by Alan Schom
Chapter Two – “To Destiny”
‘Nature made me strong and determined...and you of gossamer and lace.’
To Josephine, 1796
The warm welcome the family received on landing at Toulon in June came as a pleasant shock, the members of the local Jacobin Club helping out the refugees by renting a house for them first in the suburb of La Valette and then in Marseilles. Lucien, the youngest Jacobin, responsible for this unexpected house moving, was given the sobering job of night watchman of a warehouse at nearby St.-Maximin. But for once it was Joseph who took expeditious action, going to Paris to lobby influential friends, returning in September as a newly appointed commissaire de guerre (a title unique to France at the time, something like a quartermaster or commissary officer) in charge of provisioning the army — a lucrative post with a salary of 6,000 francs a year, plus substantial bribes and the usual black-market deals, to which another 2,400 livres were added on his further appointment as commissioner of the Executive Committee of the Department of Corsica.[26] Hereafter the Buonapartes would not starve.
But it was in Paris that important things were happening that were to shape the lives of this family as well as much of Europe. Louis XVI had been executed on January 21, 1793, in the Place de la Révolution. France had declared war on Austria back in April of the previous year, against Great Britain and Holland in February 1793, and against Spain in March. The country had been convulsed by riots ever since: food riots in hungry Paris; royalist revolts in Brittany, the Vendée, and the West; the revolt of royalist Lyons, soon to be suppressed in a bloody slaughter of civilians on the orders of a former headmaster of a church school, one Joseph Fouché. The Buonapartes had not yet made the acquaintance of that particular individual, but all eventually would — to their regret. A more ominous uprising took place in Paris at the end of May, and politician Jean-Paul Marat was then stabbed in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday. A new constitution was voted on June 24, which soon would bring about a new and somewhat more terrifying political order, as Robespierre became the tenth member of the Committee of Public Safety in July. This was followed by a series of stringent new laws regulating prices while also permitting neighbors to denounce neighbors “as suspects” — which they often did just out of envy or animosity, or even stemming from some long-standing feud. With an English fleet and marines seizing Toulon in August, there would be more than enough work for a very bright twenty-four-year-old officer by the name of Napoleon Buonaparte, whose real military career was just about to begin.
On November 30, 1793, Major Buonaparte (he had been promoted again) studied the damp, cold, panoramic cluster of thirteen French batteries overlooking the inner and outer harbors of the principal French Mediterranean naval base of Toulon. He was tired, having spent every day here without respite since his arrival and appointment in September 17 as commander of the two then-existing batteries of perhaps eight to ten guns, half of them with no ammunition or else provided with the wrong caliber. His long cloak and black knee-high boots were muddy, his uniform dank and wrinkled, but he had worked miracles in a mere two and a half months.
On his return to his artillery regiment — now attached to the so-called Army of Italy at Nice — in June, after an absence of twenty-two months, Napoleon had been reluctantly accepted back by Gen. Jean du Teil, whose brother had commanded the artillery regiment back at Valence and Auxonne. Teil therefore already knew something about this young officer and his checkered, intermittent career. The general also knew that his brother held a very high opinion of Napoleon’s abilities as a gunner. Therefore he had accepted him back, but with caution, assigning him to organize convoys of munitions from Avignon to Nice, through sometimes hostile royalist territory.
Indeed, the revolts that had rocked the rest of France most of the year were still active in Provence, with proroyalist columns moving southward to attack such cities as Avignon and Marseilles, the latter being finally retaken by revolutionary forces on August 25. Then Toulon had revolted on August 27-28, throwing its superb anchorages open to an Anglo-Spanish war flotilla comprising a few dozen vessels, which had immediately landed nearly seventeen thousand Spaniards, French royalists, Neapolitans, Piedmontese, and a few British marines. The British fleet was under the command of the formidable Adm. Sir Samuel Hood, famous throughout the Royal Navy for his dramatic clashes with the French during the American Revolution. Hood was already approaching his fiftieth birthday and, with more than three decades of that spent at sea, would soon be retiring.
