Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Adam Zamoyski 2018

Cover photograph © Getty Images

Adam Zamoyski asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Maps by Martin Brown

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Source ISBN: 9780008116095

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008116088

Version: 2019-08-03

Dedication

In memory

of

GILLON AITKEN

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Family Tree

Map

Preface

1 A Reluctant Messiah

2 Insular Dreams

3 Boy Soldier

4 Freedom

5 Corsica

6 France or Corsica

7 The Jacobin

8 Adolescent Loves

9 General Vendémiaire

10 Italy

11 Lodi

12 Victory and Legend

13 Master of Italy

14 Eastern Promise

15 Egypt

16 Plague

17 The Saviour

18 Fog

19 The Consul

20 Consolidation

21 Marengo

22 Caesar

23 Peace

24 The Liberator of Europe

25 His Consular Majesty

26 Towards Empire

27 Napoleon I

28 Austerlitz

29 The Emperor of the West

30 Master of Europe

31 The Sun Emperor

32 The Emperor of the East

33 The Cost of Power

34 Apotheosis

35 Apogee

36 Blinding Power

37 The Rubicon

38 Nemesis

39 Hollow Victories

40 Last Chance

41 The Wounded Lion

42 Rejection

43 The Outlaw

44 A Crown of Thorns

Notes

Picture Section

Bibliography

Index

Also by Adam Zamoyski

About the Author

About the Publisher

Illustrations

Napoleon’s mother Letizia Bonaparte in 1800, by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. (Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

Two sketches of Bonaparte by Jacques-Louis David. (Sketches of Napoleon Bonaparte, 1797 (pencil), David, Jacques-Louis (1748–1825)/Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Palais Massena, Nice, France/Bridgeman Images)

Bonaparte during the Italian campaign of 1796, by Giuseppe Longhi. (Paul Fearn/Alamy Stock Photo)

Bonaparte leading his troops across the bridge at Arcole, by Antoine-Jean Gros. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Bonaparte in 1797, by Francesco Cossia. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Josephine Bonaparte in 1797, by Andrea Appiani. (ART Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

Auguste Marmont, by Georges Rouget. (Wikimedia Commons)

Andoche Junot, by David. (© President and Fellows of Harvard College)

Joachim Murat. (ART Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

Josephine’s son Eugène de Beauharnais, by Gros. (Hirarchivum Press/Alamy Stock Photo)

Napoleon’s younger sister Pauline, by Jean Jacques Thérésa de Lusse. (flickr/lost gallery/Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese/De Lusse/CC by 2.0)

Bonaparte visiting plague victims at Jaffa during his Syrian campaign, by Gros. (Photo by Archiv Gerstenberg/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Joseph Bonaparte. (Photo by Stefano Bianchetti/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, by Nicolas Joseph Jouy. (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

Napoleon’s younger brother Lucien, by François-Xavier Fabre, c.1808. (ART Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

Bonaparte in 1800, by Louis Léopold Boilly. (Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) Premier Consul (oil on canvas), Boilly, Louis Léopold (1761–1845)/Private Collection/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images)

The house in the rue de la Victoire. (Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo)

The Tuileries, c.1860. (Photo by LL/Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Jean-Jacques-Régis Cambacérès, by Greuze, 1805. (Cambacérès/Photo © CCI/Bridgeman Images)

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand in 1804, by David. (Photo Josse/Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

Joseph Fouché. (Portrait of Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) Duke of Otranto, 1813 (oil on canvas), French School, (19th century)/Château de Versailles, France/Bridgeman Images)

Josephine’s daughter Hortense de Beauharnais, by François Gérard. (Paul Fearn/Alamy Stock Photo)

The Château of Malmaison, by Henri Courvoisier-Voisin. (Photo Josse/Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

Napoleon’s younger brother Louis in 1809, by Charles Howard Hodges. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Napoleon crossing the Alps in 1802, by David. (Photo by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

The Emperor Napoleon I in 1805, by David. (Photo Josse/Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

A fragment of David’s painting of the coronation, showing Joseph, Louis, Napoleon’s three sisters, Hortense and her son Napoléon-Charles. (Photo Josse/Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

Napoleon’s youngest brother Jérôme, 1805. (Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, xx.5.52)

Napoleon at Eylau, by Gros (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Marshal Jean Lannes, by Gérard. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

General Armand de Caulaincourt, sketched in 1805 by David. (Portrait of Armand Augustin Louis. Marquis de Caulaincourt (1772–1827) (pencil on paper) (b/w photo), David, Jacques Louis (1748–1825)/Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besancon, France/Bridgeman Images)

General Géraud-Christophe Duroc, by Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson. (Portrait of Duroc, Grand Marshal of the Palace (oil on canvas), Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, Anne Louis (1767–1824)/Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, France/Bridgeman Images)

Napoleon I in 1806, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. (Photo Josse/Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

View of the proposed palace for the King of Rome, by Pierre-François Fontaine. (From Projets d’architecture, plan number 32, France, 19th century/De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images)

Napoleon en famille, by Alexandre Menjaud. (Napoleon I (1769–1821), Marie Louise (1791–1847) and the King of Rome (1811–73) 1812 (oil on canvas), Menjaud, Alexandre (1773–1832)/Château de Versailles, France/Bridgeman Images)

Napoleon in early 1812, by David. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Napoleon on the bridge of HMS Bellerophon, by Charles Lock Eastlake, 1815. (Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

The house at Longwood on St Helena, where Napoleon spent his last years. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)

Napoleon on St Helena, 1820. (Paul Fearn/Alamy Stock Photo)

Maps

Europe in 1792

Toulon

The Italian theatre

Montenotte

Lodi

The pursuit

Castiglione

Würmser outmanoeuvred

Arcole

Rivoli

The march on Vienna

The settlement of Campo Formio

Egypt

Europe in 1800

Marengo

Ulm

Austerlitz

The campaigns of 1806–07

Europe in 1808

Aspern–Essling

Wagram

Europe in 1812

The invasion of Russia

Borodino

The Berezina

The Saxon campaign, 1813

The defence of France in 1814

The Waterloo campaign

Family Tree

Map

Preface

A Polish home, English schools, and holidays with French cousins exposed me from an early age to violently conflicting visions of Napoleon – as godlike genius, Romantic avatar, evil monster or just nasty little dictator. In this crossfire of fantasy and prejudice I developed an empathy with each of these views without being able to agree with any of them.

Napoleon was a man, and while I understand how others have done, I can see nothing superhuman about him. Although he did exhibit some extraordinary qualities, he was in many ways a very ordinary man. I find it difficult to credit genius to someone who, for all his many triumphs, presided over the worst (and entirely self-inflicted) disaster in military history and single-handedly destroyed the great enterprise he and others had toiled so hard to construct. He was undoubtedly a brilliant tactician, as one would expect of a clever operator from a small-town background. But he was no strategist, as his miserable end attests.

Nor was Napoleon an evil monster. He could be as selfish and violent as the next man, but there is no evidence of him wishing to inflict suffering gratuitously. His motives were on the whole praiseworthy, and his ambition no greater than that of contemporaries such as Alexander I of Russia, Wellington, Nelson, Metternich, Blücher, Bernadotte and many more. What made his ambition so exceptional was the scope it was accorded by circumstance.

On hearing the news of his death, the Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer wrote a poem on the subject. He had been a student in Vienna when Napoleon bombarded the city in 1809, so he had no reason to like him, but in the poem he admits that while he cannot love him, he cannot bring himself to hate him; according to Grillparzer, Napoleon was but the visible symptom of the sickness of the times, and as such bore the blame for the sins of all. There is much truth in this view.1

In the half-century before Napoleon came to power, a titanic struggle for dominion saw the British acquire Canada, large swathes of India, a string of colonies, and aspire to lay down the law at sea; Austria grab provinces in Italy and Poland; Prussia increase in size by two-thirds; and Russia push her frontier 600 kilometres into Europe and occupy large areas of Central Asia, Siberia and Alaska, laying claims as far afield as California. Yet George III, Maria Theresa, Frederick William II and Catherine II are not generally accused of being megalomaniac monsters and compulsive warmongers.

Napoleon is frequently condemned for his invasion of Egypt, while the British occupation which followed, designed to guarantee colonial monopoly over India, is not. He is regularly blamed for re-establishing slavery in Martinique, while Britain applied it in its colonies for a further thirty years, and every other colonial power for several decades after that. His use of police surveillance and censorship is also regularly reproved, even though every other state in Europe emulated him, with varying degrees of discretion or hypocrisy.

The tone was set by the victors of 1815, who arrogated the role of defenders of a supposedly righteous social order against evil, and writing on Napoleon has been bedevilled ever since by a moral dimension, which has entailed an imperative to slander or glorify. Beginning with Stendhal, who claimed he could only write of Napoleon in religious terms, and no doubt inspired by Goethe, who saw his life as ‘that of a demi-god’, French and other European historians have struggled to keep the numinous out of their work, and even today it is tinged by a sense of awe. Until very recently, Anglo-Saxon historians have shown reluctance to allow an understanding of the spirit of the times to help them see Napoleon as anything other than an alien monster. Rival national mythologies have added layers of prejudice which many find hard to overcome.2

Napoleon was in every sense the product of his times; he was in many ways the embodiment of his epoch. If one wishes to gain an understanding of him and what he was about, one has to place him in context. This requires ruthless jettisoning of received opinion and nationalist prejudice, and dispassionate examination of what the seismic conditions of his times threatened and offered.

In the 1790s Napoleon entered a world at war, and one in which the very basis of human society was being questioned. It was a struggle for supremacy and survival in which every state on the Continent acted out of self-interest, breaking treaties and betraying allies shamelessly. Monarchs, statesmen and commanders on all sides displayed similar levels of fearful aggression, greed, callousness and brutality. To ascribe to any of the states involved a morally superior role is ahistorical humbug, and to condemn the lust for power is to deny human nature and political necessity.

For Aristotle power was, along with wealth and friendship, one of the essential components of individual happiness. For Hobbes, the urge to acquire it was not only innate but beneficent, as it led men to dominate and therefore organise communities, and no social organisation of any form could exist without the power of one or more individuals to order others.

Napoleon did not start the war that broke out in 1792 when he was a mere lieutenant and continued, with one brief interruption, until 1814. Which side was responsible for the outbreak and for the continuing hostilities is fruitlessly debatable, since responsibility cannot be laid squarely on one side or the other. The fighting cost lives, for which responsibility is often heaped on Napoleon, which is absurd, as all the belligerents must share the blame. And he was not as profligate with the lives of his own soldiers as some.

French losses in the seven years of revolutionary government (1792–99) are estimated at four to five hundred thousand; those during the fifteen years of Napoleon’s rule at just under twice as high, at eight to nine hundred thousand. Given that these figures include not only dead, wounded and sick, but also those reported as missing, whose numbers went up dramatically as his ventures took the armies further afield, it is clear that battle losses were lower under Napoleon than during the revolutionary period – despite the increasing use of heavy artillery and the greater size of the armies. The majority of those classed as missing were deserters who either drifted back home or settled in other countries. This is not to diminish the suffering or the trauma of the war, but to put it in perspective.3

My aim in this book is not to justify or condemn, but to piece together the life of the man born Napoleone Buonaparte, and to examine how he became ‘Napoleon’ and achieved what he did, and how it came about that he undid it.

In order to do so I have concentrated on verifiable primary sources, treating with caution the memoirs of those such as Bourrienne, Fouché, Barras and others who wrote principally to justify themselves or to tailor their own image, and have avoided using as evidence those of the duchesse d’Abrantès, which were written years after the events by her lover the novelist Balzac. I also ignore the various anecdotes regarding Napoleon’s birth and childhood, believing that it is immaterial as well as unprovable that he cried or not when he was born, that he liked playing with swords and drums as a child, had a childhood crush on some little girl, or that a comet was sighted at his birth and death. There are quite enough solid facts to deal with.

I have devoted more space in relative terms to Napoleon’s formative years than to his time in power, as I believe they hold the key to understanding his extraordinary trajectory. As I consider the military aspects only insofar as they produced an effect, on him and his career or the international situation, the reader will find my coverage very uneven. I give prominence to the first Italian campaign because it demonstrates the ways in which Napoleon was superior to his enemies and colleagues, and because it turned him into an exceptional being, both in his own eyes and those of others. Subsequent battles are of interest primarily for the use he made of them, while the Russian campaign is seminal to his decline and reveals the confusion in his mind which led to his political suicide. To those who would like to learn more about the battles I would recommend Andrew Roberts’s masterful Napoleon the Great. The battle maps in the text are similarly spare, and do not pretend to accuracy; they are designed to illustrate the essence of the action.

The subject is so vast that anyone attempting a life of Napoleon must necessarily rely on the work of many who have trawled through archives and on published sources. I feel hugely indebted to all those involved in the Fondation Napoléon’s new edition of Napoleon’s correspondence. I also owe a great deal to the work done over the past two decades by French historians in debunking the myths that have gained the status of truth and excising the carbuncles that have overgrown the verifiable facts during the past two centuries. Thierry Lentz and Jean Tulard stand out in this respect, but Pierre Branda, Jean Defranceschi, Patrice Gueniffey, Annie Jourdan, Aurélien Lignereux and Michel Vergé-Franceschi have also helped to blow away cobwebs and enlighten. Among Anglo-Saxon historians, Philip Dwyer has my gratitude for his brilliant work on Napoleon as propagandist, and Munro Price for his invaluable archival research on the last phase of his reign. The work of Michael Broers and Steven Englund is also noteworthy.

I owe a debt of thanks to Olivier Varlan for bibliographic guidance, and particularly for having let me see Caulaincourt’s manuscript on the Prussian and Russian campaigns of 1806–07; to Vincenz Hoppe for seeking out sources in Germany; to Hubert Czyżewski for assisting me in unearthing obscure sources in Polish libraries; to Laetitia Oppenheim for doing the same for me in France; to Carlo De Luca for alerting me to the existence of the diary of Giuseppe Mallardi; and to Angelika von Hase for helping me with German sources. I also owe thanks to Shervie Price for reading the typescript, and to the incomparable Robert Lacey for his sensitive editing.

Although at times I felt like cursing him, I would like to thank Detlef Felken for his implicit faith in suggesting I write this book, and Clare Alexander and Arabella Pike for their support. Finally, I must thank my wife Emma for putting up with me and encouraging me throughout what has been a challenging task.

Adam Zamoyski

1
A Reluctant Messiah

At noon on 10 December 1797 a thunderous discharge from a battery of guns echoed across Paris, opening yet another of the many grandiose festivals for which the French Revolution was so notable.

Although the day was cold and grey, crowds had been gathering around the Luxembourg Palace, the seat of the Executive Directory which governed France, and according to the Prussian diplomat Daniel von Sandoz-Rollin, ‘never had the cheering sounded more enthusiastic’. People lined the streets leading up to the palace in the hope of catching a glimpse of the hero of the day. But his reticence defeated them. At around ten o’clock that morning he had left his modest house on the rue Chantereine with one of the Directors who had come to fetch him in a cab. As it trundled through the streets, followed by several officers on horseback, he sat well back, seeming in the words of one English witness ‘to shrink from those acclamations which were then the voluntary offering of the heart’.1

They were indeed heartfelt. The people of France were tired after eight years of revolution and political struggle marked by violent lurches to the right or the left. They were sick of the war which had lasted for more than five years and which the Directory seemed unable to end. The man they were cheering, a twenty-eight-year-old general by the name of Bonaparte, had won a string of victories in Italy against France’s principal enemy, Austria, and forced her emperor to come to terms. The relief felt at the prospect of peace and the political stability it was hoped would ensue was accompanied by a subliminal sense of deliverance.

The Revolution which began in 1789 had unleashed boundless hopes of a new era in human affairs. These had been whipped up and manipulated by successive political leaders in a self-perpetuating power struggle, and people longed for someone who could put an end to it. They had read the Bulletins recounting this general’s deeds and his proclamations to the people of Italy, which contrasted sharply with the utterances of those ruling France. Many believed, or just hoped, that the longed-for man had come. The sense of exaltation engendered by the Revolution had been kept alive by overblown festivals, and this one was, according to one witness, as ‘magnifique’ as any.2

The great court of the Luxembourg Palace had been transformed for the occasion. A dais had been erected opposite the entrance, on which stood the indispensable ‘altar of the fatherland’ surmounted by three statues, representing Liberty, Equality and Peace. These were flanked by panoplies of enemy standards captured during the recent campaign, beneath which were placed seats for the five members of the Directory, one for its secretary-general, and more below them for the ministers. Beneath were places for the diplomatic corps, and to either side stretched a great amphitheatre for the members of the two legislative chambers and for the 1,200-strong choir of the Conservatoire. The courtyard was decked with tricolour flags and covered by an awning, turning it into a monumental tent.3

As the last echoes of the gun salute died away, the Directors emerged from a chamber in the depths of the palace, dressed in their ‘grand costume’. Designed by the painter Jacques-Louis David, this consisted of a blue velvet tunic heavily embroidered with gold thread and girded with a gold-tasselled white silk sash, white breeches and stockings, and shoes with blue bows. It was given a supposedly classical look by a voluminous red cloak with a white lace collar, a ‘Roman’ sword on a richly embroidered baldric, and a black felt hat adorned by a blue-white-red tricolour of three ostrich feathers.

The Directors took their place at the end of a cortège led by the commissioners of police, followed by magistrates, civil servants, the judiciary, teachers, members of the Institute of Arts and Sciences, officers, officials, the diplomatic representatives of foreign powers, and the ministers of the Directory. It was preceded by a band playing ‘the airs beloved of the French Republic’.4

The cortège snaked its way through the corridors of the palace and out into the courtyard, the various bodies taking their appointed seats. The members of the legislative chambers had already taken theirs. They wore costumes similar to that of the Directors, the ‘Roman’ look in their case sitting uneasily with their four-cornered caps, which were David’s homage to the heroes of the Polish revolution of 1794.

Having taken their seats, the Directors despatched an official to usher in the principal actors of the day’s festivities. The airs beloved of the French Republic had been superseded by a symphony performed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire, but this was rudely interrupted by shouts of ‘Vive Bonaparte!’, ‘Vive la Nation!’, ‘Vive le libérateur de l’Italie!’ and ‘Vive le pacificateur du continent!’ as a group of men entered the courtyard.

First came the ministers of war and foreign relations in their black ceremonial costumes. They were followed by a diminutive, gaunt figure in uniform, his lank hair dressed in the already unfashionable ‘dog’s ears’ flopping on either side of his face. His gauche movements ‘charmed every heart’, according to one onlooker. He was accompanied by three aides-de-camp, ‘all taller than him, but almost bowed by the respect they showed him’. There was a religious silence as the group entered the courtyard. Everyone present stood and uncovered themselves. Then the cheering broke out again. ‘The present elite of France applauded the victorious general, for he was the hope of everyone: republicans, royalists, all saw their present and future salvation in the support of his powerful arm.’ The dazzling military victories and diplomatic triumph he had achieved contrasted so strikingly with his puny stature, dishevelled appearance and unassuming manner that it was difficult not to believe he was inspired and guided by some higher power. The philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt was so impressed when he saw him, he thought he was contemplating an ideal of modern humanity.5

When the group reached the foot of the altar of the fatherland, the orchestra and choir of the Conservatoire struck up a ‘Hymn to Liberty’ composed by François-Joseph Gossec to the tune of the Catholic Eucharistic hymn O Salutaris Hostia, and the crowd joined in an emotionally charged rendition of what the official account of the proceedings described as ‘this religious couplet’. The Directors and assembled dignitaries took their seats, with the exception of the general himself. ‘I saw him decline placing himself in the chair of state which had been prepared for him, and seem as if he wished to escape from the general bursts of applause,’ recalled the English lady, who was full of admiration for the ‘modesty in his demeanour’. He had in fact requested that the ceremony be cancelled when he heard what was in store. But there was no escape.6

The Republic’s minister for foreign relations, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, limped forward in his orthopaedic shoe, his ceremonial sword and the plumes in his hat performing curious motions as he went. The President of the Directory had chosen him rather than the minister of war to present the reluctant hero. ‘It is not the general, it is the peacemaker, and above all the citizen that you must single out to praise here,’ he had written to Talleyrand. ‘My colleagues are terrified, not without reason, of military glory.’ This was true.7

‘No government has ever been so universally despised,’ an informant in France had written to his masters in Vienna only a couple of weeks before, assuring them that the first general with the courage to raise the standard of revolt would have half of the nation behind him. Many in Paris, at both ends of the political spectrum, were expecting General Bonaparte to make such a move, and in the words of one observer, ‘everyone seemed to be watching each other’. According to another, there were many present who would happily have strangled him.8

The forty-three-year-old ex-aristocrat and former bishop Talleyrand knew all this. He was used to shrouding his feelings with an impassive countenance, but his upturned nose and thin lips, curling up on the left-hand side in a way suggesting wry amusement, were well fitted to the speech he now delivered.

‘Citizen Directors,’ he began, ‘I have the honour to present to the executive Directory citizen Bonaparte, who comes bearing the ratification of the treaty of peace concluded with the emperor.’ While reminding those present that the peace was only the crowning glory of ‘innumerable marvels’ on the battlefield, he reassured the shrinking general that he would not dwell on his military achievements, leaving that to posterity, secure in the knowledge that the hero himself viewed them not as his own, but as those of France and the Revolution. ‘Thus, all Frenchmen have been victorious through Bonaparte; thus his glory is the property of all; thus there is no republican who cannot claim his part of it.’ The general’s extraordinary talents, which Talleyrand briefly ran through, were, he admitted, innate to him, but they were also in large measure the fruit of his ‘insatiable love of the fatherland and of humanity’. But it was his modesty, the fact that he seemed to ‘apologise for his own glory’, his extraordinary taste for simplicity, worthy of the heroes of classical antiquity, his love of the abstract sciences, his literary passion for ‘that sublime Ossian’ and ‘his profound contempt for show, luxury, ostentation, those paltry ambitions of common souls’ that were so striking, indeed alarming: ‘Oh! far from fearing what some would call his ambition, I feel that we will one day have to beg him to give up the comforts of his studious retreat.’ The general’s countless civic virtues were almost a burden to him: ‘All France will be free: it may be that he will never be, that is his destiny.’9

When the minister had concluded, the victim of destiny presented the ratified copy of the peace treaty to the Directors, and then addressed the assembly ‘with a kind of feigned nonchalance, as though he were trying to intimate that he little liked the regime under which he was called to serve’, in the words of one observer. According to another, he spoke ‘like a man who knows his worth’.10

In a few clipped sentences, delivered in an atrocious foreign accent, he attributed his victories to the French nation, which through the Revolution had abolished eighteen centuries of bigotry and tyranny, had established representative government and roused the other two great nations of Europe, the Germans and Italians, enabling them to embrace the ‘spirit of liberty’. He concluded, somewhat bluntly, that the whole of Europe would be truly free and at peace ‘when the happiness of the French people will be based on the best organic laws’.11

The response of the Directory to this equivocal statement was delivered by its president, Paul François Barras, a forty-two-year-old minor nobleman from Provence with a fine figure and what one contemporary described as the swagger of a fencing-master. He began with the usual flowery glorification of ‘the sublime revolution of the French nation’ before moving on to vaporous praise of the ‘peacemaker of the continent’, whom he likened to Socrates and hailed as the liberator of the people of Italy. General Bonaparte had rivalled Caesar, but unlike other victorious generals, he was a man of peace: ‘at the first word of a proposal of peace, you halted your triumphant progress, you laid down the sword with which the fatherland had armed you, and preferred to take up the olive branch of peace!’ Bonaparte was living proof ‘that one can give up the pursuit of victory without relinquishing greatness’.12

The address meandered off into a diatribe against those ‘vile Carthaginians’ (the British) who were the last obstacle standing in the way of a general peace which the new Rome (France) was striving to bestow on the Continent. Barras concluded by exhorting the general, ‘the liberator to whom outraged humanity calls out with plaintive appeals’, to lead an army across the Channel, whose waters would be proud to carry him and his men: ‘As soon as the tricolour standard is unfurled on its bloodied shores, a unanimous cry of benediction will greet your presence; and, seeing the dawn of approaching happiness, that generous nation will hail you as liberators who come not to fight and enslave it, but to put an end to its sufferings.’13

Barras then stepped forward with extended arms and in the name of the French nation embraced the general in a ‘fraternal accolade’. The other Directors did likewise, followed by the ministers and other dignitaries, after which the general was allowed to step down from the altar of the fatherland and take his seat. The choir intoned a hymn to peace written for the occasion by the revolutionary bard Marie-Joseph Chénier, set to music by Étienne Méhul.

The minister for war, General Barthélémy Scherer, a forty-nine-year-old veteran of several campaigns, then presented to the Directory two of Bonaparte’s aides bearing a huge white standard on which the triumphs of the Army of Italy were embroidered in gold thread. These included: the capture of 150,000 prisoners, 170 flags and over a thousand pieces of artillery, as well as some fifty ships; the conclusion of a number of armistices and treaties with various Italian states; the liberation of the people of most of northern Italy; and the acquisition for France of masterpieces by Michelangelo, Guercino, Titian, Veronese, Correggio, Caracci, Raphael, Leonardo and other works of art. Scherer praised the soldiers of the Army of Italy and particularly their commander, who had ‘married the audacity of Achilles to the wisdom of Nestor’.14

The guns thundered as Barras received the standard from the hands of the two officers, and in another interminable address, he returned to his anti-British theme. ‘May the palace of St. James crumble! The Fatherland wishes it, humanity demands it, vengeance commands it.’ After the two warriors had received the ‘fraternal accolade’ of the Directors and ministers, the ceremony closed with a rendition of the rousing revolutionary war hymn Le Chant du Départ, following which the Directors exited as they had come, and Bonaparte left, cheered by the multitude gathered outside, greatly relieved that it was all over.15

For all his apparent nonchalance, he had been treading warily throughout. The Directory had not welcomed the coming of peace. The war had paid for its armies and bolstered its finances, while the victories had deflected criticism of its domestic shortcomings. More important, war kept the army occupied and ambitious generals away from Paris. This peace had been made by Bonaparte in total disregard of the Directory’s instructions, and it was no secret that the Directors had been furious when they were presented with the draft treaty. A few days after receiving it, they had nominated Bonaparte commander of the Army of England, not because they believed in the possibility of a successful invasion, but because they wanted him away from Paris and committed to a venture which would surely undermine his reputation. Their principal preoccupation now was to get him away from Paris, where he was a natural focus for their enemies.16

The day’s event had been a politically charged performance in which, as Bonaparte’s secretary put it, ‘everyone acted out as best they could this scene from a sentimental comedy’. But it was a dangerous one; according to one well-informed observer, ‘it was one of those occasions when one imprudent word, one gesture out of place can decide the future of a great man’. As Sandoz-Rollin pointed out, Paris could easily have become the general’s ‘tomb’.17

The hero of the day was well aware of this. The ceremony was followed by illuminations ‘worthy of the majesty of the people’ and a banquet given in his honour by the minister of the interior, in the course of which no fewer than twelve toasts were raised, each followed by a three-gun salute and an appropriate burst of song from the choir of the Conservatoire. Closely guarded by his aides, the general did not touch a morsel of food or drink a thing, for fear of being poisoned.18

It was not only the Directors who wished him ill. The royalists who longed for a return of Bourbon rule hated him as a ruthless defender of the Republic. The extreme revolutionaries, the Jacobins who had been ousted from power, feared he might be scheming to restore the monarchy. They denounced the treaty he had signed as ‘an abominable betrayal’ of the Republic’s values and referred to him as a ‘little Caesar’ about to stage a coup and seize power.19

Such thoughts were not far from the general’s mind. But he hid them as he assessed the possibilities, playing to perfection the part of a latter-day Cincinnatus. He refused the offer of the Directory to place a guard of honour outside his door, he avoided public events and kept a low profile, wearing civilian dress when he went out. ‘His behaviour continues to upset all the extravagant calculations and perfidious adulation of certain people,’ reported the Journal des hommes libres approvingly. Sandoz-Rollin assured his masters in Berlin that there was nothing which might lead one to suspect Bonaparte of meaning to take power. ‘The health of this general is weak, his chest is in a very poor state,’ he wrote, ‘his taste for literature and philosophy and his need of rest as well as to silence the envious will lead him to live a quiet life among friends …’20

One man was not fooled. For all his cynicism, Talleyrand was impressed, and sensed power. ‘What a man this Bonaparte,’ he had written to a friend a few weeks before. ‘He has not finished his twenty-eighth year: and he is crowned with all the glories. Those of war and those of peace, those of moderation, those of generosity. He has everything.’21

2
Insular Dreams

The man who had everything was born into a family of little consequence in one of the poorest places in Europe, the island of Corsica. It was also one of the most idiosyncratic, having never been an independent political unit and yet never been fully a province or colony of another state. It had always been a world of its own.

In the late Middle Ages the Republic of Genoa established bases at the anchorages of Bastia on the north-eastern coast and Ajaccio in the south-west to protect its shipping lanes and deny their use to others. It garrisoned these with soldiers, mostly impoverished nobles from the Italian mainland, and gradually extended its rule inland. But the mountainous interior held little economic interest, and although they penetrated it in order to put down insurgencies and exact what contributions they could, the Genoese found it impossible to control its feral denizens and largely left it alone, not even bothering to map it.

The indigenous population preserved its traditional ways, subsisting on a diet of chestnuts (from which even the local bread was made), cheese, onions, fruit and the occasional piece of goat or pork, washed down with local wine. They dressed in homespun brown cloth and spoke their own Italian patois. They were in constant conflict over issues such as grazing rights with the inhabitants of the port towns. These considered themselves superior and married amongst themselves or found spouses on the Italian mainland, yet with time they could not help being absorbed by the interior and its ways.

It was a pre-feudal society. The majority owned at least a scrap of land, and while a few families aspired to nobility, the differentials of wealth were narrow. Even the poorest families had a sense of pride, of their dignity and of the worth of their ‘house’. It was also a fundamentally pagan society, with Christianity spread thinly, if tenaciously, over a stew of ancient myths and atavisms. A profound belief in destiny overrode the Christian vision of salvation.

As there was hardly any coinage in circulation, most of the necessities of life were bartered. The result was a complicated web of favours granted and expected, of rights established or revindicated, agreements, often unspoken, and a plethora of litigation. Any violent move could provoke a vendetta from which it was almost impossible to escape, as nothing could be kept secret for long in such a restricted space. Shortage of land meant that ownership was divided and subdivided, traded and encumbered with complicated clauses governing rights of reversal. It was also the principal motive for marriage. And so it was for General Bonaparte’s father, Carlo Maria Buonaparte.

When his son came to power, genealogists, sycophants and fortune-hunters set about tracing his ancestry and came up with various pedigrees, linking him to Roman emperors, Guelf kings and even the Man in the Iron Mask. The only indisputable facts concerning his ancestry are that he was descended from a Gabriele Buonaparte who in the sixteenth century owned the grandest mansion in Ajaccio, consisting of two rooms and a kitchen over a shop and a store room, and a small garden with a mulberry tree.

Where Gabriele came from remains uncertain. The most convincing filiation is to minor gentry of the same name from the little town of Sarzana on the borders of Tuscany and Liguria, some of whom took service with the Genoese and were sent to Corsica. Recent DNA tests have shown that the Corsican Buonaparte belonged to the population group E, which is found mainly in North Africa, Sicily and particularly the Levant. This does not rule out a Ligurian connection, since people from those areas washed up over the ages on the coasts of Italy as well as those of Corsica.1

Gabriele’s son Geronimo had been notable enough to be sent as Ajaccio’s deputy to Genoa in 1572, and acquired, by marriage, a house in Ajaccio as well as a lease on some low-lying ground outside the town known as the Salines. His descendants also married well, within the circle of Ajaccio notables, but the need to provide dowries for daughters split up the family’s property, and Sebastiano Buonaparte, born in 1683, was reduced to marrying a girl from the upland village of Bocognano, apparently for the two small plots of land in the hills and the ninety sheep she brought him in her dowry. She bore him five children: one girl, Paola Maria, and four boys: Giuseppe Maria, Napoleone, Sebastiano and Luciano.

The family home had been partitioned by dowries, and the seven of them were crammed into the forty square metres that remained theirs. The building was so dilapidated that a military billeting commission classified it as unfit for any but lower ranks. Thus, although they were still considered among the anziani, the elders or notables of Ajaccio, the family’s lifestyle was anything but noble. A smallholding provided vegetables and their vineyards wine for their own needs and some extra to sell or exchange for oil and flour, while their flocks produced occasional meat for their own consumption and a little income.

Luciano was the most intelligent of the brood, and joined the priesthood. He bought out other family members and installed an indoor staircase in the house. His nephew, Giuseppe’s son Carlo Maria, born in 1746, also set about rebuilding the family fortunes, and it is his social ambitions that were to have such a profound effect on European history.2

History had begun to take an interest in Corsica. The corrupt inefficiency of Genoese rule had sparked off a rebellion on the island in 1729. It was put down by troops, but simmered on in the interior. In 1735 three ‘Generals of the Corsican nation’ convoked an assembly, the consulta, at Corte in the uplands and proclaimed independence, attracting the sympathies of many across Europe. One of the dominant themes in the literature of the Enlightenment was that of the noble savage, and Corsica seemed to fit the ideal of a society unspoilt by the supposedly corrupted Christian culture of Europe. In 1736 a German baron, Theodor von Neuhoff, landed in Corsica with weapons and aid for the rebels. He proclaimed himself King of the Corsicans and set about developing the island according to current ideals. Genoa called on France for military assistance, the rebels were obliged to flee, and Theodor settled in London, where he died, a declared bankrupt, in 1756. His vision did not die with him.3

In 1755 Pasquale Paoli, the son of one of the three ‘Generals of the Corsican nation’, had returned from exile in Naples and proclaimed a Corsican Republic. Born in 1725, Paoli had been eleven years old when Theodor expounded to him his vision for the island, and it had haunted him throughout his exile. Styling himself General of the Nation, over the next thirteen years he worked at building an ideal modern state endowed with a constitution, institutions and a university. His charisma ensured him the love of the majority of the Corsicans, who served him devotedly, referring to him as their Babbo, their father. He gained the admiration of enlightened European opinion, with Voltaire and Rousseau in the lead. The British traveller James Boswell visited him in 1765 and wrote up his experiences in what turned into a best-seller, further enhancing his reputation.4

While Paoli ruled the Corsican Nation from the Lilliputian hill-town of Corte at the heart of the island, coastal towns remained in the hands of the Genoese, who had twice called in French military assistance to maintain their grip. The French at first confined themselves to holding the port cities and surrounding areas, but it was unlikely that France would countenance the existence of a utopian republic on its doorstep for long, and wise Corsicans hedged their bets.

On 2 June 1764, a year after the death of his father, the eighteen-year-old Carlo Buonaparte married Letizia Ramolino, who was just under fifteen years of age. She was by all accounts a beauty, but that was not the motive for the match, which had been arranged by Carlo’s uncle Luciano. The Ramolino family, descended from a Lombard nobleman who had come to Corsica a couple of hundred years earlier, were of higher social standing than the Buonaparte. They were also better-connected and richer. Letizia’s dowry, which consisted of a house in Ajaccio and some rooms in another, a vineyard and about a dozen hectares of land, enhanced Carlo’s position. The marriage did not take place in church since the essence of any Corsican marital union was property, the principal element was the contract, and it was customary to sign this in the house of one of the parties, after which the newlyweds might or might not have their marriage blessed by a priest.5

Soon after their wedding, the couple moved to Corte, where Carlo’s uncle Napoleone had already joined Pasquale Paoli. Their first child was stillborn, their second, a daughter born in 1767, died in infancy. On 7 January 1768 they had a son, baptised Joseph Nabullion. Carlo enrolled at the university and eventually published a dissertation on natural rights which reveals a degree of education.6

Paoli resided in a massive structure made of the same dark-grey rock as all the other houses and the paving of the streets in Corte. He imported furniture and textiles from Italy in order to create within this grim building a few rooms in which a head of government could receive. Good-looking and amiable, the young Carlo quickly won his friendship. Letizia was by Corte standards a sophisticated and well-dressed lady, and her beauty and strong personality meant that along with her sister Geltruda Paravicini she was a welcome member of Paoli’s entourage.

