The Siege Of Toulon And The Revised Stature Of Napoleon Bonaparte
The Siege Of Toulon And The Revised Stature Of Napoleon Bonaparte
A reposted essay on the arts of war and propaganda
Originally published one year ago when I had half the current subscriber base.
Napoleone Buonaparte (Italian spelling) saw Toulon as his destiny, Phillip Dwyer writes in his 2008 Napoleon: The Path to Power. Two weeks after his arrival the delegates of the Committee of Public Safety, Augustin Robespierre and Antoine Christophe Saliceti, recommended the Corsican captain for promotion to major and chef de bataillon. It was his first foundation of political support from the new regime and the beginning of his path to replacing it as Empereror Napoleon Bonaparte. His promotion reduced the power of Jean Baptiste François Carteaux, “a vain, proud man with little military competence” who was particularly “incompetent in matters of siege warfare,” as Dwyer notes. Whereas “Toulon was considered to be one of the most impregnable fortified cities in the world” thanks to centuries of fortification and the concerted efforts of a British garrison, Carteaux could not even site his own fortress correctly.
“Buonaparte's first task when he arrived at Toulon was to organize the artillery,” Dwyer writes. “It was less than impressive, made up of four cannon, two mortars and only a few companies of volunteers to man them.”
There was also a total lack of command; everyone from the general-in-chief down to his lowliest aide-de-camp gave orders and changed siege dispositions at will. Buonaparte established an artillery park, put some order into the service, and employed all the non-commissioned officers he could get his hands on. Three days after he arrived, as a result of his own zeal and organizational skills, the army had an adequate artillery — fourteen cannon pieces and four mortars with all the necessary equipment. He produced a stream of orders for the cannon, horses, draught-oxen and stores necessary for the effective prosecution of the siege. He ordered 5,000 sacks of earth a day from Marseilles to build ramparts. He created an arsenal at Ollioules where eighty blacksmiths, cartwrights and carpenters worked, manufacturing and repairing muskets and incendiary cannon balls. He requisitioned skilled workers from Marseilles to make equipment for the artillery and took over a foundry in the region so that he could produce case shot, cannon balls and shells for his mortars. He reorganized the artillery company, obtained powder that was sadly lacking on his arrival, fought with suppliers, and scrounged more cannon from the surrounding region. Within a relatively short space of time, he had managed to gather almost one hundred guns and mortars, which worked twenty hours a day.
Carteaux ordered an attack on 22 September 1793 without the preparations Napoleon wanted, or in sufficient strength. Alerted to the danger of the position by the repulsed attack, British troops reinforced “Fort Mulgrave,” as they called it. The fiasco further undercut Carteaux’s authority and Napoleon took advantage. “His letters from this period are authoritative, not to say haughty, which suggests that he did not consider himself subordinate to Carteaux” despite still being nominally under his command, Dwyer writes. Following more than two months of preparation and a change of commander over him, Napoleon led the breakthrough in person. “On 17 December, under the cover of a bombardment and in pouring rain, the final assault began,” Dwyer relates.
Six thousand men stormed Fort Mulgrave and succeeded in taking it at about three o'clock in the morning, at the cost of over one thousand casualties. During this time, Buonaparte was given the order to take the lesser forts of Eguilette and Balaquier, and in the course of the operation, had a horse killed from under him and received a bayonet wound to the thigh. After these successful attacks, it was clear that the fleet's position was no longer tenable, and Admiral Hood ordered the evacuation of the port.
On their way out, the British destroyed the French fleet and the arsenal. Most of the public buildings of Toulon were burned in the resulting conflagration. A powder ship exploded during the evacuation, sinking two boats and killing four sailors. Thomas Whitcombe printed that dramatic scene in 1816, a year after Waterloo, using the explosion and fire to illuminate the night. A copy hangs in the Royal Navy Museum at Portsmouth today. The gathering darkness of the evening is appropriate to the aftermath of the withdrawal, for while many refugees had escaped, between 800 and 1000 French Royalists were butchered when the revolutionary regime entered Toulon the next day. By the time Whitcombe picked up his pen and brush, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had become a single, extended bloodbath in the mind of the British public — and Toulon had come to be seen as the moment of Napoleon’s genesis.
