The War of Wars Read online

  All of these were extraordinarily advanced ideas for the time. However, he also believed in the absolute sovereignty of parliament, as advocated by the Jacobins, and apologized for popular violence: ‘If some disturbances have taken place, they should be pardoned after so many centuries of servitude and misery.’ Like Rousseau, Robespierre believed that most people were good by nature – but only in a democracy. ‘The people are just and in general their government . . . only strikes the guilty. When despots make revolutions against the people, their revolutionary masters, [they] are no more than instruments of cruelty and oppression; but when the people take action against despotism and the aristocracy, revolutionary measures are no more than healthy measures and acts of universal benevolence.’

  He took this further. Although he defended the institution of property, he argued that the rich had taken it too far: he even argued against the bourgeoisie – by which he meant the wealthy middle-class: ‘To defeat the bourgeoisie, the people must be rallied.’ He favoured equality of inheritance to break down the big estates and progressive taxation. Robespierre advocated free trade, but only up to a point – he feared it could degenerate into greed and speculation under the ancien régime.

  Most controversially, he believed that in times of revolution, terror was needed to supplant virtue: he defined terror as the application of ‘proper, severe and inflexible justice’. This he inflicted through setting up the revolutionary Tribunals of March 1793. ‘People,’ he declared, ‘do not judge like judicial courts; they do not hand down sentences. They throw lightning bolts. Revolution is the war of freedom against its enemies. Revolutionary government gives good citizens all natural protection; it gives only death to enemies of the people.’

  Robespierre was remarkable for embracing, at least a century before such views became significant, the Communist concept of the party as the embodiment of the people and the Fascist commitment to pure nationalism. If many of his ideas were also those of constitutional democracy well in advance of its time, he was also the forerunner of totalitarianism. Napoleon was at first to be closely allied with the Robespierre faction, then reject it: but the debt he owed to its extraordinarily prescient ideology cannot be doubted, both on the popular dictatorial and the nationalist score, which was to be enshrined in his concept of emperorship. Napoleon was never a profound political thinker, and it is clear that he was hugely influenced by Robespierre’s political philosophy. It is doubly ironic that the ‘incorruptible’s’ final warning was against everything that Napoleon was later to personify.

  He delivered an extraordinary address in which he proposed the worship of a Supreme Being and set aside a day in every ten to worship him, honouring a different virtue each time. Robespierre staged a procession, with himself leading, dressed in a purple robe, and the people following bearing fruit and vegetables, as though in a kind of pagan ritual. It was hard not to believe that he had become quite mad. The ceremony attracted ridicule among atheists and the condemnation of Catholics.

  Robespierre now issued a law giving his underlings the power to arrest virtually anyone at will and sentence them to death for spreading false news, for showing delicacy in manner and even for speaking correctly. This passed only with huge dispute in the Assembly, many of whose own members feared being so arrested. When Robespierre proposed the arrest of one of the most vigorous enforcers of the Terror, as being a sympathizer of Danton, he found himself for the first time in a minority on the Committee of Public Safety.

  Robespierre descended to the Assembly and denounced the two committees, as well as a host of other institutions. This proved too much even for the usually terrorized Assembly, which erupted in a storm of criticism – each member fearing for his life. Only Robespierre’s loyal brother, Augustin, and two supporters, Saint-Just and Couthon, spoke in his favour. He then appealed to the Jacobin clubs, which volunteered to move on the two committees and arrest their members.

  On 25 July a crowd tried to rescue eighty people being taken to the guillotine, but they were prevented. Robespierre sought the same day to speak to the convention, but his right-hand man Saint-Just was interrupted by Tallien. When the pale and trembling Robespierre rose he was greeted with shouts of ‘Down with the tyrant.’ Tallien said he would kill Robespierre if necessary. When the latter tried to speak he was shouted down. His shrill voice screaming, ‘parliament of assassins, for the last time I seek the privilege of speech’, was the last heard of him before his voice gave out.

