It so happened that one of Carteaux’s représentants-en-mission (political commissioners) was none other than Saliceti. Carteaux knew little about artillery and was looking for someone to take over the artillery on the army’s right flank after the wounding of its commander, Colonel Dommartin, and in the absence of Dommartin’s second-in-command, Major Perrier. Saliceti and his colleague Thomas de Gasparin persuaded Carteaux to appoint Napoleon to the post, despite his only being twenty-four years old. Napoleon suspected that his education at the École Militaire had been a deciding factor in getting him this first major break. He would later say that the artillery was short of ‘scientific men, that department was entirely directed by sergeants and corporals. I understood the service.’54 His youth was overlooked in an army so depleted by mass emigration and the guillotining of the aristocracy, which had previously provided the overwhelming majority of its officers. It also helped, of course, that Carteaux’s appointments were overseen by his ally Saliceti.
Carteaux – who Saliceti and Gasparin were privately reporting back to Paris was ‘incapable’ – had 8,000 men on the hills between Toulon and Ollioules, and another 3,000 under General Jean Lapoype on the La Valette side of the city. Yet he had no plan of attack. By October 9 Saliceti and Gasparin had obtained for Napoleon command of all of the artillery outside Toulon. Since this was clearly going to be an artillery-led operation, the post gave him a central role.* Saliceti and Gasparin were soon reporting to Paris that ‘Bonna Parte’ was ‘the only officer of artillery who knows anything of his duty, and he has too much work’.55 They were wrong about the second part: for Napoleon there was no such thing as too much work. Later in the three-month siege he was helped by two aides-de-camp, Auguste de Marmont and Andoche Junot. Marmont came from a good family and Napoleon liked him very much, but he loved Junot, a former battalion quartermaster on the Côte d’Or, from the moment that a cannonball landed near them while he was dictating a letter, spraying dust and gravel over them both, and Junot coolly remarked that now he wouldn’t need any sand to blot it.56
Visiting the site of Napoleon’s batteries above Toulon today, it is immediately obvious what he had to do. There is an outer harbour and an inner harbour, and a high promontory to the west called L’Eguillette that dominates both. ‘To become master of the harbour,’ Napoleon reported to the war minister, Jean-Baptiste Bouchotte, ‘one must become master of the Eguillette.’57 In order to pour heated cannonballs onto the Royal Navy vessels in the inner harbour, it was therefore necessary to capture Fort Mulgrave – built by its commander the 1st Earl of Mulgrave and nicknamed ‘Little Gibraltar’ because it was so heavily fortified – which dominated the promontory.* Although the fort’s importance was obvious to all, it was Napoleon who put in place the plan to capture it. Success would almost instantly unlock the strategic situation, for once the Royal Navy was ejected from the harbour, the city of 28,000 people couldn’t be defended by the fédérés alone.
Napoleon threw himself into the project of capturing Fort Mulgrave. By cajoling nearby towns he got together fourteen cannon and four mortars as well as stores, tools and ammunition. He sent officers further afield, to Lyons, Briançon and Grenoble, and requested that the Army of Italy furnish him with the cannon not then being used to defend Antibes and Monaco. He established an eighty-man arsenal at Ollioules to make cannon and cannonballs, requisitioned horses from Nice, Valence and Montpellier, and injected a sense of unceasing activity into his men. Constantly imploring, complaining and raging – there wasn’t enough gunpowder, the cartridges were the wrong size, trained artillery horses were being requisitioned for other uses, and so on – he sent scores of letters with demands to Bouchotte and even on occasion to the Committee of Public Safety itself, going over the heads of Carteaux and his immediate superiors.
