by Alan Schom
In the meantime the unsuspecting Napoleon returned to Nice on July 29 only to find himself placed under arrest and incarcerated in the Fort Carré, facing the calm harbor of Antibes. He had in fact been denounced by his fellow countryman, a vengeful Salicetti, the same Salicetti who had just proclaimed “that my heart is filled with joy” on learning of the death of Robespierre, the same Robespierre with whom he had been working so closely for many months. His denunciation of Napoleon had been equally warm: “What was this general doing in a foreign country?” he asked the French authorities in outraged innocence, because of course, among other things, Napoleon’s campaign plans had superseded his own. “There are strong suspicions of treason and fraud against him,” Salicetti concluded.[35]
Much more relevant in the eyes of Paris, however, were Napoleon’s friendly relations with the late terrorist Augustin Robespierre. And of course Napoleon’s younger brother Lucien was a known Jacobin hothead. Men had been executed for far less in revolutionary France. Fearing for his own life, Napoleon’s commanding general, who had been fully aware of his subordinate’s mission to Genoa, had immediately removed Buonaparte from his command.
Napoleon’s fiercely loyal aide-de-camp, Andoche Junot, warmly advised his general to flee: “My conscience is clear,” Napoleon informed Junot, “therefore do not do anything rash, or you will simply compromise me.” Given a fair hearing, he felt confident he would have no problem explaining himself, and although he knew he had a real enemy in Fréron, he also had a friend and ally in the more influential Barras. Writing to another friend, Napoleon admitted to having been “affected by Robespierre’s catastrophe, a man I liked and felt was completely honest. But,” he added, “if he had been my own father I would have stabbed him myself if he had attempted to become a real tyrant.”[36]
And then, just as unexpectedly as it had begun, his imprisonment ended. General Dumerbion, no doubt having second thoughts, released Napoleon on his own authority, merely requesting him not to leave the vicinity. He did refuse for the time being to reintegrate him into the Army of Italy, however, until he could demonstrate his ability “to regain our confidence, through his devotion to the public weal, and by his private actions.” For, said his former commanding officer, “we are quite convinced of the services his military talents can still provide...at a time when men of his high caliber are extraordinarly rare.”
In fact Buonaparte had been one of seventy-four general officers arrested after the fall of Robespierre. Then, for some inexplicable reason, the same Salicetti who had demanded Napoleon’s arrest in the first place — perhaps after the intervention of his good friend Joseph Buonaparte — not only withdrew all allegations against Napoleon but even recommended his heading an expedition to liberate Corsica! In any event, with the British in command of the Mediterranean, no such French naval rescue would have been possible, and Napoleon for his part just wanted to get away from this infernal region, if not from France itself. In May 1795 he suddenly found himself ordered to join the Army of the West in his former rank of brigadier general, to command that army’s artillery![37]
Despite the great relief he felt at being reinstated in the army and receiving a new posting, he hardly cared for the idea of being involved in a French civil war, for the Army of the West was in Brittany and the western departments with orders to put down French royalists and anyone else rebelling against the French government.
Thus he set out for Paris with Junot, his military school classmate Capt. Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont, and his own younger brother Louis. He delayed as much as possible en route, not arriving until the end of the month, by which time another revolution had taken place (on the twentieth), when a reaction to the return of the last of the Jacobins had been transformed into fear and force, resulting in flight of the remainder of Napoleon’s influential friends from the capital. Although Napoleon managed to escape imprisonment again, the new government did its best to irritate him, by removing him from his artillery command, replacing it with an infantry brigade. Quelle insulte...
At first he pouted, then he requested a furlough, in order “to reestablish my health,” holing up in an obscure hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris with Junot and Marmont. He even considered applying for a post in the Ottoman Army. After a while, however, he was able to wangle a transfer to the general staff in Paris, as head of the Topographical Office. In the meantime he had submitted a plan to the government for the invasion of Italy. It interested them.[38]
As for his private life, it was in a shambles, as usual. Brother Joseph had married Julie Clary on August 1, 1794, in the village of Cuges, just outside Marseilles, but none of the Buonapartes had bothered to attend the ceremony — not even Letizia and Napoleon, who were then in nearby Nice. The bride’s mother and two sisters, however, Eugénie Désirée and Honorine Blait, were present.
