Napoleon - Vincent Cronin

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Brittany. Napoleon regarded this letter as yet another misfortune. He had had his fill of civil war; he wanted to shoot down no more Frenchmen amid heather and granite calvaries, and anyway he now considered himself, with reason, an expert on the Alpine frontier. He hurried to Paris to get the appointment rescinded.

      Aubry, the War Minister, was busy purging the army of ‘political undesirables’. Augustin Robespierre had described Napoleon as an officer of ‘transcendent merit’; that was sufficient to make him suspect to a Thermidorean like Aubry. So when Napoleon applied for a different job, Aubry coolly struck his name off the list of artillery officers – the élite of the Army – and transferred him to the infantry in the Army of the West – a form of down-grading, almost an insult, which Aubry had found effective in provoking the resignation of many ‘undesirable’ officers.

      Napoleon was shocked and pained but did not resign. He asked for two months’ sick leave – he was indeed sick at heart, if not in body – which was granted, and went to see Aubry, himself an old artillery man who had never risen above the rank of captain. Napoleon asked for a gunner’s job in the Army of the Alps; Aubry said he was too young. ‘Citizen representative,’ replied Napoleon, ‘the battlefield ages men quickly, and that is where I come from.’ But Aubry was unmoved. Who after all was this man Buonaparte? Just another general, with 138 generals above him on the Army List.

      Napoleon thought of pulling strings. Stanislas Fréron, the loose-living journalist turned politician who had closed the Marseille gambling-houses, was now a power in the land. Napoleon knew him a little and was aware that he had fallen in love with Pauline. One day, a petition in his pocket, Napoleon went to Fréron’s fine house in Rue de Chabannais, but when he stood on the doorstep he could not bring himself to beg in person from the butcher of Toulon. He sent a friend instead, and Fréron did nothing.

      Napoleon found Paris alarmingly expensive. A bushel of flour which in 1790 had cost two livres now cost 225, a decent hat, formerly fourteen livres, now cost 500. His annual pay of 15,000 livres, which he received in paper money, mostly went in supporting his mother and sisters, and in paying Louis’s fees at an expensive school in Châlons. So Napoleon sold his carriage and moved to a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, in one of Paris’s narrowest and most despised streets, Rue de la Huchette. He could not afford to replace his threadbare uniform and had to give up wearing gloves as a ‘useless expense’.

      Napoleon felt thwarted and miserable. In May he had defined happiness to a friend as the greatest possible development of one’s abilities; and now Paris seemed bent on the greatest possible impeding of Brigadier Buonaparte’s abilities. ‘I have served in Toulon with some distinction …’ He considered he had been treated ‘unjustly’ and began to bore his friends with tales of his grievances. He went for dismal walks with Junot in the Jardin des Plantes. Junot wanted to marry Pauline, but he was only a lieutenant, attached to a politically undesirable brigadier on sick leave. ‘You have nothing,’ Napoleon told him. ‘She has nothing. What does that total? Nothing. Your children will be born to wretchedness. Best to wait.’

      To cheer him up, Bourrienne took Napoleon to see Baptiste Cadet, a fine comedy actor, in the hit of Paris, Le Sourd. To win a bet, the hero must contrive to get a good dinner and a night’s lodging in an Avignon inn without paying a penny; he decides to pretend to be deaf and is thus able to interpret angry words as compliments, rebuffs as invitations. Finally he wins his bet and also gets the girl, who is called Josephine. Napoleon usually enjoyed the theatre but on this occasion, while everyone in the house roared with laughter, he sat in icy silence. Not only was he personally frustrated, he felt depressed by the cynicism and apathy of France’s new rulers. To Joseph he wrote that he no longer felt any taste for living. ‘If this continues, I shall end by not stepping aside when a carriage rushes past.’

      If Napoleon did not step under a carriage, perhaps it was because of his hope in a brooding cosmic justice and a line from a more amusing play, for on 17 August, after three and a half months’ inactivity, he was able to write less dejectedly to a friend: ‘If you meet evil and nasty men, remember the good if farcical maxim of Scapin: “Let us be thankful for all the crimes they don’t commit.”’

