Napoleon’s father was Carlo Buonaparte, a prominent lawyer and politician, who also acted as an aide and close associate of Pasquale Paoli, the leading Corsican nationalist of the second half of the eighteenth century and a man who had fought to throw off both Genoese and French rule on the island.
As we will see, the Corsican independence movement shaped much of Napoleon’s life and political outlook until his mid-twenties. His mother was Maria-Letizia Buonaparte whose maiden name was Ramolino. Like the Buonapartes, the Ramolinos were a family of Italian origin, originally hailing from the Lombardy region of northern Italy.
Her father was a minor official and military officer who had commanded the garrison of Ajaccio before his death in the mid-1750s, after which her mother remarried, to a Swiss officer serving in the Genoese navy. Consequently, Napoleon hailed from a family which comprised of prominent Corsican officials and military figures on both sides.
Maria-Letizia had married Carlo in June 1764, when she was no more than 15 years of age and Carlo was 18, Carlo having left the University of Pisa on the Italian mainland to return to Corsica and enter what was effectively an arranged marriage to cement ties between two leading Corsican families.
Napoleon was the fourth of his parents’ thirteen children. At a time of very high levels of infant mortality, only eight of these survived infancy. Maria-Letizia’s first two children were amongst the five who didn’t survive and so growing up, Napoleon only had one older sibling, his brother Joseph who was born in January 1768.
His other surviving siblings were split evenly between three brothers, Lucien, Louis and Jerome, born respectively in 1775, 1778 and 1784, and three sisters, Maria Anna, Pauline and Caroline, born in 1777, 1780 and 1782. Napoleon’s seven siblings would later play an important part in his life and by extension
The politics of Europe, as their brother promoted them to positions of immense power and prestige on the back of his own success. Collectively they would eventually number three kings, one sovereign prince, a queen, a sovereign princess and a grand duchess. It was a tight-knit family, as Napoleon’s nepotism towards his kin, clearly indicates,
A fact which Bonaparte attributed in later years to the influence of his mother, whom he characterised as a person of immense ‘ability and courage’. The Buonaparte family who spelled their name with a ‘u’ after the ‘B’ for much
Of its history, only changing this in the 1790s when Napoleon was well into his twenties, was a family of the Italian minor nobility. The paternal line hailed from the Italian mainland where it had roots in Florence and the wider Tuscany region north towards Liguria, the region of Italy along the northwest coast
Towards the city of Genoa. The Buonaparte, whose name means ‘good part’ or ‘good side’, had ties here stretching back to at least the thirteenth century. Napoleon rarely discussed his Italian heritage in later years, but when he did, he exhibited some pride in it, claiming he was an heir of the Ancient Romans.
The family’s ties to Corsica were established in the fifteenth century when Francesco Buonaparte, a condottiere or mercenary commander, settled there in his role as a contractor with the Genoese Bank of St George, the Republic of Genoa having controlled Corsica since the late thirteenth century.
There he married into the establishment of the town of Ajaccio such that the Buonapartes became one of the foremost families on the island of Corsica by the eighteenth century. Although the republican and mercantile nature of the Republic of Genoa ensured that the
Buonapartes did not receive noble titles under Genoese rule, no sooner had French rule been established on the island than Carlo Buonaparte was granted a minor noble title in 1771, just a few weeks after Napoleon’s second birthday. Despite this swift acknowledgement by the French monarchical government, it should be
Noted that the Buonaparte family were effectively of Italian origin and at the time of his birth were Corsican nationalists in their political outlook. Napoleon’s early life cannot be understood without an awareness of the history of Corsica in the early modern period.
The island had come under the control of the Republic of Genoa, one of the great maritime trading republics of medieval Italy, during the thirteenth century. Yet as early as the sixteenth century, Genoese control of the island had been threatened
By the French, who briefly occupied Corsica in the 1550s in the context of the Italian Wars of that time, whereby France and Spain had been vying to attain a dominant position across Italy since the 1490s. Although the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis of 1559 resulted in the French relinquishing
Control of the island back to Genoa, the interminable decline of the Ligurian Republic in the centuries that followed, continued to weaken Genoese control over Corsica. As a consequence, a Corsican nationalist movement emerged in the early eighteenth century. Led by Pasquale Paoli by mid-century, these nationalists proclaimed Corsica to be a republic
In 1755, then effectively expelled the Genoese from the island and promulgated a new Corsican constitution. Although Genoa refused to relinquish control of the island and the Corsican Republic did not gain wide recognition from the other European powers, from 1755 down to the late 1760s,
Just before Napoleon was born, Corsica was an independent nation in most respects. The establishment of its independence was ultimately the undoing of the Corsican nationalist movement. As early as 1764, Genoa had sought French aid in reconquering Corsica from what it considered to be rebellious subjects.
But the French had other ideas and in 1768 they instead agreed the Treaty of Versailles with the Genoese government, whereby Genoa agreed to cede Corsica to France, in exchange for the cancellation of millions of livres of debt which the Genoese government owed to the French.
France had been spurred into acting over concerns that the British would try to acquire Corsica, giving them naval bases less than 200 kilometres from the southern French coast. With the agreement in place with Genoa, the French launched a military invasion of Corsica within weeks.
The Corsicans lacked the fleet, artillery and manpower to resist the French and with Britain refusing requests to intervene on the side of the Corsican nationalists, France made good on its ownership of Corsica within a matter of months. With victory at the Battle of Ponte Novu in early May 1769, the island came completely
Under French control, while Pasquale Paoli fled from Corsica to Britain. Meanwhile, on Corsica, as French rule began, just weeks before Napoleon’s birth, the spirit of Corsican nationalism remained alive and well. As we will see, it was the dominant political ideology of Napoleon’s early years.
Napoleon grew up on Corsica, living in his family’s three-storey manor house, Casa Buonaparte, in Ajaccio. He possibly suffered briefly from a bout of tuberculosis in his youth, which would explain the hacking cough he had for some time, evidence of which was still visible on his left lung,
A half a century later in the post-mortem carried out after his death. His family nickname for him, ‘Rabulione’, meaning ‘troublemaker’, indicates a vivacious child, but he was also a prodigious reader, absorbed in histories and biographies from a young age.
As he grew up, Alexander the Great, who had conquered the known world as King of Macedon in the fourth century BC, was his idol, closely followed by Julius Caesar. Yet he was also a child of his time, reading works by his near contemporary, Jean Jacques
Rousseau, the great French romantic Enlightenment philosopher, long before he became a teenager. Even in their youths there was already a clear sense that Napoleon was much the stronger willed of his siblings, despite Joseph’s seniority. The older sibling certainly did not argue in later years with this arrangement.
Overall the sense we get, is of a relatively happy childhood, though one which would be cut brutally short, long before he was even a teenager when Napoleon would be sent to the mainland as part of the new policy of Gallicisation of Corsica.
The country which Corsica had become a part of, right around the time of Napoleon’s birth was one which was mired in the past. While a form of constitutional monarchy had evolved in Britain during the seventeenth century after a protracted struggle between the crown and parliament, France was an absolutist
Monarchy, one in which the Bourbon dynasty of kings ruled the country in a totalitarian fashion. The government, such as it was, was comprised of a small group of ministers who were hand-picked by King Louis XIV and his advisors.
No parliament had been convened in the country since 1614 and to compound matters, King Louis XIV, the paragon of absolutism in Europe during his long reign between 1643 and 1715, had even moved the court from Paris to his vast palatial estate at Versailles outside the city.
Consequently, France in the eighteenth century was dominated by the king and his government, the aristocracy, the Roman Catholic Church and a small army of royal bureaucrats who kept hated taxes like the gabelle, the tax on salt, high and helped collect revenue to
Maintain the splendour of the court and the large armies which France needed to continue its perennial rivalry with Britain. However, while this system had functioned well under Louis XIV, it was dependent on a strong, capable ruler.
