The Fall of Toulon

by Bernard Ireland

  The question of further troops was likely to be a thorny one, for it has already been related how the prime minister, only the year before, had greatly reduced the strength of the army in order to release funds to pursue more politically popular social projects. British troops were now urgently required to reinforce garrisons in the West Indies and for duty at home, where the government had real fear that the virus of revolution might cross the Channel on the back of popular discontent. It was apparent that any military enhancement to Hood’s force would need to include a high proportion of hired mercenaries or contributions from allies whose fighting qualities were, at best, suspect.

  THE ‘IMMENSE but unforeseen opportunity’ offered by the occupation of Toulon by the allies was neither universally recognized nor treated as such. At a regional level, Francis Drake, the British minister at Genoa, wrote to Lord Grenville at the Foreign Office extolling the fact that ‘no event of the war has so much tended to bring about a safe and honourable peace’.

  A ‘safe and honourable peace’, however, meant different things to different people. King George III and his chief ministers, Pitt, Dundas and Grenville, were engaged in a war that posed little direct or imminent threat to British soil and, lacking the overriding imperative of home defence, they failed to develop a clear war strategy. There were obvious opportunities to injure the traditional enemy, but the means to do so were deficient. There were also chances to acquire French foreign territories, possibly through the diversion of those resources already allocated to the safeguard of Britain’s own interests. At the highest level, there was a detestation of the course of the Revolution in France, a visceral urge to stamp out both it and its excesses, both as a moral duty and to excise the very real threat of its spreading.

  Was, however, a reversal of the Revolution synonymous with the restoration of the French monarchy? The large-scale dissent in Brittany and the Vendée had resulted in many influential French leaders taking refuge in the British Channel Islands, which became a conduit for contact with counterrevolutionaries and the means of providing them with material support. Lower echelons of French royalty, the émigré princes, were also active in seeking help from their adopted homes beyond the French borders. They, of course, were able to bargain with some authority, being able to promise reward for support in the event that that support was successful in returning them to power.

  Active among these was the comte d’Artois, brother of the murdered Louis XVI and now resident in Turin. He felt able to offer the islands of Ile de France (Mauritius) and Ile de Bourbon (Réunion) to the British as compensation for their ‘guaranteeing the integrity of the other possessions of the French Crown’. The circle represented by d’Artois was not, however, recognized as having the necessary authority to thus negotiate, which was something of a convenience to Pitt and Grenville, who had every intention of profiting by France’s disarray to extend British interests in the West Indies. There appeared to be a genuine wish among British ministers that France should not be dismembered by a triumphant coalition but, on the other hand, they were keen to see some advantage accruing from an expensive war. Pitt assured the House that his main interest lay in British national security but ‘with a little mixture of indemnification’.

  Despite representations to the government by such powerful voices as those of Burke, Portland, Spencer and Windham, the Cabinet refused to give direct support for ‘King Louis XVII’. The French duc d’Harcourt had argued to the British foreign minister that a degree of formal British recognition of the ‘King’ would give massive assurance to those who were waging a counter-revolutionary war in north-west France. Their overtly pro-royalist aims, however, were not those which Britain wished to adopt.

  Heartening noises were not sufficient and the French were deeply suspicious of British intentions. They assumed, as had the Spanish in connection with their fleet, that enough British support would be rendered to maintain counter-revolutionary operations without it ever being sufficient to guarantee a decisive result. Indeed, many French intellectuals were convinced that Britain was fomenting further disorder on the back of the Revolution in order to weaken France the more.

  Britain’s attitudes were certainly inconsistent. As late as November 1793 King George himself would make a formal declaration to the Deputation du Comité Général des Sections de Toulon, stating it as his desire to see France return to a state of order. In his opinion, the best course would be to re-establish the monarchy ‘in the person of Louis XVII and the legitimate heirs to the crown’. Yet he went on to avoid appearing to favour any particular form of government, stipulating only that it be ‘regular’ and ‘solidly established’.