Which is ironic, for Jacques François Dugommier, Carteaux’s replacement in command of the siege, was hailed in Paris as the hero of Toulon immediately after the city fell. Napoleon gained notoriety, but he was not most prominent among French generals until the 1795 Convention.
On 5 October that year — 13 Vendémiaire by the Revolutionary calendar — thousands of Royalists converged on Napoleon’s force in the streets of Paris. Outnumbered six to one, but armed with 40 cannons, he won the day with a “whiff of grapeshot,” in the famous words of historian-philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who observed that the French Revolution was “blown into space” by the event. It is the final chapter of his famous history of the Revolution, for it was the definitive beginning of military dictatorships in Paris.
Grapeshot and a vigorous fusilade from Napoleon’s infanty stopped the Royalist mass cold, and they fled, leaving hundreds dead in the streets. No one had ever used grapeshot to quell a crowd before. Napolon had positioned his guns and charged his cannons for greatest effect in the close urban terrain. “It is false,” Carlyle quotes Napoleon, “that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.” Instead, he had taken decisive action in the face of a mortal enemy who could not withstand the punishment.
Defeated, the Royalists later framed the battle as a one-sided massacre of innocents. This is not supported by the physical evidence. Carlyle writes in his typical poetic style that “the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain there was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch Church show splintered by it, to this hour.” Nevertheless, the false image of a bloodthirsty tyrant stuck forever.
Napoleon embraced the bitter Royalist name of Général Vendémiaire as his “first title of glory.” It was a power-move when he was on the rise. After his fall from the throne, however, Toulon and 13 Vendémiaire were used to satirize and epitomize his career. For example, this was printed even before the Battle of Waterloo and became a classic after Napoleon’s brief return to power.
Born the same year as the Revolution, George Cruikshank was to be the foremost caricaturist of the Victorian era, achieving fame even before the end of the wars. His sketches skewered public figures, but he went after Napoleon with special relish. Printed in London 1815, The Life of Napoleon, a Hubridaic Poem in Fifteen Cantos includes thirty handcolored copperplate engravings by Cruikshank. Attributed to William Combe, the true author of the verses is unknown. Cruikshank put his name on his art, however. Nor would it have been hard to identify his style. His work stands out from contemporaries for its “bite,” Robert L. Patten says in his 1992 book George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art.
Cruikshank was among the British illustrators who invented the ‘John Bull’ character representing Britain. Napoleon had ushered Europe into an age of nationalism and Cruikshank was an ardent patriot. Like the best English pirates, however, Cruikshank courted danger with his rapier wit quite early in his career. “On three occasions during the war Cruikshank sailed very near the wind.” Patten writes.
In January 1812, when the Prince of Wales was sorely harassed by the difficulty of forming a cabinet after the regency restrictions lapsed, Cruikshank charged in A Kick from Yarmouth to Wales for the Radical publisher Johnston that the regent was cuckolding Lord Yarmouth. The plate was also used as the folding frontispiece to a satirical poem by George Daniel and alleged to have a deplorably "powerful influence on the lower classes," who enjoyed hearing about the sexual improprieties of royalty. The regent paid Daniel a large sum and bought up most copies prior to publication, but the verses circulated widely in manuscript, were quoted extensively in journals, and gained further currency through Cruikshank's design.
In the first few years of what would be a long career, Cruikshank developed a distinctive portrayal of ‘Old Boney.’ He showed the emperor, who was of average height for a Frenchman, as a short man. The ‘Napoleonic complex,’ in which short men become more aggressive to make up for insecurity about their height, did not apply to the real Napoleon. His soldiers referred to him as ‘the little corporal’ out of affection, not description. This lasting falsehood is instead a legacy of Cruikshank and other British cartoonists of the period drawing caricatures of Napoleon. They reduced his size in order to highlight his real megalomania.