Through Joseph, Napoleon had earlier met the family, and an understanding of sorts was arrived at that he and Désirée would marry. But despite a brief discreet premarital tryst, the Clarys were none too happy at the prospect of yet another penniless Buonaparte in the family, especially the less-than-totally sociable brigadier. Thus Napoleon and Désirée parted on a wait-and-see basis. By the summer of 1795, however, no decision had been reached.
In mid-September Napoleon’s alarmingly uncertain status was aggravated when he received orders to prepare to lead a special eight-man military mission to Turkey to organize and modernize the sultan’s imperial artillery.[39] Napoleon had been hoping for something better. He remained optimistic at the announcement that General Barras was now heading the nation’s defenses, and that most of the officers dismissed earlier for their lack of “republicanism” would now be reinstated. Seizing this opportunity, Napoleon went to see Barras at the Tuileries Palace on 12 Vendémiaire (October 3).
At midnight that same day, thousands of mostly working-class Parisians and royalists, marching under the banner of the self-proclaimed General Danican, arrived at the Tuileries. At dawn the next day the rebels, several thousand strong, were in position, while Barras was impatiently awaiting several regiments from the suburbs. Summoning Napoleon during the early morning hours, he had ordered him to send for cannon and to defend the Tuileries. Time was clearly of the essence.
Napoleon had immediately dispatched a strapping twenty-seven-year-old cavalry officer with an incredible mop of dark curly hair, one Maj. Joachim Murat, to execute Barras’s order. By 6:00 A.M. Murat appeared almost magically with a long convoy including forty powerful cannon, caissons, and gun crews, which Napoleon began placing where they would be most effective, before the Tuileries, while the nearby side streets were barred by regular army troops. But due to the congested medieval streets, he moved most of the heavy artillery pieces across the road before the Eglise St.-Roch, where he had a wider field of fire.
The first attack by Danican’s rebel columns caught the troops at the Tuileries before they were fully deployed, but the regular regiments held their ground under heavy small-arms fire, and the attack was stalemated by two o’clock that afternoon. But at three o’clock Danican launched a more successful one, breaking through the defending troops and bursting into the Rue St.-Honoré, while other rebels threatened the National Assembly, across the Seine. Gaining control again, the defending regiments then succeeded in forcing the invading armed columns of rebels toward the Eglise St.-Roch. There Napoleon was waiting impatiently. He finally gave the order to open fire, and dozens of powerful cannon tearing huge red swaths through the mob of rebels, against which mere muskets were useless. Screaming, shouting, confused, the insurgents broke and fled. It took hours to clear the streets of the fourteen hundred corpses, as Napoleon summed up the day’s events to Joseph: “The enemy attacked us at the Tuileries. We killed a great many of them. They killed thirty of our men and wounded another sixty...Now all is quiet. As usual I did not receive a scratch. I could not be happier.”[40]
The battle was over; the Tuileries, the seat of government, was safe, Barra
s was more secure than ever, and the last of the rebel positions were cleared by the following day, October 5.
A few days later Barras appeared in uniform before a grateful National Assembly with his generals, including Napoleon, but without naming any of them. Napoleon, whose face was still unknown to most people, no doubt was peeved, especially when suddenly none other than the former representative of Marseilles, Fréron, who had earlier endorsed Salicetti’s insistence on Napoleon’s arrest at Nice, suddenly scrambled up to the dais to address the hundreds of people present, including Barras. He pointed not to a smiling Barras but to Napoleon. “Do not forget, citizens,” he boomed out, “that General Buona-Parte...who had only that morning in which to station his cannon so cleverly, the fortunate results of which you have clearly seen yourselves,” was the real hero of the day! An astonished Napoleon stood there speechless, not knowing that the same Fréron who had demanded his head the year before now needed him very much alive, for Fréron was madly in love with, of all people, Napoleon’s lovely young sister Pauline. The names of “Buonaparte” and “Barras” rang through the jubilant crowd.
