a child on her. He later numbered her among his conquests and confessed
sheepishly that he had needlessly sacrificed the lives of some of his men
in a futile attack on an enemy position on the Italian front simply to show
off to her. There seems an element of fantasy about this ill-documented
'affair' which, however, Frederic Masson accepts as a genuine liaison.
Perhaps the true fantasy, as the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones suggested,
was not the affair, which was real enough, but the sacrifice of the men. A
psychoanalytical reading of the business with Mme de Lignieres would
suggest that the words Napoleon uses to describe the alleged incident -
'some men were left on the field of battle' - could refer to the husbands
he had cuckolded. Napoleon's confession might therefore be the Sartrean
ploy of pleading guilty to a 'lesser' misdemeanour: in Napoleon's
confused mind the loss of soldiers might weigh less than the 'sin' of
adultery about which he always had such strong feelings.
The year I794 certainly ended Napoleon's flirtation with Jacobinism
and other forms of political radicalism. The Thermidorean reaction
meant that landowners and men of property were entrenched as the true
beneficiaries of the Revolution, and that there would be no further
pandering to the sans-culottes or other dispossessed groups. This hard line
by Carnot and his colleagues, together with the famines, harvest failures,
unemployment and price rises - for after Robespierre's fall there was a
year of chaos with depreciating assignats, unpaid armies and therefore
zero recruitment - brought the old revolutionaries out on the streets
again. The crowd stormed the Convention on I2 Germinal Year III (I
April I795) and were dispersed by the National Guard. They tried again
on I Prairial (zo May I795) and were again dispersed by the Guard. But
the heart had gone out of the revolutionary crowd: these manifestations
lacked the zeal and organization of previous post-1789 ins urrections and
were more like the old-fashioned ancien regime bread riots. Put down
ruthlessly, these street revolts proved to be the last hurrah of the
Revolutionary crowd, which was not seen in action again until after the
Napoleonic era.
The Thermidorean defence of property meant most of all the defence
of new property, for the men of Thermidor - the profiteers, hoarders,
black marketeers, speculators in military supplies or the falling assignats -
were the true beneficiaries of the Revolution. Most of all, the new class
was made up of those who had cornered large public monopolies or who
had purchased what was euphemistically called 'national property' - in
other words, confiscated Church lands or real estate previously belonging
to exiled aristocrats. The Thermidorean alliance of the bourgeoisie with
the upper peasantry gave Napoleon a valuable lesson in political
marcin
(Marcin)
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