Although Napoleon wasn’t present at Avignon’s capture, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), it formed the backdrop for what was easily his most important piece of writing to date, the political pamphlet Le Souper de Beaucaire:
Le Souper de Beaucaire was a fictional account of a supper at an inn at Beaucaire, a village between Avignon and Arles, which Napoleon wrote at the end of July 1793. It took the form of a discussion between an officer in Carteaux’s army, two Marseillais merchants and two citizens of Montpellier and of nearby Nîmes. It argued that France was in grave danger, so the Jacobin government in Paris must be supported because the alternative was the victory of European despots and a vengeful French aristocracy.
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When Napoleon showed the manuscript to Saliceti, who was now a government commissioner in Provence, and Robespierre’s younger brother Augustin, they arranged for it to be published at public expense. It established him as a politically trustworthy soldier in the eyes of the Jacobins.
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It so happened that one of Carteaux’s représentants-en-mission (political commissioners) was none other than Saliceti. Carteaux knew little about artillery and was looking for someone to take over the artillery on the army’s right flank after the wounding of its commander, Colonel Dommartin, and in the absence of Dommartin’s second-in-command, Major Perrier. Saliceti and his colleague Thomas de Gasparin persuaded Carteaux to appoint Napoleon to the post, despite his only being twenty-four years old. Napoleon suspected that his education at the École Militaire had been a deciding factor in getting him this first major break. He would later say that the artillery was short of ‘scientific men, that department was entirely directed by sergeants and corporals. I understood the service.’
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By October 9 Saliceti and Gasparin had obtained for Napoleon command of all of the artillery outside Toulon. Since this was clearly going to be an artillery-led operation, the post gave him a central role.
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Napoleon threw himself into the project of capturing Fort Mulgrave. By cajoling nearby towns he got together fourteen cannon and four mortars as well as stores, tools and ammunition. He sent officers further afield, to Lyons, Briançon and Grenoble, and requested that the Army of Italy furnish him with the cannon not then being used to defend Antibes and Monaco. He established an eighty-man arsenal at Ollioules to make cannon and cannonballs, requisitioned horses from Nice, Valence and Montpellier, and injected a sense of unceasing activity into his men. Constantly imploring, complaining and raging – there wasn’t enough gunpowder, the cartridges were the wrong size, trained artillery horses were being requisitioned for other uses, and so on – he sent scores of letters with demands to Bouchotte and even on occasion to the Committee of Public Safety itself, going over the heads of Carteaux and his immediate superiors.
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Along with his energy and activity, his letters convey a meticulous attention to detail in everything from the price of rations to the proper building of palisades. Overall, however, his message was constant; they only had 600 milliers (just over half a ton) of gunpowder, and if they couldn’t procure more it would be impossible to start serious operations.
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The result of all his hectoring, bluster, requisitioning and political string-pulling was that Napoleon put together a strong artillery train in very short order. He commandeered a foundry where shot and mortars were manufactured, and a workshop where muskets were repaired. He got the authorities in Marseilles to supply thousands of sandbags. This took significant powers of leadership – and also the kind of implicit threat that could be made by a Jacobin army officer during Robespierre’s Terror. By the end of the siege Napoleon commanded eleven batteries totalling nearly one hundred cannon and mortars.
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Doppet was impressed with his artillery commander, reporting to Paris: ‘I always found him at his post; when he needed rest he lay on the ground wrapped in his cloak: he never left the batteries.’
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Napoleon showed considerable personal bravery in the batteries and redoubts of Toulon, at one point picking up a blood-soaked ramrod from an artilleryman who had been killed near him and helping to load and fire the cannon himself. He believed it was this action that gave him scabies. ‘I found myself in a very few days suffering under an inveterate itch,’ he later said of this ‘terrible malady’. The cutaneous irritation stayed with him through the Italian and Egyptian campaigns and was only cured in 1802 when his doctor, Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, applied sulphur baths and by ‘putting three blisters on my chest … brought on a salutary crisis. Before that I had always been thin and sallow; since then I have always had good health.’ Some historians have argued that limited contact with the blood-stained ramrod was unlikely to have been the real cause, but Napoleon would probably have also donned the dead man’s gloves, which would have made dermatitis infection far more likely.
