2
Revolution

‘Amid the noise of drums, arms, blood, I write you this letter,’Napoleon told Joseph from Auxonne, where rioting had broken out again eight days after the fall of the Bastille. ¹ He proudly reported to his brother that General du Teil had asked his advice on the situation. Napoleon arrested thirty-three people and spent the better part of an hour exhorting the rioters to stop.

Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire. He embraced its anti-clericalism and did not mind the weakening of a monarchy for which he had no particular respect. Beyond that, it seemed to offer Corsica prospects of greater independence, and far better career opportunities for an ambitious young outsider without money or connections. Napoleon believed that the new social order it promised to usher in would destroy both of these disadvantages and would be built on logic and reason, which the Enlightenment philosophes saw as the only true foundations for authority.

The Bonapartes were in the minority among Corsica's gentry in supporting the Revolution, although not quite ‘the only persons’on the island to do so, as Napoleon later claimed. ² What does appear to be true is that he was the only artillery graduate of his year from the École Militaire to support the overthrow of Louis XVI, and one of only a handful of officers from his corps, many of whom fled France in 1789. Although Napoleon faithfully carried out his military duties, putting down food riots in Valence and Auxonne – where some men from his own regiment mutinied and joined the rioters – he was an early adherent of the local branch of the revolutionary Society of the Friends of the Constitution. Back in Ajaccio his fourteen-year-old brother Lucien, whose commitment to radical politics was much more profound and enduring, joined the extremist Jacobin Club. ³ *

On August 8, 1789, when Paris was in uproar and a large part of the French officer corps in disarray, Napoleon was once again granted sick leave to return to Corsica, where he stayed for the next eighteen months, throwing himself energetically into the island's politics. Again, there is no indication that he was genuinely ill. In his Account of Corsica , Boswell described how the island was politically split between its cities, its nine provinces and its many ecclesiastical pieves (groups of parishes which were ‘as much used for civil affairs as for those of the church’). The power of the governor, based in the capital, Corte, was limited. There were traditional rivalries between towns, villages and clans, and strong attachments to the Catholic Church and to the exiled Paoli. Napoleon stepped into this maelstrom with gusto, and over the next four years would be far more concerned with Corsican politics than his career as a French officer.

As soon as he arrived in Ajaccio, Napoleon, supported by Joseph and Lucien, urged Corsicans to adhere to the revolutionary cause, fly the new tricolour flag and wear it as a cockade in their hats, form a revolutionary ‘Patriots’club, and organize a regiment of Corsican Volunteers, a National Guard militia that it was hoped would one day match the governor's force. When the governor closed the club and banned the Volunteers, Napoleon's name topped the petition sent in protest to the National Assembly in Paris. ⁴ In October, he wrote a pamphlet denouncing the French commander in Corsica and criticizing the island's government as insufficiently revolutionary. ⁵ While Napoleon led the revolutionary party in Ajaccio, Antoine-Christophe Saliceti, a Corsican deputy to the National Assembly, radicalized the larger town of Bastia.

When in January 1790 the National Assembly passed a decree at Saliceti's urging making Corsica a department of France, Napoleon supported the move. Paoli denounced it from London as a measure designed to impose the will of Paris. As Saliceti and Napoleon now saw Paris as an ally in the task of revolutionizing Corsica, a major split was likely if Paoli were to return to the island. In the midst of all the politicking – Joseph was elected Ajaccio's mayor in March – Napoleon spent his nights writing his history of Corsica and re-reading Caesar's Gallic Wars , committing whole pages of it to memory. As his sick leave came to an end he asked for an extension. With so few officers left in the regiment, his commanding officer couldn't afford to refuse him.

