Napoleon

The work requires little comment. It is a psychoanalyst’s feast with its display of emotional immaturity, dreams of glory, and sense of superiority combined with a desperate awareness of inferiority in some areas, with aggression coupled to a curiously mawkish sensibility, and total self-obsession.

On 17 August, having received orders to take up his posting with the Army of the West, Buonaparte called on Aubry’s successor at the ministry of war, Doulcet de Pontécoulant. The new head of military affairs was struck by the way the frail, sickly-looking man came to life as he spoke, his eyes sparkling with fire as he uttered the words ‘army’, ‘battle’ and ‘victory’. He appointed him to the Cabinet Historique et Topographique, a general staff consisting of twenty officers. Buonaparte applied himself with his usual single-mindedness, producing plans and memoranda on every aspect of the military situation, often staying up until 3 a.m. ‘When I work on a plan of campaign, I cannot rest until I have finished, until I have worked through all my ideas,’ he later explained. ‘I am like a woman in labour.’ He presented Pontécoulant with a plan for the conquest of northern Italy which when it was sent to the commander of the Army of Italy was rejected as the figment of a madman who should be sent to an asylum.39

The work did not distract him from more prosaic matters; he was looking at properties within easy reach of Paris, and had located one with ‘a very fine house’ whose drawing rooms, dining room, kitchen, pantry, bedrooms, garden, orchard, kitchen garden, fields, pastures and woods he listed for his brother’s benefit. ‘In any case, I shall buy it, because it seems to me that it cannot fail to be a good deal,’ he concluded. His confidence in being able to find the necessary funds may have had something to do with a revival of his marriage plans.40

‘I have friends, much esteem, balls, parties, but far from my sweet Eugénie I can have only some pleasure, some enjoyment, but no happiness,’ he wrote to Désirée at the end of August, urging her to join him, adding, ‘time flies, the seasons follow each other and old age advances’. To Joseph he wrote that he wanted to ‘conclude the business of Eugénie’, as it was interfering with his plans; he felt it was time he married, and there was no lack of willing women in Paris. ‘It is for her to sort things out, since she spoiled everything by her journey [to Genoa]. If she really wants it, everything can be easily arranged.’41

‘You well know, my friend, that I live only for the pleasure I can give my own family, happy only in their Happiness,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘If my hopes are assisted by that success which never fails me in my enterprises, I will be able to be of use to all of you, make you happy and fulfil your desires …’ He was trying to obtain Joseph a consulate in Italy, and had managed to land Fesch a job provisioning the Army of the Rhine. He was sending Louis 300 francs a month: ‘He’s a good sort, and, also, just like me, he has warmth, wit, health, talent, attention to detail, all of it.’ He was pleased with the way the family was doing, and full of hope for the future. ‘I could not be better situated or have a more pleasant and satisfactory position here,’ he assured Joseph on 8 September. ‘The future should be held in contempt by a man who has courage.’ In between various proposals for speculating on property he returned to ‘the business of Eugénie’, which he insisted must be resolved. ‘If these people do not wish to conclude the matter of Eugénie, so much the worse for her, since she is stupid enough to listen to them,’ he wrote a couple of weeks later, making out that he would have done her family an honour by marrying her. He had better things to do than wait on them, and he crossed ‘Eugénie’ out of the title of his novella.42

He got wind of a project to send officers to Constantinople to modernise the Sultan’s artillery, and applied to lead it. As he explained to his brother, he would be in command of an important mission, he would probably be able to get him the post of consul, and they would make a deal of money. On 15 September 1795 he was confirmed in command of a military mission to the Porte. He selected Songis, Marmont, Junot and Muiron to accompany him on what promised to be the adventure of a lifetime. Yet a different adventure would change his plans.43

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 of them slept that night. Sometime after one o’clock on the morning of 5 October, Buonaparte ordered a young chef d’escadron of the 21st Mounted Chasseurs, Joachim Murat, to ride over to the plain of the Sablons and secure forty cannon stored there before the rebels could get hold of them. At first light, as the drumrolls summoning the national guards of the various sections resounded across the city, Buonaparte was positioning the guns at strategic points around the seat of the government at the Tuileries, such as the Pont Neuf in the east, the rue Saint-Honoré to the north, and what is now the Place de la Concorde in the west.

The government troops, numbering just over 5,000 men, supported by 1,500 ‘patriots’ ready to defend the Republic against the royalists, and several hundred deputies armed with muskets, faced probably about four times their number of national guards converging from all sides. There followed a lengthy stand-off. A heavy downpour dampened the ardour of the insurgents, and it was not until around four o’clock in the afternoon that the first shots were fired. The batteries were positioned in such a way that the insurgents could not deploy and bring their superior numbers to bear, and the canister shot they fired precluded any attempt to rush them. It was all over within two hours, and while gunfire was heard at various points in the city during the night, all remaining rebel forces were mopped up the following day. Reports of casualties vary from around 400 to over a thousand.5

