Either way, neither of them slept that night. Sometime after one o’clock on the morning of 5 October, Buonaparte ordered a young chef d’escadron of the 21st Mounted Chasseurs, Joachim Murat, to ride over to the plain of the Sablons and secure forty cannon stored there before the rebels could get hold of them. At first light, as the drumrolls summoning the national guards of the various sections resounded across the city, Buonaparte was positioning the guns at strategic points around the seat of the government at the Tuileries, such as the Pont Neuf in the east, the rue Saint-Honoré to the north, and what is now the Place de la Concorde in the west.
The government troops, numbering just over 5,000 men, supported by 1,500 ‘patriots’ ready to defend the Republic against the royalists, and several hundred deputies armed with muskets, faced probably about four times their number of national guards converging from all sides. There followed a lengthy stand-off. A heavy downpour dampened the ardour of the insurgents, and it was not until around four o’clock in the afternoon that the first shots were fired. The batteries were positioned in such a way that the insurgents could not deploy and bring their superior numbers to bear, and the canister shot they fired precluded any attempt to rush them. It was all over within two hours, and while gunfire was heard at various points in the city during the night, all remaining rebel forces were mopped up the following day. Reports of casualties vary from around 400 to over a thousand.5
Buonaparte’s version, which became official history and then legend as the ‘whiff of grapeshot’ which demonstrated his ruthless sense of purpose, has him in charge, directing everything, generously waiting for the insurgents to fire first, using only enough of the canister shot to show that he meant business, and firing blanks thereafter. The truth of this is hard to ascertain. ‘The enemy came to attack us at the Tuileries,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘We killed a lot of them. They killed 30 of our men and wounded 60. We disarmed the sections and everything is quiet.’ Later he claimed that casualties were no higher than 200 dead and wounded on each side.6
Long after he had been shunted aside by the ‘little Corsican officer’, an embittered Barras would describe the events differently. It was he who had planned everything, he who had ordered the guns brought from the Sablons, he who had instructed Brune to fire canister shot over the heads of the oncoming rebels. ‘On the 13 Vendémiaire Bonaparte played no role other than that of my aide de camp,’ he summed up. In his official report delivered to the Convention on 10 October, he praised Brune and others, and did not mention Buonaparte. When Barras had finished, Fréron, still hoping to marry Paulette, rose to speak and reminded him of Buonaparte’s contribution, which Barras reluctantly acknowledged. His report is not the only one to omit Buonaparte. While one account does record that he had a horse killed under him, it states that it was General Verdier who positioned the guns. There must nevertheless have been something remarkable about Buonaparte’s conduct on that day.7
The events had shown that with well-led troops on its side, a government could put an end to the mob rule that had plagued the Revolution. High prices and food shortages meant that Paris remained vulnerable to riots, and in the following days Barras increased the military presence in the city. He recommended Buonaparte for the post of his second in command, and as he himself was about to take up that of a member of the Executive Directory, he would have to give up the command, which meant that his second would be in charge of the most powerful force in the land. It seems unlikely that he would have placed it in any but the most capable hands. There was no further mention of Constantinople, and Buonaparte was now being referred to as ‘General Vendémiaire’, which suggests that his role had been decisive.
