The world's leading conquerors

Corsica, during a large part of the eighteenth century, had drawn upon itself the attention of Europe, on account of its heroic struggle for independence. Its champion was Pasquale Paoli, whose character and patriotism provoked the same sort of enthusiastic attention from his contemporaries that centered upon Garibaldi 100 years later. The cause of the islanders against the city of Genoa, which exercised the right of overlordship over them, was so successfully defended that had not the kingdom of France interfered as the ally of Genoa, the establishment of an independent Corsican republic would have been assured. But unfortunately the Genoese surrendered the sovereignty of the island to France. The French occupied the harbors, the Corsicans were defeated in a pitched battle, and Paoli retired as a fugitive to England. All further resistance was abandoned, and the island was annexed to France.

In the Corsican deputation sent to Paris to arrange terms with the conquerors was Carlo Bonaparte, a member of a noble Tuscan family, whose ancestors had established themselves in Ajaccio 200 years before. Some time before this visit to Paris his wife, Maria Letitia, had given birth to a son, Napoleon. There has recently been a question raised whether the traditionally accepted date, August 15, 1769, is correct, and some French investigators are in favor of antedating it by one year. There were eight surviving children, five of them boys, out of a family of thirteen. Napoleon describes himself as an unruly child despite the iron discipline exercised in the home by his mother. “I was,” he says, “self-willed and obstinate, nothing awed me; nothing disconcerted me. I was quarrelsome, exasperating; I feared no one, I gave a blow here and a scratch there. Everyone was afraid of me. My brother Joseph was the one with whom I had most to do. He was beaten about and scolded; I complained that he did not get over it soon enough.”

The father, a lawyer by profession, was engaged in unending litigation in his own behalf, which required frequent trips to Paris, where he was well known on account of his efforts to recover an estate, deeded by some relative to the Jesuit order, and also as a representative deputy of the Corsican nobility. On one of these trips the head of the house died in 1785; seven years before that date he had been successful in getting a scholarship for Napoleon at the military school of Brienne, where the young soldier had just completed his course and received his commission as lieutenant at the time of his father’s death. At school Napoleon had made little reputation as a scholar; he stated himself later on that it was the general opinion that he “was fit for nothing except geometry.” He was unsociable, with an imperious temperament that parted everyone from him. One of his schoolfellows writes of his characteristics as follows: “Gloomy and even savage, almost always self-absorbed, one would have supposed that he had just come from some forest, and unmindful, until then, of the notice of his fellows, experienced for the first time the sensations of surprise and distrust; he detested games and all manner of boyish amusements. One part of the garden was allotted to him and there he studied and brooded, and woe to him who ventured to disturb him. One evening the boys were setting off fireworks and a small powder-chest exploded. In their fright the troop scattered in all directions, and some of them took refuge in Napoleon’s domain, whereat he rushed upon the fugitives in a passion and attacked them with a spade.”

He had wished to enter the navy after his studies were finished, but there was some delay until, as his family were in straitened circumstances, he decided to enter the artillery, where the applications for admission were fewer. So he passed from Brienne to Paris, where he again seems to have made no very favorable impression, except on the mathematical instructor at the military school, Monge, whose report on Bonaparte at the time he was leaving school reads as follows: “Reserved and studious, he prefers study to amusement of any kind, and takes pleasure in reading the works of good authors; while diligent in his study of abstract science, he cares little for any other; he has a thorough knowledge of mathematics and geography. He is taciturn, preferring solitude, capricious, haughty, and inordinately self-centered. While a man of few words, he is vigorous in his replies, ready and incisive in retort; he has great self-esteem, is ambitious with aspirations that stop at nothing. He is a young man worthy of patronage.”

The new officer, who was assigned to duty at Valence, found garrison life very tedious; promotion was slow, there were no drills, camp life, nor manœuvers; he spent, he says, a good deal of his time reading novels, planned even to write one, and took some part in the local life of the town, making friends among the society of petty officials, lawyers, and other persons of middle-class station. He did some solid reading also, making himself acquainted with Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Raynal, the last having so much influence over him, that he acknowledged himself as Raynal’s disciple in his views as to the need of social reform in France, which, among other things, implied the abolition of class privileges and the purification of administration. His literary attempts were various; he was prompted to make them because his pay of 100 livres a month, though adequate for himself, was not sufficient to help out his relatives in Corsica, where his mother and the rest of the family were in a position of financial difficulty.

