The War of Wars Read online

  Along with other members of the nobility he had lost his privileges when the new constitution came into effect, but that had no effect on his enthusiastic support for the document. He took the oath to the constitution, although thirty-two officers in his regiment refused. Napoleon has often been accused of pure opportunism. Yet at this time he could not be certain of the outcome of the revolutionary struggle in Paris, and few officers shared his views: it was clear that a combination of his own ideals and deep resentment against the aristocracy had turned him into a genuine supporter of the Revolution.

  Still confining his ambitions to Corsica, he decided to return with Louis in October. Joseph was there, as was sixteen-year-old Lucien, who resented his small brother, Jerome, the spoilt afterthought of the family, and two of his three sisters, the lovely Pauline and the musical Caroline. He was also present for the death of his miserly uncle, Archdeacon Luciano, aged seventy-six, who had kept his considerable fortune in gold coins under the bed. This proved a godsend – Napoleon suddenly, from near poverty, became quite well off.

  With money at last behind him, he plunged into the arcane and insular world of Corsican politics. To avoid having to return to France, he sought election to the local National Guard militia. As lieutenant-colonel of this, he became a power in the island. In April 1792 a pro-clerical group sought to hold mass in the dissolved convent of St Francis in Ajaccio and shot one of his soldiers. Napoleon wanted to seize the citadel commanding the town from the 400 regular soldiers there, but was refused. Napoleon had the might of the law behind him, but the commanding officer dug in his heels and at length emissaries from Paris told Napoleon to calm things down by withdrawing from the town. Napoleon had to travel back to Paris to clear his name in May 1792.

  There an old school friend and he would aimlessly walk across the revolution-torn city, so different from the ordered place he had known in his time at school. On 20 June they followed a large crowd pouring out of the huge market of Les Halles, joining up with two more mobs heading for the royal palace of the Tuileries. It was the occasion when the King was forced to put on the red revolutionary hat and drink the health of the people. ‘The King came out of it well,’ commented Napoleon, ‘but it is inevitable that this is unconstitutional and a very dangerous precedent.’ Napoleon was by now thoroughly disenchanted with the ordinary people. He wrote to Lucien:

  Those at the top are poor creatures. It must be admitted, when you see things at first hand, that the people are not worth the trouble taken in winning their favour. You know the history of Ajaccio; that of Paris is exactly the same; perhaps men are here even a little smaller, nastier, more slanderous and censorious.

  On 10 August the scene repeated itself as tragedy. As a large mob gathered, singing ‘The Marseillaise’, the new anthem of the Revolution, the King appeared, but was booed and withdrew. His lawyer advised that he, the Queen and the royal princes should take refuge in the National Assembly. National guardsmen burst into the palace, scuffling with the 2,000 Swiss Guards stationed there. Fighting broke out, and the crowd brought up cannon to shoot into the palace. The King sent orders to the guards not to resist. The crowd swarmed in and massacred them and any remaining courtiers. Some 800 were killed, their bodies savagely mutilated, the guardsmen castrated. Napoleon, now promoted to captain, was appalled.

  Before reaching the Carousel I had been met in the rue de Petits Champs by a group of hideous men bearing a head at the end of a pike. Seeing that I was presentably dressed and had the appearance of a gentleman, they approached me and asked me to shout ‘Long live the Republic!’ which you can easily imagine I did without difficulty . . . With the palace broken into, and the King there, in the heart of the Assembly, I ventured to go into the garden. The sight of the dead Swiss Guards gave me an idea of the meaning of death such as I have never had since, on any of my battlefields. Perhaps it was that the smallness of the area made the number of corpses appear larger, or perhaps it was because this was the first time I had undergone such an experience. I saw well-dressed women committing acts of the grossest indecency on the corpses of the Swiss Guards.

  Napoleon decided to accompany his sister Marie Anne (who called herself Elisa) out of the Paris charnel house and back to Corsica. There he was in for a shock: Paoli, his hero, had turned against him. The patriot leader was much more conservative than the reformist young soldier.