On 16 October Buonaparte was promoted to divisional general, and ten days later he was confirmed as commander of the Army of the Interior. He had been effective military governor of Paris since 6 October, and had immediately set about pacifying the city, reforming the National Guard and confiscating privately-held arms, discharging officers with royalist leanings and closing down the Jacobin Club, and taking in hand the police of the capital. Not confining himself to his headquarters in the Place Vendôme, he rode about the city, escorted by a retinue of staff officers and a growing number of aides, including his brother Louis, for whom he had obtained the rank of lieutenant, Junot, Marmont and Murat, whose dash in the early hours of 5 October had impressed him. ‘He never went anywhere without his moustachioed officers with their long sabres,’ recalled Barras. ‘He would mount his tall palfrey, wearing a huge hat with its tricolour plumes and its turned-up rims, his boots turned down, and a dangling sabre larger than its wearer.’ Junot and Murat had been promoted by Buonaparte, and wore with panache the distinctions of a rank they did not officially hold, while Murat embellished his uniform with various outlandish accoutrements.8
Buonaparte himself had grown into his role. Gone was the awkward gait. ‘He already had extraordinary aplomb, a grand manner quite new to me,’ remembered Marmont. He would go to the theatre, making a dramatic entrance with his entourage of swaggering young bloods, their spurs and sabres clinking as they went. He was developing a taste for the theatrical, and was learning a new part. During a food riot in one of the poorer quartiers as he rode through it one day with his glittering cavalcade, he confronted a huge woman who accused his like of growing fat on their salaries by asking her which of them was the fatter, which provoked mirth and defused the situation.9
While he had not gained weight, he was certainly growing fat in the sense the woman meant. Barras, himself one of the great embezzlers of history, had seen to it that Buonaparte was well provided for. How, we do not know. Although he was drawing a salary of 4,000 francs a month, the value of the assignats in which it was paid had fallen dramatically: by 23 October it had dropped to 3 per cent of its nominal value, and specie was extremely scarce. With a pound of sugar costing 100 francs and a bushel of potatoes 200, his salary would not have gone far. He did get a daily allowance for food and other essentials, and fodder for his horses. But that does not explain how he was able to provide his mother with financial assistance adding up to more than his annual salary, send Joseph 400,000 francs, and badger Bourrienne to find him a property to buy.10
As well as money, he was not short of influence. He now wrote to Letizia that Paulette must not marry Fréron, who no longer counted politically. He was in the process of arranging a consulate in Italy for Joseph, and in the meantime obtained for him letters of marque licensing two corsairs to operate out of Genoa and prey on British shipping. He found Lucien a job as commissary to the Army of the North, and Fesch one as a secretary, pending a better job overseeing the Paris hospitals. Nor did he forget more distant relatives. ‘The family wants for nothing,’ he declared to Joseph with satisfaction in a letter of 18 December. ‘I have sent them all money, assignats, clothing, etc. …’11
Barras relates that he was arranging to set Buonaparte up by marrying him off to Mademoiselle de Montansier, an older lady who owned several theatres in Paris, a sure source of income at the time. Thoughts of Désirée would not stand in the way: in a letter to his sister-in-law Marie-Julie Clary, Buonaparte mentions every member of the family but her. In a letter of 9 December he bids Joseph to give her his regards, but for the first time refers to her as Désirée, not Eugénie. He does ask for news of her in one written ten days later, but without the impatience that accompanied previous requests. Buonaparte did not, however, marry Mademoiselle de Montansier.12
Shortly after he had ordered all privately-owned arms to be confiscated, a fourteen-year-old boy called at his headquarters, begging that he might be allowed to keep the sword which had belonged to his father, a general guillotined under the Terror. Moved by the boy’s request, Buonaparte agreed. The following day, the story goes, the grateful mother called. Or he may have called on her, bringing the document permitting the family to keep the sword. Or, as Buonaparte would have us believe, he sent along one of his aides, who reported back that she was a beautiful widow. Or th
e whole story may be a fable woven round some incident to do with the sword. It is unlikely that Buonaparte had never met the widow in question, since she was a close friend of the ladies whose salons he had been frequenting for months, and, being the mistress of Barras, was often at his side. One thing is certain – that General Buonaparte fell madly, almost obsessively in love with her.13
Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Beauharnais was born into the parvenu and scandal-ridden family of Tascher, who owned La Pagerie, a plantation in the French island colony of Martinique. She was brought to France and married off at an early age to an undistinguished nobleman, Alexandre de Beauharnais, who paraded under the assumed title of vicomte. He was jealous and abusive as well as unfaithful, and repudiated her after having sired two children. During the Revolution he had briefly presided over the National Assembly and then been put in command of the Army of the Rhine. An inept soldier, he had allowed the fortress of Mainz to fall to the enemy in 1793 out of fecklessness, but was accused of treason and executed the following year. His wife, known in childhood as Yéyette and later as Josephine, was incarcerated in the same prison, Les Carmes, where, while he was conducting an affair with the widow of an executed general, she was doing the same with General Lazare Hoche, also a prisoner.
