Despised by his fellows for what they considered his humble birth, Corsican origins and still heavily accented French, Napoleon not surprisingly became surly and withdrawn, given to occasional outbursts of violent temper. But he was a good scholar and a hard worker, and his brilliance in mathematics earned him in October 1784 a place at the national Ecole Militaire in Paris.188 Even here he made no secret of his Corsican patriotism, lashing out with his fists or any weapon that came to hand against all who mocked him; but he worked harder than ever, and in September 1785, when still only sixteen, he passed out as an officer. He was sent first to the artillery training school at Valence, and then in 1788 to Auxonne in Burgundy; it was in Auxonne that he heard the news that was to transform his life. On 14 July 1789 the Bastille had fallen: France was in revolution. A month later his regiment mutinied.
As an instinctive hater of the ancien régime, Napoleon flung himself with enthusiasm into the revolutionary cause. He considered going straight to Paris, but in view of the general chaos in the capital he decided instead to return temporarily to his home, where he was confident of his ability to shape events. His father had died, aged only thirty-eight, in 1784; back in Corsica, despite the presence of his elder brother Joseph, Napoleon now effectively made himself head of his family, advancing its interests in true Corsican style in any way he could. Before long his influence extended well beyond family limits. It was he who drafted, and was the first to sign, a letter to the National Assembly in Paris demanding that action be taken against the royalists who were still in charge of the island–a letter which seems to have been largely responsible for the Assembly’s decision shortly afterwards to declare Corsica an integral part of the French state. He remained there throughout 1790, during which time republican-dominated municipalities were elected in Ajaccio and the other principal towns, and when the Ajaccio Jacobin Club189 was established in January 1791 he became a founder member. In October, after a flagrantly dishonest election, he acquired command of the local volunteer militia. Sadly, however, he and his family fell out with the returned Paoli who, while still striving for Corsican independence, was now de facto ruler of the island under the French and had no patience with the revolutionary adventurers which he now conceived the Bonapartes to be.
He was certainly right where Napoleon was concerned. Matters came to a head when the bumptious young officer proposed that his battalion of militia should replace the French garrison in the Ajaccio citadel. Paoli, outraged, refused to consider the idea, whereupon Napoleon launched an attack on the fortress on his own initiative. The fighting went on for three days, during which several men were killed; then French reinforcements arrived and the besiegers were forced to retire. A report was sent to the Ministry of War in Paris, where Napoleon had already been recorded as having seriously overstayed his leave. If he wished to continue his military career, he would have to return and explain himself. By the end of May 1792 he was back in Paris.
His reception at the Ministry was warmer than he might have expected. The authorities were inclined to accept the various specious documents which he had brought from Corsica to explain his long absence. They had little choice: France was now at war and needed every man she could get. Since the outbreak of the revolution vast numbers of royalist officers had left the army in disgust, and its present depleted strength–particularly in the cavalry and the artillery–was causing grave concern. Of the fifty-six officers of Napoleon’s own class, only six now remained. He too had been given up for lost, and now that the prodigal son had returned the authorities had no intention of losing him again. The incident of the Ajaccio citadel was conveniently forgotten. He was restored to duty, and promoted to captain.
He made one more visit to Corsica–how he was permitted to take such a vast amount of leave has never been properly explained, especially since he had shown himself apt to exceed his allowance by several months–this time ostensibly to escort his sister Marianna back from the royal convent school at Saint-Cyr, which circumstances had forced to close down. They sailed from Marseille on 10 October. There was, predictably, no welcome from Paoli; ignoring him completely, Napoleon at once reinstated himself as lieutenant-colonel in the volunteers–a rank which he had had to renounce on his return to the army in Paris. He then flung himself into a campaign to get his brother Joseph elected as a Corsican representative to the National Convention.
