by Will Durant
When the Revolution came he welcomed it, and spent another furlough, in 1790, working for full acceptance of the new regime. In 1791 he submitted to the Academy of Lyons—in competition for a prize offered by Raynal—an essay on “What truths or sentiments should be imputed to men to further their happiness?” Perhaps under the spell of Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, which had “turned his head,”23 the young army officer replied: Teach them that the best life is a simple one, parents and children tilling the soil, enjoying its fruits, far from the exciting and corrupting influence of the city. All a man needs for happiness is food and clothing, a hut and a wife; let him work, eat, beget, and sleep, and he will be happier than a prince. The life and philosophy of the Spartans was the best. “Virtue consists in courage and strength; … energy is the life of the soul.… The strong man is good; only the weak man is bad.”24 Here the young Napoleon echoed Thrasymachus25 and foreshadowed Nietzsche, who returned the compliment by making Napoleon a hero of the will to power.26 Amid the argument he went out of his way to condemn absolute monarchy, class privileges, and ecclesiastical trumpery. The Lyons Academy rejected the essay as immature.
In September, 1791, Napoleon again visited his native land. He rejoiced in the decree by which the Constituent Assembly had made Corsica a département of France, and had dowered its people with all the privileges of French citizens. Withdrawing his vows of vengeance upon the nation that had so violently made him a Frenchman, he felt that the Revolution was creating a brilliant new France. In an imaginary conversation—Le Souper de Beaucaire—published at his own expense in the fall of 1793, he defended the Revolution as “a combat to the death between the patriots and the despots of Europe,”27 and urged all the oppressed to join in the struggle for the rights of man. His old hero Paoli, however, felt that membership of Corsica in the French nation would be acceptable to him only if he were given full authority in the island, with finances to be supplied by France, but with the rigorous exclusion of French soldiers from Corsican soil. Napoleon thought this proposal extreme; he broke with his idol, and opposed Paoli’s candidates in the Ajaccio municipal election of April 1, 1792. Paoli won, and Napoleon returned to France.
In Paris, on June 20, he saw the populace invade the Tuileries; he marveled that the King did not disperse the “cannibals” with a fusillade from his Swiss Guards. On August 10 he saw the sansculottes and the Fédérés drive the royal family from the palace; he described the crowd as “the lowest scum; … they do not belong to the working classes at all.”28 With rising reservations he continued to support the Revolution, being now an officer in its Army. In December, 1793, as already related, he distinguished himself in the capture of Toulon. The commendation sent to Robespierre resulted in the appointment of Napoleon as brigadier general at the age of twenty-four; but it shared in his being arrested as a Robespierriste (August 6, 1794) after Robespierre’s fall. He was imprisoned at Antibes, and was scheduled for trial and possible execution; he was released after a fortnight, but was placed on inactive service at reduced pay. In the spring of 1795 (he tells us) he was wandering along the Seine, meditating suicide, when a friend, encountering him, revived him with a gift of thirty thousand francs;29 Napoleon later returned the sum manifold. In June Boissy d’Anglas described him as “a little Italian, pale, slender, and puny, but singularly audacious in his views.”30 He thought for a time of going to Turkey, reorganizing the Sultan’s army, and carving out for himself some Oriental realm. In a more practical mood he drew up for the War Ministry a plan of campaign for driving the Austrians out of Italy.
Then, in one of those whims of history that open a door to the inevitable, the Convention, besieged (October 5, 1795) by royalists and others, assigned Barras to organize its defense. He decided that a blast of artillery would do it, but no artillery was at hand. He had noted Napoleon’s enterprise at Toulon; he sent for him, commissioned him to secure and use artillery; it was done, and Napoleon became at once famous and infamous. When the War Ministry needed a bold and enterprising commander to lead the Army of Italy, Carnot (or Barras31) secured the appointment for Bonaparte (March 2, 1796). Seven days later the happy general married the still beautiful Josephine.
