Napoleon

by Adam Zamoyski

  Ever aware of the power of appearances, he prepared his return to Cairo carefully. His uniform officer was put to work, replacements were despatched from every available store, and the remnants of the Syrian expedition were kitted out with the greatest possible panache. Bonaparte entered Cairo at their head through a victory arch with bands playing, marching over streets strewn with palm fronds. Having crossed the city from end to end the columns made their way around it and marched through once again, an operation lasting for five hours designed to confuse anyone who might have been trying to count how many men he had lost.20

  Back in Cairo, Bonaparte carried on as though nothing had changed, and continued to send optimistic reports to the Directory (many of which never got through, as they were intercepted by the Royal Navy). On 19 June he not only expounded on the advantages of Egypt as a colony for France, but also devoted much ink to criticising the way the French navy was organised. He was building a couple of corvettes at Suez, and was shocked when a French vessel was blown up by a single shot from a British ship as a result of negligence. The French navy would never be of any use, he argued, while the practices brought in during the Revolution survived and until the captain was given absolute authority.21

  He was confident that he could make up his losses in men by the purchase of a couple of thousand black slaves who could be incorporated into his units. He nevertheless pressed the Directory to send more men, and particularly arms. From his despatches and correspondence it is clear that he found the challenge of running his own fief exhilarating. He had begun to treat the army as his legion, distributing sabres of honour not in the name of the Republic, but his own. He courted the natives, prefacing every statement with the words: ‘There is no other god than God, and Mahomet is his Prophet!’22

  He also attended meetings of the Institute, which had been carrying on its work throughout this time, but at a session on 4 July he ran into trouble when he blamed the lack of success in Syria on the plague and the inability of the physicians to find a cure. He argued that by treating it as a contagious disease, they had undermined morale, and that for the general good it would be better to declare it to be non-contagious. Desgenettes insisted that scientific integrity demanded the truth be told. Bonaparte denounced him and his kind as fastidious theorists, to which the doctor responded by accusing him of despotic leadership and lack of foresight, and laid the blame for all the carnage and death during the Syrian campaign at his door.23

  On 15 July at the pyramids, where he was encamped, Bonaparte received news that a Turkish fleet had appeared off Aboukir. He quickly gathered a force of some 10,000 men and marched north. The Turks disembarked between 10,000 and 15,000 men and entrenched on the narrow peninsula with the fortress of Aboukir at their back.

  On 24 July Bonaparte pitched his tents about seven kilometres from Aboukir. It would not have taken him long to assess what had to be done once he had seen the Turkish positions. Yet that night when everyone else was asleep Michel Rigo, a young painter who had been allowed to bed down in the same tent as Bonaparte and his staff, saw the general get up in the middle of the night and go over to a table on which maps were spread. He observed him pore over them, measuring distances with a compass, pace up and down, return to the table to study the maps again, belabouring the table with a small knife, and then step into the opening of the tent and stare for a long time into the distance.24

  At dawn two divisions, under Lannes and Destaing, attacked the enemy line, while Murat’s cavalry broke through at its extremity and swept into its rear. The Turks had nowhere to retreat to, and most ran into the sea in an effort to reach their ships. Those that did not drown were taken prisoner. Within the space of an hour some 3,000 had been put out of action. Bonaparte then attacked the fortress. The initial assault was repulsed and the defenders rushed out to decapitate the wounded, whereupon the French surged forward and drove the entire Turkish army into the sea. The final toll was 10,000–12,000 Ottoman dead, mostly drowned, to 250 French dead and about a thousand wounded. ‘It is one of the finest battles I have seen,’ Bonaparte wrote to General Dugua.25

  He had been at the forefront, directing the troops under a hail of bullets which killed several around him. When one of his aides was struck by a cannonball, ‘then, the whole of this army which only yesterday was insulting him during its long and painful march, and seemed for some time to have drifted away from him, uttered a cry of horror’, recalled one sergeant. ‘Everyone trembled for the life of this man who had become so precious to us, while, only a few moments earlier, he had been universally cursed.’ The sergeant’s feelings that day were by no means isolated. ‘The army had to believe, like him, in fate,’ wrote another soldier, ‘for it seemed as though he had it written on his forehead that cannonballs and grapeshot must respect his person.’ Even the obstreperous Kléber was impressed. After the battle he embraced Bonaparte, with the words, ‘General, you are as great as the world!’26

