And so, ingloriously for the Allies, ended the first coalition against Revolutionary France. The young Republic was for the moment saved; yet it must have been hard to think that the salvation could be more than temporary, so many and so strong were her foes. Her crisis brought forth, for her rescue, the extraordinary being whom most historians agree in deeming the greatest military genius in the whole course of man's story--Napoleon Bonaparte, born, as we have seen, in that little island of Corsica only lately ceded to France by Genoa. It is ever difficult to say to what degree this or that remarkable man has influenced the story of mankind, but we can hardly {164} have a doubt of the immense effect due to the genius of Napoleon. He came into notice first in course of the attack by the Republican troops on Toulon, which was held by Royalists aided by some English and Spanish ships. He was a Colonel of Artillery then, and conducted certain artillery operations with a masterly success. After the death of Robespierre the chief power in the Government was put into the hands of a Council of five Directors. Together, they were called the Directory. It was their special business to see that the laws were carried out. The Paris mob did not appreciate the carrying out of the laws, and rose in protest, with the militia, called the National Guard, supporting them. They marched on the Tuileries, where the Government offices were established. The President, warned in time, summoned that young officer of artillery, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was then in Paris, with his batteries, for their defence. Napoleon placed his guns to command the streets approaching the Tuileries, and when the columns of the mob appeared he opened fire on them with grapeshot. Grapeshot: consider the effect of it on those dense columns of humanity advancing through a street! Even the Paris mob, frantic with enthusiasm, could not stand such butchery. They wavered, halted, then streamed back, mangled and beaten. The Directory, the Government of the country, was saved. The reputation of that artillery officer, first heard of at Toulon, was made. He was appointed to the command of what was known as the Army of the Interior. [Sidenote: France and the kings] It was in 1795 that Prussia had made peace, that Austria had yielded the Netherlands, and that all immediate danger to France from the north had passed. And it was in the same year that the "whiff of grapeshot" ploughed its furrows through these living masses, {165} and may be said to have ended the French Revolution, properly so-called. From that time forward the story is not of revolution in the heart of France but of France struggling with, and strangling, the kings of Europe. And the struggle and the strangling are all dominated by one man and his amazing personality--Napoleon. {166} CHAPTER XIII THE NAPOLEONIC WARS