King Louis XVI, who became King of France at 19 years of age on the death of his grandfather, Louis XV, in the early summer of 1774, was most certainly not a strong ruler. Political and social trouble would follow his accession.
The nation that Louis XVI became king of in 1774, when Napoleon was just four years old, was one of the strongest powers in Europe. With a large population and a significant overseas empire in North America and the Caribbean,
The French state had large reserves of wealth to draw upon and King Louis XIV had extended the nation’s borders in the Low Countries and into the Alsace-Lorraine region of what would historically have been perceived to be a part of Germany.
France also had close ties with Spain as a branch of the French Bourbon dynasty had become the royal family of Spain early in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, France faced threats on the world stage. Britain was the newly ascendant superpower of the age, based on its navy, its growing
Overseas empire and its novel economic system, where manufacturing and capitalism were growing apace while much of the rest of Europe’s economy remained backwards by comparison. In a series of wars since the start of the eighteenth century, Britain had emerged victorious
Against France, notably in the Seven Years War fought between 1756 and 1763, at the end of which, France had to cede New France in North America to Britain, paving the way for the development of British Canada. In a clash for control of India, Britain had also won out over the French.
Within Europe itself Austria’s control of the Holy Roman Empire was augmented by its growing influence in Italy and the Balkans, while Prussia and Russia were emerging great powers, a status which was compounded by their partitioning, along with Austria, of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Such was the political map of Europe in the early years of Napoleon’s life. Yet if there was one feature of European life which would shape Napoleon’s career and story to the greatest extent, it was possibly not the political landscape of France in the
Second half of the eighteenth century, or the rivalries between the great powers of Europe at this time, but the social and cultural landscape. Europe was experiencing profound change in the eighteenth century, driven by the Scientific and Medical Revolutions of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
Each year brought new technological and scientific breakthroughs, while everywhere old values were being questioned and re-evaluated. Above all, people were conscious that the old institutions of life in Europe were either tyrannical or highly corrupt. These included absolutist monarchies, the powerful Roman Catholic Church and the instruments
Of state power, such as censorship and heavy taxation which were used to keep the wider populace in check. Britain and the newly established United States, which declared its independence from Britain a few weeks before Napoleon’s seventh birthday, provided templates for a possible path forwards, either by establishing republics or constitutional monarchies.
These ideas were proving very difficult to contain and in countries like Austria, enlightened monarchs such as Maria Theresa and Joseph II tried to satiate their people’s desire for change by introducing major reforms to education, healthcare and the social hierarchy.
But in France, King Louis XV and King Louis XVI made very little effort to do so. In the end, this would have brutal consequences for the man who became King of France when Napoleon was four years old. While Pasquale Paoli and other Corsican nationalists had left their homeland in 1769 as the French
Began hoisting flags above the centre of Ajaccio and other towns, the Buonapartes continued to live there. This was despite the fact that Napoleon’s father, Carlo, had been a close associate of Paoli and had been involved in the independent Corsican government, while also resisting the French invasion in 1768 and 1769.
Napoleon was probably conceived while his parents were at Corte, the capital of Paoli’s Corsican Republic, in the latter stages of the French invasion of the island. Yet, seeing the changing course of events in 1769, reconciliation to French rule became inevitable.
The island was incorporated as a French province in 1770 and a programme of Gallicisation was commenced which sought to make the island like any other part of France. A key early component of this, was that Carlo Buonaparte was made a minor French noble in
The early 1770s, as part of a new Corsican nobility created on orders from Paris. Thereafter he quickly rose as a lawyer within the regional government, such that in 1778 when Napoleon was still just eight years old, Carlo Buonaparte was made Corsica’s representative to the Court of King Louis XVI at Versailles.
But Carlo was a pragmatist and while he might have reconciled himself to the reality of French rule, he and his family never abandoned their Corsican nationalism. Part of the programme of Gallicization included a plan to send the sons of the Corsican nobility
And gentry to be educated on mainland France from a young age, the goal being for them to adopt French political and cultural values, so that in a generation or two Corsican nationalism would be a thing of the past, replaced with a Corsican ruling class committed to French rule.
As a result of this policy, Napoleon was forced to leave Corsica when he was just nine years old in 1779, to begin attending a religious school at Autun in the Burgundy region of eastern France. It was the beginning of many years in exile from his native Corsica.
Napoleon would only ever return to his Mediterranean homeland for one protracted period in the late 1780s and early 1790s, but despite this, he never fully abandoned his Corsican roots. For the remainder of his life his accent betrayed his Corsican heritage, with the Emperor of
France decades later, speaking with an Italian tint to his speech, while anyone who consults those letters which Napoleon wrote himself, from amongst the over 33,000 letters he either wrote or dictated during his lifetime, will see that his writing in French continued to
Contain traces of the Corsican Italian he had first learned on his island home in the 1770s. Napoleon’s earliest years away from Corsica were not easy ones and only served to cement his conception of himself as Corsican and a member of an island people oppressed by a new imperial power.
He was bullied at length in his early years in France, on account of his hailing from Corsica and his Italian accent and was noted as having no friends at Autun. This aside, he excelled academically, learning French well within a few months of arriving
In Autun, and then quickly leaving there to head to the Royal Military School at Brienne-le-Chateau near Troyes in the Champagne region. There he rarely saw any of his family, the pupils slept on straw mats and were taught for long hours every day, but he excelled.
Though his passion was for history, he also had a mind for mathematics, something which would serve him well when it came to managing large armies in years to come, while since the Royal Military School was considered a finishing school for the nobility, he also
Learned some of the courtly skills of the age such as dancing, fencing and music, subjects which would aid him in later years when he found himself presiding over Europe’s royal courts. There is no doubt that the policy of Gallicization had its effect in this regard.
Napoleon left Corsica when he was nine years old and did not return until he was in his late teens, a period of absorption in French cultural and social values which must have affected him in some considerable ways, regardless of whether he lost his Corsican accent or not.
In September 1784, Napoleon sat his final exams at the Royal Military School at fifteen years of age and after easily passing these, he headed for the more advanced École Royale Militaire in Paris. He spent the next twelve months there, though he had little opportunity to see much of Paris,
His time being absorbed by his studies. Napoleon had been selected as one of a small number of students in the military schools to specialise in artillery studies, owing to his mathematical abilities. This was a period during which the use of artillery as field weapons was being revolutionised.
While artillery and cannons had been used for centuries to break down the walls of cities during sieges, it was only during the eighteenth century that field artillery became central to pitched battles between armies. The French, like every other major European power, were trying to establish sophisticated
Artillery departments within their armies and Napoleon was part of this process in the 1780s. This was important. As we will see, Napoleon’s abilities as an artillery commander were a key component of his success and his genius in years to come.
He learned much in his year here, from a trio of distinguished teachers, Louis Monge, Louis Domairon and the Marquis de Laplace, the latter of whom would one day become a senior minister in Napoleon’s government.
The sense we get of the young man who attended the École in Paris in 1784 and 1785 is of someone who was already an accomplished young man by the time he was a teenager. An inspector’s report shortly before he left the military school at Brienne stated
That his character displayed signs of docility, but honesty and a sense of gratitude. Otherwise his conduct was faultless and his diligence in studying mathematics, history and geography was described as exceptional. The inspector had recommended him to be sent to the École in Paris, noting that he would make a good naval officer.
Interestingly, he noted that one of Napoleon’s weaknesses was in recreation. Little could he have known how far the young man’s restlessness would take him. Much has been made of Napoleon’s stature, but standing at five foot, six inches he was almost exactly the estimated average height of European males during the eighteenth century.
Thus, Napoleon was only small in so far as European men are on average over ten centimetres taller today than they were in the 1790s, a shift owing to diet and other factors. Therefore, while much has been made of his allegedly small frame, this would not have
Been a major factor at all in how contemporaries perceived him. What many did recognise, was that he was a thin individual, with unusually fine, delicate features for a military man. He was also notable in his teenage years and his twenties for wearing his hair long, down to his shoulders, cut around the ears.