During the early years of the revolutionary movement in France, Napoleon spent a large part of the time in Corsica, where the nationalist party hoped to take advantage of the civil disturbances of their new rulers, and reclaim their independence. For a time he made their cause his own, and developed a scheme for driving the French from the island. But conditions soon changed after Paoli returned to Corsica. Napoleon, who hoped for high military command among his own people, failed to secure the support of the old leader, who suspected the young officer, on account of the radical sympathies he manifested for the revolutionary party in France. Paoli believed in a constitutional monarchy, and refused to side with the Convention which had put Louis XVI to death. Most of the Corsicans followed their conservative statesman, and in May, 1793, Napoleon and the whole Bonaparte family were declared outlaws.

After an unsuccessful attempt to take Ajaccio from the Paolists Napoleon, with the rest of his family, abandoned the island and withdrew to Toulon. His scheme of self-advancement at home had failed; he had now only France to look to as the field of his ambition. It was fortunate for him that during this period his irregular connection with the French army, in which he still held the rank of officer, was tolerated. He had made himself marked by his openly declared sympathies with the anti-monarchical party, and for this reason, his independent action in visiting Corsica and remaining there as long as he liked was passed over without criticism from his superiors in Paris; indeed, his captain’s commission was dated February 6, 1792, a time when he was devoting his attention altogether to Corsican affairs, in his own interest.

His arrival in France coincided with the establishment of the Reign of Terror, and the government at Paris had on their hands an insurrection in the southern part of the country which sided with the Girondins, many of whose leaders had been put to death by the Jacobins. Napoleon resumed his military service at Nice, and immediately took part in repressing the Girondin insurrection. He also expressed his full agreement with the Jacobins in a dialogue entitled the Souper de Beaucaire, a pamphlet intended to win adherents to the cause of the Terrorists at Paris. His apology called public attention to him,—the dialogue was printed at the expense of the state, and its author was soon on friendly terms with the younger Robespierre, one of the commissioners of the Convention in southern France.

In various towns, Marseilles included, the insurrectionists were losing their foothold. The last important place left to them was Toulon, where they were being actively supported by English and Spanish allies. It was necessary to win the place, for preparations were being made on a large scale by both England and Austria to use Toulon as a starting-point to invade southern France. Napoleon was given the command of a battalion of artillery, and it was his scheme for arranging the batteries around the town that led to the taking of the city by the French. His services were recognized by promotion to a brigadier generalship, a fitting reward, for it was his strategy which had compelled the allied troops of Spain and England to evacuate the one place on French territory which they occupied.

The younger Robespierre spoke of him in a report to the Committee of Public Safety as a man of transcendent merit. Bonaparte was intimate with the commissioner, and that he impressed those who knew him as an ardent sympathizer with the Terrorists is borne out by a statement contained in Mlle. Robespierre’s memoranda: “Bonaparte was a republican, I should say that he was a republican of the Mountain, at least he made that impression upon me from his manner of regarding things at the time I was in Nice [1794]. Later his victories turned his head and made him aspire to rule over his fellow-citizens, but, while he was but a general of artillery in the army of Italy, he was a believer in thorough-going liberty and equality.” Yet the fanatical side of the Robespierre government, with its policy of ruthless massacre, evidently did not win his sympathy, for there is good ground for believing that, after the capture of Toulon, he was one of those who counseled moderation towards the vanquished and opposed the wholesale execution of the rebels. What attracted him to the Robespierre régime was its directness and its energy, and there is no doubt that he had a much higher opinion of the personal capacity of Robespierre than is held by a later school of historians of the French Revolution, who see in him a somewhat commonplace and decorative tool of the obscurer members of the Committee of Public Safety. In a conversation with Marmont, after Robespierre’s downfall, he said, “If Robespierre had remained in power, he would have been able to strike out another way for himself, he would have systematized the laws and made them permanent; we should have attained this result without shocks and convulsions because it would have proceeded from the exercise of power. We are now trying to reach this goal through a revolution, and this revolution will give birth to a monarchy.”

As a friend and counselor of Robespierre’s younger brother, who had already become interested in Napoleon’s scheme for an invasion of Italy, the prospects of his securing an independent military command were most encouraging, especially as he had just been so flatteringly recommended by the younger Robespierre to the Committee of Public Safety. But all chances of such advancement were lost with the downfall and execution of the revolutionary dictator in July, 1794.

