Napoleon was unimpressed by what he found in Paris. ‘The men at the head of the Revolution are a poor lot,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘Everyone pursues his own interest, and searches to gain his own ends by dint of all sorts of crimes; people intrigue as basely as ever. All this destroys ambition. One pities those who have the misfortune to play a part in public affairs.’29 If the part of the honest soldier, detached from the muddy business of politics, sat poorly with the reality of the revolutionary intriguer of Ajaccio, it was nonetheless one that he played well, and strategically. By this time he was a fully-fledged revolutionary, as his support for the overthrow of the monarchy and the nationalization of Corsica’s monasteries attested. Politically he veered towards the Jacobin extremists, who moreover seemed to be on the winning side. Although he wasn’t personally involved in any of the acts of repression already taking place in Paris as the Revolution moved towards its climax, there is no evidence that he disapproved of them.
Napoleon was in Paris on June 20, 1792 when the mob invaded the Tuileries, captured Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and forced the king to wear a red cap of liberty on the palace balcony. Bourrienne had met him at a restaurant on the rue Saint-Honoré, and when they saw a heavily armed crowd marching towards the palace, he claims that Napoleon said, ‘Let’s follow the rabble.’ Taking their place on the riverside terrace, they then watched with (presumably well-disguised) ‘surprise and indignation’ the historic scenes that followed.30 Two days later Napoleon described them to Joseph:
Between seven and eight thousand men armed with pikes, axes, swords, guns, spits, sharpened sticks … went to the king. The Tuileries gardens were closed and 15,000 National Guards were on guard there. They broke down the gates, entered the palace, pointed the cannon at the king’s apartment, threw four doors to the ground, and presented the king with two cockades, one white [the Bourbon colour] and the other tricolour. They made him choose. Choose, they said, whether you reign here or in Coblenz. The king presented himself. He put on a red bonnet. So did the queen and the royal prince. They gave the king a drink. They stayed in the palace for four hours … All this is unconstitutional and sets a dangerous precedent. It is hard to predict what will happen to the empire in such stormy circumstances.31
Bourrienne later reported that Napoleon remarked: ‘What madness! How could they allow that rabble to enter? Why do they not sweep away four or five hundred of them with cannon? Then the rest would take themselves off very quickly.’ The humiliation of the royal family on that occasion further lowered the monarchy in Napoleon’s estimation. He supported the toppling of the king but could not understand why Louis XVI had meekly allowed himself to be humiliated. As it was, the royal couple had less than two months of this hazardous liberty left to them.
Austria and Prussia invaded France ten days later, inviting the well-justified supposition that Louis XVI and his Austrian wife sympathized with the invasion, and were collaborating with France’s enemies who now publicly stated their wish to restore them to full authority. Napoleon’s contempt for the pusillanimity of the Bourbons was again made clear on August 10, when the mob returned to arrest the king and queen and massacred their Swiss Guards. He had left his hotel in the rue de Mail and gone to watch events from a friend’s house on the Place du Carrousel. Seeing the well-dressed young officer on his way there, members of the crowd ordered Napoleon to shout ‘Vive la Nation!’, which, as he reminisced decades later, ‘as you can imagine, I hastened to do!’32 His friend’s house was stuffed with the property of aristocrats who had been forced to sell their belongings at a heavy discount before fleeing France. ‘Che coglione!’ (‘What asses!’) he exclaimed in Italian when, from an upstairs window, he saw the Swiss Guards refrain from firing on the mob, at what turned out to be the cost of their lives.33 When he himself moved into the Tuileries seven years later he had the bullet holes from that day effaced from the building.
