LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

on his head, and to drink a glass of wine with them. For two hours he stayed with them, while they shouted and demonstrated, then, reassured, they drifted away. ‘The King came out of it well,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph, ‘… but an incident like this is unconstitutional and a very dangerous example.’

      Dangerous it soon proved. On 9 August Jacobins invaded the galleries and heckled the Government, which, as the Austro-Prussian army pressed on, was steadily losing its grip. ‘The noise and disorder were excessive,’ wrote an English eyewitness, Dr Moore. ‘Fifty members were vociferating at once: I never was witness to a scene so tumultuous; the bell, as well as the voice of the President, was drowned in a storm, compared to which the most boisterous night I ever was witness to in the House of Commons, was calm.’

      Next morning, 10 August, crowds roamed the streets. It was a blazing hot day and tempers were frayed. Leaving his hotel, Napoleon went to a house in the Place du Carrousel where Bourrienne’s brother kept a pawnshop – with Napoleon’s watch among the pawned articles. From the windows he had a view of the Tuileries, and of the crowd beginning to form in front of it, no longer only Parisians but National Guardsmen fresh from the provinces, chiefly Brittany and Marseille. The latter were chanting the Marseillaise, fresh from the pen of Rouget de Lisle; this anthem, perhaps the most stirring ever written, made provincials and Parisians feel a common cause and a new strength.

      Louis XVI appeared outside the palace. The crowd booed and shouted insults. Louis went in again. He wanted to stay in the palace but Roederer, a young lawyer whose advice he trusted, begged him to go, with the Queen and his children, to the Assembly. This he did. The National Guardsmen then broke into the palace forecourt, and firing started – no one knew who fired the first shot. As the Swiss Guard resisted, the crowd brought up cannon to the Pont Royal and started shelling the palace. Hoping to avert bloodshed, the King sent orders to his Swiss Guards to cease fire. At this the National Guardsmen swarmed in almost unopposed, broke down doors with axes, and killed whoever they found, mainly courtiers and Swiss Guards.

      About noon Napoleon crossed to the forecourt, now a great pool of blood where 800 men lay dead or dying. He was sickened to see respectable-looking women perpetrating outrages on dead Swiss Guardsmen. He also saw men from Marseille killing in cold blood. As one of them pointed his musket at a wounded Swiss Guard, Napoleon intervened. ‘You’re from the south? So am I. Let’s save this wretch.’ The Marseillais, either from shame or pity, dropped his musket, and on that day of blood one life at least was saved.

      While the crowd drifted away, laden with Marie Antoinette’s jewels, silver and dresses, Napoleon went to the nearby cafés, scanning people’s faces. He read on them only anger and hatred. What had become of the generous ideals, the sense of law and justice and fraternity, which had launched the Revolution?

      That hot August day Napoleon learned a lesson he was never to forget: that once leadership breaks down, even the most generous ideals go awry. Still a firm believer in constitutional monarchy, he felt that the leadership should have come from the King. To Joseph that evening he wrote: ‘If Louis XVI had shown himself on horseback, victory would have been his.’

      Napoleon meanwhile was going regularly to the War Office. He explained his conduct in Ajaccio so satisfactorily that the idea of a court-martial was dropped. His keenness to bring the benefits of the Revolution to Corsica made a very favourable impression. Not only was he allowed to return to his command, with 352 livres for travelling expenses, but he was raised a rank in the regular army. From the last day of August he would be Captain Buonaparte.

      This triumph was followed by a new worry. On 16 August the school of Saint-Cyr, aristocratic and therefore undesirable, was officially closed. For Napoleon this was alarming news, because Marie Anne was a pupil there. As soon as he had finished at the War Office Napoleon hurried to Saint-Cyr to fetch the sister he had not seen for eight years. She was now aged fifteen, not very pretty, but intelligent, self-composed and given to the rather stilted language taught at Saint-Cyr. Her school uniform was a black dress, black stockings and black gloves: on her breast a cross spangled with fleurs-de-lys, the figure of Christ on one side, of St Louis on the other. This emblem Napoleon doubtless eyed with considerable unease: in France’s present mood it was enough to get his sister strung up on one of the street lanternes.