Buonaparte’s version, which became official history and then legend as the ‘whiff of grapeshot’ which demonstrated his ruthless sense of purpose, has him in charge, directing everything, generously waiting for the insurgents to fire first, using only enough of the canister shot to show that he meant business, and firing blanks thereafter. The truth of this is hard to ascertain. ‘The enemy came to attack us at the Tuileries,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘We killed a lot of them. They killed 30 of our men and wounded 60. We disarmed the sections and everything is quiet.’ Later he claimed that casualties were no higher than 200 dead and wounded on each side.6

Long after he had been shunted aside by the ‘little Corsican officer’, an embittered Barras would describe the events differently. It was he who had planned everything, he who had ordered the guns brought from the Sablons, he who had instructed Brune to fire canister shot over the heads of the oncoming rebels. ‘On the 13 Vendémiaire Bonaparte played no role other than that of my aide de camp,’ he summed up. In his official report delivered to the Convention on 10 October, he praised Brune and others, and did not mention Buonaparte. When Barras had finished, Fréron, still hoping to marry Paulette, rose to speak and reminded him of Buonaparte’s contribution, which Barras reluctantly acknowledged. His report is not the only one to omit Buonaparte. While one account does record that he had a horse killed under him, it states that it was General Verdier who positioned the guns. There must nevertheless have been something remarkable about Buonaparte’s conduct on that day.7

The events had shown that with well-led troops on its side, a government could put an end to the mob rule that had plagued the Revolution. High prices and food shortages meant that Paris remained vulnerable to riots, and in the following days Barras increased the military presence in the city. He recommended Buonaparte for the post of his second in command, and as he himself was about to take up that of a member of the Executive Directory, he would have to give up the command, which meant that his second would be in charge of the most powerful force in the land. It seems unlikely that he would have placed it in any but the most capable hands. There was no further mention of Constantinople, and Buonaparte was now being referred to as ‘General Vendémiaire’, which suggests that his role had been decisive.

On 16 October Buonaparte was promoted to divisional general, and ten days later he was confirmed as commander of the Army of the Interior. He had been effective military governor of Paris since 6 October, and had immediately set about pacifying the city, reforming the National Guard and confiscating privately-held arms, discharging officers with royalist leanings and closing down the Jacobin Club, and taking in hand the police of the capital. Not confining himself to his headquarters in the Place Vendôme, he rode about the city, escorted by a retinue of staff officers and a growing number of aides, including his brother Louis, for whom he had obtained the rank of lieutenant, Junot, Marmont and Murat, whose dash in the early hours of 5 October had impressed him. ‘He never went anywhere without his moustachioed officers with their long sabres,’ recalled Barras. ‘He would mount his tall palfrey, wearing a huge hat with its tricolour plumes and its turned-up rims, his boots turned down, and a dangling sabre larger than its wearer.’ Junot and Murat had been promoted by Buonaparte, and wore with panache the distinctions of a rank they did not officially hold, while Murat embellished his uniform with various outlandish accoutrements.8

Buonaparte himself had grown into his role. Gone was the awkward gait. ‘He already had extraordinary aplomb, a grand manner quite new to me,’ remembered Marmont. He would go to the theatre, making a dramatic entrance with his entourage of swaggering young bloods, their spurs and sabres clinking as they went. He was developing a taste for the theatrical, and was learning a new part. During a food riot in one of the poorer quartiers as he rode through it one day with his glittering cavalcade, he confronted a huge woman who accused his like of growing fat on their salaries by asking her which of them was the fatter, which provoked mirth and defused the situation.9

While he had not gained weight, he was certainly growing fat in the sense the woman meant. Barras, himself one of the great embezzlers of history, had seen to it that Buonaparte was well provided for. How, we do not know. Although he was drawing a salary of 4,000 francs a month, the value of the assignats in which it was paid had fallen dramatically: by 23 October it had dropped to 3 per cent of its nominal value, and specie was extremely scarce. With a pound of sugar costing 100 francs and a bushel of potatoes 200, his salary would not have gone far. He did get a daily allowance for food and other essentials, and fodder for his horses. But that does not explain how he was able to provide his mother with financial assistance adding up to more than his annual salary, send Joseph 400,000 francs, and badger Bourrienne to find him a property to buy.10

As well as money, he was not short of influence. He now wrote to Letizia that Paulette must not marry Fréron, who no longer counted politically. He was in the process of arranging a consulate in Italy for Joseph, and in the meantime obtained for him letters of marque licensing two corsairs to operate out of Genoa and prey on British shipping. He found Lucien a job as commissary to the Army of the North, and Fesch one as a secretary, pending a better job overseeing the Paris hospitals. Nor did he forget more distant relatives. ‘The family wants for nothing,’ he declared to Joseph with satisfaction in a letter of 18 December. ‘I have sent them all money, assignats, clothing, etc. …’11

Barras relates that he was arranging to set Buonaparte up by marrying him off to Mademoiselle de Montansier, an older lady who owned several theatres in Paris, a sure source of income at the time. Thoughts of Désirée would not stand in the way: in a letter to his sister-in-law Marie-Julie Clary, Buonaparte mentions every member of the family but her. In a letter of 9 December he bids Joseph to give her his regards, but for the first time refers to her as Désirée, not Eugénie. He does ask for news of her in one written ten days later, but without the impatience that accompanied previous requests. Buonaparte did not, however, marry Mademoiselle de Montansier.12

