In various towns, Marseilles included, the insurrectionists were losing their foothold. The last important place left to them was Toulon, where they were being actively supported by English and Spanish allies. It was necessary to win the place, for preparations were being made on a large scale by both England and Austria to use Toulon as a starting-point to invade southern France. Napoleon was given the command of a battalion of artillery, and it was his scheme for arranging the batteries around the town that led to the taking of the city by the French. His services were recognized by promotion to a brigadier generalship, a fitting reward, for it was his strategy which had compelled the allied troops of Spain and England to evacuate the one place on French territory which they occupied.

The younger Robespierre spoke of him in a report to the Committee of Public Safety as a man of transcendent merit. Bonaparte was intimate with the commissioner, and that he impressed those who knew him as an ardent sympathizer with the Terrorists is borne out by a statement contained in Mlle. Robespierre’s memoranda: “Bonaparte was a republican, I should say that he was a republican of the Mountain, at least he made that impression upon me from his manner of regarding things at the time I was in Nice [1794]. Later his victories turned his head and made him aspire to rule over his fellow-citizens, but, while he was but a general of artillery in the army of Italy, he was a believer in thorough-going liberty and equality.” Yet the fanatical side of the Robespierre government, with its policy of ruthless massacre, evidently did not win his sympathy, for there is good ground for believing that, after the capture of Toulon, he was one of those who counseled moderation towards the vanquished and opposed the wholesale execution of the rebels. What attracted him to the Robespierre régime was its directness and its energy, and there is no doubt that he had a much higher opinion of the personal capacity of Robespierre than is held by a later school of historians of the French Revolution, who see in him a somewhat commonplace and decorative tool of the obscurer members of the Committee of Public Safety. In a conversation with Marmont, after Robespierre’s downfall, he said, “If Robespierre had remained in power, he would have been able to strike out another way for himself, he would have systematized the laws and made them permanent; we should have attained this result without shocks and convulsions because it would have proceeded from the exercise of power. We are now trying to reach this goal through a revolution, and this revolution will give birth to a monarchy.”

As a friend and counselor of Robespierre’s younger brother, who had already become interested in Napoleon’s scheme for an invasion of Italy, the prospects of his securing an independent military command were most encouraging, especially as he had just been so flatteringly recommended by the younger Robespierre to the Committee of Public Safety. But all chances of such advancement were lost with the downfall and execution of the revolutionary dictator in July, 1794.

Napoleon was involved in the general ruin of the Robespierre party; he lost his commission as general and spent a month as a prisoner in a military fortress. He fortunately had friends who interceded for him, among them Salicetti, the Corsican, a member of the Convention, by whose efforts the charge of disloyalty to the Republic was shown to be baseless and the prisoner was released, reinstated, and given the important mission of restoring French sovereignty in Corsica, which had lately declared itself a constitutional monarchy under the protection of England. The expedition failed on account of the weakness of the French fleet. For some time after this misadventure Napoleon remained without a command; the government at Paris was not inclined to forward the interests of a former partisan of Robespierre.

There were besides a number of young officers quite capable of filling important army commands, and all that Napoleon could secure was an assignment in the west under Hoche, who was engaged in repressing the insurrection in La Vendée. He had no taste for such work, nor did he desire to serve in a subordinate capacity. Taking advantage of the weakness of the administration, he delayed his departure from Paris, although he had received peremptory orders to leave for his command. He hoped by the influence of friends such as Barras, whom he had known at Toulon, and who was now a man of weight in the counsels of the party predominant in the Convention, to secure the acceptance from the ministry of war of his plan for the invasion of Italy. He was not only disappointed in this hope, but he found himself again stricken from the list of French generals because of his refusal to proceed to the post already assigned him.

There was no encouragement to be got out of the prevailing political tendencies, which were showing a marked antagonism to the radical revolutionary party, with whose program Napoleon had been allied from the first. A restoration of the monarchy seemed not improbable, for the common people of Paris were showing signs of restlessness under the régime of the Terrorist factions. The members of the Convention, after providing for a stable government with an executive power vested in a Directory of five members, were fearful of the consequences of the proposed changes they had themselves provided, and they proceeded to pass a measure by which the newly elected legislative body, the Council of Five Hundred, should be composed, to the extent of two-thirds of its membership, of those who had served in the Convention. This action caused an open revolt. Forty-four out of the forty-eight sections, into which Paris was divided, were in arms against the continuance of the tyranny of the Convention. On one side stood the National Guard of the city; on the other there were only 8000 regular troops willing to obey the mandate of the government. Barras happened to be one of the commissioners of the Convention appointed to preserve order. He was then chosen commander-in-chief of the army, and, acting with the reluctant consent of the other members of the Committee, he selected his friend Napoleon as second in command, with full power to act in defense of the Convention.

No time could be lost, and everything depended on getting artillery into the city to the Tuileries. Here the guns were stationed, before the National Guard commenced to advance on the 5th of October. No one knows who fired the first shot, but the engagement that followed soon ended in a complete disaster for the insurgents, who were driven from position to position by the volleys of grapeshot which swept the streets in the vicinity of the Seine. In recognition of his services rendered at such a crisis, Napoleon was almost immediately advanced to the post of commander-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, the way being made easy for him by Barras’ appointment as one of the Directors in the new government. Napoleon’s analysis of the situation, made the day after this fight in the streets of Paris, was characteristically clear-headed. “Fortune is on my side,” he writes to his brother Joseph, and from this sudden change in his prospects may be dated that belief in his star signalized by his favorite motto, “Au destin,” which became the axiom of his career, as well as its explanation and justification.

Barras’ services did not end here; he realized the young general’s capacity, seeing in him a man whom it would be useful to have bound to him by personal obligations, and he suggested, and it is said, even arranged Napoleon’s marriage with Mme. de Beauharnais, a well known member of Parisian society, the widow of a nobleman who had fallen a victim of the Terror, and herself a native of Martinique. She had fascinated the soldier by her charm of manner and was now prepared, despite the objections of her friends, to give him the social position that Barras insisted was necessary for his further promotion. This advice of Barras was not necessarily disinterested, for there were, it seems, reasons of a different nature, which may have prompted him to relieve himself, by making use of Napoleon, of further personal responsibilities he had incurred towards the lady in question. The marriage had an immediate influence in advancing the fortunes of the bridegroom, for two days before it was solemnized (March 4, 1796), Napoleon attained the long-coveted position of commander-in-chief of the Army of Italy; and on the 11th of the same month, he set out for his new post.

II
ITALY AND EGYPT

Of the great Continental Powers which had formed a coalition against the revolutionary government of France, Austria and Russia were actively inimical, and there was no prospect of coming to terms with them, unless all the conquered territories recently acquired by France were sacrificed. The idea of natural boundaries had become by this time a dogma of political faith, and even the Directory, confronted as it was by a demoralized administration, by bad business conditions, and by an inflated currency, had no thought of making peace. Armies were operating along the eastern frontiers; and as soon as Napoleon reached Nice, he prepared, along the lines he had so frequently urged, to take the offensive against the vulnerable Austrian provinces of northern Italy.