A Wilderness So Immense (34 page)

Artillery was young Bonaparte’s military specialty, but his genius was far-reaching. “Reserved and studious,” his final examiners at the Ecole Militaire reported in August 1785, “he prefers study to any type of amusement, finding pleasure in the reading of good authors.” Napoleons instructors saw his aptitude for “abstract sciences” and his solid knowledge of geography and mathematics (including algebra, geometry, and trigonometry). “Quiet and solitary, capricious, haughty, and frightfully egotistical,” according to his artillery instructor, Bonaparte spoke little in class but was “spirited in his answers.” Outside of class he was “swift and sharp in his repartee” and imbued with “pride and boundless ambition.” In his evenings of solitude Bonaparte indulged a passion for reading the lives of great men and the history of wars and empires, writing essays in the privacy of his room, and haunting the bookshops of Paris or Valence, where he was stationed after graduating from the Ecole Militaire.
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Both at Valence and on two lengthy sojourns home to Corsica, Bonaparte read voraciously, filling his notebooks (thirty-six of which survive) with reflections about military science, Corsican liberation, and ancient
and modern history. He devoured French translations of Plutarch, Plato, Cicero, Livy, and Tacitus, as well as the great authors of the Renaissance and Enlightenment—Corneille, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire—and Buffon’s
Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière.
Bonaparte’s obsession with the liberation of Corsica found a larger context in James Boswell’s
Account of Corsica
(published in 1768 by Samuel Johnson’s companion and biographer), in Rousseau’s
Social Contract,
and in the radical works of Guillaume-Thomas, Abbé de Raynal.

Sixteen-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte was graduated in September
1785
from the Ecole Militaire, the academy founded by Louis XV and designed by Jacques-Ange Gabriel. The adjacent Champ de Mars, originally a parade ground for the military academy, was the site of the Paris Exposition of 1889, for which the Eiffel Tower was constructed opposite the Ecole Militaire. A few blocks to the northwest, the tomb of Napoleon rests beneath the golden dome of the Hotel des Invalides, where the emperor’s body was reinterred in 1840.
(Collection of the author)

Born in 1713 and trained by the Jesuits, the Abbé Raynal had left the church for a career as a writer and philosophe, winning fame less for his originality than his gift for popularizing the insights of other Enlightenment thinkers. Raynal’s most successful and influential work was his six-volume
Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies.
Published in 1770 and proscribed by the Catholic Church’s
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
four years later, the influential history sold out thirty editions by 1789. Owing in part to the editorial influence of Denis Diderot, who coordinated the Enlightenment’s great cooperative project, the
Encyclopædia,
each edition of Raynal’s grew more radical in its denunciations of slavery, royalty, and the Church—until French royal authorities ordered the book burned in 1781 and sent its author into exile.

The Abbé Raynal’s
History of the Two Indies,
as it was widely known, inspired grand thoughts about liberation. The author’s persecution by the ancien regime only accentuated the validity of his arguments for young men like Bonaparte, whose enthusiasm for Raynal went beyond the pages of his notebooks. After three years in exile, the abbé had been permitted to return to France in 1784 (although not to Paris until after the fall of the Bastille) and was living in Marseilles. On a trip home in 1786 Bonaparte sought out Raynal and showed him an early draft of his impassioned history of the “unjust French domination of Corsica.”
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The abbé encouraged him to finish and publish it.

“How is it possible,” Bonaparte’s essay demanded, “that an enlightened nation like France is not touched by our plight, a direct result of their actions? … Mankind! Mankind! How wretched you are in the state of bondage, but how great you are impassioned by the flame of liberty!” Drawing a lesson from the Abbé Raynal’s
History,
Bonaparte believed that Corsica needed a liberating champion, a Spartacus, “a courageous chief.” But when and where, he wondered, “shall a William Tell appear?”
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The twenty-year-old officer visited the aging Abbé Raynal at least twice on his travels between Corsica and France. Bolstered by his encouragement and advice, Bonaparte reworked his polemic into the epistolary form that Montesquieu had employed in his
Persian Letters.
Then he proudly sent a few chapters to his boyhood hero, the Corsican patriot General Pasquale Paoli, and dispatched the introduction to a former instructor at the military college at Brienne. Their verdicts were harsh but wise. General Paoli thought it “would have made a much greater impression if it had said less and if it had shown less partiality,” while the Abbé Dupuy sent a flurry of criticisms and suggestions culminating in the prudent warning that “this language is too strong in a monarchy.”
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Had Napoleon Bonaparte ignored Paoli and Dupuy and followed Raynal’s counsel, his “Corsican Letters” surely would have brought a summary dismissal from the French army. As it happened, however, the daring words of the Abbé Raynal that directly influenced the course of history came not from his private advice to an aspiring author but from his
History of the Two Indies.
In retrospect, the keepers of the
Index
and protectors of the ancien régime had good reason to worry about the Abbé Raynal’s ideas as they were disseminated throughout the world in thirty editions of his history. Bonaparte was not the only reader inspired to watch for the deliverance of a Spartacus or a William Tell.