Napoleon was involved in the general ruin of the Robespierre party; he lost his commission as general and spent a month as a prisoner in a military fortress. He fortunately had friends who interceded for him, among them Salicetti, the Corsican, a member of the Convention, by whose efforts the charge of disloyalty to the Republic was shown to be baseless and the prisoner was released, reinstated, and given the important mission of restoring French sovereignty in Corsica, which had lately declared itself a constitutional monarchy under the protection of England. The expedition failed on account of the weakness of the French fleet. For some time after this misadventure Napoleon remained without a command; the government at Paris was not inclined to forward the interests of a former partisan of Robespierre.

There were besides a number of young officers quite capable of filling important army commands, and all that Napoleon could secure was an assignment in the west under Hoche, who was engaged in repressing the insurrection in La Vendée. He had no taste for such work, nor did he desire to serve in a subordinate capacity. Taking advantage of the weakness of the administration, he delayed his departure from Paris, although he had received peremptory orders to leave for his command. He hoped by the influence of friends such as Barras, whom he had known at Toulon, and who was now a man of weight in the counsels of the party predominant in the Convention, to secure the acceptance from the ministry of war of his plan for the invasion of Italy. He was not only disappointed in this hope, but he found himself again stricken from the list of French generals because of his refusal to proceed to the post already assigned him.

There was no encouragement to be got out of the prevailing political tendencies, which were showing a marked antagonism to the radical revolutionary party, with whose program Napoleon had been allied from the first. A restoration of the monarchy seemed not improbable, for the common people of Paris were showing signs of restlessness under the régime of the Terrorist factions. The members of the Convention, after providing for a stable government with an executive power vested in a Directory of five members, were fearful of the consequences of the proposed changes they had themselves provided, and they proceeded to pass a measure by which the newly elected legislative body, the Council of Five Hundred, should be composed, to the extent of two-thirds of its membership, of those who had served in the Convention. This action caused an open revolt. Forty-four out of the forty-eight sections, into which Paris was divided, were in arms against the continuance of the tyranny of the Convention. On one side stood the National Guard of the city; on the other there were only 8000 regular troops willing to obey the mandate of the government. Barras happened to be one of the commissioners of the Convention appointed to preserve order. He was then chosen commander-in-chief of the army, and, acting with the reluctant consent of the other members of the Committee, he selected his friend Napoleon as second in command, with full power to act in defense of the Convention.

No time could be lost, and everything depended on getting artillery into the city to the Tuileries. Here the guns were stationed, before the National Guard commenced to advance on the 5th of October. No one knows who fired the first shot, but the engagement that followed soon ended in a complete disaster for the insurgents, who were driven from position to position by the volleys of grapeshot which swept the streets in the vicinity of the Seine. In recognition of his services rendered at such a crisis, Napoleon was almost immediately advanced to the post of commander-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, the way being made easy for him by Barras’ appointment as one of the Directors in the new government. Napoleon’s analysis of the situation, made the day after this fight in the streets of Paris, was characteristically clear-headed. “Fortune is on my side,” he writes to his brother Joseph, and from this sudden change in his prospects may be dated that belief in his star signalized by his favorite motto, “Au destin,” which became the axiom of his career, as well as its explanation and justification.

Barras’ services did not end here; he realized the young general’s capacity, seeing in him a man whom it would be useful to have bound to him by personal obligations, and he suggested, and it is said, even arranged Napoleon’s marriage with Mme. de Beauharnais, a well known member of Parisian society, the widow of a nobleman who had fallen a victim of the Terror, and herself a native of Martinique. She had fascinated the soldier by her charm of manner and was now prepared, despite the objections of her friends, to give him the social position that Barras insisted was necessary for his further promotion. This advice of Barras was not necessarily disinterested, for there were, it seems, reasons of a different nature, which may have prompted him to relieve himself, by making use of Napoleon, of further personal responsibilities he had incurred towards the lady in question. The marriage had an immediate influence in advancing the fortunes of the bridegroom, for two days before it was solemnized (March 4, 1796), Napoleon attained the long-coveted position of commander-in-chief of the Army of Italy; and on the 11th of the same month, he set out for his new post.