Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [118]
Napoleon Bonaparte had come to power at the head of a conservative, though not explicitly royalist, backlash against the most radical extremes of the French Revolution. As a young officer, Napoleon was wont to absent himself without leave from the French army in order to participate in bootless rebellions in his native Corsica. In calmer times he might have been court-martialed and possibly shot for these derelictions, but revolutionary France, at war on practically all of its borders, was in desperate need of capable commanders, and Napoleon was certainly one of the best available. His ambition was also nakedly apparent: in 1791, War Commissioner Simon-Antoine Sucy commented, “I do not see him stopping short of either the throne or the scaffold.”35
In 1791 the French throne was in serious jeopardy, though it had not yet been abolished. Louis XVI and his family, arrested in their attempt to flee France at Varennes, were now more or less prisoners of the National Assembly, and the cause of a constitutional monarchy was weakened. Napoleon Bonaparte threw his lot in with the republican side, with such fervor that people began to call him “the little Jacobin.” The controversy over the fate of the king finally ended with his execution on January 21, 1793; the following month France, already at war with royalist regimes in Austria and Prussia, went to war with England, Holland, and Spain. In Paris, meanwhile, the National Convention (the legislative body which succeeded the National Assembly in Sep-tember 1792) was in the final throes of a struggle between the comparatively moderate Girondins and the far left Montagnards. In June 1793 the Montagnards, under the leadership of Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien de Robespierre, purged the Girondins from the convention. Two months later the Reign of Terror was proclaimed, and the dread Committee of Public Safety, chaired by Robespierre, began sending a stream of suspect civilians to the guillotine.
The Terror was bloody but relatively short-lived; on July 27, 1794, Robespierre himself fell victim to the death machine he had designed. The Committee of Public Safety collapsed, along with the rest of the Terror's apparatus. During this same period, Napoleon Bonaparte, just twenty-five years old in 1794, had advanced in rank from captain to brigadier general. The new constitution of September 1795 replaced the Committee of Public Safety—which had turned into the chief executive organ of government—with a five-member Executive Directory, complemented by the 750-member legislature. On October 3, General Danican attempted a military coup against this fragile new government. General Napoleon Bonaparte, who happened to be in Paris at the time, put himself at the head of troops loyal to the government and repelled the coup. From this event he emerged a hero and won command of the Army of the Interior.
From 1795 to 1799 he led large-scale campaigns outside French borders, first in Italy, then in Egypt. In October 1799 he left his army in Egypt and returned to France. Fresh from a major victory at Aboukir, he was received with huge popular enthusiasm, but his reception by the increasingly shaky Directory was comparatively cool. The French economy was exhausted by a decade of war all over Europe, and the country was being strangled by a British naval blockade. A coalition of six nations threatened the French republic from without, and within there was a plot to overthrow the Directory and restore Louis XVIII to the throne.
In 1791, war minister La Tour du Pin, alarmed by a series of mutinies in the army, had warned against the threat of “this military democracy, a type of political monster that has always devoured the empires that created it.” Eight years later, many had begun to believe that a military dictatorship offered the best chance of saving the repub-lie. Napoleon's