While “interest alone can exert its influence over [the nations of Europe],” the Abbé Raynal had written in a stirring passage of his
History of the Two Indies,
slaves had no need of European generosity “to break the yoke of their oppression”:

At least one copy of Raynal’s history found its way to a sugar plantation in the French colony of St. Domingue. Thousands of miles away from Valence and Marseilles, on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, a slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture read the Abbé Raynal’s words over and over again. “Where is he? He will undoubtedly appear.” When the French Revolution came, Napoleon would fashion his own version of William Tell, and Haiti would embrace Toussaint L’Ouverture as “the black Spartacus who, as [the Abbé] Raynal predicted, has come to revenge all the evil done to his race.”
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“Revolutions,” Napoleon Bonaparte told a fellow artillerist in September 1789, “are ideal times for soldiers with a bit of wit and the courage to act.” He had both, and they quickly overwhelmed his aspirations as a writer. After a stint in the Corsican national guard, Bonaparte returned to France in 1793 and was assigned to a revolutionary army laying siege to the port city and naval base of Toulon, where royalists assisted by the British fleet had revolted against the French republic. The city’s defenses fell before his cannon, and the British fleet fled the harbor. On December 19, 1793, Major Bonaparte turned his guns on hundreds of royalist collaborators gathered in the town square for their slaughter, and then he leveled the public buildings of Toulon as a warning to royalists elsewhere. “I cannot find praiseworthy enough words to describe Bonaparte’s full worth,” the commanding officer reported to the war ministry in Paris. “He has a solid scientific knowledge of this profession and as much intelligence, if too much courage,
voilá.
… It now only remains for you, Minister, to consecrate his talents to the glory of the Republic!” Three days later the twenty-four-year-old military genius was promoted to the rank of brigadier general.
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General Bonaparte was among seventy-four officers detained as a precaution after the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 and then released and reinstated. Wary of Jacobinism and the excesses of the guillotine, the new and more conservative Directory recognized “the services his military talents can still provide … at a time when men of his high caliber are extraordinarily rare.” Early in October, still uncertain about his future, Napoleon called upon Paul François Nicolas de Barras, one of the most influential members of the five-man Directory that now ruled France, at the seat of government in the Tuileries (a building destroyed in 1871 and
now the site of I. M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre). Much later in the day about midnight, a crowd of several thousand working-class Parisians and royalists led by a self-proclaimed General Danican gathered ominously at the Tuileries. In the wee hours of the morning of 13 Vendémiaire (October 4) Barras summoned Bonaparte to defend the government.
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Soon after dawn General Bonaparte arrived with forty cannon, the largest of which he positioned at the Eglise St.-Roch, just north of the Tuileries and its gardens. Twice the rebellious crowd surged toward the building, peppering the defending regiments with small-arms fire. Twice the defenders held their ground, and the second time they pushed the armed rebels back toward the Eglise St.-Roch, where Bonaparte opened fire with his cannon. “The enemy attacked us at the Tuileries,” he wrote that night to his brother Joseph.

Fourteen hundred rebellious citizens lay dead in the streets, and the government was safe. Two weeks later he was promoted to major general, and on October 25 he succeeded Barras as commander of the Army of the Interior. Bonaparte, having dropped the letter
u
from his last name, was the man of the hour. The next spring, on March 6, 1796, he married Barras’s former mistress, Josephine de Beauharnais, who was adorned in republican simplicity with a white muslin dress, a tricolor sash, and his wedding gift of an enameled locket with the inscription “To Destiny.” Two days after the wedding, Bonaparte headed for Nice and the headquarters of the Army of Italy, his new command.
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Thirty-two-year-old Josephine de Beauharnais had lost her husband to the guillotine during the Terror and taken up with Barras as his principal mistress—a fact that now spawned ugly scuttlebutt about Bonaparte’s new assignment. The gossip, as the baron de Frénilly recorded it in his memoirs, was that Barras had “tired of her and got rid of her by giving the Army of Italy as a dowry,” and that “the little General of 13 Vendémiaire took the dowry and the mistress, and made of her an Empress.”
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Barras was, in fact, instrumental in making the appointment, but for all the members of the Directory, the choice was sweetened by Bonaparte’s proven abilities and his previous obscurity. Better to entrust the Army of Italy to a talented but unknown general, the reasoning went,
than to place it in the hands of others whose power and fame might threaten the government. Bonaparte, of course, confounded these calculations.
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In Italy he defeated four Austrian generals in succession, each with superior numbers, and forced Austria and its allies to sue for peace. In the north he founded the Cisalpine Republic, later known as the kingdom of Italy, and bolstered his influence at home by sending treasure worth millions of francs to the nearly bankrupt Directory. Plagued by financial problems, factional strife, corruption, and a series of attempted coups d’état, the Directory governed without distinction for four years, its income always dependent on the plunder sent home from Bonaparte’s conquests. “The directors believe that they are using him,” warned Bonaparte’s former mathematics instructor, General Jean Charles Pichegru, “but one fine morning he is going to gobble them up, without their being able to do anything about it.”
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