Napoleone spent most of February 1792 at Corte, ostensibly as guide and amanuensis to the visiting philosopher Constantin de Volney, but in fact probably trying to obtain Paoli’s favour. His behaviour was not calculated to engage it: he was hyperactive, attending political gatherings and holding discussions with people in the street, voicing extreme views and calling for action. He did not cut a convincing figure. Although he was now twenty-two he looked much younger, and people made jokes about his small stature. According to one source, when he challenged Peraldi to a duel, the other did not bother to turn up.18
As the elections to the colonelcies of the Ajaccio battalions approached, Napoleone was back at home canvassing. All comers were welcomed into the Buonaparte home to dine. Mattresses were laid out on the floor for supporters from the interior, who would be useful in swaying the national guards, most of whom were also from the country, and it was they who would elect the officers. The opposition also canvassed, but they had not taken into account the determination of the Buonaparte.
The election, set for 1 April, was to be presided over by three commissioners, who arrived in Ajaccio two days before. One, Grimaldi, was lodged with the Buonaparte; another, Quenza, stayed with Letizia’s Ramolino family; but the third, Murati, had accepted the hospitality of the Peraldi. On the eve of the election Napoleone sent one of his henchmen from Bocognano, a patriotic bandit who had fought with Paoli against the French, to the Peraldi house with his gang of cut-throats. They burst in while the household were at dinner and kidnapped the commissioner, bundling him off to the Buonaparte house, where his protests were countered by Napoleone with the assurance that he only wished to preserve his independence of judgement from the influence of the Peraldi.19
In the morning, the 500 or so national guards gathered to elect their officers. Pozzo di Borgo and Peraldi were shouted down, and in a travesty of procedure Giovanni Battista Quenza was elected commanding officer, with Napoleone as lieutenant colonel and second in command. The celebrations in the Buonaparte home that evening were accompanied by a military band.
The following day Colonel Maillard, commander of the French garrison of Ajaccio, inspected Napoleone’s volunteers, but the presence of the two forces in the town made for tension. Just as tense were relations between the generally conservative citizens, who saw in the French regulars a guarantee of stability, and the volunteers, most of them wild men from the hills. On the afternoon of 8 April a quarrel developed between some girls playing skittles on the Olmo, and as onlookers and passers-by took sides insults began to fly which had nothing to do with the original dispute. Shots were fired and Napoleone went out to restore order, but more people spilled out into the streets in a confused outburst of animosities. After one of his officers had been killed, Napoleone was obliged to retire to the safety of the former seminary, where his men were stationed. Quenza and he agreed that the insurgency justified retaliation, and they began shooting at any of the townsfolk who came within range. The fighting gradually turned into a chaotic brawl with guns as private scores were settled. Napoleone tried to exploit the crisis by requesting permission from Maillard to take refuge with his men in the citadel, which aroused the Frenchman’s suspicion, and the following day Maillard ordered the volunteers to withdraw from Ajaccio. Napoleone insisted they remain, and again attempted to gain admittance to the citadel – he even tried to subvert the soldiers by denouncing their colonel as an ‘aristo’.