During one assault on an outlying fort protecting Mulgrave, Napoleon was wounded by an English gunner, who ‘ran a pike into’ his left thigh. He was trying to enter the battery by its embrasure, but fortunately reinforcements came around by the rear, entering at the same moment. Many years later Napoleon showed off to a doctor ‘a very deep cicatrix [scar] above the left knee’, recalling that ‘the surgeons were in doubt whether it might not be ultimately necessary to amputate’. In a book he wrote in exile on St Helena on Julius Caesar’s wars, Napoleon contrasted the commanders of the ancient world, who were well protected during battles, with those of the modern, concluding: ‘Today the commander-in-chief is forced every day to face the guns, often within range of grapeshot, and all battles within cannon-shot, in order to assess, see and give orders, as the view is not wide enough for generals to be able to keep out of the way of bullets.’ One of the accusations made by his detractors was that Napoleon wasn’t personally brave. ‘Cowardice had of late years been habitual to Bonaparte,’ wrote the English writer Helen Williams in 1815, for example. This is absurd; not only do cowards not fight sixty battles, but Napoleon came near death several times between battles too, while reconnoitring close to the enemy. The number of people killed near him and the bullet that hit him at the battle of Ratisbon are further testaments to his great physical bravery. Napoleon’s troops appreciated his courage and his ability to magnify their own. When all the gunners trying to establish a battery of cannon within a pistol shot of Fort Mulgrave were killed or wounded, Napoleon christened it ‘Hommes Sans Peur’ (Men Without Fear) and thereby continued to receive volunteers to man it. Nobody better understood the psychology of the ordinary soldier.
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By mid-November he had surrounded Fort Mulgrave with batteries, and on the 23rd he captured its British commander, General Charles O’Hara, who had tried to counter-attack from it in a sortie and spike the French guns of one of them. ‘General Dugommier fought with true republican courage,’ Napoleon reported of that action. ‘We recaptured the battery … The guns of the Convention were un-spiked in sufficient time to increase the confusion of their retreat.’69 It was very rare to be able to repair guns that had had metal spikes hammered into their firing mechanisms, let alone quickly, and it was a sign of the professional pitch to which Napoleon had trained his men.
At one o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, December 17, 1793, Dugommier put Napoleon’s plan of attack on Toulon into action. A column under Claude Victor-Perrin (later Marshal Victor) got beyond the first line of defences at Fort Mulgrave, but faltered at the second. At about 3 a.m. Dugommier sent in the next assault of 2,000 men in the teeth of driving rain, high winds and lightning strikes. Led by Napoleon, whose horse was shot from under him, and Captain Jean-Baptiste Muiron, this assault finally took the fort after heavy hand-to-hand fighting. Napoleon then proceeded to pour heated cannonballs onto the Royal Navy vessels across the harbour below. The memory of the explosion of two Spanish gunpowder-ships stayed with him for the rest of his life. Decades later he recalled how ‘The whirlwind of flames and smoke from the arsenal resembled the eruption of a volcano, and the thirteen vessels blazing in the roads were like so many displays of fireworks: the masts and forms of the vessels were distinctly traced out by the flames, which lasted many hours and formed an unparalleled spectacle.’ He was exaggerating – only two ships caught fire rather than the whole fleet – but the effect was nonetheless dramatic.
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Great and deserved benefits flowed to Napoleon from the victory at Toulon. On December 22 he was appointed brigadier-general and inspector of coastal defences from the Rhône to the Var. Saliceti brought him to the attention of the senior politicians Paul Barras and Louis-Stanislas Fréron, but best of all, as he later put it, Toulon ‘gave him confidence in himself’.
Rarely in military history has there been so high a turnover of generals as in France in the 1790s. It meant that capable young men could advance through the ranks at unprecedented speed. The Terror, emigration, war, political purges, disgrace after defeat, political suspicion and scapegoating, on top of all the normal cases of resignation and retirement, meant that men like Lazare Hoche, who was a corporal in 1789, could be a general by 1793, or Michel Ney, a lieutenant in 1792, could become one by 1796. Napoleon’s rise through the ranks was therefore by no means unique given the political and military circumstances of the day. Still, his progress was impressive: he had spent five and a half years as a second-lieutenant, a year as a lieutenant, sixteen months as a captain, only three months as a major and no time at all as a colonel. On December 22, 1793, having been on leave for fifty-eight of his ninety-nine months of service – with and without permission – and after spending less than four years on active duty, Napoleon was made, at twenty-four, a general.
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During the Piedmontese campaign Napoleon received official confirmation of his promotion to brigadier-general, which required him to answer the question ‘Noble or not noble?’ Very sensibly, given that the Terror was still raging, he answered, technically untruthfully, in the negative.
The young Napoleon was this.