  Robespierre and his handful of supporters were seized and marched to the prison of Paris, where the gaolers refused to accept him, such was their terror of him. He was led to the offices of the Committee of Public Safety. A group of his supporters managed to free him and tried to take him back to the Hôtel de Ville, where 2,000 loyalists and artillerymen were waiting to acclaim him.

  The Convention, learning of his release, passed a decree outlawing him and his supporters and demanded that he be immediately executed. Fighting seemed about to break out on the streets of Paris. Cannon were brought up by Convention loyalists. Augustin Robespierre tried to kill himself by jumping from a window, but survived. Saint-Just and Couthon both tried unsuccessfully to kill themselves. Robespierre fired a gun which badly wounded his lower jaw. When the besiegers broke into the dreadful scene, they seized these wretched men and carried them straight to execution. The cloth holding Robespierre’s shattered jaw together was torn off on the scaffold. He issued a shout of agony, and was promptly guillotined.

  It was widely assumed that he had been executed so that others nearly as badly steeped in blood, such as Tallien and Barras, who had headed the assailants at the Hôtel de Ville, could seize power for themselves. But a general outcry against the Terror was taking place, and both felt under threat, as did others. Although a handful of Robespierre’s closest supporters were seized, both Tallien and Barras refused to undertake a new wave of Terror against their own enemies – which required considerable courage, as the two could have been swept away. A general amnesty was proclaimed.

  Relatives of those guillotined – the Avengers – toured the streets wearing black collars and with their hair plaited and tied up as if in preparation for the guillotine, setting upon the Jacobin bands still daring to show themselves. The Jacobin Club held a session to try and spark off a new revolution, but the Avengers broke up the sitting. A handful of Robespierre’s closest associates were guillotined, including Carier, the Butcher of Nantes, and Fouquier-Tinville, the implacable public prosecutor.

  On 20 May 1795 the Jacobins staged one last insurrection, breaking into the Convention and killing a deputy and being dispersed at length. Two days of rioting followed. A detachment of rural guards was sent to clear up the suburb of Faubourg St Antoine and the mob there were forced to surrender their arms. Another group of hard-line Jacobins committed mass suicide rather than be sent to the gallows. The Jacobins left only their memory – egalitarianism, revolutionary terror, escalating mass purges – to inspire future generations of murderous revolutionaries, particularly Communists in Russia, China, Kampuchea, and elsewhere.

  In one key sense the French Revolution was very different to the English and American Revolutions: offshore Britain and distant America did not threaten the peace and stability of Europe. Cromwell’s few interventions into continental politics were not regarded as furnishing a serious danger of infecting the continent; in any event the monarchy was restored after a decade. The American Revolution, as we have seen, had a huge impact on France but not one – to their own cost – taken seriously by the royal family and court.

  The French Revolution was something else: in order to save themselves, its leaders seized on the idea of national expansion against the hostile royal powers surrounding it and sought to export its revolutionary creed, threatening to spread the contagion across Europe. When the success of Dumouriez’s levée en masse became apparent, there seemed no limit to the possibilities of French domination of Europe. A new weapon, the mass popular army, was sure to d
efeat traditional aristocratic armies with their antiquated tactics and fighting seasons. From being an egalitarian revolution, it quickly became a nationalist one as well.

  Chapter 7

  THE BOY FROM AJACCIO

  At the time of the tumultuous events in Paris and Versailles in 1789, an obscure twenty-year-old second lieutenant, Napoleone Buonaparte, was studying and writing essays in the tiny garrison town of Valence near the French coast close to his homeland of Corsica. The young man had ambitions to become a writer and was deeply studious. He read widely: La Chaumière Indienne, a pastoral idyll by Bernardin de St Pierre, Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, Plato’s Republic, Montigny’s History of the Arabs and Barrow’s New and Impartial History of England, from which he made notes approving such parliamentarians as Simon de Montfort and Pym. For Charles I and James II he expressed contempt. He noted that:

  The principal advantage of the English Constitution consists in the fact that the national spirit is always in full vitality. For a long spell of years, the King can doubtless arrogate to himself more authority than he ought to have, may even use his great power to commit injustice, but the cries of the nation soon change to thunder, and sooner or later the King yields.

