The Fall of Toulon

by Bernard Ireland

  In April 1793 the Toulon republicans demanded that Paoli came to the mainland to explain his attitude. Wisely, he declined to comply, instead summoning leading figures from all the island’s communities. They gave him full backing and Corsica effectively revolted against French rule, confining its representatives to the towns. It was readily apparent to the British that, if the Royal Navy could prevent any French intervention, Corsica would come over to the coalition by dint of its own effort.

  From Turin, John Trevor had reported back to Hood in gloomy terms. During the month’s delay in the anticipated arrival of the British fleet, the French had established up to 18,000 troops in Nice and had dug well in. At the moment, the coalition could oppose them with some 20,000 Piedmontese and 7,000 Austrians. Because further Italian reinforcement was being withheld due to petty internal jealousies, additional Austrian assistance had been sought.

  Trevor reported further that one Captain Masseria, personal representative of General Paoli (and paid a retainer by the British) had arrived at Leghorn to confer but had been sent packing by the Tuscan government, itself both nervous of the French and anxious to maintain the highly profitable grain trade.

  Trevor also had useful intelligence on French fleet dispositions. With Hood delayed, the Toulon squadron had been urged to strike quickly against the Spanish fleet and to destroy it in detail. This fleeting opportunity had, however, passed unexploited owing to the poor material condition of some French vessels, together with the general state of indiscipline and indifferent leadership. Three frigates, none the less, were at Leghorn and two more at Genoa, all designated escorts for grain convoys. A Levant squadron comprised five frigates, backed by four more at Smyrna and one detached at Salonika. More immediately relevant to Hood were two unspecified French warships off Corsica while, at Tunis, the Bey of which the French were cultivating, lay a 74, four frigates and three smaller ships.

  The first hostile brush with the French occurred when Captain Inglefield, having received his despatch, began to warp the Aigle from the mole at Genoa where she had been moored stern-on, ‘Mediterranean fashion’. The port was, of course, neutral territory and, laying close aboard the British vessel were the French frigate Modeste and the corvette Badine. As the Aigle got under weigh, so both the French ships did likewise, obstructing her. It was deliberate provocation, probably spurred by the knowledge that the Aigle had been captured from the French a decade earlier. A strong diplomatic representation followed Hood’s expressed displeasure at the incident. It was met with an anodyne response from the Genoese authorities; but the Modeste would discover, just three months later, that the Royal Navy had its own way of responding to calculated insult.

  PROBABLY NOT UNCONNECTED with the fact that his father was comptroller of the navy, Thomas Byam Martin, on being promoted to the rank of commander, was given his choice of ship in the Tisiphone. Built as a fireship, she had been converted to a 20-gun ship-sloop and was reputed to be a fast sailer.

  Having received Trevor’s despatch from Turin, Hood, while still at Gibraltar, had placed Martin under the orders of Captain George Lumsdaine for a special mission. The latter, in the Mermaid frigate, was to accompany the Isis 32, laden with gifts for the Bey of Tripoli. He also carried important despatches for the British consul at Tunis. These were to be passed to Martin, when near that port, for personal delivery.

  Duly entering the Bay of Tunis in a gale of wind, Martin was confronted by the sight of the French Duquesne 74 and a frigate squadron at anchor. He saw his primary duty as reporting the enemy presence to his superior officer. Duly overhauled and brought back, Lumsdaine assessed the situation and sent away the Mermaid to report directly to Hood while he joined Martin in the Tisiphone to accompany the Isis to Tripoli as ordered.

  Having thus discharged their duties, as they had thought, Lumsdaine and Martin were more than surprised on their return to discover that their admiral had ‘expressed his dissatisfaction with much warmth’ and, upon being summoned aboard the flagship, were informed of Hood’s intention of court-martialling both for disobeying orders.

  Hood, of course, had been playing something of a wily game. Apprised of the French squadron at Tunis he had sent the Tisiphone there in the hope that the senior French officer would ‘in the rashness of [his] republican feelings’ take the ship. Such an action would give Hood the necessary pretext for sweeping the enemy out of every neutral port. Lumsdaine was duly tried but was exonerated, the majority of the board feeling that he had used reasonable discretion. Because he was obeying the orders of his senior officer, Martin never faced a court.

  The affair did neither officer much harm in that Byam Martin died an admiral of the fleet and Lumsdaine a vice admiral. It did, however, say much for the character of Hood and illustrates the touch of ruthlessness necessary in an effective commander-in-chief in time of war.

  Perhaps, also, the admiral felt a little guilty at his readiness to put the Tisiphone and her crew in such danger. In the following October, the enemy frigate Modeste, which had caused such offence at Genoa, was cut out there, taken and commissioned into Hood’s fleet. Martin was promoted post captain to take her command.

