The Fall of Toulon

by Bernard Ireland

  The coming of war transformed matters inasmuch as considerable numbers of workers, both skilled and unskilled, were drafted into the arsenal. As many had been recruited from around the country they were unaffected by problems peculiar to Toulon and acted as a counter to radicalism. Also resident in the arsenal were two représentants en mission, sent by the National Convention to enforce efficient working practices. These enjoyed every cooperation from the Jacobin administration, which began to dismiss recalcitrant employees, a previously unthinkable measure. Dockyard workers and naval personnel were also obliged to leave the militia in order to prevent the resulting continual absenteeism. Thus, the National Guard, previously an instrument of Jacobin policy, saw its party ties weakened and uncertainty grow in its ranks as to the direction in which affairs were heading.

  Even as it had underlain the widespread grievances that had launched the Revolution four years before, the price of bread remained a major issue. At a local level this was due in part to naval blockade interrupting grain supplies from Ligurian ports. General unrest also stemmed from the unpopularity of the assignats which, imposed upon workers as a portion of their wages, were steadily depreciating in value. Traders were increasingly reluctant to accept them as payment, many charging a premium to do so and thus adding a further twist to the spiral of hardship.

  General disaffection was staved off during the first half of 1793 by the local authorities, supported by the représentants, approving pay increases of the order of 150 per cent, with the further concession of issues of bread. Concessions were, however, of limited use for, sensing their growing bargaining power with the extra demands of war, workers’ committees demanded an end to the issue of paper money and a freeze on the price of staples. Powerless to refuse them, the authorities acceded to their demands, but the lot of the average worker remained measurably worse than it had been under the monarchy and, for this, he blamed the controlling Jacobins.

  The currency of the local administration was considerably undermined by a succession of events which began in March 1793 with the hang-dog return of the miserably unsuccessful expedition against Sardinia. A month later, the authority of the replacement commander-in-chief, Trogoff, was challenged when the crews of two recently returned frigates refused to put to sea again. Their failed demand for shore leave, as a right, hardened into a total lack of cooperation with their officers.

  Now, by their own actions, inextricably bound into the workings of the navy, the civil authorities took both crews ashore for interrogation. What emerged was a story centred upon the senior captain, François-Gabriel de Basterot of the Melpomène, who at only 30 had been fast-tracked for promotion due to the general shortage of officers. On the recent voyage his behaviour had, indeed, been somewhat unusual but was less that of someone conspiring against the new republic than of one suffering from nervous exhaustion. None the less, he was charged with involvement with émigré counter-revolutionaries and, as scapegoat, faced with court martial. Despite every evidence that the crews had been exercising their new democratic right to question and debate every order given to them, making Basterot’s authority unenforceable, the hapless captain was declared guilty as charged and summarily guillotined before the assembled fleet.

  The incident was significant in that the Revolutionary authorities, having gained power, were faced with the consequences of the mutinous behaviour that their new order encouraged. It also demonstrated that officers were still likely to be blamed for the indiscriminate actions of their crews, a situation here exacerbated by Basterot’s minor aristocratic background and his having joined the service under the old regime.

  There existed also the paradox of mutinous crew members addressing the local Republican Society, where they were enthusiastically received, although this same club represented the forces that were striving to get the fleet on to a war footing despite the depredations of its own policies.

  Commanding officers, for their own good as much as for the benefit of the service, had to accept the realities of the situation but, having done so, were entitled to expect to be able to maintain discipline in the name of a central authority. As this authority was now the republic rather than the crown, it was to the republic that they looked for support, only to discover that they, as a corps, were still generally regarded by those in power as potential enemies of the people. They also found that local committees exercised greater authority than did the Convention in Paris.

  It was events in Paris, however, that were to shape those in Toulon, fatally damaging the Jacobins’ credibility. Late in the May the Girondins were expelled from the Convention, their leaders confined under house arrest. Delegates thus proscribed returned to their provincial constituencies, burning with desire to prevent a single group perverting a popular revolution to its own ends. The result in several major cities was the so-called ‘federalist’ backlash. Minor employees and merchants, the middle-class bourgeoisie hated by the activists of the Left, greatly concerned at the course of events, felt sufficiently emboldened to unite and to challenge the Left’s authority. Perhaps to their surprise, they discovered that they were supported by many of their employees, the humbler working folk that the militants assumed were the mainspring of their cause. Brave parades by a few thousand such as in Lyon or Marseille did not, however, yet constitute a major threat to those in control in the capital. Further, had the federalists enjoyed more eventual success, complications would have emerged through their being polarized between royalist and non-royalist sympathies.

  Matters came to a head on 13 July when Jean-Paul Marat, who typified the clique that espoused bloody death as reward for the slightest suspicion of anti-revolutionary foot-dragging, was himself assassinated. Interestingly, his killer, the young Charlotte Corday, had been motivated not by the death of the king but by the conviction that Marat was a leading cause of the intensifying civil war that was plunging France into outright anarchy.