Napoleon spent fifteen months reworking his Corsican history, but he was unable to find a publisher. The parts of it which survive argue that Corsicans personify all the Ancient Roman virtues but are prey to ‘an inexplicable fate’that has kept them subjugated. Around this time Napoleon also wrote an exceptionally violent and vindictive short story entitled ‘New Corsica’, which began as a tale of adventure but then turned into a political rant and ended as a bloodbath. In it, an Englishman meets an old man who relates the atrocities that took place in Corsica after the French invasion of 1768. ‘I left my men to fly to the help of my unfortunate father whom I found drowning in his own blood,’he says. ‘He had only the strength to tell me: “My son, avenge me. It is the first law of nature. Die like me if you have to, but never recognize the French as your masters.”’The old man relates how he found the naked corpse of his raped mother, ‘covered in wounds and in the most obscene posture’, and reports: ‘My wife and three of my brothers had been hung in the same place. Seven of my sons, of whom three were under the age of five, had met the same fate. Our cabin had been burnt; the blood of our goats was mixed with that of my family,’and so on. ⁶ ‘Since that time,’the old man says, ‘I have sworn anew on my altar, never to spare another Frenchman.’ ⁷ This disturbing tale, written when Napoleon was twenty years old and a serving army officer, is a Francophobic revenge fantasy. The retribution the old man wreaks is cataclysmic; he kills everyone on board a French ship, up to and including the cabin boy, and then: ‘We dragged their bodies to our altar, and there burned them all. This new incense seemed to please the Deity.’ ⁸ When the Revolution began, Napoleon clearly was not immune to the lure of violence.

On June 24, 1790 Napoleon sent his history of Corsica to the Abbé Raynal, an influential Enlightenment thinker whose Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes , first published anonymously in 1770 and subsequently banned in France, had been a popular success and, despite its length, an influential polemic. The abbé had been forced into exile for several years but he was invited to return in 1787. In his covering letter – dated ‘Year 1 of Liberty’– Napoleon wrote: ‘Nations slaughter each other for family quarrels, cutting each other's throats in the name of the Ruler of the Universe, knavish and greedy priests working on their imagination by means of their love of the marvellous and their fears.’ ⁹ Equally melodramatically, he told Raynal: ‘I eagerly accepted a labour which flattered my love for my country, then abased, unhappy, enslaved.’He added, mimicking Boswell's and Rousseau's hagiography of Corsica's glories: ‘I see with pleasure my country, to the shame of the Universe, serve as an asylum for the last remains of Roman liberty, and the heirs of Cato.’ ¹⁰ The idea that the squabbling Corsicans were the true heirs of Marcus Porcius Cato, paladin of Roman liberty, was more an indication of Napoleon's romantic obsession with the classical world than a useful historical insight. He also sent his manuscript to his old Brienne tutor, Père Dupuy, who suggested a complete rewriting – advice to which few authors take kindly.

• • •

On July 12, 1790, the National Assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, providing for government control over the Church and abolishing the monastic orders. The demand for priests to take the Constitutional Oath of loyalty to the state split the First Estate between juring (that is, oath-taking) and non-juring priests, and was denounced by Pope Pius VI the following March. Hostility to Christianity in general, and to the Roman Catholic Church in particular, animated many of the revolutionaries. By November 1793, Notre-Dame Cathedral had been re-dedicated to the Cult of Reason, and six months later the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre passed a decree establishing the pantheist Cult of the Supreme Being. As well as tens of thousands of aristocrats being stripped of their possessions and forced into exile to become émigrés abroad, several thousand priests left the country too.

Napoleon supported the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in a pamphlet that was sufficiently inflammatory for him and Joseph only narrowly to avoid a lynching when they happened to walk near a religious procession in Ajaccio soon after its publication. (They were saved by a bandit named Trenta Coste, who was duly rewarded when Napoleon became First Consul.) ¹¹ July 1790 saw the sixty-five-year-old Paoli's return to Corsica after twenty-two years in exile. Napoleon and Joseph were on Ajaccio's reception committee to welcome him. He was immediately and unanimously appointed Lieutenant of Corsica and elected to the presidencies of Corsica's assembly and its recently constituted National Guard.

Paoli saw the Bonaparte boys as the children of a collaborator, and made minimal effort to retain their loyalty, despite Napoleon's patent eagerness for his approbation. One of his first acts was to move the capital from Corte to Bastia, to the irritation of Ajaccio's inhabitants, such as the Bonapartes. According to local legend, Paoli was infuriated by Napoleon's criticism of his troop dispositions when they toured the battlefield of Ponte Nuovo together (though Joseph's memoirs suggest that Napoleon confined his critical remarks to his brother alone). ¹² Paoli had been a revered figure in progressive circles in Europe in the later decades of the Enlightenment; the Bonapartes would go to great lengths to accommodate him.