Paoli admitted to Boswell that he placed great trust in Providence. That, and the praise being directed at him from various parts of Europe, had lulled him into a state of complacency. He believed that the British, who had taken an interest in supporting the Corsican cause before, and were now in thrall to Boswell’s An Account of Corsica, would come to his aid if he were threatened. By the same token France could not countenance the possibility of the strategically important island falling into the hands of a hostile power. Still smarting from overseas losses to Britain during the recently ended Seven Years’ War, French wounded pride would welcome the balsam of a colonial gain. Genoa had given up on Corsica, and owed France a great deal of money. By the Treaty of Versailles of May 1768 it ceded the island to France, pending the repayment of the overdue debt. French troops moved out of their coastal bases to impose the authority of King Louis XV.7

Paoli issued a call to arms, but his was a lost cause, though the men of the uplands put up a stiff resistance, inflicting heavy casualties on the French. Carlo was at Paoli’s side during the decisive engagement at Ponte-Novo on 8 May 1769, but did not take part in the fighting; Paoli hovered some three kilometres away as his men were routed by a superior French force under the comte de Vaux. Paoli fled over the mountains to Porto Vecchio, whence two British frigates took him and a handful of supporters off to exile in England.8

Carlo Buonaparte was not among them. Family legend has it that Paoli insisted he stay behind in Corsica, but it is more likely that Carlo made the decision himself. The island had never entirely submitted to any regime, and among its inhabitants family came a long way before loyalty to any cause. While Carlo and his uncle Napoleone had served Paoli, his other uncle Luciano had remained in French-held Ajaccio, where he had sworn fealty to the King of France, as had most of the notables of the coastal cities. Unperturbed by the cause of independence, Letizia was writing to her grandfather Giuseppe Maria Pietrasanta in French-held Bastia asking him to send her bales of Lyon silk and new dresses fit for a noblewoman.9

‘I was a good patriot and a Paolist in my heart as long as the national government lasted,’ Carlo wrote. ‘But this government has ceased to exist. We have become French. Eviva il Re e suo governo.’ Having submitted to Vaux, he went back to Ajaccio. On the way home over the mountains, Carlo almost lost his wife and the child she was carrying in her womb when her mule stumbled in the torrent of the river Liamone.10

The child was born on the night of 15 August 1769, and named after his great-uncle Napoleone, who had died two years before. The name did not figure in the liturgical calendar as belonging to a saint, but it was not unknown in Genoa and Corsica, where it was sometimes spelt Nabullione or even Lapullione, and had been given to several members of the family in the past. He would not be christened until July 1771, by which time his father had repositioned himself with considerable skill.11

Since the legal profession was the key to obtaining civic office under any government, Carlo set off for Pisa to obtain the necessary qualifications. ‘One can have no idea of the facility with which the title of doctor is granted here,’ wrote a contemporary French traveller of the university of Pisa. ‘Everyone in the locality is one, even the inn-keepers and post-masters.’ Carlo presented a hastily-written thesis for which he obtained a doctorate, and within six weeks he was back in Ajaccio, where he found no shortage of work.12

With a population of 3,907 according to the French census of 1770, Ajaccio was the second largest city in Corsica, but it was in essence a sleepy, smelly village. When Balzac visited it more than half a century later he was stunned by the ‘unbelievable indolence’ pervading the place, with the menfolk wandering about all day smoking. It consisted of a minuscule citadel stuck out on the promontory shielding the port, and behind it a walled town not more than 250 metres across in any direction, clustered around three radiating streets intersected by another three narrower ones, with an attractive promenade and square between the two named the Olmo after a large elm that grew on it. Within the walls there was a cathedral whose roof fell in in 1771 and would not be repaired for twenty years, and which was unusable in summer due to the stink emanating from the dead buried under its floor. There was also a Jesuit college and a governor’s residence, tucked into an assortment of mean-looking townhouses ranged along narrow streets bordered by small shops whose trade spilled out onto them. The smell of fish drifting over from the harbour mingled with that of the hides put out to dry by the butchers cutting up carcases in the street and the stench from the moat of the citadel. Outside the city walls stood a convent, a hospital, a military barracks and a seminary, and, along the road leading up to the town from the north, an agglomeration of dwellings known as the Borgo, where the poorer inhabitants lived.13

The city was dominated by families such as the Ponte, Pozzo di Borgo, Bacciochi and the Peraldi, and an oligarchy of notaries, lawyers and clerics with ‘noble’ connections such as the Buonaparte. This society was supplemented by the magistrates, judge, officers and other officials of the French administration. The houses within the city walls were mostly divided by multiple ownership like the Buonaparte home, and, since all their inhabitants were related to each other by blood or marriage, the whole area was a familial congeries connected by tangled ties. Ajaccio’s lawyers, Carlo among them, thrived on the squabbles generated by the resulting disputes over restricted space and scant resources. Carlo himself would be engaged for many years in a legal battle over some used wine-making equipment and a few leaky barrels. In one case, he pleaded for a client over one kerchief. There was plenty of work, but it was not remunerative enough or commensurate with Carlo’s ambitions. On the basis of his doctorate, in 1771 he obtained a minor post at the court of Ajaccio, but he was aiming higher.14

He had wasted no time in seeking the favour of the French military governor of the south-west of the island, the comte de Narbonne. On being fobbed off, he offered his services to Narbonne’s superior in Bastia. Charles Louis, comte de Marbeuf, needed a party of supporters among the notables of Ajaccio, and the Buonaparte were ideally placed to provide it. Their collaboration developed so well that Carlo felt bold enough to invite Marbeuf to stand godparent at the christening of his son Napoleone on 21 July 1771, and Marbeuf agreed. In the event Marbeuf was prevented from attending, so he sent a Genoese patrician and later royal lieutenant at Ajaccio, Lorenzo Giubega, to act as proxy. Marbeuf did come to Ajaccio less than a month later for the festivities of the feast of the Assumption and the little Napoleone’s second birthday on 15 August. He was so struck by the beauty of the child’s mother that he insisted she take his arm on the afternoon passegiata up and down the Olmo, and after walking her home he stayed there until one in the morning. Carlo’s ambitions soared.15

France was interested in Corsica both for its strategic importance and for its economic potential. It was accorded the status of a semi-autonomous province within the kingdom, and the French authorities set about organising it. A survey revealed to them the idiosyncratic nature of Corsican society, with its broad base of land tenure and plethora of hunting, gathering and fishing rights and obligations. These would hinder rationalisation, while the egalitarianism that had so enchanted Boswell and Rousseau impeded not only progress but the establishment of a hierarchy necessary for successful political control. One of the first actions of the new French regime was to correct this by recognising as noble the most prominent families. In large measure thanks to the usefulness of Carlo and the charms of his wife, the Buonaparte were included. ‘Ajaccio is struck with astonishment and filled with jealousy by the news,’ Carlo wrote to his wife’s grandfather.16

The connection with Marbeuf was invaluable. In 1772 Carlo was elected to represent Ajaccio in the newly established Assembly of Corsican Estates only because Marbeuf intervened to have his successful rival’s election annulled. The governor’s direct intercession also helped resolve a lengthy court battle between the Buonaparte and their Ornano cousins over a dowry that included a significant part of the house in which they lived. By way of a series of buy-outs, swaps and court cases Carlo would extend his possession over the years against a backdrop of running battles between the various members of the family involving the use of the staircase and other areas where interests clashed. These occasionally flared into violence, and inevitably ended up in court, where the knowledge that Carlo had the backing of Marbeuf counted.17

The rise of Carlo’s fortunes and the governor’s interest in Letizia aroused jealousy and gave rise to gossip. Marbeuf, a widower, did have an official mistress in Bastia, a Madame Varese, but whatever charms she may have possessed, at fifty she was past her prime, while Letizia was still young. It is difficult to see any reason other than an amorous one for him to spend time with an uneducated woman forty years his junior, and he gave every sign of being besotted by Letizia. There is no evidence that the relationship was sexual, but it was widely believed that it was, and that her son Louis, born in 1778, was his.18

Letizia would bear a total of thirteen children, of whom three died young and two in childbirth. The first surviving child was Joseph, born in 1768, the next Napoleone, born in 1769. As his mother was unable to feed him, he was provided with a wet-nurse, Camilla Carbon Ilari, who grew so fond of him that she neglected her own son. Napoleone and his elder brother, christened Joseph but known as Giuseppe, were also spoiled by their father and their grandmother Saveria Paravicini, known in the family as Minanna. But they were kept under strict control by Letizia. Strong, brave and characterful, Letizia was endowed with common sense. Unlike the rest of her family she was pious, and hardly went out other than to church. She was also a strict disciplinarian, administering slaps to all her children, and once giving Napoleone a thrashing which he remembered to the end of his life. She exerted a strong influence on him, and he would later say that he owed everything to her.19

There is no evidence that Napoleone ever attended school, although according to his mother he did go to lessons at a girls’ school. He was probably taught to read at home by a local priest, the Abbé Recco – presumably in Latin rather than the local patois they all spoke. His great-uncle Luciano, effective head of the family, must have found other teachers, as Napoleone from an early age showed an almost obsessive interest in, and remarkable aptitude for, mathematics.20

His seems to have been a happy childhood, much of it spent in the street playing with various cousins, while the summers were passed up in the hills at Bocognano. The family grew, with the birth of a boy, Luciano, in 1775, and a girl, the fourth to be christened Maria-Anna and the first to survive, in 1777. While most of the anecdotes collected by early biographers can be dismissed as ‘remembered’ under the suggestive influence of the boy’s later trajectory, one thing can be retained. His mother admiringly reminisced that of all her children Napoleone had been ‘the most intrepid’. In fact, he seems to have been aggressive and quarrelsome, leading to frequent fights with his elder brother.21

There was violence all around him, since much of the population continued in its lawless ways, and in order to stamp out the remaining resistance and the inherent banditry, the French applied the harshest measures. Mobile columns scoured the countryside burning down the houses and crops and slaughtering the flocks of suspected rebels, breaking them on the wheel and hanging the corpses on public highways as a warning. The five-year-old boy could not have avoided seeing them.

Whatever his feelings, Carlo had tied his family’s fortunes to the French regime and its representative in Corsica. Being thought a cuckold was a small price to pay for the benefits brought by Marbeuf’s favour, which he drew on at every upward step. While Luciano saved every penny and literally slept on his money-bags, Carlo spent lavishly, dressing well in order to keep up appearances when he attended the assembly in Bastia or other official functions. Having gained recognition of his status as a Corsican nobleman, he was determined to propel himself into the French nobility, as only that opened the door to careers in the kingdom. It had been decided that his elder son, Joseph, would go into the Church and Napoleone into the army. Marbeuf’s nephew was the bishop of Autun, in eastern France, and Joseph was easily secured a place at the city’s seminary, with the position of a sub-deacon and a stipend lined up for him.

Placing Napoleone would be more difficult. In 1776 Carlo applied for a place at one of the royal military academies, but the boy would require a royal bursary to pay for his studies. These were awarded to sons of officers and indigent nobles, so Carlo had to prove his noble credentials and provide evidence of his lack of means. The recognition of nobility he had gained in 1771 was based on proofs dating back only 200 years, which was not sufficient. In 1777 Carlo was chosen as one of the deputies to represent the nobility of Corsica at the court of Louis XVI, but he would not be presented to the king unless he could provide proofs of more ancient lineage.

When he had gone to Pisa to obtain his doctorate, Carlo had obtained from the city’s archbishop a document attesting that his birth entitled him to the status of a ‘noble patrician of Tuscany’. He now returned to Tuscany and located a canon by the name of Filipo Buonaparte, who provided him with documents purportedly relating him to his own family, which could trace noble status back to the fourteenth century. Armed with these, Carlo hoped to be able to gain recognition in France, and with it the right to a bursary for Napoleone.22

On 12 December 1778 Carlo left Ajaccio, accompanied by Letizia and their sons Joseph and Napoleone. The party also included two other young men. One was Letizia’s half-brother Giuseppe Fesch. When her father had died soon after Letizia’s birth her mother had remarried a Swiss naval officer in Genoese service and produced a son. Giuseppe Fesch had been awarded a bursary to study for the priesthood at the seminary of Aix-en-Provence. The other young man was Abbé Varese, a cousin of Letizia who, like Joseph, had been granted the post of sub-deacon at the cathedral of Autun. They travelled by cart and mule via Bocognano to Corte, where a carriage sent by Marbeuf waited to conduct Letizia in greater comfort on the rest of their journey to Bastia. From there, Carlo and the four boys sailed for Marseille while Letizia moved into Marbeuf’s residence.23

They reached Autun on 30 December, having left Fesch at Aix on the way. On 1 January 1779 Joseph and Napoleone entered the college of Autun, the first to prepare for the priesthood, the second in order to learn French. He would spend three months and twenty days at the college, whose thirty boarders were taught by priests of the Oratorian order. During that time he would learn French well enough to carry on a conversation and to write a simple essay, but he did not, then or ever, learn the language well, and his grammar and use of words remained poor. His handwriting never developed beyond an ugly scrawl.24

Carlo travelled on to Paris, where he learned that Napoleone had been deemed eligible for a bursary, subject to the submission of the necessary proofs of nobility. He duly presented these, before joining the other Corsican deputies to be presented to the king at Versailles. On 9 March the three Corsicans were admitted into the royal presence, bowed low and handed their petition to the monarch, who handed it to an attendant minister and graciously watched them leave his presence, stepping backwards and bowing repeatedly. They were then presented to the queen, the dauphin and various dignitaries, after which they were driven around the park in a carriage and rowed up and down the grand canal before being allowed to depart.25

On 28 March the minister of war, the prince de Montbarrey, officially informed Carlo that his son had been admitted with a royal bursary to the military academy of Brienne. As he could not leave Versailles, Carlo asked the father of another boy due to be transferred from Autun to Brienne to take Napoleone there. On 21 April, after an emotional farewell to Joseph, the nine-year-old Napoleone set off on his military career.26

3
Boy Soldier

Napoleone arrived at the military academy of Brienne on 15 May 1779, three months short of his tenth birthday. The regulation kit each boy brought with him consisted of: three pairs of bed-sheets; a set of dining silver and a silver goblet, engraved with his family arms or initials; a dozen napkins; a blue coat with white metal buttons bearing the arms of the academy; two pairs of black serge breeches; twelve shirts, twelve kerchiefs, twelve white collars, six cotton caps, two dressing gowns, a hair-powder pouch and a hair ribbon. The powder and ribbon would be redundant for the first three years, as up to the age of twelve the boys wore their hair close-cropped.1

The academy occupied an inelegant sprawl of buildings in the small town of 400 people, dominated by the château of the Loménie de Brienne family (to whom Marbeuf had recommended the boy). It had some 110 pupils, about fifty of them beneficiaries of royal bursaries like Napoleone. It was an austere institution, run by friars of the Order of Minims, founded in the fifteenth century by St Francis de Paola in Calabria and dedicated to abstention and frugality, so the atmosphere was Spartan. The boys attended mass every morning and discipline was strict, although there was no corporal punishment. At night they were locked in cells furnished with a straw-filled mattress, blanket, ewer and basin. In order to teach them to do without servants, they had to look after themselves and their kit. There were no holidays, and they were only allowed home in exceptional circumstances.2

Following the defeats in the Seven Years’ War, thought to have been partly due to the dilettantism of the officers, French military thinking focused on ways of producing an officer class inured to hardship and inspired by a sense of duty. Institutions such as Brienne were not meant to provide military training; the curriculum, taught by the friars supplemented by lay teachers, included the study of Suetonius, Tacitus, Quintillian, Cicero, Horace and Virgil, and, most importantly Plutarch, whose lives of the heroes of antiquity were meant to serve as role models for the aspiring soldiers. The works of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Bossuet, Fénelon and other French classics were to awaken in them the instincts of chivalry, honour, duty and sacrifice, as well as teaching them elocution and rhetoric. The curriculum also included German, history, geography, mathematics, physics, drawing, dancing, fencing and music.3

His new environment must have presented a challenge for the young Napoleone at many levels. He was by all accounts a puny child, showing signs of a delicate constitution. He had an olive complexion, which along with his poor French and atrocious accent marked him out as a foreigner. Corsica was seen in France at the time as a land of treacherous brigands. His outlandish first name, pronounced in the French way with the last syllable accented, ended with a sound like ‘nez’, leading to jibes based on the nose. Having a bursary singled him out as the son of a poor family, while his noble status was open to question, or at least mockery, from those of a higher social standing. The patronage of Marbeuf, and occasional visits to the château on Sundays, fed rumours about his mother’s morals and his own paternity. All this laid him open to teasing and bullying, which must have aggravated the homesickness he would have felt on entering this alien world and the cold, sunless climate of north-eastern France. But in boarding schools where boys are cut off from home those with character or certain gifts easily impose themselves and can achieve a status they do not have in the outside world. And Napoleone did not lack character.4

Apart from Charles-Étienne de Gudin, who became a fine general, and Étienne-Marie Champion de Nansouty, later a distinguished cavalry commander, few of Napoleone’s contemporaries at Brienne made much of their lives. Later, some could not resist laying a claim to fame by recording memories, true or invented, of their days together. Childhood reminiscences are unreliable at the best of times, and in this case should be treated with the greatest caution. Typical is the story of a snowball fight that probably took place in the winter of 1783, which assumed epic proportions in various memoirs, with Napoleone organising his colleagues into armies, building elaborate fortifications out of snow and staging assaults which supposedly revealed his tactical talents and leadership qualities.5

The concurrent image of an alienated youth drawn by such memoirists and developed by romantically-minded biographers should likewise be taken with a pinch of salt. Napoleone was capable of standing up to his schoolmates, displaying a ‘ferocity’ and even ‘fury’ born of contempt when provoked, but he did not seek their friendship. ‘I do not recollect, that he ever showed the slightest partiality in favour of any of his comrades; gloomy and fierce to excess, almost always by himself,’ recalled one of the few fellow pupils whose accounts can be trusted, ‘averse likewise to all that is called children’s plays and amusements, he never was seen to share in the noisy mirth of his school-fellows …’6

He did have friends. One was Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, whose family origins in trade may have made him less arrogant than the others. Jean-Baptiste Le Lieur de Ville sur Arce, four years older than Napoleone, recalled being drawn to him by the ‘originality’ of his character, his ‘somewhat strange’ manner and his intelligence, and the two became close. Another friend was Pierre François Laugier de Bellecour, whom Napoleone liked in spite of his frivolity. There were others with whom he was on good terms, and he also had some friends among the friars and the teachers.7

What did set Napoleone apart from his peers was his application and his intellectual curiosity. With a library at his disposal for the first time in his life, he read voraciously. The cadets were assigned small allotments of land to cultivate, and Napoleone fenced his off and planted it so as to provide himself with a place of solitude in which he could read. ‘Reserved in his temper, and wholly occupied by his own pursuits, Buonaparte courted that solitude which seemed to constitute his delight,’ recorded the librarian.8

With Napoleone at Brienne and Joseph at Autun, Carlo with a seat in the Corsican Estates and the appointment in 1779 of his uncle Luciano as archdeacon of Ajaccio cathedral, the senior clerical post in the city, the standing of the family seemed assured. But Carlo’s social ambitions bred requirements which imposed new struggles on him, and anxieties on his family. By a complicated transaction in 1779 he managed to gain sole title to most of the lease granted to his ancestor Geronimo in 1584 on the Salines, twenty-three hectares of land outside Ajaccio. Originally a salt-marsh, it had been partly drained and turned into a cherry orchard, but had reverted to an unhealthy swamp. Carlo applied for a subsidy from the French government to drain the land on grounds of public health and turn it into a nursery for mulberry trees, which, it was hoped, would be planted all over the island and provide raw silk for the French textile industry. Thanks to Marbeuf’s support, the subsidy was granted in June 1782.9

The next objective required more tortuous negotiations, in which his patron’s assistance would be even more necessary. Almost a century earlier, a great-aunt of Carlo had married an Odone, and in her dowry brought him a property which was to revert to the Buonaparte if the progeny of the union were to die out. But instead of returning the property, the last of the Odone bequeathed it to the Jesuits. When the Jesuits were expelled from France in 1764, the property devolved to the state. Carlo intended to prove that the Odone bequest was illegal, and laid claim to Les Milleli, another former Jesuit property, as compensation.10

The matter required a trip to Paris and Versailles, and in September 1782 Carlo set off, taking Letizia with him for a cure at the spa of Bourbonne-les-Bains before going on to Paris. At some stage during this trip she visited Napoleone at Brienne, and recorded being struck by how wasted and sickly he looked.11

Carlo marked his social ascent by restoring the Buonaparte home in Ajaccio, putting in marble fireplaces, mirrors, lining his bedroom with crimson silk, draping the windows with muslin curtains and installing a library. Behind the scenes, things looked different, according to inventories of the family possessions, which list every pot and pan in the kitchen, buckets, iron pokers, pewter plates (three large and twenty-nine small), knives, forks and spoons. The path to grandeur was not without its difficult moments. A row over possession of the part of the house occupied by Carlo’s cousin Maria Giustina and her Pozzo di Borgo husband, which Carlo escalated by trying to deny them the use of the only staircase, climaxed in Maria Giustina emptying her chamberpot over Carlo’s best silk suit, airing on the terrace below, which entailed yet another court case.12

The intimacy with Marbeuf would soon be at an end. He had married a young lady of his own class, and lost interest in his Corsican protégés. This came at a bad moment. The mulberry nursery was not going well, and the costs soon outstripped the amount of the subsidy. Another trip to Paris would be required, for family reasons too. Carlo had succeeded in getting his third son, now referred to as Lucien, admitted to Autun, where he joined Joseph. And he had achieved a social triumph in having his eldest daughter Maria-Anna accepted into the Maison Royale de Saint-Cyr, founded a hundred years before by Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Maintenon for the daughters of indigent nobility, which not only provided a free education, but also a dowry when they left. In June 1784 he set off for Paris with her. He needed to get more money out of the government for the Salines project, to press his suit over the Odone inheritance and the Milleli compensation, and to lobby for the nine-year-old Lucien to be granted a bursary at Brienne, where he was now due to join Napoleone. After stopping off at Autun to pick up Lucien, Carlo’s appearance at Brienne, dressed in a cerise coat with puce breeches and silk stockings, with silver buckles on his shoes and his hair curled, caused Napoleone embarrassment. ‘My father was a good man,’ he later reminisced, but added that he was ‘a little too fond of the ridiculous gentility of the times’.13

Carlo’s plans were beginning to come unstuck. Joseph had come to the conclusion that he was not made for the priesthood, and announced that he too would like to pursue a military career, as an artillery officer. Carlo was dismayed, and pointed out that Joseph was neither hardy in health nor courageous. With Marbeuf’s backing he would easily obtain a good position and end up a bishop, which would be of advantage to the whole family, while, as Napoleone explained, he could at best make a passable garrison officer, being entirely unsuited for the artillery on account of his lack of application and his ‘weakness of character’.14

These comments were made in the first extant letter written by Napoleone, to his half-uncle Joseph Fesch in June 1784. He was still only fourteen, but while his spelling and grammar are atrocious, he adopts an authoritative tone, particularly with relation to his elder brother, whom he discusses as a parent might a wayward teenager. Of his younger sibling Lucien he remarks that ‘he shows a good disposition and good will’ and ‘should make a good fellow’. Lucien claimed that on his arrival at Brienne Napoleone received him ‘without the slightest show of tenderness’ and that ‘there was nothing amiable in his manner, either towards me or towards the other comrades of his age who did not like him’, but these reminiscences, written down much later by an embittered Lucien, are unreliable.15

Napoleone had originally intended to go into the navy. The voyages of exploration of Admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and the creditable part played by the French navy against the British during the War of American Independence had raised its profile and made it fashionable. The navy offered a better chance of action in peacetime, and with it better prospects for promotion. It held greater appeal than garrison service in some gloomy northern town. In the navy consideration rested on talent, and social origins counted for little. Napoleone was good at mathematics and geography, and he was small and agile, all vital assets. But in 1783 higher powers decided that he should go into the army. Carlo’s interventions in Paris proved fruitless and he was destined for the artillery – which came as a relief to Letizia, as the navy involved the danger of death by drowning as well as by enemy action. The artillery had also gained in prestige due to recent technical advances, and as it was an arm in which favour could not trump ability and mathematics was a prerequisite, Napoleone would also have an advantage. On 22 September 1784 he was interviewed by the inspector Raymond de Monts and selected for the École Militaire in Paris.16

The fifteen-year-old Napoleone and four other cadets set off, under the care of one of the friars, on 17 October, travelling by heavy mail coach to Nogent-sur-Seine, where they changed to a coche d’eau, a barge with a superstructure for passengers and goods, drawn by four Percheron horses along a tow-path. Two days later they disembarked on the left bank of the Seine opposite the Ile de la Cité and walked through what was then known as the ‘pays latin’ to their new school. On the way they stopped at a bookshop to buy books, and at the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to say a prayer.17

The École Militaire, founded in 1751, had been reformed in the 1770s by the war minister Claude Louis de Saint-Germain. The 200 cadets wore military uniform of blue coat with yellow collar and red facings, red waistcoat and breeches. They were housed in a grand stone building which still stands at the end of the Champ de Mars, with a spacious courtyard in which they performed drills and played ball games. They slept in a dormitory with wooden partitions, each compartment containing an iron bedstead with curtains and minimal built-in furniture for their clothes, ewer and basin, and a chamberpot.18

The day began with mass at six o’clock, followed by eight hours of instruction, except on Thursdays, Sundays and feast days, when the only obligations were four hours of reading and letter-writing, and sometimes target practice. Although the school was run by laymen, the routine included grace before and after breakfast, dinner and supper, prayers in chapel before bedtime, vespers and catechism as well as mass on Sundays, and confession once a month. The cadets were not allowed out, and were punished by detention on bread and water.

The curriculum included Latin, French and German, mathematics, geography, history, moral studies, law, fortification, drawing, fencing, handling of weapons, letter-writing and dancing (those destined for the navy and the artillery were too busy with technical subjects to attend these). The accent was on developing character and a military ethos: the cadets would be taught soldiering when they joined their regiments.19

Napoleone did not take to the establishment, which he found too grand. The food was good and plentiful, and the cadets were waited on by servants, which he found inappropriate. He thought the austerity of Brienne more in keeping with the military life as he imagined it. Although the director, the Chevalier de Valfort, had risen from the ranks, the presence of fee-paying young men not destined for a career in the army lent the place an aristocratic atmosphere Napoleone did not like. At Brienne, the fee-paying cadets had been provincial gentry. Here they were of a higher social and economic standing, and they made the others feel it. Napoleone was teased for his origins, and the allusions to his being Marbeuf’s bastard resurfaced. But he should have felt in good company, given that one of his brother cadets, Władysław Jabłonowski, a Pole of mixed race referred to as ‘le petit noir’, was supposedly the son of King Louis XV.20

In a letter to his father of September 1784, four and a half years after arriving at Brienne, the fifteen-year-old Napoleone had asked him to send a copy of Boswell’s book and any other historical works on Corsica he could find. He had left his homeland at the age of nine, at which time he can have known little of its history or circumstances. His reading at Brienne would have exposed him to the current intellectual and emotional trends, which included the cult of the patrie, the motherland which demanded to be served and died for. Paoli’s Corsican project chimed with this, and his fate appealed to the growing fashion for glorifying victimhood and lost causes. During his last years at Brienne Napoleone went through a phase of what he called ‘grande sensibilité’, and he embraced this one, casting himself as a Corsican patriot and an ardent worshipper of Paoli. The motivation may have been partly the need for a modern hero to emulate. The study of Plutarch had inspired a cult of heroes in late-eighteenth-century France, which was in matters of taste entering the age of neo-classicism. Alexander the Great, Caesar, Brutus, Cicero and others were the lode-stars of Napoleone’s generation. A little wishful thinking could cast Paoli in the same mould. Napoleone’s new-found emotional association with Corsica may also have had something to do with his sense of social inferiority, with a desire to claim for himself a status distinct from and morally superior to that of his fellow cadets with their noble pretensions, that of the persecuted patriot. It was certainly some kind of attempt to capture the moral high ground. But it sat uneasily with his family’s having hitched its fortunes to the French monarchy, let alone his aim of making a career in the service of the King of France. The ambiguities of his situation, both national and social, were inescapable, and made no less real by his father’s increasingly desperate efforts to position his family.21

Carlo was not well. He had taken Joseph away from Autun and back to Corsica, hoping the boy would take a law degree and assume the responsibilities of head of the family. But Joseph persisted in his desire to become an artillery officer. After undergoing a short cure and assisting at the birth of his youngest son Jérôme, at the end of 1784 Carlo left the island with Joseph, meaning to take him to Brienne and then go on to Paris to petition for a bursary on his behalf, as well as press his own case for the award of the Milleli estate. The sea crossing was so rough they were nearly shipwrecked, and by the time they made land, at Saint-Tropez, Carlo was in a bad way. They travelled to Aix, where they met up with Joseph Fesch and decided to consult doctors at the medical school of Montpellier. There they found a close friend of Letizia from Corsica, now married to a tax official by the name of Permon, who helped Joseph and Fesch look after the thirty-nine-year-old Carlo. But he was sinking fast, and the doctors could do nothing for him. The end came on 24 February 1785: the post-mortem suggests either stomach cancer or a perforated ulcer as the cause of death.22

Napoleone had never known his father well. Carlo was away for long spells during his childhood and they only saw each other once in France, when Carlo came to drop off Lucien at Brienne (and possibly when Letizia visited him). That short visit had not made a favourable impression on the boy, and frequent allusions to his paternity made him wonder whether Carlo really was his father. When, as was customary in such circumstances at the École Militaire, his confessor came to console him, Napoleone brushed him off, saying he had enough strength of character to cope with his loss without spiritual consolation. ‘There would be no point in expressing to you how much I have been affected by the misfortune which has befallen us,’ he wrote to his great-uncle Luciano. ‘We have lost in him a father, and God knows what a father, with his tenderness and his attachment.’ The letter dwells on the cruelty of Carlo’s having had to die away from his home and his family, and ends by dutifully imploring Luciano to take the place of the father he has lost.23

His father’s death might have come as something of a liberation in one sense: the socially embarrassing and pushy Carlo, with his limited aspirations, fitted ill with Plutarch’s heroes who filled the boy’s imagination, and his obsequious attachment to France even less with the idealised vision of Paoli’s struggle for the liberation of the Corsican nation which had become central to his view of himself. In Napoleone’s imagination, Paoli was now not only a modern-day Plutarchian hero, a role model to be emulated, but also a spiritual father figure.

His obsession with Paoli was mocked by his fellow cadets, as a surviving caricature attests. But his pose as a representative of the heroic nation wronged by France was psychologically convenient for confronting the superior airs of his aristocratic comrades: he could parry their arrogance with self-righteous contempt. Such sparring should not be made too much of, and he only seems to have had one real hate in the school, a cadet by the name of Le Picard de Phélippeaux.24

Napoleone’s friend Laugier de Bellecour had come to the École Militaire from Brienne with him. Le Lieur de Ville sur Arce had left to join his regiment just before Napoleone arrived, but before leaving he had asked his friend Alexandre des Mazis to look out for him, warning him that he was prickly and difficult. Their first meeting bore this out, but the two soon became close. Napoleone found in him ‘someone who understood him, liked him, and to whom he could without constraint uncover his thoughts’, in the words of des Mazis.25

Napoleone hated drill, and his mind would drift, with the result that his was always the last musket to be shouldered or lowered, despite des Mazis nudging him, incurring a sharp ‘Monsieur de Buonaparte, wake up!’ from the drill-master, at whom on one occasion Napoleone threw his musket in a rage. As a result he was made to perform his drill under the supervision of des Mazis. He loved fencing, but was a dangerous sparring partner. He was aggressive and, if touched, would go for his adversary with such fury that he laid himself open to further touches, which made him all the angrier. He often broke his foil, and sometimes the fencing-master would have to separate the combatants.26

The two boys shared an interest in mathematics, and des Mazis admired the way his friend relished the challenge of a mathematical problem. ‘He would not give up until he had overcome every difficulty,’ he recalled. They were taught by Le Paute d’Agelet, a mathematician and astronomer who had circumnavigated the globe with Bougainville, and who enthralled them with his accounts, reviving Napoleone’s naval aspirations. In 1785 he was preparing to set off on a voyage of discovery with the explorer Jean François de La Pérouse, and along with several others Napoleone applied to accompany the expedition. Only one was chosen, and it was not him. The voyage ended in disaster in the South Pacific, and nobody survived.27

As well as mathematics, Napoleone showed a great curiosity about geography and history, and read widely in both. Although he loved literature, he seemed to have little interest in improving his French, and the exasperated French teacher eventually told him not to bother attending his classes. He also showed what one teacher described as ‘an invincible repugnance’ for learning German. But he was generally popular with the teachers, who were impressed by ‘the persistence with which he argued his points’.28

He struck teachers and cadets alike as serious-minded, and was described by one of them as ‘preferring study to every kind of amusement’, interested in literature and ideas, ‘uncommunicative, fond of solitude, capricious, arrogant, extremely self-centred’, ‘having high self-esteem’ and a good deal of ambition. Much of the time he appeared to be in a world of his own, pacing up and down, lost in thought, sometimes gesticulating or laughing to himself.29

According to des Mazis, ‘he groaned at the frivolity of the other pupils’, and disapproved of their ‘depravities’, going so far as to say the school authorities should do more to ‘preserve them from corruption’. This was not driven by religious feelings: he had taken his first Holy Communion at Brienne and was confirmed at the École Militaire, and while he went through the motions, never rebelling against the obligation to hear mass every day, he showed no religious zeal. It probably had more to do with his own awkwardness, which made him dismiss sex as something silly and embarrassing. He later admitted that puberty had made him ‘morose’. This was exacerbated by the behaviour of his friend Laugier de Bellecour, who had found some like-minded young gentlemen at the École Militaire and flaunted his homosexuality. Napoleone admonished him on the subject and declared that they could not remain friends unless Laugier reformed, as he could not countenance such immoral behaviour. When Laugier teased him for a prig he lost his temper and attacked him physically. Napoleone later expressed regret, and often spoke of his former friend ‘with sincere affection’. But a prig he remained.30

In September 1785 he sat the exam to be admitted into the artillery, and passed forty-second out of fifty-eight candidates. All the others had spent two or in some cases four years longer than him preparing for it, so it was not a bad showing. He was posted second lieutenant to the prestigious regiment of La Fère, stationed at Valence. He quickly put together his new uniform, which consisted of a blue coat with red facings and lining, blue waistcoat, red piping and one epaulette. He was so proud of it that he could not resist showing it off to the Permons and other Corsicans in Paris, as he was now allowed out of the school building.31

Des Mazis had been posted to the same regiment, and on 30 October 1785 the two left Paris together. They took a coach as far as Chalon-sur-Saône, where they transferred to the coche d’eau for the rest of the journey to Lyon, and continued by post-boat down the Rhône to Valence. It was the first time the sixteen-year-old Napoleone had been unsupervised, and at one point he exclaimed, ‘At last, I am free!’ and ran around gesticulating wildly.32

4
Freedom

Valence was a medieval town of tortuous muddy streets dominated by a citadel built to guard the valley of the Rhône and surrounded by fortifications designed by the celebrated engineer Vauban. It had a population of some 5,000, a significant portion of which was accounted for by its fourteen convents, abbeys and priories. Napoleone arrived on 3 November 1785 and took lodgings above a café belonging to Claudine-Marie Bou, a merry and cultivated forty-year-old spinster who washed his linen and looked after his needs. He messed with his fellow officers at the Auberge des Trois Pigeons nearby.1

Second Lieutenant Napolionne de Buonaparte, as he was listed, was placed in command of a company of bombardiers manning mortars and howitzers. He had never handled a piece of ordnance before, and now acquainted himself with the practical aspects of gunnery during frequent exercises on a training ground outside the town. He also had to familiarise himself with the works of the founders of modern French artillery, Generals Gribeauval and Guibert, take more advanced courses in mathematics, trigonometry and geography, and learn how to draw maps and plans.

The regiment of La Fère was one of the most professional in the French army. Its officers were a close-knit family with none of the snobbishness Napoleone had encountered up till now. His messmates included des Mazis and another friend from Brienne, Belly de Bussy, who had joined the regiment a little earlier, and two new ones who were to have distinguished careers, Jean-Ambroise de Lariboisière and Jean-Joseph Sorbier. Napoleone’s company commander was a kindly man who befriended him and invited him to stay at his country house.2

The officers of the regiment were welcomed by the local gentry, and Napoleone took dancing lessons to enable him to participate in social gatherings (he remained a graceless dancer). He was befriended by two English ladies who lived nearby, and was a frequent guest at the château of a Madame du Colombier a dozen kilometres outside the town. He flirted with her daughter Caroline, whom he would describe as an ‘amie de coeur’. ‘Nothing could have been more innocent,’ he recalled: they would arrange secret meetings during which ‘our greatest delight was to eat cherries together’. He was not yet seventeen, and had spent the past eight years cloistered in all-male institutions, so his first emotional stirrings were confused. There is some evidence that he had tender relations with another young woman, a Miss Lauberie de Saint-Germain, but these probably did not amount to much either. ‘He was of a moral purity very rare among young men,’ recalled des Mazis, adding that Napoleone could not conceive how anyone could allow themselves to be dominated by feelings for a woman.3

Napoleone was able to nourish his mind as well as his heart, as he was a welcome guest at the house of Monseigneur de Tardivon, abbot of the abbey of Saint-Ruf, to whom Bishop Marbeuf had given him a letter of introduction. Tardivon, a friend of the renowned anti-colonialist author Abbé Raynal, was the leading light in the intellectual life of Valence, and the gatherings at his lodgings gave Napoleone an opportunity to broaden his views and for the first time in his life take part in intellectual discussion. He caught the spirit of the times and began to question received wisdom and reappraise the world around him; according to one of his brother officers he became insufferably voluble. There was a bookshop which doubled as a reading room opposite his lodgings, to which he took out a subscription, which gave him access to books he could not afford to buy. He read fast, occasionally misunderstanding texts, and erratically: of Voltaire’s works he read some of the least influential, little of Diderot’s, and less of Montesquieu’s, and only those passages of Raynal which related to Corsica. Given his emotional and sexual immaturity, it is not surprising that he was horrified by Sade, but adored the straightforward sentimentality of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie.4

Like most educated young men of ambition at the time, Napoleone began to fancy himself as a man of letters. With France at peace, literature provided a welcome distraction as well as an opportunity to shine, as another artillery officer, Choderlos de Laclos, had shown with his publication four years earlier of Les Liaisons dangereuses. For Napoleone it was a way of formulating his views, and more importantly a conduit for his feelings about his island home and his own identity. His first surviving essay, written in April 1786, is a brief sketch of the history of Corsica.

Barely ten days later he produced a short essay on suicide, a stilted piece full of self-pity and self-dramatisation. ‘Always alone while surrounded by people’, he prefers to come home and indulge his melancholy. He wonders whether he should not end his life, as he can see no useful purpose for himself in this world. ‘Since I must die one day, would it not be as well to kill myself?’ he asks rhetorically. What does come through the verbiage is unhappiness at having recently suffered ‘misfortunes’ as a result of which life holds no pleasure for him, and a sense of disgust at the mediocrity and corruption of people, which has led him to despise the society in which he is obliged to live. Whether this was a response to some amorous rejection or social snub, or just an outburst of teenage angst, one can only speculate. It is not the expression of a deeper malaise. Less than a week later, on 9 May, he wrote an impassioned defence of Rousseau against the Swiss pastor Antoine Jacques Roustan’s criticism of him. Rousseau’s works exerted a profound influence on Napoleone’s emotional development, and although he would later change his mind and deride Rousseau’s sentimentality, he would never shake it off entirely.5

With Carlo gone, Napoleone had become the family’s man in France, and it now fell to him to obtain places in various institutions for his siblings and petition on behalf of the family’s interests. These were not looking good. The Salines had been only partly drained during Carlo’s lifetime, and as only a fraction of the intended mulberry trees had been planted, the government had decided to stop throwing good money after bad. On the other hand, the Buonaparte had won their case for compensation for the Odone legacy in the form of Les Milleli. It was a fine property with a small house and olive groves above Ajaccio. But Napoleone’s great-uncle Luciano was ill and incapacitated, and Joseph was proving incapable in practical matters. Aged seventeen, Napoleone was obliged to take over the management of the family’s affairs. He applied for leave, and on 15 September 1786 was back in Ajaccio. His mother and Joseph were on the quayside to greet him, but the place was unfamiliar. He was seeing Corsica after an absence of seven years and nine months. He had left as a child, and returned a young man. He met for the first time four younger siblings: Louis aged eight, Maria Paolina six, Maria Nunziata three, and Geronimo only two. He even found it difficult speaking to them, as he had not used his Corsican Italian while he was away.6

Luciano had resigned his post as archdeacon, which was taken by Napoleone’s half-uncle Joseph Fesch, but he had some money, which lent him weight in family affairs, and it was with Fesch and Joseph that he took charge of them. Napoleone applied for an extension of his leave and busied himself with the harvest, the family properties and other practical matters.