  At this stage Napoleon was virtually a complete failure: at the age of twenty-four he was a minor player in a small revolutionary sideshow, his own native island of Corsica, about which few Frenchmen spared a thought. All of his grandiose plans had come to nothing: he was captain in an army that had ceased to exist or respected rank, a minor nobleman in a country that abhorred the nobility. He thought of becoming a mercenary in India, a country which always seemed to grip his imagination. He was a professional soldier who had never seen active service.

  Chapter 9

  THE CORSICAN

  By 1793, Danton and the new leaders of France, bent on territorial expansion, had decided that the soft under-belly of Europe, Italy, divided into a multitude of states and dominated in the north by the arch-enemy of the Revolution, Austria, was a fertile field for conquest. The stepping stone after Corsica was to be Sardinia; and an expedition was assembled under Admiral Truguet to take this and intimidate the mainland. Truguet arrived in Ajaccio early in 1793 with a huge flotilla and several hundred troops. Napoleon was only too eager to join the expedition, now that his local ambitions had been frustrated by Paoli. Truguet, moreover, fell in love with Napoleon’s sister, Elisa, now sixteen. Napoleon saw the French as potential allies in overthrowing Paoli, whom he had come to detest with the hatred of a spurned supporter.

  The latter, nominally in charge of Corsica, suggested that Truguet should attack Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia while mounting a diversionary attack on La Maddalena, an island off the coast. Napoleon was placed in charge of this operation, with 600 men in sixteen transports supported by a single warship under his command. The expedition was a disastrous failure from the start: gales forced the ships back to Ajaccio and the element of surprise was lost.

  Napoleon led his men into landing on the nearby island of Santo Stefano, capturing the fort there and bombarding La Maddalena. However, having been left on the little island, he was suddenly informed that the sailors on the warship had mutinied so that the flotilla had to abandon the venture. Napoleon was very nearly stranded ashore: he straggled down to the beach with his guns to find that only a single boat had been sent to fetch him and his men: he had to spike and abandon his guns, narrowly escaping.

  On his return to Corsica at the end of February, the young lieutenant was convinced that Paoli had deliberately conspired to undermine the expedition: for Paoli, who had spent so many years in exile in Britain was, Napoleon had come to believe, a British agent. Others had come to the same conclusion: Napoleon’s brother Lucien, then in France, believed it, and so did Christophe Saliceti, an old political ally of Napoleon’s who was soon to head a commission of inquiry into events on the island.

  In early March Napoleon was walking in the Place Doria at Bonifacio when a group of students suddenly set upon him, denouncing him as an aristocrat for his care in military dress and his insistence on cleanliness aboard the ship on the ill-fated Maddalena expedition: he was nearly lynched before being rescued by some of his volunteers. Napoleon immediately suspected Paoli of instigating this murder attempt, and demanded to see him at the Convent of Rostino. There the veteran guerrilla leader effectively confirmed that he had gone over to the British: the Revolution, he claimed, had become too extremist and he had been appalled by the King’s execution. Corsican independence was his revered goal. When Napoleon disagreed, Paoli angrily left him.

  Napoleon switched his support from his former hero to his rival, Saliceti, while the French authorities, alerted to Paoli’s views, ordered the guerrilla chieftain to Paris on pain of being outlawed. He refused; and the French government, lacking the resources to
mount an expedition to Corsica at that moment, backed down.

  This infuriated Saliceti and Napoleon, who began to intrigue against him. Napoleon was arrested at Corsacci but was helped by friends, and then escaped across country to Ajaccio where, now an outlaw, he fled by sea to Bastia. There he persuaded Saliceti to launch an expedition of 400 men and two ships back to Ajaccio. But Paoli’s vengeance was merciless: his supporters burnt down Napoleon’s house in Ajaccio and destroyed the Bonaparte farms while Letizia and her daughters fled into hiding.

  Napoleon’s small expedition arrived and he jumped into the water to take his mother and her children aboard. He laid siege to Ajaccio without success and had to sail to Calvi defeated and with his entire fortune lost through his recklessness. The Bonapartes were denounced as ‘traitors and enemies of the fatherland, condemned to perpetual execution and infamy’ by Paoli. On 10 June 1793, the family, now destitute, set sail for Toulon in France aboard a cargo ship, narrowly escaping capture by the British. Corsica had effectively passed into Britain’s hands.

