by Tom Anderson
Meanwhile, quite a different situation was occuring with the French Navy in Toulon, as a certain British captain named Leo Bone would soon discover...
Chapter 22: The Making of a Legend
“...always be wary of telling lies, especially when they turn out to be the truth.”
- Leo Bone, Captain, RN
From: “The Man With Three Names—The Life and Times of Napoleone Buonaparte” (Dr Henri Pelletier, University of Nantes Press, 1962)—
The Toulon incident was at first overlooked in the broader chaos of the dawning wars of the Revolutionary Age, but from our perspective, with the benefit of sitting comfortably atop more than a century of distance from these events, it was as important as the Battle of Saint-Quentin or the Flight from Fleurus. It sealed the fate of naval affairs in Revolutionary France, leading to some obvious consequences and some that were anything but.
By October 3rd 1795, when a small Royal Navy force under Captain Leo Bone ventured into the Rade d’Hyeres, several of those northern battles had already been won and lost. News of this filtered very sporadically down to Provence, though, which by now had broken with Paris. Ostensibly this break was a Mirabeauiste project due to the Jacobins’ perversion of the Revolutionary sentiment—but if there had ever been any truth to this, in any case the Royalists soon seized power from the Mirabeauistes and Provence became a straightforward counter-revolutionary stronghold. The bulk of the French Mediterranean fleet—which until the mid 18th century had been an entirely separate force from the oceanic[144] navy—was in harbour at Toulon, and this gave whoever held Toulon a major bargaining chip.
The fleet in question was under the command of the Comte d’Estaing, Jean-Baptiste Charles Henri Hector. While d’Estaing had scored a rather filmish[145] if minor victory over the British at the Battle of Bermuda, during the Second Platinean War, he was an indecisive commander. In particular, at the present the Revolution presented a dilemma to him. He had supported the reforms of the Diamant period, but had remained loyal to the Royal Family and was unable to countenance their executions. But, without any orders from above, he could not decide what course to take in this new, ugly era. His best hope was that the Dauphin would return from Spain with new orders.
At the same time, the Jacobins in Paris had heard of the breakaway of Provence and Robespierre flew into a rage, ordering the raising of another new regiment, and its immediate dispatch to “purge” the province and in particular the city of Toulon. This was not the wisest choice considering the rumours coming out of Flanders and Picardy of a general Austrian victory on that front, but nonetheless the orders were obeyed. This reflects the centralisation of power in the Consulate even by this early stage, in which the allegedly free men of the NLA were dragged along. It was also the first use of conscription in the Revolutionary army, the levée en masse—the army had previously relied on the existing large Royalist armies (suitably ‘purified’ of ‘traitors’), augmented by the new volunteers of the Legion du Diamant.
Unsurprisingly, the resulting force was less than professional, but as usual with Revolutionary armies in this period, its overwhelming quantity was a quality of its own kind. The army was under the command of the attainted Comte de Custine, Adam Philippe, who had escaped the chirurgien or chambre phlogistique because Robespierre had taken a liking to him. More importantly, unlike the vast majority of the overpromoted Revolutionary generals at this point, Custine had genuine military experience, having served in the Platinean conflict. It was there, after Noailles’ army had surrendered to the Platineans, that Custine had first become familiar with the revolutionary ideals that would soon sweep over his own country.
Thus, in Custine the army had a competent commander, but in practice his task was not unakin to herding cats. The vast number of Sans-Culotte volunteers and the new conscripts simply overwhelmed the existing logistical system, with the result that the army turned to “foraging” across the countryside—la maraude, as it was later infamously called. Custine’s army was scarcely unique in this, and the resulting resentment by the French peasantry only served to justify Robespierre’s paranoia that ‘there is an enemy of the Revolution behind every door!’
