3
Desire

On February 7, 1794, Napoleon was appointed artillery commander of the Army of Italy. He played a creditable but unremarkable part in General Pierre Dumberion's five-week campaign against Austria's ally, the independent kingdom of Piedmont in north-west Italy (which also ruled Sardinia), in which three small victories were won and he acquainted himself with the topography of the beautiful but potentially treacherous mountains and passes of the Ligurian Alps. He fought alongside the fiery and brilliant General André Masséna, whose campaign that May to drive the Piedmontese from Ventimiglia and outflank the Austrians and Piedmontese at the Col di Tenda won him the soubriquet ‘the darling child of victory’.

The campaign was over quickly, and by early summer Napoleon was back in Nice and Antibes, where he began to court Eugénie Désirée Clary, the pretty sixteen-year-old daughter of a dead royalist textile and soap millionaire. Désirée's elder sister Julie married Napoleon's brother Joseph on August 1, 1794, bringing with her a substantial dowry of 400,000 francs, which finally ended the Bonaparte family's money worries. Napoleon and Désirée's relationship was conducted almost entirely by correspondence and they were engaged the following April. A year earlier the nineteen-year-old Lucien Bonaparte had married Christine Boyer, a charming but illiterate twenty-two-year-old daughter of an innkeeper. He had put his adopted revolutionary name – Brutus – on the wedding certificate, the only one of the Bonapartes to change his name in such a way.

In April 1794 Napoleon submitted a plan to the Committee of Public Safety for the invasion of Italy via Piedmont. It was taken to Paris by Augustin Robespierre, who was attached to the Army of Italy. Fortunately written in Junot's legible handwriting rather than Napoleon's increasingly illegible scrawl, it contained such strategic statements as: ‘Attacks must not be disseminated, but concentrated’, ‘It is [Austria] that must be annihilated; that accomplished, Spain and Italy will fall of themselves’and ‘No dispassionate person could think of taking Madrid. The defensive system should be adopted on the Spanish, and the offensive on the Piedmontese frontier.’And eager even then to centralize authority, Napoleon wrote: ‘The armies of the Alps and of Italy should be united to obey the same mind.’ ¹

Napoleon's hapless chef de bataillon , Major Berlier, bore the brunt of his restless impatience, focus on detail and need for everything to be done faster and more efficiently. ‘I'm extremely unhappy at the manner in which the loading of the sixteen pieces [of cannon] has been performed,’read one letter. ‘You will certainly wish to respond to the following questions ... for which I give you twenty-four hours.’Another: ‘I'm surprised that you are so tardy in the execution of orders, it's always necessary to tell you the same thing three times.’No aspect of his command was too small to escape notice. ‘Imprison Corporal Carli, the commander of the battery,’he ordered Berlier, ‘who absented himself to search for wine in Antibes.’ ²

During the Piedmontese campaign Napoleon received official confirmation of his promotion to brigadier-general, which required him to answer the question ‘Noble or not noble?’Very sensibly, given that the Terror was still raging, he answered, technically untruthfully, in the negative. ³ The guillotining of the extremist Hébertist faction on March 5 and of Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins on April 5, both ordered by Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety, showed the Revolution remorselessly devouring its own children. A contemporary noted ‘thousands of women and children sitting on the stones in front of bakers shops’, and ‘more than half of Paris living upon potatoes. Paper money was without value.’ ⁴ The city was ripe for a reaction against the Jacobins, who had so clearly failed to deliver either food or peace. With the Allies in retreat in 1794 in Spain and Belgium and along the Rhine, a group of conspirators felt confident enough to overthrow the Jacobins and finally end the Reign of Terror.

• • •

For six days in mid-July Napoleon took part in a secret mission to Genoa on Augustin Robespierre's behalf to report on its fortifications, conduct a five-hour meeting with the French chargé d'affaires , Jean Tilly, and persuade the doge of the need for better Franco-Genoese relations. It drew him closer into the Robespierres’political circle at precisely the worst time, for the ‘Thermidorian reaction’, led by Barras and Fréron, overthrew Maximilien Robespierre on July 27 (9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar). Both brothers and sixty other ‘Terrorists’were guillotined the next day. Had Napoleon been in Paris at the time he might well have been scooped up and sent to the guillotine along with them. He had just returned from his brother Joseph's wedding and was at the army camp at Sieg near Nice on August 5 when he heard of the Robespierres’fate. ‘I've been somewhat moved by the fate of the younger Robespierre,’he wrote to Tilly, ‘whom I liked and believed honest, but had he been my own brother, if he had aspired to tyranny I'd have stabbed him myself.’ ⁵

Augustin Robespierre's patronage naturally put Napoleon under suspicion. On August 9 he was arrested by an officer and ten men at his lodgings in Nice and taken to the fortress in Nice for a day, before being imprisoned at the Fort-Carré in Antibes, where he was to spend the next ten days. (Both were places he had inspected officially earlier in his career.) Saliceti, from a wholly justifiable sense of self-preservation, did nothing to protect him and indeed ransacked Napoleon's papers looking for evidence of treachery. ⁶ ‘He barely deigned to look at me from the lofty heights of his greatness,’was Napoleon's resentful comment on his fellow Corsican and political comrade of five years. ⁷

