LORD HOOD AT TOULON.*
ME occupation of Toulon by the British and Allied forces from August to December, 1793, at the invitation of the moderate Republicans and Royalists in the town, is a well-known episode, because the young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, played an active parts in the Jacobin army which besieged and retook the place. But Professor Rose's new account of the affair— based on the despatches and on the correspondence of Lord Hood, who commanded the British fleet in the Mediterranean— puts it in proper perspective and throws fresh light on the details. The failure of the Allies to retain the chief naval station of Southern France which fortune had placed in their hands was mainly due, of course, not to Napoleon but to their own interne- cine jealousies and to the incompetence of the Spanish and Neapolitan troops. Had Austria sent an army into Provence to co-operate with Hood's fleet the Jacobin levies would have been swept away and the revolt against the Convention might have spread far and wide. But Austria would not move until the Court of Turin agreed to give up a small piece of disputed territory on the Milanese border, and thus the golden oppor- tunity was lost. The only foreign troops who gave Hood any substantial help were the Piedmontose, who fought well. It appears, however, that Hood and the military commander, Lord Mulgrave, misled the Government at home by their cheerful optimism, and encouraged Pitt and Dundas to believe that Toulon needed no reinforcements. The consequence was that, while the Jacobins were hastily strengthening their forces outside Toulon, Dundee ordered Hood to send away two of his best • Lord Rood and the Defenc4 of Toulon. By J. Holland Bose. Cambridge : st the University Preis. LIOs. net.] regiments to Gibraltar for the West Indies. The troops were afterwards ordered to return, but there was so much delay that they did not reach Toulon till long, after the evacuation. Further, Hood, with the best intentions, detached so many of, his ships
on missions to Genoa, Tunis and elsewhere, that he had a very inadequate force left when the crisis came.
Napoleon did not display such exceptional skill in the direction of the Jacobin artillery as is commonly supposed. He was a trained gunner and a brave man in an army of amateurs and cowards. In the last sortie of ,the besiegers, for example, a whole French division broke and ran away when attacked by a few hundred Allied troops led by a detachment of the Royals.
Napoleon is always praised for his recognition of the fact that, if the Allies could be driven from the western peninsula over- looking the inner roadstead of Toulon, the British fleet would be compelled to make for the open sea to escape destruction. Lord Mulgrave had seen the importance of the peninsula from the first, and had occupied the heights of La Grasse in September, 1793, and built a small fort, called after him. The fort, however, was not completed, owing to the incompetence of the Spanish general entrusted with the command of the position, and it was very weakly held. When the Jacobins attacked it early in the morning of December 17th they outnumbered the 700 defenders by about ten to one. Even then, although Bonaparte himself led the reserve column to the attack, they might have been repulsed had not the Spanish troops run away, while the Spanish general in the rear refused to send reinforcements. Napoleon had all the luck, as on many later occasions. Professor Rose points out also that this defeat might not have been conclusive had not the hill fort to the north of Toulon been surprised and taken almost at the same time by the French army operating on the east of the town. The garrison was reduced to 1,500 effeetives and could not hope to recover the lost positions from which the town and harbour were commanded. Napoleon's real merit lay, not so much in the capture of Fort Mulgrave as in the persistence with which he constructed battery after battery along the western shore of the roadstead and subjected Hood's fleet to incessant bombardment. Hood soon found out, like his successors at Gallipoli, that ships, and especially big ships, were unequally matched against forts. One of Napoleon's
guns had a range of over three miles, and his fire was far more accurate than that of the ships could possibly be. Sir Sidney Smith, the future hero of Acre, told Lord Auckland in a letter that the ' Princess Royal ' had been firing for three weeks at a
two-gun battery " without making any impression on the heap of sand of which it was formed, while every shot from the shore struck some part of her rigging and hulL" We are particularly interested in what Professor Rose says about the effect produced in Toulon and throughout Provence by the Allied intervention. It paralysed the anti-Jacobins and gained for their opponents the support of most Frenchmen.
General O'Hara, who had succeeded Mulgrave, wrote to Dorados, in November, 1793 :—
" The people of this country from the first arrival of the English have never taken any active part in supporting the common cause. A want of energy pervades the whole. They seem solely to depend on the combined forces for their defence, and on their humanity for their subsistence ; and I am told that this apathy extends to the whole of this and the neighbouring provinces."
There were large numbers of moderate Republican and Royalist refugees who had fled from the Red Terror to Toulon, but few of them could or would fight side by side with the Allies against their countrymen. Most of them were a source of embarrass-
ment to the Allied troops, who openly expressed their contempt for the Toulonese and were hated in return. Bonaparte had predicted in his first pamphlet, Le Souper de Beaucaire, that the party which called in a foreign fleet to its aid would live to repent of its unpatriotic action. " If you do that, you will in a week have sixty thousand patriots ranged against you." Bonaparte was right. Frenchmen, who had no sympathy with
the ferocious doctrinaires of Paris, nevertheless felt humiliated by the foreign occupation of the great French naval station.
The Jacobins, detested though they were, could profit by this sentiment of nationality. Even the cruel massacres perpetrated by Freron and Barras on the inhabitants who did not leave Toulon with the Allies failed to check this patriotic movement. The dockyard and the fleet, which Hood and his Spanish col- league had failed to destroy utterly when they had the chance, were rapidly repaired and reconstructed. Ten months later Nelson wrote, " The French have put together a fleet at Toulon
which could hardly be credited." The. Allied intervention in French domestic quarrels helped the faction against whom it was directed and injured the party whom it was designed to assist. •
Previous page