The army reached Toulon on September 17th and Custine called a truce, meeting with the Comte d’Estaing on his flagship Améthyste. Custine defended the latest depredations of the Consulate and argued that d’Estaing’s oaths were to France, not the royal family, and that France now needed his ships to safeguard the ideals of the Revolution.
If Custine had got there a week earlier, it is quite likely that the dithering Comte d’Estaing would have been persuaded, but by now he had become emotionally invested in the defences of Toulon that he and the few royal officers in the town had been putting together. The town was quite a defensible position from the land, providing that the besieged town could be resupplied by sea. D’Estaing proceeded to do just that, sending Custine back to his army with a degree of icy-cold chivalry as though he were an enemy general which, d’Estaing slowly began to realise, was in fact the case.
D’Estaing ordered that elements of the fleet make a voyage to Corsica and return with powder, shot, food and preferably some of the troops still stationed there. Those ships reappeared on the 1st of October, or some of them did: news of the Revolution was spreading throughout the lower decks, and some crews had successfully risen up in mutiny. D’Estaing was appalled to learn that some of his frigates had apparently taken up ‘democratic piracy’, while others had simply beached their vessels on Corsica and fled there. This is likely the means by which the news of the Revolution in turn spread to Corsica so rapidly.
While d’Estaing’s gamble did little to relieve the Siege of Toulon, it did serve to intrigue a British captain named Leo Bone and his small force of HMS Diamond and two smaller frigates. Since being assigned to the Mediterranean, Bone had already unofficially visited Corsica several times, curious about the land of his birth he barely remembered. He justified these to the Board of the Admiralty as ‘exploratory operations’.[146]
While there under an alias, he learned of d’Estaing’s ships being present and even witnessed a shootout in Aiacciu[147] between the officers and men of one of those ships, as Revolutionary sentiment grew too strong. Bone had of course heard of the Revolution by this point, but as with practically all Britons his information was sketchy and incomplete. Intrigued, he bought drinks for one of the less wounded Revolutionary crewmen and got a clearer account (at least, at first). He then supplemented this with an account from one of the officers of another ship, over a game of Vingt-et-un in an inn in Bastia.
By the time the remaining ships of d’Estaing returned, Bone had as clear a picture of the Revolution as anyone in Toulon, and this gave him an idea. An audacious, unimaginably brash idea, but one that suited the highly ambitious captain down to the ground. His father Charles Bone had passed on some of his political ideas, and the younger Bone wondered whether, on the back of triumphs at sea, he could enter Parliament and eventually become Prime Minister. The minister who finally presided over the passing of Catholic emancipation...that would be the way to make Charles proud.
So it was on 3rd October that Bone’s trio of ships shadowed d’Estaing’s back into the Rade d’Hyeres. By this point d’Estaing was despairing and barely acknowledged the foreign, possibly hostile ships. Custine’s army had begun to overwhelm the fewer and scarcely more disciplined defenders of Toulon. However, the heart of the city was still held by the Royalists with resupply by d’Estaing’s ships. Realising this, Custine found several good sites for his heavy artillery and, using the new Cugnot fardiers, towed them into position.
Bone claimed in later accounts to be unflustered by the guns apparently moving by themselves, though his subordinates at the time recorded that he was anything but. In any case, slowly but steadily the guns rose to the summits of the hills and ridges that Custine and his artillery commander had chosen. Briefly they were hidden by clouds of steam, but then the Cugnot steam engines wer
e dampened and the guns rotated. Then Custine spelt out a simple message on the ridge of l’Evescat in white shirts held down by stones, visible to everyone on the French ships who could read: SURRENDER OR DIE.
Not a minute later, the first guns began to fire, tearing through the ships at close range and wreaking horrible casualties. Custine had sited his guns well and d’Estaing’s attempt to silence the guns by counterbattery fire failed. Soon there were more mutinies on nearby ships, with revolutionary (or opportunistic) crewmen hastily raising the red flag in a bid to escape. Other ships began to retreat and flee, abandoning Toulon. And, inevitably, d’Estaing was indecisive.