Joseph was elected as one of Ajaccio's deputies to the Corsican assembly on September 15, and later became president of the city's executive government, known as the Directory, but Napoleon failed to be elected either as a deputy or to a senior position in the National Guard. ‘This city is full of bad citizens,’he wrote to Charles-André Pozzo di Borgo, a member of the island's government. ‘You've no idea of their craziness and meanness.’He proposed that three members of the town council be removed from office. ‘This measure is violent, possibly illegal, but essential,’he wrote, ending with a quotation from Montesquieu: ‘Laws are like the statues of certain divinities which on some occasions must be veiled.’ ¹³ In this instance, he didn't get his way.

The following month the National Assembly, now effectively the sovereign parliament of France, passed a motion proposed by the Comte de Mirabeau that although Corsica was now a part of France and would be subject to its laws, she would henceforth be governed solely by Corsicans. Huge celebrations greeted the news across the island, Te Deums were sung in every church and Napoleon hung a huge banner from the Casa Bonaparte which read: ‘Vive la Nation, Vive Paoli, Vive Mirabeau’. ¹⁴ To Raynal he trumpeted, with characteristic (if on this occasion pardonable) hyperbole, ‘The sea no longer separates us.’ ¹⁵ Yet Paoli had no place for Napoleon in his new political order. As the Paolists started to fall out with the Paris government, the Bonapartes stayed loyal to the National Assembly – and after September 1792 its successor, the Convention. Their split from the Paolists was gradual, and involved both accelerations and reverses, but by spring 1793 it was complete.

On January 6, 1791 Napoleon was present at the inauguration of the Globo Patriottico, a revolutionary club in Ajaccio that aped the political clubs that the Jacobins and the more moderate Girondins were establishing in Paris. Later that month he published a political pamphlet, ‘Letter to M. Buttafuoco’, which accused the man who had been appointed to rule the island twenty-three years earlier of being a traitor and supporter of ‘the absurd feudal regime’; it accused Paoli of being tricked by Buttafuoco and of being ‘surrounded by enthusiasts’, a reference to the returned exiles who tended to want a British-style constitution for Corsica, while Napoleon favoured the French revolutionary one. Paoli, who was working well with Buttafuoco at the time, responded aggressively to Napoleon's pamphlet, refusing his offer of the dedication of his history of Corsica. ‘History should not be written in youth,’he said, it requires ‘maturity and balance’. ¹⁶ He added that he couldn't return the manuscript, because he had no time to look for it, and turned down Napoleon's request for documents. Any hopes Napoleon might have had of becoming a successful author were once again stymied, this time by the man he had spent his youth idolizing. When, later on, there were rumours – probably politically inspired, but quite possibly true – that Joseph had pilfered Ajaccio's coffers, Paoli offered no support. ¹⁷

• • •

Although his leave had officially ended on October 15, 1790, Napoleon left Corsica for his regiment only on February 1 the following year, taking with him his twelve-year-old brother Louis, whose schooling at Auxonne he was going to pay for. He produced certificates for ill-health and even for the bad weather to his ever-patient commanding officer, who obligingly gave him three months’back-pay. Louis nonetheless had to sleep on the floor in a closet next to Napoleon's bed, with a single table and two chairs as their only furniture. ‘Do you know how I managed?’Napoleon later recalled of this period of his life. ‘By never entering a café or going into society; by eating dry bread, and brushing my own clothes so that they might last the longer. I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends ... These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth.’ ¹⁸ He might have been exaggerating slightly, but not much. There was nothing he valued so much as books and a good education.

Between February and August 1791 Napoleon worked on a discourse for the Lyons Academy's essay prize, on the subject: ‘What are the Most Important Truths and Feelings for Men to Learn to be Happy?’The Academy and Abbé Raynal offered 1,200 francs – more than Napoleon's annual salary – for the best submission. Napoleon took six months to write his essay. In it he denounced the vanity of ambition, even criticizing Alexander the Great for hubris: ‘What is Alexander doing when he rushes from Thebes into Persia and thence into India? He is ever restless, he loses his wits, he believes himself God. What is the end of Cromwell? He governs England. But is he not tormented by all the daggers of the Furies?’ ¹⁹ He also wrote, surely autobiographically: ‘You return to your homeland after an absence of four years: you wander round the sites, the places where you played in those first tender years ... You feel all the fire of love for the homeland.’ ²⁰