Note that Cruikshank makes Napoleon’s hat, and by extension his head, enormous in proportion to his body. He also uses a large mortar to make Napoleon smaller by comparison. These are very common tropes in comic imagery. Thanks to the magic of the printing press, however, the myth of Napoleon’s supposed height, and consequent complex, endures. He is forever the ‘angry little man’ in English.
Cruikshank also portrays the events of 13 Vendémiaire. His Napoleon stands on a drum to make him look smaller. French portrayals of this incident during the 19th century all show Napoleon on horseback. The Royalists seem surrounded and outnumbered and unarmed, an historical inversion.
Of course, anyone in France would have a different perspective from Cruikshank. During the war, depictions of the emperor produced in Paris had to be flattering. In an early act of propaganda, Napoleon’s enemies made serious efforts to smuggle unflattering images of Napoleon into France.
“Napoleon’s concern with caricatures was at least as great as the written press,” Robert Justin Goldstein writes in his 1989 history Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth Century France. “He lodged diplomatic protests with the British government against these caricatures,” which he attributed to his domestic enemies abroad. In 1802, he “even tried to have inserted into the Treaty of Amiens with England a clause providing that persons who ridiculed his persons or policies should be treated as a murderer or forger and subject to extradition.” In fact many caricatures did come from the French dissidents who understood him best.
Napoleon kept an iron hand on the press in Paris and subject states until he fell, whereupon the pent up frustrations with his reign were unleashed as vitriolic portraits. “Some of the attacks on Napoleon after his downfall were so violent that they led to complaints from caricaturists,” Goldstein writes.
Thus, at a meeting of caricaturists in August 1814, one artist expressed his “indignation” at the “disgusting productions which each day adorn our walls and which violate both good taste and good sense” responsible for such works, who threatened to “heap discredit and scorn” on the profession of caricaturists.
Le Nain Jaune, a Bonapartist newspaper, complained that “the print merchants display without any constraint before the eyes of the public portraits of the Bourbons and caricatures of all types. There are even those among them in which the [Napoleonic] government is not spared.” Napoleon abolished censorship himself during his hundred days in 1815. Louis XVIII, on the other hand, was a fan of caricature. “When his nephew reproached him for subscribing to Le Nain Jeune,” Goldstein writes, Louis retorted that the paper “teaches me many things neither you nor anyone else would dare tell me.” Still, he banned the paper in the emergency of July 1815.
A century of political tumults lay ahead once the emperor was finally finished, and so it remained unsafe to lampoon Napoleon in France even after his final exile. “In July 1816, police raided the offices of the Pellerin Company in Epinal, a major publisher of popular prints, as well as those of some of its distributors, and seized many Napoleonic prints,” Goldstein says. “A variety of other ‘subversive’ visual imagery, including separately published prints of Napoleon, as well as jewelry, busts, and snuffboxes with depictions of the fallen emperor, also periodically triggered police raids and prosecutions after the One Hundred Days.” Even wooden canes carved with Napoleonic symbols were banned and their makers prosecuted.
From 1822 until 1882, all printed caricatures were subject to censorship before publication. During this period, “the precise rules concerning images of Napoleon shifted from time to time in ways difficult to decipher.” At first, artists could portray his defeats, but not his victories. Only in 1829 did the minister of interior order that Napoleon could be portrayed as “a general, representing battles and and bearing a historic character.” Efforts to micromanage artists this way were doomed to failure and so was the Second Republic.
France was still using the Napoleonic code and administrative system. The Bourbon regime had leveraged Napoleon’s image to enhance their own credibility, most notably upon his death, when they sacralized his ashes at l’Hôtel des Invalides in Paris. The Second Republic was radical, but then the French voted for a Bonaparte as emperor again, and so the image of Napoleon was off-limits to satirists in France. After the fall of Napoleon III and the formation of the Third Republic, prospective military dictators, most notably Gen. Georges Ernest Boulanger, evoked the image of Napoleon as they promised to revitalize France. Thus it never really became safe to satirize Napoleon in France until the late 1880s.