Bemoaning the ‘confusion and waste’ and the ‘evident absurdity’ of the current arrangements to his friend Chauvet, the chief ordonnateur (quartermaster), Napoleon despaired that ‘the provisioning of armies is no more than luck’.58 In a typical letter to Saliceti and Gasparin he wrote: ‘One can remain for twenty-four or if necessary thirty-six hours without eating, but one cannot remain three minutes without gunpowder.’59 Along with his energy and activity, his letters convey a meticulous attention to detail in everything from the price of rations to the proper building of palisades. Overall, however, his message was constant; they only had 600 milliers (just over half a ton) of gunpowder, and if they couldn’t procure more it would be impossible to start serious operations. On October 22 he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety of the ‘extreme pain he felt at the little attention paid to his branch of the service,’ adding: ‘I have had to struggle against ignorance and the base passions which it engenders.’60
The result of all his hectoring, bluster, requisitioning and political string-pulling was that Napoleon put together a strong artillery train in very short order. He commandeered a foundry where shot and mortars were manufactured, and a workshop where muskets were repaired. He got the authorities in Marseilles to supply thousands of sandbags. This took significant powers of leadership – and also the kind of implicit threat that could be made by a Jacobin army officer during Robespierre’s Terror. By the end of the siege Napoleon commanded eleven batteries totalling nearly one hundred cannon and mortars.
Napoleon received little support in all this from Carteaux, whom he came to despise, and who Saliceti and Gasparin conspired to have replaced with General François Doppet by November 11. Doppet was impressed with his artillery commander, reporting to Paris: ‘I always found him at his post; when he needed rest he lay on the ground wrapped in his cloak: he never left the batteries.’61 The admiration was not mutual, however, and after an attack on Fort Mulgrave on November 15, during which Doppet sounded the retreat too early, Napoleon returned to the redoubt and swore: ‘Our blow at Toulon has missed, because a [expletive deleted in the nineteenth century] has beaten the retreat!’62
Napoleon showed considerable personal bravery in the batteries and redoubts of Toulon, at one point picking up a blood-soaked ramrod from an artilleryman who had been killed near him and helping to load and fire the cannon himself. He believed it was this action that gave him scabies. ‘I found myself in a very few days suffering under an inveterate itch,’ he later said of this ‘terrible malady’.63 The cutaneous irritation stayed with him through the Italian and Egyptian campaigns and was only cured in 1802 when his doctor, Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, applied sulphur baths and by ‘putting three blisters on my chest . . . brought on a salutary crisis. Before that I had always been thin and sallow; since then I have always had good health.’64 Some historians have argued that limited contact with the blood-stained ramrod was unlikely to have been the real cause, but Napoleon would probably have also donned the dead man’s gloves, which would have made dermatitis infection far more likely.65*
During one assault on an outlying fort protecting Mulgrave, Napoleon was wounded by an English gunner, who ‘ran a pike into’ his left thigh. He was trying to enter the battery by its embrasure, but fortunately reinforcements came around by the rear, entering at the same moment. Many years later Napoleon showed off to a doctor ‘a very deep cicatrix [scar] above the left knee’, recalling that ‘the surgeons were in doubt whether it might not be ultimately necessary to amputate’.66 In a book he wrote in exile on St Helena on Julius Caesar’s wars, Napoleon contrasted the commanders of the ancient world, who were well protected during battles, with those of the modern, concluding: ‘Today the commander-in-chief is forced every day to face the guns, often within range of grapeshot, and all battles within cannon-shot, in order to assess, see and give orders, as the view is not wide enough for generals to be able to keep out of the way of bullets.’67 One of the accusations made by his detractors was that Napoleon wasn’t personally brave. ‘Cowardice had of late years been habitual to Bonaparte,’ wrote the English writer Helen Williams in 1815, for example.68 This is absurd; not only do cowards no
t fight sixty battles, but Napoleon came near death several times between battles too, while reconnoitring close to the enemy. The number of people killed near him and the bullet that hit him at the battle of Ratisbon are further testaments to his great physical bravery. Napoleon’s troops appreciated his courage and his ability to magnify their own. When all the gunners trying to establish a battery of cannon within a pistol shot of Fort Mulgrave were killed or wounded, Napoleon christened it ‘Hommes Sans Peur’ (Men Without Fear) and thereby continued to receive volunteers to man it. Nobody better understood the psychology of the ordinary soldier.