Napoleon was still in Paris in early September when more than 1,200 people, including 115 priests, were murdered by the mob in the city’s prisons in cold blood. Verdun had fallen to the Duke of Brunswick’s invading Prussian army on September 3, after which four days of wanton killing of suspected collaborators began. Napoleon later attempted to defend what had happened, saying: ‘I think the massacres of September may have produced a powerful effect on the men of the invading army. In one moment they saw a whole population rising up against them.’34 He claimed that those who had carried them out ‘were almost all soldiers, who … were resolved to leave no enemies behind them’. Of the senior Jacobin revolutionaries he said: ‘Whatever people say of them they are not despicable characters. Few men have made their mark on the world as they have done.’35 Napoleon didn’t deny his own Jacobin past when he ruled France, saying, ‘At one time every man of spirit was bound to be one’, and he gave two of Robespierre’s female relatives annual pensions of 7,200 francs and 1,800 francs respectively.36 He had assessed the situation at first hand and, like his father, aligned himself with what looked like the winning side.
On September 21, 1792 France formally declared itself a Republic and the Assembly announced that Louis XVI would be tried for collaboration with the enemy and crimes against the French people. The day before, the Revolution was saved when Generals François Kellermann and Charles Dumouriez defeated Brunswick’s Prussian army at the battle of Valmy in the Champagne-Ardenne region, proving that the citizen army of France could defeat the regular armies of the counter-revolutionary Powers.
By mid-October Napoleon was back in Ajaccio promoting the Jacobin cause, returning to his lieutenant-colonelcy of the Corsican National Guard rather than taking up the captaincy of the 4th Regiment of Artillery in France’s regular army. He found the island far more anti-French than it had been when he left, especially after the September Massacres and the declaration of the Republic. Yet he remained, as he put it, ‘persuaded that the best thing Corsica could do was to become a province of France’.37 He moved from being a Corsican nationalist to a French revolutionary not because he finally got over being bullied at school, or because of anything to do with his father, let alone for any of the weird psycho-sexual reasons that have been advanced by historians and biographers in recent years, but simply because the politics of France and of Corsica had profoundly changed and so too had his place within them. Paoli, who preferred alliances with the grander and more politically influential Buttafuoco and Pozzo di Borgo clans than with the Bonapartes, opposed the Republic, the suppression of the monasteries and much of the rest of the revolutionary agenda that the Bonapartes supported. Paoli refused to take Lucien on to his staff, and even tried to prevent Napoleon from returning to his post in the National Guard. It was impossible for Napoleon to remain a Corsican patriot when the man who personified Corsican nationalism rejected him and his family so comprehensively.
In the intricate, intensely personal and fast-moving clan politics of Corsica, the Bonapartes were losing out to the Paolists. Through his reading, education, time in Paris and immersion in French culture, Napoleon had been imbued with French ideas even while he was still a zealous Corsican nationalist. He could see how provincial Corsica’s concerns were compared to the universal ideals thrown up by the Revolution, which was threatened by a full-scale invasion from Austria and Prussia. Over the coming months, Napoleon began to think of himself more and more as French, and less and less as Corsican. When, years later, a mayor attempted to compliment him by saying, ‘It is surprising, Sire, that though you are not a Frenchman, you love France so well, and have done so much for her,’ Napoleon said, ‘I felt as if he had struck me a blow! I turned my back on him.’38
The alienation between the Bonapartes and the Paolists was accelerated by the decapitation of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793 and the creation of the Committee of Public Safety in Paris. A witness who was present when Napoleon heard the news of Louis’ death recalled his privately saying, ‘Oh! The wretches! The poor wretches! They will go through anarchy.’39 Napoleon thought of the king’s
execution – followed in October by that of Marie Antoinette – as a tactical error. ‘Had the French been more moderate and not put Louis to death,’ he later opined, ‘all Europe would have been revolutionized: the war saved England.’40 Yet at the time he publicly supported what had been done, and started his letters with the republican address ‘Citizen’.41 On February 1 France declared war on Britain and Holland, shortly after Spain, Portugal and the Kingdom of Piedmont in Italy had declared war on France. Ignoring the verdict of Valmy, the European monarchies were coming together to punish the regicide Republic. In March 1793 the Convention set up the Committee of Public Safety, which by July had become the de facto executive government of France. Prominent among its members were the leading Jacobins Robespierre and Louis Saint-Just. On August 23 the French Republic declared a levée en masse (mass conscription) in which all able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were called up to defend the Revolution and la patrie, more than doubling the size of the French army from 645,000 to 1.5 million, and uniting the whole nation behind its fortunes.