During that time he got to know his family, not only his mother, whom he had seen just once briefly since he was nine, but also his siblings and the extended network of cousins, uncles and aunts. He revisited his wet-nurse and others who had looked after him when he was little, and spent much time with the ailing Luciano, whom he revered. He developed a relationship with his brother Joseph, who recalled with fondness their long walks along the coast, breathing in the scent of myrtle and orange blossom, sometimes returning home only after dark.

Napoleone explored the island and tried to acquaint himself with its people and their lore, of which he had only dim childhood memories. He was taken aback by primitive aspects of Corsican life that had not struck him when he was a child, but convinced himself that his fellow islanders were noble savages whose vices were the consequence of the barbarous French occupation. He had brought with him a trunk full of books, which no doubt sustained him and provided the moral and emotional arguments which would enable him to construct an appropriate vision of Corsica.7

He spent almost a year on the island, and did not leave until 12 September 1787. He did not rejoin his regiment, but set off instead for Paris, where he hoped to obtain payment of the 3,000 livres of the subsidy still due for the Salines. It was a considerable sum, roughly equal to three years of his pay as a lieutenant. When he reached the capital he called on ministers and people of influence, probably including Loménie de Brienne, now minister of finances. He also went to great lengths to obtain a place at the seminary in Aix for his brother Lucien. An impecunious outsider in a city in which the aristocracy’s wealth and privilege were on display, the provincial subaltern’s social inhibitions could only have been aggravated by the need to beg for favour.8

When not petitioning ministers, he was reading, taking notes and writing draughts of essays which display a critical attitude to the political system. In one, he argued that while Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Machiavelli and others were undoubtedly great men, they were driven by the desire to win acclaim, which made Leonidas, who had set out to lay down his life for his country unconditionally at the battle of Thermopylae, superior to them, a typically Romantic value judgement showing the influence of Rousseau and a tendency to reject the practical. It sat uneasily with his own instincts, if his brother Joseph is to be believed. He recalled that during one of their walks on Corsica Napoleone had told him he wished he could perform some great and noble act which would be recognised by posterity, and that he could, after his death, witness a representation of it ‘and see what a poet such as the great Corneille would make me feel, think and say’. Such transference of the desire for recognition, normal in any teenager, suggests a disinclination or perhaps inability to engage with the world around him. A combination of awkwardness and disdain certainly marked his attitude to sex.9

On the evening of 21 November he went to see a play, and on leaving the theatre strolled through the Palais-Royal, the Paris residence of the Orléans branch of the royal family. It had extensive gardens at the back, flanked by arcades with shops, cafés and small premises in which whores plied their trade. The higher-class ones sat at their windows beckoning to the passers-by, the next degree down would sit in the cafés, and the cheapest would loiter under the colonnade or along the avenues of the garden.10

The following morning, Napoleone sat down and described what happened next as though he were writing up a scientific experiment. ‘My soul, agitated by the vigorous sentiments natural to it, made me bear the cold with indifference,’ he wrote, ‘but when my imagination cooled, I began to feel the rigours of the season and made for the arcades.’ There a young girl caught his eye. She was obviously a prostitute but did not have the brazen manner of the others, and returned his look with modesty. ‘Her timidity encouraged me and I addressed her … I who more than anyone else felt the horror of her kind, and had always felt myself sullied by a mere look from one …’ In his account, he makes it clear that he was looking for someone ‘who would be useful for the observations I wished to make’. He admits that previous attempts to pick up a prostitute had not been ‘crowned with success’, which might appear odd, as a young officer would not normally have difficulty carrying out such a transaction in the Palais-Royal. His record of their conversation goes some way to explain why: he began by asking how she came to her present condition, which was neither tactful nor to the point, and after more such banter on a freezing November night, it was she who suggested they go back to his lodgings, only to be asked what for. ‘Well, we could warm ourselves and you could satisfy your fancy,’ she answered. The clinical account does not mention whether the experience had been pleasurable or not.11

On 1 December, having obtained a six-month extension of his leave, Napoleone set off for Corsica once more. His efforts in Paris had come to nothing, which only contributed to his disenchantment with a state of affairs that seemed to exclude him as well as his native land, whose subjugation he was beginning to take personally. His vision of a noble nation oppressed by a wicked and corrupt France fitted well with a feeling that he and his family were being thwarted, or at least disrespected, by the regime in Paris.

He spent the next four and a half months in Corsica, and it was not until 14 June 1788 that he rejoined his regiment, now stationed at Auxonne, after an absence of twenty-one months. This was not unusual, as in peacetime officers were allowed to absent themselves for long periods.

Auxonne was a fortified town on the river Saône with an artillery school under the sixty-six-year-old lieutenant general baron Jean-Pierre du Teil, a clever and innovative commander who worked his men hard by setting them challenges that upset their routines. Du Teil took an immediate liking to Napoleone. He set him the task of designing and constructing earthworks, which involved calculations of firepower, resistance and ballistics, followed by ten days of physical work, with Napoleone marshalling 200 men with picks and shovels. ‘This extraordinary mark of favour earned me the ill-feeling of the captains who claimed it was insulting to them that a mere lieutenant be charged with such an important task and that if there were more than 50 men involved one of their rank should be in command,’ he wrote to Joseph Fesch on 29 August. He nevertheless pacified them and even gained their friendship; considering him an intellectual, they tasked him with drawing up the Calotte, a regimental code of conduct. He rose to the challenge and produced a document that was both reasoned and idealistic, very much in the spirit of Rousseau, which could have been the constitution for a popular dictatorship.12

From his essays and notes it is clear that he was already a republican, having, like Rousseau, come to the conclusion that existing systems of government were absurd and that kings had no right to rule. In the introduction to what was to be a dissertation on royal authority, he argued that this was entirely ‘usurped’, since sovereignty resided in the people, adding that ‘there are very few kings who have not deserved to be dethroned’. He also adopted Rousseau’s thesis that religion was destructive, since it was in competition with the state as it held out the promise of happiness in another world, when it was for the state to provide people with the means to achieve it in this.13

He continued to read, annotating and commenting as he went, on subjects as varied as ancient and modern history, geography, the fiscal systems of different states, the role of artillery and ballistics, Greek philosophy, Arab culture, biology, natural history, the possibility of digging a canal through the isthmus of Suez, and many more. That summer he read Richardson’s Clarissa and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, and himself wrote Le Comte d’Essex, a gothick novella about an imagined conspiracy against Charles I featuring ghosts, blood and daggers, and Le Masque Prophète, a short piece set in the Arab world which is a kind of parable about dictatorship. The plots are melodramatic, the prose bristles with adjectives and metaphors, not to mention spelling mistakes, the characterisation is non-existent.14

Auxonne lay in a marshy, misty part of the Burgundian plain, and Napoleone believed it was the insalubrious exhalations from the stagnant moat beyond the ramparts which brought him down with a fever that autumn, but it may in part have been a consequence of his lifestyle. He was economising on food in order to be able to send money home to his mother. He lived in barracks, in a small room with a bed, a table, six straw-seated chairs and one armchair. He messed with the other officers, but although his lodgings were free, he was still only on the pay of second lieutenant, so he had to be careful. But there was also a manic element to his life at this time. ‘I have no other resource here but work,’ he wrote to his great-uncle Luciano in March 1789. ‘I only get dressed once a week, I sleep very little since my illness. It is incredible. I go to bed at ten o’clock and get up at four in the morning. I only take one meal and dine at three; it suits my health very well.’ He would keep the shutters closed to help his concentration. He did in fact go out, for, as he proudly explained in the same letter, ‘I have gained quite a distinguished reputation in this little town with my speeches on various occasions.’15

The French monarchy was virtually bankrupt, and as a last resort to raise money the king called the Estates General. As this body, representing the clergy, the nobility and the non-noble ‘third estate’, had not been summoned for nearly two centuries, this opened up a Pandora’s box of questions about the nature of the government. All over the country people of every station aired their views and propounded solutions to the political crisis. This was accompanied by popular unrest, and on 1 April Napoleone was sent to the town of Seurre with 100 men to suppress riots. The rebellious spirit inspired bad behaviour, and one day he was sent to the monastery of Citeaux to quell a mutiny by the monks. Over dinner a grateful abbot served him ‘delicious wine’ from the Clos Vougeot in the monastery cellar, which the monks had tried to raid. In a letter to Letizia, he described the sumptuous Easter dinner he was given by a local nobleman. ‘But I would rather have been eating ravioli or lasagne in Ajaccio,’ he concluded.16

He was in high spirits. His health had recovered, the weather was glorious, and he bathed in the Saône (once he got a cramp and nearly drowned). ‘My friend, if my heart were susceptible to love, what a favourable moment this would be: fêted everywhere, treated with a respect that you could not imagine,’ he wrote to Joseph, boasting that ‘The prettiest women are delighted with our company.’17

Like most of his generation, he was in a state of excitement about political events. ‘This year heralds some beginnings which will be very welcome to all right-thinking people,’ he wrote to his proxy godfather Giubega from Auxonne in June, ‘and after so many centuries of feudal barbarism and political slavery, it is wonderful to see the word Liberty inflame hearts which seemed corrupted by luxury, weakness and the arts.’ But this raised questions closer to home. ‘While France is being reborn, what will become of us, unfortunate Corsicans?’ he asked. The moment seemed ripe for him to strike a blow for his island nation by publishing a history of Corsica, but he felt he needed the support or at least approval of Paoli, so he wrote to him in his London exile.18

‘I was born as the fatherland was perishing,’ he wrote. ‘My eyes opened to the odious sight of 30,000 French who had been vomited onto our shores drowning the throne of liberty in rivers of blood. The screams of the dying, the moans of the oppressed, tears of despair surrounded my cradle from the moment of my birth.’ There is some doubt as to the authenticity of this letter, as the original has never been found and there is no trace of a response from Paoli. But it would have been an odd one to forge, given Napoleone’s later career, and the melodramatic style is in tune with his contemporary writings, most notably his Nouvelle Corse. This is a confused rant against the French, represented as irredeemably cruel and corrupt, with a plot derived from Robinson Crusoe and Paul et Virginie so lurid and violent as to be incoherent, couched in a pornography of gore, rape and mutilation, punctuated by flights of sentimentality.19

The history he had been planning for the past few years was finally taking shape in the form of Lettres sur la Corse, an emotional account of events up to the beginning of the eighteenth century which anthropomorphises the Corsican ‘nation’ in the fashion of the day. When the first two letters were finished he sent them to his former French teacher at Brienne, the Abbé Dupuy, asking him to edit them. As well as rewriting whole passages, Dupuy delivered a withering verdict, suggesting in the politest terms that he cut out all the ‘metaphysical’ content.20

On 15 July, Napoleone was in the process of writing to his great-uncle Luciano when two brother officers came into the room with the news they had just received from Paris about a riot having got out of hand and the mob having stormed the Bastille. Whatever his feelings about the monarchy, he was alarmed at the disorders. Four days later, riots broke out in Auxonne, and in a letter to Joseph he expressed contempt for the ‘populace’ and the ‘assortment of brigands from outside who had come to pillage’ the customs house and the tax gatherer’s office. Nor was he impressed by the attitude of his own men, who showed reluctance to quell the riot. On the night of 21 July he acted as the general’s aide, marshalling troops against the rioters. While he claims to have brought matters under control with a forty-five-minute harangue (which sounds unlikely given his oratorical skills), he makes no bones about his frustration at not being allowed to fire on the mob, a profound distaste for which shines through his account.21

He was nevertheless excited by the developments. ‘All over France blood has flowed,’ he wrote to Joseph on 8 August, ‘but almost everywhere it was the impure blood of the enemies of Liberty and the Nation.’ His commander had put him in charge of a group of officers with the brief of studying the possibilities of firing bombs from siege pieces, and he wrote up its report diligently, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He had applied for long leave, meaning to go to Corsica and play a part in whatever might take place there. Both his feelings and his ambition drew him there: the ideal of the island nation he had nourished over the past few years beckoned, as did the fact that there he could play a more prominent part than in France.22

On 16 August his regiment mutinied. The soldiers confronted their officers demanding they hand over the regimental chest, which they were obliged to do. The soldiers then got drunk and tried to fraternise with the officers, forcing them to drink with them. Napoleone’s thoughts are not recorded, but there can be little doubt as to what they were. When, a few days later, the regiment went on parade to swear a new oath, to the Nation, the King and the Law, he was probably thinking of another nation. His request for leave had been granted, and in the first days of September he left Auxonne for Corsica.23

5
Corsica

Napoleone reached Ajaccio at the end of September 1789. Apart from Maria-Anna, who was still at Saint-Cyr, the whole family was there. Joseph had a judicial post in the city, but Lucien, who had abandoned a military career because of poor eyesight and then given a clerical one a try, was idling, along with Louis. Their prospects in France had faded and they were reduced to Corsica once more. Napoleone intended to play a part in the island’s affairs, but the political scene was not quite as he had imagined.

There had been riots in the coastal cities in the wake of events in France, but there was no impetus for revolution, since none of the grievances which motivated it in France resonated in Corsica, where feudal privilege and class differences were not major issues. Here, the conflict was between the separatists and those who had thrown in their lot with France, and between rival clans. In the early summer of 1789 a Corsican assembly had sent four deputies to the Estates General at Versailles: Matteo Buttafocco representing the nobility, the Abbé Peretti the clergy, and the lawyer Cristoforo Saliceti and Captain Pietro Paulo Colonna Cesari the third estate. The only thing uniting them was resentment of the French administration. Even the French loyalists Buttafocco and Peretti wanted the island administered by its inhabitants, meaning their own sort. The representatives of the third estate, Saliceti and Cesari, belonged to a faction describing themselves as ‘patriots’, some of whom wanted greater autonomy or even independence, others integration into France.

The Estates General had transformed itself into a National Assembly, and this would decide Corsica’s future. On 17 June 1789 Saliceti and Cesari appealed to it demanding that Corsica be governed by a committee of locals and the formation of a native civic guard on the model of those which had sprung up all over France. Meanwhile, a rash of opportunistic disturbances covered the island as latent gripes were voiced and scores settled. On 14 August the assembly which had chosen the deputies to the Estates General set up a revolutionary municipal authority in Bastia. The following day the festivities of the Assumption of the Virgin in Ajaccio resulted in the formation of a ‘patriotic committee’ there, with Joseph as secretary (since he was the only one of them who could read and write French). Napoleone assumed that the next step would be the formation of a civic guard, and with another young enthusiast, Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, went about distributing tricolour cockades to be worn as a mark of solidarity with the Revolution in France and encouraging people to form a citizens’ militia.

On 17 October the National Assembly, which had by then transferred from Versailles to Paris, decided against allowing Corsica its own assembly and civic guard, on grounds of cost. Napoleone composed a letter of protest, signed by all the revolutionary activists in Ajaccio. He continued to agitate, and on 30 November his appeal demanding for Corsica the same rights enjoyed by the rest of France was read out to the National Assembly in Paris. It was backed by Saliceti and supported by the revolutionary tribune Mirabeau, and in one of those moments of wild enthusiasm characteristic of the early days of the Revolution, Corsica was integrated into the French nation and all those who had fought against the French were amnestied. Paoli was invited to leave London and come to Paris, where he would be welcomed as a hero before travelling on to Corsica. There were celebrations with the Te Deum sung in the island’s churches, and Napoleone hung a banner on the façade of the Buonaparte house bearing the inscription ‘Vive la Nation! Vive Paoli! Vive Mirabeau!’1

The words encapsulated a confusion as to which ‘nation’ Napoleone now associated with. ‘This young officer was brought up at the École Militaire, his sister is at Saint-Cyr, his mother has been showered with benefactions by the government,’ the French commander in Ajaccio wrote to the minister of war in Paris, adding that he should be with his regiment instead of stirring up trouble in Corsica. But Napoleone was not recalled, and the question of his allegiance would be complicated further with the arrival on the island of Paoli.2

The Babbo was preceded by various of his followers returning from exile whose sufferings in the cause endowed them with a sense of self-righteousness that led them to call into question the loyalty of those who, like the Buonaparte, had accommodated themselves to French rule. This made it incumbent on the Buonaparte brothers to demonstrate their devotion to the Corsican cause. They took down a portrait of Marbeuf which hung in their drawing room and hid it, but it was not clear where they stood.3

As Napoleone was writing his violently anti-French history of Corsica at the time, one must assume he still considered himself a Corsican patriot rather than a Frenchman. But given the uncertainties of the situation, he had to hedge his bets and remember that he had a career in the French army. His immediate priority was to secure position and influence. In February 1790 the two brothers agitated for the election of their friend Jean Jérôme Levie as mayor of Ajaccio, and of Joseph to the municipal council (which entailed archdeacon Fesch falsifying his birth certificate to make him of eligible age).4

The next step was to get Joseph elected to the general assembly which was to meet at Orezza to set up an administration for the island. Joseph was successful, and Napoleone accompanied him as they set off on horseback on 12 April, but on arrival they found themselves looked on askance by many of Paoli’s faithful. Napoleone expressed anti-French feelings and wrote an appeal demanding that all Frenchmen be expelled from the island. He befriended Filippo Buonarroti, a revolutionary and supporter of Paoli from Tuscany, and Filippo Masseria, Paoli’s right-hand man who had been sent ahead from London (and was a British agent). He also wrote to his commanding officer asking for an extension of leave, citing health reasons.5

None of this did much to enhance his credibility with Paoli’s henchmen at Corte, but it did affect his standing in Ajaccio, and when the two brothers returned they faced the enmity of the more conservative inhabitants. In the first days of May, while strolling on the Olmo they were attacked by a gang led by a local priest, but were saved by the appearance of a bandit of their acquaintance. They managed to mobilise their supporters in the Borgo, and on 25 June all French officials were expelled from Ajaccio.6

Joseph was one of those selected to meet Paoli on his way from Paris and accompany him back to his native island, where they landed on 14 July 1790. Napoleone and others from Ajaccio met him at Bastia on 4 August, and the two brothers joined some 500 supporters who rode with him on his triumphal progress to Corte.7

The General of the Corsican Nation was sixty-five and marked by twenty-one years of exile in London, during which he had grown to appreciate the merits of monarchy. Although it was the Revolution that gave him back his homeland, he was no revolutionary. On 8 September he opened a congress at Orezza which he packed with his family and supporters. Over the next three weeks this reorganised the administration of the island, giving him unlimited executive power, overall command of the National Guard and a considerable income. This was out of tune with what was being done in Paris, and many of the measures taken were against the law, given that Corsica was now a department of France.

Napoleone was not put off by such high-handed methods. Thanks to Paoli’s favour, Joseph had obtained a seat in the congress and the presidency of the district of Ajaccio. And although he did not benefit personally, Napoleone supported Paoli, accusing anyone who showed less than full commitment of being ‘bad citizens’, and suggesting to Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo the physical removal of three officials whose zeal he found wanting. ‘The means are violent, possibly illegal, but indispensable,’ he insisted. He considered that Paoli was still placing too much trust in democracy and felt he should be more ruthless.8

Napoleone’s leave was running out, so at the end of October he sailed for France. His ship was twice driven back by gales, and it was not until the end of January 1791 that he would finally make it off the island. In the meantime, he remained politically active. On 6 January, along with Joseph, Lucien and Joseph Fesch he took part in the opening session of the Globbo Patriotico, the Patriotic Club of Ajaccio, affiliated to the extreme revolutionary Jacobin Club of Paris. Napoleone attended regularly, making frequent speeches. He was at his most fervent when it came to denouncing Buttafocco and Peretti, who had been agitating in Paris against Paoli. Napoleone wrote a pamphlet entitled Lettre à Buttafocco in which he denounced the deputy as a traitor and blamed him for all the blood spilt by the French in Corsica. He read the letter out in the club, where it was enthusiastically received, with a vote that a hundred copies be printed.9

When Napoleone did eventually sail for France, he took with him his younger brother Louis. The boy was twelve years old and unlikely to obtain an education if he were left in Ajaccio, and as there was no money to send him to a proper school, Napoleone decided to take this in hand himself.

On 12 February he was back with his regiment at Auxonne. He took two small rooms in the town, one for himself and one for Louis. ‘He is studying hard, learning to read and write French, and I am teaching him mathematics and geography,’ Napoleone wrote to Joseph on 24 April. ‘He will be a fine fellow. All the ladies here are in love with him. He has adopted a slightly French manner, correct and elegant; he goes into society, greets people with grace, makes the usual small talk with the gravity and dignity of a man of thirty. I have no doubt that he will be the best fellow of the four of us.’ He did not mention that young Louis sometimes required a thrashing to encourage him.10

On their journey from the south coast Napoleone had rejoiced in the revolutionary ardour he witnessed everywhere. Passing through Valence he attended a session of the local revolutionary club, and on 8 February in a letter to Joseph Fesch he assured him that the whole country was behind the Revolution, and that the only royalists he had met were women. ‘It is not surprising,’ he quipped. ‘Liberty is a woman more beautiful who eclipses them.’ This reflection seems to have prompted him to scribble some thoughts for an essay on the subject of love, which, he maintained, was an entirely superfluous emotion.11

He was welcomed at Auxonne by his friend des Mazis and his commanding officer du Teil, but many of his brother officers gave him a chilly reception when he began to voice his opinions. In its first stages, the Revolution had been welcomed by most educated Frenchmen, and certainly by young officers in provincial regiments, who resented the aristocracy’s monopoly over higher ranks. The abolition of noble rank itself in June 1790 removed all barriers to advancement, but it was not well received by all, and subsequent developments turned many against the way the Revolution was going. Napoleone’s revolutionary enthusiasm grated on them, and his obsession with Corsica would not have won him much sympathy.

He was busy seeing to the printing of his Lettre à Buttafocco, of which he sent copies to the National Assembly in Paris and to Paoli in Corsica. He was hoping to complete and publish his history of Corsica, and wrote to Paoli requesting access to his archive. Paoli was dismissive, describing the pamphlet as a pointless gesture, and not only failed to comply with Napoleone’s request for access to his papers, but let off the parting shot that history should not be written by young people, making it clear he considered him immature.12

In the process of reorganising the army, the National Assembly replaced the names of artillery regiments with numbers, and that of La Fère now became the First. Napoleone was transferred to the Fourth, formerly the regiment of Grenoble, now based at Valence, in which he was posted first lieutenant. He left Auxonne on 14 June and reached Valence two days later, moving into the same rooms he had occupied before and messing at the same inn. Madame du Colombier and her daughter had left the area, but many of the friends he had made during his previous sojourn were still there. Mademoiselle Lauberie de Saint-Germain, with whom he had flirted before, had in the meantime married Jean-Pierre Bachasson de Montalivet, an intelligent man whom Napoleone befriended.

Having settled in, Napoleone composed Dialogue sur l’amour, a Platonic discourse addressed to des Mazis, who was wont to fall in love and then extol the condition’s joys and sufferings to Napoleone. In it he admitted to having been in love himself, but argued that what was at bottom a simple sensation had been garlanded with too many ‘metaphysical definitions’. ‘I believe it to be harmful to society, to the individual happiness of mankind, and I believe that love does more harm than good,’ he argued, ‘and that it would be a blessing if some protective divinity were to rid us of it and deliver the world from it.’ It seemed absurd to him that men, ‘this sex which is master of the world through its strength, its industry, its mind and other faculties, should find its supreme felicity in languishing in the chains of a weak passion and under the sway of a being more feeble than itself in mind and body’. He might have jettisoned the sentimentality of La Nouvelle Héloïse, but Napoleone was still a child of Rousseau in believing that man’s first duty is to society and the state.13

The nature of the French state was being transformed, testing allegiances and polarising society. A few days after his arrival news reached Valence of the king’s attempt to flee the country and arrest at Varennes near the border with the Austrian Netherlands on the night of 21 June 1791. Back in October 1789 Louis XVI had been obliged by a mob of women to leave Versailles and move to Paris. He and his family effectively became prisoners in the royal palace of the Tuileries, and the increasing hostility of the Paris mob precipitated a decision to flee. This was seen as a betrayal, since his intention had been to join the anti-revolutionary forces gathering against France at Koblenz in Germany under his younger brother the comte d’Artois.

Napoleone had joined the Club des Amis de la Constitution, of which he soon became secretary, at whose meetings he made republican speeches. On 14 July, as his regiment paraded to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the officers and men swore a new oath of loyalty, to the National Assembly. A Te Deum was sung and at a banquet that evening Lieutenant Buonaparte was among those raising republican toasts. Not wishing to perjure themselves by taking an oath which overrode that pledging loyalty to the king, many of his brother officers resigned their commissions, and some would cross the frontier to join the royalist forces. Napoleone felt no such scruples. In his cherished narrative of a Corsica violated by the French, the monarch was the incarnation of the arch enemy, and since he had begun to develop a more positive attitude to France, the king drew the residue of his negative feelings.

Having to support both himself and Louis, Napoleone was short of money, and it was partly the prize of 1,200 francs (more than his annual pay) that induced him to enter a competition announced by the Académie of Lyon for an essay on the theme of ‘Which truths and which sentiments it is most necessary to inculcate in people in order to ensure their happiness’. In the event, neither he nor any of the other fifteen applicants won the prize, as the jury found their efforts wanting. One of its members described Napoleone’s essay as a wild dream, and another commented that ‘It may be the work of a man of some sensibility, but it is too poorly ordered, too disparate, too rambling and too badly written to hold the attention.’ It is indeed pompous, florid, full of cultural references and recherché words (he had made a list of them before starting), but it is nevertheless a fascinating document.14

It bristles with contradictions as Napoleone’s libertarian instincts jostle with an authoritarian urge to order things for the best. He prefaces it with some verses by Pope to the effect that man is born to enjoy life and be happy, and opens with the sentence: ‘At his birth, man acquires the right to that portion of the fruits of the earth which are necessary to his existence.’ He rages against those such as profiteers who stand in the way of this, and against authority in general. He stipulates that everyone should have their portion of land and the full protection of the law, and that people should be allowed to say and write what they like. Yet the law should direct people according to the rules of reason and logic, and protect them from ‘bad’ and ‘perverted’ ideas, which should not be permitted to circulate in word or in print. Intriguingly, he identifies ambition as the principal scourge of mankind, above all ‘the ambition which overthrows states and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crime; the ambition which inspired Charles V, Philip II, Louis XIV’, which he sees as an ‘unruly passion, a violent and unthinking delirium’, since ‘Ambition is never satisfied, even at the pinnacle of greatness.’ Although he rejects Rousseau’s premise of man’s natural goodness in favour of a more cynical view of human nature, he indulges the noble savage myth and holds up Paoli as a paragon of virtue who had revived the spirit of Athens and Sparta.15

Having managed to obtain leave once more, Napoleone was back in Ajaccio by the beginning of October 1791. He canvassed for Joseph, who was seeking election to represent Corsica at the Legislative Assembly which was to meet in Paris (the National Assembly had dissolved itself). But Paoli placed his favoured candidates, and Joseph was rewarded with no more than a local post at Corte. Paoli showed ambivalence with regard to the Buonaparte clan, and particularly to Napoleone, who wore a French uniform and was beginning to behave more like a French Jacobin than a Corsican patriot.16

Although Paoli had sworn loyalty to the French nation before the National Assembly in Paris on 22 April 1790, he had regarded the French as the enemy for so long that it was difficult for him to trust them. As well as being a monarchist, he was a devout Catholic and a friend of the clergy, who had backed him and sheltered his partisans. The Revolution’s disestablishment of the Church and persecution of the clergy was as offensive to him as to most Corsicans.

Only a couple of weeks after Napoleone’s arrival, on 16 October, his great-uncle Luciano died. Hardly had he breathed his last than his nephews and nieces groped under his mattress and then ransacked the room in search of the money they assumed he had squirrelled away. It turned out there was little left, as Luciano had been obliged to dig into his savings to pay Carlo’s debts. But Joseph managed to persuade the administration (of which he was a member) to reimburse the money Carlo had invested in the Salines over the years. The funds were invested in a number of properties confiscated from the Church, the royal domain and the nobility which were being sold off as biens nationaux, ‘national assets’. It seems that in order to scotch rumours of malversation, the Buonaparte brothers put about the story that they had found a fortune under Luciano’s mattress.17

While Joseph grafted at Corte, Napoleone obtained a command in the National Guard of Ajaccio, which relieved him from having to report back to his regular unit. But a new law stipulated that officers below the rank of lieutenant colonel must leave the National Guard and rejoin their units. Determined to remain in Corsica, he decided to try for that rank. He would have to dispute it with two formidable candidates. One was Matteo Pozzo di Borgo, a member of the most powerful clan in Ajaccio and brother of Carlo Andrea, Paoli’s trusted collaborator and currently a deputy to the Legislative Assembly in Paris. The other, Giovanni Peraldi, an infantry captain, was equally well connected, and his brother Marius was the other Corsican deputy in Paris.

Napoleone spent most of February 1792 at Corte, ostensibly as guide and amanuensis to the visiting philosopher Constantin de Volney, but in fact probably trying to obtain Paoli’s favour. His behaviour was not calculated to engage it: he was hyperactive, attending political gatherings and holding discussions with people in the street, voicing extreme views and calling for action. He did not cut a convincing figure. Although he was now twenty-two he looked much younger, and people made jokes about his small stature. According to one source, when he challenged Peraldi to a duel, the other did not bother to turn up.18

As the elections to the colonelcies of the Ajaccio battalions approached, Napoleone was back at home canvassing. All comers were welcomed into the Buonaparte home to dine. Mattresses were laid out on the floor for supporters from the interior, who would be useful in swaying the national guards, most of whom were also from the country, and it was they who would elect the officers. The opposition also canvassed, but they had not taken into account the determination of the Buonaparte.

The election, set for 1 April, was to be presided over by three commissioners, who arrived in Ajaccio two days before. One, Grimaldi, was lodged with the Buonaparte; another, Quenza, stayed with Letizia’s Ramolino family; but the third, Murati, had accepted the hospitality of the Peraldi. On the eve of the election Napoleone sent one of his henchmen from Bocognano, a patriotic bandit who had fought with Paoli against the French, to the Peraldi house with his gang of cut-throats. They burst in while the household were at dinner and kidnapped the commissioner, bundling him off to the Buonaparte house, where his protests were countered by Napoleone with the assurance that he only wished to preserve his independence of judgement from the influence of the Peraldi.19

In the morning, the 500 or so national guards gathered to elect their officers. Pozzo di Borgo and Peraldi were shouted down, and in a travesty of procedure Giovanni Battista Quenza was elected commanding officer, with Napoleone as lieutenant colonel and second in command. The celebrations in the Buonaparte home that evening were accompanied by a military band.

The following day Colonel Maillard, commander of the French garrison of Ajaccio, inspected Napoleone’s volunteers, but the presence of the two forces in the town made for tension. Just as tense were relations between the generally conservative citizens, who saw in the French regulars a guarantee of stability, and the volunteers, most of them wild men from the hills. On the afternoon of 8 April a quarrel developed between some girls playing skittles on the Olmo, and as onlookers and passers-by took sides insults began to fly which had nothing to do with the original dispute. Shots were fired and Napoleone went out to restore order, but more people spilled out into the streets in a confused outburst of animosities. After one of his officers had been killed, Napoleone was obliged to retire to the safety of the former seminary, where his men were stationed. Quenza and he agreed that the insurgency justified retaliation, and they began shooting at any of the townsfolk who came within range. The fighting gradually turned into a chaotic brawl with guns as private scores were settled. Napoleone tried to exploit the crisis by requesting permission from Maillard to take refuge with his men in the citadel, which aroused the Frenchman’s suspicion, and the following day Maillard ordered the volunteers to withdraw from Ajaccio. Napoleone insisted they remain, and again attempted to gain admittance to the citadel – he even tried to subvert the soldiers by denouncing their colonel as an ‘aristo’.

Hearing of the disturbances, the authorities in Corte despatched commissioners to find out what was going on. Napoleone set off to meet them in order to tell the facts his way, and wrote up a version justifying himself. After a cursory examination of the circumstances, the commissioners had a number of citizens arrested and ordered Napoleone and his volunteers to leave Ajaccio. He duly led them off on 16 April, and intended to go to Corte himself to explain, but he could not expect a welcome there. Paoli’s verdict on the events at Ajaccio was that one could expect nothing less when ‘inexperienced little boys are placed in command of the national guards’. He had had enough of the Buonaparte. ‘The General returned here yesterday evening, he is badly disposed towards me; I saw him this morning, we had an argument, and all is over,’ Joseph wrote to his brother, urging him to go to Paris as soon as he could to justify himself before the government.20

6
France or Corsica

Napoleone had much explaining to do when he reached Paris two weeks later, at the end of May 1792. More than one damning report of his activities in Ajaccio had reached the capital, and he had been denounced in the Legislative Assembly by the Corsican deputies Carlo Maria Pozzo di Borgo and Marius Peraldi, no friends of the Buonaparte since the National Guard elections in which their brothers had been trounced. Peraldi had made up his mind that the family had ‘never, under whatever regime, had any merit other than spying, treachery, vice, impudence and prostitution’. Pozzo di Borgo was more amenable, and Napoleone managed to placate him.1

Napoleone also needed to placate the war ministry, since he had overstayed his leave and could be classed as a deserter. Fortunately for him, war had broken out against Austria barely a month before, and since the emigration of thousands of officers had left a shortage, the ministry was not about to deprive the army of a trained officer on account of a squabble between small-town Corsicans. Colonel Maillard’s denunciation was passed to the ministry of justice, and although this had received similar unfavourable reports from other quarters, the matter rested there.2

The day after his arrival in Paris, on 29 May, Napoleone unexpectedly met an old friend from Brienne, Fauvelet de Bourrienne. Bourrienne had not pursued a military career but had joined the diplomatic service, which took him to Vienna and Warsaw, and he was now at a loose end. The two young men teamed up, sharing what little money they had and thinking up ways of making some more. Napoleone also found friendship at the home of his mother’s childhood friend Panoria Permon, a beautiful woman of doubtful virtue who presided over what appears to have been something of a gaming house in which she received Corsicans and others.3

On 16 June he visited his sister Maria-Anna at Saint-Cyr. ‘She is tall, well-formed, has learned to sew, read, write, dress her hair, dance and also a few words of history,’ he reported to Joseph Fesch, but he was worried that she had lost touch with her roots and become ‘an aristocrat’, and feared that if she had known he was a supporter of the Revolution she would never have agreed to see him. But his own attitude to the Revolution was about to be tested.4

A couple of days later, on 20 June, he met up with Bourrienne for lunch at a restaurant in the rue Saint-Honoré. On coming out they saw a crowd of several thousand men and women armed with pikes, axes, swords, guns and sticks making for the Tuileries. They followed, and took up position on the terrace of the Tuileries gardens, from which they watched as the mob surged up to the palace, broke down the doors, overpowered the national guards on duty and swept inside. Napoleone could not hide his indignation, and when he saw the king submitting to don a red cap of liberty and appear at the window to drink the health of the people, he exploded. ‘Che coglione!’ he reportedly exclaimed, disgusted that nobody had prevented the rabble from storming the palace, and declared that if he had been the king things would have turned out differently. He kept returning to the subject, making pessimistic prognoses for the future. ‘When one sees all this close up one has to admit that the people are hardly worth the trouble we take to win their favour,’ he wrote to Lucien two weeks later, adding that the scenes he had witnessed made their scrape in Ajaccio look like child’s play.5

A week later, on 10 July, he was reintegrated into the artillery with the rank of captain, and awarded six months’ back-pay. Although he was ordered to rejoin his regiment, he was in two minds as to what course to take. He had put the finishing touches to his Lettres sur la Corse, which was now ready for the printer, but as he admitted to Joseph, the political context was unfavourable. He was beginning to think that his future might lie in France, and advised Joseph to get himself elected to the Legislative Assembly in Paris, as Corsica was becoming peripheral. At the same time, he urged him to encourage Lucien to remain close to Paoli. ‘It is more likely than ever that this will all end in our gaining independence,’ he wrote, suggesting they keep their options open.6

Lucien failed to get taken on as a secretary to Paoli. He was seventeen, exalted and rebellious. His spirit was, as he put it himself in a letter to Joseph, gripped by boundless ‘enthusiasm’; he had looked inside himself and was ‘developing’ his character in a ‘strongly pronounced way’. His soul had been set on fire by reading the immensely fashionable Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, and he had been inspired to discover his identity through writing. He was composing a poem about Brutus, and his pen flew over the paper ‘with astonishing velocity’. ‘I correct little; I do not like rules which restrain genius and I do not observe any,’ he wrote. He had also embraced the most radical revolutionary ideals. He assured Joseph that he ‘felt the courage to kill tyrants’ and would rather die with a dagger in his hand than in a bed surrounded by priestly ‘farce’.7

Warned by his younger brother Louis that Lucien was about to take a step that ‘might well compromise the general interest of the family’, Napoleone wrote to him more than once, trying to restrain him. Lucien was having none of it. He resented Napoleone’s dominant influence, accusing him of having fallen for the courtly attractions of Paris, and expressed his resentment at being told what to do in an impassioned letter to Joseph on 24 June, couched in the obligatory revolutionary idiom. ‘He seems to me to be well suited to being a tyrant and I think that he would be one if he were a king, and that his name would be one of horror for posterity and for the sensitive patriot,’ he wrote, casting himself as a ‘pure’ revolutionary and Napoleone as one who had sold out. ‘I believe him capable of being a turncoat …’8

Napoleone was in fact switching allegiance. He had nourished a vision of himself as the champion of a noble persecuted nation and its heroic leader Paoli, demonising France, on which he heaped responsibility for every ill. But over the past couple of years he had acquainted himself with that downtrodden nation, and found it was less innocent than in his dreams. Its heroic leader turned out to be just as unprincipled and tyrannical as any other ruler – and had failed to accord Napoleone the recognition he felt to be his due. Meanwhile, the demonic France had been reborn as the torchbearer for everything he had come to believe in. Viewed from Paris, Corsica was beginning to look small and mean. On 7 August Napoleone wrote to Joseph that he had made up his mind to remain in France. In its present financial condition, the family would benefit from his rejoining his regiment: at least one member would be drawing a salary. There was a war on, and sooner or later he would get the chance to gain promotion. But only three days later something occurred which changed his mind.9

On 10 August he was roused at his lodgings on the rue du Mail near the Place des Victoires by the sound of the tocsin. Hearing that the Tuileries Palace was being stormed, he set off for the place du Carrousel, where Bourrienne’s brother had a furniture shop, from where he would be able to see what was going on. ‘Before I reached the Carrousel I encountered in the rue des Petits-Champs a group of hideous men bearing a head on the end of a pike,’ he reminisced many years later. ‘Seeing me passably well dressed and looking like a gentleman, they accosted me and made me shout Vive la Nation!, which I readily did, as one can imagine.’10

A mob numbering some 20,000 armed with guns, pikes, axes, knives and even spits had attacked the Tuileries, which were defended by 900 men of the Swiss Guards and a hundred or so courtiers and nobles. The king and his family fled to the protection of the Legislative Assembly, but the defenders of the palace were butchered. When it was over, Napoleone ventured into the palace gardens, where people were finishing off the wounded and mutilating their bodies in obscene ways. ‘Never since has any of my battlefields struck me by the number of dead bodies as did the mass of the Swiss, maybe on account of the constricted space or perhaps because it was the first time I had seen anything like it,’ he recalled. ‘I saw even quite well dressed women commit the most extreme indecencies on the bodies of the Swiss guards.’ Napoleone was terrified as well as horrified, and never shed his fear of the mob.11

He was not going to remain in Paris to watch the slide into anarchy, and he could not afford to leave his sister in an institution that identified her as a noblewoman. On 31 August he went to Saint-Cyr to collect Maria-Anna, and brought her to Paris. On 2 September mobs began breaking into prisons and slaughtering the inmates in reaction to a declaration by the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the allied army marching into France to restore the monarchy, in which he vowed to deal severely with the population of the French capital if the king or any of his family were harmed. The massacre of aristocrats, priests and others detained for one reason or another went on for five days, and it was only on 9 September that Napoleone and his sister were able to leave Paris. They stopped at Marseille just long enough to collect his pay arrears, and on 10 October, by which time the monarchy had been abolished and France declared a republic, the two siblings embarked at Toulon, reaching Ajaccio five days later. Napoleone promptly set off for Corte, hoping to restore the Buonaparte clan to favour.