      Napoleon took Marie Anne to Paris and booked two places in the stage coach for Marseille a week ahead. While waiting, perhaps to celebrate his new captaincy, he took her to the Opera. Marie Anne had been taught that opera was indecent and the work of the devil. At first she scrupulously shut her eyes tight, but presently Napoleon noticed that she had opened them and was enjoying the new experience.

      All the while power was passing to the Jacobins. They were out for the blood of aristocrats and priests. On 7 September mobs broke into the Paris prisons and massacred over one thousand innocent men and women. Before the month was out they were to throw Louis Capet into the Temple gaol and declare France a Republic.

      Two days after the terrible massacre in Paris, Napoleon and Marie Anne boarded the stage coach. All the way across France the girl with the Saint-Cyr accent and manners made a bad impression on the Jacobin crowds, and when she climbed down from the coach in Marseille a threatening group pointed to her feathered taffeta bonnet: ‘Aristocrats! Death to the aristocrats!’ ‘We’re no more aristocrats than you!’ retorted Captain Buonaparte, and snatching the feathered bonnet from her head, threw it to the crowd, who cheered.

      In October 1792 Napoleon was back in Ajaccio, his personal position enhanced, glad to be out of the Paris blood-bath. He resumed his post as lieutenant-colonel in the second battalion of the Corsican National Guard. But his role now was a new one, because the Revolution had entered yet another phase. In September at Valmy the French won a victory over the Austro-Prussians. Valmy turned the tide of war. All the pent-up energy unleashed by the new Constitution was now directed against the external enemies of the French people: the kings and noblemen and reactionary bishops who had dared to send armies into France. Not only did the French fight back, they carried the war on to enemy soil. They invaded Belgium, an Austrian possession, threatened Holland – thereby alarming England, and seized Savoy and Nice from King Victor Amadeus of Piedmont, an ally of Austria.

      The French Revolution had taken the offensive. A patriot – and Napoleon wished above all to be a patriot – was no longer a man who brought to his fellows the benefits of the Constitution, but one who fought in the front line against an enemy bent on suppressing those benefits. A friend of Napoleon’s, Antonio Cristoforo Saliceti, who sat in the Convention (as the new Assembly called itself), rammed the point home in a letter to him. France was at war with King Victor Amadeus, and the King’s possessions included Sardinia. Why hadn’t the Corsican National Guard seen action in that area? The Convention was ill-pleased with the Corsicans’ feeble efforts in defence of the people’s liberty. To Napoleon Saliceti’s message was clear. If Corsica wished to continue to be identified with France, she must march against the common enemy.

      Paoli had returned to Corsica, where he headed the government. He was not eager to attack Sardinia, perhaps bringing reprisals, but he did consent to strike a blow against the Sardinian off-shore islets of Maddalena and Caprera. Napoleon ensured that he and his battalion were chosen for this patriotic expedition. Inhabited by Corsican-speaking shepherds and fishermen, the eleven islands had been occupied for twenty-five years by Sardinia, and though of small intrinsic value, would be useful stepping-stones.

      On 18 February 1793, Napoleon and his senior colleague, Colonel Quenza embarked 800 men of the National Guard, two 12-pounders and one mortar in the naval corvette, Fauvette. She was manned by Marseille desperadoes, who had already won a bad name by getting drunk in Ajaccio and killing three Corsicans. Command of the expedition had been entrusted by Paoli to his friend Colonna Cesari.

      Napoleon was eager as only a young officer can be on the eve of his first engagement. During the stormy four-day voyage it was noticed that he was scrupulous about fulfilling orders to the last detail, and that he dictated his own orders fast. He had taken along a dressing-case with fittings of silver marked with his initials, and every morning washed himself with a wet sponge.

      At four in the afternoon of 22 February, protected by fire from the Fauvette, Napoleon and Quenza landed on the

Скачать книгу