Shortly after he had ordered all privately-owned arms to be confiscated, a fourteen-year-old boy called at his headquarters, begging that he might be allowed to keep the sword which had belonged to his father, a general guillotined under the Terror. Moved by the boy’s request, Buonaparte agreed. The following day, the story goes, the grateful mother called. Or he may have called on her, bringing the document permitting the family to keep the sword. Or, as Buonaparte would have us believe, he sent along one of his aides, who reported back that she was a beautiful widow. Or the whole story may be a fable woven round some incident to do with the sword. It is unlikely that Buonaparte had never met the widow in question, since she was a close friend of the ladies whose salons he had been frequenting for months, and, being the mistress of Barras, was often at his side. One thing is certain – that General Buonaparte fell madly, almost obsessively in love with her.13

Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Beauharnais was born into the parvenu and scandal-ridden family of Tascher, who owned La Pagerie, a plantation in the French island colony of Martinique. She was brought to France and married off at an early age to an undistinguished nobleman, Alexandre de Beauharnais, who paraded under the assumed title of vicomte. He was jealous and abusive as well as unfaithful, and repudiated her after having sired two children. During the Revolution he had briefly presided over the National Assembly and then been put in command of the Army of the Rhine. An inept soldier, he had allowed the fortress of Mainz to fall to the enemy in 1793 out of fecklessness, but was accused of treason and executed the following year. His wife, known in childhood as Yéyette and later as Josephine, was incarcerated in the same prison, Les Carmes, where, while he was conducting an affair with the widow of an executed general, she was doing the same with General Lazare Hoche, also a prisoner.

Prisons were hotbeds of sexual activity during the Terror, and Les Carmes, whose walls were still smeared with the blood of the 115 priests massacred there in September 1792, was no exception. The usual instinct in the presence of impending death was in this case reinforced by the hope of getting pregnant, which would spare a woman the guillotine. As a result, the multiple-occupancy chambers throbbed to the sound of couplings, often with the warders themselves, in scenes of fear and degradation which left their mark on those like Josephine who were fortunate enough to survive.

On her release from prison following the fall of Robespierre, Josephine made the most of the friendships forged there with, amongst others, Thérèse Tallien. She resumed her affair with General Hoche and was prominent in the exuberant new society, the salons and the extravagant macabre entertainments of the capital. Sometime in the early summer of 1795 she became the mistress of Barras, but by the beginning of the autumn he was ready to move on and began looking around for a husband who might provide for her. She had no money and was living from day to day on the generosity of lovers, currently that of Barras, who had rented a small house for her off the rue Chantereine.

Josephine was thirty-two and, as Barras put it, ‘growing precociously decrepit’. She had never been a beauty, and with her freshness wilting she had to resort to what he called ‘the most refined, the most perfected artistry ever practised by the courtesans of ancient Greece or Paris in the exercise of their profession’. She knew how to overcome every disadvantage, concealing her rotten teeth by keeping her mouth shut when she smiled, which many found irresistible. She possessed an almost legendary charm, grace, and a languor of movement which people associated with her creole origins, lending her a certain spice in their imagination. She was both dignified, with elegant manners and bearing, and girlishly light-hearted, displaying a devil-may-care attitude to practicalities. And there is little doubt that she was an accomplished lover. But she had no position to fall back on when these assets failed, and marriage was the only practical way of securing her future.14

According to Barras she had set her cap at Hoche, but he was married, and had allegedly commented that ‘one could take a whore as a mistress for a time, but not as a legitimate wife’. It seems that Barras then suggested she marry Buonaparte. She was not taken with the idea, allegedly saying that of all the men she might bring herself to love, this ‘puss in boots’ was the last, and objecting that he came from ‘a family of beggars’, even though he was by then showering her with presents. Barras encouraged the match, partly in order to establish her on a respectable footing, perhaps also to tighten his grip on the useful young general, who was growing alarmingly independent.15

Buonaparte had begun to do as he pleased, appointing and cashiering officers, reorganising units, and extending his brief beyond military matters. He called on the Directors almost daily, not so much advising them as telling them what to do, and castigating them for their incompetence. When they reproved him for acting in an arbitrary manner, he reputedly countered by saying it was impossible to get anything done if one were to stick to the law, and he usually managed to get them to see things his way. Getting Buonaparte settled might make life easier for the Directors. Barras advised him that ‘a married man finds his place in society’, and that marriage gave a man ‘more substance and greater resilience against his enemies’. Most people thought he was merely trying to park an unwanted mistress, and the Marquis de Sade would publish that version, thinly veiled, in his Zoloé et ses deux acolytes.16

Buonaparte was not as fussy as Hoche. He allegedly told Barras that he did not like the idea of seducing a virgin, and preferred to find ‘l’amour tout fait que l’amour a faire’, in other words the ground well prepared. Whether those really were his words or not, there is a ring of truth about what they expressed; such cynical bluster is characteristic of the sexually insecure.17