Paoli may have been a dictator, but his attempts to set up an efficient executive had failed. The culture of the island had been profoundly affected by French rule: the influx of specie up-ended a system in which the majority of the population had never previously held a coin, while the creation of a salaried administration launched a rush for official posts which opened up new fields for conflict between rival clans and tempting prospects for corruption. Most of those in office were more concerned with score-settling, nepotism and profiteering than running the country. It was they who would acquire the biens nationaux being sold off: these made up 12 per cent of the land surface of the island, but only 500 out of a population of 150,000 were able to benefit. This altered the previously egalitarian pattern of land ownership, while newly-introduced regulations impinged on unwritten age-old grazing and gathering rights, leading to disputes and banditry on a scale no government could control.12

Paoli was not well, and was unable to exercise the same authority as in the past. His relationship with France was strained, and he could not but be wary of those who identified with that country or with the Revolution. He viewed the Buonaparte brothers with mistrust. He had dismissed Joseph, whom he regarded as too ambitious for his merits, and had refused to take on the hot-headed Lucien as secretary. When Napoleone appeared in Corte hoping for a senior command, Paoli brushed him off with vague promises and sent him back to Ajaccio to await orders in connection with an impending invasion of Sardinia.

The idea had been mooted in Paris more than a year before. The island was only a few hours’ sailing from Corsica. It was rich in grain and cattle, which the French government needed to feed its armies, and it was assumed that its people needed liberating. Its ruling dynasty, the house of Savoy, also reigned over Piedmont and Savoy, and had joined the coalition against France.

The invasion was to be carried out by a combined force of French regulars, volunteers from Marseille and Corsican national guards. At the end of October, a few days after Napoleone’s return from Corte, the French naval squadron carrying the regulars and a detachment of volunteers dropped anchor off Ajaccio. Its commander, Rear-Admiral Laurent Truguet, was received by the principal families of the town, who entertained him with dinners and dances. The forty-year-old sailor was a frequent guest at the Buonaparte house, having taken a fancy to the sixteen-year-old Maria-Anna. Accompanying him on his flagship was Charles Huguet de Sémonville, on his way to take up the post of ambassador in Constantinople. He too was courted by the Buonaparte family, and he agreed to take Lucien along as his secretary. According to Lucien, Napoleone contemplated going east too, to take service with the British in India, calculating that his professional credentials would provide the chance for a command that would give him the opportunity of achieving great things. In the meantime, he nearly met his end on the streets of Ajaccio.13

When allowed off their ships, the French troops roamed the city picking fights. On 15 December a force of volunteers from Marseille sailed in. It was made up of the dregs of the city’s port, and three days later they teamed up with some of the regulars and began lynching people they accused of being ‘aristos’, including members of the Corsican National Guard, mutilating their bodies and parading them around town before dumping them in the harbour. Order was restored with some difficulty, but in January 1793 a further contingent of volunteers sailed in and Napoleone was only saved from being lynched by some of his guardsmen.

On 18 February, to the relief of the people of Ajaccio, the expedition sailed. Napoleone was in command of a small artillery section under his colleague Quenza. The expedition had been divided into two forces, the larger of which, composed of French regulars, was to attack Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, while the smaller, made up mostly of Corsican volunteers, took the island of Maddalena off the island’s north coast. This force, commanded by Colonna Cesari, consisted of the corvette La Fauvette and a number of troop transports. Unfavourable winds pushed the flotilla back, and it was only four days later that it sailed, landing on Maddalena on 23 February. The Sardinian garrison took refuge in the small town of Maddalena. Napoleone set up a battery which began bombarding the place into submission, and after two days it was on the point of surrendering. But the crew of La Fauvette decided to sail home, and Cesari was obliged to order immediate withdrawal, with instructions to jettison guns and other heavy equipment. Napoleone and Quenza had to scramble back to the boats, whose crews had been seized by panic. The flotilla was back in Corsica by 28 February.

Napoleone wasted no time in covering his own back. He wrote up a detailed account of the events for Paoli; another, critical of Cesari and by extension Paoli, for the minister of war in Paris; and signed another jointly with the other officers who had taken part, in which he defended Cesari. It was not as easy to defend himself from more direct threats, and he was on the point of being lynched as an ‘aristo’ by sailors from La Fauvette when a group of his own men delivered him.14

In Paris, Saliceti had been putting it about that Paoli was no longer fit to rule and that his clan was embezzling on a gigantic scale. The Convention, which had replaced the National Assembly, decided to investigate, and designated three commissioners with Saliceti at their head to travel to Corsica. Their official brief was to see to the defence of the island against a potential attack by the Royal Navy, as the international situation had become critical. King Louis XVI had been guillotined on 21 January, which shocked public opinion accross Europe and broadened support for the coalition of Austria, Prussia, Spain and Sardinia already fighting France. On 1 February France declared war on Britain and the Netherlands. Paoli’s monarchist and Anglophile sympathies were no secret in Paris. The Convention ordered the four battalions of Corsican national guards to be disbanded and replaced by French regulars, and placed all the forces on the island under the command of a French general.

On 14 March, Lucien, who had accompanied Sémonville back to Toulon when he was recalled, made a speech in the local Société Patriotique denouncing Paoli. He may have been put up to it by some of Paoli’s enemies gathered in Toulon, and he would later claim that he did not really know what he was saying. Nevertheless, on 2 April his speech was read out to the Convention in Paris, which only the day before had received news that the commander of the French army facing the Austrians, General Dumouriez, had defected to the enemy. Seeing treason everywhere, it issued a decree outlawing Paoli and ordering his arrest.15

Saliceti and the other two commissioners were still riding at anchor in the Golfe Juan awaiting favourable winds when they heard the news, and wrote to Paris asking for the decree to be suspended while they investigated. It was not until the beginning of April that they reached Bastia, where they were joined by Joseph Buonaparte. Given the intricate web of alliances, enmities and motivations spread over the island, and that almost everyone involved later destroyed and doctored documents, falsified evidence and spun colourful tales, it is impossible to be certain what the commissioners intended. Saliceti probably hoped to maintain Paoli but replace those around him with his own clan and associates, in which category he may have included the Buonaparte.16

On 18 April news of the Convention’s decree outlawing Paoli reached the island. Paoli tried to calm tempers, and sent two delegates to the Convention to justify himself, but Corsican patriots were in uproar, demanding war with France. Napoleone was in Ajaccio, where he wrote a defence of Paoli, which he personally posted on walls around town with a demand for the Convention’s decree to be rescinded. He also attempted to persuade his fellow citizens to affirm their loyalty to the French Republic, in the hope of avoiding a break with France. But most of the notables of Ajaccio had turned against the Buonaparte clan, and he was warned of a plan to assassinate him. He thought of joining Saliceti in Bastia, but changed his mind, and on 2 May set off for Corte to see Paoli. By then news of Lucien’s Toulon speech had reached the island. Worse, a letter from Lucien to his brother boasting that he had provoked the Convention’s decree against Paoli had been intercepted and sent to Corte.17

On his way, Napoleone met a kinsman who warned him that if he went to Corte he would never get out alive. He turned back and reached Bocognano on the evening of 5 May. But he was by no means out of danger, as Marius Peraldi, brother of his erstwhile rival for the Ajaccio colonelcy, was hot on his heels meaning to arrest him and take him to Corte. The various accounts of what happened next read like an adventure story, with Napoleone arrested, locked up under guard, freed at night by cunning subterfuge, pursued, caught, held with a gun to his temple in a stand-off, and finally spirited away while rival gangs of bandits settled scores. What is certain is that he was arrested in Bocognano, that he was freed by a cousin, briefly held again, and eventually taken to a kinsman shepherd’s hut outside Ajaccio.18

Napoleone could not show himself openly, so he slipped into the poor suburb, the Borgo, where he was popular, and that night went to the house of his friend Levie, former mayor of Ajaccio, in which his partisans had gathered. There they cowered, sleeping on the floor, their guns at the ready, for two days, while a boat was prepared to take Napoleone away at night. On the evening of his intended escape the house was surrounded by gendarmes. Levie told his guests to hide, and invited the chief of the gendarmes in. As they talked, both noticed that some of the sleeping-mats had not been hidden. The gendarme, fearing for his life, pretended to see nothing, and the two men continued to drink and talk while Napoleone was smuggled out of the back of the house and down to the beach, where a boat was waiting. By 10 May he was safe in Bastia.19

On the night of 23 May, Letizia was woken by a knock on the door; a cousin had come to warn her that Paoli’s partisans were on their way to seize everyone in the house. He had brought a handful of armed relatives to escort them to safety. Letizia left her two youngest children, Maria Nunziata and Geronimo, in safe hands and took Louis, Maria-Anna, Maria Paolina and Fesch with her. They crept out of town and made for the hills. A few hours later the Buonaparte home was sacked.

Meanwhile Napoleone had persuaded Saliceti and the other commissioners at Bastia that it would be easy to recover control of Ajaccio with a show of force. Four hundred French regulars were assembled and set sail in two ships, with Napoleone, Joseph and the three commissioners on board. The attempt to take the city failed, but Letizia and her children, Joseph Fesch and various French loyalists were evacuated.20

By 3 June Napoleone and his family were in Calvi, one of only three ports still held by the French. The rest of the island was under Paoli’s sway. On 27 May a thousand-strong assembly in Corte had issued a proclamation condemning the Buonaparte. ‘Born in despotism, nourished and brought up at the expense of a lustful pasha who ruled the island, the three brothers turned themselves with ardent enthusiasm into the zealous collaborators and the perfidious agents of Saliceti,’ it ran. ‘As punishment, the Assembly abandons them to their private remorse and to public opinion which has already condemned them to eternal execration and infamy.’21

Whether the French could hang on at Calvi for much longer was open to doubt, and the Buonaparte could no longer hope to play a part in Corsican affairs. On 11 June Letizia, her half-brother Fesch and her brood sailed for France. It was not a good time to be going there.

7
The Jacobin

On 2 June 1793, eleven days before the Buonaparte family reached the mainland, the Revolution had entered a new phase. The extremist Jacobin faction in the Convention, known as Montagnards or La Montagne because they sat on the highest seats in the amphitheatre, had expelled the more moderate Girondins. France was plunged into what was effectively civil war. In Toulon, where the Buonaparte landed, the Jacobins were laying down the law through terror and intimidation, arresting nobles, dragging wealthy citizens out of their houses and stringing them up from lamp-posts or bludgeoning them to death in the streets.

The Buonaparte family were not immediately threatened: they were unknown and destitute, and Lucien was prominent in the local Jacobin club. But the city was in ferment, crowds could be volatile, and the Buonaparte were, after all, ci-devant nobles. In such a climate nobody was safe. They moved to the village of La Valette outside the city. Having settled Letizia and his siblings there, Joseph made contact with Saliceti, who had also fled Corsica. He had publicly distanced himself from the Buonaparte, declaring that ‘Neither of these little intriguers will ever count among my friends,’ but he was not a man to burn bridges. He too needed associates, and with his backing Lucien was given an administrative post as quartermaster in nearby Saint-Maximin, and Joseph Fesch, who had shed his ecclesiastical garb, a similar position at Chauvet. Joseph himself accompanied Saliceti to Paris, where he lobbied the Convention to provide funds for the sustenance of exiled Corsican ‘patriots’ such as the Buonaparte who had suffered in the cause of the Revolution. His efforts were rewarded, and Letizia obtained her dole. Joseph then looked around for career opportunities, and secured the lucrative post of commissary to the army.1

Napoleone had gone to Nice, where the greater part of his regiment was stationed as part of the Army of Italy. Given the dearth of officers, he was welcomed back and given 3,000 francs in back-pay. It so happened that the commander of the artillery of the Army of Italy was Jean du Teil, younger brother of Napoleone’s old friend and commander at Auxonne. He gave Napoleone the task of inspecting the coastal batteries between Nice and Marseille, as Admiral Hood’s fleet was looking for an opportunity to land troops. At the beginning of July he was ordered to Avignon where he was to organise the convoy of ordnance and powder destined for Nice. He had not gone halfway when he found himself entering a war zone.2

The events of 2 June in Paris had provoked violent reactions and an anti-Jacobin backlash around the country. Ten provinces defied the Convention, a royalist rising had taken over the Vendée in the west, and in the south Marseille, Toulon and the valley of the Rhône were in open revolt. The fédérés, as the rebels were called, overran the region, including Avignon, stopping Napoleone in his tracks. An army under General Carteaux was marching south to defeat them, and by the end of July the fédérés had been expelled from the former Papal fief. Napoleone was present, but probably played no part in the fighting.3

There is little firm evidence about his movements over the following weeks, but he probably spent them carrying out his orders of convoying powder and shot from Avignon to Nice, possibly delayed by a bout of fever at Avignon. If so, it may have given him the time to reflect on his position. France had become a dangerous place for young men like him, and he needed to assert his political stance. He did this by writing Le Souper de Beaucaire, a polemic in the form of a dialogue which may or may not have taken place over dinner shared by a group of people at an inn at Beaucaire, on Napoleone’s route from Avignon to Nice.4

It is a political diatribe against the fédérés, in which the narrator, an officer, discusses the political situation with a group of citizens of Marseille, Nîmes and Montpellier who had come to the fair at Beaucaire, and argues in support of the Convention in Paris. He admits that the Girondins are good republicans and that the Montagnards might not be perfect, but asserts that the former showed weakness and the latter strength, and their authority should therefore be acknowledged: the successful faction has right on its side. He takes the opportunity to denounce Paoli, who only feigned loyalty to the French Republic ‘in order to gain time to deceive the people, to crush the true friends of liberty, to lead his compatriots into his ambitious and criminal projects’.

It was a political manifesto, calculated to establish Napoleone’s revolutionary credentials and position himself politically in a way that would shield him from the kind of accusations that had sent many an officer to the guillotine. It also aimed to represent the Buonaparte clan as the victims of the counter-revolutionary Paoli. Patriots such as they had welcomed Paoli believing him to be a good republican, and only gradually became aware of his ‘fatal ambition’ and his perfidy.5

The piece is couched in the flowery hyperbole so beloved of revolutionary France (and every totalitarian regime since), but there are few traces of the idealism that still haunted Napoleone’s recent writings, and it represents an emotional as well as an ideological coming of age. Reality had not lived up to his adolescent dreams of a Corsica reborn under Paoli, and his disappointment and sense of rejection had turned into anger, and even bitterness. He renounced Corsica; henceforth he would angrily reprove anyone who called him a Corsican and declare that he was and always had been French, since the island had already been incorporated into the kingdom when he was born. He was not bothered by the apparent inconsistencies or what might be seen as his betrayal of the Corsican and Paolist cause: it was Paoli who had betrayed him, and Corsica had let him down. In addition, he had smelt weakness in Paoli, and he had come to see that as a failing.

The riots he had witnessed over the past three years had dispelled any faith he might have had in the inherent goodness of human nature. The disgust and fear he had felt outside the Tuileries on 10 August the previous year had convinced him that the lower orders must be contained. The small-town struggles for power in Corsica had taught him that subterfuge, cheating, treachery and brute force were the only effective means of achieving a goal in politics. He had participated in several elections in which rules had been disregarded and results falsified, and had taken part in two coups. As an officer on full pay he had tried to subvert troops from under the authority of a brother officer. He still saw himself as a soldier, but the Revolution had politicised the army, and in politics the rules of chivalry did not apply. The winning side was the one to be on. The dreamy romanticism of his youth had been confronted with the seamy side of human affairs, and at the age of twenty-four he had emerged a cynical realist ready to make his way in the increasingly dangerous world in which he was obliged to live.

On his way from Avignon to Nice in mid-September Napoleone passed through Le Beausset, where Saliceti and the représentant en mission of the Convention Thomas Gasparin were staying, and he naturally called on his compatriot. ‘Chance served us well,’ Saliceti wrote of the encounter: they were in urgent need of a capable and politically reliable artillery officer.6

As well as being torn by internal dissent and civil war, France was now under attack from the combined forces of Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, the Dutch Republic, Sardinia, Naples and several other small Italian states, on five fronts. By the late summer of 1793 the Prussians had pushed back the French on the Rhine, the Austrians had taken the French fortress of Valenciennes, Spanish forces had crossed the Pyrenees and were moving on Perpignan, the Sardinians were invading from the east, and the British had laid siege to Dunkirk. The minister of war, Lazare Carnot, had ordered a levée en masse to defend the motherland, but things were not looking good.

Marseille had been retaken from the fédérés by the forces of the Convention on 25 August, but Toulon was still holding out, and retaking that was not going to be easy. Horrified by the bloody reprisals visited upon the inhabitants of Marseille, the fédérés and royalists in Toulon had opened the port to Admiral Hood’s Anglo-Spanish fleet, which had landed troops and occupied the city in the name of Louis XVII, now languishing in a revolutionary gaol. Toulon, the home of France’s Mediterranean fleet, was a natural harbour, with a large inner roadstead sheltered by land and an even larger outer one protected by a long promontory. The city was defended on the landward side by a string of forts and from the sea by batteries that could cover both the inner and outer roads. These defences were now held by nearly 20,000 British, Neapolitan, Spanish and Sardinian regulars, guarding not only the city but the roads in which Hood’s fleet was anchored. General Carteaux was not the man to dislodge them. A painter by trade who owed his command to political connections, he had 4,000 men plucked from the Army of the Alps and from among defeated fédérés who sought safety in his ranks.

On 7 September Carteaux began operations, taking the village of Ollioules but in the process losing the commander of his artillery, Lieutenant Colonel Dommartin, a former colleague of Napoleone at the École Militaire, who was gravely wounded. A replacement was required. Saliceti had mixed feelings about Napoleone, but after reading Le Souper de Beaucaire he had no doubts as to his political reliability, and even decided to publish it at government expense. And, as he put it, ‘At least he’s one of us.’ He nominated Captain Buonaparte to the vacant command and sent him off to join Carteaux outside Toulon.7

What he found on arrival was not encouraging. The besieging army’s headquarters at Ollioules were a nest of political intrigue and infighting between Carteaux and General Jean La Poype, who had joined him with 3,000 men from the Army of Italy. Anyone could see that Toulon was all but impregnable and that only bombardment could yield results, but as Buonaparte quickly realised, Carteaux had no idea how to lay siege to a city. He insisted that he would capture it ‘à l’arme blanche’, that is to say with sword and bayonet, and ignored Buonaparte’s advice.8

If Toulon was impregnable on the landward side, it could not hold out unless it was resupplied by sea, and no ship could approach the harbour if the heights commanding the roads were not secured. Buonaparte was not the first to see that capturing these was the key to taking the city – it was obvious from a glance at the map, as even the governing Committee of Public Safety in Paris had pointed out. But while most of those at headquarters saw the area of La Seyne on the inner roads as the place from which to threaten the allied fleet, Buonaparte believed that it was the two forts of Balaguier and Éguillette on the promontory of Le Caire, commanding access to the outer roads, that were crucial. They were held by allied troops, and it would take artillery to dislodge them. But all Buonaparte found on arrival were two twenty-four-pounders, two sixteen-pounders and two mortars. It was not much to be going on with, but enough to enable him to chase an allied force and a frigate away from the La Seyne area and set up a battery there which he named, to stress his loyalty, La Montagne.9

Over the next weeks, Buonaparte built up his artillery park. Not bothering to seek authorisation, he scoured the surrounding area, visiting every military post as far afield as Lyon, Grenoble and Antibes and stripping them of everything that might come in useful – cannon, gun carriages, powder and shot, tools and scrap metal, horses and carts, along with any men who had ever handled ordnance. He set up a foundry to produce cannonballs, forges to supply iron fittings for gun carriages and limbers, and ovens to heat the balls to set ships on fire. He also picked men from the ranks to train as gunners.

The first attack on Fort Éguillette on 22 September was a failure. Carteaux did not share Buonaparte’s conviction about the fort’s importance and deployed too few men, while the British quickly brought up reinforcements. They realised the French had identified the military significance of the promontory, and reinforced the position with a new battery which they named Fort Mulgrave. They added two earthworks on its flanks, covering the approaches to forts Éguillette and Balaguier. Buonaparte complained to Saliceti and Gasparin that his hopes of a quick victory had been scuppered; now he would have to take Fort Mulgrave before he could get at the key positions, and that would take time. He carried on building up his batteries and stores of shot and powder, ignoring orders from Carteaux, who complained but could do nothing as Buonaparte had the ear of the representatives of the government. Saliceti passed Buonaparte’s criticisms of Carteaux to his colleagues in Marseille, Paul Barras, Stanislas Fréron and Jean-François Ricord, who wrote to Paris recommending that Carteaux be replaced and Buonaparte promoted. On 18 October he received his nomination as chef de bataillon, equivalent to the rank of major, and five days later Carteaux was removed from his command.

Buonaparte had become adept at disregarding his superiors and bypassing their instructions without giving offence, employing flattery where necessary. He also knew when to force the issue and to intimidate in order to have his way. Saliceti was now permanently at headquarters in Ollioules, and backed him up. Napoleone nevertheless had to tread carefully, as the waves of terror rippling out from Paris led people to denounce others for treason as a means of avoiding being denounced themselves, and with many officers defecting to the enemy the nobleman Buonaparte was not beyond suspicion. He nevertheless did stick his neck out to protect his former superior in the regiment of La Fère, Jean-Jacques Gassendi, who had been arrested, by insisting he needed him to organise an artillery arsenal in Marseille.10

Carteaux’s command had been given to the hardly more martial General François Doppet, a physician who dabbled in literature, and had only won high rank by finding himself in the right place at the right time. But on 15 November his nerve failed during an attack on Fort Mulgrave: he gave the order to retreat when he saw the English making a sortie, only to have a furious Buonaparte, his face bathed in blood from a light wound, gallop up and call him a jean foutre (the closest English approximation would be ‘fucking idiot’). Doppet took it well. He was aware of his limitations, and realised that chef de bataillon Buonaparte knew his business.11

Buonaparte’s orders and notes during these weeks are succinct and precise, and while their tone is commanding, he takes the trouble to explain why compliance with his demands is essential. In war, as in any other critical situation, people quickly rally to the person who gives the impression of knowing what they are about, and Buonaparte’s self-confidence was magnetic. He showed bravery and steadiness under fire, and did not spare himself, which set him apart from many of the political appointments milling around at headquarters. ‘This young officer,’ wrote General Doppet, ‘combined a rare bravery and the most indefatigable activity with his many talents. Every time I went out on my rounds, I always found him at his post; if he needed a moment’s rest, he took it on the ground, wrapped in his cloak; he was never away from his batteries.’12

Through effort and resourcefulness, Buonaparte had built up an artillery park of nearly a hundred guns and set up a dozen batteries, provided the necessary powder and shot, and trained the soldiers to man them. For his chief of staff he had picked the apparently vain and frivolous Jean-Baptiste Muiron, who had trained as an artillery officer and quickly became an enthusiastic aide. In the twenty-six-year-old Félix Chauvet he identified a brilliant commissary who earned and returned his affection as well as serving him efficiently. During an attack on one of the batteries, Buonaparte had noticed the engaging bravery under fire of a young grenadier in the battalion of the Côte d’Or named Andoche Junot. When he saw that the man also had beautiful handwriting he appropriated him as an aide, only to discover that he had trained for the artillery in the school at Châlons. A couple of weeks later, another young man joined Buonaparte’s entourage. He was the handsome nineteen-year-old Auguste Marmont, a cousin of Le Lieur de Ville sur Arce, who had trained for the artillery at Châlons with Junot.13

On 16 November a new commander arrived to take over from Doppet. He was General Jacques Dugommier, a fifty-five-year-old professional soldier, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence who knew how to call the troops to order. He had brought General du Teil and a couple of artillery officers with him, but quickly realised that Buonaparte had the situation in hand, and he did little more than endorse his decisions. ‘I can find no words to describe the merits of Buonaparte,’ he wrote to the minister of war. ‘Much technical knowledge, as much intelligence and too much bravery is only a faint sketch of the qualities of this uncommon officer.’14

On 25 November Dugommier held a council of war, attended by Saliceti and, in place of Gasparin, who had died, a newly-arrived représentant, Augustin Robespierre, younger brother of one of the leading lights of the Committee of Public Safety. They considered Dugommier’s plan, then that drawn up in Paris by Carnot. Both involved multiple attacks. Buonaparte argued that this would disperse their forces, and put forward his own plan, which consisted of a couple of feint attacks and a massive assault on forts Mulgrave, Éguillette and Balaguier, whose capture he was confident would precipitate a rapid evacuation of Hood’s fleet and the fall of the city. The plan was accepted and preparations put in hand.15

On 30 November the British commander in Toulon, General O’Hara, made a sortie and succeeded in capturing a battery and spiking its guns before moving on Ollioules. Dugommier and Saliceti managed to rally the fleeing republican forces and lead up reinforcements. They retook the battery, a battalion led by Louis-Gabriel Suchet taking O’Hara prisoner in the process, and Buonaparte unspiked the guns and opened up on the fleeing allies. He had been in the thick of the fighting and earned a mention in Dugommier’s despatch to Paris.16

The day’s fighting had nevertheless demonstrated the lack of mettle and experience of the French troops. The worsening weather combined with food shortages to sap morale. Despairing of their ability to take Toulon, Barras and Fréron considered raising the siege and taking winter quarters. Saliceti pressed Dugommier to attack, but the general hesitated, as a failed assault might cost him his head. As it was, they were being accused in Paris of lack of zeal and of living in luxury.17

Dugommier resolved to act on Buonaparte’s plan, and the batteries facing Fort Mulgrave began bombarding it on 14 December. The British batteries responded vigorously, and Buonaparte was thrown to the ground by the wind of a passing shot. The attack, by a force of 7,000 men in three columns, began at 1 a.m. on 17 December. A storm had broken and Dugommier hesitated, but Buonaparte pointed out that the conditions might actually prove favourable, and the impatience of Saliceti carried the day. The French infantry went into action in pouring rain, the darkness lit up by flashes of lightning, the sound of the guns drowned out by peals of thunder. Two of the advancing columns strayed from their prescribed route and lost cohesion as many of the soldiers fell back or fled. Other units reached Fort Mulgrave and began escalading its defences. The fighting was fierce – the attack on the fort would cost the French over a thousand casualties – but Muiron eventually forced his way into the fort, closely followed by Dugommier and Buonaparte, who had his horse shot under him at the beginning of the attack, and was wounded in the leg by an English corporal’s lance as he stormed the ramparts.

As soon as he had taken possession of the fort, Buonaparte turned its guns on those of forts Éguillette and Balaguier, and ordered Marmont to start bombarding them. The British mounted a counter-attack, but it was repulsed and they were forced to evacuate the two remaining forts. By then it was light, and Buonaparte began firing incendiary shells and red-hot cannonballs at the nearest British ships, blowing up two. He told anyone who would listen that the battle was over and Toulon was theirs, but Dugommier, Robespierre, Saliceti and others were sceptical, believing the town would only fall after a few more days’ fighting. They were wrong – the explosions of the two ships were a signal the allies could not ignore, and that morning they decided to evacuate; they began moving men out while the ships struggled in a strong wind to pull out of range of the French guns.

The evacuation proceeded through that day and the next, with the allies towing away nine French warships and blowing up a further twelve, setting fire to ships’ stores and the arsenal, and taking on board thousands of French royalists. Anyone who could get hold of a boat was rowing out to the allied ships, and some even tried swimming. They were under constant fire from batteries newly set up by Buonaparte on the promontory and the heights above the city. That night the burning ships lit up the scene, revealing what Buonaparte described as ‘a sublime but heart-rending sight’.18

The French entered the city on the morning of 19 December, looting, raping and lynching anyone they pleased to label as an enemy of the Revolution. On the quayside people were throwing themselves into the water to reach the departing British ships. Those who did not drown were subjected to the fury of the republican soldiery. Over two decades later, Buonaparte recalled the revulsion he had felt at the sight, and according to some sources he managed to save a number of lives.19

Barras, Saliceti, Ricord, Robespierre and Fréron carried out a purge of the population of Toulon. ‘The national vengeance has been unfurled,’ they proclaimed, listing those categories which had been ‘exterminated’. Barras suggested it would be simpler if they removed all those who were proven ‘patriots’, that is to say revolutionaries, and killed all the rest. The population of the city, which would be renamed Port-de-la-Montagne, fell from 30,000 to 7,000.20

On 22 December 1793 Buonaparte was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. He was only twenty-four years old, but this did not make him an exception. Over 6,000 officers of all arms had emigrated since 1791, and another 10,000 would have done so by the summer of 1794. Generals and higher-ranking officers were guillotined by the hundred as suspected traitors. In consequence, the Republic had been obliged to nominate no fewer than 962 new generals between 1791 and 1793. But in the case of Buonaparte, the promotion was merited, and he knew it.21

‘I told you we would be brilliantly successful, and, you see, I keep my word,’ he wrote banteringly from Ollioules to the deputy minister of war in Paris on 24 December, using the familiar ‘tu’ form, no doubt to stress his revolutionary attitude. He had already noted that in the current climate the story that was told first was the one that stuck in the mind, and he informed the minister that thanks to his action, the British had been prevented from burning any of the French ships or naval stores, which was a blatant lie.22

He had proved not only that he was a capable and resourceful officer, but also that he was a leader of men. He had won the admiration of all the real soldiers present, starting with Dugommier. More than that, he had revealed a charisma that many of his young comrades found hard to resist.23

‘He was small in stature, but well proportioned, thin and puny in appearance but taut and strong,’ noted Claude Victor (another who had distinguished himself at Toulon and had also been made a general), noting that ‘his features had an unusual nobility’ and his eyes seemed to send out shafts of fire. His gravity and sense of purpose impressed those around him. ‘There was mystery in the man,’ Victor felt.24

Buonaparte was exhausted. Three months of intense activity, poor diet, frequent nights spent sleeping on the ground wrapped only in his cloak, and that during the winter months, must have placed a heavy strain on his constitution. He had a deep flesh wound and had also caught scabies, which was then endemic in the army. That may be why, at a moment when he could have obtained a posting to one of the armies actively engaged against the enemy, he was content to accept that of inspector of the coastal defences along the stretch between Toulon and Marseille. Another reason may have been a desire to lie low. He had seen how easily people could lose their commands, and he had probably made a number of enemies.25

It may just have been that he wished to be close to his family, which had moved further away from Toulon, first to Beausset, then Brignoles and finally Marseille, where he joined them on 2 January 1794. His general’s pay of 12,000 livres plus expenses would have been welcome, as the cost of living had risen dramatically in the course of 1793. The family had lived through lean times, with Letizia taking in washing, and the daughters, as gossip had it, resorting to prostitution. Maria Paolina, now Paulette, who had grown into a rare beauty, had been caught stealing figs from a neighbour’s garden.26

8
Adolescent Loves

Buonaparte spent the first weeks of 1794 travelling up and down the coast inspecting the defences and issuing quantities of crisp instructions. These go into minute detail on the exact quantities of powder and shot required, which spare parts should be assembled, and even the manner in which horses should be harnessed for specific tasks.

At the beginning of February he was appointed to command the artillery of the Army of Italy, operating against the forces of the King of Sardinia. They had invaded southern France in 1792 but were driven back, following which Savoy and Nice had been incorporated into the French Republic, but they still held the Alpine passes, from which they threatened to recover the lost provinces. The port of Oneglia, a Sardinian enclave in the territory of the neutral Republic of Genoa and the chief link between the king’s island and mainland provinces, was also considered a threat, since it resupplied British warships and harboured corsairs who preyed on French shipping.

Buonaparte’s new salary allowed him to install his family in the comfortable if modest Château-Sallé outside Antibes, not far from his headquarters in Nice. Joseph, whose job as commissary had awakened an interest in trade and speculation, was currently in Nice too, exploring business opportunities. Lucien was at Saint-Maximin, where as head of its Jacobin club he had changed the town’s name to ‘Marathon’, in homage as much to the ‘martyr of the Revolution’ Jean-Paul Marat, who had been assassinated in his bath by the royalist Charlotte Corday, as to the heroic ancient Greek defenders of their homeland. He had also changed his own name, to ‘Brutus’, and had married Christine Boyer, the sister of the keeper of the inn at which he lodged.1

The commander of the Army of Italy was General Pierre Dumerbion, a sixty-year-old professional. He was supervised by the political commissioners Saliceti, Augustin Robespierre and Ricord, who commissioned Buonaparte to prepare a campaign plan. As the Sardinian positions in the mountains were almost unassailable, he suggested ignoring them and striking at their bases: their left wing on the lower ground nearer the sea was vulnerable, and if the French could break through there, they would be able to sweep into the enemy rear. His plan was accepted, and operations began on 7 April, spearheaded by General André Masséna, who captured Oneglia two days later, and by the end of the month the French were in Saorgio, strategic gateway into Piedmont.

Buonaparte’s role consisted of ensuring the artillery was in position and adequately supplied. To assist him he had selected two old comrades from the regiment of La Fère, Nicolas-Marie Songis and Gassendi, his new companions Marmont and Muiron, and as aides-de-camp Junot and his own younger brother Louis. By 1 May he was back in Nice, drawing up further plans which would have taken the French into the plain of Mondovi, but the operations were halted by the war minister Lazare Carnot, who was against involving French forces any deeper in Italy. The Midi was still politically unstable, and there might be unrest if the army moved off. Carnot also needed all available troops to roll back the Spanish invasion.