Napoleon would later claim that he had withdrawn the essay before it was judged, but that is not in fact true. The Academy's examiners gave it low marks for its excessively inflated style. One judge described it as ‘of too little interest, too ill-ordered, too disparate, too rambling, and too badly written to hold the reader's attention’. ²¹ Years later, Talleyrand obtained the original from the Academy's archives and presented it to Napoleon, who when he had re-read it said: ‘I found its author deserved to be whipped. What ridiculous things I said, and how annoyed I would be if they were preserved!’ ²² Instead he ‘flung it into the fire, and pushed it down with the tongs’, fearing that ‘It might have exposed me to ridicule.’ ²³ Although he had comprehensively failed to win the prize, that he even entered a French language essay competition showed considerable confidence.

This formal production was only part of this twenty-two-year-old's literary fecundity. He wrote a ‘Dialogue sur l'Amour’, in which the figure representing himself is called ‘B’and a real-life friend and comrade from the garrison, Alexandre de Mazis, appears under his own name. How close a friend Mazis was might be questioned, since he's depicted as boastful and impatient, compared to the serene, masterful ‘B’. The ‘Dialogue’argues that love is an incubus both to society and to individual happiness, and that Providence should abolish it in order to make everyone happier. Another composition, ‘Reflections on the State of Nature’, argued that mankind had lived better before society existed, a concept lifted wholesale from Rousseau.

In June 1791 Napoleon was promoted to lieutenant and transferred to the 4 ^th Regiment of Artillery back at Valence. In the sixty-nine months he'd been with the La Fère Regiment, he had spent no fewer than thirty-five on leave, and he had no intention of changing this pattern now. ‘Send me three hundred francs,’he wrote to his uncle Joseph Fesch on arriving; ‘that sum will enable me to go to Paris. There, at least, one can cut a figure and surmount obstacles. Everything tells me I shall succeed. Will you prevent me from doing so for the want of 100 crowns?’ ²⁴ The urgency and ambition are unmistakable, but either Fesch demurred or Napoleon in the meantime learned that four battalions of National Guards were going to be raised on Corsica, because he then asked for leave to go there instead. His new commanding officer, Colonel Compagnon, understandably refused permission on the grounds that he had been with the regiment for only two months.

In the closing days of June 1791, the royal family attempted to escape from France and were captured in their carriage at Varennes. They were forced to return to near-imprisonment at the Tuileries Palace. On July 10, Emperor Leopold II of Austria issued a request to all the other royal houses of Europe to come to the aid of his brother-in-law Louis XVI. By then Napoleon had become secretary of the Valence branch of the Society of Friends of the Constitution, and at a celebratory banquet on the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille he proposed a toast ‘To the patriots of Auxonne’, who were petitioning for the King to be put on trial. ‘This country is full of zeal and fire,’he wrote to a friend, adding that although the Revolution could count on only half his regiment's officers, all the lower ranks supported it. ²⁵ ‘The southern blood runs through my veins with the rapidity of the Rhône,’he added in a postscript; ‘you must therefore pardon me if you experience some difficulty in reading my scrawl.’

Refusing to take his commanding officer's no for an answer, on August 30 Napoleon appealed to General du Teil, who afterwards told his daughter: ‘That is a man of great ability; his name will be heard of.’ ²⁶ He was given four months’leave to go to Corsica with the understanding that if he were not back with the colours by the time of the regimental parade on January 10, 1792 he would be considered a deserter.

Napoleon found Corsica in turmoil. There had been 130 murders since the Revolution began and no taxes had been collected. His family's money worries, which had taken up so much of his time and effort since his father's death six years earlier, abated somewhat on October 15, 1791 with the death of his great-uncle, Archdeacon Luciano Bonaparte, who left the Bonaparte family his fortune. This money certainly came in useful when, on February 22, 1792, Napoleon stood for election as adjutant, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, in the 2 ^nd Battalion of the Corsican National Guard. There was a good deal of bribery involved, and one of the three election observers was even kidnapped on the day of the polls and detained in the Casa Bonaparte until the election was safely won. Napoleon's chief opponent, the influential Corsican politician Charles-André Pozzo di Borgo's brother Matteo, was shouted down from the hustings outside the church of San Francesco by Napoleon's armed supporters. Corsican politics was always tough, but these tactics were a serious infringement of accepted practices and Paoli, who supported Matteo Pozzo di Borgo, demanded an official inquiry into what he called ‘corruption and intrigue’. He was blocked by Saliceti, who represented the Paris Convention on the island, so the result stood. The January deadline for Napoleon's return to his regiment had meanwhile come and gone. A note in his war ministry file stated simply: ‘Has given up his profession and has been replaced on February 6 1792.’ ²⁷

