Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth

He only ventured out in civilian dress, his face hidden by a hat, and when he went to the theatre he sat at the back of his box. While the Directory was wary of him, he was afraid lest it feel threatened enough to resort to extreme measures. He could not avoid going to a banquet for eight hundred guests held in his honour by the two chambers on 24 December in the great gallery of the Louvre, hung with the paintings he had sent back from Italy, but he ate nothing. When dining out he partook only of dishes he had seen others taste, and otherwise confined himself to tamper-proof boiled eggs.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

On 25 December the Institute of Arts and Sciences elected him a member. He was genuinely thrilled. ‘The real conquests, the only ones which come with no regrets, are those one makes over ignorance,’ he wrote in his letter of acceptance. ‘The most honourable occupation, and that most useful to all nations, is to contribute to the extension of human thought,’ he went on, declaring that the real greatness of the French Republic should lie there. The following day he took his seat, between his friends Monge and Berthollet. He would attend over a dozen of the Institute’s meetings over the next three months, acquiring a pool of admirers among the intellectual elite of France. He would spend hours with scientists, acting the eager pupil or astounding them by his knowledge, flattering them with his deferential interest, declaring that war, which might be necessary at times, was a lowly trade that could not aspire to the level of an art or a science such as theirs. Although his friendship with Monge, twice his age, Berthollet and some of the others was heartfelt, his courting of the intellectuals was calculated. The same went for the artistic establishment. Astonishingly for someone as impatient as him, he spent no less than three hours sitting for the painter Jacques Louis David. ‘Oh, my friends, what a head he has! It is pure, it is magnificent, it has the beauty of antiquity!’ David exclaimed afterwards. ‘In all, my friends, this is a man to whom in those days altars would have been raised, yes, my friends, yes, my dear friends! Bonaparte is my hero!’5 (#litres_trial_promo)

His membership of the Institute also allowed him to sidestep a thorny issue when the Directory insisted he attend the ceremony held annually on 21 January celebrating the execution of Louis XVI. He tried to exempt himself by arguing that he did not hold any public position, protesting that the supposed celebration was inappropriate given that it commemorated a national disaster, that no government, only a faction would ever celebrate the death of a man, and that it brought no credit to the Republic or ease its relations with the other states of Europe, most of which were monarchies. The Directors were adamant, fearing that his absence would be interpreted as a sign of defiance and give heart to royalists. He eventually agreed to attend in the ranks and uniform of the Institute, thereby underlining that his attendance was purely official and did not reflect his views.

He was careful to maintain good relations with the Directors, and Lareveillère-Lepaux was delighted by his modesty, his simplicity of dress, his apparent domesticity and his declared interest in Theophilanthropy. Consistently self-effacing, Bonaparte was all things to all men – the Prussian minister was flattered when he sang the praises of Frederick the Great, dismissing his own victories as the result of ‘good luck and some hard work’.6 (#litres_trial_promo)

As commander of the Army of England, Bonaparte was supposed to invade it. He saw France as the new Rome and Britain as Carthage, and his vanity would have been caressed by the success of a play entitled Scipion l’Africain in which audiences picked out parallels between him and Scipio. Another, on the fall of Carthage, made even more obvious allusions to the heroics he was about to embark on. But it is doubtful that he ever considered the possibility seriously.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

A week after his return to Paris, on 13 December, he issued his first orders relative to the invasion, and over the next days had a number of meetings with the minister of the navy. The French navy had been irredeemably damaged by the Revolution; crews had mutinied and discipline could not be restored for ideological reasons. By 1792 all but two out of nine admirals and three out of eighteen rear-admirals had left, along with three-quarters of the captains. Training replacements was impossible, as most of the ships were confined to port by the British blockade, and after the loss of so many at Toulon, the French navy was not up to carrying out an operation of the sort envisaged.

It is doubtful that Bonaparte felt any desire to invade England. He nurtured an admiration for the British, condemned the Directory’s failure to make peace the previous summer, and reproached Barras for the belligerence of his speech at the ceremony of 10 December. He conferred with Wolfe Tone and other Irish revolutionaries, but was unimpressed. If he had intended to carry through the plan he would have applied himself to the task with his usual determination, spending his nights poring over maps and inspecting embarkation ports, identifying landing places and organising the invasion force. He did none of these, and did not present the Directory with a plan for over a month, while in the past he had produced them in a matter of days. It is doubtful that the Directors themselves believed in the possibility of a successful invasion.8 (#litres_trial_promo)