  The great man spent the next ten days at Alexandria before returning to Cairo. He had much to ponder. The victory of Aboukir ensured that the Ottomans would not be menacing Egypt in a hurry, so he was safe to continue organising his colony. But developments in Europe raised alarming questions. Although he had been cut off from France since the destruction of the fleet, he was kept informed, by small French naval vessels which got through and by neutral shipping, which brought news and even despatches. The British ships of Sydney Smith’s squadron blockading the Egyptian coast also regularly communicated with the French on shore, passing them copies of English newspapers.

  French gains in Italy had been almost wiped out, and the situation on the Rhine was precarious. It looked as though the coalition might succeed in invading France and toppling the Republic. Bonaparte could hold Egypt and await better days, but if there were to be a Bourbon restoration in France, his future would be bleak. The Republic was in peril, and it must be saved, both because he genuinely believed in it, albeit better governed, and because he had committed to it to such an extent that he would never have a future under any other system.

  He had never meant to spend long in Egypt, and had been considering a return to France for some months. There is evidence to suggest that he colluded with Sydney Smith to make this possible, the Englishman seeing in it a chance to get him out of the way, which he supposed would make the French left behind more likely to capitulate. Either way, Bonaparte had already made arrangements for a couple of frigates and two smaller craft to be made ready.27

  He was back in Cairo on 11 August. Two days later he attended the feast of the Prophet, giving every appearance of intending to continue governing the colony. On being informed that Sydney Smith’s squadron had sailed for Cyprus to take on supplies, he and those he had selected to go with him made their final preparations. Officially, he was going to sail down the Nile on a tour of inspection. On the evening of 17 August he called on Bellilotte to say goodbye. He had meant to take her with him, but changed his plans and she was to follow (when she did, she was captured by the British and did not return to France until after Bonaparte had taken power; he never saw her again, but would find her a husband and buy her a château).28

  He sailed down the Nile to Menouf, where he took a parade of the 32nd Demi-Brigade. ‘Don’t look so sad,’ he said to them. ‘Before long we will all be drinking wine in France.’ Sergeant Vigo-Roussillon thought he looked preoccupied and anxious, while Lannes, Murat and others in his suite were beaming. The next day he was off, supposedly to inspect various French positions, and on 22 August he turned off his planned route and made for the coast at a point to the west of Alexandria.29

  Two frigates, the Muiron and the Carrère, rode at anchor a short distance from the shore, along with two xebecs (small three-masted vessels), the Revanche and the Fortune. At midnight Bonaparte and his party embarked, jostling each other regardless of rank to pile into the longboats in their anxiety not to be left behind.30

  The four vessels, under the command of Rear-Admiral Honoré G
anteaume, weighed anchor in the early hours. On Bonaparte’s orders they hugged the coast, sometimes sailing only at night. He was terrified of being captured by the British, and preferred the option of putting ashore anywhere and taking his chances. ‘Suppose I were taken by the English,’ he said to Monge. ‘I would be locked up in a hulk and in the eyes of France I would be nothing but a common deserter, a general who had left his post without authorisation.’ He had charges laid in the hold, and made Monge promise to blow up the ship if it were boarded by the British.31

  The winds did not favour them so close inshore, and it took a full month to pass Malta, where they would veer north and make a dash for France. The company included Berthier, Bonaparte’s aides Marmont and Lavalette, Lannes, Murat, Bonaparte’s secretary Bourrienne, and several of the savants, including Monge, Berthollet and the art expert Vivant Denon. Bonaparte’s entourage also included a nineteen-year-old Mameluke named Roustam Raza, taken into slavery in the Caucasus as a boy of seven and presented to Bonaparte as a gift by Sheikh El-Bekri.