That indecision could have killed him, and perhaps France, but for the audacity of Leo Bone. He himself spoke fair French, his father having told him to ‘know the enemy’ and, inevitably in the national mix that was the average Royal Navy crew, he had several more fluent speakers. Bone seized the day and brought a boat out to the Améthyste, even while Custine’s roundshot was splashing huge waterspouts up all around him. D’Estaing was startled out of his funk by the appearance of this rowing boat, flying a flag of truce, calmly appearing amid the destruction. He quickly received the energetic British captain, who told him in schoolboy French that the Dauphin had made a treaty on behalf of ‘true France’ with the British, and that the loyal French forces here were to retreat to a safe British port and await further orders.
D’Estaing must have realised that Bone’s supposed “envoys from the Dauphin” (his French-speaking crewmen in makeshift costume) were anything but, but at this stage he was willing to cling to any straw. Quickly, essentially just repeating what Bone ‘advised’ him to do, he ordered that the remaining ships were to rescue as many royalist fighters from Toulon as possible and then follow the Diamond into retreat. The coincidental name of the British ship resonated throughout the French crews, and soon there was the rumour that the Dauphin had accepted Le Diamant’s reforms but continued to oppose the Consulate. This largely prevented any further mutinies. Two more ships were lost while evacuating men from Toulon—not least because women and civilians tried to pile on board—but a significant number of royalist troops, irregulars and ammunition were saved.
As the 3rd of October 1795 drew to a close, the remains of the Toulon Fleet followed HMS Diamond to Malta, even as the Revolutionary army of Custine finally fell upon the city as a whole and subjected it to what became a legendarily infamous night of rape and pillage. Custine’s own attempts to hold back his disorganised army were ineffectual.
When news of the incident got back to Paris, some deputies wanted Custine’s head, but Robespierre defended him once more. A large part of the fleet had been destroyed or captured, after all, and more importantly in Robespierre’s estimation, Toulon had certainly been ‘purified’.
Current historians put the figures at eight ships destroyed by Custine’s artillery, six lost to mutiny between Corsica and Toulon (some of whom became ‘democratic pirates’), eleven captured by the Revolutionaries...but twenty-two, including four first-rate ships of the line, were brought out of Toulon and followed Bone to the promised land.
But there was an unpleasant surprise for Leo Bone when they reached Malta. He had planned to keep up his audacious subterfuge and con d’Estaing into turning his ships over to the Royal Navy one at a time, resulting in the most bloodless addition to the fleet by capture in history. But now, he was learning, his lie had become the truth...
Chapter 23: History Repeats Itself
“Can it truly be conceived that this nation would take up arms against this new beacon of liberty, born of the tongue which gave us, via the bequest of de Montfort, our parlement?”
“I understand that the honourable gentleman has apparently failed to understand that the present unpleasantness in France has been an undermining of the aforesaid parlements. We should not seek to compare the acts of barbarism in the south to our own revolution, whereby we received our perfect Constitution by approval of the sitting Parliament. We should not imply any continuity between the lawful Estates of the King of France and this self-appointed ministry of murder.”
– Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke, debate in the British House of Commons on ‘Response to the Revolution in France’, July 30th 1795
*
From: “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (1926) –
The response of Great Britain and her Hanoverian[148] sister nations to the Jacobin Revolution was always confused and divided, even from the start. The political landscape had by this point settled into a more or less stable pattern compared to the unrest of the mid-eighteenth century. The Parliament elected in 1791 reflected this. Political parties at the time were far more fluxional and notional than nowadays, but broad divisions can be discerned.