III. JOSEPHINE DE BEAUHARNAIS
She was a Creole—i.e., a person of French or Spanish descent born and raised in tropical colonies. The island of Martinique, in the Caribbean, had been French for 128 years when Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie was born there in 1763 of an old Orléans family. Her uncle, Baron de Tascher, was then governor of the port; her father had been a page in the household of the Dauphine Marie-Josèphe, mother of Louis XVI. She was educated at the Convent of the Ladies of Providence in Fort-Royal (now Fort-de-France), seat of the colonial government. The curriculum then consisted of catechism, deportment, penmanship, drawing, embroidery, dancing, and music; the nuns believed that these would get a woman much further than Latin, Greek, history, and philosophy; and Josephine proved them right. She became, as had been said of Mme. de Pompadour, “a morsel for a king.”
At sixteen she was taken to France and was married to Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais, then only nineteen, but already experienced in the philandering ways of the French aristocracy. Soon his long and frequent absences betrayed his adulteries, and left in the impressionable Josephine the conviction that the Sixth Commandment was not intended for the upper classes. She gave herself devotedly to her two children—Eugène (1781–1824) and Hortense (1783–1837), who rewarded her with their lifelong loyalty.
When the Revolution came, the Vicomte adjusted his politics to the new regime, and for five years he kept his head. But as the Terror proceeded, any title to nobility could be a warrant for arrest. In 1794 both Alexandre and Josephine were apprehended, and separately imprisoned; and on July 24 he was guillotined. While awaiting a similar fate Josephine accepted the amorous advances of General Lazare Hoche.32 She was among the many nobles released after the fall of Robespierre.
Made almost destitute by the confiscation of her husband’s wealth, and anxious to provide care and education for her children, Josephine used the lure of her dark-blue eyes and languorous beauty to make a friend of Tallien and a lover of the rising Barras.33 Much of Beauharnais’ confiscated wealth was restored to her, including an elegant carriage and a team of black horses;34 presently she was next only to Mme. Tallien as a leader of Directory society. Napoleon described her salon as “the most distinguished in Paris.”35
He attended some of her soirees, and was fascinated by her mature charms, her easy grace, and what her indulgent father called her “exceedingly sweet disposition.”36 She was not impressed by Bonaparte, who appeared to her as a sallow youth with a “lean and hungry look,” and a corresponding income. She sent her son, now fourteen, to solicit his aid in recovering the confiscated sword of her husband. Eugène was so comely and modest that Napoleon at once agreed to attend to the matter. It was done; Josephine called on him to thank him; and invited him to lunch for October 29. He came, and was conquered. As early as December, 1795, she admitted him to her bed,37 but they were reluctant to marry. He reminisced at St. Helena: “Barras did me a service by advising me to marry Josephine. He assured me that she belonged to both the old and the new society, and that this fact would bring me more support; that her house was the best in Paris, and would rid me of my Corsican name; finally that through this marriage I should become quite French.”38 Barras gave her similar advice, for reasons still debated;39 here, he told her, is a man who gives every sign of forging a high place for himself in the world. Napoleon was not deterred by her former amours; “Everything about you pleased me,” he would soon write to her, “even to the memory of the error of your ways … Virtue, for me, consisted of what you made it.”40
They were married on March 9, 1796, by a purely civil ceremony; Tallien and Barras served as witnesses; no relatives were invited. To mitigate the disparity of their ages—he twenty-seven, she thirty-three—Napoleon registered himself as twenty-eight, Jose
phine wrote her age as twenty-nine.41 They spent their wedding night at her home. He encountered virile opposition from her pet dog, Fortuné. “That gentleman,” he tells us, “was in possession of Madame’s bed…. I wanted to have him leave, but to no avail; I was told to share the bed with him or sleep elsewhere; I had to take it or leave it. The favorite was less accommodating than I was”; at the worst possible moment the dog bit his leg, so severely that he long kept the scar.42
On March 11, torn between his new delight and his ruling passion for power and glory, Napoleon left to lead the Army of Italy, in one of the most brilliant campaigns in history.
