Part 35

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.

II ITALY AND EGYPT

Of the great Continental Powers which had formed a coalition against the revolutionary government of France, Austria and Russia were actively inimical, and there was no prospect of coming to terms with them, unless all the conquered territories recently acquired by France were sacrificed. The idea of natural boundaries had become by this time a dogma of political faith, and even the Directory, confronted as it was by a demoralized administration, by bad business conditions, and by an inflated currency, had no thought of making peace. Armies were operating along the eastern frontiers; and as soon as Napoleon reached Nice, he prepared, along the lines he had so frequently urged, to take the offensive against the vulnerable Austrian provinces of northern Italy.

The force he took over now numbered 38,000 men, out of a nominal six divisions of 60,282. They were poorly equipped, insufficiently nourished, and had not received their pay. The manifesto issued to them, according to Napoleon’s report of it at St. Helena, held out an immediate change of fortune. It is a document characteristic in contents and form of the new era of glory and conquest on which France was now to embark under Napoleon’s leadership. “Soldiers,” he said, “you are ill-fed and almost naked; the government owes you much; it can give you nothing. Your patience, the courage which you exhibit in the midst of these mountains, are worthy of admiration; but they bring you no atom of glory; not a ray is reflected upon you. I will conduct you into the most fertile places of the world. Rich provinces, great cities, will be in your power; there you will find honor, glory, and wealth. Soldiers of Italy, will you be lacking in courage or perseverance?”

These promises were made good in the remarkable campaign that followed, in which Napoleon’s soldiers found their material wants amply satisfied and their ambitious wishes for a career of glory more than answered in the brilliant victories of their general. Napoleon’s plan of operations was guided by the principles he had outlined two years before to the Robespierre régime. “In the management of war, as in the siege of a city,” he said, “the method should be to direct the fire upon a single point. The breach once made, equilibrium is destroyed, all further effort is useless, and the place is taken. Attacks should not be scattered, but united. An army should be divided for the sake of subsistence and concentrated for combat. Unity of command is indispensable to success. Time is everything.”

The last mentioned condition was fully vindicated, for before the end of April the French had beaten in a succession of quickly delivered attacks and effective battles, the Austrian army occupying Piedmont and also their Piedmontese allies. With the retreat of the Austrians from his kingdom, King Victor Amadeus made peace, and Napoleon hurried on to deal finally with the Austrians on their own territory in Lombardy. With the winning of the battle of Lodi on the 10th of May, Lombardy was soon evacuated by the enemy, and Napoleon entered the capital of the province, Milan, on the 16th of May. The commander of the victorious army paid little attention to the policy outlined at Paris for his conduct in Italy; he negotiated independently of the Directory and oftentimes contrary to their expressed wishes. When they proposed to divide his command by sharing it with General Kellermann, he wrote, “Each person has his own way of making war. General Kellermann has had more experience and will do it better than I; but both together will do it badly.” By this plain statement, the Directors were brought to terms; they were unwilling to let Napoleon resign his command, for the campaign was giving the government the prestige it badly needed, and what was equally valuable in their eyes was Napoleon’s novel method of conducting warfare without making any demands on the central treasury.

In the meantime there were further successes to be recorded against the Austrians. Wherever they made a stand they were defeated; a large number of their men were blocked up in the great citadel at Mantua, and, for months, armies in succession were sent down from the Tyrol to relieve that city. The ability of Napoleon was tested in many hard-won fights against superior numbers; he was often in critical situations, especially at the battle of Arcola where, for three days (November 17-20, 1796), the stubbornness of the Austrians held the French in check. During one of the critical incidents of the fight, Napoleon had personally to rally his men, and, when they were thrown into confusion by the Austrian fire, he was in danger of capture and was saved only by the presence of mind of his aide, Marmont, and of his own brother Louis.

Further attempts on the part of Austria to preserve its Italian possessions proved unavailing. After a decisive engagement fought at Rivoli early in the year 1797, the Austrian garrison at Mantua capitulated, and with the fall of this fortress, Austrian rule in Italy was brought to an end. Later on Napoleon followed up these successes by moving towards Vienna with a force of 34,000 men. He was ably seconded by his subordinate generals, among whom was Moreau, with the result that the remaining Austrian forces, gathered to defend their capital, were defeated, and by the preliminaries of peace signed at Leoben, Austria lost her Italian possessions, was deprived of her predominant influence in the peninsula, and agreed to the cession of Belgium. As a compensation she was to receive the possessions of Venice on the mainland, on both sides of the Adriatic.