Officially, the party labels remained Whig and Tory, though the relevance of those names had ceased with the decisive final defeat of the Jacobites in the aftermath of the War of the British Succession. Only a small rump of declared Tories remained in Parliament, largely from Scottish constituencies. The vast majority of MPs claimed to be Whigs of some stripe or another, but it is a mistake to assume any kind of unity from this. Labels overlapped, but a continuity can be traced from the ministry of Pitt (1758-1766) and the first Rockingham ministry (1766-1782) through to the government party of 1795, who were most commonly termed Liberal Whigs (or simply Liberals). Although competent and reasonably popular, Rockingham had been forced to resign in 1782 due to the Africa Bubble scandal.[149] His government had, however, survived almost intact and the inoffensive Duke of Portland was appointed titular Prime Minister while Edmund Burke, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, became the real power behind the throne.[150]
The largest opposition party was that of Charles James Fox, usually referred to as the Radical Whigs or simply Radicals (although there were also unaffiliated, more extreme groups describing themselves as Radicals, who had little to no Parliamentary representation). The Radicals advocated the abolition of the slave trade, Catholic relief and Parliamentary reform; the third course was by far the most popular among other groups in Parliament and the general public. Prior to the Jacobin Revolution, the Radicals had pointed to the new system of parliamentary governance in the Empire of North America as a model for reform in Great Britain, as well as expressing admiration for the republican Cortes Nacionales of the UPSA. However, Fox’s support for the Jacobins typically broke any link in the British public imagination between the Radicals and the Americans, who were later more identified with the Liberal Whigs of the government.
As well as these broad divisions, there was also the inevitable lasting trace of a distinction between the Court and Country parties, the latter being MPs from rural constituencies and Lords from rural estate who would typically vote against any given ministry unless placated, usually by bribery. MPs elected from rotten boroughs were common, even among the Radicals who advocated the abolition of such boroughs. This perceived hypocrisy did nothing to help their cause.
The Revolutionary sentiment in France initially drew broad approval from the Parliament of Great Britain (in that of Ireland, as we shall see later, the situation was somewhat more complex). As news of Revolutionary atrocities filtered down, however, Parliamentary support fell away until only the core of Foxite Radical Whigs was left, continuing to argue that any unfortunate incidents in Republican France were excusable compared to the centuries of royalist repression that had precipitated them.
The Liberal Whig government, however, turned against the Revolution. Edmund Burke drew a sharp distrinction between the Whiggish conception of the gradual progressive growth of liberty across history and the Jacobins’ abrupt, violent revolutions. He also rejected comparisons of republican France with republican South America, arguing that while both were born of war, the UPSA had never turned on its own people with such viciousness, not even those who had been Spanish loyalists.
Nonetheless, even the government was divided on the question of what the response of the Depa
rtment for Foreign Affairs should be. The situation was not without precedent: when England had briefly become a republic in the previous century, several European powers had continued to recognise the Kingdom of England, even when it was reduced to merely the Isles of Scilly. The more reactionary Whigs and most Tories argued that Britain should recognise the Dauphin as King Louis XVII and that any French government formed without his approval should be considered illegal and to have no authority. Burke was leaning towards this view and it was likely that an Act to that effect would have been passed even in the absence of provocation from Republican France. In practice, however, the decision was made for him.
The Revolution had been accompanied by a general campaign of anti-foreigner violence on the part of the mob. This has been common to most proletarian revolutions throughout history (for example, the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381 was accompanied by attacks on Flemish weavers in London) but the Jacobin Revolution was the first to explicitly place such violence within a coherent ideological framework. This was prior to the publishing of de Lisieux’s seminal work Les Races, however, and thus cannot be understood through the usual prism which modern commentators associate with the Linnaean-Racialism of Revolutionary France. This is however beside the point. As well as attacks on foreign-born soldiers and merchants, an admixture of the anti-establishment tone of the Revolution meant that foreign dignitaries were not spared. Most ambassadors to France managed to escape the tides of violence, having seen what was coming, but the rose-tinted vision of the Revolution early on in the British Parliament had evidently spread to its representatives in Paris, and it was not until the phlogistication of Louis XVI that the British and American ambassadors attempted to leave.