LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

without a trial, and without mercy, for, according to Robespierre, ‘clemency is barbarous.’

      Many Frenchmen refused to accept this new wave of Terror. Ten départements, from Brittany to the Saintonge, had risen against the Committee, some protesting against the imprisonment of ‘suspects’, others against the soldiers’ desecration of statues and crosses, others against the scarcity and high price of bread. Lyon was in revolt, so was Toulon. Much of the Marseille area was up in arms. Not only was France at war with five other nations, she was at war with herself.

      After installing his family safely in Marseille, Napoleon rejoined his regiment and was ordered to Pontet, seven miles from Avignon, to serve under General Carteaux. National Guardsmen from Marseille had seized Avignon, an important ammunition centre, and on 24 July Napoleon took part in Carteaux’s successful attack on the town. It was a grim lesson for Napoleon in the horrors of civil war. His own troops shot and killed National Guardsmen, and in turn were killed by them. Civilians killed also and in turn were killed: the National Guardsmen, on entering Avignon, had butchered thirty civilians in cold blood.

      Napoleon was deeply upset by his experience at Avignon. All the generous impulses of the Revolution seemed to have become their opposite, and here, four years after 1789, he was shooting down his fellow Frenchmen on behalf of a terrorist Government. He was so upset that he fell ill, and went to rest at nearby Beaucaire. Here he wrote down his inner conflict in the form of a dialogue entitled Le Souper de Beaucaire.

      The speakers are an army officer, obviously Napoleon, and a Marseille businessman, a moderate Republican. The businessman claims that Southerners have the right to fight for their political views, and condemns Carteaux as a murderer. Napoleon, while showing sympathy for the businessman’s moderate views, condemns the Southerners for having committed the unpardonable crime of plunging France into civil war, and for their madness in continuing it now in the face of impossible odds. Changes must take place legally, not by armed rebellion. The majority of Frenchmen are behind the Government, and only the regular army, with its discipline and loyalty, can restore order. Though personally he detests civil war – ‘where people tear one another to pieces and kill without knowing whom they kill’ – he defends Carteaux as humane and honest: in Avignon ‘not a pin was stolen.’ He ends by bidding the businessman discard his rebellious views ‘and advance to the walls of Perpignan, to make the Spaniard, who has been puffed up by a little success, dance the Carmagnole.’ This notion puts the company in a good humour; the businessman buys champagne, which he and Napoleon sit up drinking until two in the morning.

      In Le Souper de Beaucaire, then, Napoleon justifies what he is doing, but it is really a plea to end civil war. As such he had copies printed, and probably distributed them where they could do good. But his pamphlet failed to make the desired impression, and civil war continued. In August Napoleon took part in a bloody attack on Marseille and was there when Stanislas Fréron arrived on behalf of the Government to purge and purify. ‘We have already discovered four gaming-houses where people address each other as Monsieur and Madame,’ wrote Fréron.

      Sickened by civil war and purges, Napoleon wrote to the War Office asking to be posted to the Army of the Rhine. It was France’s enemies he wanted to fight, not Frenchmen, and before the month was out he got his chance, though not in the way he expected.

      The 28,000 inhabitants of Toulon had for some time been in revolt against the Government. When Avignon and Marseille fell, they believed that France’s only hope lay with a Bourbon King, and the Bourbon King’s allies. On 27 August they raised a white flag spangled with fleurs-de-lys, proclaimed the boy Louis XVII their King, and ‘the year 1793 the first year of the regeneration of the French monarchy’. Next day they opened their port to English and Spanish ships, and their gates to English, Spanish and Italian troops.

      A few days after these events Napoleon was travelling to Nice in charge of an ammunition convoy. At Beausset, eleven miles from Toulon, he ran into Saliceti, one of four Goverment commissioners responsible for the siege of Toulon. Saliceti, a tall thin lawyer aged thirty-six with a pock-marked face, was now on close terms with the Buonapartes: he and Joseph had just been initiated together into the Freemasons’ lodge, Parfaite Sincerité, at Marseille. So when Napoleon pleaded for a job fighting the English and Spaniards in Toulon, Saliceti listened sympathetically. By a second stroke of luck for Napoleon, Lieutenant-Colonel Dommartin, commanding the artillery, had just been wounded. On 16 September Saliceti appointed Napoleon, on a temporary basis, to replace Dommartin.