With only two thousand British troops, it was evident that Flood had not been sent here to conquer France, or even Toulon. The Admiralty no doubt expected the French to rise up against the harsh new laws and brutal acts of the Robespierre-dominated Committee of Public Safety. Nevertheless, Flood had done the best he could with the guns and troops at hand, protecting the narrow strait separating the large and small harbors with powerful batteries on the west side of the harbor at Fort Mulgrave (which they had just built), at Tour de la Balquier, and at L’Eguillette. Across the way on the eastern shore was placed another series of British batteries, beginning with Grosse Tour, Malbousquet, ringing the city of Toulon itself, reaching right up to Fort Croix, high atop the dominating Mt. Faron.
Initially the French, unable to cope, had watched helplessly as the British dug in, and the terrifying news reached Paris. There were just a few thousand French troops available, and their commander, General Carteaux, an artist by training and only an amateur soldier, was supported by a mere half dozen functioning cannon. Then, to compound matters, his artillery commander had been seriously wounded, just as Captain Buonaparte was approaching Marseilles en route to rejoin his regiment at Nice. Stopping at Marseilles, Napoleon had visited two “representatives” sent by the Committee of Public Safety to clean up all royalist pockets in the city, none other than Cristoforo Salicetti, whose Corsican assignment had ended in disaster and Napoleon’s ultimate flight from that island, and another, named Gaspari. Salicetti and Napoleon at least had that in common. It was thanks to Salicetti that Napoleon had obtained Joseph’s most lucrative position, as an army commissary officer. In fact, Napoleon had now stopped to see Salicetti to ask another favor, to place his younger brother Louis as a cadet officer. Delighted to see Napoleon at this critical moment, Salicetti instead asked a favor of him, that Napoleon transfer temporarily from his regiment to replace the wounded artillery commander at Toulon. Most soldiers would simply have shrugged their shoulders on learning that they would have only half a dozen or so cannon available with which to face well over one hundred British guns. But to Napoleon it sounded like the chance of a lifetime.
It was at this time that Napoleon met Louis Fréron and Paul François de Barras, who had also been dispatched by the committee to cleanse Provence of the royalist scourge. Barras, a former career officer himself, seconded Salicetti’s request, and Napoleon was duly appointed to a post with many fascinating challenges from a gunner’s viewpoint. Barras, the renegade “Red Viscount” who had voted for the death of his king in January 1793, was busy now killing fellow aristocrats with Fréron, but spending more of his time pilfering vast amounts of silver, gold, jewelery, and paintings from the châteaux and mansions of Marseilles’s wealthy bourgeois families. A debauched man from the time he entered the army, he had received a dishonorable discharge after personally insulting the war minister. Barras was as ruthless as he was cunning, all of which was concealed beneath the gracious manners of yesteryear and an obliging smile. He was the antithesis of the crude, ruthless Fréron, who would one day attempt — and fail — to become Napoleon’s brother-in-law.
Napoleon thus avoided Fréron while he encouraged the interest Barras showed in him. This was to pay unimaginable dividends, for Barras was a man on the rise, soon to become a member of the five-man Directory, which would replace the Committee of Public Safety. Indeed, it was thanks to this much tainted voluptuary that Napoleon’s career was to skyrocket, and thanks to this same Barras that he was later
to meet Barras’s presiding mistress, one Josephine de Beauharnais.
Thus it was that General du Teil was informed in September 1793 that Captain Buonaparte had been temporarily seconded to the French army units besieging loyalist-held Toulon. After carefully studying the irregular topography of the Toulon region, which he already knew pretty well from previous visits, he spent the next several weeks scavenging for cannon and mortars from Avignon, Antibes, Nice, and Marseilles. Barras and Salicetti watched in startled admiration as the twenty-four-year-old gunner went out daily in every direction, inevitably returning with munitions, guns, junior artillery officers, heavy beams for new batteries, and three hundred horses, mules, and oxen to haul the new artillery pieces to their new sites. It took weeks, but by the end of November the newly promoted major had acquired more than ninety artillery pieces, including a goodly number of the mighty twenty-four-pounders needed to reach the English forts and vessels. “Before the week is out, Toulon will be yours,” he told the commanding general.[27]
Retaking the city was to prove a little more complicated than that, for not only were several hundred new gunners needed to man the thirteen new French batteries, but a new commanding general as well. First Carteaux was transferred for incompetence. His successor, “General” Doppet, a physician by profession and amateur soldier by preference, proved as disastrous a choice as his predecessor. Doppet in turn was dropped and replaced by a good professional officer, Gen. Jean François Dugommier, who finally took command on November 16.