• • •

Severe food riots in Paris between January and March 1792 sharpened the political crisis. Then in early February an alliance was announced between Austria and Prussia whose unavowed but hardly secret intention was to topple the revolutionary government in France and restore the monarchy. Although Britain was not part of this first coalition, her hostility to the Revolution was also clear. With war in the air, the revolution in Corsica took a radical turn. On February 28 Saliceti ordered the suppression of the ancient convents and monasteries of Ajaccio, Bastia, Bonifacio and Corte, with the proceeds going into the central government's coffers. Paoli and the vast majority of Corsicans opposed this, and on Easter Sunday fighting broke out in Ajaccio between Napoleon's National Guardsmen and local Catholic citizens who wanted to protect the monastery: one of Napoleon's lieutenants was shot dead at his side. At one point in the four days and nights of confused urban brawling and ill-tempered standoffs between the townspeople and the National Guard, Napoleon tried, unsuccessfully, to capture the town's well-fortified citadel from the French regular troops under the command of Colonel Maillard, who wrote a damning report to the war ministry effectively accusing him of treason. The roads to Ajaccio were filled with peasants carrying empty sacks, eagerly anticipating the pillaging of the town.

Paoli took Maillard's side, ordering Napoleon to leave Ajaccio and report to him at Corte, which he did. Fortunately for Napoleon, Maillard's report of the messy affair was buried under a mountain of far more pressing war ministry paperwork. France had pre-emptively declared war on Austria and Prussia on April 20 and invaded the Austrian Netherlands (present-day Belgium) eight days later to forestall an expected invasion of France from the north-west, the Austrian and Prussian armies being headquartered in Koblenz. After the Ajaccio imbroglio Napoleon couldn't stay in Corsica, but neither could he return to Valence, where he was officially a deserter. So he left for Paris.

When Napoleon reached the war ministry in the Place Vendôme in Paris he found it in turmoil: the new revolutionary government would go through six war ministers between May and October 1792. It was clear that no-one had had a chance to read Maillard's report, or much cared about what had happened in a provincial backwater like Ajaccio, and no-one seemed to mind that Napoleon's leave had officially expired in January, before his election to the Corsican National Guard. In July 1792 Napoleon was promoted to captain, ante-dated by a year with full pay, but without being assigned a new post. His cheeky demand that he be promoted to lieutenant-colonel in the regular army, on the ground that he was one in the Guard, was marked ‘SR’( sans réponse ) by the ministry. ²⁸

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:

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 4 ^th 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 23 ^rd , 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 Fiorenzo 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.

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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

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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 1 ^st 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.

Le Souper de Beaucaire was a fictional account of a supper at an inn at Beaucaire, a village between Avignon and Arles, which Napoleon wrote at the end of July 1793. It took the form of a discussion between an officer in Carteaux's army, two Marseillais merchants and two citizens of Montpellier and of nearby Nîmes. It argued that France was in grave danger, so the Jacobin government in Paris must be supported because the alternative was the victory of European despots and a vengeful French aristocracy. The Napoleon character made some highly optimistic claims for his commander – ‘Today there are six thousand men, and before four days are out there will be ten thousand’– claiming that in all the fighting Carteaux has only lost five men killed, and four wounded. Equally, he made dire predictions for the opposing fédérés based in Marseilles. Napoleon couldn't resist a self-referential attack on Paoli, saying: ‘He plundered and confiscated the belongings of the most well-to-do families because they supported the unity of the Republic, and he declared enemies of the fatherland all those who stayed in our armies.’ ⁵²

The pamphlet showed Napoleon to be a true Jacobin, sarcastically saying of the fédérés : ‘Every well-known aristocrat is anxious for your success.’The other diners speak only six times, mainly to introduce the soldier's Jacobin rejoinders. Eventually everyone is convinced by the soldier's eloquence and much champagne is drunk until 2 a.m., which ‘dissipated all worries and cares’. When Napoleon showed the manuscript to Saliceti, who was now a government commissioner in Provence, and Robespierre's younger brother Augustin, they arranged for it to be published at public expense. It established him as a politically trustworthy soldier in the eyes of the Jacobins.