In terms of his personality, many would have been impressed by his sense of humour and common touch. Despite hailing from an aristocratic family, Napoleon developed very few airs during his lifetime and even many years later when he had become the most powerful man in France,
He was known for his approachability and bawdy humour. Yet there was a deep intellect as well and from a young age Napoleon could shift from being a social extrovert to bouts of considerable introspection and reflection. He was, in short, complicated.
Napoleon’s views on two particular subjects were evolving at this time in striking ways which would influence the course of his life. Firstly, despite being raised as a Roman Catholic in line with both the French and Italian traditions of the time, he became a child of the Enlightenment in largely rejecting organised religion as
He matured into a young man. Napoleon in his later years was evidently an atheist in all but name, though few people in the eighteenth century consciously defined themselves as such. Instead his new existential outlook began to prioritise action in the world. This was shaped by his understanding of history.
As he reported in a letter to the Marquis de Caulaincourt many years later, “The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals.”
Thus, from an early age Napoleon was conscious that military figures and statesmen had shaped human history through their actions and wished to emulate them. It was lofty ambition for an individual, who although he was born into a powerful enough family on Corsica, essentially hailed from a provincial backwater in European terms and
Was far from the centre of any major political power when he was born in 1769. On the 24th of February 1785, while Napoleon was studying at the École in Paris, his father died at Montpellier in the south of France, home of one of the world’s oldest medical
Schools, where Carlo had headed to seek help for his declining health. He was just thirty-eight at the time of his death. The cause of his premature demise has never been fully resolved. Clearly the ailment came from his stomach and this has led scholars to assume that he
Was either suffering from stomach cancer or from a severe ulcer which had led to perforation of his stomach, a condition which would explain the acute state of delirium which Joseph Buonaparte reported his father spent his last days in. This was seemingly a hereditary condition and Napoleon’s own premature death over
35 years later, would be from related causes. Back in 1785 news of his father’s death cut Napoleon to the core, he deeply respected Carlo, despite the fact that he had only seen him twice in the previous six years. His demise might well explain Napoleon’s life-long distrust of doctors, while his premature
Death saw Napoleon become the spiritual head of the family, vaulting past his older brother Joseph to exercise what his younger brother Louis called ‘the greatest superiority’ among the Buonapartes. Carlo’s death quite possibly also inspired Napoleon’s drive in life, with the young
Buonaparte adopting the attitude that he needed to make his mark on the world early, for fear that he would not live to be an old man. Just a few short months after Carlo’s passing, Napoleon took his final assessment at the École in Paris, his family’s declining financial situation having necessitated that
Buonaparte condense two years of study into one. Despite this he passed, becoming the first Corsican to graduate from France’s most esteemed military academy. He was quickly commissioned on the 1st of September 1785 as a second lieutenant into the Compagnie d’Autume of bombardiers within the 1st Battalion of the Régiment de la Fère,
One of France’s oldest artillery regiments. However, he immediately had to take some leave to attend his family’s financial affairs. Carlo Buonaparte, despite his success as a lawyer and latterly as a diplomat, had left his family in financial trouble, primarily owing to a decision to borrow 137,500 francs,
A very sizeable sum of money at the time, from the government in order to establish a mulberry tree plantation back in Corsica. The business venture failed and shortly after Carlo’s death, the government began seeking repayment of the grant money.
It was the beginning of several years in which Napoleon was forced to solicit any official he knew in both Corsica and Paris for relief from the Buonapartes’ financial malaise. Relief did not come and legal challenges followed. The result was that the family were facing destitution in the mid-to-late 1780s and primarily
Viewed the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, as a boon because it might result in their debt simply being cancelled or forgiven. Realising that there would be no quick fix to the mulberry debacle in 1785, Napoleon
Took up his position with the Régiment de la Fère in the town of Valence on the banks of the Rhône, midway between Lyon and Marseilles in the late autumn. His life here as a junior officer who remarkably had only just turned sixteen years of age, was Spartan owing to the family’s financial circumstances.
His room at Valence had only a bed, an armchair and a table, while he was known to impose on the good will of local cafes and restaurants in times of thrift, though he more than compensated those who were generous to him in these lean years when he became wealthy in later times.
His time at Valence was otherwise a continuation of his studies for the most part, as France was not at war in the mid-1780s, nor preparing for a conflict. His reading material included Niccolo Machiavelli’s historical writings on Florence, histories of many European countries, Enlightenment works by Voltaire and Rousseau and some of
The seventeenth-century dramatist, Jean Racine’s writings, which Napoleon possibly employed in an effort to win over a young woman he was courting by the name of Caroline de Colombier. Elsewhere, his writings of the time indicate that despite his inculcation into French society
And position as a commissioned officer in the country’s army, he had lost none of his ardour for the cause of Corsican nationalism. Early in the summer of 1786, Napoleon composed an essay which he entitled ‘On Suicide’. This two-page treatise considered his position in the world and the fallen nature of humanity.
Interspersed with this was his anguish about the broken nature of Corsican identity. Much of what he wrote in this can be attributed to a fatalistically Romantic streak which was derived in part from his reading of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s writings since he was
A child, but there is doubtless a certain sense of a depressed and anguished young man here, one who felt oppressed by his situation and isolated in Valence. A year later, he was in Paris fighting his family’s ongoing legal and financial difficulties
In the courts of the capital where he appears to have lost his virginity to a prostitute he met in the centre of the city and with whom he walked through the gardens of the Palais Royal that night. His writing about the episode is ambiguous enough, that some have otherwise speculated
That Napoleon did not actually have his first sexual encounter until the mid-1790s, but this seems unlikely. In the autumn of 1786 Napoleon returned to Corsica for the first time since he had left his homeland as a child back in early 1779.
Incredibly, this was the first time that he met his three youngest siblings, Pauline, Caroline and Jerome. This would be a protracted first meeting with these sisters and brother and a re-acquaintance with his other siblings, as Napoleon was able to acquire a full year of leave on the back
Of what were most likely, falsified medical reports. He had many matters to deal with during this extended period back on Corsica, most notably his family’s continuingly fraught financial situation. The visit also served to reinvigorate his belief in Corsican nationalism and it was
During his year back on the Mediterranean island, that he began composing an extended work on the history and politics of Corsica which he entitled Histoire de la Corse or History of Corsica. He had been preparing to write such a work from the age of 15 when he had requested that
His father send him a copy of Samuel Boswell, the acclaimed Scottish biographer and diarist’s An Account of Corsica, a travelogue of the Scot’s journey through Napoleon’s homeland many years earlier which had been published in 1768. Beginning in 1786, Napoleon began drafting parts of the proposed work, in which he argued
Vehemently against French rule of Corsica, claiming that the people of his homeland had become, quote, “more debased than animals” since coming under French occupation, while disparagingly referring to some of his countrymen as “tremblingly kissing the hand of the oppressor.” Now, back on Corsica itself, he found time to develop the text further.
An impression of its content can be gleaned from the draft introduction in which Napoleon started by saying, “Dear countrymen, we have always been unhappy. Today, members of a powerful monarchy, we experience from its government nothing but the perversions of its Constitution.”
There is the clear sense here of a young man who utterly refutes French domination of Corsica, though his views would begin to change following the Revolution of 1789. In the meantime, Napoleon never had sufficient time to finish Histoire de la Corse as he
Was forced to return to the mainland to resume his military duties in the autumn of 1787 and it remained a patchy, unfinished manuscript text. When he returned to France, Napoleon was eventually stationed back in the east of the country,
This time at an artillery school in the town of Auxonne near Dijon in the Burgundy region. Throughout this period he continued to live frugally and sent the savings from his salary back to his mother and family on Corsica. He also read voraciously, particularly of classical literature.