  A major dilemma persisted in deciding priorities for troop allocation. The Duke of York was already leading an expeditionary force in Flanders, pronouncing it inadequate to meet its objectives. Following a build-up of cash, supplies and provisions in the Channel Islands to further the efforts of royalist forces, the British felt sufficiently sure of their ultimate success to commit a military force. Lord Moira, appointed to command it, demanded an impossible 10,000 to 12,000 troops. About 5,000 were eventually assembled, but without full equipment. It mattered not, for negotiations with the relevant French were conducted at an impossibly leisurely pace.

  Security was, to all practical purposes, non-existent and the timetable was then complicated by the new and unexpected events at Toulon. For troops to be sent to Toulon at all, the Duke of York had to be further impoverished. Eight under-strength battalions, earmarked for the reinforcement of West Indies garrisons were, to the king’s displeasure, then reallocated to Lord Moira’s new venture.

  Although this diffusion of the nation’s military assets caused the prime minister considerable concern, it could be argued that the all-important West Indies could be threatened seriously only by a considerable French military force transported by sea. At that time French armies were, for the most part, fully stretched on home soil, while about one-quarter of the French fleet lay under allied control at Toulon. It thus behove the British government to accord Toulon at least sufficient priority to keep the transport potential of the French fleet beyond the reach of the National Convention.

  This begs the issue of the actual status of the Toulon squadron. Although officially at war with France and the French, Admiral Hood regarded the Toulonnais as allies, albeit of many shades of persuasion. As has been stated, he had made it clear that he held both the city and fleet in trust for a future legitimate government. To be certain that the Revolutionary government could, under no circumstances, regain control of the squadron, the obvious solution would have been to sail it to Minorca or Gibraltar with reduced crews for safekeeping. Britain and Spain, however, remained mutually distrustful to the point that neither port would have been acceptable to the other. Further, the General Committee would have experienced great civil unrest had the ships been removed, for town and fleet co-existed, indivisible.

  Worse, the French were no doubt well aware that, where Hood spoke in honourable terms of ‘safeguarding’ and ‘holding in trust’, London’s attitude was rather less refined. Hood regarded himself and, by extension, the British as being in alliance with the Toulonnais but his government, ever eager to disseminate good news to a cynical populace, insisted in speaking of ‘surrender’, which term was even employed by Chatham, the First Lord and brother of Pitt who, himself, was no flag bearer for the Bourbon cause. There was even talk that Toulon might be permanently occupied as a ‘second Gibraltar’, terminology which was not at all helpful to Hood in his dealings with the nervous, proud and volatile French, who were traditionally (and with reason) suspicious of the British and highly sensitive regarding their own defection.

  Pitt’s views on the subject of the restoration of the French monarchy were conveyed by letter to Dundas who, in turn, complained to Hood that his proclamation appeared to favour it whereas the government, although it did not exclude it if circumstances justified it, viewed intervention as no more than repelling ag
gression.

  A contrite Hood replied that he had found himself in a critical situation. ‘I might not be perfectly correct,’ he offered, but as ‘all might [have been] lost by the delay of a few hours, I submitted to the conditions proposed [by the French Commissioners].’ Promising to attend more closely in future to what passed as a policy from London, the admiral resumed the task of coordinating the effort of as polyglot a force as any leader could dread. Now within months of his seventieth birthday, Hood might well have pondered the prospect of a quieter posting.

  * In justice to the resourceful Edward Cooke, it is appropriate to record that he would go on to render distinguished service in the months of ground fighting that lay ahead. He was rewarded suitably in the following year by promotion to post captain, being given command of the big 40-gun ex-French frigate Sibylle, in which he accompanied the Victory on her return to England. Still in her command, Cooke encountered the French frigate Forte in the Bay of Bengal in February 1799. Fought to a standstill, the enemy was taken and purchased into British service as a 44. Cooke, however, did not live to enjoy the rewards of his endeavours, dying some three months after the action from wounds received. Edward Cooke’s personal courage would have been exceptional had not such conduct been commonplace in the Royal Navy of that era.