On August 24 Carteaux retook Marseilles amid mass executions. Four days later Admiral Alexander Hood with 15,000 British, Spanish and Neapolitan troops entered the port of Toulon, France's major naval base on the Mediterranean, at the invitation of the fédérés who had risen up there the previous month. With Lyons rising for the royalists too, the Vendée in uproar and Spanish and Piedmontese armies operating inside southern France, while Prussian and Austrian armies were on her eastern borders, recapturing Toulon was of crucial strategic importance. Napoleon was appointed chef de bataillon (major) in the 2 ^nd Regiment of Artillery on September 7, and the following week, perhaps at the behest of the Corsican-born Colonel Jean-Baptiste Cervoni, he presented himself at Carteaux's headquarters at Ollioules, just north-west of Toulon. ⁵³

It so happened that one of Carteaux's représentants-en-mission (political commissioners) was none other than Saliceti. Carteaux knew little about artillery and was looking for someone to take over the artillery on the army's right flank after the wounding of its commander, Colonel Dommartin, and in the absence of Dommartin's second-in-command, Major Perrier. Saliceti and his colleague Thomas de Gasparin persuaded Carteaux to appoint Napoleon to the post, despite his only being twenty-four years old. Napoleon suspected that his education at the École Militaire had been a deciding factor in getting him this first major break. He would later say that the artillery was short of ‘scientific men, that department was entirely directed by sergeants and corporals. I understood the service.’ ⁵⁴ His youth was overlooked in an army so depleted by mass emigration and the guillotining of the aristocracy, which had previously provided the overwhelming majority of its officers. It also helped, of course, that Carteaux's appointments were overseen by his ally Saliceti.

Carteaux – who Saliceti and Gasparin were privately reporting back to Paris was ‘incapable’– had 8,000 men on the hills between Toulon and Ollioules, and another 3,000 under General Jean Lapoype on the La Valette side of the city. Yet he had no plan of attack. By October 9 Saliceti and Gasparin had obtained for Napoleon command of all of the artillery outside Toulon. Since this was clearly going to be an artillery-led operation, the post gave him a central role. * Saliceti and Gasparin were soon reporting to Paris that ‘Bonna Parte’was ‘the only officer of artillery who knows anything of his duty, and he has too much work’. ⁵⁵ They were wrong about the second part: for Napoleon there was no such thing as too much work. Later in the three-month siege he was helped by two aides-de-camp, Auguste de Marmont and Andoche Junot. Marmont came from a good family and Napoleon liked him very much, but he loved Junot, a former battalion quartermaster on the Côte d'Or, from the moment that a cannonball landed near them while he was dictating a letter, spraying dust and gravel over them both, and Junot coolly remarked that now he wouldn't need any sand to blot it. ⁵⁶

Visiting the site of Napoleon's batteries above Toulon today, it is immediately obvious what he had to do. There is an outer harbour and an inner harbour, and a high promontory to the west called L'Eguillette that dominates both. ‘To become master of the harbour,’Napoleon reported to the war minister, Jean-Baptiste Bouchotte, ‘one must become master of the Eguillette.’ ⁵⁷ In order to pour heated cannonballs onto the Royal Navy vessels in the inner harbour, it was therefore necessary to capture Fort Mulgrave – built by its commander the 1 ^st Earl of Mulgrave and nicknamed ‘Little Gibraltar’because it was so heavily fortified – which dominated the promontory. * Although the fort's importance was obvious to all, it was Napoleon who put in place the plan to capture it. Success would almost instantly unlock the strategic situation, for once the Royal Navy was ejected from the harbour, the city of 28,000 people couldn't be defended by the fédérés alone.

Napoleon threw himself into the project of capturing Fort Mulgrave. By cajoling nearby towns he got together fourteen cannon and four mortars as well as stores, tools and ammunition. He sent officers further afield, to Lyons, Briançon and Grenoble, and requested that the Army of Italy furnish him with the cannon not then being used to defend Antibes and Monaco. He established an eighty-man arsenal at Ollioules to make cannon and cannonballs, requisitioned horses from Nice, Valence and Montpellier, and injected a sense of unceasing activity into his men. Constantly imploring, complaining and raging – there wasn't enough gunpowder, the cartridges were the wrong size, trained artillery horses were being requisitioned for other uses, and so on – he sent scores of letters with demands to Bouchotte and even on occasion to the Committee of Public Safety itself, going over the heads of Carteaux and his immediate superiors.