In 1794, innocence was no defence against the guillotine, and nor was proven heroism fighting on behalf of the Republic, so Napoleon was in genuine danger. The official reason for his arrest was that certain Marseillais believed his positioning of a battery on the landward side of their city had been intended for use against them rather than an invader. Back in January he'd written to Bouchotte, the war minister: ‘The batteries which defend Marseilles harbour are in a ridiculous condition. Total ignorance presided over their layout.’ ⁸ The real reason was, of course, political; he had benefited from Augustin Robespierre's patronage and had written a Jacobin tract, Le Souper de Beaucaire , which Robespierre had helped him publish. ‘Men can be unjust towards me, my dear Junot,’he wrote to his faithful aide-de-camp, ‘but it suffices to be innocent; my conscience is the tribunal before which I call my conduct.’ ⁹ (The loyal but impulsive Junot had come up with a Scarlet Pimpernel scheme to spring Napoleon from jail, which the prisoner sensibly and firmly scotched: ‘Do nothing. You would only compromise me.’ ¹⁰ )

Napoleon was fortunate that the Thermidoreans didn't pursue their enemies as ruthlessly as the Jacobins had theirs, or indulge in extrajudicial prison murders like the September Massacres. He was released for lack of evidence on August 20. His incarceration had not been physically onerous and he made his prison guard a palace adjutant when he came to power. Once he was freed he returned to planning an expedition against Corsica and harassing poor Major Berlier. He also had time to renew his suit with Désirée Clary – whom he called Eugénie – telling her on September 10, ‘the charms of your person and character have won over the heart of your lover’. ¹¹ To increase the charms of her intellect he sent her a list of books he wanted her to read, and promised to follow them with his thoughts on music. He also urged her to improve her memory and ‘form her reason’.

Although Napoleon generally saw women as lesser beings, he had clear ideas of how they should be educated in order to make proper companions for men. He asked Désirée about the effect of her reading ‘on her soul’and tried to make her think about music intellectually, since it had ‘the happiest effects on life’. (Hector Berlioz would later say that Napoleon was a discerning connoisseur of the music of Giovanni Paisiello, whom the Bonapartes had employed in Paris and Rome, composing works almost continuously between 1797 and 1814.) Napoleon's letters to Désirée were not particularly flowery or even romantic, but his interest in her was palpable, and to be the object of his concentrated attention was pleasing to her, even if, despite the new republican informality, he insisted on addressing her as ‘vous’. ¹²

He seems to have enjoyed her playful chastisement. ‘If you could witness, mademoiselle,’he wrote in February 1795, ‘the sentiments with which your letter inspired me, you would be convinced of the injustice of your reproaches ... There is no pleasure in which I do not desire to include you, no dream of which you do not furnish half. Be certain then that “the most sensible of women loves the coldest of men”is an iniquitous and ill-judged, unjust phrase which you did not believe in the writing. Your heart disavowed it even as your hand wrote it.’ ¹³ Writing to her, he added, was both his greatest pleasure and ‘the most imperative need’of his soul. He subscribed to a clavichord journal on her behalf so that she would receive the latest music from Paris, and was concerned that her teacher was paying insufficient attention to her solfège lessons. He added a long paragraph on singing technique which suggests that he was knowledgeable about (or at least had opinions on) vocal music. By April 11, 1795 he was finally using the familiar ‘tu’form, and writing that he was ‘yours for life’. ¹⁴ Napoleon was in love.

• • •

On March 3, 1795 Napoleon set sail from Marseilles with 15 ships, 1,174 guns and 16,900 men to recapture Corsica from Paoli and the British. His expedition was soon scattered by a British squadron of fifteen ships with fewer guns and half the number of men. Two French ships were captured. Napoleon wasn't held responsible for the reverse, but neither did this quintessential landlubber learn the lessons of attempting to put to sea against a similarly sized but far more skilfully deployed force of the Royal Navy. Between 1793 and 1797, the French would lose 125 warships to Britain's 38, including 35 capital vessels (ships-of-the-line) to Britain's 11, most of the latter the result of fire, accidents and storms rather than French attack. ¹⁵ The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon's weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea.

Once the expedition was abandoned, Napoleon was technically unemployed and only 139 ^th on the list of generals in terms of seniority. The new commander of the Army of Italy, General Barthélemy Schérer, didn't want to take him because, although an acknowledged expert in artillery, he was thought to be ‘too much given to intrigue for promotion’. ¹⁶ This was certainly true: Napoleon saw no separation between the military and political spheres any more than his heroes Caesar or Alexander had done. But only eight days after disembarking from the Corsican expedition, he was ordered to take command of the artillery of General Hoche's Army of the West, stationed at Brest, which was then suppressing the royalist uprising in the Vendée.