A fortnight later Napoleon was gazetted major general, and on October 25 Barras resigned as commander of the Army of the Interior. Divisional General Buonaparte was named to succeed him. Everywhere Napoleon’s name was proclaimed throughout the former realm, this First Republic. He could no longer attend a performance of the Théâtre Français without receiving a rousing ovation. He would never again be forgotten, and it was now that he dropped the u in his name: Bonaparte had arrived.[41]
Throughout this period, despite the astonishing ups and downs in his career, Napoleon did enjoy some social life, especially at the Permon residence. There he would arrive, pale and thin, with his muddy boots and funny round hat and shapeless gray overcoat to visit young Laure, her brother, and her sister, but in particular their mother, Panoria. It was literally still the only foyer in Paris where he felt at home, except chez Bourrienne. But the Permons were special: They were family, and in Corsica that said everything.
The Permons, who had been out of Paris during the final illness of Monsieur Permon, returned just after the October events and Napoleon’s elevation to commander of the Army of the Interior. When the Permons had left Paris, Napoleon’s future was still in doubt. He was sharing a room with Junot and Marmont in a cheap Left Bank hotel. He had not a sou to spare for cabs or a horse, and his boots were always muddy from his long walks through the largely unpaved streets of the French capital. But according to Laure Permon:
Muddy boots were out of the question. Bonaparte never appeared anywhere now but in a handsome carriage, and he lived in a very respectable house, in the Rue des Capucines. In brief, he had become a necessary and important personage, and all as if by magic. He came every day to see us, with the same kindness and familiarity. Sometimes, but very rarely, he brought along with him one of his aides-de-camp, either Junot or Muiron, or Uncle Fesch, a man of the mildest manners and most even temperament.
At this time the situation in Paris was desperate. Workers had no jobs, and people were starving. Napoleon would arrive in his carriage almost daily with dozens of loaves of bread for the Permons to distribute, but on strict orders not to say that this bounty had come from him.
Madame Permon was still in deep mourning. But Napoleon, as usual, was oblivious to anyone else’s feelings. After pestering Madame Permon in vain to arrange for a marriage between Laure’s brother and his sister Pauline, he then attempted a second alliance between Laure and Louis or Jérôme. Laure’s mother rejected this suggestion as well, on the grounds of youth and both families’ lack of fortune (the once wealthy Permons having lost almost everything during the Revolution).
“Indeed, my dear Napoleon,” she had replied, “you are acting the high priest today. You are marrying everybody, even the youngsters,” she laughed.
Bonaparte was embarrassed. He admitted that when he woke up that morning a “marriage-breeze” had swept over him. To prove it, he kissed Madame Permon’s hand and now proposed the union of the two families by a marriage between him and herself “as soon as a regard to decency would allow.” Madame Permon “stared at Bonaparte for some seconds with an astonishment bordering upon stupefaction, and then burst into so hearty a laugh” that the family heard her in the next room.
Napoleon continued to visit the Permons, and conversation in the drawing room was a little awkward for some time. Then one day a real storm developed out of the blue that eclipsed their misunderstanding and permanently destroyed the close ties he had maintained for so many years with this family.
It had all begun innocently enough, when Madame Permon asked Napoleon, now the great man, to obtain a commission in the elite special guards assigned to protect the National Assembly for the son of a Corsican cousin, a young man named Dimo Stephanopoli. Napoleon assured her that he would take care of it. A week later Madame Permon asked Napoleon if he had considered her recommendation. He replied that he had the war minister’s promise. There was one more detail to take care of, and he would bring her the commission tomorrow.
When he arrived the next day, it turned out that with all his professional preoccupations he had completely forgotten his promise. “You owe this to me!” Madame Permon snapped at him. Napoleon explained that all the offices were closed for the weekend.
