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      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 It had been superseded, along with the monarchy, by a republican one in June 1793, Year I in the revolutionary calendar.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

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