his scheming to get back to Corsica had been a mistake, that maybe the
future did, after all, lie with the 4th Artillery Regiment. Or perhaps he
should throw up his career and go to India or somewhere else in the East
as a mercenary. Certainly it was a subdued and unwontedly quiet
Napoleon who spent the last months of 1792 in Corte, at least until 15
December, when he brought down to Ajaccio two hundred men from his
battalion for a proposed expedition against Sardinia. Apart from a brief
trip back to Corte, he was in Ajaccio from Christmas 1792 to 18 February
1793, and it was during this limbo period that Lucien remembers his
brother often talking to his mother about the opportunities for service in
India with Tippoo Sahib, Britain's mortal enemy on the subcontinent.
By February 1793 the French Revolution had taken a dramatic turn.
Staring military defeat in the face, by a massive effort (the levee en masse)
the revolutionaries had turned the tables on the Prussians and Austrians.
At the 'Thermopylae' of Valmy on 20 September 1792 Dumouriez
decisively defeated the Prussians. By the end of the year the new armies
of revolutionary France had invaded the Rhineland and the Austrian
Netherlands, officially 'exporting' the ideology of the revolution but
actually in search of loot to shore up the value of the tottering assignat.
January 1793 was a key date in the Revolution, for Louis XVI was
executed and Danton declared the doctrine of France's 'natural frontiers'
(the sea, the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Rhine). In line with these
national aspirations, the revolutionary executive or Convention declared
war on England and Spain.
The French plan for an expedition against Sardinia was a sign of the
new expansionist policies. Sardinia had an obvious strategic importance
in the Mediterranean, and the invasion was meant to demonstrate
France's new found power and to overawe Florence and Naples; there
were additional objectives of seizing the island's corn and alleviating
shortages in the south of France. Admiral Truguet arrived in Ajaccio
with a large body of regulars and a flotilla of ships, intending to
incorporate the Corsican volunteer battalions in his force. On the way
over from France there had been tension between soldiers and sailors; to
this was now added acrimony and bad feeling between the regulars and
the Corsican volunteers. Paoli, who was now close to an overt breach with
Revolutionary France, bitterly opposed the venture but was shrewd
enough to see that Truguet's regulars might combine with Napoleon's
volunteers to depose him if he came out openly against the expedition,
especially since there were rumours that Truguet was already a fast friend
of the Bonapartes and was besotted with the sixteen-year-old Elisa. He
marcin
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