Bemoaning the ‘confusion and waste’and the ‘evident absurdity’of the current arrangements to his friend Chauvet, the chief ordonnateur (quartermaster), Napoleon despaired that ‘the provisioning of armies is no more than luck’. ⁵⁸ In a typical letter to Saliceti and Gasparin he wrote: ‘One can remain for twenty-four or if necessary thirty-six hours without eating, but one cannot remain three minutes without gunpowder.’ ⁵⁹ Along with his energy and activity, his letters convey a meticulous attention to detail in everything from the price of rations to the proper building of palisades. Overall, however, his message was constant; they only had 600 milliers (just over half a ton) of gunpowder, and if they couldn't procure more it would be impossible to start serious operations. On October 22 he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety of the ‘extreme pain he felt at the little attention paid to his branch of the service,’adding: ‘I have had to struggle against ignorance and the base passions which it engenders.’ ⁶⁰

The result of all his hectoring, bluster, requisitioning and political string-pulling was that Napoleon put together a strong artillery train in very short order. He commandeered a foundry where shot and mortars were manufactured, and a workshop where muskets were repaired. He got the authorities in Marseilles to supply thousands of sandbags. This took significant powers of leadership – and also the kind of implicit threat that could be made by a Jacobin army officer during Robespierre's Terror. By the end of the siege Napoleon commanded eleven batteries totalling nearly one hundred cannon and mortars.

Napoleon received little support in all this from Carteaux, whom he came to despise, and who Saliceti and Gasparin conspired to have replaced with General François Doppet by November 11. Doppet was impressed with his artillery commander, reporting to Paris: ‘I always found him at his post; when he needed rest he lay on the ground wrapped in his cloak: he never left the batteries.’ ⁶¹ The admiration was not mutual, however, and after an attack on Fort Mulgrave on November 15, during which Doppet sounded the retreat too early, Napoleon returned to the redoubt and swore: ‘Our blow at Toulon has missed, because a [expletive deleted in the nineteenth century] has beaten the retreat!’ ⁶²

Napoleon showed considerable personal bravery in the batteries and redoubts of Toulon, at one point picking up a blood-soaked ramrod from an artilleryman who had been killed near him and helping to load and fire the cannon himself. He believed it was this action that gave him scabies. ‘I found myself in a very few days suffering under an inveterate itch,’he later said of this ‘terrible malady’. ⁶³ The cutaneous irritation stayed with him through the Italian and Egyptian campaigns and was only cured in 1802 when his doctor, Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, applied sulphur baths and by ‘putting three blisters on my chest ... brought on a salutary crisis. Before that I had always been thin and sallow; since then I have always had good health.’ ⁶⁴ Some historians have argued that limited contact with the blood-stained ramrod was unlikely to have been the real cause, but Napoleon would probably have also donned the dead man's gloves, which would have made dermatitis infection far more likely. ⁶⁵ *

During one assault on an outlying fort protecting Mulgrave, Napoleon was wounded by an English gunner, who ‘ran a pike into’his left thigh. He was trying to enter the battery by its embrasure, but fortunately reinforcements came around by the rear, entering at the same moment. Many years later Napoleon showed off to a doctor ‘a very deep cicatrix [scar] above the left knee’, recalling that ‘the surgeons were in doubt whether it might not be ultimately necessary to amputate’. ⁶⁶ In a book he wrote in exile on St Helena on Julius Caesar's wars, Napoleon contrasted the commanders of the ancient world, who were well protected during battles, with those of the modern, concluding: ‘Today the commander-in-chief is forced every day to face the guns, often within range of grapeshot, and all battles within cannon-shot, in order to assess, see and give orders, as the view is not wide enough for generals to be able to keep out of the way of bullets.’ ⁶⁷ One of the accusations made by his detractors was that Napoleon wasn't personally brave. ‘Cowardice had of late years been habitual to Bonaparte,’wrote the English writer Helen Williams in 1815, for example. ⁶⁸ This is absurd; not only do cowards not fight sixty battles, but Napoleon came near death several times between battles too, while reconnoitring close to the enemy. The number of people killed near him and the bullet that hit him at the battle of Ratisbon are further testaments to his great physical bravery. Napoleon's troops appreciated his courage and his ability to magnify their own. When all the gunners trying to establish a battery of cannon within a pistol shot of Fort Mulgrave were killed or wounded, Napoleon christened it ‘Hommes Sans Peur’(Men Without Fear) and thereby continued to receive volunteers to man it. Nobody better understood the psychology of the ordinary soldier.