Hearing of the disturbances, the authorities in Corte despatched commissioners to find out what was going on. Napoleone set off to meet them in order to tell the facts his way, and wrote up a version justifying himself. After a cursory examination of the circumstances, the commissioners had a number of citizens arrested and ordered Napoleone and his volunteers to leave Ajaccio. He duly led them off on 16 April, and intended to go to Corte himself to explain, but he could not expect a welcome there. Paoli’s verdict on the events at Ajaccio was that one could expect nothing less when ‘inexperienced little boys are placed in command of the national guards’. He had had enough of the Buonaparte. ‘The General returned here yesterday evening, he is badly disposed towards me; I saw him this morning, we had an argument, and all is over,’ Joseph wrote to his brother, urging him to go to Paris as soon as he could to justify himself before the government.20
6
France or Corsica
Napoleone had much explaining to do when he reached Paris two weeks later, at the end of May 1792. More than one damning report of his activities in Ajaccio had reached the capital, and he had been denounced in the Legislative Assembly by the Corsican deputies Carlo Maria Pozzo di Borgo and Marius Peraldi, no friends of the Buonaparte since the National Guard elections in which their brothers had been trounced. Peraldi had made up his mind that the family had ‘never, under whatever regime, had any merit other than spying, treachery, vice, impudence and prostitution’. Pozzo di Borgo was more amenable, and Napoleone managed to placate him.1
Napoleone also needed to placate the war ministry, since he had overstayed his leave and could be classed as a deserter. Fortunately for him, war had broken out against Austria barely a month before, and since the emigration of thousands of officers had left a shortage, the ministry was not about to deprive the army of a trained officer on account of a squabble between small-town Corsicans. Colonel Maillard’s denunciation was passed to the ministry of justice, and although this had received similar unfavourable reports from other quarters, the matter rested there.2
The day after his arrival in Paris, on 29 May, Napoleone unexpectedly met an old friend from Brienne, Fauvelet de Bourrienne. Bourrienne had not pursued a military career but had joined the diplomatic service, which took him to Vienna and Warsaw, and he was now at a loose end. The two young men teamed up, sharing what little money they had and thinking up ways of making some more. Napoleone also found friendship at the home of his mother’s childhood friend Panoria Permon, a beautiful woman of doubtful virtue who presided over what appears to have been something of a gaming house in which she received Corsicans and others.3
On 16 June he visited his sister Maria-Anna at Saint-Cyr. ‘She is tall, well-formed, has learned to sew, read, write, dress her hair, dance and also a few words of history,’ he reported to Joseph Fesch, but he was worried that she had lost touch with her roots and become ‘an aristocrat’, and feared that if she had known he was a supporter of the Revolution she would never have agreed to see him. But his own attitude to the Revolution was about to be tested.4
A couple of days later, on 20 June, he met up with Bourrienne for lunch at a restaurant in the rue Saint-Honoré. On coming out they saw a crowd of several thousand men and women armed with pikes, axes, swords, guns and sticks making for the Tuileries. They followed, and took up position on the terrace of the Tuileries gardens, from which they watched as the mob surged up to the palace, broke down the doors, overpowered the national guards on duty and swept inside. Napoleone could not hide his indignation, and when he saw the king submitting to don a red cap of liberty and appear at the window to drink the health of the people, he exploded. ‘Che coglione!’ he reportedly exclaimed, disgusted that nobody had prevented the rabble from storming the palace, and declared that if he had been the king things would have turned out differently. He kept returning to the subject, making pessimistic prognoses for the future. ‘When one sees all this close up one has to admit that the people are hardly worth the trouble we take to win their favour,’ he wrote to Lucien two weeks later, adding that the scenes he had witnessed made their scrape in Ajaccio look like child’s play.5
A week later, on 10 July, he was reintegrated into the artillery with the rank of captain, and awarded six months’ back-pay. Although he was ordered to rejoin his regiment, he was in two minds as to what course to take. He had put the finishing touches to his Lettres sur la Corse, which was now ready for the printer, but as he admitted to Joseph, the political context was unfavourable. He was beginning to think that his future might lie in France, and
advised Joseph to get himself elected to the Legislative Assembly in Paris, as Corsica was becoming peripheral. At the same time, he urged him to encourage Lucien to remain close to Paoli. ‘It is more likely than ever that this will all end in our gaining independence,’ he wrote, suggesting they keep their options open.6