The government, which was now largely made up of Girondins who had survived the Terror, was conducting a vicious dirty war in western France, where more Frenchmen were killed than in the whole of the Paris Terror. Napoleon knew there was little glory to be had there, even if he were to succeed. Hoche was only a year older than him, so Napoleon's chances of advancement were slim. Having fought against the British and Piedmontese, he didn't relish the prospect of fighting other Frenchmen, and on May 8 he left for Paris to try to get a better posting, taking his sixteen-year-old brother Louis, for whom he hoped to find a place at the artillery school at Châlons-sur-Marne, and two of his aides-de-camp, Marmont and Junot, with him (Muiron was now his third). ¹⁷

Once installed at the Hôtel de la Liberté in Paris on May 25, Napoleon called on the acting war minister, Captain Aubry, who actually degraded the offer to command of the infantry in the Vendée. ‘This appeared to Napoleon as an insult,’recorded his brother Louis, ‘he refused, and lived in Paris without employment, enjoying his pay as an unemployed general.’ ¹⁸ He claimed illness again, and eked out a living on half-pay, nonetheless sending Louis to Châlons. He proceeded to ignore the war ministry's demands that he go to the Vendée, or furnish proof of illness, or retire altogether. These were uncomfortable months for him, but he was philosophical about his lot, telling Joseph in August: ‘Me, I'm very little attached to life ... finding myself constantly in the situation in which one finds oneself on the eve of battle, convinced only by the sentiment that when death, which terminates everything, is found amid it, anxiety is folly.’He then made a self-mocking joke which has been drained of all comic charm by being taken seriously by historians: ‘Always trusting myself very much to Fate and destiny, if this continues, my friend, I'll end up by not getting out of the way when a carriage approaches.’ ¹⁹

Napoleon was in fact determined to enjoy the charms of Paris. ‘The memory of the Terror is no more than a nightmare here,’he reported to Joseph. ‘Everyone appears determined to make up for what they have suffered; determined, too, because of the uncertain future, not to miss a single pleasure of the present.’ ²⁰ He steeled himself to embark on a social life for the first time, although he wasn't comfortable in the company of women. This might in part have been because of his looks; a woman who met him several times that spring called him ‘the thinnest and queerest being I ever met ... so thin that he inspired pity’. ²¹ Another nicknamed him ‘Puss-in-Boots’. ²² The socialite Laure d'Abrantès, who knew Napoleon at this time, though probably not as well as she later claimed in her bitchy memoirs, remembered him ‘with a shabby round hat drawn over his forehead, and his ill-powdered hair hanging over the collar of his grey greatcoat, without gloves because he used to say they were a useless luxury, with boots ill-made and ill-blackened, with his thinness and his sallow complexion’. ²³ Small wonder that Napoleon wasn't comfortable in the fashionable Parisian salons and rather despised those who were: he denounced dandies to Junot (whom Laure d'Abrantès later married) for their modes of dress and adopted lisps, and as Emperor he was convinced that the hostesses of the fashionable faubourg salons encouraged opposition to him. His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. ‘Tragedy excites the soul,’he later told one of his secretaries, ‘lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.’ ²⁴

• • •

On his way to Paris in May 1795, Napoleon had written to Désirée that he was ‘much afflicted at the thought of having to be so far away from you for so long’. ²⁵ He had enough money saved from his salary at this point to consider buying a small chateau at Ragny in Burgundy, listing the potential revenues he could make from various cereal crops there, estimating that the dining room was four times the size of the Casa Bonaparte's, and making the sound republican remark that ‘In pulling down three or four towers which give it an aristocratic air, the chateau would be no more than an attractive very large family home.’ ²⁶ He told Joseph of his wish to start a family.

‘I saw many pretty women of agreeable disposition at Marmont's house in Châtillon,’Napoleon wrote to Désirée in a rather transparent attempt to excite her jealousy on June 2, ‘but I never felt even for an instant that any of them could measure up to my dear, good Eugénie.’Two days later he wrote again: ‘Adored friend, I have received no more letters from you. How could you go eleven days without writing to me?’ ²⁷ Perhaps realizing that Madame Clary had discouraged her daughter from further involvement, thinking that one Bonaparte in the family was quite enough. A week later Napoleon was merely calling her ‘Mademoiselle’. By June 14 he acknowledged the situation: ‘I know that you will always retain an affection for your friend, but it will be no more than affectionate esteem.’ ²⁸ His letters to Joseph make it clear that he still loved Désirée, but in August, calling her ‘vous’once more, he wrote: ‘Follow your instincts, allow yourself to love what's near to you ... You know that my destiny lies in the hazard of combat, in glory or in death.’ ²⁹ For all their cloying melodrama, his words had the advantage of being true.

Was it self-pity over Désirée as much as fraternal love that compelled Napoleon to dissolve into tears while writing to Joseph on June 24, a letter ostensibly about something as prosaic as his brother's plans to enter the Genoese olive-oil trade? ‘Life is like an empty dream which vanishes,’he wrote to Joseph, asking for his portrait. ‘We have lived so many years together, so closely united, that our hearts are mingled, and you know better than anyone how entirely mine belongs to you.’ ³⁰ By July 12 he was trying to persuade himself that he was over Désirée, railing to Joseph against the effeminacy of men who were interested in women, who ‘are mad about them, think only of them, live only by and for them. A woman requires to be but six months in Paris to know what is due to her and the extent of her empire.’ ³¹

Désirée's rejection of Napoleon contributed to his deep cynicism about women and even about love itself. On St Helena he defined love as ‘the occupation of the idle man, the distraction of the warrior, the stumbling block of the sovereign’, and told one of his entourage: ‘Love does not really exist. It's an artificial sentiment born of society.’ ³² Less than three months after the end of his courting of Désirée he was ready to fall in love again, although he seems to have retained a place in his heart for her, even after she had married General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, and wound up as queen of Sweden.

