Napoleon - Vincent Cronin

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small Sardinian garrison and lost one man wounded. Quickly they occupied the whole island save for a square tower where the Sardinians took refuge. Napoleon trained his guns on Maddalena to cover the landing he supposed Cesari would at once make. But Cesari refused to land that night. Napoleon pleaded. Cesari still refused. As Napoleon wrote in his report, ‘We lost the favourable moment which in war decides everything.’

      For two nights and a day, in a high wind and drenching rain, Napoleon waited impatiently. His gunners killed a goat, skinned it and cooked it on a wood fire. Napoleon ate a piece of the meat, ill-tasting without any salt. Only on the 24th did Napoleon receive orders to open fire. He did so to good effect, bombarding Maddalena village with shells and red-hot shot, and setting fire to it four times. He destroyed eighty houses, burned a timber yard and reduced the guns in the two enemy forts to silence.

      On the 25th Cesari at last ordered the attack. The Fauvette was to sail close in-shore and land troops. But in the three days of inaction any ardour the sailors from Marseille might have had was gone. One sailor had been killed by a Sardinian shell and the others were frightened of the 450 Sardinian troops on Maddalena. ‘Take us back,’ they shouted to Cesari. The Corsican tried to rally them, but the sailors only became threatening and at last mutinous. Cesari broke down in tears – and was promptly nicknamed the pleureur.

      The sailors forced Cesari to write a letter to Quenza, ordering him to evacuate San Stefano. When they read it, Quenza and Napoleon could hardly believe their eyes. But of course they had to obey. Napoleon and his men, heaving and pushing, managed to get the one-ton guns through the mud down to the beach. But the Fauvette sent boats enough only to take off the troops. In this, his first engagement, Napoleon had to spike his guns and abandon them to the enemy.

      As the ill-fated expedition sailed back to Bonifacio, Napoleon suffered all the pangs of disappointment, frustration and shame. His immediate reaction was to write to the War Office urging another expedition to seize Maddalena and wipe out this ‘stain of dishonour’ on the second battalion; he enclosed two plans of attack. For the ill-named Cesari he felt scorn, for the Marseillais sailors, deep indignation, which he did not hide. A few days after their return some of the sailors seized Napoleon of the silver-fitted dressing-case and with cries of ‘L’aristocrat à la lanterne’ tried to string him up. This was prevented only by the lucky arrival of some of Napoleon’s Guardsmen.

      The Maddalena affair left a lasting impression on Napoleon. It taught him, as only a first failure could, the difficulty of combined operations. It taught him the importance of speed, of the ‘favourable moment’ when men are tensed for action, and the enemy surprised. It taught him the vital importance of firmness in a commander, and of discipline in the ranks. It left him also with the conviction that if he had been in charge instead of Cesari, Maddalena would have fallen.

      After Napoleon’s return, events began to move quickly. Lucien decided that Paoli was dragging his feet and even favouring the English, now at war with France. He went to Toulon and in a flamboyant speech denounced Paoli; calling on the revolutionary tribunal to ‘deliver his head to the sword of justice’. Lucien’s speech was read in the Convention, and the Government ordered Commissioner Saliceti to arrest Paoli.

      Napoleon wrote to the Convention in defence of Paoli and when Saliceti landed went to see him in the hope of reconciling Paoli and France. But Paoli believed that, like Lucien, Napoleon had turned against him and issued an order for Napoleon’s capture, dead or alive. Napoleon had to take to the maquis and later regained Bastia by fishing-boat.

      Napoleon was an outlaw, whom Paoli’s men would shoot on sight. But he was also a French officer committed to the notion that Corsica was part of the patrie. Where a less conscientious man would have caught the first boat for Marseille, Napoleon decided not only to hang on, but to fight back. Ajaccio, he explained to Saliceti, was mainly pro-French. With two warships and 400 light infantry he felt sure he could seize the town. So convincingly did Napoleon speak that Saliceti agreed to try.