Dugommier was the first of the commanders to appreciate Napoleon’s full value, including his objectives; and, of course, this being a siege, cannon was king, infantry playing only a secondary role. Napoleon’s ultimate aim was to isolate Toulon by land and sea. Thus he carefully sited his batteries to knock out those of his opponents, while peppering the Anglo-Spanish fleet to make life so hot for them that they would be forced to withdraw.
With the dramatic change brought about since Napoleon’s arrival — and realizing that he was not going to receive sufficient support from the French on the mainland, thereby permitting more and more batteries to be brought to bear on him and his ships — Admiral Hood acknowledged that it was simply a matter of time before he would have to withdraw, and he issued those plans to his captains weeks in advance.
To force the British to do just that, Napoleon first wanted to knock out their powerful battery at L’Eguillette, situated at the top of the promontory at the entrance of the inner harbor. Once that was achieved, he would simply turn those English guns around and attack the hostile fleet. Next he wanted to seize Fort Mulgrave, and then Fort Malbousquet.
By the beginning of December he was at last ready with all his new batteries, including thirty-eight cannon just to neutralize Fort Mulgrave with a lethal crossfire. On November 25 General Dugommier had held a key war council formally adopting Napoleon’s plan, which now went into effect, waiting only for Brig. Gen. André Masséna to arrive with his fresh troops to bring them up to full force. Meanwhile Napoleon never left his thundering guns, standing by them all day long, sleeping in or near the batteries every night, despite the heavy rain.
With all in readiness, Dugommier gave the signal for the all-out assault, which was launched on December 17 with the most devastating cannonading to date, followed by General Muiron’s troops storming the powerful Fort Mulgrave, Masséna capturing Fort d’Artigues, and Napoleon himself taking Point L’Eguillette and another fort (under such heavy defensive fire by the British that he had one horse shot from beneath him, also receiving a minor bayonet wound in the thigh). Hood, his ships clustered in Toulon’s smaller inner harbor, gave the evacuation orders, placing Capt. Sir William Sidney Smith — a man Napoleon would come into contact with time and again in his career — in charge of destroying the enormous French arsenal, stores, and ships. Although the arsenal was duly destroyed, along with ten French ships, the rest escaped when the Spanish in charge of that aspect of the operation failed to execute their orders.
At 9:00 A.M. on December 19, General Dugommier’s revolutionary army finally occupied Toulon, and Major Buonaparte (promoted on October 18), the hero of the day, turned his cannon on the hundreds of “collaborators” (royalists) rounded up in the main square of Toulon, slaughtering them.[28] The main public buildings of the port were then leveled, to further discourage royalists throughout the country. This is how the revolutionary government dealt with such opposition, soon surpassed by the destruction of Lyons and the massacre of its civilian leaders, not to mention the horrifying mass drowning of citizens in the Loire at Nantes.
As for Citizen Buonaparte, who had arrived in Toulon a mere captain in charge of a wagon train en route for Nice back in mid-September, three months later, on December 22, 1793, he received a further promotion to brigadier general. For the first time in his military career, his name was briefly mentioned in every city and village of the land. “I cannot find praiseworthy enough words to describe Buonaparte’s full worth,” General du Teil wrote the war minister following the taking of Toulon. “He has a solid scientific knowledge of his profession and as much intelligence, if too much courage, voila — there you have but a scant sketch of the virtues of this rare officer. It now only remains for you, Minister, to consecrate his talents to the glory of the Republic!”[29] At the age of twenty-five Napoleon Buonaparte had arrived — or nearly.
