Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [19]
Napoleon had clearly played his cards sufficiently well to keep in with Paris. But that did not mean that he was happy. On the contrary, his visit to the capital had coincided with the violent risings of 20 June and
10 August 1792, and these understandably left him not only with a deep fear of popular violence, but also convinced him that the Jacobins were playing with fire. As he wrote to Joseph, ‘The Jacobins are fools who have no common sense.’12 In short, the future ostensibly lay with Corsica, but Napoleon was more out of favour there than ever, for Paoli was increasingly alarmed by the direction events were taking. To advance the interests of his family, his erstwhile admirer therefore had no option but to take the side of the Jacobin party in the island, and all the more so as the Jacobins were now in control in Paris. In doing so, however, he does not appear to have deceived his own family. ‘I have always descried in Napoleon,’ wrote his brother Lucien, ‘an ambition that, whilst not wholly egotistic, surpasses his love of the public good . . . Given a [fresh] revolution, Napoleon would strain every nerve to maintain his position, whilst I even believe him capable of turning his coat if that is what is required to make his fortune.’13 As the future emperor later reminisced, it was ‘a fine time for an enterprising young man’.14
Whatever the truth may have been, from here it was but a short step to a breach with Paoli. According to Napoleon’s own account, the Corsican leader was now scheming with the British to deliver the island into their hands. No such plot was afoot - there seems to have been no contact between Paoli and the British until April 1793 and even then the approach came not from Paoli but the British. As for the idea that Paoli suggested the future emperor should seek a career in the British army, this is pure invention. If relations between the two were very frosty, it was rather because Paoli had increasingly fallen under the influence of traditional rivals of the Bonapartes, of which the most notable was the Pozzo di Borgo clan. Following an unsuccessful expedition against Sardinia, a territory of the hostile state of Piedmont, the resentment on both sides finally exploded. On the one hand, Napoleon hinted that Paoli had deliberately sabotaged the expedition, while on the other Paoli accused the Jacobins of forcing him into ordering a hopeless attack in order to provide a pretext for his arrest and execution. Whatever the reality of the situation, the affair plunged Corsica into open conflict. In this situation the Bonapartes and their allies had no chance. Increasingly the weaker faction in Corsican politics, the Jacobins were routed, leaving Napoleon and his entire family no option but to flee to the French mainland.
The breach with Paoli, and with it the loss of his family estates, ended Napoleon’s Corsican dreams for good. Henceforward he would be French and, for the moment at least, a Jacobin: only weeks after his arrival in France he was penning Le Souper de Beaucaire, an imagined conversation between himself and a number of local civilians in which he expatiated on the evils of the so-called federalist revolt that was then gripping much of France, and defended the actions of the government forces that had just stormed Avignon. As for Corsica and its ruler, all loyalty to them was expunged: Napoleon never returned to his homeland and rarely spoke of it except with disdain, while Le Souper de Beaucaire and a previous pamphlet published virtually simultaneously with his flight into exile heaped scorn upon his sometime idol and accused him of treason, thereby exonerating the Bonaparte clan of the charge of betrayal.
This vehemence, however, is all too transparent. On one level, it was a classic