  To a brilliant, highly strung and imperious young man like Napoleon, the whole episode had been character-shaping. He had taken part in his first military engagement, a failure – even though his gunnery had been astonishingly accurate, destroying eighty huts and a timber yard as well as setting fire to Maddalena four times. He was quite certain he had been frustrated through the negligence of others. Had he been in charge of the expedition, he believed, it would have turned out very differently – which inspired a contempt for authority other than his own. Worse, he believed Paoli was behind his humiliation, as well as the later assassination attempt, and he was wary of others (although he was not paranoid: throughout his life he was deeply loyal to his friends).

  He had now lost his family fortune and endangered his mother and sisters – a terrible setback for a man born in modest wealth, who then had had to struggle, after his father’s death, and had finally emerged reasonably rich again. In addition he considered himself head of the family, and the significance of how he had lost his wealth must have weighed deeply on his young shoulders. Finally, and perhaps most significantly of all, he had cast in his lot with revolutionary France. Partly this was a furious repudiation of Paoli with his ‘primitive’ ideal of a peasant-led society, and partly from hurt after what he considered to be a ruthless betrayal by his hero. Quite by accident, because of his family’s decision to align itself with the French, his own education there and his sympathies with the initial revolutionaries, he had been one of the leaders of the pro-French faction on the island – whereas the independence-minded Paoli preferred to align with the British as a much better guarantee of Corsica’s freedom.

  The Italian-descended Corsican, whose earlier intense dislike of the French was evident through jottings of the early twenties, was suddenly a genuine Frenchman whose first enemy was the British. Masson puts it with brilliant succinctness: ‘Just as France had made him Corsican, so Corsica had made him a Frenchman.’

  Paoli even encouraged the British to besiege the remaining French positions in Corsica, and then invited George III to become King of the island. Sir Gilbert Elliot was sent in as viceroy, and Paoli faded into retirement in England. Consequently Britain now occupied the homeland of what was to become its bitterest foe, although it did not yet know it.

  It is hard to exaggerate the wretchedness of the twenty-four-year-old Napoleon in France during the terrible summer of 1793. Ruined financially, intensely guilty at having let his family down, a failure in an uncertain world, with all his academic work come to naught, and just one disastrous military engagement behind him, he was a political refugee from his own obscure island. Letizia and her daughters had to be called ‘dressmakers’ on their passports to ensure their safety as former ‘aristos’.

  Toulon was no safe haven, however. A month later there was an uprising and the British under Admiral Hood were allowed to take possession of the port. Napoleon and his family had to flee again. Much of the region of Marseilles and Lyon also rose up against the regime, along with most of the country regions of France, particularly in the west: civil war loomed. Letizia and her family moved to Marseilles where they were forced to queue for soup from a paupers’ kitchen. It was a terrible fate for a proud and prosperous family, and seared a burning desire for getting even on the young Napoleon, brought up in a vendetta society.

  Chapter 10

  TOULON

  For the moment the young officer was desperate to earn money to keep his impoverished family, and immediately rejoined his regiment in Nice. During the next few months he performed various military tasks, and was introduced by Saliceti to Augustin Robespierre, a much more amiable man than his brother, with a pretty mistress who immediately took to Napoleon. He wrote a work of Jacobin propaganda, which took a sideswipe at the hated Paoli:

  He ravaged and confiscated the property of the richer families because they were allied to the unity of the Republic, and all those who remained in our armies he declared ‘enemies of the nation’. He had already caused the failure of the Sardinian expedition, yet he had the impudence to call himself the friend of France and a good republican.

  Saliceti also introduced Napoleon to General Carteaux, in command of the siege of Toulon against the English and Spanish occupiers: as the artillery commander had been badly wounded, Saliceti had Napoleon appointed in his place.