Prisons were hotbeds of sexual activity during the Terror, and Les Carmes, whose walls were still smeared with the blood of the 115 priests massacred there in September 1792, was no exception. The usual instinct in the presence of impending death was in this case reinforced by the hope of getting pregnant, which would spare a woman the guillotine. As a result, the multiple-occupancy chambers throbbed to the sound of couplings, often with the warders themselves, in scenes of fear and degradation which left their mark on those like Josephine who were fortunate enough to survive.
On her release from prison following the fall of Robespierre, Josephine made the most of the friendships forged there with, amongst others, Thérèse Tallien. She resumed her affair with General Hoche and was prominent in the exuberant new society, the salons and the extravagant macabre entertainments of the capital. Sometime in the early summer of 1795 she became the mistress of Barras, but by the beginning of the autumn he was ready to move on and began looking around for a husband who might provide for her. She had no money and was living from day to day on the generosity of lovers, currently that of Barras, who had rented a small house for her off the rue Chantereine.
Josephine was thirty-two and, as Barras put it, ‘growing precociously decrepit’. She had never been a beauty, and with her freshness wilting she had to resort to what he called ‘the most refined, the most perfected artistry ever practised by the courtesans of ancient Greece or Paris in the exercise of their profession’. She knew how to overcome every disadvantage, concealing her rotten teeth by keeping her mouth shut when she smiled, which many found irresistible. She possessed an almost legendary charm, grace, and a languor of movement which people associated with her creole origins, lending her a certain spice in their imagination. She was both dignified, with elegant manners and bearing, and girlishly light-hearted, displaying a devil-may-care attitude to practicalities. And there is little doubt that she was an accomplished lover. But she had no position to fall back on when these assets failed, and marriage was the only practical way of securing her future.14
According to Barras she had set her cap at Hoche, but he was married, and had allegedly commented that ‘one could take a whore as a mistress for a time, but not as a legitimate wife’. It seems that Barras then suggested she marry Buonaparte. She was not taken with the idea, allegedly saying that of all the men she might bring herself to love, this ‘puss in boots’ was the last, and objecting that he came from ‘a family of beggars’, even though he was by then showering her with presents. Barras encouraged the match, partly in order to establish her on a respectable footing, perhaps also to tighten his grip on the useful young general, who was growing alarmingly independent.15
Buonaparte had begun to do as he pleased, appointing and cashiering officers, reorganising units, and extending his brief beyond military matters. He called on the Directors almost daily, not so much advising them as telling them what to do, and castigating them for their incompetence. When they reproved him for acting in an arbitrary manner, he reputedly countered by saying it was impossible to get anything done if one were to stick to the law, and he usually managed to get them to see things his way. Getting Buonaparte settled might make life easier for the Directors. Barras advised him that ‘a married man finds his place in society’, and that marriage gave a man ‘more substance and greater resilience against his enemies’. Most people thought he was merely trying to park an unwanted mistress, and the Marquis de Sade would publish that version, thinly veiled, in his Zoloé et ses deux acolytes.16
Buonaparte was not as fussy as Hoche. He allegedly told Barras that he did not like the idea of seducing a virgin, and preferred to find ‘l’amour tout fait que l’amour a faire’, in other words the ground well prepared. Whether those really were his words or not, there is a ring of truth about what they expressed; such cynical bluster is characteristic of the sexually insecure.17
The first extant letter from Buonaparte to Josephine is undated, but it was written at seven in the morning, probably in the second half of December 1795, and almost certainly after their first night of love. ‘I have woken full of you,’ he wrote. ‘The picture of you and the memory of yesterday’s intoxicating evening have left no rest to my senses. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what a strange effect you have had on my heart!’ He goes on to say that he cannot stop thinking about her and what she is doing, and cannot wait to see her again, in three hours’ time. ‘Meanwhile, mio dolce amor, a million kisses from me; but do not give me any, as your kisses set my blood on fire.’18
