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By Root 2434 0

of the dazzling victory of the Pyramids. But at this point things went wrong. The French fleet was destroyed at the battle of Aboukir; Turkey, Naples, Austria and Russia all went to war; the French were driven from most of Italy; short-lived success in Naples, which had been transformed into the so-called Parthenopaean Republic in January 1799, was cancelled out in a welter of blood-letting and peasant revolt; and Napoleon himself was for some time precluded from returning to France by the need to rescue his reputation from the loss of his ships. In their different ways, then, both Napoleon and Talleyrand were foiled. Yet the former, at least, remained undaunted. Although an invasion of Palestine failed before the walls of Acre, Napoleon clinched the glory that he needed by literally wiping out a Turkish army of 9,000 men in the second battle of Aboukir (25 July

1799), at which point he fortuitously obtained a packet of European newspapers. Suggesting as these did that France was on the brink of complete defeat, this was all Napoleon needed, and less than a month later he secretly took ship for France, accompanied only by a small group of trusted cronies. With Egypt seemingly securely in the hands of the French and a string of fresh victories under his belt, there were just enough grounds for him to be able to affect the role of conquering hero once again. Bolstered by the arrival just prior to his surprise reappearance of a series of official dispatches that glossed over the failure in the Holy Land, painted the French position in the most roseate of hues and exaggerated the scale of his battlefield triumphs, Napoleon was greeted with great excitement. Hence the scenes witnessed when Napoleon made landfall at Fréjus on 9 October:

An officer rowed to the beach in a boat. We could see him quite clearly. Some men came to meet him, but scarcely had a few seconds passed than we perceived a great commotion: people were running towards the town, and soon the beach was covered by a huge crowd. Boats were loaded with passengers, and . . . a horde of people quickly climbed through the portholes into the ship . . . Soon there was no possibility of the general being mistaken as to the feelings of the entire population. ‘You only can save France,’ they cried to him on all sides. ‘Without you she perishes. You are sent by Heaven: take up the reins of government!’66

Nor did things change thereafter. ‘Our journey from Fréjus to Paris’, wrote Napoleon’s stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, ‘was a triumphal progress. One single sentiment animated the entire French people and indicated to Napoleon what he should do. At Lyons, especially, the joy of the inhabitants reached the pitch of delirium.’67 As for the capital, here too spirits were high. To quote one of the future emperor’s most enthusiastic collaborators:

On his arrival Bonaparte took up his residence at the little house that he had bought in the Rue Chantereine . . . This was soon thronged with all the leading personalities of the government, the legislature, the army and the Institute, together with all those who exercised some degree of personal influence . . . Every heart was so overflowing with joy, admiration and love at the return of the hero that, whilst nobody actually acknowledged the fact that he possessed supreme power, everybody recognized this to be the case.68

The reasons for this excitement are understandable. For men of property the domestic situation had become increasingly intolerable. The economy was in ruins; law and order had in many rural areas almost completely broken down due to the immense numbers of men who had been forced into brigandage by poverty and conscription; there had been a resumption of revolt in the Vendée and further trouble in Belgium; and the great military crisis of 1799 was only resolved by once more resorting to measures that recalled the Terror of 1793. To deal with these problems, it was felt that France needed a greatly reinforced executive power, the Directory having proved not just corrupt but incapable of imposing the required degree