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By Root 2515 0

in 1792, he told Joseph, the palace would never have fallen. But the principle was political as much as it was military: the mob had to be defeated. Uncivilized and brutal, in Napoleon’s eyes it would inevitably run amok the moment the bounds of order and discipline were relaxed. Indeed, as an eyewitness to the storming of the Tuileries in August 1792 he had seen the ferocity of which it was capable all too clearly - the defenders had in many cases literally been hacked to pieces. Gratuitous defilement and mutilation had been very much the order of the day, and within a few days further horrors had come in the terrible atrocities known as the September massacres. Already the product of a society in which fear of peasant insurrection and banditry was endemic, Napoleon could not but recoil in disgust. All these feelings, needless to say, were confirmed by Vendémiaire. On the one hand, the crowd had been crushed: faced by 25,000 insurgents, 8,000 government troops had broken the uprising in little more than twenty-four hours of serious fighting with the loss of perhaps 100 casualties. And, on the other, most of the insurgents had not taken part in the actual fighting but given themselves over to drunkenness and pillage. If they had been called on to the streets at all, meanwhile, it was the result of a political factionalism born solely of what Napoleon saw as selfish ambition. As he had written to his brother Lucien in 1792, ‘Those at the top are poor creatures . . . Everyone wants to succeed at the price of no matter what horror and calumny; intrigue is as base as ever.’28 What Vendémiaire showed, then, was not just that the rabble could and should be kept in check, but also that the powerful state created by the Revolution that Napoleon so admired was threatened not just in the streets but in the corridors of power - that the new elites, in short, had to be kept under tutelage as well.

If there was much material to ponder here, there is no evidence that the hero of Vendémiaire was considering a bid for power at this time. All the same, by the end of 1795 we see a Napoleon who had almost overnight become a key player in the politics of revolutionary Paris, a wealthy man with an official residence on the Place Vendôme, and a regular visitor to the most fashionable salons of the capital. In March

1796 there followed his marriage to the thirty-two-year-old Creole widow, Rose de Beauharnais (‘Josephine’ was the name given her by Napoleon, who had the curious habit of rebaptizing all his female conquests). Was this, too, just one more piece of calculation? For many historians this has been an act of faith. As Josephine had until very recently numbered Paul de Barras amongst her many lovers, and was still highly regarded by him, marrying her may have seemed a good way of retaining the ear of one of the most powerful men in France. Equally, Josephine’s first husband having been a nobleman executed in the Terror, the young general may have believed that he was securing the acceptance that had been denied him at Brienne. In the words of his close friend, Marmont, ‘Bonaparte’s amour-propre was flattered. The ideas of the Old Order had always attracted him a great deal, and, although he played the republican, he was still susceptible to . . . all sorts of aristocratic prejudice.’29 And, finally, money may also have played a role, the artful Josephine having given Napoleon the quite erroneous impression that she was extremely rich. Yet other historians have insisted either that he was simply besotted with her, or, alternatively, that it was the hopelessly indebted Josephine herself who took the lead, seducing him into a marriage that was not only highly advantageous to her, but the only way out of a situation in which the looks that were her only asset were already starting to fade. Whatever the reason, by all accounts Josephine was wooed with considerable vigour, as witness Hortense de Beauharnais’s recollection of a dinner chez Barras, which proved to be the first time that she met her future stepfather:

Barras’s guest-list proved