• • •

‘We are so sure of the superiority of our infantry that we laugh at the threats of the English,’Napoleon wrote to Joseph after the British landed a force in Quiberon Bay, near Saint-Nazaire, in late June 1795 to assist the revolt in the Vendée. ³³ It was an early example of his overconfidence regarding the British following Toulon (though admittedly justified in this instance, as by October the expedition had comprehensively failed). Besides Toulon, he was to fight the British only twice more, at Acre and in the Waterloo campaign.

By early August he was still lobbying for a post back with the artillery of the Army of Italy, but he also seriously considered taking up an offer to go to Turkey to modernize the Sultan's artillery. According to Lucien's memoirs, during this period of complete flux in his career Napoleon even contemplated joining the East India Company's army, albeit more for its financial than military advantages, saying ‘I will return in a few years a rich nabob, bringing some handsome dowries for my three sisters.’ ³⁴ Madame Mère, as his mother came to be called, took the suggestion seriously enough to rebuke him for even considering the notion, which she thought him quite capable of taking up ‘in a moment of vexation against the Government’. There is also an indication that the Russians were wooing him to help them fight the Turks.

In mid-August 1795 matters came to a head when the war ministry demanded that Napoleon present himself to its medical board to ascertain whether he was in fact sick. He appealed to Barras, Fréron and his other political contacts, one of whom landed him an attachment to the Historical and Topographical Bureau of the war ministry. Despite its title, this was actually the planning staff that co-ordinated French military strategy. So whereas on August 17 Napoleon was writing to Simon Sucy de Clisson, the ordonnateur of the Army of Italy at Nice, ‘I've been appointed to a generalship in the Army of the Vendée: I won't accept’, three days later he was crowing to Joseph: ‘I am at this moment attached to the Topographical Department of the Committee of Public Safety for the direction of armies.’ ³⁵ The Bureau was under the command of General Henri Clarke, a protégé of the great military administrator Lazare Carnot, known as ‘The Organizer of Victory’.

The Topographical Bureau was a small, highly efficient organization within the war ministry that has been described as ‘the most sophisticated planning organisation of its day’. ³⁶ Set up by Carnot and reporting directly to the Committee, it took information from the commanders-in-chief, plotted troop movements, prepared detailed operational directives and co-ordinated logistics. Under Clarke, the senior staff included Generals Jean-Girard Lacuée, César-Gabriel Berthier and Pierre-Victor Houdon, all talented and dedicated strategists. Napoleon could hardly have been better placed to learn all the necessary strands of supply, support and logistics that make up strategy (although the word entered the military lexicon only in the early nineteenth century and was not one Napoleon ever used). ³⁷ This period between mid-August and early October 1795 – short, but intellectually intense – was when Napoleon learned the practicalities of strategic warfare, as distinct from the tactical battle-fighting at which he had excelled at Toulon. Napoleon's military success was ultimately down to his own genius and capacity for gruellingly hard work, but France had some exceptionally talented military thinkers and bureaucrats at this time, able to teach him and ultimately to do the detailed work necessary to put his ideas into practice. The Topographical Bureau was also the best place to make his own estimations of which generals were worthwhile and which expendable.

The Bureau didn't decide overall grand strategy; that was done by the politicians on the Committee of Public Safety, which was highly vulnerable to factional struggles. The debate over whether, where and when to cross the Rhine to attack Austria in 1795, for example, had to be fought out there, with the Bureau merely giving advice on each option. In August any plans to fight for – or indeed against – Turkey were quashed by the Committee, which also ordained that Napoleon couldn't leave the country until the end of the war. He still had problems from different bureaucracies within the ministry over whether he was active or retired, and on September 15 he was even struck off the list of serving generals. ‘I have fought like a lion for the Republic,’he wrote to his friend the actor François-Joseph Talma, ‘and in recompense she leaves me dying of hunger.’ ³⁸ (He was soon reinstated.)

The Topographical Bureau's curious office hours – from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. – allowed Napoleon plenty of time to write a romantic novella entitled Clisson et Eugénie , a swansong for his unrequited love affair with Désirée. Employing the short, terse sentences of the heroic tradition, it was either consciously or unconsciously influenced by Goethe's celebrated novel of 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther , which Napoleon read no fewer than six times during the Egyptian campaign, and probably first when he was eighteen. The most important European Sturm-und-Drang novel and the great bestseller of its age, Werther deeply affected the Romantic literary movement and Napoleon's own writing. Although the name ‘Clisson’was borrowed from one of Napoleon's friends of the time, Sucy de Clisson, the character is pure Napoleon, right down to their identical ages of twenty-six. ‘From birth Clisson was strongly attracted to war,’the story opens. ‘While others of his age were still listening avidly to fireside tales, he was ardently dreaming of battle.’Clisson joined the revolutionary National Guard and ‘Soon he had exceeded the high expectations people had of him: victory was his constant companion.’ ³⁹

Clisson was superior to the frivolous pastimes of his contemporaries such as flirtation, gambling and conversational repartee: ‘A man of his fervent imagination, with his blazing heart, his uncompromising intellect and his cool head, was bound to be irritated by the affected conversation of coquettes, the games of seduction, the logic of the tables and the hurling of witty insults.’ ⁴⁰ Such a paragon was only at ease communing Rousseau-like with nature in the forests, where ‘he felt at peace with himself, scorning human wickedness and despising folly and cruelty’. When Clisson met the sixteen-year-old Eugénie at a spa, ‘she revealed beautifully-arranged pearly white teeth’. After that,

