United States or Solomon Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They styled the place Fort Mulgrave. It was speedily flanked by three redoubts. To Buonaparte this contemptuous defiance was insufferable: he spoke and Salicetti wrote of the siege as destitute both of brains and means. Thereupon the Paris legates began to represent Carteaux as an incapable and demand his recall.
Carteaux with some 8,000 men held the hills between Toulon and Ollioules, while a corps 3,000 strong, under Lapoype, observed the fortress on the side of La Valette.
In this interval, while Buonaparte remained, according to the best authority, within reach of Avignon, securing artillery supplies and writing a political pamphlet in support of the Jacobins, Carteaux had, on August twenty-fifth, 1793, taken Marseilles. The capture was celebrated by one of the bloodiest orgies of that horrible year.
From two to three o'clock, general Carteaux, who occupied the Pont Neuf with four hundred men and two four-pounders, was surrounded by several columns of sectionaries, who obliged him to retire on the Louvre. This advantage emboldened the insurgents, who were strong on all points. General Danican summoned the convention to withdraw its troops, and disarm the terrorists.
The works and guns at Nice being inadequate and almost worthless, he was probably sent to secure supplies from the stores of Avignon when it should be conquered. Such were the straits of the needy republican general that he immediately appointed his visitor to the command of a strong body of flying artillery. In the first attack on the town Carteaux received a check.
Everywhere the Convention had to send its troops to re-establish peace by force, and to compel the people to submit to its rule. Whole army corps had to be raised to win back to the republic the rebellious cities, and only after hard fighting did General Carteaux subdue Marseilles.
From the very moment of his arrival this simple but clever conception had been urged on the council of war by Buonaparte. But Carteaux could not and would not see its importance: it was not until a skilled commander took charge that Buonaparte's insight was justified and his plan adopted.
Lapoype and Carteaux quarreled bitterly, and there was such confusion that Buonaparte ended by squarely disobeying his superior and taking many minor movements into his own hand; he was so cocksure that artillery alone would end the siege that the general dubbed him Captain Cannon.
In the dialogue the officer gives most excellent military advice to the representative of Marseilles on the impossibility of their resisting the old soldiers of Carteaux. The Marseilles citizen argues but feebly, and is alarmed at the officer's representations; while his threat to call in the Spaniards turns the other speakers against him.
The successor of Carteaux, the old General Dugommier, recognizing the superior mind of the young chief of battalion, willingly followed his plans, and was readily guided and led by the surer insight of the young man. The position of new Gibraltar had to be conquered so as to secure the fall of Toulon; such was, such remained Napoleon's unswerving judgment.
Word Of The Day