But Corsica, he realised, was rapidly becoming a backwater. The revolution was no longer purely French: it was beginning to involve all Europe. In April 1792, despite the ruinous state of her finances, the depletion of her armed forces and the chaos still prevailing throughout the country, France had declared war on Austria. Two months later she had done the same to Prussia and to Sardinia. One reason for these displays of naked aggression was, paradoxically enough, economic: in their present state, the only way the French armies could support themselves was by commandeering food and all their other needs from countries they invaded. Inevitably, however, revolutionary idealism played its part: the theory that under the shock of war all the peoples of Europe would rise up against their sovereigns, and the spirit of the revolution would spread across the world. This, fortunately, failed to happen, but the initial success of the French armies certainly surpassed anything that could have been expected. An Austrian and Prussian invading army was turned back at Valmy in September; in October a French army swept through the Rhineland, and a month later another defeated the Austrians at Jemappes, occupied Brussels and part of the Netherlands, while a fourth annexed Savoy. In February 1793 the Convention declared war on England, and a month later on Spain. Meanwhile, on 21 January, King Louis XVI had been beheaded on the guillotine in the Place de la Concorde, before a cheering crowd.
In all this stirring international drama, Napoleon Bonaparte’s first role was one of almost laughable insignificance. Pasquale Paoli had received instructions from Paris to support an invasion of Sardinia. He was loath to do anything of the kind. Sardinia was Corsica’s neighbour and natural ally; her Piedmontese king had always been the friend of the Corsicans and of their cause, and had in the past often been generous with supplies and munitions. Still, orders were orders, and he gave his reluctant approval to an expedition by the Ajaccio battalion of the militia to seize and fortify the small island of La Maddelena, opposite Corsica off the north Sardinian coast; at the same time, however, he murmured to the expedition’s leader, his nephew Colonel Colonna-Cesari, that it would be an excellent thing if the whole enterprise went up in smoke.
The Colonel took the hint. The battalion, hopelessly ill-equipped, sailed on 20 February, and by the 24th was strategically placed to take the island. Captain Bonaparte, it need hardly be said, was of the company. From the start he distinguished himself by his sheer professionalism–a quality in lamentably short supply among his fellows–and was confident that within a matter of hours La Maddelena would be theirs; but Cesari identified a few grumbling sailors as an incipient mutiny and ordered the expedition’s immediate return to Corsica. Napoleon objected fiercely, but was overruled. As a final humiliation, he was obliged to spike two of his guns and consign them to the sea. He addressed a letter of furious protest to Paoli, sending copies to the War Minister in Paris as well as to the two Corsican representatives. Almost simultaneously Paoli was the subject of another attack, this time by Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte, in a speech to the Jacobin Club at Toulon. Paoli, declared Lucien, was a traitor to France whose only object was to deliver Corsica to the British. His words made a deep impression on the Convention in Paris, who ordered the General’s immediate arrest and sent three commissioners to investigate the charges.
The commissioners found the island openly hostile. Paoli somehow was Corsica, and his people were prepared to fight for him–against the Bonapartes, against the Convention, against anyone. To make matters worse, Lucien had stupidly sent his brother a letter, in which he had written: ‘Paoli and Pozzo190 are to be arrested; our fortune is made.’ This letter was intercepted by Pa
oli’s police before the commissioners arrived, as a result of which the Bonapartes were condemned to ‘perpetual execration and infamy’–tantamount, in the Corsican code of honour, to a death sentence. To remain on the island was to risk assassination. Besides, Paoli had now begun an armed insurrection against the French, and the island was on the verge of civil war. For a moment Napoleon considered a republican counter-rising of his own, with the object of taking over Ajaccio and turning the tables on his enemies, but it was too late. Clearly, there was no longer a future for him in Corsica. By the middle of June he and his whole family were on their way to France.
On his arrival Napoleon rejoined the army and, finding himself in Nice at the beginning of September, made contact with his old friend and fellow Corsican Jean-Christophe Saliceti. Saliceti was one of the two ‘representatives of the people’ with the revolution’s Army of Italy; it was at that time besieging Toulon, which had been occupied a week or two before by royalist, British and Spanish forces. It chanced that some days previously the French artillery commander had been badly wounded; a replacement was urgently needed, and Saliceti saw that Captain Bonaparte was just the man. Napoleon asked nothing better. From one moment to the next, his Corsican patriotism was forgotten. Henceforth he was a Frenchman–a Frenchman, indeed, such as there had never been before.