Clisson and Eugénie marry, have children and live happily together, much admired by the poor for their generous philanthropy. But this idyllic fairy-tale is too good to last. One day a message arrives instructing Clisson that he must leave for Paris within twenty-four hours. ‘There he was to be given an important mission, which called for a man of his talents.’Appointed to command an army, Clisson ‘was a success at everything; he exceeded the hopes of the people and the army; indeed, he alone was the reason for the army's success.’Seriously wounded in a skirmish, however, Clisson despatches one of his officers, Berville, to inform Eugénie, ‘and to keep her company until he had made a full recovery’. For no good reason discernible to the reader, Eugénie promptly sleeps with Berville, which the recuperating Clisson finds out about and understandably wants to avenge. ‘But how could he leave the army and his duty? The fatherland needed him here!’The solution was a glorious death in battle, so when ‘Beating drums announced the charge on the flanks, and death stalked amongst the ranks,’Clisson writes a suitably emotional letter to Eugénie which he hands to an aide-de-camp, ‘and, dutifully placing himself at the head of the fray – at the point where the victory would be decided – and expired, pierced by a thousand blows.’ ⁴² Finis .

We should try to view Clisson et Eugénie through an eighteenth-century literary prism, rather than as a cheap romance of today. The seventeen-page short story has been described as ‘the last manifestation of an incipient Romanticism in a man who would go on to dazzle with his brilliant pragmatism’, and Napoleon clearly used the story to fantasize, in this case by making Eugénie despicably adulterous while he remained heroic, faithful and even forgiving of her infidelity at the end. ⁴³ Yet Napoleon can't be excused the melodrama, sentimentality and cliché because his story was tossed off in a furious moment of immature resentment: Clisson et Eugénie underwent endless drafting and re-drafting.

• • •

In the second half of 1795 France's leaders recognized that she would need a new constitution if she were to put the days of the Jacobin Terror behind her. ‘The royalists are stirring,’Napoleon wrote to Joseph on September 1, ‘we shall see how this will end.’ ⁴⁴ Alexis de Tocqueville would write that states are never more vulnerable than when they attempt to reform themselves, and that was certainly true of France in the autumn of 1795. On August 23 the third constitution since the fall of the Bastille, known as the Constitution of the Year III, establishing a bicameral legislature and a five-man executive government called the Directory, was approved by the Convention. It would come into effect at the end of October. A National Assembly consisting of a Council of Five Hundred and Council of the Elders would replace the Convention, and the Directory would replace the Committee of Public Safety, which had grown to be synonymous with the Terror. This moment of reform provided an opportunity for opponents both of the Revolution and the Republic to strike. As Austria returned to the Rhine in a major counter-attack on September 20, with the French economy still very weak and corruption widespread, the enemies of the Republic coalesced to overthrow the new government in the first week of October, smuggling large quantities of arms and ammunition into Paris.

Although the Terror was over and the Committee of Public Safety would be abolished when the new Directory came into being, the bitterness they had inspired was now directed against their successors. It was in the ‘Sections’, forty-eight districts of Paris established in 1790 which controlled local assemblies and the local National Guard units, that the insurrection was focused. Although only seven Sections actually rose in revolt, National Guardsmen from others joined in.

The men of the Sections were not all – or even mainly – royalists. The veteran soldier General Mathieu Dumas wrote in his memoirs, ‘The most general desire of the population of Paris was to return to the constitution of 1791’, and there was little appetite for the civil war that a Bourbon restoration would have entailed. ⁴⁵ The Sections included middle-class National Guardsmen, royalists, some moderates and liberals, and ordinary Parisians who opposed the government for its corruption and domestic and international failures. The very disparate nature of the rebellion's political make-up made any central co-ordination impossible beyond establishing a date for action, which couldn't be kept secret from the government.

The man whom the Convention had originally relied upon to put down the coming insurrection, General Jacques-François Menou, commander of the Army of the Interior, had attempted to negotiate with the Sections to avoid bloodshed. The leaders of the Convention mistook this for incipient treachery and had him arrested. (He was later acquitted.) With time running out before the anticipated attack, the Thermidorians appointed one of their leaders, the president of the National Assembly, Paul Barras, to command the Army of the Interior, despite his having no military experience since 1783. His instructions were to save the Revolution.

On the evening of Sunday, October 4, Napoleon was at the Feydeau Theatre watching Saurin's play Beverley when he heard that the Sections intended to rise the following day. ⁴⁶ Very early the next morning – 13 Vendémiaire by the revolutionary calendar – Barras appointed him second-in-command of the Army of the Interior, and ordered him to use all means necessary to crush the revolt. Napoleon had impressed the most important decision-makers in his life – among them Kéralio, the du Teil brothers, Saliceti, Doppet, Dugommier, Augustin Robespierre and now Barras, who had heard of him from Saliceti after the victory at Toulon. Having served in the Topographical Bureau, he was known to leading government figures such as Carnot and Jean-Lambert Tallien. ⁴⁷ (He later recalled with amusement that the politician who had had least qualms about the spilling of blood at Vendémiaire had been the priest and political theorist Abbé Emmanuel Sieyès.) It is astonishing that there were so few other senior officers in Paris to take the job, or at least ones who were willing to fire on civilians in the streets. From Napoleon's reactions to the two Tuileries attacks he had witnessed in 1792, there was no doubt what he would do.