  WITH THE CIVIL WAR intensifying, and major cities and regions openly hostile to the legislature in Paris, a coordinated effort on the part of the coalition might well have reversed the course of the Revolution. But its forces were divided, by both geography and inclination. The Spaniards, entering France by the Pyrenees, were far distant from the Sardinians attacking across the Alps in Savoy. These failed to assist the royalist stronghold of Lyon, besieged by the troops of the Convention from mid July. During that month Austrian, British and Dutch forces advanced into French territory, capturing the fortress of Valenciennes. Simultaneously, the Prussians probed into the Vosges. What had begun promisingly, however, collapsed when the British and Austrians decided to operate separately, followed by a similar split between the Austrians and the Prussians.

  French military forces, which should have been greatly divided and everywhere under pressure, were thus able to contain the threats from both within and without. Internal dissent was now countered increasingly through the policy of terror, as decreed by the now smaller Committee of Public Safety. Although courts were never quite as indiscriminately ruthless as often portrayed, often discharging as many as they condemned, this was offset by the sheer number sent for trial.

  Terror was now the means by which those put in a position of responsibility discharged that responsibility. The threat of summary punishment permeated from the War Cabinet to the humblest of levies. Terror became the cement that maintained the fabric of the Revolution at the time when it looked most vulnerable. It is generally held to be the means by which the Revolution survived.

  Acting with fierce energy, the committee organized the famous levée en masse. All France was to be mobilized. Unmarried men would fight, with improvised weapons if necessary. Married men would manufacture weapons and generally support those who fought by manning the rear echelons. Women would tend the injured and sew uniforms and tents, assisted by their children. This was total mobilization, war across national boundaries even as forecast by the comte de Guibert.

  In areas where the spirit of Revolution commanded only borderline support, the posting of conscription notices fomented more seats of mass opposition. None, however, prospered, snuffed out by the universal threat of summary punishment (even battalion-sized units were issued with mobile guillotines). In return for this enforced absence from its farms, the peasantry was promised that the last seigneurial rights would be abolished.

  Military units were all accompanied by représentants en mission, the dreaded commissars who would have officers shot in front of their men for incompetence or non-enforcement of discipline. In extreme cases they insisted that, in the name of equality, the duties of commander be rotated in turn throughout the unit.

  Although life afloat to an extent insulated ship’s crews from the immediate effects of these draconian decrees, the st
eady drip of half-baked fraternalistic dogma eroded their will and weakened the sense of total unity that defines efficient companies. The response of authority was not to inspire the lower deck with that trust in direction that saw gun crews fight to the last round but to threaten the officers with death should they fail to do so. The same fate awaited the commander of any ship of the line that was surrendered, unless that ship was sinking under him. Any that allowed a line of battle to be broken would suffer likewise. No smaller ship could be surrendered to an enemy of less than twice its strength while, in combat, no quarter was to be given.

  AS HE QUIETLY FULMINATED at the easterlies that slowed his passage from Gibraltar, Hood could have had little inkling of what lay ahead. His Admiralty orders promised a standard routine of blockade, patrol and convoy. The major task of bringing the enemy to action depended very much on whether that enemy was minded to leave the security of his well-defended Toulon base. Information was scanty for, as late as 1 August, the First Lord, Chatham, mentioned in a letter to Hood: ‘I am very anxious to hear what the real situation is of the French force at Toulon, of which we have very little and very imperfect intelligence.’

  Although the admiral was almost certainly aware of the extent of the civil war wracking France, and that much of the Midi embraced policies more moderate than those being imposed upon it by a far-off Paris, he took the robust view that he was at war with France and that all French were to be assumed hostile. His first imperative was to foster the required easy working relationships with Britain’s coalition partners, whatever his private opinions of their fighting qualities.

  Events ashore had, in fact, progressed somewhat. Wisely, the Convention had extended feelers to investigate the possibility of a negotiated settlement with the intractable south. If a little magnanimity could defuse the situation, suitable retribution could wait awhile.

  Both the far south and the Rhône valley, however, remained implacably opposed to the new order and were capable of committing like excesses to demonstrate the fact. On 27 July, therefore, as Hood offshore reassembled his fleet, scattered and damaged by a fierce three-day gale, the Revolutionary General Jean-François Carteaux occupied Avignon, which effectively put a wedge between the federalist hotspots of Lyon and Marseilles/Toulon.

  Carteaux’s army had, in fact, been drawn from the so-called Army of the Alps, whose coalition opponents remained more interested in mutual disagreement than in pushing westward to exploit the opportunity of aiding the Girondist moderates while they were still a force. For Lyon, therefore, once it had been invested, it was only a matter of time. Its capture, some ten weeks later, was accompanied by savagery designed deliberately to cow remaining opposition elsewhere. The termination of the siege also freed republican military strength, which was immediately directed at the dissidents in the south.

  The British appreciated that too little grain could be grown in the dry south to support its population. As communications with the north were still comparatively primitive, the region depended upon its imports from Italy and North Africa, and these were now effectively cut off by blockade.

  As in Corsica, the region had been greatly antagonized by the activities of the two représentants en mission sent by Paris, but remained more committed to a France of moderate change than it was to defection. (‘Although the Convention has denounced them as traitors,’ Nelson wrote, ‘yet even these people will not declare for anything but Liberty and Equality.’)

