 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 reconnaissance and quickly sized up the strategic situation. He recommended training the artillery on the British encampment on a promontory overlooking Toulon’s harbour, rather than on the city itself.
He could see that seizing control of the British position would allow him to fire on the harbour itself, rather than the town, and to drive out the British fleet, leaving the defenders without a supply-line from the sea.
The general in charge, however, made a half-hearted attempt on the promontory which succeeded only in alerting the British to their danger: they reinforced the promontory so heavily that it was dubbed ‘Little Gibraltar’.
‘The Men Without Fear’
Napoleon had been denied what was to become one of his later trade-mark routes to success: acting with great speed to surprise the enemy, exploiting a weakness that they had not recognised. Denied this, his next move represented another classic Napoleonic strategy: apply overwhelming force.
He requisitioned artillery from all around the region, and established a series of batteries that were given stirring patriotic names – ‘The Convention’, ‘Camp of the Republicans’, ‘The Jacobins’, ‘The Men Without Fear’. This in itself was a clever piece of leadership, demonstrating Napoleon’s instinctive grasp of motivation.
The battery of ‘The Men without Fear’ was indeed sited in a very exposed and dangerous position, but it never lacked for volunteers, keen to prove their bravery. Legend has it that Napoleon himself worked on this battery, wielding a ramrod alongside his gunners. He probably did.
The original general in charge of the siege was dismissed by the politicos; he was succeeded by a former doctor – a classic example of the danger of letting political cadres take control of an army. He in turn resigned in recognition of his own incompetence and was succeeded at last by an experienced soldier, Dugommier, who recognised the merit of Napoleon’s strategy and gave it his full support.
After repulsing one British attack on the French gun emplacements, Napoleon and Dugommier to