Lucien failed to get taken on as a secretary to Paoli. He was seventeen, exalted and rebellious. His spirit was, as he put it himself in a letter to Joseph, gripped by boundless ‘enthusiasm’; he had looked inside himself and was ‘developing’ his character in a ‘strongly pronounced way’. His soul had been set on fire by reading the immensely fashionable Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, and he had been inspired to discover his identity through writing. He was composing a poem about Brutus, and his pen flew over the paper ‘with astonishing velocity’. ‘I correct little; I do not like rules which restrain genius and I do not observe any,’ he wrote. He had also embraced the most radical revolutionary ideals. He assured Joseph that he ‘felt the courage to kill tyrants’ and would rather die with a dagger in his hand than in a bed surrounded by priestly ‘farce’.7
Warned by his younger brother Louis that Lucien was about to take a step that ‘might well compromise the general interest of the family’, Napoleone wrote to him more than once, trying to restrain him. Lucien was having none of it. He resented Napoleone’s dominant influence, accusing him of having fallen for the courtly attractions of Paris, and expressed his resentment at being told what to do in an impassioned letter to Joseph on 24 June, couched in the obligatory revolutionary idiom. ‘He seems to me to be well suited to being a tyrant and I think that he would be one if he were a king, and that his name would be one of horror for posterity and for the sensitive patriot,’ he wrote, casting himself as a ‘pure’ revolutionary and Napoleone as one who had sold out. ‘I believe him capable of being a turncoat …’8
Napoleone was in fact switching allegiance. He had nourished a vision of himself as the champion of a noble persecuted nation and its heroic leader Paoli, demonising France, on which he heaped responsibility for every ill. But over the past couple of years he had acquainted himself with that downtrodden nation, and found it was less innocent than in his dreams. Its heroic leader turned out to be just as unprincipled and tyrannical as any other ruler – and had failed to accord Napoleone the recognition he felt to be his due. Meanwhile, the demonic France had been reborn as the torchbearer for everything he had come to believe in. Viewed from Paris, Corsica was beginning to look small and mean. On 7 August Napoleone wrote to Joseph that he had made up his mind to remain in France. In its present financial condition, the family would benefit from his rejoining his regiment: at least one member would be drawing a salary. There was a war on, and sooner or later he would get the chance to gain promotion. But only three days later something occurred which changed his mind.9
On 10 August he was roused at his lodgings on the rue du Mail near the Place des Victoires by the sound of the tocsin. Hearing that the Tuileries Palace was being stormed, he set off for the place du Carrousel, where Bourrienne’s brother had a furniture shop, from where he would be able to see what was going on. ‘Before I reached the Carrousel I encountered in the rue des Petits-Champs a group of hideous men bearing a head on the end of a pike,’ he reminisced many years later. ‘Seeing me passably well dressed and looking like a gentleman, they accosted me and made me shout Vive la Nation!, which I readily did, as one can imagine.’10
A mob numbering some 20,000 armed with guns, pikes, axes, knives and even spits had attacked the Tuileries, which were defended by 900 men of the Swiss Guards and a hundred or so courtiers and nobles. The king and his family fled to the protection of the Legislative Assembly, but the defenders of the palace were butchered. When it was over, Napoleone ventured into the palace gardens, where people were finishing off the wounded and mutilating their bodies in obscene ways. ‘Never since has any of my battlefields struck me by the number of dead bodies as did the mass of the Swiss, maybe on account of the constricted space or perhaps because it was the first time I had seen anything like it,’ he recalled. ‘I saw even quite well dressed women commit the most extreme indecencies on the bodies of the Swiss guards.’ Napoleone was terrified as well as horrified, and never shed his fear of the mob.11
He was not going to remain in Paris to watch the slide into anarchy, and he could not afford to leave his sister in an institution that identified her as a noblewoman. On 31 August he went to Saint-Cyr to collect Maria-Anna, and brought her to Paris. On 2 September mobs began breaking into prisons and slaughtering the inmates in reaction to a declaration by the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the allied army marching into France to restore the monarchy, in which he vowed to deal severely with the population of the French capital if the king or any of his family were harmed. The massacre of aristocrats, priests and others detained for one reason or another went on for five days, and it was only on 9 September that Napoleone and his sister were able to leave Paris. They stopped at Marseille just long enough to collect his pay arrears, and on 10 October, by which time the monarchy had been abolished and France declared a republic, the two siblings embarked at Toulon, reaching Ajaccio five days later. Napoleone promptly set off for Corte, hoping to restore the Buonaparte clan to favour.