These manipulations of territory, so far as Italy was concerned, were directed entirely in accordance with the personal will of Napoleon, who had already acted on his own initiative in his dealings with the petty Italian states. During the course of the campaign he had forced Tuscany and Naples to accept French sovereignty in the peninsula practically on his own terms, he had deprived the Pope of a large part of his territory and, after the terms of the treaty were signed, but before they were publicly announced, he had sought a quarrel with Venice, in order to put an end to the republic and so to find an excuse for annexing part of her territory to France. In this way he could hand over to Austria the fragments that had been secretly assigned to that power at Leoben. The brilliancy of these military operations, by which the whole face of the traditional situation in Italy was altered in the short space of one year, set Napoleon in such a secure position that his critics and detractors hesitated to call in question his autocratic acts, though Mallet du Pan tells us that the praise showered by the Directory on the young conqueror was recognized as insincere, adding, “There were voices in favor of sending the young hero to the Place de la Révolution to have a score of bullets lodged in his pate.”

Napoleon himself, contrasting his success with the inefficiency of the Austrians, describes his victories in the following passage: “My military successes have been great; but then consider the servants of the Emperor! His soldiers are good and brave, though heavy and inactive compared with mine; but what generals! a Beaulieu, who had not the slightest knowledge of localities in Italy; Wormser, deaf and eternally slow; or Alvinzy, who was altogether incompetent. They have been accused of being bribed by me; these are nothing but falsehoods, for I never had such a thing in view. But I can prove that no one of these three generals had a single staff on which several of the superior officers were not devoted to me and in my pay. Hence I was apprised not only of their plans but of their designs, and I interfered with them, while they were still under deliberation.”

With the states wrested from the Pope, there were taken from the Duke of Modena and from Austria territories sufficient to found a republic entitled the Cisalpine, and with this, there was a new rearrangement of the territories on the west coast by which the ancient republic of Genoa ceased to exist and reappeared with the Napoleonic brand as the Ligurian Republic. Both of these creations were after the French model, but the general of the army drew up the constitutions, chose the officials, and exercised the irresponsible powers of a dictator. The final terms of the treaty with Austria were not settled till October, 1797, but nothing was gained by the shrewd diplomatic fencings of the Viennese representatives. Napoleon, in a theatrical scene, at which he passionately broke in pieces a valuable porcelain vase in the presence of Coblentzl, the Austrian envoy, threatened to smash the Austrian monarchy if the parleyings were too long continued. The liberation of Italy appealed to the patriotic sentiment of the Italians, until the political realism of their conqueror manifested itself by enforcing on them contributions of money, art treasures, valuable manuscripts, all of which were sifted and collected by the experts Napoleon carried with his army. Even mathematical instruments and natural history collections did not escape his vigilance.

In the imposition of these exactions, the Papacy fared no better than the secular princes. While the dukes of Parma and Modena paid 12,000,000 francs and 20 pictures, the Pope was mulcted to the extent of 21,000,000 francs, 15,000,000 in cash, the rest to be made up by the surrender of 100 pictures, 500 manuscripts, and the bust of the patriot Brutus. This original method of making war pay for itself pleased the Directory. Great fêtes were prepared for the conqueror, when he appeared in Paris, to celebrate his victories. The official orator of the occasion was Talleyrand, who selected as the chief points of his eulogy Napoleon’s modesty, his taste for the poems of Ossian, and his fondness for mathematics.

But to the clear intelligence of Napoleon, forms of adulation, real or insincere, meant little. He was making rapid progress towards the goal of personal rule. The government already suspected his loyalty to them, but they were weak and without moral influence. Besides, they were under obligations, even more binding than those based or the money contributions which flowed in from Italy, for when the reactionary party was about to get the upper hand, both among the Legislative Body and among the Directors themselves, it was Napoleon’s agent, Augereau, who had coöperated actively with the radical element and made its continued predominance in the control of national affairs possible.