Praise attracts praise, and Napoleon’s critical role in defeating the British at Toulon was now echoed everywhere, even by the tyrannically powerful “representatives.” These political commissaires of the Committee of Public Safety sent to subdue and administer Provence, from the Rhône River to the Var, had enormous powers to appoint and replace even the highest officials and officers. Two such representatives, Fréron and Salicetti, wrote to Paris of their “satisfaction with the zeal and intelligence displayed by Citizen Buonaparte.” Even more important to Napoleon, now at his new headquarters at Nice, were the reports sent by the more powerful and influential representatives of Paris in that city, Ricord and Maximilien Robespierre’s twenty-nine-year-old brother, Augustin, who took up the cause of the hero of the day. Writing to his brother, the dreaded head of the Committee of Public Safety, after praising Napoleon to the hilt, Augustin declared him “to be worthy of rising merit.”[30]
Following the capture of Toulon, and after being confirmed in his new rank, Napoleon was ordered to survey French defenses along the entire Mediterranean coast from Marseilles to Nice. In particular he found the Army of Italy, under the command of Gen. P. J. Dumerbion, to be in a most unmilitary state of apathy and preparedness. This would have to be corrected, he informed Representatives Ricord and Robespierre. But more important was the military policy for this region as laid down by Paris.
In addition to the Army of Italy, there was, just to the north, the Army of the Alps, with headquarters in the narrow mountain valley at Barcelonnette, both armies disputing military objectives on the other side of the Maritime Alps. The original targets — the Comté of Nice and the Duchy of Savoy — had been largely secured, with the exception of Piedmont. As the king of Sardinia was an ally of Austria, he was automatically a foe of France. And then there was the question of the Republic of Genoa, which had to be neutralized. But to complicate matters, not only were the Armies of the Alps and of Italy at odds with each other in the Parisian corridors of power, but the swaggering representatives of each region were equally jealous of one another.
Salicetti and Fréron, for instance, were a dangerous pair. Having rounded up the royalists of Marseilles and being responsible for the beheading of most of the 409 among them, they had added to their personal triumph by their support of Napoleon, resulting in his great victory at Toulon. But with Napoleon now literally out of their bailiwick, in Nice, where the rival commissars Ricord and Robespierre ruled, there was fresh anxiety and tension in the air. Napoleon was “their man,” Fréron and Salicetti insisted, and they resented being shunted aside as their new brigadier general moved on. “Buon
aparte has hardly deigned to look at me, he [is] now so high and mighty,” Salicetti privately complained to Paris.[31] Little did Napoleon realize that he had a new, unscrupulous enemy who was only awaiting his moment to avenge this slight.
Champing at the bit, Napoleon was looking ahead to fresh action as he encouraged young Robespierre to put the Army of Italy in fighting shape. “It is up to you to make the Committee [of Public Safety] aware of our shameful inaction,” he advised, explaining his willingness to “develop my plan that will permit me to conquer the whole of Italy with just 12-15,000 men.”[32] (Meanwhile, of course, the Army of the Alps — to which Salicetti was now attached — had its own plans for Italian conquest, which left no room for the Army of Italy.)
Finally convinced by July 1794, Augustin Robespierre ordered Napoleon to carry out a one-man mission to the Republic of Genoa to sound out how its government stood vis-à-vis France. Accordingly, on July 11 Buonaparte set out for that Italian port, quite unaware of the rebellion taking place in Paris at that very moment, a strong counterreaction to the Jacobins and their horrifying massacres, destruction, and infamous new decrees — all authorized by Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety. The leaders of this new party were three Jacobins themselves taking refuge in the guise of the outraged: none other than Jean-Lambert Tallien, Fréron, and Barras (two of whom had been responsible for more than one massacre in Provence).
But shortly after Napoleon left Nice, Robespierre sent an urgent message to Augustin to return immediately to the capital, where Maximilien needed all the support he could muster. But it was already too late. Even as Napoleon sat negotiating with the Genoese and assessing the state of their military defenses, on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor), the “Thermidorians”[33] acted and overthrew Robespierre, his closest associates, and Augustin, who were dispatched to the Place de la Révolution and beheaded.[34] As for the 650 delegates to the National Convention, they were assigned to one of the thirteen ruling committees, their loyalties and political jealousies nicely divided, even as the Jacobin clubs throughout France were closed down by the newly reconstituted Committee of Public Safety, which included Fréron, Tallien, and Barras. Plus ça change...