  Marat lay virtually in state, to be viewed for days by much of the populace as preparations were advanced for an elaborate martyr’s funeral. This led to a series of events, climaxed on 10 August by an ambitious travelling spectacle which enacted, in allegorical form, the progress of the Revolution to date. This, the so-called Fête de l’Unité et L’Indivisibilité, celebrated the first anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy, and was designed as a consecration of the new constitution. Such cavorting may well have cheered Parisians, reinforcing their belief in themselves as the dynamo of the Revolution, but they could not disguise the fact that all was not well elsewhere.

  Although, at the end of July, General Carteaux’s republican army had taken the city of Avignon, driving a wedge between dissidents on the Mediterranean coast and those in the area of Lyon, foreign armies were advancing across France’s borders while, in the Vendée and the Midi, opposition thrived. It was, however, never likely that the federalist forces in Lyon, Marseille and Toulon would unite in a common front, while Carteaux’s active presence was a potent reminder that, once demolished in detail, those forces would face the worst of state retribution.

  In the Convention, the considerable figure of Georges Danton strove to promote the policy of appeasement, to meet with the forces of counterrevolution in order to agree a mutually acceptable compromise. He failed in the white heat of extremist anger that followed the death of Marat, and was dropped from the Committee of Public Safety. In place of pragmatism there thus emerged the policy of organized terror.

  Accused of allowing the price of bread to exceed by far that obtaining during the monarchy, the Convention responded by denouncing hoarding. All those holding stocks of a wide range of essentials were ordered, on pain of death, to declare them. All had to be available on the open market. Regulating officials would be appointed in every region to oversee harvests and to ensure that no wily peasant withheld any part of his crop. Représentants en mission would everywhere ensure that the republic imposed its will, if not by edict then by force and, if necessary, terror.

  Facing threa
ts to the Revolution, both within their borders and without, the authorities initiated an attempted total mobilization, a levée en masse for the creation of a huge conscript army. In the south, however, events had moved ahead of the Convention’s ability to control them.

  In both Marseille and Toulon the Jacobins were on the defensive, their clubs in close touch in an attempt to keep the situation under control. To the general population, however, had come the realization that it was being cowed by a comparatively small number of resolute extremists who were imposing the policies of a far-off Convention whose actions transcended the mores of decent folk.

  As the silent majority began, haltingly but with increasing confidence, to find its voice, the oppressed from the whole region began to migrate to the coast. They were not necessarily pro-royalist nor anti-revolutionary so much as merely fearful for themselves and their dependants and bewildered by events and contemptuous of pip-squeak representatives of a new order who strutted among them exercising extreme and terrible authority. The local sections, the committees of citizens’ representatives, had been proscribed by the new authorities, who determined that any discussion would be tightly controlled. Now, however, some nine months later, there came strengthening calls for the committees’ reinstatement.

  Deciding on a show of strength, the Jacobins staged a procession through Toulon’s narrow streets. But the armed mob, with its bellowed, orchestrated demands of death for all who supported reversion to the old system, had lost much of its power to shock and to intimidate. Onlookers were now repelled by the spectacle.

  Previously a feared instrument of Jacobin authority, the National Guard was now a force of very uncertain individuals. The power that had spawned them appeared to be on the wane and there was a fair chance that they would be called to account for past actions carried out in its name. In a somewhat craven volte face they backed a new and strongly worded demand that the eight section assemblies be permitted to reconvene and that the process of government of citizens’ affairs return to something like the earlier normality that now appeared so desirable.

  With a surprising docility, the Jacobins stepped down, transferring power back to the district assemblies, which quickly moved to appoint an overall General Committee. This comprised thirty-two members, drawn from every section. They came from the bourgeois aristocracy, so detested by the Convention and who, mostly, had earlier experience, together with arsenal and military representatives, artisans and clergy. In Marseille the handover process was rather more difficult, but ended similarly.

  In a symbolic move to extirpate Jacobin philosophies, that club’s meeting place was destroyed although, in the spirit of reconciliation, some of its members were invited to participate in the new neighbourhood assemblies. Probably because of the lack of any practicable alternative, some officials were left in post. These included magistrates, some committee leaders and National Guard commanders.

  By coincidence, power in Toulon reverted on 14 July 1793, the fourth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Measures were put in hand to appoint new district and departmental assemblies but, due to the course of events, the process was never satisfactorily completed.

  An inevitable and unpleasant result of the changeover was the establishment of a Popular Tribunal to try those accused of excesses committed under the Jacobin regime. So many were taken into custody that most had to be imprisoned afloat. The vessel so employed was the Thémistocle, a new, Lorient-crewed 74 that was awaiting repair following an on-board fire and explosion caused by explosive shells during the abortive Sardinian expedition.

  It is a sad indictment of the new and ‘moderate’ administration that its courts handed down far more sentences of capital punishment than had those of the ‘extremist’ Jacobins. Of the four local représentants en mission, two managed to escape but both their colleagues died as a direct result of their incarceration. All had been die-hard Montagnards and, as it was this faction that was held primarily responsible for the creation of a state of civil war, the local population was absolved from being bound by any of the Convention’s decrees.