This was Napoleon's first introduction to frontline, high-level national politics, and he found it intoxicating. He ordered Captain Joachim Murat of the 21 ^st Chasseurs à Cheval to gallop to the Sablons military camp two miles away with one hundred cavalrymen, secure the cannon there and bring them into central Paris, and to sabre anyone who tried to prevent him. The Sections had missed a great opportunity as the Sablons cannon were at that point guarded by only fifty men.

Between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., having assured himself of the loyalty of his officers and men, Napoleon placed two cannon at the entrance of the rue Saint-Nicaise, another facing the church of Saint-Roch at the bottom of the rue Dauphine, two more in the rue Saint-Honoré near the Place Vendôme, and two facing the Pont Royal on the Quai Voltaire. He formed up his infantry behind the cannon, and sent his reserves to the Place du Carrousel to defend the Tuileries where the Convention sat and the government was headquartered. His cavalry was posted in the Place de la Révolution (today's Place de la Concorde). ⁴⁸ He then spent three hours visiting each of his guns in turn. ‘Good and upstanding people must be persuaded by gentle means,’Napoleon would later write. ‘The rabble must be moved by terror.’ ⁴⁹

Napoleon prepared to use grapeshot, the colloquial term for canister or case shot, which consists of hundreds of musket balls packed into a metal case that rips open as soon as it leaves the cannon's muzzle, sending the lead balls flying in a relatively wide arc at an even greater velocity than the 1,760 feet per second of a musket shot. Its maximum range was roughly 600 yards, optimum 250. The use of grapeshot on civilians was hitherto unknown in Paris, and was testament to Napoleon's ruthlessness that he was willing to contemplate it. He was not about to be a coglione . ‘If you treat the mob with kindness,’he told Joseph later, ‘these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable; if you hang a few, they get tired of the game, and become as submissive and humble as they ought to be.’ ⁵⁰

Napoleon's force consisted of 4,500 troops and about 1,500 ‘patriots’, gendarmes and veterans from Les Invalides. Opposing them was a disparate force of up to 30,000 men from the Sections, nominally under the control of General Dancian, who wasted much of the day trying to conduct negotiations. Only at 4 p.m. did the rebel columns start issuing from side streets to the north of the Tuileries. Napoleon did not open fire immediately, but as soon as the first musket shots were heard from the Sections sometime between 4.15 p.m. and 4.45 p.m. he unleashed a devastating artillery response. He also fired grapeshot at the men of the Sections attempting to cross the bridges over the Seine, who took heavy casualties and quickly fled. In most parts of Paris the attack was all over by 6 p.m., but at the church of Saint-Roch in the rue Saint-Honoré, which became the de facto headquarters of the insurrection and where the wounded were brought, snipers carried on firing from rooftops and from behind barricades. The fighting continued for many hours, until Napoleon brought his cannon to within 60 yards of the church and surrender was the only option. ⁵¹ Around three hundred insurrectionists were killed that day, against only half a dozen of Napoleon's men. Magnanimously by the standards of the day, the Convention executed only two Section leaders afterwards. * ‘The whiff of grapeshot’– as it became known – meant that the Paris mob played no further part in French politics for the next three decades.

In 1811 General Jean Sarrazin published a book in London entitled Confession of General Buonaparté to the Abbé Maury . As Napoleon had by then had Sarrazin sentenced to death in absentia for treachery, it didn't cost him much to claim that on 13 Vendémiaire, ‘Far from putting a stop to the blind fury of his soldiers, Buonaparté set them the example of inhumanity. He cut down with his sabre wretched beings, who in their fright had thrown down their arms and implored his mercy.’ ⁵² Sarrazin further claimed that Napoleon's lieutenant, Monvoisin, reproached Napoleon for his cruelty that day and resigned. None of this was true, but it was all part of the ‘Black Legend’that came to surround Napoleon from Vendémiaire onwards.

• • •

Heavy rainfall on the night of 13 Vendémiaire quickly washed the blood from the streets, but its memory lingered. Even the violently anti-Jacobin Annual Register , founded by Edmund Burke, pointed out that ‘It was in this conflict that Buonaparte appeared first on the theatre of war, and by his courage and conduct laid the foundation of that confidence in his powers which conducted him so soon thereafter to preferment and to glory.’ ⁵³ The urgent political exigencies meant that there was to be no more nonsense from the war ministry about seniority lists, medical boards, desertion and so on. Before the end of Vendémiaire, Napoleon had been promoted to général de division by Barras and soon afterwards to commander of the Army of the Interior in recognition of his service in saving the Republic and possibly preventing civil war. It was ironic that he had refused the Vendée post partly because he hadn't wanted to kill Frenchmen, and then gained his most vertiginous promotion by doing just that. But to his mind there was a difference between a legitimate fighting force and a rabble.

For a while afterwards Napoleon was sometimes called ‘General Vendémiaire’, though not to his face. Far from being uneasy about his involvement in the deaths of so many of his compatriots, he ordered the anniversary to be celebrated once he became First Consul, and when a lady asked him how he could have fired so mercilessly on the mob he replied: ‘A soldier is only a machine to obey orders.’ ⁵⁴ He did not point out that it was he who had given the orders.