Although it is likely that war would have broken out eventually anyway, the declaration of war against Britain by the revolutionary regime was a profound mistake; the Tory government of William Pitt the Younger (who had come to power in 1783 at the astonishingly young age of twenty-four) was by then viscerally opposed to regicidal France.* Taking advantage of its insular geography, Britain was to become by far the most consistent of all the opponents of revolutionary and Napoleonic France, with which it was henceforth at peace for only fourteen months of the next twenty-three years. ‘Depend upon it,’ Pitt was to tell the political philosopher Edmund Burke, whose book Reflections on the Revolution in France had as early as 1790 predicted the Reign of Terror and the rise of a dictator, ‘we shall go on as we are till the Day of Judgement.’42 Britain saw an opportunity to use her maritime power to sweep French trade from the world’s oceans, neutralize or capture French colonies and cement her position as the world’s greatest commercial power after her humiliation in America only a decade earlier. For Pitt and his followers, unyielding opposition to the French Revolution, and later to Napoleonic France, was not only a moral and ideological imperative, it also made perfect geo-political sense in affording Britain the opportunity to replace France as the world’s hegemon. To that end, the Pittites in London funded a series of military coalitions against France – numbering no fewer than seven in all – through massive direct government-to-government cash subsidies, what Napoleon would call ‘Pitt’s gold’.43
The month after Louis XVI’s execution, Napoleon obtained his first significant command. He was put in charge of the artillery section of an expedition to ‘liberate’ three small Sardinian islands from the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia under Paoli’s nephew, Pier di Cesari Rocca, whom he privately derided as a ‘clothes-horse’.44 On February 18 he embarked with his Corsican National Guardsmen on the twenty-two-gun corvette La Fauvette, part of a small fleet commanded by Admiral Laurent de Truguet, which sailed from Bonifacio. By nightfall on the 23rd, the island of San Stefano had been occupied. It was separated from the other two islands, La Maddelana and Caprera, by only 800 yards. Napoleon placed his cannon so they could fire upon the other islands, and they did so the next day. On board the Fauvette, however, the Provençal peasant conscripts who made up the largest part of Rocca’s force had noticed that the well-armed and warlike Sardinians thronging the shores showed little sign of wanting to be liberated. They mutinied, and so the entire expedition was aborted by Rocca. A furious Napoleon was forced to spike his own cannon and throw his mortars into the sea.
The first time Napoleon saw military action was therefore an humiliation, but had Paoli furnished the 10,000 men that the Paris Convention had requested for the expedition, rather than only 1,800, it might have succeeded. Napoleon complained to Paoli that his troops had been ‘absolutely denuded of all which was necessary for a campaign; they marched without tents, without uniforms, without cloaks and with no artillery train.’ He added that it was only ‘the hope of success’ that had sustained them.45 It was an inauspicious start for the career of the new Caesar, but it taught him the importance of morale, logistics and leadership more powerfully than any number of academic lectures.
Over the next four months, as Paoli’s government grew closer to the British – who were to occupy Corsica with his blessing on July 23, 1794 – and further from the French, Napoleon tried to straddle his two loyalties as long as he could, even when, after one spat, Paoli called Lucien a ‘serpent’. With rebels in the deeply Catholic Vendée region of western France – known as Chouans – rising up in support for the Bourbons against the atheist Revolution after the king’s execution, government commissioners crisscrossing France to ensure ideological purity – reportedly bringing a portable guillotine with them* – and Paoli fortifying the Ajaccio citadel, Napoleon’s options were narrowing. As late as April 18 he wrote a pamphlet entitled ‘Address to the Convention’ that defended Paoli, but that same month he also composed a ‘Petition to the Municipality of Ajaccio’ urging the town to take an oath of allegiance to the Republic. When Saliceti had ordered Paoli’s arrest for treason an urgent decision was needed. The island rose in revolt for their ‘Babbù’, Paoli, and burnt Saliceti in effigy, hacking down ‘trees of liberty’ that had been planted by the republicans. Only Bastia, San Fiorenzi and Calvi, with their French military garrisons, held out for the Republic.