Buonaparte composed a memorandum for the Committee of Public Safety giving a strategic overview of France’s military position. He argued that invading Spain would yield no tangible benefits, while invading Piedmont would result in the overthrow of a throne that would always be inimical to the French Republic. More important, it would make it possible to defeat Austria, which would only make peace if Vienna were threatened by a two-pronged attack, through Germany in the north and Italy in the south. Austria, he argued, was the cornerstone of the coalition against France, and if it were knocked out that would fall apart.2

Robespierre suggested that Buonaparte accompany him to Paris. The two men had grown close over the past four months, drawn together by the zeal with which they approached their respective tasks and by the shared conviction of the need for strong central authority. Under the dominant influence of Robespierre’s elder brother Maximilien, the Committee of Public Safety in Paris was exercising just such authority, through a reign of Terror which sent thousands to the guillotine. But Robespierre’s grip on power was weakening, and Augustin’s suggestion that Buonaparte come to Paris might have had something to do with that: he allegedly suggested placing him in command of the Paris National Guard.3

Buonaparte briefly considered the proposal, and according to Lucien discussed it with his brothers before deciding against it. To Ricord he admitted a reluctance to get involved in revolutionary politics, and his instinct was to stay at his post with the army. Whether the fact that he was also having an affair with Ricord’s wife Marguerite had any bearing on his decision is unclear.4

At the beginning of July he was sent by Saliceti to Genoa to assess the intentions of the city’s government, which was neutral but under pressure from the anti-French coalition, and to inspect its defences for future reference. He left on 11 July, accompanied by Junot, Marmont and Louis, as well as Ricord, but was back at Nice by the end of the month. Yet he was too busy to attend the wedding of his brother Joseph on 1 August.5

Joseph’s bride, Marie-Julie Clary, was twenty-two years old, not pretty, but pious, honest, generous, dutiful, family-minded, intelligent and rich. She came from a family of Marseille merchants with extensive interests in the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, and she brought him a considerable dowry. With this under his belt, Joseph’s bearing changed, and he now assumed a gravitas he felt appropriate as head of the family.6

Buonaparte was still at headquarters when, on 4 August, news reached him of the coup in Paris which had toppled Robespierre on 27 July – 9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar. He was deeply affected by the misfortune of his friend, who was guillotined along with his brother the following day. And he did not have to wait long to be arrested himself.7

As soon as he heard of the fall of Robespierre, Saliceti wrote to the Committee of Public Safety accusing Augustin Robespierre, Ricord and ‘their man’ Buonaparte of having sabotaged the operations of the Army of Italy and conspired against the Republic with the allies and with Genoa, whose authorities had bribed Buonaparte with ‘a million’ (the currency was not specified). He ordered the arrest of Buonaparte and the seizure of his papers prior to his being sent to Paris to answer charges of treason.8

It is not clear whether Buonaparte was actually put in gaol or merely under house arrest. Junot managed to pass a note to him offering to arrange his escape, but Buonaparte refused. ‘I recognise your friendship in your proposal, my dear Junot; and you well know that which I have vowed you and on which you know you may count,’ he wrote back. But he was confident his innocence would be recognised and urged Junot to do nothing, as this could only compromise him. Innocence was no guarantor of safety under revolutionary conditions, but Buonaparte was lucky. Saliceti’s accusation had been no more than a reflex of self-preservation, and as soon as he felt he was in the clear he sent another letter to Paris stating that examination of the general’s papers had yielded no evidence of treason, and, bearing in mind his usefulness for the Army of Italy, he and his colleagues had ordered his provisional release. Nobody apart from Junot seems to have taken the charges against Buonaparte seriously. His landlord Joseph Laurenti, with whose daughter Buonaparte was carrying on a flirtation, had stood bail, and as a result he spent most of the eleven days of his detention in his own lodgings.9

Meanwhile, the Austrians had sent an army to reinforce the Sardinian forces, and General Dumerbion felt he had to do something. ‘My child,’ he wrote to Buonaparte, ‘draw me up a campaign plan as only you know how.’ On 26 August the child handed him one, and on 5 September he was at Oneglia to implement it. The French forces advanced on the point at which the two enemy armies met, aiming to split them apart. On 21 September Buonaparte witnessed his first pitched battle, an attack on Dego in which General Masséna distinguished himself. But further operations were called off by Carnot in Paris, and Buonaparte was left with nothing to do. This should have been welcome to him.10

Shortly after his release from arrest he had gone to Marseille to see Joseph, who was enjoying his new-found wealth and having himself addressed by the title of count by his in-laws. On meeting the family, Buonaparte had been struck by Marie-Julie’s much prettier younger sister, Bernardine Eugénie Désirée, and declared himself to be in love. Désirée, or Eugénie as he would call her, was sixteen or seventeen, modest and innocent, with just enough education for a deferential companion and obedient wife. ‘A stranger to tender passions’, Buonaparte wrote to her on 10 September, he had succumbed to ‘the pleasure’ of her company. ‘The charms of your person, of your character, imperceptibly conquered the heart of your love.’ His letters to her are stilted, rushes of passionate prose alternating with suggestions that she buy a piano and take a good teacher, as ‘music is the soul of love, the sweetness of life, the consolation of sorrows and the companion of innocence’. They lack conviction, which is not surprising.11

A new envoy from the Convention, Louis Turreau, had arrived at headquarters in Loano. As he had only just married, he brought his twenty-three-year-old wife with him, but it turned out to be not much of a honeymoon, as she took a fancy to Buonaparte and wasted no time in having an affair with him. ‘I was very young then, happy and proud of my success,’ he later recalled, and admitted that his exhilaration had led him to act irresponsibly: he had taken her on an excursion to see the front line, and to impress her he ordered a battery to open fire on an enemy position. The ensuing cannonade had cost the lives of several men. He later reproached himself bitterly for his childish action.12

Operations on the Italian front had come to a standstill, and at the beginning of November the Committee of Public Safety switched its priority to Corsica. The British had responded to Paoli’s appeal by occupying the island as a colony, with George III as monarch, Sir Gilbert Elliot as viceroy and Pozzo di Borgo as chief administrator. Paoli was bundled off to a second exile in London. As General Dumerbion had paid generous tribute to Buonaparte’s talents, he was given the task of preparing the artillery of the expeditionary force intended to recapture the island.13

He spent most of the last month of 1794 and the first two of 1795 in Toulon where it was assembling. The city was scarred by the siege and subject to riots by mobs seeking ‘aristos’ to lynch. One day a captured Spanish ship with some émigré French noble families aboard was brought into harbour, and a mob gathered in expectation. The city authorities tried to protect the émigrés, only to be accused of being royalist stooges and threatened with lynching. Buonaparte managed to calm the crowd, which contained some gunners who had served under him at the siege, and then smuggle the émigrés out of town in his artillery caissons.14

The Corsican expedition sailed from Toulon on 11 March, but soon ran into an Anglo-Neapolitan fleet, and after a brief encounter in which it lost two ships, sailed back into port. Disheartened by the prospect of inaction, Buonaparte asked to be transferred to the Army of the Rhine. His request remained without response, and he spent the next weeks mainly in Marseille, where on 21 April he became engaged to Désirée.15

He had been seeing her intermittently over the past months and corresponding with her regularly. Most of his letters are couched in the tone of a schoolmaster, as he tells her which books to read and which not, frets about whether her music teacher is good enough, arranges for a publisher in Paris to send her the latest tunes, reminds her to sing her scales regularly, going into tedious detail about the effects of striking a wrong note. He was a great music-lover, with a passion for the Italian composers of the day, and enjoyed lecturing those French ones he found wanting, sometimes entering into arguments of a technical nature with them.16

The engagement had probably been precipitated by the fact that at the end of March he had received a transfer to the Army of the West, operating against insurgents in the Vendée region of western France. The order to take up this posting reached him on 7 May, and to his chagrin he learned that he had been struck off the list of artillery generals, as their quota had been exceeded and he was the youngest, so he was relegated to what he regarded as the inferior status of infantry general.

The following day he set off for Paris, accompanied by his brother Louis, to whose education he was continuing to attend, drilling him mercilessly with mathematical tests even as they travelled up the valley of the Rhône and through Burgundy. He also took with him his devoted Junot and Marmont, who had come to hero-worship him. ‘I found him so superior to everything I had encountered in my life, his intimate conversation was so deep and so captivating, his mind was so full of future promise,’ wrote Marmont, ‘that I could not bear the idea of his impending departure.’ When Buonaparte suggested he accompany him he did not hesitate, even though he had no authorisation to do so.17

Marmont insisted they break their journey at Châtillon-sur-Seine, where his parents lived. His mother found Buonaparte taciturn to the point of being impossible to communicate with, and took the ‘little general’ off to visit her friends the Chastenay family who lived nearby. ‘On this first visit, in order to pass the time I was asked to play the piano,’ recalled the daughter of the house, Victorine. ‘The general seemed to appreciate it but his compliments were curt. I was then asked to sing, so I sang one in Italian which I had just learnt the music for. I asked him if I was pronouncing right, to which he just said no.’18

The following day the Chastenays dined at the Marmonts’, and afterwards Victorine asked Buonaparte about Corsica. He unwound, and in the course of the conversation, which lasted a full four hours, he spoke of his love for the epic poems supposedly written by the thirteenth-century Gaelic poet Ossian and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie. He spoke earnestly about politics, about happiness and self-fulfilment. On the third day he helped her make a posy of cornflowers and they played games, flirting and dancing. She was dismayed when, the day after that, he continued his journey.19

On reaching Paris in the last days of May, Buonaparte called on François Aubry, Carnot’s successor at the war ministry, but any hopes of reversing the decision striking him off the list of artillery generals were quickly dispelled. Aubry, a former artillery officer embittered by career disappointments, was not to be swayed. Buonaparte began to look around for someone who might help him.

One of the most prominent among those known as the ‘jeunesse dorée’, a faction persecuting the fallen Jacobins, was Stanislas Fréron, who was in love with Buonaparte’s fifteen-year-old sister Paulette, whom he had met in Marseille and whom he wished to marry. Buonaparte was not averse to the match if it could help his own cause.20

A potentially more useful acquaintance was Paul Barras, who had also been at Toulon. His chequered past included fighting the British in India, voting for the death of Louis XVI in the Convention, a minor role in the downfall of Robespierre, and the defeat of a royalist attempt to overthrow the Republic. A spell as commissary to the army had provided the opportunities for graft which enabled him to acquire considerable wealth, with which he indulged his love of luxury and women. He had turned his Jacobin coat inside out, surrounding himself with a court of roués and courtesans, and would have welcomed another ex-Jacobin with a realist’s ability to change his tune, but Barras trusted nobody. There had been Jacobin riots a few days before Buonaparte’s arrival, and the political situation remained unstable, with people representing every shade of revolution and counter-revolution manoeuvring in a kaleidoscopic succession of alliances and realignments. Barras would see no point in helping Buonaparte until he needed him. But he did take him under his wing to keep in reserve.

On 13 June Buonaparte received his posting to the Army of the West under General Lazare Hoche, operating against royalist rebels in the Vendée. He had no intention of going and obtained sick leave until 31 August, which gave him time to consider his options.

The fall of Robespierre had put an end to the Terror, and the resulting release from fear produced an eruption of hedonism. Buonaparte was astonished at the extent to which the people of Paris threw themselves into a life of pleasure. ‘To dance, to go to the theatre, to parties out in the country and to pay court to women, who are here the most beautiful in the world, is the main occupation and the most important thing,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘People look back on the Terror as on a bad dream.’21

Antoine Lavalette, a contemporary of Buonaparte, was horrified at what had happened to his native city, where ‘the dissolution of society had plumbed new depths’. He noted disapprovingly that ‘it was the newly rich who sought to set the tone, combining all the errors of a bad upbringing with all the ridicule of an inborn absence of dignity’. He was shocked at the ‘barely believable level of licentiousness’ on display, at the ‘lovely, well-bred women of high birth’ who ‘wore flesh-coloured pantaloons and buskins on their feet, barely covered by dresses of transparent gauze, with their breasts uncovered and their arms naked to the shoulder’. As another explained, ‘The aim of these ladies and the ne plus ultra of their art was to show as much nudity as possible without being naked’. Some moistened their dresses with oil to make them cling to the body.22

There were balls to which only relatives of those who had been guillotined were invited, in some cases held in prisons where the September massacres had taken place, at which the guests wore a red ribbon round their necks in a gesture somewhere between gallows humour and exorcism. Buonaparte may have been shocked, but he showed understanding of people’s need to compensate for the sufferings and the anxieties of the past – and he was a good deal less censorious than Lavalette when it came to the nouveaux riches.23

A disastrous economic situation and a financial crisis provoked by the vertiginous fall in value of the paper currency, the assignats, coupled with the emigration or execution of nobles, entailing the confiscation of their property, meant that there were a large number of properties on the market. People who had grown rich during the Revolution were desperate to park their depreciating cash in solid assets, creating a febrile market in which there was money to be made. On leaving Châtillon for Paris, Buonaparte had made a detour to view a country house at Ragny in Burgundy. ‘The château itself consists of a new residence or pavilion in the modern style,’ he wrote to Joseph on 22 May, going on to list its merits and pointing out that if the turrets which gave it ‘an aristocratic look’ were demolished it could be marketed as a splendid residence, with its ‘superb’ dining room four times the size of their old one in Ajaccio.24

The pursuit of pleasure had spawned a taste for luxuries of every kind, and some were scarce in Paris. Three days after reaching the capital Buonaparte took time off from promoting his career to research the price of sugar, soap and coffee. As it was far higher than in Marseille, he instructed Joseph to buy up a stock there and ship it to Paris. Ragny had been sold, he informed his brother a few weeks later, but there were plenty of other investment opportunities.25

At the beginning of July he reported that he had put in hand the sale of the coffee Joseph had sent, and urged him to buy up in Genoa, where the Clary family had moved, silk stockings, shawls, and Florentine and English taffeta (which would have to be imported into France through Leipzig, since Britain and France were at war), all of which were at a premium in Paris. He had succeeded in finding a sales outlet in Paris for Joseph Fesch, who had set himself up in the porcelain trade in Basel in Switzerland. He even urged Joseph to investigate the price of pasta in Italy, as the food shortages in Paris might make it worthwhile to import that. He had located a promising property in the valley of Montmorency, and was looking for others. He wanted Joseph to finance these speculations, but he also identified ways of buying on credit and selling on at a profit before having to realise the purchase. If only Joseph had followed his first suggestion, he complained, they would have made a million. Buonaparte could see people making fortunes all around him, and was exasperated by Joseph’s lack of interest.26

Naturally lazy, Joseph had no wish to hazard his easily acquired fortune in property speculation. He had followed the Clary family to neutral Genoa, where they had managed to take most of their money with them and from where they carried on their Levantine trade. Joseph was living well, and supporting his mother and sisters at Château-Sallé. Yet he badgered Buonaparte to use his influence to obtain for him a post as French consul in some trading city in Italy or the Levant, where he would be able to benefit from the salary and use his position to further his commercial activities. ‘We have lived so many years so closely bound together that our hearts have become entwined,’ Buonaparte wrote back, promising to try. ‘You know better than anyone how profoundly mine is entirely devoted to you.’27

He had managed to place Louis in the officers’ school at Châlons, which was costing him a considerable share of his half-pay, and was exploring the possibilities of getting the youngest, Geronimo, into school in Paris. He had used his connections to free Lucien – ‘Brutus’ had got himself arrested for his Jacobin connections. He found Lucien tiresome, impudent and irresponsible, ‘a born intriguer’, but he was family.28

In the culture to which Buonaparte had been brought up, the family operated as a clan, providing a security which he was missing in Paris. Although he was now twenty-five years old, and had been through a great deal over the past few years, he was still in many ways a child, with his displays of aggressive defensiveness and of emotion clothed in cynicism. Yet he was now having to deal with a complex set of challenges and sensations, and was emotionally torn between two different worlds. The one associated with Désirée held strong appeal.

Joseph’s was a perfect match. The Buonaparte and the Clary were grounded in the culture of the Mediterranean with its mainstay of the family. Both families were bent on financial and social advancement, but were essentially middle-class in outlook. Their aspirations to noble status were driven by material rather than ideological motives, and had nothing in common with the supposedly chivalric impulses of the noblesse. Nor were they bound by its prejudices.29

It is unlikely that Buonaparte’s feelings for Désirée were profound. Yet he did kindle strong feelings in her. Her surviving letters and drafts exude all the passion and sentimentality one would expect of a lovelorn teenager. When he left for Paris in May she spelled out her desolation, assuring him that every instant they were apart pierced her soul. ‘The thought of you is with me always, and will follow me to my grave,’ she wrote shortly after his departure, her only consolation the knowledge that he would always be faithful. She hoped he would not find the Parisian beauties too alluring, and reassured herself that ‘our hearts are much too closely united for it ever to be possible for them to separate’.30

Shortly after his arrival in Paris, Buonaparte wrote saying that although he had met some ‘pretty and very charming women’ at Châtillon, none could compare with his ‘sweet and kind Eugénie’. He wrote two days later, sending her some songs, and again three days after that, with more sheet music, chiding her for not writing more often. On 14 June, on hearing that she had moved to Genoa with her brother and sisters, he wrote a long and barely coherent letter reproaching her for letting him down.31

He had made her promise that she would wait for him in Marseille, and her leaving made it impossible for them to see each other. A French citizen who went abroad was liable to be labelled an émigré and proscribed. For a serving officer to do so was tantamount to treason. Her going to Genoa suggested that her family were opposed to their marriage, and he saw it as a betrayal on her part. In an emotional letter of 14 June, Buonaparte assumes that their liaison is over while expressing the conviction that she will always love him. Feigning noble abnegation, he expresses the hope that she will find one worthier than himself. In a welter of self-deprecation he describes himself as a being cursed with ‘a fiery imagination, a cool head, a strange heart and an inclination to melancholy’, who is ‘surrounded by the savagery and immorality of men’, believes himself to be ‘the opposite of other men’ and despises life. Yet he insists that he can only find happiness in her love, and begs her to find a way for them to be reunited. ‘There is nothing I will not undertake for my adorable Eugénie,’ he affirms. ‘But if fate is against us think only of yourself and of your own Happiness: it is more precious than mine.’ Perhaps significantly, that was the day he resolved not to join the Army of the West and extended his sick leave.32

He wrote again ten days later, complaining of her silence and assuring her that although Paris was brimming with pleasures of every kind he could think only of his Eugénie and consoled himself with looking at her portrait, promising to send her his own. The same day in a letter to Joseph he wrote that ‘if the business with Eugénie is not concluded and if you do not send me any funds with which to operate, then I will accept the post of infantry general and go with the Army of the Rhine to seek my death’. He intimated that the engagement was broken off and suggested that as she would not want the portrait he had sent, Joseph should keep it for himself. She continued to cover notebooks with his name and initials, but there is little doubt her family wanted no more to do with him, and he too now had other things on his mind.33

‘So there we were the three of us in Paris,’ recalled Marmont. ‘Bonaparte without a job, me without any formal permission, and Junot attached as aide de camp to a general whom they did not want to employ […] passing our time at the Palais-Royal and at the theatres, having very little money and no future.’ Money does not in fact appear to have been a major problem; Buonaparte may have been on half-pay, but that did represent a regular income, and Junot, who came from a comfortably-off family, received subsidies from his father. Their future was indeed uncertain; Buonaparte’s military career had stalled and his political connections were not influential enough to restart it.34

Barras had opened a new world to Buonaparte by introducing him to those who set the tone in Paris. Chief among them was the great beauty, the daughter of a Spanish banker, Thérèse de Cabarrus, known as ‘Notre Dame de Thermidor’ because the revolutionary Jean-Lambert Tallien had fallen in love with her, freed her from prison and then helped bring down Robespierre and end the Terror in order to save his own as well as her neck. Other social lionesses included Juliette Récamier, Aimée de Coigny, Julie Talma and Rose de Beauharnais, as well as the more intellectually prized Germaine de Staël and older, more experienced ladies such as Mesdames de Montansier and Château-Renaud. They were seductive, sophisticated and assertive women who did as they pleased, and Buonaparte’s references in letters to Désirée and to Joseph leave no doubt that he was fascinated and excited by them.

He cut a poor figure with his small stature, lean and sallow features, hungry look and worn clothes, and he had no idea of how to present himself, how to enter a room, greet people or respond. His manner was farouche, a mixture of shyness and aggression that baffled people. While it could be appealing to the provincial girls he had encountered up till now, it grew disagreeable when he became defensive. He was particularly awkward with sophisticated women, and gave the impression of not caring what they thought of him. He was out of his depth, not so much socially as in terms of simple human communication: he showed a curious lack of empathy which meant that he did not know what to say to people, and therefore either said nothing or something inappropriate.

His gracelessness, unkempt appearance and poor French, delivered in staccato phrases, did not help. Laure Permon, in whose parents’ house he and Junot found a second home, thought him ugly and dirty. Bourrienne’s wife found him cold and sombre, and little short of savage. He could sit through a comedy with them and remain impassive while the whole house laughed, and then laugh raucously at odd moments. She remembered him telling a tasteless joke about one of his men having his testicles shot off at Toulon, and laughing uproariously while all around sat horrified. Yet there was something about his manner that some found unaccountably attractive.35

The sophistication of the liberated ladies both attracted and repelled him. They made Désirée seem provincial and uninteresting on the one hand, yet pure and sublime on the other. But the ardent love of a virginal teenager would not stand up to the sensual draw of the more sophisticated older woman, particularly in a young man who was still a child craving a mother figure. It seems he made a pass at Thérèse Tallien, who rebuffed him but apparently retained a fondness for him, as he was welcome in her salon, and she even used her contacts to obtain some cloth for him to have a new uniform run up. He appears to have been more successful with other women, perhaps including Letizia’s childhood friend Panoria Permon.36

He was feeling sorry for himself. On 5 August he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety complaining that his merits and devotion to the Republic had not been recognised. A few days later he admitted to Joseph that he was ‘very little attached to life’, and suggested he might as well throw himself under a passing carriage. Those are not the only things he said and wrote which suggest that he did on occasion contemplate suicide.37

With little else to do, he spent whole days at the Bibliothèque Nationale, established in 1792 with the amalgamation of the old royal library and the noble and ecclesiastical libraries seized during the Revolution. He was not only reading, as he always did when he had time on his hands. He was also writing.

The fruit was a novella entitled Clisson et Eugénie, no doubt in homage to one of his favourite novels, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie. Its hero, Clisson, feels the call to arms from earliest childhood, excited by the sight of a helmet, a sabre or a drum. At the age when others read fairy tales he studies the lives of great men; while others chase girls he applies himself to the art of war. He grows up to be an inspired young soldier who ‘marked every step with brilliant actions’, and quickly attains the highest rank. ‘His victories followed one after the other and his name was known to the nation as that of one of its dearest defenders.’ But he is the victim of ‘wickedness and envy’, having to endure the ‘calumnies’ of his peers. ‘They called his loftiness of spirit’ pride and reproached him for his ‘firmness’. Disenchanted, feeling out of place in social gatherings, he flees society, wandering remote forests and abandoning himself to ‘the desires and palpitations of his heart’ on moonlit nights, brimming with melancholy and self-pity. He meets Eugénie, who is ‘like the song of the nightingale or a passage of Paisiello [his favourite composer], which pleases merely sensitive souls, but whose melody transports and arouses passions only in those which can feel it keenly’. They fall in love, settle down and start a family, but after a few years he hears the call of duty from the endangered motherland and resolves to gird his loins once more. ‘His name was the signal for victory’, and his triumphs ‘surpassed the hopes of the nation and the army’. He sends one of his aides, his best friend, to console Eugénie in his absence, which he does only too well. When Clisson discovers that they have fallen in love he writes her a letter full of generosity and tenderness, and charges into battle and his death.38

The work requires little comment. It is a psychoanalyst’s feast with its display of emotional immaturity, dreams of glory, and sense of superiority combined with a desperate awareness of inferiority in some areas, with aggression coupled to a curiously mawkish sensibility, and total self-obsession.

On 17 August, having received orders to take up his posting with the Army of the West, Buonaparte called on Aubry’s successor at the ministry of war, Doulcet de Pontécoulant. The new head of military affairs was struck by the way the frail, sickly-looking man came to life as he spoke, his eyes sparkling with fire as he uttered the words ‘army’, ‘battle’ and ‘victory’. He appointed him to the Cabinet Historique et Topographique, a general staff consisting of twenty officers. Buonaparte applied himself with his usual single-mindedness, producing plans and memoranda on every aspect of the military situation, often staying up until 3 a.m. ‘When I work on a plan of campaign, I cannot rest until I have finished, until I have worked through all my ideas,’ he later explained. ‘I am like a woman in labour.’ He presented Pontécoulant with a plan for the conquest of northern Italy which when it was sent to the commander of the Army of Italy was rejected as the figment of a madman who should be sent to an asylum.39

The work did not distract him from more prosaic matters; he was looking at properties within easy reach of Paris, and had located one with ‘a very fine house’ whose drawing rooms, dining room, kitchen, pantry, bedrooms, garden, orchard, kitchen garden, fields, pastures and woods he listed for his brother’s benefit. ‘In any case, I shall buy it, because it seems to me that it cannot fail to be a good deal,’ he concluded. His confidence in being able to find the necessary funds may have had something to do with a revival of his marriage plans.40

‘I have friends, much esteem, balls, parties, but far from my sweet Eugénie I can have only some pleasure, some enjoyment, but no happiness,’ he wrote to Désirée at the end of August, urging her to join him, adding, ‘time flies, the seasons follow each other and old age advances’. To Joseph he wrote that he wanted to ‘conclude the business of Eugénie’, as it was interfering with his plans; he felt it was time he married, and there was no lack of willing women in Paris. ‘It is for her to sort things out, since she spoiled everything by her journey [to Genoa]. If she really wants it, everything can be easily arranged.’41

‘You well know, my friend, that I live only for the pleasure I can give my own family, happy only in their Happiness,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘If my hopes are assisted by that success which never fails me in my enterprises, I will be able to be of use to all of you, make you happy and fulfil your desires …’ He was trying to obtain Joseph a consulate in Italy, and had managed to land Fesch a job provisioning the Army of the Rhine. He was sending Louis 300 francs a month: ‘He’s a good sort, and, also, just like me, he has warmth, wit, health, talent, attention to detail, all of it.’ He was pleased with the way the family was doing, and full of hope for the future. ‘I could not be better situated or have a more pleasant and satisfactory position here,’ he assured Joseph on 8 September. ‘The future should be held in contempt by a man who has courage.’ In between various proposals for speculating on property he returned to ‘the business of Eugénie’, which he insisted must be resolved. ‘If these people do not wish to conclude the matter of Eugénie, so much the worse for her, since she is stupid enough to listen to them,’ he wrote a couple of weeks later, making out that he would have done her family an honour by marrying her. He had better things to do than wait on them, and he crossed ‘Eugénie’ out of the title of his novella.42

He got wind of a project to send officers to Constantinople to modernise the Sultan’s artillery, and applied to lead it. As he explained to his brother, he would be in command of an important mission, he would probably be able to get him the post of consul, and they would make a deal of money. On 15 September 1795 he was confirmed in command of a military mission to the Porte. He selected Songis, Marmont, Junot and Muiron to accompany him on what promised to be the adventure of a lifetime. Yet a different adventure would change his plans.43

9
General Vendémiaire

What really happened on 5 October 1795 remains a mystery. The events of that day, 13 Vendémiaire in the revolutionary calendar, were rich in consequences, not so much for the continuing course of the Revolution as for the future of one man – General Buonaparte. Yet it is his role in the events that is the most elusive.

While he was absorbed by his contradictory feelings for Désirée, his financial speculations, his military career and his dreams of oriental riches, a new political crisis had been brewing. The men who had taken power after the fall of Robespierre had provided neither strong government and stability nor any principles which could unite the nation. They reflected all the vices and uncertainties of a society that had lost its way. Jacobins lurked in the wings, and the more extreme such as ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf were plotting the ultimate revolution. At the opposite end of the scale, royalists mustered for a restoration of the monarchy.

On 8 June the ten-year-old son of Louis XVI died in the Temple prison in Paris. His uncle, the late king’s younger brother, issued a proclamation from Verona, where he had taken refuge, assuming the succession as Louis XVIII. Less than three weeks later the Royal Navy landed 4,000 émigrés in Brittany to support royalist insurgents. General Hoche, commanding the army in which Buonaparte should have been serving, forced them back to the Quiberon peninsula, where they and another 2,000 men landed by the British were defeated on 21 July. The following day peace was signed between France and Spain, whose invasion force had been driven back as far as Bilbao. The Republic appeared to be secure. But royalist feeling remained strong, and discontent with the existing government simmered on.

There was a degree of consensus that the country needed a new constitution. The first, passed in September 1791, had turned France into a constitutional monarchy. It had been superseded, along with the monarchy, by a republican one in June 1793, Year I in the revolutionary calendar. But this had been quickly suspended in the state of national emergency provoked by the threat of invasion. A new one, the Constitution of Year III, was adopted on 22 August 1795. It replaced the Convention with a Council of the Five Hundred and a Council of Elders of half that number, both elected by suffrage based on property ownership. The governing Committee of Public Safety was to be superseded by an Executive Directory of five elected by the chambers through a complex procedure. ‘The government will soon be formed,’ Buonaparte wrote to Joseph on 12 September. ‘A serene future is dawning for France.’ He could not have been more wrong.1

Those who sat in the Convention had no intention of relinquishing power. Realising that in free elections royalists would capture a majority in both new chambers, they passed a law stipulating that two-thirds of the seats, 500 out of 750, would go to members of the existing Convention. This provoked an insurrection in Normandy and agitation in Paris. Royalists were dominant in several of the sections, the neighbourhood assemblies of the capital, and by the first days of October the city was in a state of ferment.

On the evening of 3 October Buonaparte received a note from Barras, still a member of the Committee of Public Safety, asking him to call at his house in Chaillot at ten the following morning. Barras needed ‘men of execution’ to deal with what he called ‘the royalist terrorists’ mustering their forces. It is not known what was agreed at their meeting, but Buonaparte seems to have remained non-committal, and Barras also contacted two former Jacobin generals who had been set aside after the fall of Robespierre: Carteaux and Guillaume Brune.2

Insurrection was in the air, and by the time Buonaparte returned from Chaillot one of the sections, Le Pelletier, was mobilising its National Guard. He nevertheless went to the theatre. By the time he came out, at about seven or eight in the evening, the situation had grown critical. The Le Pelletier section was in open revolt, turning its narrow streets into an impregnable fortress. General Jacques Menou and representatives of the Convention had set out with troops to confront the rebels, but seeing the impossibility of dislodging them without heavy casualties and realising that they would soon be trapped, they negotiated a truce and retreated. The Le Pelletier section declared itself to be the rightful authority, and called on other sections to join it.

Menou, a former officer of the royal army, was accused of treason and placed under arrest, and the search was on for someone to replace him. Writing more than twenty years later, Buonaparte asserts that he went to the Convention and found the deputies in a state of panic. The names of various generals were put forward, including his. Hidden among the spectators, he was able to slip out to consider his position. He relates that it took him half an hour to decide whether to take up the challenge: he did not like the existing authorities, but if the royalists were to get the upper hand and bring back the Bourbons, everything that had been achieved since 1789 (and his own future) would be in jeopardy. He maintains that he then offered his services to the Committee of Public Safety, on condition he was given absolute authority, without having to take instructions from its representatives as was usual.3

Barras tells a different story. ‘There is nothing simpler than replacing Menou,’ he claims to have told the Committee. ‘I have the man you need; a little Corsican officer who will not be so squeamish.’ In Buonaparte’s version, Barras assumed nominal command of the Convention’s forces, which dispensed with the requirement of government representatives, and he, as second in command, took effective control of operations.4

Either way, neither of them slept that night. Sometime after one o’clock on the morning of 5 October, Buonaparte ordered a young chef d’escadron of the 21st Mounted Chasseurs, Joachim Murat, to ride over to the plain of the Sablons and secure forty cannon stored there before the rebels could get hold of them. At first light, as the drumrolls summoning the national guards of the various sections resounded across the city, Buonaparte was positioning the guns at strategic points around the seat of the government at the Tuileries, such as the Pont Neuf in the east, the rue Saint-Honoré to the north, and what is now the Place de la Concorde in the west.

The government troops, numbering just over 5,000 men, supported by 1,500 ‘patriots’ ready to defend the Republic against the royalists, and several hundred deputies armed with muskets, faced probably about four times their number of national guards converging from all sides. There followed a lengthy stand-off. A heavy downpour dampened the ardour of the insurgents, and it was not until around four o’clock in the afternoon that the first shots were fired. The batteries were positioned in such a way that the insurgents could not deploy and bring their superior numbers to bear, and the canister shot they fired precluded any attempt to rush them. It was all over within two hours, and while gunfire was heard at various points in the city during the night, all remaining rebel forces were mopped up the following day. Reports of casualties vary from around 400 to over a thousand.5

Buonaparte’s version, which became official history and then legend as the ‘whiff of grapeshot’ which demonstrated his ruthless sense of purpose, has him in charge, directing everything, generously waiting for the insurgents to fire first, using only enough of the canister shot to show that he meant business, and firing blanks thereafter. The truth of this is hard to ascertain. ‘The enemy came to attack us at the Tuileries,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘We killed a lot of them. They killed 30 of our men and wounded 60. We disarmed the sections and everything is quiet.’ Later he claimed that casualties were no higher than 200 dead and wounded on each side.6

Long after he had been shunted aside by the ‘little Corsican officer’, an embittered Barras would describe the events differently. It was he who had planned everything, he who had ordered the guns brought from the Sablons, he who had instructed Brune to fire canister shot over the heads of the oncoming rebels. ‘On the 13 Vendémiaire Bonaparte played no role other than that of my aide de camp,’ he summed up. In his official report delivered to the Convention on 10 October, he praised Brune and others, and did not mention Buonaparte. When Barras had finished, Fréron, still hoping to marry Paulette, rose to speak and reminded him of Buonaparte’s contribution, which Barras reluctantly acknowledged. His report is not the only one to omit Buonaparte. While one account does record that he had a horse killed under him, it states that it was General Verdier who positioned the guns. There must nevertheless have been something remarkable about Buonaparte’s conduct on that day.7

The events had shown that with well-led troops on its side, a government could put an end to the mob rule that had plagued the Revolution. High prices and food shortages meant that Paris remained vulnerable to riots, and in the following days Barras increased the military presence in the city. He recommended Buonaparte for the post of his second in command, and as he himself was about to take up that of a member of the Executive Directory, he would have to give up the command, which meant that his second would be in charge of the most powerful force in the land. It seems unlikely that he would have placed it in any but the most capable hands. There was no further mention of Constantinople, and Buonaparte was now being referred to as ‘General Vendémiaire’, which suggests that his role had been decisive.

On 16 October Buonaparte was promoted to divisional general, and ten days later he was confirmed as commander of the Army of the Interior. He had been effective military governor of Paris since 6 October, and had immediately set about pacifying the city, reforming the National Guard and confiscating privately-held arms, discharging officers with royalist leanings and closing down the Jacobin Club, and taking in hand the police of the capital. Not confining himself to his headquarters in the Place Vendôme, he rode about the city, escorted by a retinue of staff officers and a growing number of aides, including his brother Louis, for whom he had obtained the rank of lieutenant, Junot, Marmont and Murat, whose dash in the early hours of 5 October had impressed him. ‘He never went anywhere without his moustachioed officers with their long sabres,’ recalled Barras. ‘He would mount his tall palfrey, wearing a huge hat with its tricolour plumes and its turned-up rims, his boots turned down, and a dangling sabre larger than its wearer.’ Junot and Murat had been promoted by Buonaparte, and wore with panache the distinctions of a rank they did not officially hold, while Murat embellished his uniform with various outlandish accoutrements.8

Buonaparte himself had grown into his role. Gone was the awkward gait. ‘He already had extraordinary aplomb, a grand manner quite new to me,’ remembered Marmont. He would go to the theatre, making a dramatic entrance with his entourage of swaggering young bloods, their spurs and sabres clinking as they went. He was developing a taste for the theatrical, and was learning a new part. During a food riot in one of the poorer quartiers as he rode through it one day with his glittering cavalcade, he confronted a huge woman who accused his like of growing fat on their salaries by asking her which of them was the fatter, which provoked mirth and defused the situation.9

While he had not gained weight, he was certainly growing fat in the sense the woman meant. Barras, himself one of the great embezzlers of history, had seen to it that Buonaparte was well provided for. How, we do not know. Although he was drawing a salary of 4,000 francs a month, the value of the assignats in which it was paid had fallen dramatically: by 23 October it had dropped to 3 per cent of its nominal value, and specie was extremely scarce. With a pound of sugar costing 100 francs and a bushel of potatoes 200, his salary would not have gone far. He did get a daily allowance for food and other essentials, and fodder for his horses. But that does not explain how he was able to provide his mother with financial assistance adding up to more than his annual salary, send Joseph 400,000 francs, and badger Bourrienne to find him a property to buy.10

As well as money, he was not short of influence. He now wrote to Letizia that Paulette must not marry Fréron, who no longer counted politically. He was in the process of arranging a consulate in Italy for Joseph, and in the meantime obtained for him letters of marque licensing two corsairs to operate out of Genoa and prey on British shipping. He found Lucien a job as commissary to the Army of the North, and Fesch one as a secretary, pending a better job overseeing the Paris hospitals. Nor did he forget more distant relatives. ‘The family wants for nothing,’ he declared to Joseph with satisfaction in a letter of 18 December. ‘I have sent them all money, assignats, clothing, etc. …’11

Barras relates that he was arranging to set Buonaparte up by marrying him off to Mademoiselle de Montansier, an older lady who owned several theatres in Paris, a sure source of income at the time. Thoughts of Désirée would not stand in the way: in a letter to his sister-in-law Marie-Julie Clary, Buonaparte mentions every member of the family but her. In a letter of 9 December he bids Joseph to give her his regards, but for the first time refers to her as Désirée, not Eugénie. He does ask for news of her in one written ten days later, but without the impatience that accompanied previous requests. Buonaparte did not, however, marry Mademoiselle de Montansier.12

Shortly after he had ordered all privately-owned arms to be confiscated, a fourteen-year-old boy called at his headquarters, begging that he might be allowed to keep the sword which had belonged to his father, a general guillotined under the Terror. Moved by the boy’s request, Buonaparte agreed. The following day, the story goes, the grateful mother called. Or he may have called on her, bringing the document permitting the family to keep the sword. Or, as Buonaparte would have us believe, he sent along one of his aides, who reported back that she was a beautiful widow. Or the whole story may be a fable woven round some incident to do with the sword. It is unlikely that Buonaparte had never met the widow in question, since she was a close friend of the ladies whose salons he had been frequenting for months, and, being the mistress of Barras, was often at his side. One thing is certain – that General Buonaparte fell madly, almost obsessively in love with her.13

Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Beauharnais was born into the parvenu and scandal-ridden family of Tascher, who owned La Pagerie, a plantation in the French island colony of Martinique. She was brought to France and married off at an early age to an undistinguished nobleman, Alexandre de Beauharnais, who paraded under the assumed title of vicomte. He was jealous and abusive as well as unfaithful, and repudiated her after having sired two children. During the Revolution he had briefly presided over the National Assembly and then been put in command of the Army of the Rhine. An inept soldier, he had allowed the fortress of Mainz to fall to the enemy in 1793 out of fecklessness, but was accused of treason and executed the following year. His wife, known in childhood as Yéyette and later as Josephine, was incarcerated in the same prison, Les Carmes, where, while he was conducting an affair with the widow of an executed general, she was doing the same with General Lazare Hoche, also a prisoner.

Prisons were hotbeds of sexual activity during the Terror, and Les Carmes, whose walls were still smeared with the blood of the 115 priests massacred there in September 1792, was no exception. The usual instinct in the presence of impending death was in this case reinforced by the hope of getting pregnant, which would spare a woman the guillotine. As a result, the multiple-occupancy chambers throbbed to the sound of couplings, often with the warders themselves, in scenes of fear and degradation which left their mark on those like Josephine who were fortunate enough to survive.

On her release from prison following the fall of Robespierre, Josephine made the most of the friendships forged there with, amongst others, Thérèse Tallien. She resumed her affair with General Hoche and was prominent in the exuberant new society, the salons and the extravagant macabre entertainments of the capital. Sometime in the early summer of 1795 she became the mistress of Barras, but by the beginning of the autumn he was ready to move on and began looking around for a husband who might provide for her. She had no money and was living from day to day on the generosity of lovers, currently that of Barras, who had rented a small house for her off the rue Chantereine.