It is hard to understate the influence of ancient Greek and Roman history on Napoleon. For the majority of the period between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries educational curricula included a much greater focus on Greek and Roman historians like Livy, the
Author of the most expansive history of the Roman Republic to have survived down to the modern age, Suetonius, the great Roman biographer of Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus and others, and Plutarch, whose Lives of the greatest Greek and Roman rulers and military commanders survived virtually intact through the middle ages.
Tales of Alexander the Great, the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who marched over the Alps against Rome in the third century BC, and Julius Caesar inspired him and he later self-consciously modelled himself on their exploits. Beyond this, he continued to develop his skills as an artillery commander at Auxonne, while
In the spring of 1789, he saw his first minor military action when he was sent down river from Auxonne to the town of Seurre to suppress a riot where hungry country folk had killed two grain merchants. Thus did Napoleon spend the years before the most momentous event in French political history erupted.
While Napoleon was continuing his studies in artillery warfare at various military postings in the second half of the 1780s, France was descending into an economic and social crisis which the riot at Seurre in the spring of 1789 had been symptomatic of.
When Louis XVI ascended the throne back in 1774, the state finances of France were already in a precarious state. In many ways this was a long term problem wrought by the many and costly wars engaged in by Louis XIV and Louis XV.
Most of these had been against Britain or the Dutch Republic, but those two nations were able to fund such ventures off the back of their proto-industrial progress, and highly developed economic and mercantile systems. France’s domestic economy was backwards by comparison and the state was spending far
Too much money maintaining the lavish court at Versailles. By the 1780s, the state finances were in crisis and successive finance ministers such as Jacques Necker could not control the situation. As taxes increased, both the nobility and the common people were increasingly disgruntled
By the state of affairs and this was compounded when the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland in 1783 and 1784 led to such extreme weather events, that poor harvests were triggered across Europe. With food prices escalating and famine gripping large parts of France, public sentiment against
The perceived fecklessness of the royal court at Versailles grew to new heights. By the spring of 1789 the crisis was escalating. The state debt had grown to an enormous four and half billion livres and opposition to further increases in taxation in 1788 had led the latest finance minister, Étienne
De Brienne, to attempt to devalue the French coinage. As any armchair economist today knows, this will simply trigger heavy inflation, which is exactly what happened in 1788 and into early 1789. This hit the poor and farmers worst and social tensions increased.
In a desperate last ditch effort to remedy the situation Louis XVI recalled Jacques Necker as his finance minister, having dismissed him from that post several years earlier, but Necker effectively indicated that there was little he could do without being able to draw down a large subsidy from the nation.
This was a common way of alleviating fiscal crises in medieval and early modern times in Europe, but such a subsidy could only be acquired by convening parliament and the crown making concessions to the political nation. Given that the French parliament, the Estates General, had not sat in 175 years they would
Doubtlessly have a lot to discuss and would demand a lot of concessions and reforms in return for granting a subsidy. Thus it was, in the awareness that a political firestorm was being opened in doing so, that Louis XVI summoned the Estates General in January 1789.
It took several months for elections to be held across the country, but on the 5th of May 1789 the approximately 1,200 delegates representing the French people convened at Versailles. The country’s history would never be the same. Louis and his advisors had hoped in 1789 that they might be able to convene the Estates,
Request a large subsidy to tackle the economic crisis, fob the delegates off with some false promises of political, social and fiscal reforms and then dissolve the parliament quickly before it could do any real work. They were entirely wrong. From the beginning it became clear that hundreds of the delegates had arrived at Versailles
With the intention of demanding major political change in France. Louis was also not helped by the fact that his own finance minister, Jacques Necker, was sympathetic to the Third Estate, the large block of representatives which represented the common French people, as opposed to the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocracy.
Weeks of wrangling followed, as the delegates tried to form committees to discuss various matters, but the king’s parliamentary managers attempted to focus on taxation and financial matters. Eventually, with the fear rising that Louis would dissolve the meeting, on the 20th of
June hundreds of members of the Third Estate convened on the tennis court on the grounds of the palace of Versailles and swore an oath that they would not dissolve and if needs be they would reassemble in Paris, until such time as a new constitution for France was agreed upon.
It was the beginning of the French Revolution as the monarchy lost control of the situation politically. The events of the following weeks are reasonably well known. The Third Estate now formed themselves into a newly christened National Assembly which continued to meet at Versailles.
Three weeks later, on the 14th of July, a group of anti-monarchical insurgents stormed the Bastille Prison, a symbol of royal authority in Paris. On the 4th of August the National Assembly declared an end to the feudal order of society,
Abolishing the concept of the nobility being a higher class than the ordinary French people in line with the principles of the Enlightenment, while on the 26th of August the Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a seminal document in the creation of modern liberal democracy.
By now Louis XVI and his court had been side-lined at Versailles and were no longer in charge of France, though a Counter-Revolution of certain sections of the nobility and old order was brewing. Fearing such scheming and embittered by rising bread prices in the capital, on the 5th of
October 1789 an angry mob of Parisian women marched to Versailles from Paris, detained the royal family and dragged them back to Paris where they were effectively placed under house arrest at the Tuileries Palace. Upon his arrival there, Louis requested an aide to bring him a history of King Charles
I of England, who had been deposed and executed by the English parliament back in the 1640s. Within days the revolutionary parliament, now named the National Constituent Assembly, moved its business to Paris and began planning France’s new constitution. Ominously, the Assembly voted on the 12th of October to change Louis’s title from
King of France to King of the French. In Auxonne, Napoleon, like all French men and women, was doubtlessly gripped by the news of events in Versailles and Paris over the summer and autumn of 1789. He greeted the Revolution with considerable optimism, primarily owing to his anti-monarchical
Views and the belief that the changing political situation might benefit him and his family financially. Nevertheless, as a French military officer, he was forced in the summer to oversee the quelling of riots in eastern France, while he kept his political views largely to himself
Within an officer establishment which largely favoured the monarchy in the early months of the unrest. In August 1789, he obtained a fresh period of leave and headed back to Corsica where he found that several of his siblings were also early supporters of the revolutionary
Movement, particularly his older brother Joseph and next youngest brother Lucien. In the weeks that followed, Napoleon established himself as one of the most vocal and prominent supporters of the Revolutionary cause on the island and particularly so in his native Ajaccio,
Urging others to fly the new tricolor flag which had been adopted by the National Assembly at Versailles as the new emblem of the country over the old gold and blue fleur-de-lis flag of the French monarchy. Corsica’s politics during the early years of the Revolution were complex.
Elsewhere in France there were regional struggles between those who supported the revolutionary movement and the National Assembly and National Constituent Assembly on the one hand, and those who defended the old order of monarchy, aristocracy and church on the other. In Corsica, though, this was complicated by a third faction whose primary political outlook
Was one of Corsican nationalism and who viewed the Revolution as an opportunity to further those goals. The island would be torn apart from the summer of 1789 onwards by these three factions: revolutionaries, monarchists and nationalists. The monarchists were led by reactionary elements amongst the church and landholders on the
Island, who stood to lose from the overthrow of the old order, but they were nowhere near as significant a faction on Corsica as they were elsewhere in France. The Corsican nationalist faction were the strongest of the three, though their spiritual
Leader, Pasquale Paoli, was absent from the Mediterranean for the time being, albeit in exile in England, he was keeping a close eye on matters and preparing to return to Corsica on short notice. Finally, the revolutionary movement there was soon led by Napoleon in Ajaccio and Antoine-Christophe
Saliceti in Bastia, Saliceti being a deputy to the Assembly in Versailles and then Paris. Napoleon’s brother Joseph was also prominent in the revolutionary camp on Corsica, after he was elected as Mayor of Ajaccio. In 1790 Saliceti also convinced the National Constituent Assembly to have Corsica made
A French department, an administrative rezoning which solidified its position as part of France. However, the position of figures like Napoleon, Joseph Buonaparte and Saliceti was complex, combining support for the revolutionary government with a certain degree of nationalist ardour as well, wishing to have the revolutionary ideals promulgated across Corsica while also
Maintaining a fair degree of regional autonomy. Despite his position as a leading figure in the island’s politics in late 1789 and early 1790, Napoleon could not remain on leave indefinitely, particularly so since the regional unrest which was occurring incessantly across the country, required military action and many
Of Napoleon’s fellow officers with royalist sympathies were absent without leave. Therefore he technically returned to duty in the spring of 1790, yet he was able to remain on Corsica for a time, where he was instructed to oversee the maintenance of stability
On the island, a situation which placed him in a position of being able to support his political views on the Revolution as a member of the island’s garrison. This involved him in bloody events, notably in the summer of 1790, when a violent insurrection
In Ajaccio required Napoleon to call in his troops to restore public order. Nevertheless, it is clear that there was still a fair degree of internal turmoil for Napoleon concerning the evolving political situation, as his views on Corsican nationalism and support for the Revolution’s goals wrestled with each other.