The ‘whiff of grapeshot’advanced the Bonaparte family hugely, and overnight. Napoleon would now be paid 48,000 francs per annum, Joseph was given a job in the diplomatic service, Louis advanced through the Châlons artillery school and later became one of Napoleon's burgeoning team of aides-de-camp, while the youngest of the Bonaparte boys, the eleven-year-old Jérôme, was sent to a better school. ‘The family will want for nothing,’Napoleon told Joseph, and that was to be true for the next twenty years. Laure d'Abrantès claimed that she noticed a change after Vendémiaire:

No-one would call him ‘Puss-in-Boots’anymore.

• • •

In the immediate aftermath of Vendémiaire, Napoleon supervised the closing of the opposition Panthéon Club and the expulsion of crypto-royalists from the war ministry, as well as the policing of theatrical productions. In this last role he wrote almost daily to the government about the behaviour of the audiences at four Parisian theatres: the Opéra, Opéra Comique, Feydeau and La République. A typical report reads, ‘While patriotic airs were well received in two [of the theatres], and a third was tranquil, the police had to arrest a man (thought to be a Vendéen) who whistled during the penultimate verse of the “Marseillaise”at the Feydeau’. ⁵⁶ * Another task was to oversee the confiscation of all civilian weaponry, which according to family lore led to his meeting a woman of whom he had possibly heard on the social grapevine but hadn't hitherto met: Vicomtesse Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, the widow de Beauharnais, whom Napoleon was to dub ‘Josephine’.

Josephine's grandfather, a noble called Gaspard Tascher, had left France for Martinique in 1726, hoping to make his fortune with a sugar-cane plantation, although hurricanes, bad luck and his own indolence had prevented him; La Pagerie was the name of an estate the family owned on Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). Josephine's father, Joseph, had served as a page at the court of Louis XVI but returned to his father's estates. Josephine was born in Martinique on June 23, 1763, although in later life she claimed that it was 1767. ⁵⁷ She arrived in Paris in 1780 aged seventeen, so poorly educated that her first husband – a cousin to whom she had been engaged at fifteen, the General Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais – couldn't hide his contempt for her lack of education.

Josephine had blackened stubs for teeth, thought to be the result of chewing Martiniquais cane sugar as a child, but she learned to smile without showing them. ⁵⁸ ‘Had she only possessed teeth,’wrote Laure d'Abrantès, who was to become Madame Mère's lady-in-waiting, ‘she would certainly have outvied nearly all the ladies of the Consular Court.’ ⁵⁹ Although Beauharnais had been an abusive husband – once kidnapping their three-year-old son Eugène from the convent in which Josephine had taken refuge from his beatings – she nonetheless courageously tried to save him from the guillotine after his arrest in 1794.

From April 22, 1794 until shortly after her husband's execution on July 22 that year, Josephine was herself imprisoned as a suspected royalist in the crypt underneath the church of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes in the rue de Vaugirard. * One of her cellmates, an Englishwoman named Grace Elliott, recalled how ‘the walls and even the wooden chairs were still stained with the blood and the brains of the priests’. ⁶⁰ Josephine had to endure truly inhumane conditions: air came only from three deep holes to the underground cells and there were no lavatories; she and her cellmates lived in daily fear of the guillotine; they had one bottle of water a day each, for all uses; and since pregnant women weren't guillotined until after giving birth, the sound of sexual couplings with the warders could be heard in the hallways at night. ⁶¹ It is cold down in the Saint-Joseph crypt even in midsummer, and inmates’health broke down fast, indeed it is possible that Josephine survived only because she was too ill to be guillotined. Her husband was executed just four days before Robespierre's fall, and had Robespierre survived any longer Josephine would probably have followed him. There was a paradoxical symmetry in the way that the Thermidor coup released Josephine from one prison and simultaneously put Napoleon into another.

The stench, darkness, cold, degradation and daily fear of violent death for weeks on end makes the Terror well named, and it is likely that for months, possibly even years, afterwards Josephine suffered from a form of what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. If she was later sexually self-indulgent, became involved in sleazy business deals and loved luxury – her dress bills became higher than Marie Antoinette's – and married for stability and financial security rather than for love, it is hard to hold this against her after what she had been through. ⁶² Josephine has often been seen as a seductive, shallow, extravagant hussy, but she certainly wasn't shallow culturally, having good taste in music and the decorative arts. She was also generous – albeit usually with public money – and one of the most accomplished diplomats of the age, Clemens von Metternich, referred to her ‘unique social tact’. ⁶³ She was a skilled harpist – although some said she always played the same tune – and she did something in bed known as ‘zigzags’. ⁶⁴ She couldn't draw, did a bit of tapestry, and played backgammon occasionally, but she received callers all day and enjoyed gossipy lunches with her many girlfriends.

By late 1795 this undeniably sexy femme fatale in her mid-thirties (with an inimitable closed-mouth smile) needed a protector and provider. On leaving prison she had an affair with General Lazare Hoche, who refused to leave his wife for her but whom she would have liked to marry, even up to the day she reluctantly married Napoleon. ⁶⁵ Another lover was Paul Barras, but that didn't last much longer than the summer of 1795. ‘I was long since tired of and bored with her,’recalled Barras in his memoirs, in which he ungallantly described her as a ‘cajoling courtesan’. ⁶⁶ It is a well-known historical phenomenon for a sexually permissive period to follow one of prolonged bloodletting: the ‘Roaring Twenties’after the Great War and the licentiousness of Ancient Roman society after the Civil Wars are but two examples. Josephine's decision to take powerful lovers after the Terror was, like so much else in her life, à la mode (though she wasn't as promiscuous as her friend Thérésa Tallien, who was nicknamed ‘Government Property’because so many ministers had slept with her). Whatever ‘zigzags’were, Josephine had performed them for others besides her first husband, Hoche and Barras; her éducation amoureuse was far more advanced than her near-virginal second husband's.