Leafing through a bound annual volume of l’Eclipse, a small Paris newssheet, printed for 1868, it is striking to find zero images of Napoleon — or Napoleon III. The name of the paper reflected its origins. L’Eclipse had the same staff as La Lune, a paper that the latter Napoleon shuttered the year before because he had disliked an unflattering caricature by illustrator André Gill. The publishing team simply reopened the paper under a new name, as was common for suppressed papers to do.
All sorts of prominent Parisians are caricatured in l’Eclipse, from politicians to pundits to opera divas. As the politics of the late Second Empire grew ever more impossible, however, the tone of the paper grew dim about its prospects. The moon on the masthead became an increasingly slender crescent, ever more in eclipse. Finally, in May of 1869, Gill created an image of a squat Napoleon II in slippers. Already dead for decades, he had been a disputed emperor for just a few weeks in 1815, then died in obscurity at the Austrian court.
So far as I know this is as close as Gill got to commenting on the First Empire, though I have not exhausted the archives. I found a volume of Gill’s work, Chargez! Le second empire et les débuts de la troisième république par un maître de la caricature edited by Chemin Vert. The earliest surviving caricatures of Napoleon III in that volume all date to 1872, the year after the Third Republic had been established in the ashes of defeat. There are no caricatures of Napoleon I at all.
Censorship had its effect. However, the most important throttle on free expression in France was not the government censors at all, but l’École des Beaux-Arts, known at the time as Académie des Beaux-Arts. Anyone who wanted to show their work in the Parisian Salon had to pass through l’Académie. Training and indoctrination and groupthink did the rest. Perhaps because expression was still so dangerous, French painters embraced impressionism during this period.
François Grenier de Saint-Martin was almost the same age as Cruikshank, only a year younger, but his roots lay in the brief glory of Napoleonic empire. “A painter who showed in the Parisian Salon from 1810, when he presented his version of Atala, until his death in the 1860s,” Darius Alexander writes of Martin in Napoleon’s Sorcerors: The Sophisians. Martin’s father was an actor in Paris drawn to the Sophisian Order, an association of veterans from the Egyptian campaign, including soldiers, Egyptologists, early scientists, and various creatives. The son was also a member, for he is mentioned in the so-called Golden Book at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, an illuminated manuscript filled with “underground mazes, cave settings, pyramids, and temple structures as theatrical settings to re-create Ancient Egyptian initiation practices.” He would be known for Egyptian scenes in his art.
François Martin, as he signed his work, was also a graduate of l’École. He “started his career with Napoleonic subject matter but after the Restoration concentrated mainly on genre and peasant scenes. Numerous reproductive lithographs … popularized his art over the course of the nineteenth century,” Alexander writes. One might then expect François Martin to be something of a Napoleon stan, and he was.
Here, Napoleon is also manning a cannon. Whereas Cruikshank has placed a gabion in the foreground to make Napoleon smaller, Martin has placed two of them just behind the cannon to make him look bigger. Napoleon is normal height, but still dominates the scene.
Gabions are made with bundled sticks filled with earth, heavy enough that a team of men is required to move one. Gabions can stop a musket ball or even a small cannon and are positioned as needed to protect the artillery team from counterfire.
The dead in Cruikshank’s cartoon are random, a waste of life. The soldier on the ground in Martin’s drawing is mortally wounded, contributing his dead weight to help steady the gun. Napoleon is ramming the charge home as the last gunner braces. There are four rifles stacked and two dead men; the fourth member of the artillery team is returning with ammunition. Napoleon is not just manning the cannon, he is doing the work of two men to keep the gun firing. Heroes, all of them.