  Although he railed at the incompetence and corruption of the Directory, Bonaparte did not discuss any political plans he may have been nurturing, and according to Vivant Denon he behaved like a passenger on a cruise, discussing scientific topics, playing cards (cheating shamelessly) and bantering with his friends. He avoided chess, at which he was surprisingly bad. In the evenings he entertained his companions with ghost stories, ‘a genre of story-telling in which he was highly skilled’, according to Lavalette.32

  The longueurs of the crossing induced in Bonaparte reflection on the past as well as the future, and one evening in conversation with Monge he broached the subject of his paternity. He referred to the gossip surrounding the relationship between his mother and Marbeuf, saying that he would like to know for certain who his father was. The dates suggested it was indeed Carlo Maria Buonaparte, but he wondered where, in that case, he had got his military inclination and talents from. The uncertainty intrigued more than it nagged him, and he appeared even to derive a slight sense of superiority from it, as it placed him outside the common run.33

  As they sailed north, past Lampedusa, Pantelleria and the west of Sicily, the danger from hostile ships became greater. Bonaparte ordered Ganteaume to hug the west coast of Sardinia, as he believed that in the worst case he could go ashore there and get away. They were low on water, and had to put in to Ajaccio on 30 September to tank up.

  Bonaparte went ashore and revisited his home. Letizia had used the indemnity obtained from the French government as a good Republican patriot whose property had been sacked to enlarge and redecorate the family home to unprecedented grandeur. His sister Élisa’s husband Bacciochi was now commander of the citadel and a personage in the town. Joseph and Fesch had been buying land around Ajaccio, and Bonaparte could take his companions to stay at Les Milleli in comfort.34

  Before leaving Corsica on the evening of 6 October he bought a longboat and hired a dozen strong oarsmen, to enable him to make a run for the coast in the event of an encounter with the Royal Navy. They did spot several British ships as they neared the French coast on the evening of 8 October, and Bonaparte ordered a change of course. They spent the night in a state of anxiety, fearing that they might have been spotted, but in the late morning of 9 October they sailed into the bay of Saint Raphael unhindered.

  As soon as news got about that it was the commander of the Army of the Orient who had arrived, the cannon of the local fort fired a salute and people climbed into boats to row out to greet him, ignoring the rules on quarantine which required all ships arriving from foreign lands to lay up for forty days before anyone could land or come aboard. Since the rules had been broken, Bonaparte went ashore and, extricating himself from the enthusiastic attentions of the locals, by six that evening he was on the road to Paris.

  17

  The Saviour

  ‘Here is our liberator; the heavens have sent him!’ people greeted Bonaparte when he came ashore. Others hailed him as their ‘saviour’, and some wanted to make him king. At Aix, which he reached the following day, crowds gathered outside his hotel and the municipal authorities called on him as though he were a dignitary on official business. Along the road peasants cheered and even carried torches beside his coach at night to safeguard him from the brigands with whom the region was infested – which did not prevent his baggage being stolen by what his Mameluke Roustam termed ‘French Arabs’.1

  At his next stop, Avignon, ‘word suddenly got around with extraordinary speed that General Bonaparte had arrived from Egypt and would be entering the city in a few hours’, recorded the young artillery lieutenant Jean-François Boulart. ‘In a flash the whole city was in motion, the troops stood to and marched out beyond the city walls on the road along which the hero of Italy and Egypt would come. The crowd was immense. At the sight of the great man the enthusiasm reached its peak, the air resounded with acclamations and with shouts of Vive Bonaparte! and that crowd and those shouts accompanied him all the way to the hotel in which he stopped. It was an electrifying spectacle. As soon as he reached it, he received the authorities and the officers; it was the first time I saw this prodigious being. I contemplated him with a sort of voracity, I was in a state of ecstasy. […] From that moment, we looked on him as being called to save France from the crisis into which the pitiful government of the Directory and the reverses suffered by our armies had precipitated it.’ Boulart had no doubt that Fate had brought Bonaparte back.2

  Similar scenes greeted him at Valence, where his erstwhile landlady came to see him and received the present of a cashmere shawl. When he reached Lyon on 13 October he provoked enthusiasm which turned into a civic festival, with illuminations and fireworks, and a play glorifying his deeds was staged. Enthusiastic crowds obliged him to show himself on the balcony of his hotel time after time. Again, the city dignitaries and prominent citizens called on him to pay their respects as they might to a king on his progress, and the pattern was repeated at every stop.3