Paoli may have been a dictator, but his attempts to set up an efficient executive had failed. The culture of the island had been profoundly affected by French rule: the influx of specie up-ended a system in which the majority of the population had never previously held a coin, while the creation of a salaried administration launched a rush for official posts which opened up new fields for conflict between rival clans and tempting prospects for corruption. Most of those in office were more concerned with score-settling, nepotism and profiteering than running the country. It was they who would acquire the biens nationaux being sold off: these made up 12 per cent of the land surface of the island, but only 500 out of a population of 150,000 were able to benefit. This altered the previously egalitarian pattern of land ownership, while newly-introduced regulations impinged on unwritten age-old grazing and gathering rights, leading to disputes and banditry on a scale no government could control.12
Paoli was not well, and was unable to exercise the same authority as in the past. His relationship with France was strained, and he could not but be wary of those who identified with that country or with the Revolution. He viewed the Buonaparte brothers with mistrust. He had dismissed Joseph, whom he regarded as too ambitious for his merits, and had refused to take on the hot-headed Lucien as secretary. When Napoleone appeared in Corte hoping for a senior command, Paoli brushed him off with vague promises and sent him back to Ajaccio to await orders in connection with an impending invasion of Sardinia.
The idea had been mooted in Paris more than a year before. The island was only a few hours’ sailing from Corsica. It was rich in grain and cattle, which the French government needed to feed its armies, and it was assumed that its people needed liberating. Its ruling dynasty, the house of Savoy, also reigned over Piedmont and Savoy, and had joined the coalition against France.
The invasion was to be carried out by a combined force of French regulars, volunteers from Marseille and Corsican national guards. At the end of October, a few days after Napoleone’s return from Corte, the French naval squadron carrying the regulars and a detachment of volunteers dropped anchor off Ajaccio. Its commander, Rear-Admiral Laurent Truguet, was received by the principal families of the town, who entertained him with dinners and dances. The forty-year-old sailor was a frequent guest at the Buonaparte house, having taken a fancy to the sixteen-year-old Maria-Anna. Accompanying him on his flagship was Charles Huguet de Sémonville, on his way to take up the post of ambassador in Constantinople. He too was courted by the Buonaparte family, and he agreed to take Lucien along as his secretary. According to Lucien, Napoleone contemplated going east too, to take service with the British in India, calculating that his professional credentials woul
d provide the chance for a command that would give him the opportunity of achieving great things. In the meantime, he nearly met his end on the streets of Ajaccio.13
When allowed off their ships, the French troops roamed the city picking fights. On 15 December a force of volunteers from Marseille sailed in. It was made up of the dregs of the city’s port, and three days later they teamed up with some of the regulars and began lynching people they accused of being ‘aristos’, including members of the Corsican National Guard, mutilating their bodies and parading them around town before dumping them in the harbour. Order was restored with some difficulty, but in January 1793 a further contingent of volunteers sailed in and Napoleone was only saved from being lynched by some of his guardsmen.
On 18 February, to the relief of the people of Ajaccio, the expedition sailed. Napoleone was in command of a small artillery section under his colleague Quenza. The expedition had been divided into two forces, the larger of which, composed of French regulars, was to attack Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, while the smaller, made up mostly of Corsican volunteers, took the island of Maddalena off the island’s north coast. This force, commanded by Colonna Cesari, consisted of the corvette La Fauvette and a number of troop transports. Unfavourable winds pushed the flotilla back, and it was only four days later that it sailed, landing on Maddalena on 23 February. The Sardinian garrison took refuge in the small town of Maddalena. Napoleone set up a battery which began bombarding the place into submission, and after two days it was on the point of surrendering. But the crew of La Fauvette decided to sail home, and Cesari was obliged to order immediate withdrawal, with instructions to jettison guns and other heavy equipment. Napoleone and Quenza had to scramble back to the boats, whose crews had been seized by panic. The flotilla was back in Corsica by 28 February.
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