Marseilles and Toulon, while he waited for the ratification of his new
appointment to come through, Napoleon moved to Nice, with the faithful
Junot in tow, to take up his post as senior gunner in the Army of Italy.
Until mid-July 1794 he was to be found commuting from Nice westwards
to Antibes and Frejus and eastward to San Remo and Vintimiglia,
tirelessly working on new military schemes and confirming the battle
readiness of his units. After two years of warfare against Austria, the
Army of Italy was stalemated in a fruitless campaign against Piedmont,
which was being constantly rearmed, reinforced, supplied and sustained
by the British Navy operating through Genoa. Napoleon began by
writing up a stratagem for capturing Oneglia. When this fell, on 9 April
1794, his reputation was sky high and he was asked to write a general
memorandum on grand strategy.
Basing his strategy on the writings of Guibert de Bourcet, Napoleon
devised a plan that enabled the Army ofltaly to advance to the watershed
of the Maritime Alps, having secured control of the passes of Col
d' Argentiere, Tende and St-Bernard. With the enthusiastic support of
Augustin Robespierre, who took Bonaparte's memorandum to Paris with
him, Napoleon argued that if the French attacked in Piedmont, Austria
would be forced to come to the aid of her Austrian possessions and thus
weaken her position on the Rhine, allowing the French to strike a
knockout blow there. Napoleon's chances of getting the plan accepted
looked good, for his new commander-in-chief, General Dumerbion,
deferred in all things to the political commissars; Saliceti and Augustin
Robespierre, in turn, nodded through anything military that came from
the pen of Napoleon.
The one obstacle to the implementation of Napoleon's plans was
Carnot in Paris. Carnot argued instead for an invasion of Spain, in the
teeth of the explicit advice in the Bonaparte memorandum that Spain was
too tough a nut to crack - ironically advice Napoleon himself was to
ignore later in his career. But Carnot was adamant that the Piedmont
venture would not proceed. There are even some historians who argue
that the fervent advocacy of the Italian invasion by the Robespierre
brothers was what turned Carnot against them and sealed their fate.
The famous 'Thermidorean reaction' of 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor),
which brought the Robespierre brothers and the Jacobin leaders to the
guillotine, was the end of the French Revolution in all but name. After
three years in which the Left had ruled the roost in Paris, it was now the
turn of the Right. As a committed Jacobin and friend of Augustin
Robespierre, Napoleon was in danger. It has sometimes been suggested
that he was not really in deadly peril from the ideological point of view,
marcin
(Marcin)
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