The War of Wars (13 page)

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.

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.

Napoleon was promoted to become artillery commander for the army of Italy, based at Nice, with 15,000 livres a year, impressive pay, even allowing for the rampant inflation of the time. He settled eagerly into the job, seeking to break the deadlock in the war against Piedmont, whose army was being supplied by the British through Genoa. Napoleon devised a strategy for an attack on the town of
Oneglia, although he did not take part in it himself. This proved highly successful.

He argued for an offensive to capture the western Alpine passes of Col d’Argentière, Tende and St Bernard for a major attack on northern Italy, and was supported in this by his friends in Paris, Saliceti and Augustin Robespierre. He was opposed by Lazare Carnot, the member of the Committee who was effectively war minister, who favoured an all-out attack on Spain. Napoleon argued that a concentrated attack on Piedmont would force the Austrians to divert troops from the Rhine to defend the passes there, permitting a French thrust in central Europe; but Carnot prevailed.

Napoleon also incurred the wrath of the Committee for seeking to build-up a fort overlooking Marseilles, which he considered potentially rebellious. ‘I am going to position two guns in order to curb the town,’ he declared. He was briefly detained under house arrest for insulting the people. This may have reflected concerns even at this stage about his overweening ambition. There may have been fears that he sought to control the city for his own or counter-revolutionary purposes.

In Paris, meanwhile, as we have seen, the fall of the Robespierres on 27 July 1794 marked the end of the Terror. With remarkable alacrity, their friends sought to distance themselves from the bloodstained and now bloodied brothers. Saliceti, who was beginning to be jealous of the successes of his protégé Napoleon, came under suspicion himself, and promptly tried to deflect the danger by accusing his friend of going off on a suspicious mission to the port of Genoa: in fact it had been a scouting mission. But Saliceti suggested Napoleon may have been depositing French gold in a Genoese bank account.

Napoleon, for his part, rushed to condemn his old friend Augustin Robespierre: ‘I have been somewhat moved by the catastrophe of the Younger Robespierre whom I loved and whom I believed to be pure, but were he my brother, I would have stabbed him with my own hand had he aspired to tyranny.’

Nevertheless he was placed under house arrest for a fortnight, where he made a dignified defence of himself:

I abandoned my belongings. I lost everything for the sake of the Republic. Since then, I have served at Toulon with some distinction . . . Since Robespierre’s conspiracy was discovered, my conduct has been that of a man accustomed to judge according to principles [not persons]. No one can deny me the title of patriot.