In April 1793, once it became clear that Robespierre’s Jacobins had triumphed politically in the Convention, General Dumouriez, the co-victor of Valmy and a Girondin, defected to the Austro-Prussian Coalition. Dumouriez’s treachery and other crises led Robespierre to order the wholesale arrest of Girondins, twenty-two of whose heads were cut off in the space of thirty-six minutes on October 31. The Reign of Terror had begun.
Napoleon tried to join Joseph at Bastia on May 3 but was detained by Paolist montagnards (mountain men). He was freed soon afterwards by villagers from Bocognano, where the family had had an estate, and allowed to continue on his way. On May 23 the Casa Bonaparte in Ajaccio was ransacked by a Paolist mob, though not burned down as some accounts have suggested (and probably not too badly treated, as the labourers’ bill for refurbishing it four years later came to only 131 francs).46 Corsica’s Paoli-dominated parliament now formally outlawed the Bonapartes, though not their thirty cousins on the island. It couldn’t resist resurrecting the slur against Letizia, saying the family had been ‘born in the mud of despotism, nourished and raised under the eyes and at the expense of a lascivious pasha, the late Marbeuf, of perpetual infamy’.47
On May 31 Napoleon and Saliceti, who as commissioner for Corsica represented the Jacobin government in Paris, took part in a failed attempt to recapture Ajaccio. The next day Napoleon wrote a paper, ‘Memoir on the Political and Military Position of the Department of Corsica’, in which he finally denounced Paoli for having ‘hatred and vengeance in his heart’.48 It was his farewell note to his homeland. On June 11, 1793 the Bonapartes left Calvi on board the Prosélyte, landing at Toulon two days later and bringing to an end nearly two and three-quarter centuries of residency on the island.49 With the collapse of Jacobin power on Corsica, Saliceti was forced to flee to Provence too, and by the end of the month Paoli had recognized Britain’s King George III as king of Corsica.*
Napoleon never entirely severed relations with the land of his birth, although he would set foot there only once again, for a few days on his way back from Egypt in 1799. When he ordered the recapture of the island in October 1796, he granted a general amnesty from which he excluded only the most senior Paolists, who had anyhow all gone into exile.50 In later life he spoke ‘with the greatest respect of Paoli’, who died in exile in London in 1807, but as he stepped ashore in Provence on June 13, 1793 he knew it was in France that he would have to build his future.51
The Bonapartes arrived in Toulon as political refugees with little more than Letizia’s life-savings and Napoleon�
��s modest salary as a captain in the 1st Regiment of Artillery to pay for the fatherless family of nine. Otherwise, Napoleon had nothing except his education and his ambition to sustain them. He installed his family at La Valette, a village outside Toulon, and joined his regiment at Nice, armed with yet another certificate explaining his absence, this one signed by Saliceti. Fortunately Colonel Compagnon needed every officer he could get after the king’s execution and the mass exodus of aristocrats; only fourteen officers out of eighty in his unit were still serving the Republic.
Napoleon received a commission from General Jean du Teil, the younger brother of his Auxonne commandant, to organize gunpowder convoys to one of France’s revolutionary armies, the Army of Italy. In mid-July he was transferred to the Army of the South under General Jean-François Carteaux, a former professional painter who was about to besiege the fédérés (anti-Jacobin rebels) in Avignon, which contained an important ammunition depot. Although Napoleon wasn’t present at Avignon’s capture on July 25, the success there formed the backdrop for what was easily his most important piece of writing to date, the political pamphlet Le Souper de Beaucaire. Since January 1792 all his writing had a military or political bent. His purple-prosed rhetoric, which once sounded so false in the context of his own adolescent fantasies, took on a more genuine grandeur when applied to the great events of which he was about to become a prime actor. He stopped taking notes on literary works after 1792, and instead wrote a description of the Easter Sunday incident in Ajaccio, a defence of his actions in the Sardinian expedition and a project for capturing Corsica from the British.
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