On November 17 the highly competent General Jacques Dugommier took over from Doppet, soon followed by reinforcements that brought the numbers of besiegers up to 37,000. Napoleon got on well with Dugommier. By mid-November he had surrounded Fort Mulgrave with batteries, and on the 23 ^rd he captured its British commander, General Charles O'Hara, who had tried to counter-attack from it in a sortie and spike the French guns of one of them. ‘General Dugommier fought with true republican courage,’Napoleon reported of that action. ‘We recaptured the battery ... The guns of the Convention were un-spiked in sufficient time to increase the confusion of their retreat.’ ⁶⁹ It was very rare to be able to repair guns that had had metal spikes hammered into their firing mechanisms, let alone quickly, and it was a sign of the professional pitch to which Napoleon had trained his men.

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At one o'clock on the morning of Tuesday, December 17, 1793, Dugommier put Napoleon's plan of attack on Toulon into action. A column under Claude Victor-Perrin (later Marshal Victor) got beyond the first line of defences at Fort Mulgrave, but faltered at the second. At about 3 a.m. Dugommier sent in the next assault of 2,000 men in the teeth of driving rain, high winds and lightning strikes. Led by Napoleon, whose horse was shot from under him, and Captain Jean-Baptiste Muiron, this assault finally took the fort after heavy hand-to-hand fighting. Napoleon then proceeded to pour heated cannonballs onto the Royal Navy vessels across the harbour below. The memory of the explosion of two Spanish gunpowder-ships stayed with him for the rest of his life. Decades later he recalled how ‘The whirlwind of flames and smoke from the arsenal resembled the eruption of a volcano, and the thirteen vessels blazing in the roads were like so many displays of fireworks: the masts and forms of the vessels were distinctly traced out by the flames, which lasted many hours and formed an unparalleled spectacle.’He was exaggerating – only two ships caught fire rather than the whole fleet – but the effect was nonetheless dramatic. Dugommier gave a glowing report of Napoleon, whom he called ‘this rare officer’. ⁷⁰

The Allies evacuated Toulon the next morning, creating pandemonium, especially once General Lapoype took the Faron heights and started bombarding the city from the eastern side too. Soon afterwards Saliceti and Gasparin ordered the execution of some four hundred suspected fédéres , though Napoleon took no part in that. ⁷¹ Great and deserved benefits flowed to Napoleon from the victory at Toulon. On December 22 he was appointed brigadier-general and inspector of coastal defences from the Rhône to the Var. Saliceti brought him to the attention of the senior politicians Paul Barras and Louis-Stanislas Fréron, but best of all, as he later put it, Toulon ‘gave him confidence in himself’. ⁷² He had shown that he could be trusted with command.

Rarely in military history has there been so high a turnover of generals as in France in the 1790s. It meant that capable young men could advance through the ranks at unprecedented speed. The Terror, emigration, war, political purges, disgrace after defeat, political suspicion and scapegoating, on top of all the normal cases of resignation and retirement, meant that men like Lazare Hoche, who was a corporal in 1789, could be a general by 1793, or Michel Ney, a lieutenant in 1792, could become one by 1796. Napoleon's rise through the ranks was therefore by no means unique given the political and military circumstances of the day. ⁷³ Still, his progress was impressive: he had spent five and a half years as a second-lieutenant, a year as a lieutenant, sixteen months as a captain, only three months as a major and no time at all as a colonel. On December 22, 1793, having been on leave for fifty-eight of his ninety-nine months of service – with and without permission – and after spending less than four years on active duty, Napoleon was made, at twenty-four, a general. 2x7nFAWJ5xUxvcSjHxHx2LlKqj6WlJXrj/sL+EZuHiqnBDlTYRiCxS9qjLVZUI+z