The state of the army which he found drawn up before Toulon was enough to make any trained officer weep. Most of the old royalists had emigrated, to be replaced by republican volunteers with virtually no experience; the artillery consisted of a few broken-down old cannon and mortars, all of which were dangerously short of ammunition. On the credit side there was only Napoleon himself, one of the few officers in the whole Army of Italy who was a professional through and through. True, he was only a captain, but he had the powerful support of Saliceti, and his genius did the rest. One of his first actions was to send for more heavy guns from Nice and Marseille (which also provided 5,000 sandbags); others he requisitioned from the forts at Martigues, Antibes and Monaco. Wood was ordered from Le Ciotat for the construction of proper platforms; at Ollioules he created a veritable arsenal and repair centre with eighty blacksmiths, wheel-wrights and carpenters. From the outset, however, he found himself at loggerheads with his commander, the politically irreproachable but militarily idiotic General Carteaux, whose only idea was to pour as much shot as possible into the town. Napoleon, on the other hand, seeing at once that the key to its continued resistance was the British fleet under Admiral Lord Hood which lay just off the coast, pressed insistently for the capture of the little peninsula of Le Caire, from which red-hot cannonballs could be fired into Hood’s ships. Finally, with the help of Saliceti, he obliged a grudging Carteaux to give his permission.
The first attempt on Le Caire failed, as Carteaux–furious at having been overruled–had released only 400 men for the task. Thanks largely to the influence of the newly promoted Major Bonaparte, the hopeless old general was dismissed in October; his successor, General Jacques-François Dugommier, who had joined the army at thirteen and was another thoroughgoing professional, immediately recognised his subordinate’s genius and backed him to the hilt. The result was a full-scale assault on Fort Mulgrave, recently constructed by the British on the highest point of Le Caire. It took place on 17 December, in pouring rain, but was ultimately successful; in the early hours of the following morning the British garrison evacuated the fort, while Hood’s ships hastily weighed anchor and made for the open sea. On the following day, 19 December 1793, Toulon was French again.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind to whom the credit belonged. Napoleon Bonaparte–who had had his horse shot under him and had been wounded by a bayonet in the thigh–had been proved right. Dugommier had already sent urgent–and prophetic–advice to the War Minister in Paris: ‘Récompensez, avancez ce jeune homme; car, si l’on était ingrat envers lui, il s’avancerait de lui-même.’191 Three days after the recovery of Toulon he was appointed brigadier. He was just twenty-four years old.
The long-delayed Corsican expedition took place in March 1795. It proved a fiasco: the British fleet was standing off the island in force, and took so severe a toll of the French transports that they were unable to land. Once again, for a moment, Bonaparte’s luck seemed to have deserted him. He returned to Paris, officially on sick leave, and awaited his next opportunity. It came on 5 October–13 vendémiaire, in the new republican calendar–when he was ordered by Paul Barras, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Interior, to put down a threatened royalist rising. With the memory of Corsican insurrections behind him, he did not hesitate. There would be no negotiation; he preferred to put his faith in heavy artillery. Fierce fighting broke out at the Tuileries, with heavy casualties on both sides, but the final issue was never in doubt. When the Directory was established just a week or two later, Barras was nominated the first of its five members and Bonaparte appointed second-in-command of the Army of the Interior. In March 1796, when the Directory resolved to launch a new campaign against Austria through Italy, the slim, solemn young Corsican, bilingual in Italian, seemed the obvious choice to lead it.
