gether led a counter-attack, during which Napoleon captured General O’Hara, the British commanding officer. Napoleon was promoted to Colonel. Later he led the final, successful, attack on the British position and was wounded in the thigh by a bayonet. It was, astoundingly, the only wound that he was ever to receive in battle, despite his legendary insouciance about exposing himself to enemy fire. As his career progressed, this insouciance (or bravery) seemed to come from a genuine fatalism: he believed that he would not be killed until he had fulfilled his destiny.
Napoleon meets Josephine
The British fleet were indeed driven out of the harbour by French artillery, Toulon fell and Napoleon was the hero of the day, emerging as General of Brigade. His success brought him further to the attention of the Committee of Public Safety. It also brought him to the attention of Paul Barras, then a member of the National Convention and Commissioner of the French Army.
Barras was (incidentally) to introduce Napoleon to a mistress of his, whose minor aristocrat husband had been killed in the Terror, and of whom Barras was growing slightly (but not yet irrevocably) tired – the young but far from innocent Josephine Beauharnais, Napoleon’s future wife and, despite their infidelities and Napoleon’s later divorce of Josephine and remarriage, the love of his life.
Less than one year after the siege of Toulon, the revolutionary excesses of the Terror had burned themselves out. Barras was one of many in the Convention sickened by the excesses of the Jacobins and fearful of who might be its next victims: after a revolt of moderates in the Convention, Barras led the National Guard to arrest the Robespierre brothers, and others, on the night of July 27th 1794.
Augustin threw himself out of a window to his death; Maximilien was either shot in jaw by a member of the National Guard or wounded himself in an attempted suicide – he was guillotined the next day, without trial, with nineteen of his colleagues. Napoleon subsequently spent two weeks in prison as a result of his friendship with Augustin Robespierre, but was released.
The following year, Barras had become a member of the French Directoire: one of the five members of the Directory, an executive body heading up two new parliamentary houses: the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. Members of the two hundred an fifty-strong ‘Ancients’ were indeed ancient, having to be at least forty years old.
Napoleon set out to prove to the Directoire that he was the most important man in their lives.
Napoleon Bonaparte features in History Lessons: ‘Doing the Planning’
 David G Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon, vol. 1, Scribner, New York, 1966 pp 6-9
 F.M. Kircheisen, Memoirs of Napoleon I, trans, F. Collins, London 1929, p 26, quoted in Chandler op.cit. p 12