This is clear from his ongoing efforts in 1790 to find a publisher for his history of Corsica, sending a draft copy to the prominent Enlightenment thinker, the Abbé Raynal. He dated the covering letter as ‘Year 1 of Liberty’, a reference to the Revolutionary
Idea of dating the beginning of modern history from the Revolution of 1789, but the text’s espousal of the cause of Corsican independence points to a fundamental conflict in his political outlook which the Revolution had brought about. In July 1790 Pasquale Paoli returned to Corsica after just over two decades in exile in Britain.
The National Constituent Assembly had offered pardons to thousands of individuals across France in late 1789 and early 1790 and Paoli had been amongst them. He was given a hero’s welcome as he arrived back on the Mediterranean island, with Napoleon and his brother Joseph prominent amongst those who turned up to witness his disembarkation
At Ajaccio. Paoli was quickly acknowledged as the new leader of the Corsican assembly and was made lieutenant of the island. However, while the Buonapartes did their best to accommodate and welcome the great champion of Corsican nationalism in the weeks following his return, relations quickly began to fray,
In large part owing to Paoli’s actions. Pasquale viewed the Buonapartes as having betrayed the Corsican cause, when Napoleon’s father Carlo had decided to remain with his family on the island, following the French occupation in 1769 and conform to the French government.
Paoli also inflamed sentiments amongst prominent natives of Ajaccio like the Buonapartes by moving the administrative capital to the town of Bastia on the other side of the island to Ajaccio. Hence, within weeks of Paoli’s return to Corsica, he had been installed as the foremost
Political figure on the island, but was already in growing conflict with Napoleon and his family. Matters were also moving quickly in Paris at the heart of the Revolution, where what was happening was very different in the early 1790s, from what was occurring on far away Corsica.
Following the removal of the royal family and the National Constituent Assembly to Paris in October 1789, events accelerated. By early 1790, committees were developing the new constitution and the first political parties were beginning to emerge in the capital, notably the Jacobins, a group which had emerged
As a collection of anti-Royalist deputies at the Estates General at Versailles, but who by early 1790, had morphed into a countrywide political organisation which favoured the eradication of the monarchy and the creation of a French Republic. The Jacobins and other groups spent much of 1790 attacking the privileges and wealth of
Both the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocracy, implementing an oath which the clergy had to swear to the French state rather than the king or the pope that summer. Then, on the 3rd of September 1791, the National Constituent Assembly finally adopted the new French Constitution, the first ever written constitution of France.
It provided the framework for France to be governed as a constitutional monarchy, one in which the king and his ministers would play a largely symbolic role in the governing of the country, while real power would rest with a newly created Legislative Assembly,
One which came into existence on the 1st of October 1791 and succeeded the National Constituent Assembly. As great as these advances were in fostering the goals of the revolutionaries of 1789, they were under considerable threat. In the days following their imprisonment in Paris in October 1789, the royal family began
Soliciting aid from Europe’s other powers. Many were receptive to the calls for foreign intervention in France, particularly Austria, the successive rulers of which in the late 1780s and early 1790s, Joseph II and Leopold II, were both brothers of Queen Marie Antoinette of France, Louis XVI’s queen consort.
There were also stirrings in France itself, where the Roman Catholic Church and large sections of the aristocracy were opposed to the Revolution. A great many regional factors were at play here and this would shape Napoleon’s experiences of the early Revolution on Corsica.
The perception of a Counter-Revolution strengthened early in 1791, as armed nobles began attempting to defend the crown’s interest in the streets of Paris and hardened in mid-June when the royal family attempted to flee from Paris to the Austrian Netherlands. There they hoped to initiate a Counter-Revolution with Austrian aid, but they were discovered
Shortly after fleeing from Paris near the town of Varennes in north-eastern France and were dragged back to the capital by the revolutionaries. It was a watershed moment in the Revolution, as it became clear to the Legislative Assembly members, that the royal family might need to be dispensed of altogether, while from
This point onwards it was clear that Austria was preparing for war with France. As all of this was occurring in Paris, Napoleon had been required to leave Corsica to return to active duty at Valence in eastern France in February 1791.
Here he continued in the thrifty manner which had been required of him throughout the second half of the 1780s, spending much of his time reading and improving his abilities as an artillery commander. In June he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant within the La Fère Regiment, while around
The very same time, he was appointed as secretary of the local branch of the Jacobins in Valence, the clearest sign yet of Napoleon’s drift to becoming a fully-fledged radical revolutionary. Elsewhere during the autumn, he indicated his own growing support for placing King Louis on trial for opposing the Revolutionary regime.
Yet despite the turmoil across France, he managed to secure a new period of leave for the winter of 1791 and headed back to Corsica in early September. This was just in time, as the National Constituent Assembly passed a resolution just days later
Prohibiting leave periods within the military indefinitely, such was the shortage of officers and soldiers. Back on Corsica, he found that the island’s politics had become more fractious as the competing nationalist, revolutionary and royalist factions vied for power in the various towns and regions.
Well over a hundred people had been killed in violent clashes. On the other hand, the death of Napoleon’s great-uncle, Luciano, in mid-October saw the family receive a significant sum of money in his will which alleviated the Buonapartes’ financial problems to some extent.
During Napoleon’s latest period of leave, the international situation was shifting against France once more. On the 27th of August 1791, Emperor Leopold II of Austria and King Frederick William II of Prussia issued a declaration from Pillnitz Castle in Dresden in Germany which affirmed
That the welfare of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette was of communal interest to Europe’s monarchs and that they intended to begin building a coalition to defend the monarchy in France. It was the beginning of a gradual shift towards outright war, plans for which escalated in
The months that followed as the Austrian and Prussian governments co-ordinated their efforts with the growing number of French nobles and church leaders who had fled France to cities like Vienna and Berlin. As yet, several of the other European powers were uncommitted, notably Britain, which as
A constitutional monarchy that had confronted its own growing absolutist monarch in the seventeenth century, was less concerned about the anti-monarchical sentiments of the Revolution, but held France to be its foremost rival for power, both in Europe and overseas in regions like North America and India.
It also feared the growing radicalism of the Revolution, but remained uncommitted to going to war in 1791. In the end the French government moved, before Austria and Prussia had the chance to do so, as the Legislative Assembly determined that it would be best to pre-empt any Austrian
Attack on north-eastern France by instead moving to secure Austria’s territories in what was then known as the Austrian Netherlands then, but which correlates with Belgium and the border regions around Luxembourg and north-eastern France today. Thus, on the 20th of April 1792 a French revolutionary army invaded the Austrian Netherlands in the
First act of what would eventually come to be known as the War of the First Coalition. It soon escalated as Prussia honoured its alliance with Austria and declared war on France in June, following which a Prussian army, the most effective military in the world in the eighteenth century, marched into northern France.
The revolutionaries won a major victory at Valmy that September, but with Britain and the Dutch Republic soon joining the Austrians and Prussians in their alliance, it was clear that a long war was in store if France was to emerge victorious.