Josephine was thirty-two and, as Barras put it, ‘growing precociously decrepit’. She had never been a beauty, and with her freshness wilting she had to resort to what he called ‘the most refined, the most perfected artistry ever practised by the courtesans of ancient Greece or Paris in the exercise of their profession’. She knew how to overcome every disadvantage, concealing her rotten teeth by keeping her mouth shut when she smiled, which many found irresistible. She possessed an almost legendary charm, grace, and a languor of movement which people associated with her creole origins, lending her a certain spice in their imagination. She was both dignified, with elegant manners and bearing, and girlishly light-hearted, displaying a devil-may-care attitude to practicalities. And there is little doubt that she was an accomplished lover. But she had no position to fall back on when these assets failed, and marriage was the only practical way of securing her future.14

According to Barras she had set her cap at Hoche, but he was married, and had allegedly commented that ‘one could take a whore as a mistress for a time, but not as a legitimate wife’. It seems that Barras then suggested she marry Buonaparte. She was not taken with the idea, allegedly saying that of all the men she might bring herself to love, this ‘puss in boots’ was the last, and objecting that he came from ‘a family of beggars’, even though he was by then showering her with presents. Barras encouraged the match, partly in order to establish her on a respectable footing, perhaps also to tighten his grip on the useful young general, who was growing alarmingly independent.15

Buonaparte had begun to do as he pleased, appointing and cashiering officers, reorganising units, and extending his brief beyond military matters. He called on the Directors almost daily, not so much advising them as telling them what to do, and castigating them for their incompetence. When they reproved him for acting in an arbitrary manner, he reputedly countered by saying it was impossible to get anything done if one were to stick to the law, and he usually managed to get them to see things his way. Getting Buonaparte settled might make life easier for the Directors. Barras advised him that ‘a married man finds his place in society’, and that marriage gave a man ‘more substance and greater resilience against his enemies’. Most people thought he was merely trying to park an unwanted mistress, and the Marquis de Sade would publish that version, thinly veiled, in his Zoloé et ses deux acolytes.16

Buonaparte was not as fussy as Hoche. He allegedly told Barras that he did not like the idea of seducing a virgin, and preferred to find ‘l’amour tout fait que l’amour a faire’, in other words the ground well prepared. Whether those really were his words or not, there is a ring of truth about what they expressed; such cynical bluster is characteristic of the sexually insecure.17

The first extant letter from Buonaparte to Josephine is undated, but it was written at seven in the morning, probably in the second half of December 1795, and almost certainly after their first night of love. ‘I have woken full of you,’ he wrote. ‘The picture of you and the memory of yesterday’s intoxicating evening have left no rest to my senses. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what a strange effect you have had on my heart!’ He goes on to say that he cannot stop thinking about her and what she is doing, and cannot wait to see her again, in three hours’ time. ‘Meanwhile, mio dolce amor, a million kisses from me; but do not give me any, as your kisses set my blood on fire.’18

The incomparable courtesan had clearly given him his first pleasurable amorous experience. ‘It was, it seems, his first love, and he experienced it with all the intensity of his nature,’ noted Marmont. He also noted something else. ‘What is incredible, and yet absolutely true, is that Bonaparte’s vanity was flattered,’ he wrote, explaining that for all his republican talk, the young general was beguiled by the social grace of the old nobility, and that in the company of the former pseudo-vicomtesse de Beauharnais he felt as though he had been accepted into its charmed circle; he was not Carlo Buonaparte’s son for nothing. Josephine fed Buonaparte’s social aspirations with talk of her estates in Martinique, cleverly disguising her penury and hinting at great wealth. She had taste and flair, and had managed to create a sense of elegance in the little house on the rue Chantereine with the few sticks of furniture and meagre ornaments she possessed, and despite the chipped assorted china and unmatched flatware her dinners exuded refined aristocratic ease. The house itself, designed for the philosopher Condorcet by Claude Nicolas Ledoux, was an intimate retreat, reached by a narrow walled lane, a refuge from the political turmoil of the capital. Buonaparte felt well there not just on account of his love for Josephine. He quickly captivated her two children, the fourteen-year-old Eugène and the twelve-year-old Hortense. They had begun by resenting his intrusion, but gave in when he started telling them ghost stories and playing with them. Still something of a child himself, he had found a home in Paris.19

Josephine was unsure about this third child. ‘They want me to marry, my dear friend!’ she wrote to a confidante. ‘All my friends urge me to, my aunt almost orders it and my children beg me to! “Do you love him?” you will ask. – Well … no. “So you find him unappealing?” – No, but I find myself in a state of tepidity which I find unpleasant …’ She goes on to say that she feels she should feel greater ardour: ‘I admire the general’s courage, the extent of his knowledge in all things, of which he speaks equally well, the agility of his mind, which allows him to seize the thoughts of others almost before they have expressed them; but I am fearful, I confess, of the control he seems to wish to exert over everything around him. His piercing look has something about it quite mysterious which impresses even the directors: you can judge for yourself how it intimidates a woman!’

What seems to have bothered her most was his ardour. His various sexual encounters to date had evidently left him cold, and what he experienced with Josephine had opened up a gamut of new sensations and unlocked feelings he had either never known, or had repressed with all the vehemence with which he had lambasted his friend des Mazis at Valence. ‘Above all,’ continues Josephine, ‘that which should please me, the strength of a passion of which he speaks with a force which does not permit any doubt as to its sincerity is precisely that which holds back the consent which I am often ready to give. Having passed my first youth, can I hope to preserve this violent love which, in the general’s case, resembles an access of madness?’ She also found it faintly ridiculous to be the object of adoration of a younger man. She was astonished at his ‘absurd self-confidence’, while admitting that at moments she believed him capable of anything. Her friends encouraged her, and Barras reassured her that he would soon be sending the young general off to war to cool his ardour.20

By then the coalition against France was in poor shape: Tuscany, Prussia, Holland and Spain had dropped out and made peace. Only Austria, Britain and Sardinia were actively pursuing the war. On 31 December an armistice was signed with Austria, but it was expected that hostilities would resume in the spring, and Buonaparte had pronounced ideas on how they should be conducted. Although he was now in command of Paris and the interior, he could not help meddling in overall strategy, to the annoyance of most of the Directors.

Buonaparte’s plan for a two-pronged attack on Vienna, to be delivered through Germany by the Army of the Rhine under General Jean-Victor Moreau and through the Tyrol by the Army of Italy, had been sent to the relevant commanders in September 1795. It had been ridiculed by General Kellermann, who had succeeded Dumerbion at the Army of Italy, but was implemented by General Scherer, who had replaced him in command. He carried out the first stage successfully, but then, instead of moving on as prescribed, came to a standstill, pleading insufficient strength and the low morale of his troops. In January 1796 Buonaparte produced an amended version of the plan, but this too met with a critical reception, and one of the commissioners attached to the Army of Italy protested at orders being sent by ‘project-mongers’ ‘gnawed by ambition and greedy for posts above their abilities’, ‘madmen’ in Paris who knew nothing of the realities of the situation on the ground yet thought they could ‘seize the moon with their teeth’. Scherer tendered his resignation.21

The Directory sent Saliceti to Nice to investigate. He reported that the Army of Italy was not only lacking in all the necessities, it was suffering from low morale, due largely to Scherer’s poor leadership. At the suggestion of Barras, the head of the Directory, Carnot, appointed Buonaparte to succeed him. Carnot regarded the Italian theatre of operations as secondary, and supposed that this ‘little captain’, as he referred to him, would be up to the limited task. The appointment nevertheless raised eyebrows, as Buonaparte had never commanded a unit, let alone an army in the field, and had never been in a real battle. There were plenty of experienced generals to choose from who, as some observed, were not treacherous Corsicans.22

Buonaparte set to his new task with his characteristic sense of purpose. He bought all the maps and books on Italy he could find and shut himself up for a week in his office reading, lying on his stomach on maps spread on the floor and tracing possible routes and lines of advance. On the afternoon of 8 March he met Josephine at the offices of her notary Raguideau to draw up their marriage contract and sign a séparation de biens, a prenuptial agreement, after which they parted and spent the night apart (Barras claims she spent it with him). Buonaparte almost certainly worked through the night, and did not emerge from his offices until that night of 9 March, when he remembered, two hours late, an important appointment.23

At ten o’clock he drove across a Paris thickly carpeted in snow, accompanied by his aide Jean Le Marois, to the offices of the deuxième municipalité of Paris, housed in the former residence of an émigré marquis, situated in the rue d’Antin. Josephine had been waiting for him there for two hours, along with Barras, Jean-Lambert Tallien, now a member of the legislative chamber, and her lawyer Étienne Calmelet, who were to witness their marriage. The man who was to marry them, the officier de l’état civil Carles Leclercq, had grown tired of waiting and gone home to bed, leaving a minor functionary to act in his stead.

The resulting marriage was invalid. The functionary in question had no authority to marry anyone; Buonaparte’s witness Le Marois was under the required age of twenty-one; and the documents provided by both parties were spurious: pleading the impossibility of providing a birth certificate due to the British blockade of Martinique, Josephine produced a document drawn up by her notary attesting that she had been born on the island in 1767, four years after her real date of birth, while Buonaparte, using the same argument, produced a similar one giving his date of birth as 5 February 1768 (the day Corsica became French).24

After the ceremony, without so much as a celebratory drink, the participants went home singly, except for the newlyweds. But their wedding night was not a success, as Josephine’s pet pug, Fortuné, would not let Buonaparte get into her bed, and bit him in the calf when he tried. The next day he accompanied her to Madame Campan’s school at Saint-Germain-en-Laye to visit Hortense. That night he may have had access to his spouse, but by the following evening he was on his way south, travelling by night in the company of Junot and the commissary Félix Chauvet. Wisely, he had opted to have his own men running the supply services, and he trusted Chauvet, who was an old friend of the family from Marseille and had served him at Toulon. After much begging he had also persuaded Jean-Pierre Collot, an efficient victualler, to come with him.25

They went by way of Marseille, where Buonaparte had a serious matter to attend to. He had not asked his mother for permission to marry, a mark of disrespect and a sin against Corsican family lore, nor had he informed any of his siblings of the forthcoming event – with good reason. He knew that Josephine did not conform to their idea of a desirable wife or a useful addition to the family. She came from an alien milieu, and not only did she not bring any money with her, her interests and those of her children were bound to conflict with those of the Buonaparte. He had himself berated Lucien for his marriage to the lowly Christine Boyer, and more recently had ruled out allowing Paulette to marry the waning Fréron. Lucien, who knew Josephine and disliked her, would no doubt have enjoyed alerting Letizia to his brother’s mésalliance. On reaching Marseille, Buonaparte apprised Letizia of his marriage and delivered a fittingly deferential letter from Josephine. She took some persuasion, and consulted Joseph before grudgingly responding with a letter whose text Buonaparte had prepared in advance.26

He did not call on Désirée, now back in Marseille, but she heard his news and wrote him a suitably heartbroken and melodramatic letter: ‘You have made me miserable for the rest of my life, and yet I still have the heart to forgive you. My life is a horrible torture for me since I can no longer devote it to you … You, Married! I cannot accustom myself to the idea, it is killing me, I cannot survive it.’ She ended by assuring him that she would never marry another.27

Her letter might have moved the ‘Clisson’ of a few months earlier, but now Buonaparte had thoughts only for Josephine. ‘Every instant takes me further away from you, my adorable love, and with every instant I find less and less strength with which to bear being away from you,’ he wrote as he sped south two days after leaving her in Paris. ‘You are the constant object of all my thoughts,’ he assured her, wishing he could be back reading ‘our wonderful Ossian’ together. It is the first extant document he signed ‘Bonaparte’.28

10
Italy

When he reached the headquarters of the Army of Italy at Nice on 26 March 1796, the twenty-six-year-old Bonaparte faced one of the greatest challenges of his life. He had never held independent command of so much as a platoon in the field, yet he was now commander-in-chief of an army, staffed with men older and more experienced than him, with sound reputations. Such was André Masséna, eleven years his senior, a big, tall man with expansive gestures and an ironic, malicious smile, the son of a petty grocer from Nice who had been orphaned early and run away to sea, then joined the royal army in which he rose as high as a plebeian could, before, after a spell as a smuggler, fighting his way to general’s rank in the army of the Republic. He was a force of nature, uneducated, ostentatiously brave, determined and effective in battle, displaying tactical flair – and a piratical lust for treasure. Another was Charles-Pierre Augereau, twelve years older than Bonaparte, the son of a servant and a Parisian fruit-seller who had a long career behind him as a mercenary in the Neapolitan and Prussian armies before rising in that of the Republic by his conspicuous bravery. He too was a tall, martial figure, with a big nose, the blustering demeanour of a bully and the subversive attitude of a proletarian revolutionary. Foul-mouthed and violent, this child of the streets was popular with his men. The only thing the third corps commander shared with the others was a massive physique. Jean-Mathieu Sérurier was an educated fifty-three-year-old minor nobleman and veteran of the royal army who had seen action in the Seven Years’ War, a conscientious, steady, brave and efficient general.

Unlike regular armies, in which a man’s rank is taken as a mark of his worth, in the armies of the Republic officers and men learned to trust and esteem only those with a reputation bestowed by those who served under them and spread by word of mouth. Masséna had come across Bonaparte at the siege of Toulon, but was unaware of his contribution to the fall of the town, and to him and the other officers in the Army of Italy, its new commander was an unknown quantity. But they did know he had taken part in the events of Vendémiaire and that he was a political appointment, a ‘Parisian general’ and an ‘intriguer’ with no substance, in the words of another who had come across him at Toulon, chef de bataillon Louis-Gabriel Suchet. They had been expecting the worst, but when they actually saw the man they despaired. In their eyes his diminutive stature, pathetic appearance, awkward manner and rasping voice ruled him out as an effective leader of men.1

Bonaparte immediately assumed a tone which brooked no argument. ‘I have taken command of the Army of Italy,’ he wrote to Masséna less than forty-eight hours after his arrival. ‘Nominating me, the executive Directory hopes that I may be of use in leading it towards the brilliant destiny which awaits it. Europe contemplates it with awe, and France expects from it all the triumphs of a campaign.’ At the same time he flattered the commanders, officers and men, raising their hopes of action, glory and rewards, while Junot and Marmont spread their own admiration and love of the new commander. With a dose of wishful thinking, four days after his arrival he assured Josephine that ‘my soldiers display a confidence in me impossible to describe’.2

The troops were in poor shape. To have any idea of the conditions, one has to forget all the paintings of finely-uniformed officers leading ranks of men with immaculate white facings and bright-red epaulettes on their well-cut blue coats, with blue, white and red plumes in their hats. Few of the men had boots, and many had no trousers. Some had no uniform jackets. They made themselves footwear out of woven straw and in the absence of hats wore knotted handkerchiefs on their heads. Most of them looked more like scarecrows than soldiers.3

They had scant equipment, and were expected to find themselves shelter for the night as best they could when on operations, as there were no tents. Disease and infections dramatically reduced the number of effectives. The companies contracted to supply them pocketed most of the money they received from the government. Even in cantonment around Nice the troops were poorly fed, with meat once every four days, beans once in three, and bowls of rice flavoured with lard the rest of the time. In the autumn they had been able to supplement their diet by gathering chestnuts, but the winter had robbed them of this resource. They could not buy food as they were paid irregularly, and then only in worthless assignats. Some of the senior officers who received cash contributions from the local administration to pay the men did not pass it on. The men had been stuck in the same place for months with nothing to do, and morale was low. Desertion was rife and acts of insubordination frequent. Disaffection had reignited anti-government and even royalist feeling among the older men, and shouts of ‘Vive le Roi’ were not infrequent. One demi-brigade mutinied shortly before Bonaparte’s arrival, one soon after.4

Bonaparte realised extreme measures were needed, and with Saliceti as the Directory’s commissioner, he was in a position to take them. He had a couple of officers court-martialled to set an example. He sent Chauvet to Genoa to raise a loan and purchase supplies, and wrote to the local authorities demanding food and forage, threatening to send the men out to loot and rape if these were not provided. With a mixture of threat and flattery he managed to get the contractors to disgorge victuals and the local administration to make up for some of the arrears in pay. He gave instructions that the men must have fresh or salt meat every day.5

He had selected as his chief of staff a man of experience, his senior in rank and age, whom he had met only recently. The forty-two-year-old Alexandre Berthier had trained as a military engineer and cartographer before receiving his baptism of fire as a captain in the American War of Independence. With his steady temperament, extraordinary memory, unmatched attention to detail, precise mode of expression and legible handwriting, Berthier was the perfect man for the job. He could grasp in a second some hastily-rapped-out order and give it coherent form, while his team ensured it was passed on to the appropriate quarter with a professionalism hitherto unknown in the army of the Republic. Bonaparte supervised and inspected, noting deficiencies and passing them on to Berthier, demanding immediate action. He was so confident that within two days of his arrival he reported to Carnot that ‘I have been very well received by the army, which shows a confidence in me for which I am deeply grateful.’ Quite how much confidence the army felt is questionable.6

François Vigo-Roussillon, a sergeant in the 32nd Demi-Brigade under Masséna, was astonished when his neighbour whispered that the diminutive figure who had just ridden up to their ranks was the new commander-in-chief. ‘His appearance, his dress, his bearing did not appeal to us,’ he recalled; ‘… small, slight, very pale, with great black eyes and hollow cheeks, with long hair falling from his brow to his shoulders in two dog’s ears, as they were then known. He wore a blue uniform coat and over that a nut-brown overcoat. He was mounted on a large bony sorrel horse with a docked tail.’ He was followed by a single servant ‘on a rather sad looking mule’ borrowed from the supply train. The new general introduced himself to the assembled troops with a speech in which he held out the prospect of glory and the possibility of rich plunder if they managed to defeat the enemy and break into Italy. His address produced little effect, and one officer recalled that afterwards the men made fun of his hairstyle and mimicked his accent.7

The troops were an amalgam of former royal soldiers, volunteers and conscripts. Most of the younger men came from the poorer mountainous regions of southern France. They were physically hardened and used to rigorous marches. The make-up of the officer corps was overwhelmingly plebeian (the percentage of nobles had fallen from 80 to 5 between 1789 and 1793), which contributed a sense of fraternity between officers and men, enhanced by the universal penury, as officers and even most of the generals could not afford a horse (the artillery was drawn by mules). The most disciplined units were those which had just been transferred from Spain, where they had fought a victorious campaign.8

The infantry divisions each had between three and five demi-brigades, the basic fighting unit at the time. The heavy demi-brigades were supposed to number 3,000 men and the light ones 1,500. Masséna commanded two divisions, Augereau and Sérurier one each. The cavalry, which numbered less than 5,000 men and was of poor quality and short of horses, was led by General Henri Stengel, a fifty-two-year-old German who had been in French service from the age of sixteen. The overall strength of the French Army of Italy was, on paper, 60,000 men, but most historians agree that the real figure was no more than about 47,000. Some put it as low as 35,000.9

Facing them in the Alpine passes were 18,000 men of the Sardinian army, well-trained, hardy Savoyard mountain men under the command of the Austrian field marshal baron de Colli. Beside them stood 35,000 Austrians under the seventy-one-year-old Field Marshal de Beaulieu, a Belgian by birth. His troops were disciplined, well-trained, steady and motivated, but they were used to set-piece battles and methodical manoeuvres, which would disadvantage them in the tight valleys and boulder-strewn terrain on which they were to fight.

Bonaparte’s orders were to stage a diversion that would tie down the maximum number of Austrian forces in Italy while the two stronger French armies poised on the Rhine defeated the main Austrian army in Germany and marched on Vienna. But he did not think like a soldier content merely to carry out the task he had been set. He believed that as long as the Habsburgs remained dominant in Italy they would present a threat to France, and that the centuries-old rivalry between the two states for hegemony over the peninsula should be resolved. He had studied the various Franco-Austrian wars over Italy, most recently Marshal Maillebois’ campaigns of 1745–46. He had pored over maps of the area during the past two years, becoming familiar with the lie of the land and making mental notes of which passes were practicable by artillery, where rivers could be forded, and which were the possible lines of advance and retreat not only for his own army but for the enemy as well. He meant to wipe out the threat to France by expelling the Austrians from Italy.

One weapon in this struggle would be the nascent Italian national movement, which identified the Austrians as oppressors. Many of the nationalists were living in exile in Nice, and Bonaparte held meetings with them. He did not think much of those he met, and had a poor opinion of Italians in general, but he decided to take 150 of them, led by Filippo Buonarroti, along with him. On 31 March he issued a proclamation to the people of Piedmont announcing that the French nation would shortly liberate them.10

The following day his divisions were on the move. On 4 April he set up headquarters at Albenga, where he heard of the death of his friend Chauvet in Genoa. Collot was shocked by the apparent indifference with which Bonaparte received the news, merely instructing him to take over. Here and on similar occasions he made a show of calm, even brash self-control, hiding the emotional turmoil that comes through in his letters, particularly to Josephine. ‘Not a day has passed without my writing to you, not a night has passed without me pressing you in my arms, I have not drunk a cup of tea without cursing the desire for glory and the ambition which keep me far from the soul of my life,’ he had written from Nice, complaining that her letters were scarce and cold, and that in contrast to his soldiers, only she withheld her trust and remained ‘the joy and the torment’ of his life.11

To her, he poured out his despair at the news of Chauvet’s death. ‘What is the future? What is the past? What are we?’ he questioned, wondering at the purpose of life, and ‘what magical fluid shrouds us and conceals all that we should most want to know?’ But this was no time to brood, and he must think only of the army. Two days later he wrote to her in more passionate vein, telling of his burning desire for her and sending her a kiss on a point of her body ‘lower than the heart, much, much lower’.12

On 9 April Bonaparte transferred to Savona as his three corps took up their positions, with Masséna on the right, Augereau in the centre and Sérurier to their left. But it was the Austrians who struck first. Beaulieu had misinterpreted a French reconnaissance along the coast as the vanguard of an attack on Genoa, and, assuming that the whole French army would be following, decided to drive in its flank through Montenotte and Monte Legino. His attack on what he assumed to be the French flank ran head-on into the units at Monte Legino preparing to attack.13

Bonaparte had intended to strike at the gap where the Alps ended and the Apennines began, which was the juncture between the Sardinians and their Austrian allies. While Sérurier pinned down the Sardinians frontally and Augereau turned their flank at Millesimo, Masséna was to move into the gap between the two armies. Bonaparte calculated that if he inserted a wedge between the two and prised them apart, strategic imperatives would force the Sardinians to fall back in a northerly direction towards their base at Turin and the Austrians to retreat eastwards towards theirs at Milan. He would then be able to defeat them separately. His studies had convinced him that it was superior numbers that won battles, and that the art of war could be reduced to the one principle of bringing greater forces to bear at a given point.14

As they sheltered from the torrential rain that night, planning to renew their attack the next morning, the Austrians at Monte Legino were unaware that, quickly appraising the situation, Bonaparte had ordered Masséna to veer right and make a forced march through the night to Montenotte in their rear. ‘Everything suggests that today and tomorrow will go down in history,’ Berthier wrote to Masséna with his latest orders.15

The following morning, as the Austrian commander was about to push home his attack, the dispersing mist revealed Masséna’s divisions deploying on his flank and rear. Coming under simultaneous attack from two sides, he ordered a retreat which quickly turned into a rout. It had been little more than a skirmish, with Austrian losses in dead, wounded and prisoners around 2,700 and the French no more than a hundred, but Bonaparte accorded it the status of a full-scale battle. In his self-aggrandising report to the Directory, he claimed that the main Austrian force commanded by Beaulieu himself was involved, that it had lost up to 4,000 men and ‘several’ flags (in fact only one was captured), and blew the event up to epic proportions. His order of the day to the troops echoed this, praising them for their glorious exploit. It was the first brush-stroke of what was to be a masterpiece of mendacity.16

Beaulieu had in fact spent the day several kilometres away, sitting badly bruised by a roadside while his escort struggled to repair the carriage that had pitched him to the ground. He had realised his mistake too late and had lost valuable time, which Bonaparte was not going to let him regain. He urged Augereau, most of whose men were still marching without boots, and many without muskets, to hasten his attack on Millesimo, and Masséna to strike further into the Austrian rear at Dego. Once Augereau had accomplished his task, he was to swing left and begin to roll up the extremity of the Sardinian line.

Bonaparte needed to keep up the momentum so that neither of his opponents had time to regroup and strike back; if they did, he would be caught between two fires. He therefore reacted violently to any apparent hitch. After Augereau had sent the Sardinians reeling at Millesimo, one force of about 1,000 men under General Provera had ensconced themselves in an old fortress at Cosseria. Knowing them to have no more supplies or water than those they carried, Augereau meant to leave a few hundred men to pin them down and take their inevitable surrender while he went after the retreating main body of Sardinians. But Bonaparte insisted he storm Cosseria. In the ensuing assault the French suffered heavy losses from the Sardinians sniping from the battlements. Provera offered to capitulate, but Bonaparte tried to bully him into unconditional surrender, threatening to take no prisoners, and ordered Augereau to attack once more. This attack proved as futile as the first. Provera duly surrendered the next morning, having lost no more than 150 men, while Bonaparte’s impatience had cost the French at least 600 and possibly as many as 1,000 casualties. He did have the good grace to admit his mistake and express regret.17

To Augereau’s right, Masséna attacked the citadel of Dego, where over the next two days some of the most serious fighting took place, with the citadel changing hands several times. After the final assault, which he directed himself, Bonaparte promoted a young chef de bataillon named Lannes whose dash had caught his attention.

On 16 April Bonaparte learned that Beaulieu was retreating to Acqui on the road to Milan; his plan had worked. He ordered Masséna to move northwards against the Sardinians. Colli’s dwindling force was falling back in order to defend Turin. It fought doggedly, inflicting heavy losses on the French, but on 21 April, after a brief defence it had to abandon its base and stores at Mondovi. That evening the King of Sardinia, Victor Amadeus, summoned a special council in Turin. As Beaulieu had signalled that he was not able to come to his aid further resistance seemed pointless; on the morning of 23 April Colli requested an armistice.

Bonaparte replied that he lacked the necessary powers and continued his advance. When pressed by the desperate Sardinians to agree to a ceasefire, he replied that he would be putting himself at risk if he did so without guarantees, and could only sign one if they handed over the fortresses of Coni, Tortona and Alessandria. In order to prevent Beaulieu from attempting to succour his Sardinian allies, he moved quickly on Cherasco and Alba, where he encouraged Piedmontese revolutionaries to establish a ‘Republic’, as a signal to the king that he could overthrow him if he wished. He applied further pressure by raising his demands to include the cession of Savoy and Nice to France, and the supply of his army with all its needs. These he delivered as an ultimatum on 27 April.18

The two men sent to conclude the negotiations and sign the armistice, the old Piedmontese General La Tour and Colli’s chief of staff Colonel Costa de Beauregard, found Bonaparte late on the night of 27 April in a barely guarded house in Cherasco. He was haughty and firm, threatening to launch further attacks every time they suggested softening his terms. At one o’clock in the morning he informed them that his troops were under orders to begin the advance on Turin at two. But having bullied them into signing the armistice he offered them a snack of broth, cold meats, hardtack and some pastries made by the local nuns, during which he became talkative. Although Beauregard was impressed by the brilliance and wide-ranging interests Bonaparte displayed, he found him cold, proud, bitter, and lacking in any grace or amenity. He also noted that he was very tired and his eyes were red. As they parted he said to Bonaparte, ‘General, how sad that one cannot like you as much as one cannot help admiring and esteeming you!’19

Bonaparte had weightier concerns than the affection of his enemies. He had exceeded both his brief and his duty as a soldier. He was single-handedly deciding French foreign policy, presenting the Directory with a fait accompli. He was, it is true, acting in concert with commissioner Saliceti who was with him during the negotiations, but he was still at risk of being recalled in disgrace. As he had meant to act independently all along, he had anticipated this eventuality and been shoring up his position.

His treatment of the troops under his command had been designed from the start not only to make them more effective as fighting men, but also to turn them into his men. He had achieved the first aim by giving them victory: nothing acts on the soldier’s self-esteem like success. It was clear to them that this success was largely due to Bonaparte’s talents, yet he made them feel it was all down to them. He had developed a gift for talking to the men as equals. His extraordinary memory allowed him to remember their names, their units, where they came from, their ages, histories, and above all their military exploits. He would come up to a man and ask about some personal problem or congratulate him on a past feat like an old comrade. He was not shy of reprimanding officers in front of the troops, to show that he was their friend.

He had refrained from being too strict with them at first, allowing these men who had been starved of food, comforts and action for so long to indulge their basic instincts. They preyed on the country they went through, and by the time he had reached Cherasco he had to admit to being frightened by the ‘horrors’ they were committing. ‘The soldier who lacks bread is driven to excesses of violence which make one blush for humanity,’ he reported on 24 April. By then they had had a chance to fill their bellies and pull boots and items of clothing they lacked from Austrian and Sardinian dead or prisoners. Once he had halted his advance and managed to capture Sardinian stores, Bonaparte was able to begin reining them in. ‘The pillage is growing less widespread,’ he reported to the Directory on 26 April. ‘The primal thirst of an army lacking everything is being quenched.’ He had three men shot and six others condemned to hard labour, then shot a few more for looting a church. ‘It costs me much sadness and I have passed some difficult moments,’ he admitted.20

While he tightened discipline, he took care to flatter the soldiers’ self-esteem, making throwaway statements such as ‘With 20,000 men like that one could conquer Europe!’ He described their feats of arms in superlative terms in his proclamations. In that of 26 April he listed the engagements they had taken part in as if they were great battles, gave inflated figures of enemy dead and wounded, guns and standards captured, and told them they were heroic conquerors and liberators who would one day look back with pride on the glorious epic they had shared in. He encouraged the sense that they were making history with references to Hannibal as they came over the Alpine passes.21

A mixture of growing self-confidence and the urge to earn praise fed their eagerness to live up to his expectations of them. ‘I can hardly express to what degree of intoxication and pride such resounding, repeated and rapid triumphs transported our army, and what a noble emulation inspired all ranks,’ noted Collot. ‘They vied with each other to be the first to reach a redoubt, to be the first to storm a battery, the first across a river, to show the most devotion and audacity.’22

Bonaparte’s despatches to the Directory were no less hyperbolic. He wrote dramatic descriptions of every engagement, exaggerating the obstacles and the efforts with which they had been overcome, playing fast and loose with facts and figures, and singling out individual acts of courage in melodramatic images of republican heroism. At the same time, he stressed his lack of equipment and berated his masters in Paris for failing to send him guns and trained artillery officers and engineers. To Carnot he expressed his ‘despair, I could almost say my rage’ at not having the tools with which to do the job he had been set.23

Desperate to reap the fruits of success, the Directory proclaimed the victories of French arms loudly and published extracts from the despatches. The name of Bonaparte was soon familiar throughout the country, and was becoming subliminally associated with heroism, genius and victory. On 25 April Bonaparte sent Joseph and Junot to Paris with the twenty-one enemy standards captured so far, knowing that their progress through France and their arrival in Paris would make an impression. ‘It would be difficult to convey the enthusiasm of the population,’ Joseph confirmed. After signing the armistice of Cherasco, Bonaparte sent Murat with the document and more standards. Whatever their feelings about him and his doings, the Directory were happy to bask in the reflected glory, and could only hail him as a national hero.24

Murat was burdened with another mission – to persuade Josephine to come to Italy. From the moment he left Paris Bonaparte had not stopped thinking about her and longing for her to join him, and nothing could banish her from his thoughts. He could not understand why she did not write more often, why her letters were often lukewarm, and why she had not made haste to join him. He wrote to her every day, sometimes more than once, even after exhausting marches and hard-fought engagements. He had thoughts for nobody else. After Dego he was brought a beautiful young woman taken prisoner along with an Austrian officer, but he passed up the chance of having her and allowed her to go on her way.25

When he sent Joseph to Paris he entrusted him with a letter for Josephine, whom he had yet to meet. She was sure to like him, he wrote. ‘Nature has endowed him with a gentle, even and thoroughly good character; he is full of good qualities,’ he assured her. He wanted her to come out to Italy with the returning Junot. ‘You must come with him, do you understand?’ he wrote, urging her to seek inspiration and strength by reading Ossian. ‘Take wing, come, come!’ He had also written to Barras, asking him to press her to come. From Cherasco the day following the armistice he assured her that no woman was ever ‘loved with more devotion, fire and tenderness’, and that his love grew with every day that passed. He could not understand how she had come to mean so much to him. He had a carriage, silver and china for her, so all she needed was to bring a chambermaid and a cook.26

Josephine had no intention of leaving Paris, with its parties and theatres and the many friends she loved. And she had recently taken up with Hippolyte Charles, a dashing hussar officer, a good lover and a jovial companion who kept her entertained. Bonaparte had begun to suspect something of the sort, but his mind was taken up with more pressing matters.

11
Lodi

Beaulieu was by no means beaten, and given the chance to rally he would be in a position to crush the French. Bonaparte’s forces had been whittled down by fighting and forced marches, and although he had received reinforcements, his army’s cohesion and morale were still frail. According to his own assessment, the French soldier’s outstanding quality was the ability to march quickly in pursuit of a retreating enemy, building up as he went a determination and an impetus which gave him the edge. But this was lost when he came under attack from seasoned regulars.1

He ordered Sérurier to feign crossing the Po at Valenza in order to prompt Beaulieu to defend that stretch of the river. He himself led a small body of troops in a forced march covering sixty-four kilometres in thirty-six hours along the right bank of the river to Piacenza. There, deep in the Austrian rear, he crossed the river on 9 May 1796, hoping to cut off Beaulieu’s line of retreat. ‘The second campaign has begun,’ he wrote to Carnot that evening. ‘Beaulieu is disconcerted; he calculates poorly and constantly falls into the traps set for him.’ But the Austrian commander had realised what was happening and hastily fell back across the next line of defence, the river Adda. Bonaparte pursued him but failed to catch up, reaching the little town of Lodi as the Austrian rearguard was crossing the river. He only just managed to bring up a couple of guns and open fire to prevent them from destroying the bridge.2

No sensible general would have considered trying to cross this 200-metre-long wooden bridge, no more than ten metres wide, at the other end of which the Austrians had placed cannon which could rake it with fire. But Bonaparte was not a sensible general, and his men were buoyed by success. Without waiting for the rest of his force to arrive, he drew up the troops at his disposal, made a rousing speech and ordered them to storm the bridge. They surged forward, only to be mown down by canister shot, but others followed, led by Berthier, Masséna and Lannes, who showed total disregard for danger. Having got halfway across, some of the men climbed down the piles onto a sandbank from which they waded across to the opposite bank, where they engaged the Austrian defenders from the flank. After two more attempts the French managed to charge across the bridge and dislodge the Austrians, who fell back leaving 153 dead, 182 wounded and 1,701 prisoners. French losses totalled less than 500, possibly as little as 350.3

‘Pero non fu gran cosa,’ Bonaparte commented that evening at dinner in the residence of the Bishop of Lodi. But he was determined that to the outside world it should be a grandissima cosa. ‘The battle of Lodi, my dear Director, gives the whole of Lombardy to the Republic,’ he wrote to Carnot that evening, announcing that he was about to pursue and finally defeat Beaulieu. His description of the capture of the bridge was predictably florid, and he claimed for this ‘battle’ a significance which it would acquire only thanks to his efforts. Saliceti followed up with an account that was outright poetic. These would be broadcast to the public in France, and would soon be supplemented by images. Bonaparte asked the French minister in Genoa, Guillaume Faipoult, to commission an engraving of the glorious feat, the result of which was an image of himself, standard in hand, leading his men across the bridge under a hail of shot. He made sure that from now on every feat of arms was immortalised by an icon.4

He needed to enhance his authority by any means available. While at Lodi he had received two letters from Paris, one welcome, one less so. The first was from Murat, informing him that Josephine had only delayed coming out to join him in Italy because she was pregnant and feared travelling. It was not true, but she could think of no other excuse to avoid leaving Paris. Bonaparte was pleased by the news that he was to become a father, and while he was concerned for her health, he felt that her supposed condition would guarantee her fidelity.5

Earlier that day he had received less welcome news. The Directory felt he had accomplished his prescribed aim of creating a diversion to assist the two French armies operating in Germany, and now sent him new instructions. They ordered the remainder of the Army of the Alps into Italy, and planned to divide the French forces on the peninsula into a northern one under the sixty-five-year-old professional soldier and acclaimed victor of the invading Prussians at Valmy in 1792, General Kellermann, and a southern under Bonaparte, which was to march on Rome and overthrow ‘the last of the popes’.