      By attacking Ajaccio, Napoleon knew that he would be endangering his family. So he sent a message to his mother, telling her to make her way secretly with the children to the ruined tower of Capitello, east of Ajaccio Gulf. Letizia obeyed and there, on 31 May, sailing in a small boat ahead of the French warships, Napoleon found her, signalling urgently. He had been alarmed for her safety and jumped into the sea so that he might take her more quickly in his arms. Then he sent her and the children by boat to French-held Calvi.

      Next day Napoleon blazed away at the citadel with the ships’ guns, but the stone walls, several feet thick, resisted. Saliceti wrote Ajaccio council a letter urging them to declare for France, but the council replied that although attached to the Republic, they would have nothing to do with Saliceti, since he was Paoli’s enemy. Only thirty-one men from Ajaccio came over to the French ships. Napoleon had miscalculated popular feeling, and since the citadel still held, would have to sail back. One small triumph is, however, recorded. Some Ajaccians had climbed into trees beside the port and were hurling taunts at the French. Napoleon quietly loaded one of his light guns, took careful aim and fired. The shot shattered a branch on which one of the scoffers was perched: he dropped like a stone and the rest, roaring with laughter, dispersed.

      On 3 June in Calvi Napoleon rejoined his mother, three brothers and four sisters, Lucien being in Toulon. He had failed in his attempt to prevent a split between Paoli and the French, failed against Ajaccio. Not only he but his family too were outlaws, for six days earlier the Corsican assembly had condemned the Buonapartes to ‘perpetual execration and infamy’. They were also ruined, for Paolists had sacked the Casa Buonaparte, seized all their corn, oil and wine, and wrecked their mill and three farmhouses. As far as Napoleon could see, there was nothing more they could do in Corsica. And in an island torn by civil war, how long would his mother and sisters be safe? Just as he had rescued Marie Anne from the Terror, so now he must rescue the whole family from the Paolists. He got passports for them all – Letizia he described as a seamstress – and a week later found passages for them in an ammunition ship returning to France. On 10 June 1793, with no money and no possessions save the clothes they wore, the Buonapartes set sail for France.

       CHAPTER 5 Saving the Revolution

      NAPOLEON, with his refugee family, landed in Toulon on 14 June, 1793. That difficult summer he was to find that France had a new Government, the Committee of Public Safety. Its twelve members were mainly middle-class lawyers. The most influential, Maximilien Robespierre, was a bookish puritanical theorist, who believed that men are naturally moral and good. It is odd that he should have thought this, for among his colleagues on the Committee, Collot d’Herbois, a failed actor-playwright, had a pathological streak of violence, Hérault de Séchelles, an amoral rake, had expressed his brand of smiling egoism in a Theory of Ambition, while the young Saint-Just wrote a pornographic poem and ran off with his widowed mother’s silver. What united the twelve was a belief that goodness was republicanism, as defined by themselves, and that everything else, being evil, must go. According to Saint-Just: ‘What constitutes the Republic is the complete destruction of everything that is opposed to it.’

      The twelve began with Christianity, understandably enough since their name, Comité de Salut public – Salut meaning Salvation as well as Safety – implied that politics had superseded Christianity. In November 1793 they were to suppress the Christian calendar, with its Sundays and feast-days, in favour of the décade, a period of ten days, and months named after the seasons. The Republic, not the Incarnation, became the point of reference, and 22 September 1792 – old or ‘slave’ style – was deemed the beginning of the year I.

      Dechristianization was welcomed by some, including Lucien, who discarded his Christian name for Brutus – Brutus Buonaparte, he called himself – and got the name of the village where he worked in the army supply department changed from Saint-Maximin to Marathon. But for those who did not welcome it; for the Girondins, or moderate republicans; for anyone with a good word for kings; for all who resented the Committee’s dictatorial and unconstitutional powers, the ‘Twelve Just Men’ showed a hatred unparalleled since the Revolution began.

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