The outbreak of the War of the First Coalition led to a radical shift in the French Revolution. In 1791 the Feuillants Club, a right leaning, conservative and moderate party led by figures like Antoine Barnave and Adrien Duport, had become ascendant in the Legislative Assembly
And had managed to steer a course between retaining the monarchy and staying true to the principles of the Revolution. However, with the advent of war the Jacobins, led by figures like Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre, gained in popularity. The political mood in Paris was also changing considerably.
With their attempted flight to Varennes in the summer of 1791 and then the outbreak of the War of the First Coalition against France, many began to view King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette as figures who could not be reconciled to the new dispensation and
Who would have to be eliminated as a problem. These tensions came to a climax on the 10th of August 1792, when an armed revolutionary mob stormed the Tuileries Palace where the royal family was being held. In the ensuing insurrection the Swiss Guards at the palace opened fire on the mob.
In the violence which followed, hundreds of royalists and revolutionaries were killed. By the end of the day the hopes of establishing a constitutional monarchy lay dead on the ground surrounding the Tuileries Palace. The Insurrection of 10th August 1792, saw radical political figures within the Legislative
Assembly and Paris’s political clubs such as the Jacobins and Girondins, the latter being a splinter group of the Jacobins who were increasingly powerful, gain the upper hand over the more moderate Feuilliants. Public perception was that the Swiss Guards at the Tuileries Palace had opened fire first
On the civilians on the 10th of August, leading to the immense bloodshed, and it followed that many argued that Louis XVI had ordered them to do so. As a result, the king and queen, who had been under a kind of informal house arrest at the
Tuileries since the autumn of 1789, were now placed formally under arrest in August 1792. Then the monarchy was finally abolished and on the 21st of September, France was declared to be a republic. In tandem the Legislative Assembly was dissolved and was replaced by the National Convention
Which declared its aim to be the transition from the failed constitutional monarchy to a full republic. One of its first acts in the weeks that followed was to place King Louis XVI on trial. He faced over thirty different charges when his trial commenced on the 3rd of December
1792, many of them related to the violence of the 10th of August. He was found guilty after a perfunctory trial and was executed by guillotine at the Place de la Concorde in Central Paris, renamed Place de la Revolution.
When he was executed on the 21st of January 1793 it was, as Citizen Louis Capet, a reference to the Capetian name which a family that had become Kings of France back in the tenth century had held prior to becoming the royal family. His queen, Marie Antoinette, would share his fate the following October.
There could be no going back now. The Revolution would have to be successful, as all of Europe’s might was bent on destroying it after the events of 1792 and 1793. On Corsica, Napoleon was also beginning to cross an ideological Rubicon and was coming into direct confrontation with Paoli.
This was partially owing to the manner in which he gained election to a magistracy in the early spring of 1792, by bribing several officials and even kidnapping an election overseer and detaining him in Casa Buonaparte on the day of the election, foreshadowing Napoleon’s consistent election rigging in years to come.
While these methods were successful, Paoli was not impressed and tried to force an investigation into Napoleon’s conduct, though this was blocked by Saliceti, the main representative of the Paris assembly on Corsica. This was exacerbated in the weeks that followed as the government in Paris ordered Saliceti
To begin suppressing the old monasteries, convents and religious houses across Corsica, as part of the latest salvo in the growing assault on the Roman Catholic Church and its ancient privileges and wealth. Paoli, as the head of the traditional Roman Catholic Corsican nationalist movement, opposed
These measures and by the late spring violent opposition to the measure was breaking out across the island. As the head of the government’s National Guardsmen on Corsica, Napoleon was charged with suppressing these bouts of unrest, all of which further damaged the relationship between the Buonapartes and Paoli.
Before things soured any further on Corsica, Napoleon left for the mainland again, having been absent without leave from his post at Valence since the start of the spring. Despite this, when he arrived back in France he did not make for the east of the country,
But rather to the capital to ensure there was no backlash over his election rigging on Corsica. Rather than facing any punishment for this or his having been absent without leave from his military posting, he was instead promoted to captain, such was the need to expand the
Military in the context of the outbreak of the War of the First Coalition. He was still in Paris when a Parisian embassy arrived in the Tuileries Palace on the 20th of June 1792, seeking to convince the king and queen to embrace the Revolution and desist
From their conspiring with Austria and other foreign governments but in the weeks that followed, the Insurrection of the 10th of August occurred, bringing to an end any hopes of a constitutional monarchy. As the Legislative Assembly declared the establishment of the First French Republic in mid-September,
Napoleon prepared to head back to Corsica again, where he arrived in early-to-mid-October. There he found that in the factional wrangling which had characterised Corsica’s politics since the summer of 1789, the Corsican nationalist element led by Paoli was now firmly winning out, and as sentiments in Napoleon’s homeland turned completely against the Revolution,
As it entered a more radical phase, war erupted, the monarchy was dissolved and a republic was proclaimed. By the time the king was executed in Paris in late January 1793, the Buonapartes were most certainly in the minority in Corsica, in still supporting the republican government in Paris.
Late in 1792, Napoleon became involved in the first concerted military campaign of his career at 23 years of age. This involved a military expedition to the island of Sardinia, Corsica’s larger southern neighbour. In the eighteenth century Sardinia was controlled by the Kingdom of Savoy-Piedmont, the core
Of which was located along the French-Italian border region and stretched into the Plain of Lombardy, with its capital at Turin. Savoy had refrained from becoming involved in the War of the First Coalition, fearing its territory would be easily exposed to French attack.
Nevertheless, with the British already having existing bases in the Balearic Islands and considering trying to occupy Corsica, securing Sardinia was thought vital to protect southern France, by the government in Paris. Accordingly, a plan was devised by the revolutionary government during the course of 1792 to invade Sardinia.
The expedition would consist of forces from mainland France, but also contingents from Corsica. Paoli appointed his nephew Pier di Cesari Rocca to lead the Corsican expeditionary force, with Napoleon as his second in command. However, the Corsican expedition was consciously sabotaged by Paoli who feared the implications
For his quasi-autonomous control over Corsica if Paris occupied the more southerly island. Due to this, the Corsican contingent with Napoleon did not arrive in the waters off Sardinia until late February 1793, by which time the French contingent from the mainland
Had been in place in Sardinia for two months waiting for them and were unable to take the city of Cagliari without reinforcement. The delay in sending the expedition was not the only method employed by Paoli with his nephew Cesari acting as his proxy to disturb the Sardinia expedition.
Once they finally arrived in Sardinia, the expedition attempted to seize the heavily fortified island of La Madallena which protected the northern sea routes to Sardinia. But when the attack was ready to be commenced, Cesari pulled back large sections of the Corsican contingent, claiming that there were reports of a mutiny amongst his troops.
A further delay in attacking La Madallena and proceeding onward to Cagliari followed. Then the Spanish, who had entered the War of the First Coalition against the French just days earlier, dispatched a fleet from North Africa to Sardinia. This shifted the balance of the campaign and the French and Corsicans had no option but
To abandon the Sardinia expedition. As they departed Sardinia Napoleon was incensed, believing that Cesari had invented the claims of a possible mutiny amongst the troops in order to sabotage the expedition. The stage was set for a final showdown with Paoli back on Corsica.
The entire Sardinia debacle also ensured that the man who would conquer most of Europe over the next twenty years, was actually part of a humiliating defeat during his first senior military command. Back on Corsica in the summer of 1793, the divisions between Paoli and the Buonapartes
Were becoming more acute following the Sardinia expedition, exacerbated by Paoli’s decision to begin courting the British, a plan being worked out for a Royal Navy expedition to occupy the island in 1794, after which a Corsican republic would once again emerge, albeit as an enemy of France in the War of the First Coalition.