On November 17 the highly competent General Jacques Dugommier took over from Doppet, soon followed by reinforcements that brought the numbers of besiegers up to 37,000. Napoleon got on well with Dugommier. By mid-November he had surrounded Fort Mulgrave with batteries, and on the 23rd he captured its British commander, General Charles O’Hara, who had tried to counter-attack from it in a sortie and spike the French guns of one of them. ‘General Dugommier fought with true republican courage,’ Napoleon reported of that action. ‘We recaptured the battery . . . The guns of the Convention were un-spiked in sufficient time to increase the confusion of their retreat.’69 It was very rare to be able to repair guns that had had metal spikes hammered into their firing mechanisms, let alone quickly, and it was a sign of the professional pitch to which Napoleon had trained his men.
• • •
At one o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, December 17, 1793, Dugommier put Napoleon’s plan of attack on Toulon into action. A column under Claude Victor-Perrin (later Marshal Victor) got beyond the first line of defences at Fort Mulgrave, but faltered at the second. At about 3 a.m. Dugommier sent in the next assault of 2,000 men in the teeth of driving rain, high winds and lightning strikes. Led by Napoleon, whose horse was shot from under him, and Captain Jean-Baptiste Muiron, this assault finally took the fort after heavy hand-to-hand fighting. Napoleon then proceeded to pour heated cannonballs onto the Royal Navy vessels across the harbour below. The memory of the explosion of two Spanish gunpowder-ships stayed with him for the rest of his life. Decades later he recalled how ‘The whirlwind of flames and smoke from the arsenal resembled the eruption of a volcano, and the thirteen vessels blazing in the roads were like so many displays of fireworks: the masts and forms of the vessels were distinctly traced out by the flames, which lasted many hours and formed an unparalleled spectacle.’ He was exaggerating – only two ships caught fire rather than the whole fleet – but the effect was nonetheless dramatic. Dugommier gave a glowing report of Napoleon, whom he called ‘this rare officer’.70
The Allies evacuated Toulon the next morning, creating pandemonium, especially once General Lapoype took the Faron heights and started bombarding the city from the eastern side too. Soon afterwards Saliceti and Gasparin ordered the execution of some four hundred suspected fédéres, though Napoleon took no part in that.71 Great and deserved benefits flowed to Napoleon from the victory at Toulon. On December 22 he was appointed brigadier-general and inspector of coastal defences from the Rhône to the Var. Saliceti brought him to the attention of the senior politicians Paul Barras and Louis-Stanislas Fréron, but best of all, as he later put it, Toulon ‘gave him confidence in himself’.72 He had shown that he could be trusted with command.
Rarely in military history has there been so high a turnover of generals as in France in the 1790s. It meant that capable young men could advance through the ranks at unprecedented speed. The Terror, emigration, war, political purges, disgrace after defeat, political suspicion and scapegoating, on top of all the normal cases of resignation and retirement, meant that men like Lazare Hoche, who was a corporal in 1789, could be a general by 1793, or Michel Ney, a lieutenant in 1792, could become one by 1796. Napoleon’s rise through the ranks was therefore by no means unique given the political and military circumstances of the day.73 Still, his progress was impressive: he had spent five and a half years as a second-lieutenant, a year as a lieutenant, sixteen months as a captain, only three months as a major and no time at all as a colonel. On December 22, 1793, having been on leave for fifty-eight of his ninety-nine months of service – with and without permission – and after spending less than four years on active duty, Napoleon was made, at twenty-four, a general.
3
Desire
‘When the mob gains the day, it ceases to be any longer the mob. It is then called the nation. If it does not, why, then some are executed, and they are called the canaille, rebels, thieves and so forth.’
Napoleon to Dr Barry O’Meara on St Helena
‘I win nothing but battles, and Josephine, by her goodness, wins all hearts.’
Napoleon to his chamberlain, Baron Louis de Bausset-Roquefort
On February 7, 1794, Napoleon was appointed artillery commander of the Army of Italy. He played a creditable but unremarkable part in General Pierre Dumberion’s five-week campaign against Austria’s ally, the independent kingdom of Piedmont in north-west Italy (which also ruled Sardinia), in which three small victories were won and he acquainted himself with the topography of the beautiful but potentially treacherous mountains and passes of the Ligurian Alps. He fought alongside the fiery and brilliant General André Masséna, whose campaign that May to drive the Piedmontese from Ventimiglia and outflank the Austrians and Piedmontese at the Col di Tenda won him the soubriquet ‘the darling child of victory’.