On Monday morning General Bonaparte called as usual on Madame Permon. On horseback and surrounded by numerous aides, he was in a convivial mood, but Madame Permon was quite beside herself. She had just received a message from Dimo saying that nothing had been done about his commission.
When Napoleon tried to kiss her hand, she snatched it violently from his and demanded to know whether he had the commission at last. Napoleon replied that he had been busy and again promised “tomorrow.” Madame Permon flew into a rage. She accused him of lying to her and — worse — of dishonor. “You deserve a good thrashing!” she announced. “Could an enemy have served me worse?”
He tried to placate her, but to no avail. “What is done is done. With me words are nothing, actions are everything.”
As Napoleon prepared to leave, he offered his hand. Madame Permon refused, silently folding her arms in front of her.
Napoleon had been severely humiliated before his subordinates, and that ended all normal relations with the one family he was truly fond of, in which he had been treated like a son. “We went several days without seeing him,” said Laure. “He then called one evening when he knew we were at the theater, and at last stayed away altogether.”’[42]
In the future Napoleon would frequently make promises and simply forget about them. When reminded, he would merely shrug off his failure, never admitting he had wronged anyone. He developed a reputation as a notorious liar. He promised general officers, such as Baron Paul-Charles Henri Thiébault, promotion to higher rank, even before witnesses, and then did nothing about it for years. Napoleon would make enemy after enemy throughout his career, without a thought, for he had neither shame nor a sense of guilt. His word meant nothing, tant pis! Nor did he realize that this attitude lost him the respect of most of those around him — even those who otherwise genuinely admired his real military achievements — to the point that one day they would feel no compunction in abandoning him altogether.
Just as relations were ending between Napoleon and the Permons, they were beginning in another direction. Shortly after his sudden rise to power, following the October 4 cannonading, Major General Bonaparte, commander in chief of the Army of the Interior, met a woman he had no doubt heard mentioned frequently, along with some of her famous (some would say infamous) friends, such as Thérésia Tallien, Fortunée Hamelin, and Juliette Récamier, collectively known as the Merveilleuses because of the extraordinary costumes they wore. Their bacchanalia — “filthy orgies,” one member of the Directory called them — held at the Chaumière, their cottage in the Champs-Elysées, were the talk and scandal of the town. Perhaps Napoleon had already met her there, but undo
ubtedly he had at least seen her fleetingly chez Barras, whose official mistress she now was. This was in the autumn of 1795, when her affair with Gen. Lazare Hoche was drawing to a close — or almost, with the announcement of Mme. Hoche’s pregnancy and his refusal to divorce her, though he was still besotted by his mistress. The lady in question was of course Josephine, or Rose, as she was still called at this time.
To be sure, Hoche had not been her first lover since the execution of her estranged husband, Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais, a year and half earlier. There had been a chevalier, a count, and a duke, not to mention a few transient officers. The affair with the celebrated hero, Hoche, would linger to the end of 1795, when, with the dispersal of the Army of the West, he was named to head the newly forming Army of the West Coast, preparing for the invasion of Ireland.
Barras would prove to be the key to both Josephine’s and Napoleon’s lives and careers. Every woman in Paris found Barras eminently attractive: “Tall, dark, having a proud bearing, lively, and yet with a distinguished and most imposing air,” the hard-to-please Victorine de Chastenay described him, the even-harder-to please Germaine de Stael fully concurring.
Josephine was not yet “Josephine.” Born Marie Josephe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, on June 23, 1763, on the family sugar plantation at Les Trois Ilets in Martinique, she had been called Yvette by her family and then Rose after leaving school. At the age of eighteen, her father, Joseph Tascher de La Pagerie, a descendant of an old aristocratic family from the Loire, had left the court of Louis XVI, where he had been serving as a royal page, to seek his fortune in the fabled tropical Windward Islands of the Caribbean. Joseph was neither very bright nor a good businessman, and his plantation steadily declined, aided by one or two unusually destructive hurricanes and by his predilection for gambling, drink, and women. His great dream was to escape his tropical prison for the delights of Paris.