IV. ITALIAN WHIRLWIND: MARCH 27, 1796 - DECEMBER 5, 1797
The military situation had been simplified by treaties with Prussia and Spain, but Austria refused peace so long as France clung to her conquests in the Netherlands and along the Rhine. England continued the war at sea, and granted a subsidy of £600,000 to Austria to finance the war on land. Austria had ruled Lombardy since 1713. She was now allied with Charles Emmanuel IV, king of Sardinia and Piedmont, who hoped to regain Savoy and Nice, taken by the French in 1792.
The Directory, led in this matter by Carnot, planned its military operations for 1796 as a three-pronged assault upon Austria. One French army, under Jourdan, was to attack the Austrians on the northeast front along the Sambre and the Meuse; another, under Moreau, was to proceed against the Austrians along the Moselle and the Rhine; a third, under Bonaparte, was to attempt the expulsion of the Austrians and the Sardinians from Italy. Jourdan, after some victories, encountered the superior forces of the Archduke Karl Ludwig, suffered defeats at Amberg and Würzburg, and retreated to the west bank of the Rhine. Moreau advanced into Bavaria almost to Munich, then, learning that the victorious Archduke could cut his line of communications or attack him in the rear, he withdrew into Alsace. The Directory, as a final hope, turned to Napoleon.
Reaching Nice on March 27, he found the “Army of Italy” in no condition to face the Austrian and Sardinian forces that blocked the narrow entrance into Italy between the Mediterranean and the towering Alps. His troops numbered some 43,000, brave men accustomed to mountain war, but ill-clothed, ill-shod, and so poorly fed that they had to steal in order to live;43 hardly thirty thousand of them could be called upon for arduous campaigns. They had scant cavalry and almost no artillery. The generals over whom the twenty-seven-year-old commander had been placed—Augereau, Masséna, Laharpe, and Sésurier—were all older than Napoleon in service; they resented his appointment, and were resolved to make him feel their superior experience; but at their first meeting with him they were awed into quick obedience by the confident clarity with which he explained his plans and gave his orders.
He could overawe his generals, but he could not free himself from the spell that Josephine laid upon him. Four days after reaching Nice he put his maps and orderlies aside and wrote to her a letter hot with the ardor of a youth who had just discovered depths of passion under his dreams of power:
Nice, 31 March, 1796
Not a day passes without my loving you, not a night but I hold you in my arms. I cannot drink a cup of tea without cursing the martial ambition that separates me from the soul of my life. Whether I am buried in business, or leading my troops, or inspecting the camps, my adorable Josephine fills my mind.…
My soul is sad, my heart is in chains, and I imagine things that terrify me. You do not love me as you did; you will console yourself elsewhere.…
Goodbye, my wife, my tormentor, my happiness, … whom I love, whom I fear, the source of feelings that make me as gentle as Nature herself, and of impulses under which I am as catastrophic as a thunderbolt. I do not ask you to love me forever, or to be faithful to me, but simply … to tell me the truth.… Nature has made my soul resolute and strong, while yours she has constructed of lace and gauze…. My mind is intent on vast plans, my heart utterly engrossed with you…
Goodbye! Ah, if you love me less it must be that you never loved me at all. Then were I indeed to be pitied.
BONAPARTE44
He wrote to her again on April 3 and 7, amid the rising tempo of the war. He studied all the information he could get about the enemy forces that he must defeat: an Austrian army under Beaulieu at Voltri near Genoa; another under Argentau at Montenotte, farther west; and a Sardinian army under Colli at Ceva, farther north. Beaulieu assumed that his lines of communications would serve to inform him should any of his armies need urgent help. On that basis he could reasonably expect to repel the French attack, for his combined forces outnumbered the French about two to one. Napoleon’s strategy was to move as many of his troops, as secretly and rapidly as possible, to confront one of the defending armies, and overwhelm it before either of the other two could come to its aid. The plan involved rapid marches by the French over rough and mountainous routes; it required hardy and resolute warriors. Napoleon sought to arouse them with the first of those famous proclamations that were no small part of his armament:
SOLDIERS, you are hungry and naked. The Republic owes you much, but she has not the means to pay her debts. I am come to lead you into the most fertile plains that the sun beholds. Rich provinces, opulent towns; all shall be at your disposal. Soldiers! with such a prospect before you, can you fail in courage and constancy?45
It was an open invitation to plunder, but how else could he get these unpaid men to bear long marches and then face death? Napoleon, like most rulers and revolutionists, never allowed morality to hinder victory, and he trusted to success to whitewash his sins. Should not Italy contribute to the cost of her liberation?