  Sectional representatives of Toulon and Marseille declared a unity of purpose with pledges of mutual support. The effectiveness of this was soon confirmed when the Toulon authorities refused a demand from the Ministry of Marine in Paris to initiate a naval blockade of Marseille as a prelude to operations aimed at rectifying the situation there. Mutinous behaviour on the part of the crews might, in any case, have made compliance with the order impossible. Two French frigates, obliged to shelter in Marseille from superior Spanish forces, were detained there when their crews refused to sail again.

  It is essential to understand that the new regime in both cities was not totally anti-revolutionary, representing as it did the views of ordinary folk exasperated with extremism and insecurity. Decrees passed by the Convention prior to the purge of June 1793 were still observed. A joint open statement from the Toulon sections made it quite clear that they adhered to the principles of the republican constitution on condition that it promoted respect for the individual, his property and law and order. It deplored the unpredictability and violence inseparable from Jacobin control, and the fact that the Convention, the national government, was riven with factional anarchy.

  For Rear Admiral Trogoff and other senior naval staff the situation was delicate. Having adapted their outlook and procedures to accommodate the dangerous eccentricities of the new Revolutionary order, exerted primarily at a local level, they were now obliged to work with a municipal structure that had reverted to something like orthodoxy. At the same time, however, they were acutely aware that the situation was precarious, amounting as yet to no more than a successful local revolt. Authority, on paper, had been recentralized to its proper location, the Ministry of Marine, yet the functions of this organization remained hobbled by the Convention and it existed, as matters stood, in an enemy camp.

  Trogoff had already been experiencing trouble with central government. In June a Spanish squadron had appeared off the Ligurian coast. The implications for the vital coastal trade were obvious and its presence served as a reminder that it was only a matter of time until a British force came to join it. From both regional and local level, Trogoff was urged to give battle to the Spanish before the British reinforced them. However, despite a haranguing from the représentants about their duties to the state, his seamen showed little enthusiasm and the admiral was convinced that any sortie was doomed to failure. He contacted the minister of marine, requesting that he order the Toulon squadron to remain in port. He also emphasized that he was only acting C-in-C Toulon in Truguet’s absence and that, as he had not been otherwise advised, he expected Truguet to return to his command after he had explained to the minister his reasons for failure in Sardinia.

  Although the naval officer corps had played no obvious part in the overthrow of local Jacobin authority, its broad approval was evidenced by the fact that several senior ranks and an ordonnateur served from the outset on the new sectional assemblies. This left Trogoff in an impossible situation, complaining to Paris that, despite his continuing loyalty to the state, he received no support or direction in return, still being expected to supply two Revolutionary armies in addition to his own squadron.

  Wisely, Trogoff distanced himself somewhat from the new sectional authorities. All too aware of Carteaux’s army near Avignon and the advance of a large detachment from the Army of Italy, marching westward toward Toulon, he feared for the future of this modest counter-revolution and, reasonably, for himself. He resisted a demand from the new authorities to immobilize part of his squadron, maintaining that as the fleet was an instrument of the state, only the state, through the minister of marine, could so instruct him. The reason for this strange requirement had been the intention to use the crews to contribute to a military force to counter the expected reaction from central government, whose record to date suggested that conciliation was unlikely.

  Trogoff’s every action suggests that he was en
deavouring to remain true to his profession and to retain independent authority for his fleet. Effectively a hostage to events at Toulon, however, he could now anticipate only a vengeful hostility from a state administration which he still firmly supported and to which he looked for direction and sustenance.

  The revolt in the Midi, which had broken out in evident anticipation of the collapse of extreme Montagnard dominance of the Convention, soon began to look isolated in the face of energetic reaction from Paris. Cold realization set in following the defeat near Aix-en-Provence of an ad hoc military force raised jointly by Toulon and Marseille. This had set out with the quixotic intention of linking with other federal forces around Lyon before marching on Paris itself. More volunteer band than army, its resolve disintegrated before General Carteaux’s battle-hardened veterans.

  As already related, Admiral Lord Hood made his landfall near Toulon on 16 July 1793, just two days after the moderates had regained control of the city’s administration. Official British knowledge of the state of affairs in the region was, as yet, rather sketchy and the admiral had a comparatively open brief. As instructed, he detached a frigate to Genoa with despatches for the British envoy in Turin. The general attitude of the Genoese Republic appearing to place the continuing lucrative grain trade with the south of France above its loyalties as a coalition ally, Hood also deployed several minor warships, both to interdict the trade and to watch the port of Genoa. The former duty was excellent training for junior commanders as the trade was conducted for the greater part in fast-sailing local craft known as tartanes, which were single-masted and lateen-rigged.

  The home secretary, Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, was a more powerful influence on affairs than was the foreign minister, Lord Grenville. It appeared to be his policies that lay behind the efforts of the still-forming coalition to assemble a multi-national army with the specific primary objective of recovering Nice and Savoy, that had been seized by the French Revolutionary Army of Italy. Somewhat enigmatically, Dundas charged Hood, should circumstances permit, with the capture of Toulon, Marseille and Corsica. Even to contemplate the seizure and retention of major cities in metropolitan France suggests that Dundas had excellent local sources of information.