Regarding the insurrection/revolt on 13 Vendimaire AN IV (5 October 1795) and the numbers of insurgents involved the following might be helpful: Vincent Cronin in his biography of Napoleon, entitled Napoleon Bonaparte: An Intimate Biography (published in 1971), the numbers of insurgents/rebels is given as 30,000. The numbers fielded to support the government is given as 5,000 regular troops and 3,000 militiamen.-85. Andre Castelot in his biography Napoleon (published in 1967) gives the number of insurgents/rebels as 30,000 which were faced by 5,000 regulars, 1,500 gendarmes and police, and 1,500 men forming a ‘sacred’ battalion. To the insurgents the latter were said to be ‘terrorists.’-50. Andrew Roberts in his Napoleon the Great (published in 2014) states that the insurgents/rebels, termed ‘sectionnaires, numbered 30,000 faced by 4,500 loyal troops and 1,500 ‘patriots’, gendarmes and veterans from Les Invalides.-66. Roberts does list Cronin’s biography in his bibliography, but not Castelot’s. Cronin does not list Castelot’s. All three of these are superior, and much more accurate, than Schom’s (2001), McLynn’s (2003), Barnett’s (1978), and Dwyer’s (2009) biographies of Napoleon. Broers (2018), while an excellent biography, barely mentions Vendemaire. Cronin, Roberts, and Castelot all mention the same number of insurgents that attempted to overthrow the French government. The rising was brought on by a number of factors, not the least of which was the adoption of a new constitution of AN III and the replacement of the Convention by the new Directory. Royalists made up a large part of the insurgent Sectionnaires. Napoleon had little time for armed mobs, and he had seen at least one in bloody action at the storming of the Tuileries and the massacre of the Swiss Guard in 1792 defending an empty palace. ‘Take two hundred horses, go immediately to the Plaine des Sablons, and bring back the forty cannons and the artillery park. We must have them here. Use your sabers, if you have to, but bring them here! You answer to me for it if you don’t! Now get going.’-Napoleon to Murat. Regarding the artillery emplaced in the Rue Neuve-St-Roche, facing the Church, Thiebault stated afterwards: ‘Their fire enfiladed the street. When, in this way, the cannons had felled or blasted aside everything and everybody in view, a thousand men of the patriot battalion, followed by a battalion of infantry, emerged from the dead-end street and attached those sectionnaires who still remained in front of the church and were occupying the Rue St. Honore. The shock was violent, and there was hand-to-hand fighting. But our troops gained ground, and six pieces of ordnance were immediately placed in battery, three to the right and three to the left of the dead-end street. They completed the routing of the sectionnaires, who fled toward the Place Vendome and the Palais Royal…’ ‘If you treat the mob with kindness, these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable; if you hang a few, they get tired of the game, and become as submissive and humble as they ought to be.’-Napoleon to Joseph. Regarding Vincent Cronin’s biography of Napoleon, I don’t agree with the various negative ‘assessments’ of the volume, particularly regarding sourcing and the Appendix of the evaluation of memoirs. If anyone reads the subject appendix, it is quite obvious that Cronin was very familiar with the memoirs evaluated which indicates not only did he read them, they were evaluated in a scholarly manner and the conclusions drawn, especially by those that were ghost-written, are valid. Anyone interested can evaluate Cronin’s work with Jean Tulard’s similar work on period memoirs. The conclusion that I have come to is that criticism of Cronin’s work is because of the fact that the biography is sympathetic to Napoleon and those who continually cast Napoleon’s character in a bad light cannot tolerate anything either complimentary or sympathetic to Napoleon. And that is, at the very least, ahistorical. The final question is, how many biographies of Napoleon have people read? There aren’t ‘thousands’ of them in existence and there are more available than those that have been mentioned in this essay. And some are reliable and some are not, and Cronin’s most certainly is. Is his work error free? Of course not. But it is a valid work and another arrow in the quiver of our knowledge of the Emperor and his times. And he should be judged by the norms and moral of his times, and not by those of the early twenty-first century.