Shortly before his departure, in a civil ceremony held on 8 March 1796, Napoleon Bonaparte married one of the many ‘widows of the guillotine’: Josephine de Beauharnais, a cast-off mistress of his friend Barras. (Both lied about their ages, the twenty-six-year-old groom actually producing the birth certificate of his elder brother, Joseph.) Two days later he bid his bride farewell and headed south to Nice, there to take up his new command. This was to be the beginning of his first prolonged campaign, which was also to prove one of his greatest. Its intention was to mop up northern Italy, then to advance through the Tyrol into Austria and finally to meet up with the Army of the Rhine, carrying the war into Bavaria. It started with an advance into Piedmont. Nobody–except possibly Bonaparte himself–could have foreseen the measure and speed of his success: almost every day brought news of another victory. Towards the end of April Piedmont was annexed to France, King Charles Emmanuel IV abdicating and retiring to Sardinia, which remained under his authority. On 8 May the French crossed the Po, and two days later forced the narrow bridge over the Adda at Lodi. On the 15th Bonaparte made his formal entry into Milan.
His army was of course living off the conquered land, requisitioning food and accommodation as necessary, but for the members of the Directory this was not enough. Their instructions were to levy huge contributions both from the Italian states and from the Church, not just to support the troops but to send back to Paris, and Napoleon obeyed them to the letter. The neutral Duke of Parma, to take but one example, was obliged to hand over two million French livres and twenty of his best pictures, to be chosen personally by the Commander-in-Chief; few of the major towns escaped having to give up their Raphaels, their Titians and their Leonardos. Many of these found their way to the Louvre or to other French museums, where they still hang today.
With the occupation of Milan all Lombardy was now in French hands, save only Mantua. But the Austrians fought back, with such determination that by 13 November we find Bonaparte confessing to the Directory, in a mixture of exhaustion and despair, his fears that all Italy might soon be lost. Only in early 1797 did his spirits begin to recover. On 14 January he engaged the Austrians at Rivoli, a village some fourteen miles north of Verona between the Adige river and Lake Garda. He lost 2,200 men in the action, but his army inflicted 3,300 casualties on the enemy and took 7,000 prisoners. The following day his general Joubert, pursuing the fleeing Austrians, captured another 6,000; meanwhile, Joubert’s colleague André Masséna, having marched southward all night, surrounded and captured a second Austrian column now isolated outside Mantua. From that day Mantua was cut off, without hope of relief. On 2 February its starving garrison surrendered. Another 16,000 men and 1,500 guns were taken.
At last the way was clear for the invasion of Austria. True, it lay across the neutral territory of Venice, but that could not be helped. Such considerations were certainly
not heeded by the Austrians, who were regularly crossing Venetian lands without let or hindrance. But if Venice did not protest–and her imperial sympathies were well known–Napoleon certainly did, taking every opportunity to browbeat and even threaten the local Venetian authorities. What they did not know was that his anger on these occasions was nothing but a simulated display, and that most of his threats were empty. His real purpose in his dealings with Venice at this time was not to enlist her aid or even to persuade her to take a more firmly neutral line; rather it was to frighten her, to put her in the wrong, to make her feel guilty and inadequate, to erode her pride, confidence and self-respect to the point where her moral resistance would be reduced to the same level as her physical.
Towards the end of March 1797 Napoleon led his army north over the Brixen Pass and into the Tyrol. There he took the road to Vienna, leaving behind him only a few light garrisons in Bergamo and Brescia, with a rather more considerable force in Verona. He seems, however, to have had a secret purpose in mind: to stir up, throughout the Veneto, a revolutionary mood and to promote, wherever possible, open risings against Venice. The danger was, of course, that such risings might back-fire against the French themselves–which indeed they did. On Easter Monday, 17 April, despite the strength of the garrison, the people of Verona came out in open insurrection and, in what came to be known as the pâques véronaises–the Veronese Easter–massacred a considerable number of Frenchmen, both soldiers and civilians. Similar though less serious outbreaks took place in Bergamo and Brescia, though these were principally directed against Venice. If, as is generally believed, all this was the work of French agents provocateurs, Napoleon would certainly have deemed the losses well worth while; they would have provided him with a further excuse for attacking the Venetian Republic, which he was by now determined to eradicate once and for all.
The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean Page 54