The arrival of Josephine on 30 December put an end to Bonaparte’s low-profile life. On the same day, the rue Chantereine was renamed rue de la Victoire, and that evening they went to the theatre. Four days later they attended a party given in their honour by Talleyrand, a grand affair for some two hundred guests, widely commented on for its lavish scale and ancien-régime elegance. The rooms were decorated with trees and foliage, with backdrops presenting views of a military camp. The ladies wore scanty ‘Greek’ dresses, and while Josephine stood out, Bonaparte was self-effacing in civilian dress and did not stay long. He was annoyed when Madame de Staël engaged him in conversation. He would later claim she tried to seduce him, but on this occasion he was plain rude. When she asked him what kind of woman he respected most, no doubt hoping for a flattering response, he replied curtly that he esteemed only those who bore many children, before turning to talk to the Ottoman ambassador Ali Effendi.9 (#litres_trial_promo)

His opinion of women would not have been enhanced by the behaviour of Josephine. On his departure for Rastatt he had left her in Milan, from where she was to travel directly to Paris. She prolonged her journey in order to spin out her amours with Lieutenant Charles, who was travelling with her. Once she reached Paris, she dismissed her maid Louise, who had displeased her by having a fling with Junot on their way out to Italy. Louise took her revenge by spilling the beans to Bonaparte about Hippolyte Charles. He angrily reproached his wayward wife, but she managed to placate him.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

By mid-January 1798 it had become clear that Bonaparte’s presence was not after all required at Rastatt, which left him with no excuse to delay an invasion of England he had no intention of embarking on. He had gradually worked his way into the confidence of the Directors, whom he saw regularly, and contemplated joining them, but being less than forty years old he did not qualify.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

He was being urged by many to stage a coup against them, but felt the time was not ripe and remained uncertain as to the depth or durability of his popularity. There were rumours of plots to poison him, and he was aware that he had enemies at both extremities of the political spectrum. It was time he returned to his real trade and took command of an army – in the midst of which he would be safe.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Since England was such an unpromising objective, the only viable alternative was the invasion of Egypt, which Talleyrand was advocating. On 25 January news reached Paris of the death of the French ambassador in Constantinople. While the implications were being discussed by the Directors, Bonaparte set to work with Talleyrand on a fresh report which the minister delivered to them the following day. It repeated the old arguments, adding that the Porte had effectively lost control of Egypt and would not mind France administering the colony provided it remained its nominal sovereign: the corrupt and backward Mameluke administration would simply be replaced by a French one, and the Porte might actually benefit from such an arrangement. French diplomats in the area were of one voice that Mameluke rule was unpopular with the Egyptians themselves, who longed for deliverance. Talleyrand proposed to go to Constantinople himself to arrange matters.13 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Directors were divided in their opinions, and ostensibly still favoured an invasion of England. On 23 February, after visiting Etaples, Ambletuese, Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, Nieuport, Ostend, Ghent and Antwerp, Bonaparte reported that an invasion was impracticable. The following day he discussed his findings with the Directors and declared that he would not take on the job, offering to resign his commission. Reubell, who hated him, handed him a pen. The gesture was a dig at his vanity, but no more – the Directory did not want a disgruntled war hero hanging about Paris, and they needed to find him an assignment. On 5 March they sanctioned the plan to invade Egypt.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Financing the expedition was not a problem. The weak and largely conservatively-ruled confederation of Swiss cantons provided a base for British secret agents and military access to the borders not only of France but of her Cisalpine ‘sister republic’, which had long bothered the Directory. Bonaparte had already sliced off the Valtelline and added it to the Cisalpine Republic, thereby gaining control of the Simplon Pass. The Directory encouraged Jacobins bent on revolution in various parts of the country, and French troops marched in to support them in overthrowing the most conservative of all the cantonal governments, that of Berne, whose treasure, as well as its two emblematic bears, were sent to Paris at the beginning of March.

Bonaparte set to work planning the expedition. The new Army of the Orient would be composed mostly of men from the Army of Italy. They would embark at Toulon, Marseille, Ajaccio, Genoa and Civitavecchia. The respective fleets were to assemble off Malta, which was to be captured for France as the first step in denying the Royal Navy bases in the Mediterranean. The next step would be to land in Egypt, overthrow the Mamelukes and organise the country. A naval base was to be created at Suez which would connect with the French colony of Île de France (Mauritius), whose strategic position in the Indian Ocean could be exploited for trade and military purposes. As soon as it was practicable, the Isthmus of Suez was to be pierced with a canal. The plan could only work if the British navy stayed out of the Mediterranean, so it was kept a secret and preparations for the invasion of England proceeded.