  More bizarrely he observed from Buffon’s volume:

  Some men are born with only one testicle, others have three; they are stronger and more vigorous. It is astonishing how much this part of the body contributes to a man’s strength and courage. What a difference between a bull and an ox, a ram and a sheep, a cock and a capon!

  He also began a history of his native Corsica and wrote a short story in English, based on Barrow about the Earl of Essex, murdered by Charles II and the Duke of York. This somewhat lurid tale, reminiscent of the Corsican vendettas he was familiar with, was balanced by an essay on happiness, in which he conceded to feeling most satisfied meditating on the origin of nature at night and the joys of having ‘a wife and children, father and mother, brothers and sisters, a friend!’

  Above these joys, however, is love of country, ‘that love of beauty in all its energy, the pleasure of making a whole nation happy’. The true patriot ensures ‘the happiness of a hundred families’, in contrast to the vain patriot devoured by ambition ‘with its pale complexion, wild eyes, hurried footsteps, jerky gestures and sardonic laugh’ – an almost exact description of the author in his twenties. Perhaps the most significant essay of all was a ferocious defence of Rousseau’s Social Contract in which he argued that Christianity was possibly harmful to men: for by ‘making men look forward to a later life in the next world it made them too submissive to the evils of the present’. He particularly attacked Protestantism, which by allowing freedom of thought broke up the unity of society and caused schisms and civil wars. Instead it was government that held the key to happiness: it must ‘lend assistance to the feeble against the strong, and by this means allow everyone to enjoy a sweet tranquillity, the rule of happiness’. Religion was of no importance, indeed possibly harmful.

  Napoleone Buonaparte had been born twenty years before the French Revolution and baptized in the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 15 August 1769 in the small port of Ajaccio in Corsica. He was incontestably of Italian blood on both sides. The Buonapartes came from Tuscany where one ancestor, Ugo Buonaparte, had been a merchant in the service of the Duke of Swabia in 1122. The name Buonaparte derived from the good party of imperial knights who fought for the unity of Italy against the Pope. Some 350 years later a member of the clan, Francesco Buonaparte, sailed to Corsica where his descendants established themselves as lawyers working for the local government.

  On Napoleon’s mother’s side the Ramolinos were of higher origins: they were descended from the Counts of Collalto in Lombardy and her father, in the family tradition, was an army officer who commanded the Ajaccio garrisons and became inspector-general of roads and bridges, probably because he had been instructed in civil engineering – although there were few enough of either in Corsica. He died early and when his daughter Letizia was only five years old his wife married a Swiss naval officer, Captain Franz Fesch, who served in the Genoese navy and had been disinherited by his father for converting to Catholicism – which may account for the young Napoleon’s anti-Protestant bias. Letizia was no great beauty: she had wondrously wide eyes and dark-brown hair, but she was small – a touch over five foot – and had a long, somewhat stern face as well as a prominent pointed nose and a small mouth. The combination gave her a shrewish appearance. She was uneducated but extraordinarily devout, attending mass every day.

  The two families, of Italian origin, regarded themselves as among the most patrician on the island. The Ramolinos, being of superior blood but poorer means, eventually settled upon the Buonapartes for their daughter. Carlo Buonaparte, the eighteen-year-old boy, was tall with fine eyes and a prominent nose, and a pursuer of women. Carlo had studied law at Pisa University but, becoming rich on the premature death of his father when he was fourteen, had returned to Corsica to take charge of the middling family estate, a large house, two fine vineyards and some arable and grazing land.

  Carlo fell in love with a beautiful girl from the Forcioli family, but family pressure induced him to marry Letizia, who was just fourteen years old – not an unusual age for a girl to wed in those days. She brought a modest dowry of thirty-one acres, a mill and a bakery. It is possible that they were not married in church but through family agreement and their consent, despite opposition from some of the Ramolinos, fearing that Carlo was too low-born and unreliable; Carlo too seems to have had his doubts.