  It was this penniless young officer’s first real break after the disastrous experience at La Maddalena. He grasped it with both hands. Toulon was defended by some 2,000 British troops as well as 7,000 Neapolitans and 6,000 Spaniards, backed up by Admiral Hood’s fleet. Carteaux had 17,000 men who were blockading the city without attacking it. A former career officer of considerable vanity with a magnificent horse and sporting a huge black moustache, Carteaux knew virtually nothing about artillery and had just two 24-pound and two 14-pound guns. Napoleon immediately set about finding more guns from Antibes and Monaco and built up parapets from which to fire them safely. Soon he had built up his arsenal to nearly 20 guns and mortars manned by 1,600 men, in an early burst of his demonic energy. He was promoted to major. Carteaux himself was meanwhile dismissed and imprisoned for incompetence. He was succeeded by Jacques Dugommier.

  Dugommier immediately approved Napoleon’s plan for switching the objective of the French attack from the city of Toulon to Fort Mulgrave, a fort known as Little Gibraltar, two miles to the south of the city, from which the British fleet could be fired upon at leisure. As the defending troops entirely relied on the fleet for their supplies, Napoleon reasoned that the British would have to evacuate their troops from Toulon if they were forced to withdraw the ships under fire. Napoleon brought up a battery of guns close to the fort – the ‘battery of men without fear’, as he called it, and for two days and nights the two sides pounded each other – with the young officer present throughout. It was an extraordinary display of bravery for an inexperienced young officer, as well as of skill in gunnery, exhibiting the deadly accuracy he had already shown at La Maddalena.

  In December Dugommier, after initial hesitation which nearly resulted in his replacement by Napoleon, led the attack in heavy rain with 5,000 men, Napoleon bringing up the rearguard with 2,000. Dugommier’s men were driven back three times before Napoleon attacked: his horse was shot from under him. Undaunted he led two columns and clambered over the first defences with Dugommier, passing through the gun recesses, fighting viciously with sabres and bayonets. Napoleon was cut deeply in the thigh and his leg might have been amputated, but the surgeon changed his mind.

  With the guns under French command, the British evacuated ‘like the herd of swine that ran furiously into the sea possessed of the devil’, in Sidney Smith’s phrase, after setting the arsenal and the French ships on fire. The port was reoccupied the following day. It was a huge victory for the Revolution as the previous loss of Toulon had fanned the flames of the civil war then raging throughout France.

  Some 400 people were promptly executed as
collaborators with the enemy. Joseph, the officer responsible, declared blood-curdingly: ‘We have only one way of celebrating this victory; this evening 213 insurgents fall under our thunderbolt. Adieu, my friend, tears of joy flood my soul . . . we are shedding much impure blood, but for humanity and for duty.’

  Saliceti, the political commissioner in charge, received the credit for the victory, but Napoleon was praised by Dugommier to the skies: ‘I have no words to describe Buonaparte’s merit: much technical skill, an equal degree of intelligence and too much gallantry, there you have a poor sketch of this rare officer . . .’

  Napoleon was promoted brigadier-general and celebrated by moving his family from the wretched digs in Marseilles to a country house near Antibes. There he relaxed with his two favourite siblings, the fifteen-year-old Louis, whom Napoleon praised for his ‘warmth, good health, talent, precision in his dealings and kindness’ and Pauline, both beautiful and sexually alluring already at nearly fourteen. His brother Joseph was about to marry an heiress whose father, François Clary, had been accused of royalist sympathies and died. One of her brothers had committed suicide while another was imprisoned. Joseph had intervened to get the boy freed. Napoleon seems to have fallen out with the revolutionary firebrand Lucien, and the spoilt Jerome was too young to command his older brother’s attention.

  Napoleon had had several promising young officers alongside him at the siege of Fort Mulgrave. Androche Junot, his aide-de-camp, was soon eying Pauline. Several other future commanders were present at Toulon, including twenty-one-year-old Geraud Duroc, soon to be Napoleon’s best friend, twenty-five-year-old Louis Desaix, twenty-seven-year-old Louis Gabriel Suchet, nineteen-year-old August Marmont and twenty-nine-year-old Claude-Victor Perrin.