Martin has still created a cartoon, but with different purposes than Cruikshank. He is going for dramatic rather than comic effect. An artillery commander should be commanding his guns, not loading them one at a time. Without a thorough crawl through primary sources it is impossible to say just where this particular legend came from, but it seems highly unlikely to this writer that Napoleon would have charged a gun himself during any battle. He may have aimed and fired cannons himself while setting up his batteries, but during a battle he would have wanted subordinate battery commanders to keep their guns in action.
Furthermore, as noted in the opening of this post, accounts of the final battle say that he fought on horseback, not as a gunner’s assistant.
Jean-Baptiste Édouard Detaille was also a graduate of l‘Académie. Born in the year that Napoleon III became First President of France on his way to becoming the second Emperor of France, Detaille was from a military family, with a grandfather who been an arms merchant to the earlier Napoleon. He showed his first military painting at the Salon in 1868, volunteered for a Guard Mobile battalion in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and became the semi-official painter of l’Armée Français by 1880.
This version of Napoleon is not looking towards a British foe at all. By the time Detaille painted his vision of Napoleon at Toulon, the new hated enemy was Germany, and l’armée was belatedly changing as an institution.
Detaille’s Napoleon is unafraid to get dirty. Pioneers are marching behind him, for siege works are dug with shovels and picks one sap at a time. Rather than clean dash and daring, Detaille impresses us with the dusty, dirty, inglorious work of soldiering on with the task at hand. Napoleon’s eyes are fixed on the distant horizon, visualizing the victory ahead under a bright blue sky. His hat and head are of normal proportions, and his elbow is resting atop the gabion. Napoleon is presented as being larger than the large object. Likewise the background elements normalize his height. Even the vertical orientation of the canvas makes him seem perfectly tall enough for the arduous task.
This ‘professional Napoleon’ was appropriate to the new attitude of the French Army. In defeat, they learned professionalism from their enemy, creating a general staff and an intelligence bureau, pursuing breakthrough military technologies, and integrating them into formations. German arms had humiliated the French levée en masse, but the day of revenge would surely come. Hatred of Germany was a rare source of unity in French politics, however. Out of the fraught politics of 1895, Félix Faure became president of France because he gave the least offense to every party. It was a brief summer of political stability in the Third Republic until his death in 1899, and it came at the cost of justice denied for Alfred Dreyfuss for eleven years.
As the Faure presidency began, a new edition of the 1823 Le Memorial de Sainte-Helene Par Le Comte De Las Cases, the memoir of Napoleon’s exile and death, appeared in Paris. It included this scene by Louis Charles Bombled depicting Napoleon at Toulon. Note how Bombled, who was mainly a commercial artist in the Belle Epoque of early mass consumerism, vanishes Napoleon into the distance. The future emperor is facing away from the viewer with a spyglass, conferring with an aide or the battery commander.
Bombled has put the crew-served cannon in the foreground, centering the branch of land arms most acutely conscious of its failures in 1870-71. Artillery was Napoleon’s specialty and his Grand Batteries won all his greatest victories. Defeat by German artillery, and not Napoleon’s perfectly average height, was the issue of the day for the French Army.
1895 was also the year that Auguste and Louis Lumière premiered the first moving picture show at the Grand Cafe on le Boulevard de Capuchines in Paris. Visual media was undergoing epochal changes and so one would expect Napoleon to take on new representations as the technologies and the politics of France changed.
Yet films have generally followed the previous pattern. Ian Holm was 5’5” (165 cm), a bit shorter than the real Napoleon, and played him as a buffoon in the 1981 film Time Bandits. Rod Steiger was 5’10” (178 cm), a hand’s breadth taller than the real Napoleon, and played him as a tragic has-been in the 1971 production of Waterloo. The satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine has used both regular-sized, live-action Napoleon on their cover as well as short, cartoon Napoleon. The real Napoleon was 5’6”, perfectly average for a Frenchman of the time. The artistic Napoleon is exactly as tall as the artist needs him to be.