  The moderate civic leaders of Toulon, incensed by the proscription of the Girondists in Paris and at the unjustified execution of the faction’s leading members, expelled the Jacobin représentants on 13 July. As it was all too plain, however, that the Convention retained its grip on the better part of the nation, there could be no thought of recant: the Revolutionaries showed no mercy. The Toulonnais prepared to defend themselves.

  A majority of the town’s citizens had appeared, understandably, not to favour armed opposition, but had been galvanized by the activities of Carteaux’s army nearby and by the knowledge that a second column was advancing along the coast from the area around the Italian border. Fearful of retribution, they fell in behind their leaders, who declared loyalty to the now-imprisoned dauphin, the young Louis XVII. Then, almost certainly with grave misgivings, they decided to seek assistance from the enemy coalition, whose presence was very apparent in the offing.

  In the naval base, personnel were polarized between the Revolutionary cant of the crew from the recently arrived Atlantic fleet ships and the natural moderation of those aboard the existing Mediterranean squadron. Their senior officer was Contre Amiral (Rear Admiral) Comte Trogoff de Kerlessy, who was anxious to play down his aristocratic background. For obvious reasons he thus avoided risk of confrontation and, consequently, exerted little authority. His second-in-command, Contre Admiral Saint-Julien, was of Revolutionary sympathies, as were the crew of his flagship. As already noted, however, such crews were more concerned with rights than with obligations. For the moment, there was no chance that Hood would be able to realize the key requirement in his Admiralty orders, that of bringing the enemy fleet to action.

  PART THREE Toulon

  chapter five

  Occupation and Expectation, to September 1793

  EVENTS IN TOULON had been stimulated by Jacobin excess. Popular clubs had sprung up throughout the département but, where they were ostensibly to assist in the organization of the region’s defence against any incursions from the east, they had, in reality, been more concerned with assuming power by a coordinated effort. To this end, representatives were in close touch, meeting almost daily in defiance of opposition from more moderate elements who, a silent majority, appeared powerless in the face of the vigour and determination of the left-wing activists.

  Prominent opponents of the movement began to experience unpleasant deaths, succumbing in ones and twos at the hands of orchestrated mobs or of groups of men who had the entrée even to the city gaol. The latter persons were never apprehended, but their identities were known and remembered. Aimed mainly at members of the middle class, their activities pre-dated the September massacres in Paris. This was deliberate policy, for it had been declared that, while the aristocracy of the nobles and the clergy had been overthrown by the Revolution, the bourgeoisie (‘the strongest aristocracy of all’) still flourished.

  The autumn of 1792 was Toulon’s nadir, the time of the thug. Moderates were cowed into deserting the committees and institutions through which the town functioned. All authority was now through, or controlled by, the Jacobins. Maintenance of law was precarious and partisan. Employment depended in large measure on accepting the situation with as much grace as possible, although it had to be borne in mind that, to a large section of the town’s poorer community, and to those eager to take advantage, the new order was to be embraced wholeheartedly, for they believed themselves to be on the threshold of great things. It would be a difficult birth and pain had to be accepted.

  Even the architects of events in Toulon began to feel that things might have gone too far, however, and they took the precaution of sending representatives to Paris to present their case and to pre-empt awkward questions. They need not have worried, for the emissaries discovered a capital in bloody turmoil, with a National Assembly little interested in the problems of a distant, provincial city.

  To the east of Toulon, General Anselme’s campaign into Italy was going well, reducing the state of hyper-excitement and permitting the Var departmental elections to be held in September 1792 in something like normality. Turnout was low, however, and the Jacobin candidates had little difficulty in gaining power.

  By October the Revolutionary army had taken Villefranche and Toulon was busy with the preparations for Truguet’s abortive expedition to Sardinia. It was the patriotic duty of radicals to cooperate fully in such an enterprise and, once again, there was a sense of purpose as means were found to keep the arsenal busy. Further elections, for district and urban representation, were thus conducted toward
the end of the year in a calmer atmosphere, which tended to obscure the fact that, again with low turnouts, the popular representatives had firmly grasped power, and by a fully democratic process.

  Toulon’s town council now largely comprised men of no previous experience and of no great education. It firmly approved the news, early in 1793, that the king had been executed and set about restoring a sense of order and a return to the rule of law. Paint was applied over the cracks of Jacobin excess by renaming the club the Republican Society and its resolve was underlined with the imposition of the first death penalties on those who continued to act with violence. ‘Without the exercise of virtue’, it was stated, ‘your revolution will be in vain.’ This was a new departure for the more extreme fringe elements, which thrived in the general state of unrest and which had no reason to welcome normality.

  With the general return of order, the populace was relieved of much of the threat of lawlessness, the primary concern of every household. In the absence of this major preoccupation, however, townsfolk naturally concentrated upon the next most pressing issues: employment, the cost of a loaf and the falling value of money. Popular opprobrium had been directed at the old order, blamed for responsibility through mismanagement, graft or unspecified counter-revolutionary activities. Now that the Jacobins were firmly and obviously in power, and being equally powerless to effect instant improvement, they began to be blamed instead.