  The news of his advent preceded him in Paris, eliciting the same reactions. ‘It is difficult to give an idea of the universal enthusiasm produced by his return,’ recalled Amable de Barante, then a student at the École Polytechnique. ‘Without knowing what he would want to do, without attempting to foresee what would happen, everyone, of every class, had the conviction that he would not tarry to put an end to the agony in which France was expiring … People embraced in the street, people rushed to meet him, people longed to see him.’ The nineteen-year-old poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger was in a reading room when he heard the news, and he and his fellows leapt to their feet as one man with shouts of joy. Workers in the cafés of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine hailed the return of ‘our father, our saviour, Bonaparte’, while according to a popular verse heard in the streets of the capital, ‘The gods, who are friends of this hero, have brought him to our shores.’4

  Accounts of these events bristle with the words ‘fortune’, ‘providence’ and ‘destiny’, and in many Bonaparte is described and greeted as a ‘saviour’. ‘Nations cannot escape their destiny,’ wrote Mathieu Molé, who, fearing another lurch to the left, was preparing to emigrate when he heard the news of Bonaparte’s return. He could not repress a feeling that the French nation was being guided by instinct to submit to the man Providence had intended.5

  Years of often bloody political upheaval and intermittent war, punctuated by economic crises and accompanied by fiscal chaos, had obscured the benefits of the Revolution and left the nation deeply dissatisfied. The Directory had introduced a modicum of stability and did achieve some positive results, but it was mired in corruption and had a propensity for war. While Bonaparte was in Egypt, it had responded to the new coalition stacking up against France by invading Holland, Switzerland and Naples, setting up new republics which would involve France in further conflict, and by that summer of 1799 its armies were in retreat.

  Governments are rarely judged in rational terms, and their popularity is subject to a variety
of emotional responses. The Directory, along with the two representative chambers which appointed it, figured in the public imagination as a collection of ineffectual lawyers in togas bandying slogans while pursuing their own interests, venal as well as political. It was despised by the majority across the political spectrum as a pseudo-revolutionary oligarchy, ‘a provisional tyranny’ too weak to guarantee stability and rule effectively, too corrupt to engage the support of society. Yet nothing could be done to reform it, as the constitution could not be altered before nine years had elapsed.6

  The situation cried out for a radical solution. ‘The state of our country was such that the entire French nation was prepared to give itself to whoever could save them at the same time from the foreign menace and the tyranny of their own government,’ according to the royalist Louis d’Andigné. Recent experience had shown that, in the words of one young man, ‘nothing could be undertaken or accomplished except by a general and with military force’. That was also the view of the man currently preparing a coup to overthrow the Directory (of which he was a member) and change the constitution, the former priest Émmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. He made no bones about the fact that in order to do so he needed ‘a sabre’. But he failed to appreciate that people no longer wanted some politician such as him supported by a general, they wanted the general himself. As another nineteen-year-old put it: ‘The time had come for a dictatorship, and everything pointed to the dictator.’7

  There were other generals on hand, such as Bernadotte, Moreau, Augereau and Jourdan. Bonaparte himself would later say that if it had not been him it would have been another. That is certainly true up to a point, but that ‘other’ would have served his purpose and been sooner or later hung out to dry. French society was thirsting for something more. The intellectual, moral and emotional conditioning of the past half-century had given rise to new beliefs and mythologies, and to illusory expectations of life and therefore of politics, which had themselves entered a new sphere with the Revolution. The subliminal emotions and expectations traditionally focused on the person of the monarch as the anointed representative of God on earth could, up to a point, be redirected onto abstract concepts such as the Nation and the Republic, which were anthropomorphised in art and ritual for the purpose. But they did not easily settle on a group of officials, however epically they were decked out in their togas and plumed hats. Those emotions and expectations required a cynosure more numinous, a figure sanctioned by some substitute for God, by Fate, Providence, Fortune or whatever other euphemism the theologically challenged intellectuals of the time preferred.