Josephine took the opportunity of the post-Vendémiaire arms confiscations to send her fourteen-year-old son Eugène de Beauharnais to Napoleon's headquarters to ask whether his father's sword could be retained by the family for sentimental reasons. Napoleon took this for the social opening that it plainly was, and within weeks he had fallen genuinely and deeply in love with her; his infatuation only grew until their marriage five months later. As fellow outsiders, immigrants, islanders and ex-political prisoners, they had a certain amount in common. At first she wasn't attracted to his slightly yellow complexion, lank hair and unkempt look, nor presumably to his scabies, and she certainly wasn't in love with him, but then she herself was beginning to get wrinkles, her looks were fading and she was in debt. (She sensibly didn't admit the extent of her debts until she had Napoleon's ring on her finger.)

Josephine always took a great deal of trouble over her make-up and clothing. She had mirrors placed in the bedrooms of her houses and palaces, was charming and affable – though not intelligent enough to be witty – and knew perfectly what kind of attentions successful men liked. Asked whether Josephine had intelligence, Talleyrand is said to have replied: ‘No one ever managed so brilliantly without it.’For his part, Napoleon valued her political connections, her social status as a vicomtesse who was also acceptable to revolutionaries, and the way she compensated for his lack of savoir-faire and social graces. He wasn't good at drawing-room repartee. ‘Out of his mouth there never came one well-turned speech to a woman,’recalled the accomplished smooth-talker Metternich, ‘although the effort to make one was often expressed on his face and in the sound of his voice.’ ⁶⁷ He spoke to ladies about their dresses or the number of children they had, and whether they nursed them themselves, ‘a question which he commonly made in terms seldom used in good society’. While he was gauche around women, she was extremely well-connected in Paris society, with entrées into the influential political salons run by Madames Tallien, Récamier, de Staël and others.

The Revolution had removed responsibility for registering births, deaths and marriages from the clergy, so Napoleon and Josephine married in a civil ceremony at 10 p.m. on Wednesday, March 9, 1796, before a sleepy mayor in the 2 ^nd arrondissement on the rue d'Antin. The bride wore a republican tricolour sash over her white muslin wedding dress, ⁶⁸ and the groom arrived two hours late. The witnesses included Barras, Napoleon's aide-de-camp Jean Lemarois (who was technically a minor), the Talliens, Josephine's son Eugène and his eleven-year-old sister Hortense. In order to minimize the six-year disparity of their ages, Napoleon claimed in the marriage register to have been born in 1768 and she simultaneously shed her customary four years, so they could both be twenty-eight. ⁶⁹ (Later the Almanach Impérial recorded Josephine as having been born on June 24, 1768. ⁷⁰ Napoleon was always amused by his wife's insistence on lying about her age, joking: ‘According to her calculations, Eugène must have been born aged twelve!’ ⁷¹ ) As a wedding gift, Napoleon gave her a gold enamelled medallion engraved with the words ‘To Destiny’. ⁷²

• • •

The reason Napoleon had been so late for his own wedding, and why his honeymoon then lasted less than forty-eight hours, was that on March 2 Barras and the other four members of France's new executive government, the Directory, had given him the best wedding present he could ever have hoped for: command of the Army of Italy. Barras later wrote that to persuade his colleagues – the ex-Jacobins Jean-François Reubell and Louis de La Révellière-Lépeaux, and the moderates Lazare Carnot and Étienne-François Le Tourneur – to choose Napoleon for the coming campaign in the Ligurian Alps he told them that, as ‘a highlander’Corsican, he was ‘accustomed since birth to scale mountains’. ⁷³ It was hardly a scientific argument – Ajaccio is at sea level – but he also said that Napoleon would lift the Army of Italy out of its lethargy. That was a good deal nearer the mark.

In the nine days between receiving the appointment and leaving for his headquarters in Nice on March 11, Napoleon asked for every book, map and atlas on Italy that the war ministry could provide. He read biographies of commanders who had fought there and had the courage to admit his ignorance when he didn't know something. ‘I happened to be at the office of the General Staff in the rue Neuve des Capucines when General Bonaparte came in,’recalled a fellow officer years later:

Napoleon left Paris in a post-chaise on March 11, 1796, along with Junot and his friend Chauvet, the new chief ordonnateur of the Army of Italy. In a letter to Josephine of March 14, written from Chanceaux on his journey south, Napoleon dropped the ‘u’in his surname. The first time his name had appeared in the state newspaper, the Moniteur Universel , had been in 1794 when it was hyphenated as ‘Buono-Parte’. * Now he Gallicized it in a conscious move towards emphasizing his French over his Italian and Corsican identities. ⁷⁵ Another bond with the past had been broken.

He reached Nice in fifteen days. When someone made the rather otiose point that he was very young, at twenty-six, to command an army, Napoleon replied: ‘I shall be old when I return.’ ⁷⁶ WFjf4YgP9P7g/9MPFZYynh0Mv9qbH7mleoJr+zkPdWmyFk+xRY1CMMYg7XMTc45x