The incomparable courtesan had clearly given him his first pleasurable amorous experience. ‘It was, it seems, his first love, and he experienced it with all the intensity of his nature,’ noted Marmont. He also noted something else. ‘What is incredible, and yet absolutely true, is that Bonaparte’s vanity was flattered,’ he wrote, explaining that for all his republican talk, the young general was beguiled by the social grace of the old nobility, and that in the company of the former pseudo-vicomtesse de Beauharnais he felt as though he had been accepted into its charmed circle; he was not Carlo Buonaparte’s son for nothing. Josephine fed Buonaparte’s social aspirations with talk of her estates in Martinique, cleverly disguising her penury and hinting at great wealth. She had taste and flair, and had managed to create a sense of elegance in the little house on the rue Chantereine with the few sticks of furniture and meagre ornaments she possessed, and despite the chipped assorted china and unmatched flatware her dinners exuded refined aristocratic ease. The house itself, designed for the philosopher Condorcet by Claude Nicolas Ledoux, was an intimate retreat, reached by a narrow walled lane, a refuge from the political turmoil of the capital. Buonaparte felt well there not just on account of his love for Josephine. He quickly captivated her two children, the fourteen-year-old Eugène and the twelve-year-old Hortense. They had begun by resenting his intrusion, but gave in when he started telling them ghost stories and playing with them. Still something of a child himself, he had found a home in Paris.19
Josephine was unsure about this third child. ‘They want me to marry, my dear friend!’ she wrote to a confidante. ‘All my friends urge me to, my aunt almost orders it and my children beg me to! “Do you love him?” you will ask. – Well … no. “So you find him unappealing?” – No, but I find myself in a state of tepidity which I find unpleasant …’ She goes on to say that she feels she should feel greater ardour: ‘I admire the general’s courage, the extent of his knowledge in all things, of which he speaks equally well, the agility of his mind, which allows him to seize the thoughts of others almost before they have expressed them; but I am fearful, I confess, of the control he seems to wish to exert over everything around him. His piercing look has something about it quite mysterious w
hich impresses even the directors: you can judge for yourself how it intimidates a woman!’
What seems to have bothered her most was his ardour. His various sexual encounters to date had evidently left him cold, and what he experienced with Josephine had opened up a gamut of new sensations and unlocked feelings he had either never known, or had repressed with all the vehemence with which he had lambasted his friend des Mazis at Valence. ‘Above all,’ continues Josephine, ‘that which should please me, the strength of a passion of which he speaks with a force which does not permit any doubt as to its sincerity is precisely that which holds back the consent which I am often ready to give. Having passed my first youth, can I hope to preserve this violent love which, in the general’s case, resembles an access of madness?’ She also found it faintly ridiculous to be the object of adoration of a younger man. She was astonished at his ‘absurd self-confidence’, while admitting that at moments she believed him capable of anything. Her friends encouraged her, and Barras reassured her that he would soon be sending the young general off to war to cool his ardour.20
By then the coalition against France was in poor shape: Tuscany, Prussia, Holland and Spain had dropped out and made peace. Only Austria, Britain and Sardinia were actively pursuing the war. On 31 December an armistice was signed with Austria, but it was expected that hostilities would resume in the spring, and Buonaparte had pronounced ideas on how they should be conducted. Although he was now in command of Paris and the interior, he could not help meddling in overall strategy, to the annoyance of most of the Directors.
Buonaparte’s plan for a two-pronged attack on Vienna, to be delivered through Germany by the Army of the Rhine under General Jean-Victor Moreau and through the Tyrol by the Army of Italy, had been sent to the relevant commanders in September 1795. It had been ridiculed by General Kellermann, who had succeeded Dumerbion at the Army of Italy, but was implemented by General Scherer, who had replaced him in command. He carried out the first stage successfully, but then, instead of moving on as prescribed, came to a standstill, pleading insufficient strength and the low morale of his troops. In January 1796 Buonaparte produced an amended version of the plan, but this too met with a critical reception, and one of the commissioners attached to the Army of Italy protested at orders being sent by ‘project-mongers’ ‘gnawed by ambition and greedy for posts above their abilities’, ‘madmen’ in Paris who knew nothing of the realities of the situation on the ground yet thought they could ‘seize the moon with their teeth’. Scherer tendered his resignation.21
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