This did not suit him at all, as he was set on his cherished enterprise of the subversion of Italy. On 1 May he had written to Faipoult in Genoa asking for material on the topography, resources, constitutional arrangements and economic potential of every state on the peninsula. During his march to Piacenza he had crossed territory belonging to the neutral duchy of Parma. He had made a feint as though he were about to attack its capital, which prompted the duke to despatch envoys to ask for his neutrality to be respected – which it was, in return for a huge bribe in silver, corn, oats and other victuals, 1,600 horses, twenty works of art, and an undertaking to maintain hospitals for the French wounded. ‘These little princes need to be managed,’ Bonaparte commented in his report to the Directory, ignoring the fact that it was not his business to manage anybody beside his soldiers. ‘The war in Italy at this moment is half military and half diplomatic,’ he explained, instructing his superiors in Paris on the positions they should take in negotiating a treaty with the King of Sardinia.6

He sent off three letters protesting against the plan to split the command – an official one to the Directory, one to Carnot, and one to Barras – all three couched in a mixture of petulance and disingenuousness. ‘If I have lost the trust I enjoyed at the beginning of the campaign, I entreat you to let me know,’ he wrote to Barras. ‘In that case I would ask to be allowed to resign. As well as certain talents, nature has endowed me with a strong character, and I cannot be of any use here unless I have your entire confidence. If the intention is to make me play a secondary role, to oblige me to flap about under the orders of commissioners, to be subjected in my operations to a German whose principles I esteem no more than his manner, then I will leave the field to him.’ That, as the Directors well knew and Saliceti reminded them, would not have gone down well with the public, which had just received news of the epic feat of Lodi. To drive home his usefulness, Bonaparte sent a number of messages over the next few days, announcing the despatch of two million francs in gold from here, a fortune in jewellery and ingots from there, not to mention a hundred ‘fine horses, the finest that could be found’ for the Directors’ own carriages.7

‘It is only after Lodi that it struck me that I might become a major actor on our political scene,’ he would later tell his secretary. ‘It was then that the first spark of a higher ambition was ignited in me.’ He was sitting, lost in thought, by the fireside in the corner of a room on the evening of 7 May when it dawned on him that he was better qualified than the government he was serving. In writing up the fluke result of his actions at Lodi as a grand feat of arms he seems to have convinced himself that he possessed, or was possessed by, some kind of superior force. This is not entirely surprising, given that over the past four weeks success had followed success in an almost miraculous progression. Writing home to his father, Marmont could not contain his wonder. The less than admiring Costa de Beauregard reflected that ‘Bonaparte makes one think of those heroes who would cleave mountains with a flourish of their sword,’ a kind of magician who could do anything. A few days after Lodi, Bonaparte told Marmont that Fortune had singled him out and become his mistress. Such grandiloquent, emotionally charged phrases might sound like so much hot air, but they did express genuine thoughts and aspirations.8

The eighteenth century had seen the gradual replacement of the Christian view of life as a preparation for the next world with one which envisaged ways of attaining fulfilment in this. The French Revolution was born largely from the desire to reorder the world in this sense. The rejection of Christianity had suggested a return to the world of ancient Greece and Rome, which seemed more in tune with the republican ideals of the day. This was expressed in and nourished by the neo-classical movement in the arts. The legislative bodies of the French Republic dressed in togas, prominent figures assumed names taken from antiquity such as Brutus and Gracchus, and political discourse was peppered with classical references. The break with the civilisation of Christian Europe was symbolised by the adoption of a new calendar and the metric system with which to measure time and space in the new world the legislative bodies of the French Republic had created. It was Man, not God, who was central to the new value system, and his collective identity, the Nation or ‘patrie’, became the object of worship. Henri Beyle, to become famous as the novelist Stendhal, was thirteen when Bonaparte took command of the Army of Italy, and recalled that for his generation ‘our only religion was […] to be of service to the patrie’.9

The Revolution generated a cult of self-sacrifice for the cause whose ‘martyrs’ were represented in paintings by David and others in much the same manner as Christian saints had been. Where the crusaders of old sought Christian salvation, the soldiers of the French Republic believed their exertions would be crowned by a human version of immortality, loosely expressed in the word ‘gloire’.

‘The eldest of our generals had barely reached the age of thirty,’ recalled Bonaparte’s contemporary Lavalette, serving in the Army of the Rhine. ‘All of them aspired only to glory, and in their eyes it was only real if it involved danger.’ Marmont had a signet ring made which ‘expressed all the wishes with which my young heart was filled: it featured three interlaced crowns, one of ivy, one of laurel and one of myrtle, with this motto: I hope to deserve them’ (ivy was the symbol of eternity, laurel of fame, and myrtle of manhood and love).10

‘Of all the passions which affect the human heart, there is none which is more forceful than the love of la gloire,’ wrote Germaine de Staël in her book De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations, published that very year of 1796. She did not belittle the part played in this by ambition or vanity, but saw the pursuit of gloire as a force in itself. ‘It is, without doubt, an intoxicating sensation to fill the universe with one’s name, to go so far beyond the bounds of one’s being that it becomes possible to delude oneself as to the limits and extent of one’s life, and to believe that one possesses some of the metaphysical attributes of infinity.’ She pointed out that in this psychological climate, anyone who could achieve gloire and offer to others the chance of a share in it would excite in them the spirit of emulation to such a degree that they would exert themselves to the very limit and beyond, creating a seemingly superhuman surge of energy.11

Brought up reading Plutarch’s lives of the heroes, Bonaparte and his peers yearned to emulate them. They were also profoundly affected by the Romantic sensibility expressed in the works of Rousseau, Goethe and Macpherson. The conflation of the urge to the heroic with that for emotional transcendence developed in many a subliminal belief that they were living a legend and conquering the impossible, like not just the heroes but also the gods of antiquity.

It was in the guise of a conquering hero that on 15 May Bonaparte made a triumphal entry into Milan, the capital of Lombardy, mounted on a white horse, preceded by a column of Austrian prisoners and followed at a respectful distance by his staff and then his troops. He passed under a Roman triumphal arch and another made of foliage and flowers, greeted with enthusiasm by Italian Jacobins and nationalists who had been awaiting him, in the words of one of them, ‘as the Israelites awaited the Messiah’, hailing him as their deliverer from Austrian rule and, they hoped, the godfather of an independent Italian state. Those less politically aroused also turned out in force to get a look at this man whose deeds were assuming legendary proportions in the public imagination. As it was a Sunday and the feast of the Pentecost they were dressed up, presenting a curious contrast with the conquerors of the mighty Austrian army.12

‘Our uniforms, worn out by long spells of mountain warfare, had been replaced by anything the soldiers could lay their hands on,’ recalled Sergeant Vigo-Roussillon. ‘In place of our long-rotted cartridge-cases we had belts made of goatskin in which we carried our cartridges. Our heads were covered with bonnets made of sheep, cat or rabbit fur. A fox-fur bonnet with the tail hanging down the back was a prized possession.’ They wore breeches or trousers of every colour, fancy, even embroidered waistcoats, and a variety of footwear.13

Two comrades-in-arms, a major and a lieutenant, shared three shirts, one pair of brown trousers, one uniform coat and one overcoat, which was worn by the one not wearing the trousers that day. One young officer brushed up as best he could when invited to dinner by the marchesa in whose residence he was billeted, but nevertheless padded into the dining room on bare feet.14

Bonaparte had gone straight to the archbishop’s residence, where he slept for a couple of hours and had a bath before attending a banquet in his honour. He then moved into the Serbelloni Palace, which had been placed at his disposal. He was also offered the beautiful prima donna of La Scala, Giuseppina Grassini, but could think only of Josephine, so Berthier stepped in. Bonaparte was not going to waste time in Milan.

On 20 May he issued a proclamation to his ‘brothers in arms’: ‘Soldiers! You rushed like a torrent from the heights of the Apennines, you defeated, dispersed, scattered all that opposed your progress. Delivered from Austrian tyranny, Piedmont gave in to its natural sentiments of peace and friendship with France. Milan is yours, and the republican standard flies over the whole of Lombardy. The dukes of Parma and Modena owe their continued political existence only thanks to your generosity. The army which threatened you with such arrogance can no longer find a bulwark strong enough to shield it from your courage.’ He could see they were already tired of inactivity, and burning to achieve greater glory: ‘Well, let us go forward!’ he continued. ‘We still have forced marches to make, enemies to subdue, laurels to pick, wrongs to avenge.’ While they must be ready to defend the Republic, they must also fly to the aid of sister nations: ‘You will have the immortal glory of changing the face of the most beautiful part of Europe. The French nation, free, respected throughout the world, will give Europe a glorious peace which will redeem all the sacrifices it has made over the past six years. You will then return to your homes, and your fellow-citizens will say as they point you out: “He was in the Army of Italy!”’15

More to the point, he decreed that whereas they had hitherto been paid in paper money, which few, particularly in foreign lands, would accept, henceforth they would receive half of their pay in specie. The move was probably dictated in part by the need to stem the looting, but it also created a new bond of gratitude and loyalty between him and his men. The Directory was appalled by this act of independence, which diverted some of the cash being sucked out of Italy, on which it was coming to depend, into the pockets of the troops. But there was nothing it could do. Bonaparte was the only one of the army commanders helping to finance it; he was winning battles and riding high in public opinion. He was beyond the Directors’ control, and whether they liked it or not, their fate was closely tied to his popularity. On 29 May a fête of thanksgiving and victory would be held in Paris at which the captured banners were paraded, a contingent of wounded were honoured with oak leaves, sprigs of laurel and palm fronds, symbolising valour, glory and martyrdom, and a ‘Song of Victory’, while Junot presented Josephine, now hailed as ‘Notre Dame des Victoires’, to garner acclaim for her husband and Carnot praised his ‘invincible phalanxes’, whose deeds would astonish future generations.16

On 17 May Bonaparte wrote to the Directors disingenuously asking for instructions on how to deal with the local patriots. He knew they were thinking of giving Lombardy either to the King of Sardinia, in order to secure his alliance, or to Austria as a bargaining chip in the forthcoming peace negotiations. But he had his own vision. ‘Nature drew the limits of France at the Alps, but it also drew those of the Empire at the Tyrol,’ he pointed out. He had already promised liberty to the people of Lombardy and sanctioned a national guard, whose colours were to be the tricolour of the French Republic with the blue replaced by green. He began reorganising the former Austrian province along French lines, aided by Italian patriots from various parts of the peninsula who saw this as the cornerstone of an independent Italy. He was by now consciously implementing his own ideas. ‘I’m doing what I want,’ he told a surprised Italian patriot.17

‘I believe in the French Republic, and in Bonaparte her son,’ ran a Credo composed by some Italian nationalists; but others cursed him. The depredations of the French, both by officials and by soldiers on the rampage, caused hardship to ordinary people, and all those opposed to the French intrusion, be they fearful upholders of the old regime or Catholics horrified at the godlessness of the invaders, gave vent to their grievances. Riots broke out in various places. Bonaparte reacted with energy and in some cases brutality, most notably at Binasco, where the locals had massacred French soldiers. ‘Having killed a hundred people, we burned down the village, a terrible but efficacious example,’ he wrote to Berthier afterwards. At Pavia, which had risen against the French, he let his troops loose on the town for a couple of hours. He admitted that ‘although necessary, this spectacle was none the less horrible, and I was painfully affected by it’. The measures did prove efficacious, and he was soon able to report that the province was quiet. He enrolled young men coming forward to serve in what they believed to be the cause of Italy into a Lombard armed force which could maintain order.18

The improved supply situation did not stop the looting; it merely refocused it, as officers and men began to think of enriching themselves rather than just helping themselves to what they needed. The example was set by Masséna, who exacted protection money from towns he passed through, and it was widely followed. Bonaparte turned a blind eye, and even encouraged his subordinates to enrich themselves while ostentatiously declining to accept bribes offered him by the authorities of cities such as Lucca and Modena in order to distinguish himself from other generals by his moral stance.19

At the same time, Saliceti was bleeding the country dry in the service of the French Republic, as well as his own. At Lodi he raided the cathedral treasury and the Monte de Pietà, the charity which served as pawnbroker, removing five cases of silver plate and a number of ingots, and requisitioned the city’s cash funds. In Milan he helped himself to the contents of the banks, the city chest and the Monte de Pietà, although this time he returned to poor debtors their paltry treasures. He repeated the pattern in every city. ‘You are creating a hundred times more currency with your bayonets than we can with all our imaginable financial laws,’ one of the Directors acknowledged.20

It was not only cash and disposable valuables that were taken. Seeing the French Republic as the second Rome, its rulers believed the greatest works of art and science, libraries and archives, mechanical and scientific instruments, and any collections that could serve progress should be brought together in Paris. A commission consisting of the mathematician Gaspard Monge, the chemist Claude Berthollet, the botanists André Thouin and La Billardière, as well as a number of artists, was on its way with orders to select the objects worthy of being included in the libraries and museums of the capital. (It is worth noting that a protest against this was signed by the painters David, Hubert Robert, Moreau le Jeune, Girodet, the architects Percier and Fontaine, and many others.21)

Bonaparte had never accepted the secondary role of staging a diversion in Italy while Moreau carried out the main operations in Germany, and was determined to reverse this by striking first. Assuming that Moreau must have crossed the Rhine, he was eager to press on. Beaulieu had fallen back behind the river Mincio, his right wing resting at Peschiera on the southern shore of Lake Garda and his left on Mantua. Moving briskly, Bonaparte pierced his line at Borghetto and then turned north to roll it up. Disorientated Austrian units raced north in order to avoid being cut off, but some were overtaken by the French advance. At Valeggio, where he had just sat down to a light lunch with Masséna and Murat, Bonaparte was surprised by an isolated enemy unit and only had time to pull on one boot before making a dash for safety over a wall. By dawn the following day he was pursuing the Austrians falling back on Peschiera and Verona, which he reached on 3 June. He was overwhelmed by the beauty of the city. ‘I have just seen the amphitheatre,’ he reported to the Directory. ‘These remains left by the people of Rome are truly worthy of it. I could not help feeling a sense of humiliation when I thought of the tawdriness of our Champ de Mars.’22

Beaulieu had made his escape northwards along the eastern side of Lake Garda, pursued by French cavalry, while part of his army took refuge in the fortress of Mantua, where it was bottled up by Sérurier. Bonaparte was now in control of the whole former Austrian province of Lombardy, and he set about securing it. Without consulting with the Directory, he signed an armistice with the kingdom of Naples, which thereby retired from the anti-French coalition, and received a Spanish diplomat sent by the Pope to negotiate peace with the Holy See.

He raced back to Milan expecting to find Josephine waiting for him. Instead he found instructions from the Directory ordering him to march on Rome, which he could not easily disobey. He set off, reaching Bologna on 19 June, where he was met by the Pope’s envoy offering a bribe of five million francs to ward off a French invasion. Bonaparte demanded forty million, as well as the treasure of the shrine of Loretto and a hundred works of art. On 23 June the Pope’s emissaries agreed, and signed an armistice. Bonaparte then crossed the Apennines and made for Livorno to secure the port against a possible landing by the British.

From there he made a trip to San Miniato to visit Canon Filippo Buonaparte, the last surviving member of the Tuscan branch of what might at one stage have been the same family as his own. He then marched on to Florence, where he went to the opera on the evening of 30 June and the following day lunched with the Grand Duke of Tuscany, brother of the Emperor Francis II with whom he was at war. By 4 July he was back at Roverbella, where he had established his headquarters.

He was worn out physically and mentally, and racked by anxiety alternating with jealousy over Josephine, whom he showered with increasingly despairing letters which reveal his changing moods. The brevity and lack of feeling of her infrequent letters inspired reproach and jealousy, followed by fears that she might be ill and self-reproach for having questioned her feelings. He pestered Joseph for news of her. On 18 May from Milan he wrote a letter full of joyful anticipation of what he thought was her imminent arrival, describing the beauties of Italy and the happy times ahead as they listened to divine music while watching her belly grow (he was still under the impression that she was pregnant). Five days later, worried by the lack of news from her, he wrote of how he had left a ball given for him at which he looked in vain among the many beauties for any who came close to her. ‘I could see only you, think only of you, and the thought made everything else unbearable, so, half an hour after arriving I went home to bed full of sadness.’ Thinking she would arrive on 13 June, he prepared her lodgings, but then discovered she had not left Paris yet. ‘I had opened my soul to joy, and it has filled with suffering,’ he wrote. He awaited the couriers with impatience, either to find that there was no letter from her, or if there was that it lacked the passion he craved. He concluded that her feelings for him had only been a ‘mild caprice’ which he had misunderstood, that while he had given himself to her entirely and lived only for her, she had merely toyed with him, and that she wanted a different kind of man. ‘Farewell, Josephine, stay in Paris, do not write to me any more, and at least respect my retreat,’ he wrote despairingly. ‘A thousand daggers are tearing my heart asunder, do not plunge them any deeper. Farewell, my happiness, my life, everything that existed for me on earth!!!’23

Having heard no more from her, three days later he wrote that there was nothing left for him but to die: ‘All the serpents of the furies are in my heart, and already I am half dead,’ he wrote, still faintly hoping she might be on her way. ‘I hate Paris, women and love …’ he protested. ‘Farewell, my Josephine, to think of you made me happy, but everything has changed entirely,’ he went on, saying that he would never stop loving her. He had spent the night rereading all her letters and wallowing in self-pity. The same day he wrote to Barras: ‘I am in despair as my wife won’t come, she has some lover holding her back in Paris, I curse all women but heartily embrace my good friends.’ Writing three days later from Tortona, he apologised to Josephine for expressing himself with such feeling, but explained that he had been ‘drowning in sorrow’. He had just received a letter from Murat informing him that she was unwell, and although he assured him that it was only a slight indisposition, Bonaparte flew into a panic that she might die. ‘If you die, I will also die, of despair, of devastation,’ he wrote, asking her to intercede with Barras to obtain leave for him to return to Paris. He no longer cared for glory or the service of the motherland, and could not think of victory while she was ill. This long letter was followed the next day by another, even longer and more tortured, in which he blamed himself for having accused her of inconstancy. ‘My life is a continuous nightmare,’ he complained. ‘I am suffocated by a deadly presentiment. I no longer live; I have lost more than life, more than Happiness, more than tranquillity; I am almost without hope.’ He longed to be able to come to Paris. ‘I am nothing without you,’ he went on. ‘I can hardly imagine how I existed before I knew you.’24

Josephine found his letters, and the teenage frenzy they expressed, ridiculous and embarrassing. She amused her friends by reading them out, and after sharing one particularly self-dramatising passage in which he referred to Othello, she exclaimed, ‘He is funny, Bonaparte!’ But, no doubt fed up with continual enquiries as to her health and afraid that Bonaparte might indeed turn up in Paris, where he was not wanted, Barras persuaded her to go. According to some accounts he bundled her into the carriage himself, along with her dog, her maid, Hippolyte Charles and Junot. She was followed by several men of business to whom she owed money, and to whom she promised to obtain lucrative contracts supplying the army.25

Their journey was a regal progress, every city along the way wishing to honour the wife of the national hero. At Lyon she went to a special performance of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide. At Turin, where she found Marmont waiting to escort her on her onward journey, she was treated like visiting royalty by the king. Her entry into Milan on 13 July was triumphal. She was settled in the magnificent Serbelloni Palace with its pink marble columns, and showered with honours by the city authorities. Bonaparte was in such transports of joy to see her that, as she informed Thérèse Tallien, she thought he would go mad. He could not keep his hands off her, and seemed unaware of the presence of Hippolyte Charles, whose role almost everyone else had guessed.26

Two days after her arrival, on 15 July, Bonaparte had to rejoin his troops besieging Mantua, which was sheltering some 12,000 Austrians. Josephine remained in Milan, where she was bored, despite the receptions and entertainments laid on for her, particularly when Lieutenant Charles could no longer delay taking up his duties at the side of General Leclerc in Verona.

Bonaparte, who still suspected nothing, was in ecstasy. ‘What nights, my love, were those I spent in your arms!’ he wrote. ‘In my memory I ceaselessly relive everything we did, your kisses, your tears, your sweet jealousy, and the charms of the incomparable Josephine keep stoking an ardent and burning flame in my heart and in my senses. […] A few days ago I thought I loved you, but, since seeing you I feel that I love you a thousand times more.’27

That night he hoped to storm Mantua with a surprise attack from the lake, but the waters unexpectedly went down and the attempt failed. He was already planning another trick that might deliver him the fortress, but this did not prevent him from thinking of Josephine. The next evening he was walking by the lake by ‘silvery moonlight’ in the village outside Mantua where Virgil was born, ‘not one hour without thinking of my Josephine’. He was by now aware of the gossip about Lieutenant Charles, and had stumbled on evidence when he opened letters to Josephine from Barras and Thérèse Tallien. He playfully cursed her while professing his faith in her fidelity and her love for him. ‘Far from you, the nights are long, dull and sad, close to you one wishes it could always be night,’ he wrote, inviting her to join him at Brescia.28

She arrived on 26 July, meaning to go on to Verona to see Lieutenant Charles under the pretext of sightseeing, but soon after she set off she ran into enemy troops. Bonaparte sent Junot with a squadron of dragoons to escort her back; on the way they came under fire, and she had to leave her carriage and take cover in a ditch. He resolved to send her out of the war zone on a trip to Tuscany. At Parma she met Joseph Fesch, who was busily putting together an art collection by requisitioning anything that caught his eye. In Florence she was received by the grand duke. Bored by Florence, she went back to Brescia and, Bonaparte being absent, summoned Lieutenant Charles to share his quarters with her.

Bonaparte was desperate to take Mantua, whose garrison remained a threat, making vigorous sorties which prevented him from securing the area. Although he had concluded treaties with Naples, the papacy and various smaller states of the peninsula, treaties were regularly broken, and a landing by British or Russian troops in Naples or elsewhere remained a possibility. If one were to take place when his back was turned, these states might be tempted to throw their considerable forces into the fray against him. And by the end of July it was clear that Austria was about to make a concerted effort to relieve Mantua and reconquer Lombardy.

12
Victory and Legend

Beaulieu had been replaced by the no less aged Field Marshal Dagobert von Würmser. He divided his army into three columns which moved out in July 1796. One, consisting of 18,000 men under General Quasdanovitch, marched down the western side of Lake Garda, aiming to take Brescia and cut Bonaparte off from Milan. Another, of 5,000 men under General Meszaros, came down the valley of the Brenta further east in order to distract the French, while Würmser himself with 24,000 marched down the eastern side of Lake Garda aiming for Verona, where it was planned that the three forces were to come together to defeat the French and relieve Mantua.1

Bonaparte, who had just under 40,000 men in total, would be overwhelmed unless he defeated the Austrian columns separately. He took a bold decision, ordering Sérurier to abandon the siege of Mantua and pulling all his forces out of Würmser’s path. Although this would allow the Austrian to relieve Mantua and add its garrison to his force, it gave Bonaparte the opportunity to concentrate enough men to rout Quasdanovitch, which he did at Lonato on 3 August, before turning about to face Würmser with a slight numerical superiority, at Castiglione on 5 August. In a classic manoeuvre, he encouraged Würmser to turn his right flank, then launched a powerful attack on his exposed centre which cut the Austrian army in two, forcing it into a disorderly retreat back to whence it had come. ‘There you have another campaign finished in five days,’ Bonaparte rounded off his report to the Directory, in which he grossly exaggerated the enemy’s losses.2

It had been a brilliant feat of arms, with Bonaparte exploiting his central position to great effect. It had also demonstrated the qualities specific to the French army which gave it such an edge over its enemies. The Austrian army operated like a machine, observing tested routines such as only marching for six hours in twenty-four. The French followed no rules. The poor or non-existent supply system obliged them to operate in self-contained divisions or smaller units that the land they moved through could support, which encouraged greater independence and flexibility, particularly when it came to timing and distance.

Over those five days, Bonaparte had ridden more than one horse to death as he darted about. Marmont had spent twenty-four hours in the saddle, followed by another fifteen after only three hours’ rest. Augereau’s division had covered eighty kilometres in thirty-six hours, in the August heat. Masséna noted that two-thirds of his men had no coats, waistcoats, shirts or breeches, and marched barefoot. When they complained of the lack of provisions, Bonaparte told them the only ones available were in the enemy camp.3

The French army was made up of individuals with minds of their own. Bonaparte’s new aide Józef Sułkowski noted their agility and ‘astonishing vigour’, and was struck by the fact that the French soldier would surrender when cornered on his own, but never in the company of his fellows, and would ‘go out to his death rather than face shame’. In some units, shirkers and cowards were hauled before ‘juries’ of elder comrades who would condemn them to being beaten on their bottoms and despised until they had redeemed themselves with acts of valour.4

‘The French soldier has an impulsive courage and a feeling of honour which make him capable of the greatest things,’ believed Bonaparte. ‘He judges the talent and the courage of his officers. He discusses the plan of campaign and all the military manoeuvres. He is capable of anything if he approves of the operations and esteems his leaders,’ and would march and fight on an empty stomach if he believed it would bring victory.5

Many observers of the campaign of 1796 commented on the almost festive spirit in which these men appeared to banter with death, singing on the march and laughing as they went into battle. ‘We were all very young,’ recalled Marmont, and ‘devoured by love of glory’. Their ambition was ‘noble and pure’, and they felt ‘a confidence without limit in [their] destiny’, along with a contagious spirit of adventure. ‘It was during this campaign that moral exaltation played the greatest part,’ reminisced an old grenadier.’6

Exceptional leadership also played a part. At Lonato, Bonaparte led the 32nd Demi-Brigade into withering enemy fire. After the battle he presented it with a new standard, embroidered with the words: ‘Battle of Lonato: I was confident, the brave 32nd was there!’ ‘It is astonishing what power one can exert over men with words,’ he later commented about the incident. He also knew when to be harsh. After Castiglione he demoted General Valette in front of his men for having abandoned his positions too soon and allowed his unit to retreat in disorder. He hailed another demi-brigade, the 18th, as it took up positions before battle with the words: ‘Valorous 18th, I know you: the enemy won’t hold in front of you!’ At Castiglione, Augereau had excelled himself leading troops into the mêlée. ‘That day was the finest in the life of that general,’ Bonaparte later commented. Masséna too had electrified his men with his blustering courage.7

The cost of these heroics had been heavy. By the end of the campaign, almost as many men were in hospitals as in the ranks. Some of the older officers were burnt out, and Bonaparte himself was exhausted. Yet there was no time for rest. Würmser had fallen back to where he could be resupplied, and would soon be in a position to attack again. Bonaparte’s only hope lay in forestalling him. ‘We are on campaign, my adorable love,’ he wrote to Josephine on 3 September, having set off up the valley of the Adige. ‘I am never far from you. Only at your side is there Happiness and life.’ The next day, at Roveredo, he defeated an Austrian force under Davidovitch barring his way and pressed on, forcing Davidovitch to fall back beyond Trento. Würmser instructed him to hold on there while he himself marched down the Brenta valley into Bonaparte’s rear, meaning to take him between two fires.8

Bonaparte guessed Würmser’s intentions. He left around 10,000 men under General Vaubois to keep Davidovitch bottled up, and with the rest of his force set off behind Würmser, who was now marching down the Brenta hoping to penetrate into the rear of the French, without realising that they were on his tail. On 7 September Augereau caught up with and routed Würmser’s rearguard at Primolano, capturing his supply train, then forged on, hardly pausing for rest. Bonaparte spent that night under the stars, ‘dying of hunger and lassitude’, having eaten nothing but a small piece of hard-tack offered him by a soldier. He did not get much sleep, as by two in the morning he was on the move again. Würmser was unable to deploy his forces as they marched down the valley, and the French were able to defeat his divisions singly at Bassano, taking 5,000 prisoners, thirty-five pieces of artillery and most of his baggage. Quasdanovitch veered east with part of the army and made for Trieste, while Würmser with the main body made a dash for Mantua, which he entered on 15 September with no more than 17,000 men. This brought the number of Austrians bottled up in the fortress to over 25,000, including some fine cavalry, whose horses would only serve to feed them. It had been a strategic disaster. Marmont was sent to Paris with the flags taken in those two weeks, to spread the fame of the Army of Italy and its commander.9

Not for a moment during those frantic days did Bonaparte forget his ‘adorable Josephine’, to whom he complained from Verona on 17 September that ‘I write to you very often my love, and you very seldom,’ announcing that he would be with her soon. ‘One of these nights your door will open with a jealous crash and I will be in your bed,’ he warned. ‘A thousand kisses, all over, all over.’ Two days later he was back in Milan, where they would spend the best part of a month.10

Quite how happy that month was is open to question. In a letter to Thérèse Tallien on 6 September Josephine admitted to being ‘very bored’. ‘I have the most loving husband it is possible to encounter,’ she wrote. ‘I cannot wish for anything. My wishes are his. He spends his days adoring me as though I were a goddess …’ She was evidently sexually tired of him; he complained that she made him feel as though they were a middle-aged couple in ‘the winter of life’. But he had little time to brood over it.11

His recent triumphs had resolved nothing: there was still a large enemy force in Mantua which he reckoned could hold out for months, and while Lombardy was relatively quiet there were stirrings in other parts of the peninsula. The King of Sardinia had disbanded his Piedmontese regiments, with the consequence that bands of former soldiers were threatening the French supply lines. ‘Rome is arming and encouraging fanaticism among the people,’ Bonaparte wrote to the Directory, ‘a coalition is building up against us on all sides, they are only waiting for the moment to act, and their action will be successful if the army of the Emperor is reinforced.’ He suggested that given the circumstances he should be allowed to make policy decisions. ‘You cannot attribute this to personal ambition,’ he assured them. ‘I have been honoured too much already and my health is so damaged that I feel I ought to request someone to replace me. I can no longer mount a horse. All I have left is courage, and that is not enough for a posting such as this.’12

The Austrians would try harder than ever to relieve Mantua, now that it contained such a large force. And they were in a better position to achieve their goal, since the two French armies operating in Germany had been beaten and had retreated across the Rhine, releasing more Austrian troops from that theatre. Bonaparte wrote to Würmser suggesting an honourable capitulation on humanitarian grounds: Mantua was surrounded by water and marshland, and large numbers on both sides were suffering from fever. Würmser refused and sat tight, knowing help was on its way (it was only by chance that General Dumas, commanding the siege, discovered that Würmser was being delivered messages in capsules hidden in their rectums by men disguised as civilians). By the end of October there was a fresh imperial army in position under a new commander, Field Marshal Baron Josef Alvinczy.13

All Bonaparte could muster against it were some 35,000 men, exhausted after eight months of almost continuous campaigning in extreme conditions. He had received reinforcements, but these only just made up for the 17,000 who had been killed, those invalided out, those in hospitals, and the deserters. The troops were also of increasingly dubious quality, as a result of a process of negative selection. ‘The soldiers are no longer the same,’ wrote Bonaparte’s brother Louis. ‘There is no more energy, no more fire in them … The bravest are all dead, those that remain can be easily counted.’ According to some estimates, only 18 per cent of the original complement were still in the ranks, and the proportion was probably lower among officers. ‘The Army of Italy, reduced to a handful of men, is exhausted,’ reported Bonaparte. ‘The heroes of Lodi, of Milesimo, of Castiglione and Bassano have died for their motherland or lie in hospital.’14

His dazzling successes had won him not only adulation but also a host of jealous rivals and enemies. Chief among these were the various civilians – commissioners, administrators and suppliers – in the wake of the army, whom he had been preventing from enriching themselves, and who were sending slanderous reports back to Paris, warning that he was intending to make himself King of Italy. A military setback at this point might prove fatal to him.

His forces were dispersed in bodies of about 5,000, with one around his headquarters at Verona, one at Brescia in the west and one at Bassano in the east, one besieging Mantua, another in reserve at Legnago and a smaller one in a forward position to the north at Trento. They were placed in such a manner that they could easily concentrate, but this time it was going to be more difficult to deal with the enemy piecemeal. The Austrians were on the move by the beginning of November 1796: Davidovitch pushed back Vaubois from Trento while Alvinczy, with the main force of some 29,000, marched down the Brenta and on 6 November forced Masséna’s division out of Bassano. Bonaparte rushed to Rivoli to arrest the retreat of Vaubois, which he did in inimitable style. He called out two units which had shown lack of mettle and announced that their standards would be inscribed with the words ‘These no longer belong to the Army of Italy!’ Many of the men wept, and, as he had anticipated, they would redeem themselves with acts of surpassing bravery a couple of days later.15

But Alvinczy was by now threatening the French centre at Verona. Bonaparte attempted to hold him off at Caldiero, but the already dispirited troops were subjected to a violent storm. Drenching rain was succeeded by volleys of hail. ‘This storm blew straight into their faces, the heavy rain hiding the enemy who was pounding them with artillery, while the wind blew away even their fuses and their bare feet slithered in the clay soil, lending them no support,’ in the words of Sułkowski. They trudged back in mournful silence.16

Bonaparte was down to around 17,000 men facing Alvinczy’s 23,000, and he was strategically blocked, with Verona at his back. ‘We may be on the eve of losing Italy,’ he warned the Directory. He decided to take a chance. Leaving a small force in position before Verona, on the night of 14 November he crossed the Adige under cover of darkness and marched east along its right bank, recrossed it at Ronco and, leaving Masséna to cover his own left flank and distract Alvinczy, made a dash for Arcole, where he meant to cross the river Alpone and move into Alvinczy’s rear at Villanova. This would have cut the Austrians’ line of communications and forced them to retreat into his arms. They were caught in a funnel between the mountains and the river Adige and had no other exit – and the different corps of a retreating army can be taken on and defeated individually, in this case as they tried to cross the Alpone at Villanova.17

Everything went smoothly until the French spearhead came in sight of the small town of Arcole on the opposite bank of the Alpone across a thirty-metre-long straight wooden bridge resting on stone piles. It was defended by two battalions of Croat infantry numbering around 2,000 men with several field guns positioned so as to sweep not only the bridge, but the access to it on a dyke raised above the marshy floodplain.18

Bonaparte was in a hurry. He ordered General Verdier to storm the bridge, but his men came under withering fire before they got anywhere near it. He despatched a force to cross the river further south and threaten the defenders’ flank, but persisted in trying to cross the bridge. News had reached him that Alvinczy had perceived the threat to his rear and abandoned Verona. Masséna could distract him for a time, but if the Austrians crossed the Alpone at Villanova before Bonaparte could do so at Arcole, his plan would have failed and the French position would be critical once more.

Augereau and then Lannes attempted to lead the troops to the bridge, without success. Then Bonaparte dismounted and seized a flag. He challenged the men to show they were still the heroes of Lodi, but they would not follow him, even when he moved forward, accompanied by his aides and a small group of soldiers. Having covered a short distance and still a couple of hundred metres from the bridge, they were met by a volley which killed several around Bonaparte, including his aide Muiron. They rushed for cover, knocking Bonaparte off the dyke and into a drainage ditch where he landed up to his neck in water. He was eventually dragged out of it, but there could no longer be any question of taking the bridge.19

That evening, 15 November, he withdrew and recrossed the Adige. Although his initial plan had failed, he had nevertheless positioned himself in such a way that he now paralysed Alvinczy: if the Austrian moved west, Bonaparte could strike in his rear, and if he moved east he had to abandon hope of linking up with Davidovitch to achieve his objective of relieving Mantua. On the night of 16 November Bonaparte learned that Vaubois had been overwhelmed by Davidovitch, which opened the possibility of the two Austrian armies joining forces. The only way of preventing this was to threaten Alvinczy’s rear. Bonaparte had a bridge built over the Alpone downstream of Arcole and ordered Augereau to cross it while Masséna moved against Arcole, and despatched another force along the Adige to cross it further east to threaten Alvinczy’s communications. The ploy worked, and Alvinczy fell back on Villanova. This allowed Bonaparte to detach troops and send them to head off Davidovitch and force him back up to Trento. Alvinczy, who had moved west again to assist Davidovitch, now gave up and retired up the Brenta valley. He had lost many men and had failed in his purpose to liberate Würmser from Mantua.

The two-week campaign had been a messy, close-run business with no set-piece battle to present to the French public as grand spectacle. It was therefore necessary to fabricate one. In his despatch to the Directory, Bonaparte announced that the battle of Arcole had decided the fate of Italy. He grossly exaggerated Austrian losses while diminishing his own, and presented an account of derring-do to flatter French national pride. The captured flags were borne to Paris by Le Marois, who at the public ceremony in which they were handed over made a speech portraying Bonaparte tracing the path to victory, flag in hand, conveying the notion that he had stormed the bridge. In no time a print appeared in Paris depicting Bonaparte and Augereau leading the troops across it on horseback, each clutching a banner, succeeded by another showing Bonaparte on foot, brandishing the flag and encouraging his troops to follow him.20

For centuries kings and commanders had had their deeds immortalised in painting out of a mixture of vanity and political assertiveness. The Revolution had created a thirst for information among the illiterate which was satisfied by crude allegorical depiction, and this led to an explosion of semi-sacral illustration in praise of the nation, its leaders and its martyrs. Generals were depicted in heroic poses, and there were engravings of commanders such as Hoche and Moreau in circulation before any image of Bonaparte.21

But he took propaganda to new levels. His mendacious despatches to the Directory, excerpts from which were printed and even plastered on walls for the public to read, were dramatic and exciting. The hyperbolic language of the Revolution in which they were couched created a subliminal sense of the supernatural, of the miraculous, of an adventure being enacted by men who appeared as superhuman as the heroes of the Iliad. Poets, playwrights and hacks of every sort saw in this excellent raw material for their own craft, and their works added to the concert of myth-making verbiage. This was accompanied by an iconography to suit, and between the moment he took command of the Army of Italy in 1796 and the end of 1798, no fewer than thirty-seven different prints of Bonaparte appeared on the market, some commissioned, some spontaneous, some based on actual representations of him, others giving him entirely imagined features, but all representing him as a hero.22

The propaganda surrounding Arcole saved Bonaparte’s position, but it could do little to assuage the pain inflicted by Josephine. ‘At last, my adorable Josephine, I am coming back to myself, death no longer stares me in the face,’ he had written with understandable relief the day after the fiasco of Arcole. Back in Verona two days later, he wrote her a tender note just before going to bed, reproving her as usual for not writing. ‘Don’t you know that without you, without your heart, without your love there can be no happiness of life for your husband,’ he wrote, going on to say how he longed to touch her shoulder, hold her firm breast and to plunge into her ‘little black forest’. ‘To live in Josephine is to live in Elysium. To kiss her, on the mouth, the eyes, the shoulder, the breast, all over, all over!’ Two days after that, having heard nothing, he wrote in teasing vein: ‘I don’t love you at all any more, on the contrary I hate you.’ He asked her what occupied her days so fully to prevent her from writing. ‘Who can it be, this wonderful and new love who absorbs all your time, tyrannises your days and prevents you from caring for your husband? Take care, Josephine, one of these nights your door will be forced and I will be in your bed. You know! The little dagger of Othello!’ He then reverts to a more loving tone and looks forward to being in her arms again and planting a kiss on her ‘little rascal’.23

He reached Milan panting with love on 27 November, only to find that she had gone to Genoa (with Lieutenant Charles). His disappointment and bitterness are given full expression in a note dashed off to her that evening and a letter the following day. ‘Farewell, adorable woman, farewell, my Josephine,’ he ended. General Henry-Jacques Clarke, who arrived from Paris the next day, found Bonaparte ‘haggard, thin, all skin and bone, his eyes sparkling feverishly’.24

Clarke had been sent by the Directory with the ostensible mission of opening negotiations with the Austrians, but in fact to spy and report on the commander of the Army of Italy. He was pleasantly surprised when Bonaparte agreed that negotiations with Austria were in order. Bonaparte knew that having driven back the French in Germany, Austria was about to launch an all-out offensive in Italy and would not be inclined to negotiate. But he had to gain Clarke’s support, so he set out to charm him. In little over a week, Clarke was assuring the Directory that ‘There is nobody here who does not regard him as a man of genius …’ He praised the general’s judgement, his authority and his efficiency. ‘I believe him to be committed to the Republic, and without any ambition other than that of conserving the glory which he has acquired for himself,’ he followed this up.25

Clarke’s support was an important asset in Bonaparte’s long-running battle with the other arm of the Directory’s control – its commissioners. Their brief had varied with unfolding events: lured by the cash and spoils he sent back, the Directory charged them with political and financial control of the occupied territories, but with the discovery earlier that year that General Pichegru commanding the Army of the Rhine and Moselle had been plotting with the enemy, their brief had been extended to surveillance of the military. They rode about in civilian dress with tricolour sashes and plumes that gave them the aspect of high-ranking commanders, often overruling officers.