  * It might be mentioned with advantage that ‘blockade’ did not mean the bottling-up of the enemy fleet in his port, for the intention was that he be given every encouragement to come out and fight. As Nelson was to write, at a later date, to the Admiralty: ‘I beg to inform your Lordships that the port of Toulon has never been blockaded by me; quite the reverse. Every opportunity has been offered the enemy to put to sea, for it is here that we hope to realise the … expectations of our country.’

  * An interesting, if somewhat irrelevant, side issue is the way in which ships’ logs, without further comment, record normal ship routine in parallel with events ashore. For instance, the French isolation hospital, or Lazaret, was quickly put to use, the Windsor Castle noting on 7 September ‘Punished John McEvoy, Edward Griffiths, William Smith, James Dadd and John Dixon for breaking out of the Hospital on Cape Sepet [sic].’ History is silent as to the reasons why!

  chapter six

  Siege and Reality, September –November 1793

  SUCCESS, IT IS SAID, has many fathers, and there were several that claimed parentage of the master plan to force the allies out of Toulon. Proposals were first advanced by the republican General Michaud d’Arcon, assisted by a civil engineer, Doumet-Revest, but the basic working plan which was forwarded to the Committee of Public Safety, marked ‘paru mériter quelque considération’ [seems to merit consideration], was the simple but direct scheme developed by one J-J. Brunet, an administrator in the directorate of the neighbouring département of Hérault.

  It was encapsulated in the uncomplicated principle that ‘the division that occupies La Seyne [the village on the western shore of the Petite Rade] will then seize de vive force the peninsula [i.e. the western promontory] and the forts named Tour de Balaguier and L’Aiguillette’. General J. C. Dugommier, a later successor of Carteaux, wrote that ‘nobody who knew Toulon and its defences [could fail to recognize] its weak side, from which one could approach the combined fleets and direct upon them shells and red-hot shot’.

  As early as 10 September the local représentants en mission reported to the Committee of Public Safety that ‘measures have been taken to burn the English [sic] squadron or to force its retreat’. The common factor in all proposals was to seize the weaker western shore of Toulon’s inner harbour and to utilize either existing fortifications or other means to make the waters untenable to shipping, recognized as the key to the allies’ occupancy.

  For their part, the allies were alive to Toulon’s limitations, even if overconfident as to their own prospects. Complications quickly arose. The British military contingent included neither specialist artillerymen nor engineers. Where the lack of the former resulted in some of the new defensive works being sited less than ideally, the absence of the latter made for much wasted effort and inferior results.

  Lord Mulgrave, commander-designate of allied troops in Toulon, was, as we have seen, engaged also on high-level diplomatic missions for Henry Dundas. In addition, he was in the somewhat awkward situation of commanding at the time an Anglo-Spanish military force in which Spanish troops comprised a considerable majority. Fortunately, in Rear Admiral Gravina, who headed the Spanish forces ashore, Mulgrave could report to the prime minister on 15 September that he found ‘the most zealous and practicable man with whom I ever had any transaction. He is not jealous of command and has opposed no one proposal I have made to him.’

  Mulgrave went on to report that he had reorganized his slender British resources into two battalions, headed respectively by Captain Moncrieff of the 4th Regiment and Captain Brereton of the 30th. To support them in their new responsibilities, each was promoted brevet major. Gravina proposed that, as far as was practicable, British and Spanish officers and troops should share duties. The suggestion was met by Mulgrave with ‘great satisfaction and comfort’, sentiments that would be sorely tried.

  The question of British reinforcement was already being aired, Mulgrave hoping to ‘take Marseilles and to keep it’. For the moment, however, he was most solicitous of what were limited assets. ‘I fear no enemy’, he wrote, ‘but the sickness or fatigue of the troops; and I rather delay strengthening our defences than employ soldiers in any labour, for it would be truly [illogical] to break an army by erecting works for them to defend.’ Works, however, were precisely what was required.

