1794-1795.
Proposal to send Bonaparte to La Vendee--He is struck off the list of general officers--Salicetti--Joseph's marriage with Mademoiselle Clary--Bonaparte's wish to go to Turkey--Note explaining the plan of his proposed expedition--Madame Bourrienne's character of Bonaparte, and account of her husband's arrest--Constitution of the year III--The 13th Vendemiaire--Bonaparte appointed second in command of the army of the interior--Eulogium of Bonaparte by Barras, and its consequences--St. Helena manuscript.
General Bonaparte returned to Paris, where I also arrived from Germany shortly after him. Our intimacy was resumed, and he gave me an account of, all that had passed in the campaign of the south. He frequently alluded to the persecutions he had suffered, and he delivered to me the packet of papers noticed in the last chapter, desiring me to communicate their contents to my friends. He was very anxious, he said, to do away with the supposition that he was capable of betraying his country, and, under the pretence of a mission to Genoa, becoming a SPY on the interests of France. He loved to talk over his military achievements at Toulon and in Italy. He spoke of his first successes with that feeling of pleasure and gratification which they were naturally calculated to excite in him.
The Government wished to send him to La Vendee, with the rank of brigadier-general of infantry. Bonaparte rejected this proposition on two grounds. He thought the scene of action unworthy of his talents, and he regarded his projected removal from the artillery to the infantry as a sort of insult. This last was his most powerful objection, and was the only one he urged officially. In consequence of his refusal to accept the appointment offered him, the Committee of Public Safety decreed that he should be struck off the list of general officers.
--[This statement as to the proposed transfer of Bonaparte to the infantry, his disobedience to the order, and his consequent dismissal, is fiercely attacked in the 'Erreurs', tome i. chap. iv.
It is, however, correct in some points; but the real truths about Bonaparte's life at this time seem so little known that it may be well to explain the whole matter. On the 27th of March 1795 Bonaparte, already removed from his employment in the south, was ordered to proceed to the army of the west to command its artillery as brigadier-general. He went as far as Paris, and then lingered there, partly on medical certificate. While in Paris he applied, as Bourrienne says, to go to Turkey to organise its artillery. His application, instead of being neglected, as Bourrienne says, was favourably received, two members of the 'Comite de Saint Public' putting on its margin most favorable reports of him; one, Jean Debry, even saying that he was too distinguished an officer to be sent to a distance at such a time. Far from being looked on as the half-crazy fellow Bourrienne considered him at that time, Bonaparte was appointed, on the 21st of August 1795, one of four generals attached as military advisers to the Committee for the preparation of warlike operations, his own department being a most important one. He himself at the time tells Joseph that he is attached to the topographical bureau of the Comite de Saint Public, for the direction of the armies in the place of Carnot. It is apparently this significant appointment to which Madame Junot, wrongly dating it, alludes as "no great thing" (Junot, vol. i, p. 143). Another officer was therefore substituted for him as commander of Roches artillery, a fact made use of in the Erreurs (p. 31) to deny his having been dismissed--But a general re-classification of the generals was being made. The artillery generals were in excess of their establishment, and Bonaparte, as junior in age, was ordered on 13th June to join Hoche's army at Brest to command a brigade of infantry. All his efforts to get the order cancelled failed, and as he did not obey it he was struck off the list of employed general officers on the 15th of September 1795, the order of the 'Comite de Salut Public' being signed by Cambaceres, Berber, Merlin, and Boissy. His application to go to Turkey still, however, remained; and it is a curious thing that, on the very day he was struck off the list, the commission which had replaced the Minister of War recommended to the 'Comite de Saint Public' that he and his two aides de camp, Junot and Livrat, with other officers, under him, should be sent to Constantinople. So late as the 29th of September, twelve days later, this matter was being considered, the only question being as to any departmental objections to the other officers selected by him, a point which was just being settled. But on the 13th Vendemiaire (5th October 1795), or rather on the night before, only nineteen days after his removal, he was appointed second in command to Barras, a career in France was opened to him, and Turkey was no longer thought of.
