 Napoleon, now a twenty-four-year-old artillery captain, was given the opportunity to take control of artillery for the siege of Toulon.
At this time, there were still significant pockets of royalist insurrection against the revolution throughout the provinces, especially in the western Vendée region and in the South East. When royalist Marseille was retaken in August by the Jacobins, with appalling reprisals, the counter-revolutionaries holding Toulon called on the British Royal Navy to help them, along with their Spanish and other allies. Britain had been at war with France since the formation of the ‘First Coalition’ of European allies against revolutionary France, formed earlier that year after the execution of Louis XVI.
The English fleet anchored in the harbour at Toulon was commanded by Rear Admiral Hood. Captain Horatio Nelson was with Hood’s fleet, in command of the 64-gun ‘third-rater’ Agamemnon.
First- second- and, indeed, third-raters
‘Ships of the line’, that is to say, ships of the line of battle, were rated by size. A ‘first rate’ ship of the line had more than one hundred guns, typically on three decks; a third-rate, like Nelson’s Agamemnon, had between sixty-four and eighty guns, usually on two gun-decks.
The terminology, as you will have noticed, has taken on an unfairly derogatory popular meaning: to be considered ‘second rate’ is now unfortunate, whereas there was nothing ‘second-rate’ about a second rate – a fearsome fighting ship with some ninety or more guns on three decks, which was merely a slightly smaller (and slightly cheaper) version of a first rate.
The third rate Agamemnon had 64 guns on two decks; such ships could be argued to offer the best compromise between speed, handling, fire power and cost.
From King’s officer to revolutionary
Napoleon’s career – like that of many other young officers – had taken him from being a member of the King’s army to becoming a member of the French revolutionary army. He was fortunate that his Corsican ancestry, though undoubtedly ‘aristocratic’, was too obscurely provincial to alarm the political sensibilities of the new revolutionary government in Paris.
A similar ancestry on mainland France might have cost Napoleon his head, once the extreme wing of the revolution began executing large numbers of its fellow citizens with that recently-invented, modern and humane killing machine, the Guillotine. In fact, Napoleon at the time enthusiastically embraced this extreme, left-wing ‘Jacobin’ faction of the revolution.
The French revolutionary army – like the Russian and Chinese Red Armies two centuries later – was monitored by powerful political ‘advisors’. Napoleon’s political activism gave him the ear of these advisers, especially that of a fellow Corsican called Saliceti; a Deputy to the National Convention (a later political derivation of the first revolutionary National Assembly) and an enthusiastic supporter of the Terror.
Political appointments and the siege of Toulon
Saliceti’s colleague was Augustin Robespierre, younger brother of the infamous Maximilien François Marie Isadore de Robespierre – the austere and terrifying member of the Committee of Public Safety and, many would argue, the intellectual father of the Terror.
In that year of 1793, Napoleon, the young artillery captain in the French revolutionary army, was in the south of France escorting a cargo of gunpowder from Avignon to the revolutionary army of Italy. En route from Marseille to Nice, he dropped by at the siege of Toulon to pay his repsects to his fellow Coriscan Saliceti, the powerful poltical advisor. It was a shrewd move.
The occupation of Toulouse – France’s most important Mediterranean naval base – by royalist forces, supported by Britain and the allies, was a threat to the whole revolution. The original commander of artillery at the siege had been wounded, and Saliceti and Robespierre insisted that he should be immediately be replaced by the young Bonaparte, despite the reluctance of the military general in charge of the siege.
The young strategist
Napoleon carried out a reconnaissan