opposing them was a disparate force of up to 30,000 men from the Sections, nominally under the control of General Dancian, who wasted much of the day trying to conduct negotiations. Only at 4 p.m. did the rebel columns start issuing from side streets to the north of the Tuileries. Napoleon did not open fire immediately, but as soon as the first musket shots were heard from the Sections sometime between 4.15 p.m. and 4.45 p.m. he unleashed a devastating artillery response. He also fired grapeshot at the men of the Sections attempting to cross the bridges over the Seine, who took heavy casualties and quickly fled. In most parts of Paris the attack was all over by 6 p.m., but at the church of Saint-Roch in the rue Saint-Honoré, which became the de facto headquarters of the insurrection and where the wounded were brought, snipers carried on firing from rooftops and from behind barricades. The fighting continued for many hours, until Napoleon brought his cannon to within 60 yards of the church and surrender was the only option.51 Around three hundred insurrectionists were killed that day, against only half a dozen of Napoleon’s men. Magnanimously by the standards of the day, the Convention executed only two Section leaders afterwards.* ‘The whiff of grapeshot’ – as it became known – meant that the Paris mob played no further part in French politics for the next three decades.
In 1811 General Jean Sarrazin published a book in London entitled Confession of General Buonaparté to the Abbé Maury. As Napoleon had by then had Sarrazin sentenced to death in absentia for treachery, it didn’t cost him much to claim that on 13 Vendémiaire, ‘Far from putting a stop to the blind fury of his soldiers, Buonaparté set them the example of inhumanity. He cut down with his sabre wretched beings, who in their fright had thrown down their arms and implored his mercy.’52 Sarrazin further claimed that Napoleon’s lieutenant, Monvoisin, reproached Napoleon for his cruelty that day and resigned. None of this was true, but it was all part of the ‘Black Legend’ that came to surround Napoleon from Vendémiaire onwards.
• • •
Heavy rainfall on the night of 13 Vendémiaire quickly washed the blood from the streets, but its memory lingered. Even the violently anti-Jacobin Annual Register, founded by Edmund Burke, pointed out that ‘It was in this conflict that Buonaparte appeared first on the theatre of war, and by his courage and conduct laid the foundation of that confidence in his powers which conducted him so soon thereafter to preferment and to glory.’53 The urgent political exigencies meant that there was to be no more nonsense from the war ministry about seniority lists, medical boards, desertion and so on. Before the end of Vendémiaire, Napoleon had been promoted to général de division by Barras and soon afterwards to commander of the Army of the Interior in recognition of his service in saving the Republic and possibly preventing civil war. It was ironic that he had refused the Vendée post partly because he hadn’t wanted to kill Frenchmen, and then gained his most vertiginous promotion by doing just that. But to his mind there was a difference between a legitimate fighting force and a rabble. For a while afterwards Napoleon was sometimes called ‘General Vendémiaire’, though not to his face. Far from being uneasy about his involvement in the deaths of so many of his compatriots, he ordered the anniversary to be celebrated once he became First Consul, and when a lady asked him how he could have fired so mercilessly on the mob he replied: ‘A soldier is only a machine to obey orders.’54 He did not point out that it was he who had given the orders.
The ‘whiff of grapeshot’ advanced the Bonaparte family hugely, and overnight. Napoleon would now be paid 48,000 francs per annum, Joseph was given a job in the diplomatic service, Louis advanced through the Châlons artillery school and later became one of Napoleon’s burgeoning team of aides-de-camp, while the youngest of the Bonaparte boys, the eleven-year-old Jérôme, was sent to a better school. ‘The family will want for nothing,’ Napoleon told Joseph, and that was to be true for the next twenty years. Laure d’Abrantès claimed that she noticed a change after Vendémiaire:
Muddy boots were out of the question. Bonaparte never went out but in a fine carriage, and he lived in a very respectable house in the rue des Capucines . . . His emaciated thinness was converted into a fullness of face, and his complexion, which had been yellow and apparently unhealthy, became clear and comparatively fresh; his features, which were angular and sharp, became round and filled out. As to his smile, it was always agreeable.55
No-one would call him ‘Puss-in-Boots’ anymore.