      Aubry was replaced as War Minister by Pontécoulant, a former nobleman aged thirty-one, as open-minded as Aubry had been prejudiced. Napoleon went to see him, asked for a job on the Italian frontier and outlined a plan of attack. ‘General,’ said Pontécoulant, ‘your ideas are brilliant and bold, but they need to be examined calmly. Take time and draw me up a report.’ ‘Half an hour is enough,’ Napoleon replied and asked for a pen and two sheets of paper. There and then he drew up a plan for invading Piedmont. The Committee of Public Safety thought well of the plan, but instead of a command in the field, they gave Napoleon a desk job in Paris, in their important Planning Centre.

      Napoleon felt more frustrated than ever. Desk work was even further from guns than drilling infantry in a Breton garrison town. He was a gunner, an expert in ballistics and trajectories and the mathematics of warfare, and it was as a gunner he wanted to serve. Since France would not employ his talents, why should he not be seconded to the artillery of some other country? First he thought of Russia. He wrote to General Tamara, but although the Russians were interested they would not give Napoleon the rank of Major on which he insisted.

      Napoleon next thought of Turkey, probably because in Ajaccio he had met and become friendly with Admiral Truguet, who had for a time been seconded to Constantinople to reorganize the Turkish fleet. The Turkish artillery was notoriously weak and ill-organized, and there was talk in Paris of sending a small mission to modernize it. Napoleon took up the idea, pressed for it, and applied to be made head of the mission. He got the job. In early September his passport was made out: Napoleon was all set to leave France and go to Turkey.

      Once again politics intervened to upset Napoleon’s carefully laid plans. The Convention, having renounced the guillotine, found themselves unable to govern. They decided France needed a two-chamber Government, and to prevent the excesses committed by the old Committee of Public Safety, an executive separate from the legislature, this executive to be composed of five Directors. They drafted a new Constitution on these lines and promised to dissolve themselves, with the proviso that two-thirds of the members of the new legislative chamber, the Council of Five Hundred, should be chosen from among their number. In this way the principles of the Revolution would be given continuity and a new effectiveness.

      Napoleon warmly welcomed the new Constitution; and so did most Frenchmen, who approved it overwhelmingly by plebiscite; though they were less enthusiastic about the ‘two-thirds’ clause. But many Parisians bitterly opposed the Constitution: extremists opposed in principle to any strong middle-of-the-road government, and royalists, who, sick of the Revolution, wished to bring ‘Louis XVIII’ to the throne, if necessary with English help. Paris swarmed with royalists, notably certain ‘Incoyables’, men who affected a lisp and dandified airs thought to be English. Angrily Napoleon used to watch them in the Boulevard Italien eating ices: once he rose exasperated, pushed back his chair so that it fell on the legs of a noisy ‘Incoyable’, and stalked off.

      In September the royalists were cock-a-hoop when Louis XVIII’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, was landed from an English warship in the Ile d’Yeu, off Vendée, and was expected at any moment to join the 80,000 Chouans – guerrillas who wore white cockades – in armed rebellion across Brittany and Vendée. In anti-republican grey suits with black collars Parisians marched through the streets shouting ‘Down with the two-thirds’. Tempers flared and it soon became clear that Paris was fatally divided between Constitutionalists on the one hand, royalists and extremists on the other.

      The leader of the Constitutionalists was Paul Barras. The fourth son of a Vicomte from near Toulon, after serving as a second lieutenant in India, he entered politics as a moderate and friend of Mirabeau, voted for Louis XVI’s death and during Thermidor led the march on the Hôtel de Ville which overthrew Robespierre. In a Convention composed of second-rate men Barras stood out as the one best qualified to contain the increasingly angry Paris crowds.

      The night of 12 Vendémiaire – 4 October – was windy and wet. Napoleon’s departure for Turkey had been delayed by the crisis, and he walked through the rain to see a sentimental play, Le Bon Fils. Outside the

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