In Saliceti, Bonaparte had at his side a man who for all his venality and opportunism was someone he could work with. The other commissioner, Pierre-Anselme Garrau, an unprepossessing hunchback with a virulently Jacobin background, was a thorn in his side. Soon after the conclusion of the armistice at Cherasco, Bonaparte had received instructions from the Directory that diplomatic negotiations were the preserve of the commissioners, not the army commander. He had by then concluded an armistice with the kingdom of Naples, and was negotiating with envoys of the Pope.26

He left these negotiations to the two commissioners, who allowed themselves to be drawn into labyrinthine discussions which withered fruitless after three months. Worse, Garrau had inadvertedly revealed Bonaparte’s plan to surprise and capture British ships in Livorno, allowing them to get away. Bonaparte had for some time been informing the Directory of the commissioners’ incompetence and reporting the venality and scandalous behaviour of the civil functionaries operating in Italy. In July, after Saliceti was transferred to supervise the French reoccupation of Corsica, Bonaparte set about destroying Garrau. He forbade him to give orders to soldiers while bombarding him with demands for supplies and blaming him for every shortage. Bonaparte appointed his own officers to rule the occupied territories and began eliminating the ‘shameless scoundrels’, as he termed the officials following in the wake of the army, replacing them with equally venal ones who owed everything to him. Such usurpation of the Directory’s authority could end badly for Bonaparte, and the matter had reached a climax in November, at the time of the Arcole campaign. He needed to watch his back.27

In October, he ordered the arrest in Livorno of a Corsican by the name of Panattieri, the man Paoli had sent to search the Buonaparte house in Ajaccio in 1793 and bring all the papers he could find to Corte. At Bonaparte’s request, all the papers in Panattieri’s possession were seized. Meanwhile Joseph, who had gone to Corsica as soon as the British had evacuated it in order to secure the remains of the Buonaparte estate and see what could be added to it as a result of the flight of the pro-British Corsicans, scoured archives in Ajaccio and Corte. It was the first step in what was to be a methodical editing of the Buonaparte brothers’ activities on the island.28

In the context, the arrival of Clarke proved fortuitous: his glowing reports of Bonaparte’s ability and devotion to the Republic persuaded the Directors that it was best to retreat. On 6 December 1796, they abolished the role of commissioners altogether.

Meanwhile, Josephine had returned to Milan and a semblance of harmony was restored. She gave a ball on 10 December at which the couple presided in regal manner. Although he had a low opinion of Italians, considering them to be lazy and effeminate, morally defective and politically immature, Bonaparte went along with the wishes of the Milanese intellectual elites for an independent Italian republic. Pre-empting any hopes the Directory might still entertain of using Lombardy as a bargaining counter, on 27 December he announced the creation of the Cispadane Republic (covering the nearside of the river Po, Padus in Latin). It was given an armed force made up of Poles forcibly enlisted by the Austrians who had either deserted or been taken prisoner, under the command of General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski.

At the beginning of January 1797 the Austrians were on the move once more, Alvinczy marching down the valley of the Adige while two other corps swept down the valley of the Brenta to relieve Mantua. Leaving only a small force to parry these, Bonaparte collected all the troops he could muster and on the night of 13 January made a rapid march up to Rivoli, where Joubert was attempting to stem Alvinczy’s advance. He arrived at two o’clock in the morning and quickly took in the situation. Alvinczy had split his force into six columns, and Bonaparte set about them separately, defeating one after the other. By late afternoon Alvinczy was in full retreat. This was turned into a rout by the intervention of Murat on his flank, and the Austrians fled, leaving behind nearly 3,500 dead and wounded and 8,000 prisoners, representing 43 per cent of Alvinczy’s total effectives.

This obviated the need for pursuit, which was as well, since late that afternoon Bonaparte received news that one of the Austrian prongs to the south, under General Provera, had broken through and was close to Mantua. He ordered Masséna to gather up his exhausted troops and dashed south. On 16 January, while Colonel Victor contained a sortie from Mantua by Würmser, Bonaparte directed Augereau’s division against Provera at La Favorita outside the city, forcing him to surrender. It was an extraordinary result: in the space of less than four days he had depleted the Austrian forces by more than half. In the space of the week the French had taken 23,000 prisoners, sixty guns and twenty-four flags. With all hope of relief dissipated, Würmser would surrender Mantua and its garrison of 30,000 men, half of them too sick to walk, on 2 February, giving Bonaparte another twenty standards to send back to Paris. The victory had been achieved through extraordinary exertion – Masséna’s corps had fought at Verona on 13 January, at Rivoli the following day and outside Mantua two days later, covering ninety-odd kilometres in the process.

Bonaparte did not need to wait for the surrender of Mantua to know how complete his triumph was, and on 17 January he wrote to the Directors announcing that in the space of ‘three or four days’ he had destroyed his fifth imperial army. ‘I’ve beaten the enemy,’ he wrote to Josephine that evening. ‘I am dead tired. I beg you to leave immediately for Verona. I need you, because I think I am going to be very ill. A thousand kisses. I am in bed.’29

She did come, but there could be no question of a long rest. Austria would not admit defeat and was mobilising a new force. It was also negotiating with the Vatican and the kingdom of Naples, which had a sizeable army. The Directory had long before ordered Bonaparte to overthrow the papacy, which it regarded as the source of all obscurantism in the world and the avowed enemy of the French Republic. Bonaparte felt no animus against the Church and treated the clergy in the lands he occupied with respect, if only out of calculation. But he despised Pius VI, whom he regarded as a treacherous opportunist ready to stir against him every time the Austrians looked as though they might be winning. He was also short of cash, both for his army and to send back to France to placate his political masters, and there was no shortage of that to be found in Rome.

With 8,000 men, some of them Italian auxiliaries, he entered Bologna, where on 1 February he declared war on the Pope. He defeated a contingent of papal troops at Imola and took possession of Ancona. He had a cold and was depressed by the farcical nature of ‘this nasty little war’, as he wrote to Josephine on 10 February. Confronted by badly led mercenaries and displays of religious fanaticism, at Faenza he rounded up all the monks and priests of the place to lecture them about true Christian values.30

The Pope sent a delegation to negotiate, but the honey-voiced prelates who had been so successful with Garrau were no match for a bullying Bonaparte. By the Treaty of Tolentino, signed on 19 February, Pius ceded the former papal fiefs in France, Avignon and the Comtat Venaisin, the Legations of Bologna, Ferrara and Romagna, along with Ancona. He also agreed to close his ports to British ships, and undertook to pay 30 million francs and deliver a number of works of art and manuscripts.

Five days later Bonaparte was back in Bologna with Josephine, who accompanied him to Mantua, where he prepared for the next campaign. The Directory had accepted that only he was capable of beating the Austrians decisively, and reversed its policy of treating the Italian theatre as a diversion. It transferred two strong divisions from the northern theatre, under generals Delmas and Bernadotte, reinforcing Bonaparte significantly: he could field 60,000 men while leaving 20,000 guarding his rear. This made him undertake what was under any circumstances a daring enterprise – a march on Vienna.

Three Austrian forces stood in his way, one under Davidovitch at Trento, another blocking the valley of the Brenta, and the main force concentrated along the river Tagliamento. They were under the overall command of Archduke Charles of Austria, a capable general two years younger than Bonaparte who had defeated the French in Germany. His presence was helping to restore the morale of the Austrian troops, and Bonaparte decided not to give him time. On 10 March he went into action, forcing Davidovitch up the valley of the Adige towards Brixen while Masséna advanced up the Brenta and Bonaparte took on the archduke himself on the Tagliamento. He breached his defences and forced him to fall back on Gratz (Gorizia) and Laybach (Lubljana). By then two of the passes were in French hands, and the archduke had to beat a hasty retreat if he were not to be cut off as Bonaparte reached Klagenfurt, on 30 March.

He was now poised to advance on Vienna, but if he did so, the Austrian armies in Germany could sweep into his rear. Behind him lay the whole of Italy guarded by a mere 20,000 men. Anti-French feeling simmered throughout the peninsula, with Naples, Venice, the papacy, Parma and Modena only waiting for a chance to strike. His army had advanced so far that it was running out of supplies, and the rocky region in which it now found itself would not sustain it for long. He therefore had to conclude peace urgently.

The one thing that would convince Austria to give in was a French advance across the Rhine by Moreau and Hoche, who had taken over from Pichegru, and Bonaparte sent request after request to the Directory urging it to order one. But he had learned to rely only on his own resources. On 31 March he offered Archduke Charles an armistice, but pressed on swiftly, reaching Leoben and taking the Semmering pass, less than a hundred kilometres from Vienna. There was panic in the Austrian capital, with people packing their valuables and leaving for places of safety. But with no support from Moreau and Hoche, Bonaparte could not afford to go any further. On 18 April preliminaries of peace were signed at Leoben.

Bonaparte had no right to negotiate a peace, let alone one which redrew the map as drastically as this one. The terms were that Austria ceded Belgium to France, gave up its claim to Lombardy and recognised the Cispadane Republic. In return, Austria was to receive part of the territory of the Republic of Venice.

Venice had remained neutral throughout the conflict, but French and Austrian armies had operated on its territory, using cities such as Verona and Bassano as military bases. Their depredations had provoked reprisals against French soldiers, and on 7 April Bonaparte had sent Junot to Venice with an insulting ultimatum to its government to stop them. When the Venetian authorities sent envoys to Bonaparte he lambasted them and declared that he would act like Attila if they did not submit. On 17 April there was a riot in Verona, almost certainly provoked on his orders, in the course of which some French soldiers were killed. He responded by making fresh demands of the Venetian government, insisting it reform its constitution along French lines. Provocations on either side ratcheted up the conflict, and a French vessel was fired on from one of the Venetian forts. On 1 May Bonaparte declared war on Venice and sent in troops. A puppet government was set up and instructed to settle with Austria the cession of territory, for which Venice was to be compensated with the former papal province of the Legations. Meanwhile, the plunder of the city’s treasures began and the horses of St Mark’s were removed to Paris.31

Such treatment of a neutral sovereign state was nothing new for Austria, which had joined in the partitions of Poland and had long been eyeing Venetian territory, with its access to the sea. But for the French Republic, the liberator of oppressed peoples, to act in such a way was shocking, and when they heard of it the members of the Directory were incensed. Clarke, who reached Leoben two days after the signature, was aghast. But Bonaparte had already sent Masséna to Paris with the document and an accompanying letter in which he listed the advantages for France of the agreement, which he termed ‘a monument to the glory of the French Republic’. He went on to state that if the Directory did not accept the terms of the peace, he would be content to resign his post and pursue a civilian career with the same determination and single-mindedness as he had his military one – a clear threat that he would go into politics. There was nothing the Directory could do: news of the signature of peace had been greeted ecstatically throughout France, with celebrations in some towns lasting three days.32

13
Master of Italy

By the beginning of May 1797 Bonaparte was back in Milan. In the space of twelve months he had won a succession of battles, taken 160,000 prisoners and 1,100 pieces of artillery, and well over 150 standards, as well as some fifty warships, and forced the emperor to make peace after five years of war. A rest was in order, and finding the summer heat oppressive, he had installed himself at Mombello, a stately villa a short distance from the city. Set on a rise which gave it fine views, of snow-capped Alpine peaks to the north and the Lombard plain to the south, it was a perfect place for him to recover from his travails. But it soon turned into what visitors described as ‘a glittering court’ to which many gravitated.1

Pontécoulant, who had last seen Bonaparte at the War Ministry in 1795 pleading to be given back his rank, could not believe the change that had come over him. His previously hunched figure had assumed a commanding poise, and his features now put Pontécoulant in mind of classical cameos. ‘It was difficult not to feel an involuntary emotion on approaching him,’ he wrote. ‘His height, below the average, rarely equalled that of his interlocutors, yet his movements, his bearing, the decisive tone of his voice, all seemed to proclaim that he was born to command others and to impose on them the ascendancy of his will.’ Pontécoulant noted that he was polite and cordial to newcomers, speaking to each of the things which interested them. ‘There was no pride in his behaviour, only the aplomb of a man who knows his worth and has found his place,’ according to the playwright Antoine-Vincent Arnault, another who had arrived from Paris.2

As he exerted authority over the whole of northern Italy, either directly or by proxy, Bonaparte was constantly receiving representatives of the civil authorities and the administration seeking guidance or approval. And as the political system on the peninsula remained fluid, a stream of diplomats trickled through Mombello, from the emperor of Austria, the kings of Sardinia and Naples, the Pope, the republics of Genoa and Lucca, the dukes of Parma and Tuscany, from civic corporations and other bodies, even from Swiss cantons and minor German states. Couriers came and went. So did individuals seeking redress, protection or favour. In order to accommodate the numbers, a large tent was erected beside the villa to extend the drawing room.

An etiquette gradually established itself, distancing Bonaparte from his comrades-in-arms, who were made to feel they could no longer use the familiar ‘tu’ when addressing him. In French military custom, a commander kept table for all his officers when on active service, and until now Bonaparte had sat down with his comrades to eat whatever and wherever they could. At Mombello, he dined in public with Josephine as French monarchs had done, to the accompaniment of music and watched by his court, only occasionally inviting one or other of his staff to join them. In the evenings, the company was entertained with music, and La Grassini would drive out from Milan to sing for the conqueror. ‘He did not appear in the least embarrassed or put out by these excessive marks of honour, and received them as though he had been used to them all his life,’ commented the French diplomat André-François Miot de Melito.3

The painter Antoine Gros, who had been travelling in Italy, came to Mombello and started work on a portrait. Bonaparte would not sit still, so Josephine made him sit on her knee, and by playfully holding his head and caressing him she managed to immobilise him long enough for Gros to sketch the face. He would later work these sketches into the memorable painting of Bonaparte on the bridge of Arcole.4

Josephine reigned over this court with a relaxed grace that impressed visitors: she seemed born to the station of regal consort. The ladies of Milan who called were charmed by her easy and friendly manner. ‘Never has a woman combined more kindness with more natural grace and done more good with more pleasure than her,’ in the words of Miot de Melito. She was nevertheless bored, and pined for Paris. Her relationship with Bonaparte seems to have been passing through a good phase, as she informed Barras. ‘My husband has promised not to leave me any more,’ she wrote, ‘… you helped to marry us, and you made his happiness and mine. I could not love him more than I do.’ To Bonaparte’s delight, the cook’s dog killed Josephine’s pug Fortuné, who could no longer prevent him taking what one observer called ‘conjugal liberties’ with her in public, but the spontaneous and unaffected nature of his caresses disarmed even the most prudish.5

Josephine was less happy at having to put up with her husband’s family. Letizia arrived on 1 June, bringing Maria Nunziata, now styling herself Caroline, little Geronimo, and Maria-Anna, who had taken to calling herself Élisa and brought her fiancé, the Corsican Félix Bacciochi. She needed a dowry, which only her brother could provide, and though he disliked Bacciochi, Bonaparte had to give in to the entreaties of his mother, who approved of the marriage, as the man came from a prominent family of Ajaccio. Joseph had also turned up, followed by Joseph Fesch, who brought Paulette and Josephine’s son Eugène from Paris.

It was not a happy family gathering. Letizia, who now met Josephine for the first time, saw no reason to change her views on the subject of what she considered her son’s disastrous marriage. The rest of the family concurred. For her part, Josephine was unimpressed by her in-laws. She had already met Lucien, whom she detested, and Louis, who did not like her and who since falling ill in February had turned into a hypochondriac prone to fits of depression. She found Joseph amiable enough, as he kept up a diplomatic show of friendliness towards her. It was her sisters-in-law who horrified Josephine. She appears to have believed the gossip that they had all slept with Bonaparte, and Paulette’s behaviour did little to gainsay it. She was stunningly beautiful, but her demeanour combined the pranks of a schoolgirl with the morals of a harlot. One moment she would be pulling faces and sticking out her tongue, mimicking and joshing distinguished personages, the next she would be fornicating behind a curtain with whichever young officer came to hand. Bonaparte resolved to put a stop to it by marrying her off to one of his most able officers, Victor-Émmanuel Leclerc, who was in love with her and could be counted on to keep her occupied. They were married on 14 June along with Élisa and Bacciochi. Soon after, Letizia departed for Ajaccio with the Bacciochis, and a little later Joseph left for Rome to take up the job of French ambassador to the Holy See which Bonaparte had obtained for him.6

To distract Josephine, Bonaparte arranged excursions to the lakes of Garda, Maggiore and Como, to Monza and Isola Bella. But he was himself not in holiday mood. More than one witness noted that he looked not only exhausted but also sad and often dejected, that on occasion his look was filled with melancholy and reflection, that he was sometimes sombre.7

He had experienced a great deal over the past year, and had learned much about himself and others, about war, politics and human affairs in general. Most of it, including the deceptions of Josephine, had lowered his opinion of human nature. He had debased his own standards and made compromises, in his relationship with his wife, his political calculations and his financial dealings. By the beginning of 1797 he was systematically siphoning off a considerable proportion of the resources being sucked out of Italy, and following the last campaign he had taken most, at least a million francs, of the wealth uncovered by his commissary Collot at the mercury mines of Idrija in Slovenia.8

In conversation with the agronomist André Thouin at Mombello one day, he said that once peace had been signed he would retire to the country and become a justice of the peace. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of such sentiments, but they were no more than idle thoughts: in the uncertain state France was in, no government of whatever persuasion could tolerate the existence of a man of his capacities and following as an uncommitted private individual. In August, one of the army victuallers who had known him at Valence wrote to a friend that he could see ‘no end for him other than the throne or the scaffold’.9

Partly through his ambition and partly by force of circumstance, Bonaparte had become a figure famous throughout Europe. Between the spring of 1796, when he took command of the Army of Italy, and the end of 1797, no fewer than seventy-two pamphlets would have been published about him. People in the most distant parts of the Continent were either inspired or disgusted by him. Some feared him like the devil, others pinned their most ardent hopes on him. He was the source of fascination for young people of all classes and nations. But in France itself, he had become a political figure. Since the army had become an indispensable tool of government any popular general was, whether he liked it or not, a player in the power struggle which was going on over the future governance of France. Having proved his competence during the Vendémiaire rising, he was now both feared and needed by the Directory, and by every political faction in Paris.10

For a man not shy of saying what he thought of others, Bonaparte was surprisingly sensitive to criticism. He had recently come under attack from the right-wing press in Paris, which portrayed him as a Caesar only waiting to cross the Rubicon, as a Jacobin and a fiendish ‘exterminating angel’. He decided to respond in kind. On 19 July the first issue appeared in Milan of the Courrier de l’armée d’Italie, a paper ostensibly meant to keep the army informed, but whose primary aim was to work on public opinion in France, where it was disseminated. Other commanders had published papers to keep their troops informed, but this one was different. The main feature of the first number was a description of the parade held in Milan on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July. It abounded in touching vignettes, mostly apocryphal. ‘As the army marched past, a corporal of the ninth demi-brigade approached the commander-in-chief and said to him: “General, you have saved France. We, your children who share in the glory of belonging to this invincible army will make a rampart of their bodies around you. Save the Republic; may the hundred thousand soldiers who make up this army close ranks in defence of liberty.”’11

While Bonaparte made it clear that he and his army stood firm in support of the Republic, the Courrier subtly distanced him from the Directory, which, by contrast with the pure republicanism of the Army of Italy and its commander, was made to appear weak and corrupt. A second journal, which came out once a décade (ten days – the revolutionary week) under the editorship of the moderate constitutionalist royalist Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély, printed articles ‘correcting’ ‘false’ impressions of Bonaparte held in Paris and building up the image of him as a miracle-performing hero.

This positioning had a great deal to do with recent events in France, where the April elections had returned a majority of right-wing deputies to the two chambers, setting these in conflict with the Directory. Barras resolved to cow them by force, and summoned General Hoche from the Army of the Sambre-et-Meuse under pretence of giving him the job of minister of war. On 16 July, as his troops crossed the sixty-kilometre exclusion zone supposed to keep the military away from the institutions of government, the chambers denounced the action and the attempted coup was blocked. Barras and his fellow Directors then concentrated on winning over those troops legally stationed within the zone, but they needed a popular general to lead them. Bonaparte wrote to the Directory on 15 July that the Army of Italy was alarmed at news of a slide to the right in Paris and hoped they would take energetic steps in defence of the Republic, assuring them of its support. He had cause for anxiety.12

When they invaded Venetian territory in May, his troops had arrested a royalist agent, the comte d’Antraigues, and from him and the papers found on him, Bonaparte discovered that Generals Pichegru and Moreau were involved in a plot to overthrow the Directory and bring back the Bourbons, a plot which specifically involved killing him. This explained why the Austrians were dragging their feet over concluding peace.13

The preliminaries signed at Leoben were just that, and a treaty still needed to be negotiated. The Austrian foreign minister Baron Thugut sent the Neapolitan ambassador in Vienna, Marchese Gallo, to negotiate this on his behalf, and when he met Bonaparte in Milan in May they agreed to conclude rapidly. But Thugut was in no hurry. At the last moment Bonaparte had insisted that France be allowed to keep all her conquests on the left bank of the Rhine, which meant that the territory’s rulers would have to be compensated. Since their lands had formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, the emperor would need to sanction this and make whatever compensations were necessary. It was also hoped that some of Austria’s allies in the anti-French coalition would be persuaded to accede to the settlement, which would be finalised at a congress to be convoked at Rastatt at the beginning of July. The possibility of a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy radically altered the situation; Louis XVIII would be only too happy to recover France reduced to her old frontiers and let northern Italy revert to Austria. When all this dawned on Bonaparte, he was outraged.14

Both sides prepared for a resumption of hostilities. Austria took possession of the Venetian territory promised to it, while Bonaparte took over Venice itself and reorganised the area under his control. He had turned the lands taken from Venice into a Transpadane Republic, but then incorporated that with the Cispadane into one, to be known as the Cisalpine Republic. His aim was to deny the whole of northern Italy to Austria and create a political unit that could stand on its own but remain under French control. He hoped to introduce an administration which would allow it to raise and pay for enough troops to defend both itself and French interests. It was not a new idea, as Dumouriez had done much the same in the Austrian Netherlands and Hoche on the Rhine. The policy made sense to the generals operating in the respective areas, if not to the Directory. It was also partly inspired by the mission civilisatrice the Revolution was supposed to be carrying out as it liberated sister nations from feudal ‘slavery’. Bonaparte had the establishment of the Cisalpine Republic immortalised in a print showing himself before the tomb of Virgil, with the French people represented by a Herculean figure tearing the chains off a female figure representing Italy.

The reality did not live up to the ideal. Aside from a small number of Italian nationalists and Jacobins, the population had greeted the French incursion with varying degrees of hostility, which was greatly increased by the depredations of the troops and civilian administrators. Bonaparte had been careful not to upset local sensibilities by spreading revolutionary ideas, had refrained from toppling any throne (except that of Modena) or abolishing the privileges of the nobility, and had shown respect for the Church and the Pope (the Directors raged about his use of the terms ‘Holy Father’ and ‘His Holiness’ when writing and referring to him). Yet the majority of Italians remained sceptical and uncommitted. There were moments when Bonaparte despaired of the enterprise; and he was beginning to be distracted by other thoughts.

In April, the former French minister in Constantinople, Raymond Verninac, turned up at Leoben on his way back to France. He was concerned at the treatment of French citizens and interests in Egypt by the Mameluke beys who ruled it as a semi-autonomous province on behalf of the Ottoman Porte. For the past two years he had been receiving alarming reports from the French consul in Cairo, Charles Magallon, who since 1790 had been pressing for France to intervene militarily and, if necessary, take Egypt over as a colony.15

The Levant had been a French sphere of interest since the Crusades, when a French dynasty was established in Jerusalem, and later France had entertained close diplomatic and commercial ties with the Ottoman Porte. The two powers were united in opposition to Austria and Russia, both of which threatened Ottoman interests in the Balkans. Toulon and Marseille had grown up on trade with the Levant, which attracted colonies of French merchants. An Ottoman province since 1517, Egypt was ruled by a pasha nominated by the Porte assisted by Mameluke soldiers of Albanian and Circassian origin. The pasha had lost control, the beys did as they pleased, and the population suffered from their maladministration, corruption and cruelty. In the course of the eighteenth century many came to believe that Egypt was crying out for stable administration and development.

The loss of Canada and other colonies to the British in the 1760s prompted the French to look east. Featuring prominently in the art and literature of the eighteenth century, in the course of which France developed relations with Persia, the region seemed to offer great promise. The decline of the Ottoman Empire was a source of concern for France: if it were to fall apart, Austria and Russia would be the beneficiaries. A French base in Egypt would permit France to deny them that and Syria at least. It would also enable her to safeguard her interests in India, where she had a number of partisans among the Indian princes, chief among them Tipu Sahib of Mysore, who in October 1797 would make the last of several appeals for military assistance. A French force from Suez landing in Bombay at the heart of Mahratta territory would at the very least divert British forces.

As France lost further colonies to Britain in the West Indies in the 1790s, the case for acting in Egypt grew stronger. Magallon pointed out that the Nile delta provided the conditions to grow all the goods formerly derived from the Caribbean – cotton, rice, sugar, coffee and so on – while others could be obtained from neighbouring Arabia and Persia. When the British seized the Cape of Good Hope, cutting off the sea route to India, the appeal of obtaining a port on the Red Sea grew stronger, as did that of piercing the Isthmus of Suez with a canal. The idea of turning the Mediterranean into a French sea was a logical one, and with Spain onside and Corsica in French hands once more, it appeared practicable.16

When he occupied the port of Ancona earlier in the year, Bonaparte noted its strategic value and that of the Ionian islands across the Adriatic. They had been part of the Republic of Venice, and as soon as he was able to, he despatched a force to occupy them. He made overtures to the Ottoman rulers of Albania, assuring them of France’s good intentions and respect for their faith, and also to the Maniotes of the Peloponnese. Contemplation of those shores triggered a host of cultural references: Athens, Sparta, Homer and Alexander the Great litter his correspondence at the time.

Another strategic imperative for control of the eastern Mediterranean was Malta, and Bonaparte began gathering information on the state of its defences and the morale of its masters, the Knights of the Order of St John. He pressed the Directory to investigate the possibility of having a Spaniard elected Grand Master, which, Spain being France’s ally, would bring the island into France’s orbit.17

General Louis Desaix, who turned up at Mombello in late July, was intrigued to find Bonaparte poring over maps of Egypt and Syria. A year older than him, looking, according to Lavalette, ‘like a savage from the Orinoco dressed in French clothes’, Desaix had much in common with Bonaparte, always wearing a plain, poorly-fitting blue coat with no marks of rank, ill at ease in society and paying little attention to women. He caught Bonaparte’s enthusiasm, and they discussed the details of an invasion of Egypt sailing out of Venice with a corps of 10,000 French and 8,000 Polish troops.18

In his report to the Directory on 16 August Bonaparte warned that Austria was arming and would soon be in a position to field formidable forces for the reconquest of Italy, and argued that France must seek alternatives. ‘The islands of Corfu, Zante and Cephalonia are of greater interest to us than the whole of Italy taken together,’ he went on. ‘I believe that if we were forced to choose, it would be better to restitute Italy to the emperor and to keep the four islands, which are a source of riches and prosperity for our commerce. The empire of the Turks is crumbling by the day; the possession of these isles will put us in the position to support it for as long as that will be possible, or to take our share of it. It will not be long before we feel that, in order to really destroy England, we have to take Egypt.’19

Unbeknown to him, the Directory had a few weeks before received a memorandum from its foreign minister, Talleyrand, in which he put the case for seeking replacements in Africa and Egypt for the colonies lost to the British in the western hemisphere, and followed this up with three more documents developing the putative advantages, suggesting Egypt as a suitable place to begin.

The Directors had other things on their mind: they needed a general who could help them intimidate the chambers, and they approached Bonaparte. While he shared their alarm at the counter-revolutionary tide in Paris and urged them to act, he was wary of getting involved. He therefore sent them Augereau, a stalwart republican who was sure to be able to carry the troops with him. The manoeuvre had also rid him of a man he did not like or trust, and who was inconveniently popular among the rank and file.20

In the course of the past year, Bonaparte had become aware of the perils threatening him, and he created a unit of bodyguards, the Guides, to act as an escort. But he needed to make sure that the Army of Italy was also entirely his. He bought the loyalty of the other generals with a mixture of encomiums, promotions, mentions in despatches to the Directory and his Bulletins, and cash hand-outs. On the cessation of hostilities with the signature of the preliminaries of Leoben, the army was just over 80,000 strong, but a large proportion was made up of recent reinforcements, men who had seen little or no service under his command. He refrained from promoting more recent arrivals, and filled the higher ranks of every unit with men who had proved themselves under him, even if it meant giving them precedence over senior officers. On 14 July he celebrated the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille with a parade at which he honoured men and units, followed by a banquet for all those who had distinguished themselves in battle. On 28 August he presented a hundred sabres of honour, ten to cavalrymen, ninety to grenadiers, whom he was already singling out as a kind of elite, his Praetorians.21

‘What I have done so far is nothing,’ he said to Miot de Melito and the Italian statesman Francesco Melzi d’Eril as they strolled in the gardens of Mombello one summer day. ‘I am only at the beginning of the career I must pursue. Do you think it is to enhance the position of the lawyers of the Directory, the Carnots, the Barras, that I have been winning victories in Italy? And do you think it is in order to establish a republic? What nonsense! A republic of thirty million people! With our manners and our vices! It is an impossibility! It is a dream with which the French are in love, but it will pass like so many others. They want glory, they want their vanity to be satisfied, but liberty? They don’t understand it at all. […] The nation needs a glorious leader and not theories of government, phrases and speeches by ideologues which Frenchmen don’t understand. […] I do not wish to leave Italy until I can go and play in France a role similar to that I am playing here, and the time has not yet come: the pear is not yet ripe.’22

For all his cynicism, Bonaparte was still a child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a believer in human progress, to be achieved through the better organisation of society. ‘A France with honest and strong government, that is what I want,’ he told Pontécoulant. He had long ago come to the conclusion that this could only be achieved by dictatorial means. While dining with his staff at Ancona in February, he had astonished them by affirming that the only decent government since the beginning of the Revolution had been that of Robespierre. Strong central authority, he explained, was necessary in order to carry the Revolution to its logical conclusion; to create new institutions based on solid rational foundations, ensure the rule of law, stabilise the currency by abolishing paper money and introducing a functional system of tax-collection, re-establish the Church as a moral base for society, regenerate its morals and make France great once more. He concluded by saying that Robespierre had only failed because he lacked the experience and strength of ‘a military commander’.23

The Directory had once again demonstrated the truth of this. Having placed Augereau in command of the troops in the Paris region, on 4 September (18 Fructidor) it felt strong enough to invalidate the April elections, expelling 154 deputies and thereby recovering its majority. Sixty-five were sent to the penal colony of Guyana. Bonaparte had sent his aide-de-camp Antoine de Lavalette to observe and report back on events. Once the coup had been accomplished, he was therefore able to gauge public reactions and act accordingly. As these had been generally unfavourable, he distanced himself from the actions of the Directory. ‘Your silence is very curious, general,’ wrote Barras, prompting Bonaparte to issue a proclamation expressing his satisfaction at the defeat of ‘the enemies of the fatherland’. In private, he condemned the coup and particularly the deportations to Guyana. Barras remained suspicious, and sent his secretary Bottot to Italy to ascertain what was going on.24

Bonaparte had acquired a new ally in Talleyrand, who had written him a flattering letter seeking his friendship. He responded with an appropriately cordial one full of praise for the minister’s distinguished record, which he, Bonaparte, would certainly reward were he to be in a position to do so. ‘You ask for my friendship, and you have it along with my esteem,’ he wrote. ‘In return, I ask for your counsels, which I will value, I assure you.’ He went on to say that the Revolution had destroyed too much and built nothing, so ‘everything remained to be done’, and the only question was who would be the one to ‘close the Revolution’. Subsequent correspondence confirmed that it was not only their views on Egypt that coincided.25

With the possibility of a Bourbon restoration dismissed by the Fructidor coup, there was no longer any reason for Austria to delay making peace. Britain too was inclined to end the hostilities, and peace talks had been going on at Lille since July between Lord Malmesbury and Charles-Louis Letourneur. But they were undermined by the Directory, which saw them as part of an Anglo–royalist plot. Bonaparte was highly critical of the missed opportunity, arguing that the British could have been allowed to keep the Cape in exchange for agreeing to a French colonisation of Egypt.26

It was not until the end of August that the Austrian chancellor Thugut sent a senior diplomat, the monstrously fat forty-four-year-old Count Ludvig Cobenzl, to direct the negotiations along with Gallo. They took up residence at Udine while Bonaparte installed himself a short distance away at Passariano, a grand country residence set in beautiful parkland belonging to Ludovico Manin, the last Doge of Venice. They skirmished ferociously but dined together, either at Udine or Passariano.

While Thugut was now eager to proceed so as to secure Venice for Austria as quickly as possible, the Directory felt strong and belligerent. Following the unexpected death of General Hoche on 19 September it appointed Augereau commander of the Army of Germany in his place, which suggested the possibility of a fresh offensive against Austria in that theatre. This was unwelcome news to Bonaparte, as it raised the possibility of Augereau stealing a march on him, or at least dimming his glory with a victory. Equally unwelcome were the despatches which arrived from Paris on 25 September informing him that the Directory was sending someone to conduct the negotiations in his stead.

He responded with one of his tantrums. ‘I am ill and I need rest,’ he wrote to Barras the same day, asking him for a discharge, adding that he wanted to settle outside Paris and enjoy at least a couple of years of peace. He wrote to the Directory in the same vein. ‘No power on earth could make me continue to serve after this horrible mark of ingratitude by the Government, which I had been very far from expecting,’ he complained. ‘My health is considerably impaired, it urgently demands rest and tranquillity. The state of my soul is also such that it needs to reimmerse itself in the mass of my fellow citizens. I have for too long had great power placed in my hands.’ The idea of Bonaparte immersing himself in the mass of his fellow citizens was too frightening for the Directory to contemplate.27

The negotiations continued, Cobenzl trying to intimidate Bonaparte with courtly mundanity, only to be met with bullying and feigned rages. The Austrian diplomat was unused to such tactics, and through Gallo he persuaded Josephine to exert a calming influence (for which she would be rewarded by the emperor). But Bonaparte was not to be controlled as he steered his own course; he was under strict orders from the Directory not to cede any part of Venice to Austria, and while he had no intention of following these, he used them to pressure Cobenzl over other things, as by then Austria was set on having the territory. At the same time, he did not want to push the Austrian too hard, as he feared a possible resumption of hostilities, for which his army was unprepared, and he reserved his belligerence for the peace talks.28

These were eventually concluded, and the treaty was to be signed on 11 October, but at the last moment Bonaparte insisted a guarantee be inserted that France would obtain the left bank of the Rhine. Cobenzl demurred. Bonaparte, who had spent two sleepless nights, was in an agitated state and fortified himself with numerous glasses of punch as he read out his proposed draft of the treaty. When Cobenzl attempted to explain the impossibility of his acceding to the new terms, Bonaparte got up from the table clearly drunk, put on his hat and stormed out of the room, vomiting barrack-room imprecations. By his own account, he smashed Cobenzl’s favourite coffee set before walking out, pursued by a vainly emollient Gallo.29

Bourrienne records that two days later he awoke to see snow on the mountaintops and informed Bonaparte of it as he roused him. With winter on its way, a French threat to Vienna through the passes was dissolving fast, and Bonaparte realised he had to conclude speedily. The treaty was signed on the night of 17–18 October, and named after a place equidistant from the two in which the negotiations had been conducted, the village of Campoformido, mis-spelt by a French secretary as Campo Formio. Bonaparte had gained most of what he wanted. He was in high spirits, and at dinner he entertained the Austrians by telling them his favourite ghost stories.30

‘My services have earned me the approbation of the Government and the nation,’ He wrote to the Directory. ‘I have received many marks of its esteem. It now remains for me only to step back into the crowd, take up the plough of Cincinnatus and set an example of respect for the magistrates and aversion for military rule, which has destroyed so many republics and undermined several States.’31

On 5 November he received his nomination as commander of a projected Army of England and also as plenipotentiary at the congress due to convene at Rastatt to settle questions arising from France’s acquisition of the left bank of the Rhine. On the morning of 17 November he left Milan with Eugène de Beauharnais. Travelling fast and through the night he was at Mantua the next day, where he paused only to review the troops stationed there, hold a ceremony in honour of the deceased Hoche and attend the theatre, before rushing on, to reach Turin at two on the morning of 19 November. He remained there long enough to have a talk with Miot de Melito, in the course of which he again expressed his conviction that ‘those Parisian lawyers who have been put in the Directory understand nothing about government’. ‘As for me, my dear Miot, I tell you that I cannot obey; I have tasted command and I would not be able to give it up. I have made up my mind: if I cannot be master, I will leave France …’32

At three that afternoon he left Turin, and two days later he was in Geneva. People came out to catch sight of him as he passed through, not just to see the victorious hero whose reputation was spreading over the Continent, but to cheer the man who had brought peace after so many years of war. ‘Vive Bonaparte, vive le pacificateur!’ they shouted. According to Bourrienne, Bonaparte was furious when one of their former colleagues from Brienne now living in Switzerland came to see him and addressed him with the familiar ‘tu’.33

He was even angrier when, after rushing on, through Berne, Basel and Huningue and reaching Augereau’s headquarters at Offenburg, he was informed that the commander of the Army of Germany was busy getting dressed and could not see him. He hurried on to Rastatt, which he drove into on 26 November in a magnificent coach drawn like a sovereign’s by eight horses, with an escort of thirty hussars, before installing himself in the Margrave of Baden’s residence.34

He impressed the representatives of the Imperial Diet not just by his grand manner but by his familiarity with the Golden Bull of 1356, the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire and the Treaty of Westphalia. On 29 November he met the prime minister of Baden, and exchanged the ratified copies of the Treaty of Campo Formio. On the same day he received a despatch from the Directory summoning him to Paris.35

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