• • •
In the immediate aftermath of Vendémiaire, Napoleon supervised the closing of the opposition Panthéon Club and the expulsion of crypto-royalists from the war ministry, as well as the policing of theatrical productions. In this last role he wrote almost daily to the government about the behaviour of the audiences at four Parisian theatres: the Opéra, Opéra Comique, Feydeau and La République. A typical report reads, ‘While patriotic airs were well received in two [of the theatres], and a third was tranquil, the police had to arrest a man (thought to be a Vendéen) who whistled during the penultimate verse of the “Marseillaise” at the Feydeau’.56* Another task was to oversee the confiscation of all civilian weaponry, which according to family lore led to his meeting a woman of whom he had possibly heard on the social grapevine but hadn’t hitherto met: Vicomtesse Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, the widow de Beauharnais, whom Napoleon was to dub ‘Josephine’.
Josephine’s grandfather, a noble called Gaspard Tascher, had left France for Martinique in 1726, hoping to make his fortune with a sugar-cane plantation, although hurricanes, bad luck and his own indolence had prevented him; La Pagerie was the name of an estate the family owned on Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). Josephine’s father, Joseph, had served as a page at the court of Louis XVI but returned to his father’s estates. Josephine was born in Martinique on June 23, 1763, although in later life she claimed that it was 1767.57 She arrived in Paris in 1780 aged seventeen, so poorly educated that her first husband – a cousin to whom she had been engaged at fifteen, the General Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais – couldn’t hide his contempt for her lack of education. Josephine had blackened stubs for teeth, thought to be the result of chewing Martiniquais cane sugar as a child, but she learned to smile without showing them.58 ‘Had she only possessed teeth,’ wrote Laure d’Abrantès, who was to become Madame Mère’s lady-in-waiting, ‘she would certainly have outvied nearly all the ladies of the Consular Court.’59
Although Beauharnais had been an abusive husband – once kidnapping their three-year-old son Eugène from the convent in which Josephine had taken refuge from his beatings – she nonetheless courageously tried to save him from the guillotine after his arrest in 1794. From April 22, 1794 until shortly after her husband’s execution on July 22 that year, Josephine was herself imprisoned as a suspected royalist in the crypt underneath the church of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes in the rue de Vaugirard.* One of her cellmates, an Englishwoman named Grace Elliott, recalled how ‘the walls and even the wooden chairs were still stained with the blood and the brains of the priests’.60 Josephine had to endure truly inhumane conditions: air came only from three deep holes to the underground cells and there were no lavatories; she and her cellmates lived in daily fear of the guillotine; they had one bottle of water a day each, for all uses; and since pregnant women weren’t guillotined until after giving birth, the sound of sexual couplings with the warders could be heard in the hallways at night.61 It is cold down in the Saint-Joseph crypt even in midsummer, and inmates’ health broke down fast, indeed it is
possible that Josephine survived only because she was too ill to be guillotined. Her husband was executed just four days before Robespierre’s fall, and had Robespierre survived any longer Josephine would probably have followed him. There was a paradoxical symmetry in the way that the Thermidor coup released Josephine from one prison and simultaneously put Napoleon into another.
The stench, darkness, cold, degradation and daily fear of violent death for weeks on end makes the Terror well named, and it is likely that for months, possibly even years, afterwards Josephine suffered from a form of what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. If she was later sexually self-indulgent, became involved in sleazy business deals and loved luxury – her dress bills became higher than Marie Antoinette’s – and married for stability and financial security rather than for love, it is hard to hold this against her after what she had been through.62 Josephine has often been seen as a seductive, shallow, extravagant hussy, but she certainly wasn’t shallow culturally, having good taste in music and the decorative arts. She was also generous – albeit usually with public money – and one of the most accomplished diplomats of the age, Clemens von Metternich, referred to her ‘unique social tact’.63 She was a skilled harpist – although some said she always played the same tune – and she did something in bed known as ‘zigzags’.64 She couldn’t draw, did a bit of tapestry, and played backgammon occasionally, but she received callers all day and enjoyed gossipy lunches with her many girlfriends.
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