of them are so violently royalist, and their labour and their pleasure is to
win respectable people over to their cause.'
Suddenly, on 17 August 1795, the bombshell burst. Napoleon received
an express order to join the Army of the West or see his military career at
an end. Napoleon was desperate and at his wits' end. To comply meant
accepting that he had been demoted from the rank of artillery general to a
common-or-garden infantry brigadier in the endless Vendee campaign,
from which could come no glory or advancement. It almost meant serving
under the Republican hero I .azare Hoche, who had driven the Austrians
out of Alsace in 1793. Napoleon shrewdly sensed that the ambitious
Hoche, just one year older, was in competition for the same space and the
same glittering prizes, and that to serve under him might mean ending up
in front of a firing squad. Jealous of his prestige and aware that Hoche
had a reputation as a martinet and would not tolerate the slightest
insubordination, Bonaparte, the free-wheeling political intriguer and
shameless adventurer, knew that the Vendee was the end of the line.
Hoche would not permit a day's leave, never mind years of it, and took
the same draconian attitude to furlough that Napoleon himself would
take when Emperor.
Napoleon did his best to avoid the inevitable. First he tried the old
dodge of sending in a sick note, but the War Office trumped that ace by
declaring that the doctor who wrote the certificate was not competent to
do so. In despair Napoleon appealed to Barras as his last hope. Influenced
by Theresia Tallien as well as his own partiality for the young supplicant,
Barras got him a post in the Topographical Bureau of the Committee of
Public Safety. It was an exalted position, guaranteeing his rank as
brigadier-general, but not quite so elevated as Napoleon boasted when he
told Joseph he had 'replaced' Carnot there: in fact the Bureau was run by
a quadrumvirate of generals. Carnot had set up the Bureau in 1792 as a
kind of general staff and it was supposed to be a preserve of the brightest
and best military minds.
Barras's quick action to help his protege was aided by the turn of
events. On 29 June an Austrian counter-offensive routed General
Kellermann and undid all the French victories of 1794. Kellermann
claimed that Nice was in danger and asked for help. The government was
already searching for men with Italian experience when Barras put
forward Napoleon's name. His first memorandum, arguing for a
significant transfer of troops from the armies of the Rhine and the
Pyrenees to the Italian front, where Scherer now took over from
Kellermann, simply mirrored his 1794 arguments.
Ironically, on the very day he was appointed, his old project for going
marcin
(Marcin)
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