  The teenagers, after their marriage, set up house in Carlo’s home, where the ground floor was occupied by his mother and a wealthy invalid uncle, Luciano, Archdeacon of Ajaccio, and the top floor by tiresome cousins. It was a crowded household. However, they had an annual income of around £10,000 from their properties, a princely sum in those days, and Carlo’s employment generated more. Letizia had two servants and a wet nurse. In poverty-ridden Corsica, the Buonapartes were considered well off; in tiny Ajaccio they were one of the richest families. They were certainly regarded as aristocracy as far as the island was concerned, and of minor noble birth as far as Italy and France were concerned, although they would be viewed as little more than middling gentry in England.

  Tragedy, as so often in those days, started early: Letizia had a son, named Napoleone, who immediately died in 1765; a daughter also died. Carlo, strong-willed and amorous, then left Corsica for Rome at the age of twenty where he set up home with an older, married woman. He lived in that turbulent and beautiful capital for two years where, it was later claimed, he became Corsican emissary to the Pope, pleading for independence; this seems highly unlikely.

  After seducing a virgin he had to return to Corsica under a cloud and there his good looks secured him the post of secretary to the homosexual head of the Corsican independence movement, Pasquale Paoli. Paoli, a huge man with red hair and blue eyes, who wore an embossed green uniform, lived in Corte, a fortress in the interior. An overpowering personality who had served the King of Naples, he had taken up arms against Corsica’s rulers, the Genoese, since 1729, as the leader of an independence movement for this rocky backwater with its 130,000 people and the two small towns of Bastia, with 5,000 people, and Ajaccio, with 4,000. He captured the mountainous interior and drove the Genoese into the ports. Paoli secured the support of the peasantry as he fought for common pastoral land in the lowlands and primitive smallholdings in the highlands. He became admired throughout Europe, with Rousseau and James Boswell as his admirers, the former seeing him as an embodiment of the General Will, the latter as an expression of the traditional Scottish highlander.

  In 1756, Corsica had been abruptly ceded by decadent Genoa to the French King, Louis XV: the Genoese had effectively lost control of the island and the newly expansionist French coveted it as a strategic point just off their coast. There was a general uprising against them not just in the mountains but in the towns. Paoli led the upri
sing, and Buonaparte, a young man with a good fortune from one of the best families in Ajaccio, was an extremely useful supporter. Meanwhile Buonaparte’s wife had a son, Giuseppe (Joseph), the first to survive infancy. However, the French poured in troops and crushingly defeated the Corsicans on 8 May 1769 at the battle of Ponte Nuovo.

  Carlo and Letizia, as prominent independence activists, had to flee into the mountains to join Paoli at Corte: she was heavily pregnant at the time. There Paoli had to accept the inevitable, surrendered and went into exile in England along with more than 300 of his supporters. Carlo chose to stay on the island. His return to Ajaccio along precipitous mountain paths, with the pregnant Letizia cradling the infant Joseph in her arms, was to be a memory for the rest of her life. She went into labour while at mass on the Feast of the Assumption at Ajaccio Cathedral. She was attended by her sister-in-law and the baby was born, big-headed but short-limbed and weak. He was named Napoleone after a much-loved great uncle who had died recently. It was an uncommon name deriving from a Greek saint who had died in Alexandria under the Emperor Diocletian.

  The little Napoleone was what today would be called a ‘handful’. His elder brother Giuseppe was serious and quiet: but the infant Napoleone fought him fiercely. He was nicknamed Rabulione – the ‘meddler’ – and went to school at the age of five. His language was Italian. It was a mixed school run by nuns: he held hands with a girl called Giacominetta and a little verse ran: Napoleone di mezza calzetta fa l’amore a Giacominetta: Napoleone with his half socks makes love to Giacominetta. Maybe the boy was scruffy and wore his socks around his ankles, but in Italy mezza calzetta is the most common sneer towards those of a non-aristocratic background. Napoleone was extraordinarily fierce as a boy and was often in trouble for fighting. Afterwards, at the age of seven, he went to a Jesuit school.