The campaign was over quickly, and by early summer Napoleon was back in Nice and Antibes, where he began to court Eugénie Désirée Clary, the pretty sixteen-year-old daughter of a dead royalist textile and soap millionaire. Désirée’s elder sister Julie married Napoleon’s brother Joseph on August 1, 1794, bringing with her a substantial dowry of 400,000 francs, which finally ended the Bonaparte family’s money worries. Napoleon and Désirée’s relationship was conducted almost entirely by correspondence and they were engaged the following April. A year earlier the nineteen-year-old Lucien Bonaparte had married Christine Boyer, a charming but illiterate twenty-two-year-old daughter of an innkeeper. He had put his adopted revolutionary name – Brutus – on the wedding certificate, the only one of the Bonapartes to change his name in such a way.
In April 1794 Napoleon submitted a plan to the Committee of Public Safety for the invasion of Italy via Piedmont. It was taken to Paris by Augustin Robespierre, who was attached to the Army of Italy. Fortunately written in Junot’s legible handwriting rather than Napoleon’s increasingly illegible scrawl, it contained such strategic statements as: ‘Attacks must not be disseminated, but concentrated’, ‘It is [Austria] that must be annihilated; that accomplished, Spain and Italy will fall of themselves’ and ‘No dispassionate person could think of taking Madrid. The defensive system should be adopted on the Spanish, and the offensive on the Piedmontese frontier.’ And eager even then to centralize authority, Napoleon wrote: ‘The armies of the Alps and of Italy should be united to obey the same mind.’1
Napoleon’s hapless chef de bataillon, Major Berlier, bore the brunt of his restless impatience, focus on detail and need for everything to be done faster and more efficiently. ‘I’m extremely unhappy at the manner in which the loading of the sixteen pieces [of cannon] has been performed,’ read one letter. ‘You will certainly wish to respond to the following questions . . . for which I give you twenty-four hours.’ Another: ‘I’m surprised that you are so tardy in the execution of orders, it’s always necessary to tell you the same thing three times.’ No aspect of his command was too small to escape notice. ‘Imprison Corporal Carli, the commander of the battery,’ he ordered Berlier, ‘who absented himself to search for wine in Antibes.’2
During the Piedmontese campaign Napoleon received official confirmation of his promotion to brigadier-general, which required him to answer the question ‘Noble or not noble?’ Very sensibly, given that the Terror was still raging, he answered, technically untruthfully, in the negative.3 The guillotining of the extremist Héberti
st faction on March 5 and of Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins on April 5, both ordered by Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, showed the Revolution remorselessly devour its own children. A contemporary noted ‘thousands of women and children sitting on the stones in front of bakers shops’, and ‘more than half of Paris living upon potatoes. Paper money was without value.’4 The city was ripe for a reaction against the Jacobins, who had so clearly failed to deliver either food or peace. With the Allies in retreat in 1794 in Spain and Belgium and along the Rhine, a group of Girondin conspirators felt confident enough to overthrow the Jacobins and finally end the Reign of Terror.
• • •
For six days in mid-July Napoleon took part in a secret mission to Genoa on Augustin Robespierre’s behalf to report on its fortifications, conduct a five-hour meeting with the French chargé d’affaires, Jean Tilly, and persuade the doge of the need for better Franco-Genoese relations. It drew him closer into the Robespierres’ political circle at precisely the worst time, for the ‘Thermidorian reaction’, led by Barras and Fréron, overthrew Maximilien Robespierre on July 27 (9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar). Both brothers and sixty other ‘Terrorists’ were guillotined the next day. Had Napoleon been in Paris at the time he might well have been scooped up and sent to the guillotine along with them. He had just returned from his brother Joseph’s wedding and was at the army camp at Sieg near Nice on August 5 when he heard of the Robespierres’ fate. ‘I’ve been somewhat moved by the fate of the younger Robespierre,’ he wrote to Tilly, ‘whom I liked and believed honest, but had he been my own brother, if he had aspired to tyranny I‘d have stabbed him myself.’5
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