  Concerned at the vulnerability of Balaguier and L’Aiguillette if attacked from landward, Mulgrave concentrated his available effort in fortifying the height of La Grasse at their rear. In creating the strongpoint that would bear his name, he had wide swathes of trees on the slopes felled to give clear fields of fire.

  As mobile fire support, Hood had his men improvise two large pontoons, each furnished with four long 24-pounders and two brass mortars. Further inshore firepower was added through the enlistment of one of the immobilized French ships, the Aurore, which mounted thirty-two 12- and 6-pounders. Her commanding officer, Jonquier, was relieved by temporary Captain Henry Inman, who brought with him a working complement of about two hundred men.

  The major reason for the deployment of these craft was the extreme shallowness of the western end of the Petite Rade, the bay of La Seyne. Operating here, larger and more valuable ships would be confined to the deeper water of the swatchways, reducing their manoeuvrability and increasing the difficulties of extricating them under heavy fire.

  ON 16 SEPTEMBER, less than three weeks after Hood entered Toulon, it happened that a French military convoy was transporting a substantial quantity of powder from the magazines at newly recovered Marseille to the Army of Italy, whose main strength was still in the region of Nice. Its escort was commanded by one Captain Buonaparte (as he then spelt it), a 24-year-old artillery specialist and a native of Corsica.

  The captain’s record to date had been less than spectacular. In adolescence he had been known as ribulione, or ‘troublemaker’, and in uniform tended to insubordination and brushes with authority. In October 1791, two years into the Revolution, he had been allowed to transfer from the regular army to the island’s National Guard. This gave him quasi-promotion from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel. It also put him into direct contact with Pasquale Paoli, the popular leader only recently returned from exile.

  What was then France’s National Assembly had only recently declared Corsica to be a limb of ‘la République Française, une et indivisible’, a notion with which many of its sturdily independent citizens were less than pleased. Unrest developed in the major centres of population, including Ajaccio, Buonaparte’s own place of birth. In restoring order, Buonaparte acted with what Paoli considered excessive harshness. Paoli, first and foremost, was a Corsican patriot and was particularly offended by Buonaparte’s overtly claiming th
at he acted in his, i.e. Paoli’s, name.

  In its endless purging of officers of the ancien régime, the assembly had damaged the French army as much as it had the navy. Its remedial actions with respect to the military were equally unpredictable. Buonaparte was suddenly ordered, in his substantive rank as an officer of the regular Grenoble Regiment, to attend a muster of its officers at Valence. This was some 130 miles distant and, not for the first time, he ignored instructions and was mortified when informed that he had therefore been struck from the regimental roll.

  He had to act and to act quickly, travelling to Paris to plead his case. Such was the assembly’s need for qualified officers that he left the capital again in September 1792 promoted to a regular captain of artillery and confirmed as a lieutenant colonel of volunteers. He had thus spent the critical summer months at the heart of Revolutionary France and had witnessed both mob assaults on the Tuileries, the second of which had resulted in the massacre of the Swiss Guard. Himself deeply supportive of the aims of the Revolutionaries, Buonaparte was both revolted and educated by the dreadful exhibitions of mob violence that he saw. He recognized the power of its raw energy but knew that it needed to be channelled and controlled with a similar degree of ruthless severity.

  On return to his unit in Corsica, Buonaparte found himself involved in the abortive expedition, mounted primarily from Toulon, against Sardinia. A total fiasco in every respect, the conduct and direction of operations convinced him that Paoli’s ‘cooperation’ was deliberately disruptive. In view of Paoli’s later actions, this assessment was probably accurate but his reporting of it to the authorities in Paris resulted in Buonaparte being declared persona non grata in Corsica. In actual danger to his life, he resettled his family near Marseille in June 1793.