‘Will you serve me?’ Barras asked him abruptly. ‘You have three minutes to decide.’
Bonaparte needed no time to consider the offer. He assented immediately, asking only where were the guns which would be needed if they were to repel the threatened attack by the rebels who outnumbered the Convention’s forces by about six to one. Joachim Murat, a handsome, swaggering cavalry officer, an innkeeper’s son who was one day to become King of Naples, was sent to fetch them from a camp, six miles to the south. A rebel force was already on its way to the camp, but, galloping at the head of 200 horsemen, Murat arrived there first and brought back forty guns with him to Paris. Eight of these were allocated to Bonaparte who was given the task of defending the Tuileries from any attack that might be made upon it from the north.
The total number of men at the Convention’s disposal was about 8,000, of whom some 5,000 were regular troops of the line. Most of these were disposed so as to guard all approaches to the Tuileries in the Rue du Cul de Sac Dauphin, the Rue l’Échelle, the Rue Rohan and the Rue St Nicaise, on the Pont Neuf, the Pont Royal and the Pont Louis XVI, and around the Place de la Révolution and the Place Vendôme. The cavalry were held in reserve on the Carrousel and in the Tuileries gardens. An ammunition depot, a hospital and stores of provisions were established in the Tuileries itself. The heights of Meudon were occupied so that the Convention could retire there if compelled to retreat from their hall, and arms were sent to the radical Faubourg Saint-Antoine whose ‘attachment to the cause of liberty’ Barras – prepared to accept any allies so long as the emergency lasted – described as being well known and whose inhabitants Fréron was exhorting to come to the defence of the Revolution.
While these preparations were being made, the insurrectionary committee, which had been set up in the section of Lepeletier, was also making its dispositions. It appointed as commander-in-chief of its forces General Danican, an officer from a poor noble family who had served against the Vendéens but had been dismissed on suspicion of being secretly a royalist. He had come to Paris, thoroughly disillusioned by the present Government, and prepared to assist in any plans for its subversion. The misconceived plan which the insurrectionaries adopted was to make a concerted attack upon the Tuileries. Instead of building barricades around it, encircling it with sharpshooters in the surrounding houses, and bringing about its downfall by a siege of attrition, they decided to storm the Tuileries with columns of troops marching upon it from the Odéon, from the streets that led down to it from the Rue Saint-Honoré, and from the Pont Neuf.
The Convention’s forces waited all morning for the expected attack in a drizzling rain. The deputies sat in silence in their hall. Eight hundred muskets and cartouche boxes were stored in an anteroom, ready for their use should they have to defend themselves. Noon came and still there was no attack. Barras, on horseback, and Bonaparte on foot, waited in the courtyard of the Tuileries. Two eight-pounders, loaded with case-shot had been placed at the end of the Rue Neuve Saint-Roch, their barrels levelled at the church of Saint-Roch at the end of the street. After hours of silence, there came the sound of drums and musket fire. Bonaparte approached the guns and waited there for Barras’s orders.
It was soon after three o’clock when the leading columns of the rebels appeared in the Rue Saint-Honoré. The Convention’s troops opened fire on them with their muskets, but they came on, returning the fire, into the Rue Neuve Saint-Roch. Barras gave Bonaparte the order to open up with his eight pounders. Immediately the gunners responded. The shots tore into the advancing ranks, mowing many of them down and blasting chunks of masonry from the walls of the church. The rebels faltered, then came on again, wavered as the shot tore into them and finally fell back as the guns were wheeled to the right and left and fired down the Rue Saint-Honoré from top to bottom. The sectionnaires, scattered now, fled backwards towards the Lepeletier.
Here, in the convent of the Filles Saint Thomas, Danican and the insurrectionary committee decided upon another assault from the Faubourg Saint-Germain towards the Pont Neuf which was still occupied by men under the command of a young émigré named Lafond. Here they would be joined by a column under a Vendéen leader, the Comte de Maulevrier. The combined force would then advance along the Quai Voltaire to the Pont Royal. But once again the rebels could not withstand the barrage of artillery. A storm of grape-shot from the Pont Royal tore into their ranks from the front, while other guns opened up on them from the quai of the Tuileries. Lafond made a gallant effort to storm the bridge, but his men were driven back by the relentless fire of the Convention’s gunners. By six o’clock, when two to three hundred men had been killed or wounded on both sides, the fighting was over.
After the journées of Vendémiaire there was to be no further threat from the royalists. With the influence of the Montagnards and the sans-culottes also destroyed, the largely well-to-do and conservative Thermidorians were now in control of the Revolution. But it was to prove an extremely unsteady and insecure control, maintained only by devious compromises, by successive purges, by hitting out alternately at reactionaries and radicals alike, and by an increasing reliance upon the army.
EPILOGUE
THE ADVENT OF BONAPARTE
‘It appears that France must soon be governed by a single despot… a dictator produced by the Revolution’
On 3 November 1795, the day after their election, the Directors met in a small room in the gloomy deserted Luxembourg. Taking off their melodramatically plumed hats, they sat round a rickety table on straw-bottomed chairs which the porter had brought into the otherwise unfurnished room together with some logs for the fire. Only one of them was well known and he not much respected. This was Paul Barras who, so a foreign Minister said, would have ‘thrown the Republic out of the window tomorrow if it did not pay for his dogs, his mistress, his food and his gambling’. The others, all of whom had voted for the King’s death, were Louis-Marie La Revellière-Lèpeaux, Jean-François Reubell and Étienne-François Letourneur. La Revellière, an anti-clerical former Girondin, was a hunchback with a huge head and thin legs who, it was said, had escaped the guillotine only because a Montagnard had scornfully complained of time being wasted on such a ‘paltry fellow as that’. Reubell, like La Revellière, had been a deputy in the Constituent Assembly but had sat as a Montagnard. An arrogant, red-faced lawyer he had also been on the Committee of Public Safety and had once been heard to declare that ‘any deputy who opposed the Revolution ought to be put in a sack and thrown into the river’. Letourneur, an officer in the Engineers, had been an unassertive member of the Plain. The fifth Director, Sieyès, was not there. He had refused to serve, and his place was subsequently taken by Carnot.