When he learned of this, the split between Napoleon and Paoli became terminal. On the 23rd of May 1793 a Paolist mob attacked Casa Buonaparte, ransacking Napoleon’s childhood home and damaging it considerably. The die was now cast and there could be little going back in the all-out clash between the
Stalwart Corsican nationalist and Napoleon, who had ultimately chosen the French Revolution over the Corsican nationalist movement of his youth. On the 31st of May he attempted, along with the revolutionary government’s troops on Corsica, to seize Ajaccio in a last ditch effort to usurp Paoli’s position, but they
Lacked both the troops and ammunition necessary to continue the struggle and Paoli had far too much domestic support to fear being overthrown. Consequently, Napoleon took the decision in early June 1793, that he and his family would have to flee from Corsica and head for the French mainland.
The Buonapartes left Corsica on the 11th of June, heading for the French port city of Toulon, just to the southeast of Marseilles. Days before he had left his homeland, Napoleon had written a small political document entitled ‘Memoir on the Political and Military Position of the Department of Corsica’, one in which
He denounced Paoli and his movement. It was a clear statement of the political and ideological shift which had occurred in Napoleon as a result of the French Revolution. He was no longer a Corsican nationalist. He was a French revolutionary. And where Napoleon went, so went his family.
Having arrived in the French mainland in the summer of 1793, they soon began spelling their name Bonaparte without a ‘u’ to remove the Corsican and Italian element to it and to affirm their status as a French family.
He would only return to Corsica once during his lifetime and that only for a brief visit in the late 1790s, when he was heading for Egypt from southern France and it was convenient to stop there. Back in the mid-1790s, following his departure from there, Paoli intensified his contact
With the British, resulting in an expeditionary force landing there in February 1794 and gradually seizing control of the island over the next several months. By August they had secured complete control of the island and continued to hold it for
Two years before abandoning it late in 1796, as the strategic situation in the Mediterranean shifted once again. The Bonapartes had arrived in Toulon under impoverished conditions, having had to speedily abandon the family home and bringing little with themselves. Under these circumstances, Napoleon could do little other than establish the wider family,
Which still included young children, Jerome Bonaparte being just eight years old at the time, in modest lodgings in Toulon, before heading to join up with his regiment in the nearby town of Nice on the French Riviera. Over the next several weeks he was involved in numerous roles, one organising gunpowder
Convoys for the revolutionary armies in the south and along the Savoyard border. It was during this period that he composed a significant text entitled La Souper de Beaucaire, a fictionalised supper at which French military officers debate the current revolts and war throughout France.
In it Napoleon confirmed his support for the Jacobins in Paris and elsewhere in France, asserting his belief that the federalists and aristocrats who were trying to overthrow the revolutionary government in Paris were doomed. The course of the conflicts in southern France in the weeks that followed his composition
Of the treatise certainly supported his beliefs. On the 24th of August the city of Marseilles, which had been in revolt against Paris, fell to a revolutionary army. Napoleon was far from the only person in France whose political views had shifted profoundly during the course of 1792 and 1793.
In Paris the Revolution was taking on a much darker tone, following the trial and execution of Louis XVI and as the war with Austria, Prussia, Britain and their allies escalated. From the spring of 1793, the number of summary executions of perceived enemies of the Revolution
By execution at the Place de la Revolution was escalating. Two groups were in the ascendancy during this period, the Girondins and the Montagnards, both of which were scions of the Jacobins. However, while both groups had been opposed to the monarchy and wanted a republic, once
Those goals were accomplished late in 1792, the Montagnards continued to call for an ever more radical Revolution, whereas the Girondins were concerned that the Revolution was spiralling into needless bloodshed. They were right. In April 1793 the Committee for Public Safety was established by the National Convention,
Charged with protecting the Revolution, in the context of the War of the First Coalition and the outbreak of numerous revolts across France against the government in Paris. The Committee soon came under the control of Maximilien Robespierre, under whose influence
It became an instrument of state terror, with over 16,000 people executed over the year that followed. As such, as revolutions do, the French Revolution was descending into tyranny and bloodshed. In the midst of this, Robespierre himself predicted that it would end in France being ruled by a military dictator.
When he uttered that statement the man he was hypothesising the existence of, was a little known Corsican military officer in the south of France. While the Reign of Terror was beginning in Paris the country itself was undergoing a period of intense internal conflict not unlike that, which had wracked Corsica throughout
The early 1790s when Napoleon was there. This had begun in the Vendée, a coastal province of western France to the south of Brittany, in March 1793 when a coalition of Roman Catholic and royalist opponents of the Revolutionary government in Paris seized control of several of the major towns in the region including
Saumur and Angers. The Federalist revolts expanded across France that summer as many local governments and regional populations became disillusioned with the growing violence of the Committee for Public Safety and the centralisation of political power in Paris. A number of these revolts were also driven by regional tensions and unrest in cities
Like Lyon, Marseilles and Bordeaux. Many of these Federalist revolts were short-lived bouts of protest against the government, but others were more sustained, notably in Bordeaux, a city which was a strong supporter of the Girondins and which was unwilling to accept the arrest and execution of many of the Girondin
Leaders in Paris in the summer of 1793. The Federalist revolts across France in the summer of 1793, combined with the escalating international war with Austria, Prussia, Britain and the Dutch Republic, presented an unprecedented threat for the Revolution. Never had its future looked so uncertain and there was a real possibility that the Counter
Revolutionaries or powers like Austria and Britain would secure enough regional victories to threaten the security of the French Republic in Paris. To avoid this eventuality drastic measures were needed. As early as the autumn of 1789, certain members of the National Assembly had speculated that
If France’s enemies declared war on the nation it would only be able to defend itself against a pan-European alliance though mass conscription of Frenchman of fighting age. This was a wholly novel concept in Europe at the time, where for centuries wars between
The European powers had been carried out by relatively limited armies of mercenaries or professional soldiers who had chosen to join the military. As a result, ten or twenty thousand men on the battlefield constituted a major battle in any war.
Now, on the 23rd of August 1793, in response to the threats it faced, the National Convention issued a decree whereby every Frenchman of able body aged between 18 and 25 who was unmarried was to be conscripted for military service with immediate effect.
The levée-en-masse, as this programme of mass conscription became known, allowed the Revolutionary government to increase its armed forces to hundreds of thousands of men by 1794. In due course it would allow Napoleon to conquer most of Europe, but it also opened up a Pandora’s
Box of unwanted effects which would ultimately result in the carnage of the two world wars during the first half of the twentieth century. In the south of France the priority in the early stages of the Federalist Revolts was to recapture Marseilles.
As we have seen, this was accomplished on the 24th of August, but the port city of Toulon just to the southeast of Marseilles, where Napoleon and his family had landed after leaving Corsica early that summer, had also been taken over by the Federalists.
Even as the tricolore was being hoisted once again atop public buildings in Marseilles, the rebels in Toulon called on the British and the Spanish, both of whom had a significant naval presence in the Mediterranean to send aid to them. The recently appointed commander-in-chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet, Samuel
Hood, responded with a combined British, Spanish, Savoyard, Sardinian and Neapolitan expeditionary force of over five dozen ships and more than 15,000 troops. With the arrival of this sizeable contingent of allied troops in Toulon, the French port town became the epicentre of the War of the First Coalition in southern France in the
Autumn of 1793, one which the Republican government needed to recapture in order to maintain control of the Mediterranean waters off southern France. Accordingly, General Jean Francois Carteaux, who had just overseen the recapture of Marseilles, initiated a siege of Toulon in the last days of August 1793.
It would last for several months and was leant an extra political dimension in early October when the royalists and British in Toulon declared Louis XVI’s eight year old child to be King Louis XVII, despite his ongoing detention by the revolutionaries in Paris.
Napoleon was soon involved in the siege of Toulon, in part because of his sheer proximity to the city when the siege began in the final days of August, in part owing to his reputation as a knowledgeable artillery commander and in part because his old ally from Corsica,
Saliceti, had shown up in southern France as the Republican government’s political commissioner within Carteaux’s army. He recommended that Napoleon be given a senior command in the siege and Carteaux, who had a major lack of skilled artillery officers, was more than happy to oblige.