Bonaparte was thinking of more than conquest. While they were both in Italy, Monge had drawn his attention to the disparity between how much was known about Greco-Roman civilisation and how little about the Egyptian, and when they discussed the possibility of an invasion he had suggested that a commission of experts should accompany it to study the pyramids and other remains. Bonaparte agreed, and his boundless interests suggested something more. He had a vision of extending the fruits of the Enlightenment to backward lands; the regeneration of what he referred to as the cradle of civilisation by the new metropolis that was France. The venture was to be beneficial to mankind, a voyage of discovery as well as one of illumination. He therefore decided to take with him the most eminent figures in the arts and sciences, as well as engineers and technicians who would develop the country. With the greatest secrecy, he began approaching them without telling them where they would be going. Some, like the painter David, refused. The composer Méhul also backed out, as did the poet Ducis and the renowned baritone François Lays, whom Bonaparte had imagined singing Ossianic odes at the head of the troops on the march. He had the greatest difficulty in persuading Monge, who felt too old and was currently still in Italy; Bonaparte personally visited Madame Monge, pressing her to use her influence on her husband.15 (#litres_trial_promo)

He bade Bourrienne put together a travelling library, arranged in the following categories: 1. Sciences & Arts, 2. Geography & Travels, 3. History, 4. Poetry, 5. Novels, 6. Political Sciences (which contained the Old and New Testaments, the Koran and the Vedanta). Pride of place in the poetry section went to Ossian; Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther were among the novels. He also had 2,000 bottles of good Burgundy sent to Toulon. To keep the soldiers happy, he wanted to take along a troupe of actors from the Comédie-Française. He also, it seems, had ‘a leather helmet richly embroidered with gold’ run up which made him look ‘like an actor in an opera’.16 (#litres_trial_promo)

As there was a risk of the fleet being intercepted by the British, Josephine would not be sailing with him. He would send a frigate to fetch her once he had landed and pacified Egypt. Their marriage had gone through yet another trauma in mid-March when a delighted Joseph presented his brother with evidence that his wife was shamelessly carrying on her affair with Lieutenant Charles under his very nose, meeting him regularly in the afternoon at the house of a supplier to the military in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. A natural liar, Josephine denied everything and challenged Bonaparte to divorce her. To Charles, she wrote in torrid terms of her love for him and her hatred for all the Bonapartes. ‘Hippolyte, I will kill myself,’ she wrote on 17 March. ‘Yes, I must end [a life] which will be a burden to me if it cannot be devoted to you. […] Oh, they can torment me as much as they like, but they will never part me from my Hippolyte: my last breath will be for him. […] Adieu, my Hippolyte, a thousand kisses as ardent as my heart, and as loving.’ As usual, she managed to placate Bonaparte, to whom she seems to have grown sincerely attached. He bought the house in the rue de la Victoire, inserting a clause giving her life tenure in the event of his death. He also agreed to her plan of buying a house outside Paris, at La Malmaison.17 (#litres_trial_promo)

On 17 April he ordered Admiral Brueys, who was to command the fleet, to prepare to sail within ten days. There is some evidence that he made one last proposal to the Directors to share power with them, pointing out that if the war with Austria were to resume they would need a strong man. On 22 April, which was supposed to be his last night in Paris, he went to a performance of Macbeth. But the next day news arrived of a diplomatic incident provoked by France’s ambassador to Austria, General Bernadotte, which momentarily threatened to provoke a fresh war, and it was not until 27 April that the Directory felt it safe to order him to proceed to Toulon.18 (#litres_trial_promo)

He went to Saint-Germain with Josephine and Lavalette to visit her niece Émilie, whom Bonaparte had ordered Lavalette to marry, and to take her and Hortense for a picnic in the woods. The following day, 30 April, he attended a session of the Institute and then called on the Directors, who pressed him to leave as soon as possible. Others were still urging him to stay and overthrow the government. ‘Bonaparte must either get away or destroy the Directory or be crushed by it,’ Colonel Morand of the 85th Demi-Brigade wrote to his parents, revealing that even in Civitavecchia where he was stationed the political situation was no secret.19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Bonaparte left Paris incognito at three o’clock in the morning of 4 May, in a mail coach with a passport made out in a false name, accompanied only by Josephine, Eugène de Beauharnais and Bourrienne. They travelled to Lyon, where they embarked on a boat which took them down the Rhône as far as Aix, and from there went by carriage to Toulon, which they reached in the early hours of 9 May. He took a parade of the 18th, and then the 32nd and 75th Demi-Brigades, all old soldiers of his Army of Italy. ‘We greeted him with enthusiastic cheering lasting more than a quarter of an hour,’ recalled one officer. Bonaparte then walked through the ranks talking to officers and men, and ended with a speech comparing them to the Roman legions which conquered Carthage. He reminded them that only two years before he had found them covered in rags, had led them to glory and provided for their every need. He asked them to trust him now, and assured them that they would return with the money to buy enough land for a farm (six arpents