The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Vol. 1-4). William Milligan Sloane
for Amusement—New Expedition Against Corsica—Buonaparte's Advice for Its Conduct.
1794.
Buonaparte's plan for combining operations against both Genoa and Sardinia was at first hazy. In his earliest efforts to expand and clarify it, he wrote a rambling document, still in existence, which draws a contrast between the opposite policies to be adopted with reference to Italy and Spain. In it he also calls attention to the scarcity of officers suitable for concerted action in a great enterprise, and a remark concerning the course to be pursued in this particular case contains the germ of his whole military system. "Combine your forces in a war, as in a siege, on one point. The breach once made, equilibrium is destroyed, everything else is useless, and the place is taken. Do not conceal, but concentrate, your attack." In the matter of politics he sees Germany as the main prop of opposition to democracy; Spain is to be dealt with on the defensive, Italy on the offensive. But, contrary to what he actually did in the following year, he advises against proceeding too far into Piedmont, lest the adversary should gain the advantage of position. This paper Robespierre the younger had in his pocket when he left for Paris, summoned to aid his brother in difficulties which were now pressing fast upon him.
Ricord was left behind to direct, at least nominally, the movements both of the armies and of the embassy to Genoa. Buonaparte continued to be the real power. Military operations having been suspended to await the result of diplomacy, his instructions from Ricord were drawn so as to be loose and merely formal. On July eleventh he started from Nice, reaching his destination three days later. During the week of his stay—for he left again on the twenty-first—the envoy made his representations, and laid down his ultimatum that the republic of Genoa should preserve absolute neutrality, neither permitting troops to pass over its territories, nor lending aid in the construction of military roads, as she was charged with doing secretly. His success in overawing the oligarchy was complete, and a written promise of compliance to these demands was made by the Doge. Buonaparte arrived again in Nice on the twenty-eighth. We may imagine that as he traveled the romantic road between the mountains and the sea, the rising general and diplomat indulged in many rosy dreams, probably feeling already on his shoulders the insignia of a commander-in-chief. But he was returning to disgrace, if not to destruction. A week after his arrival came the stupefying news that the hour-glass had once again been reversed, that on the very day of his own exultant return to Nice, Robespierre's head had fallen, that the Mountain was shattered, and that the land was again staggering to gain its balance after another political earthquake.
The shock had been awful, but it was directly traceable to the accumulated disorders of Jacobin rule. A rude and vigorous but eerie order of things had been inaugurated on November twenty-fourth, 1793, by the so-called republic. There was first the new calendar, in which the year I began on September twenty-second, 1792, the day on which the republic had been proclaimed. In it were the twelve thirty-day months, with their names of vintage, fog, and frost; of snow, rain, and wind; of bud, flower, and meadow; of seed, heat, and harvest: the whole terminated most unpoetically by the five or six supplementary days named sansculot-tides—sansculottes meaning without knee-breeches, a garment confined to the upper classes; that is, with long trousers like the common people—and these days were so named because they were to be a holiday for the long-trousered populace which was to use the new reckoning. There was next the new, strange, and unhallowed spectacle, seen in history for the first time, the realization of a nightmare—a whole people finally turned into an army, and at war with nearly all the world. The reforming Girondists had created the situation, and the Jacobins, with grim humor, were unflinchingly facing the logical consequences of such audacity. Carnot had given the watchword of attack in mass and with superior numbers; the times gave the frenzied courage of sentimental exaltation. Before the end of 1793 the foreign enemies of France, though not conquered, had been checked on the frontier; the outbreak of civil war in Vendée had been temporarily suppressed; both Lyons and Toulon had been retaken.
Robespierre, St. Just, Couthon, and Billaud-Varennes were theorists after the manner of Rousseau. Their new gospel of social regeneration embraced democracy, civic virtue, moral institutions, and public festivals. These were their shibboleths and catch-words. Incidentally they extolled paternalism in government, general conscription, compulsory military service, and, on the very eve of the greatest industrial revival known to history, a return to agricultural society! The sanction of all this was not moral suasion: essential to the system was Spartan simplicity and severity, compulsion was the means to their utopia.[40] The Jacobins were nothing if not thorough; and here was another new and awful thing—the "Terror"—which had broken loose with its foul furies of party against party through all the land. It seemed at last as if it were exhausting itself, though for a time it had grown in intensity as it spread in extent. It had created three factions in the Mountain. Early in 1794 there remained but a little handful of avowed and still eager terrorists in the Convention—Hébert and his friends. These were the atheists who had abolished religion and the past, bowing down before the fetish which they dubbed Reason. They were seized and put to death on March twenty-fourth. There then remained the cliques of Danton and Robespierre; the former claiming the name of moderates, and telling men to be calm, the latter with no principle but devotion to a person who claimed to be the regenerator of society. These hero-worshipers were for a time victorious. Danton, like Hébert, was foully murdered, and Robespierre remained alone, virtually dictator. But his theatrical conduct in decreeing by law the existence of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, and in organizing tawdry festivals to supply the place of worship, utterly embittered against him both atheists and pious people. In disappointed rage at his failure, he laid aside the characters of prophet and mild saint to give vent to his natural wickedness and to become a devil.
During the long days of June and July there raged again a carnival of blood, known to history as the "Great Terror." In less than seven weeks upward of twelve hundred victims were immolated. The unbridled license of the guillotine broadened as it ran. First the aristocrats had fallen, then royalty, then their sympathizers, then the hated rich, then the merely well-to-do, and lastly anybody not cringing to existing power. The reaction against Robespierre was one of universal fear. Its inception was the work of Tallien, Fouché, Barras, Carrier, Fréron, and the like, men of vile character, who knew that if Robespierre could maintain his pose of the "Incorruptible" their doom was sealed. In this sense Robespierre was what Napoleon called him at St. Helena, "the scapegoat of the Revolution." The uprising of these accomplices was, however, the opportunity long desired by the better elements in Parisian society, and the two antipodal classes made common cause. Dictator as Robespierre wished to be, he was formed of other stuff, for when the reckoning came his brutal violence was cowed. On July twenty-seventh (the ninth of Thermidor), the Convention turned on him in rebellion, extreme radicals and moderate conservatives combining for the effort. Terrible scenes were enacted. The sections of Paris were divided, some for the Convention, some for Robespierre. The artillerymen who were ordered by the latter to batter down the part of the Tuileries where his enemies were sitting hesitated and disobeyed; at once all resistance to the decrees of the Convention died out. The dictator would have been his own executioner, but his faltering terrors stopped him midway in his half-committed suicide. He and his brother, with their friends, were seized, and beheaded on the morrow. With the downfall of Robespierre went the last vestige of social or political authority; for the Convention was no longer trusted by the nation—the only organized power with popular support which was left was the army.
This was the news which, traveling southward, finally reached Toulon, Marseilles, and Nice, cities where Robespierre's stanchest adherents were flaunting their newly gained importance. No wonder if the brains of common men reeled. The recent so-called parties had disappeared for the moment like wraiths. The victorious group in the Convention, now known as the Thermidorians, was compounded of elements from them both, and claimed to represent the whole of France as the wretched factions who had so long controlled the government had never done. Where now should those who had been active supporters of the late administration turn for refuge? The Corsicans who had escaped from the island at the same time with Salicetti and the Buonapartes were nearly all with the Army of Italy. Employment had been given to them, but, having failed to keep Corsica for France, they were not in favor. It had already been remarked in the Committee of Public Safety that their patriotism was less manifest than their disposition to enrich themselves. This too was the