Therefore by mid-September, Napoleon was appointed to command Carteaux’s artillery division on the right flank of his forces during the siege of Toulon. In the weeks that followed, as the Republican forces surrounded Toulon and began the siege, Bonaparte’s remit was extended until he was effectively in control of the entire artillery
Command in the besieging army of approximately 30,000 men, in large part because Saliceti and other officers and political commissioners were soon reporting back to Paris that the other artillery officers were incompetent. This was a major problem in the French revolutionary armies during the early stages of the War
Of the First Coalition and there was room for ambitious and talented young men like Napoleon to rise to positions of considerable seniority within the French army at this time by demonstrating their abilities and effectiveness. Napoleon was central to French victory at Toulon.
A high promontory stands over the town of Toulon and it was here in the autumn of 1793, that the royalists and British had established one of their key defensive sites at Fort Mulgrave. From early on in the siege Napoleon argued that if the fort could be seized and with
It control of the promontory, the French artillery could then be stationed there and cannon shot would rain down on the British fleet in the harbour of Toulon, while the French would also be able to secure Cairo Hill, cutting off the royalist and British supply lines
Between the distinct inner and outer harbours of Toulon. On the other hand, securing the promontory would be a difficult task, given the paltry state of the revolutionary forces at Toulon, many of whom were under-trained, under-supplied and led by ineffective commanders, chief amongst them was General Carteaux, although he was
Replaced by the more capable Jacques Francois Dugommier during the course of the siege. To offset these deficiencies, Napoleon began energetically requisitioning gunpowder and artillery from revolutionary forces all over southern France and having them brought to Toulon, along with other vital supplies such as sandbags.
He even wrote to the government in Paris petitioning them for further aid in his task. It all paid off. By early November, Bonaparte had an artillery reserve of over 100 cannon and was in a position to initiate a sustained barrage of the English position on the promontory with a view to
Seizing Fort Mulgrave. The attacks on Fort Mulgrave and a number of other smaller redoubts on the promontory which the British had christened ‘Little Gibraltar’ continued through November and into December 1793. During this period, Napoleon showed great courage on the field of battle.
In the midst of an assault on one of the smaller forts near Fort Mulgrave, a British soldier ran a pike into Napoleon’s left thigh, leaving him with a wound which was severe enough that years later he claimed that his leg very nearly had to be amputated.
On another occasion he began loading a cannon himself using a blood-soaked ramrod when the gunner who had been tasked with doing so was killed. The incident may have been responsible for Napoleon developing a viral infection of some
Kind, one which many have claimed was a form of scabies that he carried for several years thereafter, but which has also been posited to be a form of dermatitis, a more likely scenario, given that Napoleon was fastidiously clean by the standards of the time.
Whatever the condition was, there is no doubt that it began during the siege of Toulon and would cause him considerable irritation until a doctor cured it over eight years later in 1802 using sulphur salts. In the end, Napoleon’s skin condition and severe leg wound were worth it.
His plan to break the siege of Toulon by capturing ‘Little Gibraltar’ had worked. Additional batteries of artillery, one named ‘Jacobin’ after the political clubs which Napoleon clearly felt a strong affinity for by 1793, were placed at two strategic locations on the 20th and 28th of November.
As the artillery positions expanded, the British and Neapolitans attempted a sortie against Napoleon’s lines in mid-December, but these were repelled and late on the night of the 16th of December, a full assault, supported by Dugommier’s troops, was initiated against the British position on ‘Little Gibraltar’.
Under cover of darkness, the French assaulted Fort Mulgrave and after heavy close quarters combat they secured it before dawn on the 17th. Napoleon’s horse was shot from under him during the clash, but with the capture of the fort and the hill the success of his strategy was realised.
As dawn broke on the 17th, the Revolutionary forces began moving cannon into place to lay fire on the royalist, British, Spanish and other allied ships and positions below. When they began assailing the harbour, two Spanish ships carrying large gunpowder consignments
Were hit, creating an explosion which ripped through the fleet in the harbour below. With ‘Little Gibraltar’ lost to the French, their fleet badly damaged from the explosions and the position of the town utterly precarious now, the British, Spanish and other ships
And forces began to withdraw from Toulon and negotiations were initiated to bring about the surrender of the town, which duly followed on the 19th of December 1793. Writing concerning his role in the new republic’s victory, the commander-in-chief of the siege, General Dugommier, stated, “I have no words to describe Bonaparte’s merit: much technical
Skill, an equal degree of intelligence and too much gallantry.” The end of the siege of Toulon largely brought about an end to the Federalist Revolts in France, while the growing reign of terror employed by Robespierre, the Jacobins and the Committee for Public Safety in Paris and elsewhere, was serving to quell the internal
Unrest within France, though there is no doubt that whatever idealism had suffused the Revolution when it began in 1789, died on the guillotine from the summer of 1793 onwards. By the end of the year, the Revolutionary government had largely seized back control
Of all of France and the Counter-Revolution was being brought to an end. The note of finality to the early stages of the Revolution occurred not just with Toulon, but also with the execution of Marie Antoinette in October 1793.
But, though the last links with the monarchy had been severed and the civil war at home had come to an end, the War of the First Coalition against France’s many international enemies was still very much underway. As the year ended the government in Paris was at war with Austria, Britain, the Dutch
Republic, Spain, Naples, Sardinia, Portugal, Prussia and numerous smaller states in Italy and Germany, as the entire continent combined to crush the political abomination which it perceived to be occurring in France. However, the mid-1790s would bring striking success for the French and the beginning of its ascent as the pre-eminent power on the continent.
Napoleon’s role in the siege of Toulon was a highly significant moment in his career and in his rise to power, it was the point at which he transitioned fully from being a Corsican nationalist with considerable potential, to being a Revolutionary soldier who was increasingly noticed by his superiors in Paris and elsewhere.
Yet, we should not overemphasise the extent of his successes during the siege. In particular, it would be wrong to suggest, as many studies of Bonaparte have, that Toulon constituted his first major military victory. For certain he contributed to it, but he was not in command of the siege and while he might
Have distinguished himself during the course of it, it does not rank with his massive campaign successes in Italy in the late 1790s or Central Europe in the mid-1800s. Nevertheless, he had distinguished himself considerably in the action and he was credited
With having played a significant part in the French victory at Toulon by his superiors. The war minister and other officials in Paris were impressed and on the 22nd of December 1793, just four days after the final capture of Toulon, word was received that at just
24 years of age, Napoleon was to be elevated to the office of brigadier-general within the French army. It was the beginning of his meteoric ascent. Few people meeting Napoleon in 1793 would have imagined that the man they were meeting
Would rise to become the most powerful individual in France by the end of the decade and in the whole world in the years following that. In fact, Napoleon’s career up to the early 1790s had in many ways pointed towards him becoming an opponent of France.
Born on Corsica just months after the French crushed the Corsican Republic which had existed since 1755, the Bonapartes were ardent Corsican nationalists. This was the primary political outlook of Napoleon throughout his younger years. It was only with the advent of the French Revolution in 1789 and the emergence of the
Liberal, Enlightenment values which it proclaimed that Napoleon’s political loyalties shifted towards the revolutionary movement and away from Corsican nationalism. When this occurred, France gained a formidable servant. What his early years had proved was that Napoleon was an immensely intelligent young military officer, one who was well-versed in artillery warfare in particular.
Above all, he viewed himself as a man of destiny, a latter Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. Once, when discussing his Italian heritage, Napoleon quipped of his hailing from the peninsula that birthed the Roman Empire that, “I am of the race that founds empires.”
Indeed, in the second half of the 1790s he would begin to build one of the greatest empires ever assembled. What do you think of Napoleon’s early career? Was his rise to power in the 1790s somewhat unexpected given his origins on Corsica and his early ardent Corsican nationalism?
Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
