The War of Wars (12 page)

Among the French aristocrats’ sons who were his fellow pupils he was almost beneath contempt. This he reciprocated, referring to aristocrats as ‘imbeciles’, ‘asses’ and ‘the curse of the nation’. He considered himself high born, with adequate reason, and yet was not treated as part of them – an explosive combination. Tough, surly and from an island background where slights were met by a vendetta and even death, he had reason enough for harbouring resentment and deep ambition. Being able and having the luck to be educated at France’s most prestigious military academy, he had the perfect means to prove himself: by becoming a leader in the very nation that had annexed his homeland: that would be a triumph of vendetta indeed.

However, none of this early background explains either his rise to power or later actions: there must have been hundreds of officers in the French army with similarly complex lives and motives. He had been promoted, partly through luck, partly through ability, so that he had the potential to reach the top of French society; he had no reason to feel ungrateful to the French.

With the death of his father, he was forced to take lodgings in a noisy first floor café, next door to a billiard room and send back most of his pay to his mother, who had now lost not just a husband but a patron, the randy Comte de Marbeuf, who had married an eighteen-year-old. Yet countless other young officers were in similar financial straits. There was not much that marked out Napoleon from his peers –
except his intelligence and overweening curiosity. He was not even especially ambitious at that stage: he wanted to become a writer.

He was certainly unhappy and depressed during these penurious times. He wrote miserably:

Life is a burden to me because I feel no pleasure and because everything is affliction to me. It is a burden to me because the men with whom I have to live, and will probably always live, have ways as different from mine as the light of the moon from that of the sun. I cannot then pursue the only manner of living which could enable me to put up with existence, whence follows a disgust for everything.

Later the same pessimism surfaced in a letter to his hero, Paoli:

As the nation was perishing I was born. Thirty thousand Frenchmen were vomited on to our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in waves of blood. Such was the odious sight which was the first to strike me. From my birth, my cradle was surrounded by the cries of the dying, the groans of the oppressed and tears of despair. You left our island and with you went all hope of happiness. Slavery was the price of our submission. Crushed by the triple yoke of the soldier, the law-maker and the tax inspector, our compatriots live despised.

This was remarkable as an expression of his open hatred for the French. He had acquired this when, after Marbeuf’s death, Corsica was ruled by spendthrift bureaucrats who had cut back payments to his mother for agricultural improvements. During this period, he was given leave to visit his home, where he was shocked to find his mother virtually unaided, and he soon procured a servant for her, Severia, who remained with her for forty years. Joseph, who was now studying law in Pisa, returned and the two old playground antagonists got on famously. Napoleon travelled to Paris to lobby for a financial grant, which failed. But at the age of eighteen he slept with a girl for the first time in his life, a Breton prostitute.

He returned to his regiment, which was now stationed at Auxonne. There he had a very relaxed work regime, needing to attend parades
just once a week, and made up for it by reading and writing. He was a furious worker, rising at 4 am and going to bed at 10 p.m., which brought on physical exhaustion. He filled no fewer than thirty-six notebooks with his thoughts in just fifteen months. He contracted malaria. During his studies he read extensively about his own specialist subject, artillery: the main contemporary exponent of this was Jean de Beaumont du Teil, who urged a sudden massing of guns in battle, rather as Pierre Bouret, another tactician, urged separating army units to help them move at speed, then massing them before a battle. Both of these ideas were to feature hugely in Napoleon’s military campaigns. Du Teil’s brother, Jean-Pierre, was Napoleon’s commanding officer and quickly spotted his abilities.

So the historic year of 1789 dawned in France, with the nineteen-year-old officer of promise in a provincial posting. His first awareness of tumultuous change came in April, when he was ordered to join a small force to put down a grain riot in Seurre, twenty miles away. The riot was quelled before he arrived, but not before du Teil’s country house had been set on fire and mutinous soldiers had seized funds. Napoleon, with his strong sense of discipline, strongly disapproved of this, although he sympathized with the burgeoning Revolution. Napoleon’s studies had led him to admire Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that a ‘social contract’ was the sole means by which monarchy could justify itself.

Although clearly reform-minded, he was horrified when in July the local mob rose up and burned the tax register as well as the offices of a provincial official. The La Fère regiment caught the contagion and mutinied against du Teil, forcing officers to submit to indignities. Napoleon and other officers restored order, but he was appalled by the indiscipline and claimed later that he was ready to fire upon the mutineers if so ordered.

Soon afterwards, as the revolt got under way in earnest, he obtained leave again to return to Corsica. It seems almost certain this was the right moment to adopt the mantle of Paoli and launch a new war of independence for his country: he saw his future as the island’s leader – not unreasonably, as Paoli was ageing and his father had originally been
one of his helpers. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, the island had embraced the cause of radical reform and Paoli had been invited back to the island.

At this stage Napoleon was still torn between loyalty to his own provincial people and the French oppressor which had nevertheless recognized his talents and promoted him. Shortly after his arrival a popular uprising had taken place in Bastia, the capital. Napoleon threw himself into the political fray on the island with vigour and on 17 July – shortly after the fall of the Bastille – he met his hero face to face: Paoli stooped and white-haired at sixty-six, but still a great bull of a man, arrived in Bastia. Napoleon, who had joined the Ajaccio Jacobin Club, became a firm supporter. The local governor complained bitterly that ‘this young officer was educated at the École Militaire. His sister is at St-Cyr and his mother has received countless kindnesses from the government. This officer had much better be with his regiment since he spends all his time stirring up trouble.’

Under orders, he tried to return to the mainland, but appalling weather drove him back and it was not until the end of January 1791 that he reached the mainland with his twelve-year-old brother Louis. The boy, far from being impressed by Napoleon’s spartan living quarters at Auxonne, hated them and begged to return to Corsica. Meanwhile Napoleon’s radical views made him deeply unpopular with many of his royalist brother officers, who threatened at one stage to throw him into the Saône. He was promoted by du Teil to first lieutenant and sent to the Fourth Artillery Regiment at Valence. There he became a member of the Society of Friends of the Constitution, and in July he openly criticized the King’s attempted flight to Belgium. He was in the forefront of the sale of confiscated clerical and noble property.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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