      Napoleon’s new commanding officer was General Carteaux, whom he had served under at Avignon but only now came to know. Carteaux was by profession a Court painter, but though he painted kings, he evidently did not love them, for he threw himself into the Revolution, taught himself soldiering, and now at forty-two was a general.

      Napoleon was rather amused by Carteaux. He noticed how the painter-general kept twirling his long black moustaches, how he rode a magnificent horse once owned by the Prince de Condé, on which he would pose, as though for his portrait, with one hand on his sabre, and how no matter the context he kept announcing ‘I attack in column of three.’

      Next morning at dawn Carteaux led Napoleon over mountain paths to his artillery: two 24-pounders and two 16-pounders. In the kitchen of a nearby farm gunners with brass bellows were blowing on red-hot shot to make it glow. Carteaux asked Napoleon how he thought the shot should be loaded into the guns. Napoleon said the best way was with a big iron scoop, but since there wasn’t one available a wooden scoop would do. Carteaux told the gunners to load one of the 24-pounders with red-hot shot as Napoleon said, and announced the imminent burning of the English fleet. Napoleon thought this was a joke, for the English ships were at least three miles off, but Carteaux was in earnest. ‘Oughtn’t we to fire a sighting round?’ Napoleon asked. Neither Carteaux nor his staff seemed to know what a sighting round was, but they repeated approvingly, ‘Sighting round? Yes, certainly.’

      The 24-pounder was loaded with an iron ball. ‘Fire!’ With a flash, a roar and a cloud of smoke, the ball sped away and landed less than a mile off: it did not even reach the sea. Carteaux’s comment amused Napoleon: ‘Those wretches in Marseille have sent us dud gunpowder!’ Carteaux then ordered a culverin, a clumsy gun with a very long barrel, to be brought into position and fired at the English ships. At the third shot it blew up. That day the burning of the English fleet did not take place.

      Despite this farcical prelude, Napoleon knew that his big chance had come. In Toulon were 18,000 foreign troops, notably English. They had come to destroy the Revolution and put Louis XVII on the throne. The longer they stayed, the more heart they gave to regional insurrections and to the anarchy which, in another way, would also destroy the Revolution. A victory at Toulon could save the Revolution, the rights of man, justice under law, all the ideals in which Napoleon believed. And he was certain Toulon could be captured – with guns.

      Napoleon asked Gasparin, one of the commissioners with military experience, for a free hand with the artillery. This he was granted, despite grumbles from Carteaux’s headquarters that Napoleon was one of Louis Capet’s officers and a dirty aristocrat. Napoleon then set to work with a will. He drew from the citadels of Antibes and Monaco unneeded guns; got draught oxen from as far as Montpellier, organised brigades of wagoners to bring 100,000 sacks of earth from Marseille for parapets. He employed basket-makers to make gabions, and erected an arsenal of eighty forges, as well as a workshop for repairing muskets.

      As guns arrived, Napoleon dug them in on the sea edge and pounded the fleet. Four days after Napoleon took command an English officer noted: ‘Gunboats suffered considerably … Seventy men wounded or killed … Lord Hood became anxious about the shipping.’ But at Carteaux’s headquarters they grumbled that Napoleon had gone too close, that he’d had gunners killed.

      On 19 October Napoleon learned that he had been promoted major, but even with this rank he could not get Carteaux to appreciate the vital role of guns. So he asked the Government commissioners to appoint a senior officer to command the artillery, at least a brigadier, ‘who if only by his rank will carry weight with a crowd of ignoramuses at headquarters’. This request was granted, but the man appointed, Brigadier Du Teil – brother of Napoleon’s old commanding officer – was elderly and unwell. Du Teil left decisions to

Скачать книгу