The first goal of his strategy was to smash the Sardinian army and induce the King of Sardinia to retire to Turin, his Piedmont capital. A series of crucial and successful engagements—Montenotte (April 11), Millesimo (April 13), Dego (April 15), and Mondovi (April 22)—shattered the Sardinian forces and compelled Charles Emmanuel to sign at Cherasco (April 28) an armistice ceding Savoy and Nice to France, and, in effect, withdrawing from the war. In those battles the young commander impressed his subordinates with his keen and quick perception of developments, needs, and opportunities, his clear and decisive orders, the logic and success of tactics completing the foresight of strategy that often caught the enemy on flank or rear. The older generals learned to obey him with confidence in his vision and judgment; the younger officers—Junot, Lannes, Murat, Marmont, Berthier—developed for him a devotion that repeatedly faced death in his cause. When, after these victories, the exhausted survivors reached the heights of Monte Zemoto—from which they could view the sunlit plains of Lombardy—many of them broke out in a spontaneous salute to the youth who had led them so brilliantly.
Now they did not have to plunder in order to live; wherever he established French rule Napoleon taxed the rich and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and persuaded or ordered the towns to contribute to the upkeep and orderly behavior of his troops. On April 26, at Cherasco, he addressed his army in a clever eulogy that cautioned them against pillage:
SOLDIERS:
You have in a fortnight won six victories, taken twenty-one standards, fifty-five pieces of artillery, and conquered the richest part of Piedmont…. Without any resources you have supplied all that was necessary. You have won battles without cannon, passed rivers without bridges, made forced marches without shoes, camped without brandy and often without bread…. Your grateful country will owe its prosperity to you….
But, soldiers, you have done nothing as yet compared with what there still remains to do. Neither Turin nor Milan remains to you…. Is there anyone among you whose courage is lacking? Is there anyone who would prefer to return across the summits of the Apennines and the Alps and bear patiently the disgrace of a slavish soldier? No, there is none such among the conquerors of Montenotte, of Dego, of Mondovi. All of you are burning to extend the glory of the French people….
Friends, I am promising you this conquest, but there is one condition which you must swear to fulfill. That is to respect the peoples
whom you deliver, and repress the horrible pillage which certain scoundrels, incited by our enemies, commit. Otherwise you will not be the deliverers of the people but their scourges…. Your victories, your bravery, your success, the blood of your brothers who have died in battle—all will be lost, even honor and glory. As for me and the generals who have your confidence, we should blush to command an army without discipline and restraint…. Anyone who engages in pillage will be shot without mercy.
Peoples of Italy, the French army comes to break your chains; the French people is the friend of all peoples. You may receive them with confidence. Your property, your religion, and your customs will be respected…. We have no grudge except against the tyrants who oppress you.
BONAPARTE
There had been much pillage in that first campaign; there would still be some despite this plea and threat. Napoleon had some looters shot, and pardoned others. “These wretches,” he said, “are excusable; they have sighed for three years after the promised land, … and now that they have entered it they wish to enjoy it.”46 He appeased them by letting them share in the contributions and provisions that he exacted from the “liberated” towns.
Amid all this turmoil of marches, battles, and diplomacy he thought almost hourly of the wife he had left so soon after their wedding night. Now that she might safely pass over the Cévennes he begged her, in a letter of April 17, to come to him. “Come quickly,” he wrote on April 24, 1796; “I warn you, if you delay longer, you will find me ill. These fatigues and your absence—the two together are more than I can bear…. Take wings, and fly…. A kiss upon your heart, another a little lower, another lower still, far lower!”47