Due to his success in quelling the insurgency in Paris, Napoleon was appointed as the commander of the Army of the Interior in March 1796, and he earned wealth and patronage from the new government due to his military brilliance. He succeeded in defeating the insurgents within four months.Ī new government called the French Directory headed by Barras emerged in 1795.
Napoleon was assigned by French political Paul Barras, who had been given full military powers, to defend the convention. This refusal resulted in his name being stricken out from the list of general officers in September 1795.Ī More Prominent Role in the French Directory During the Middle Years of the French Revolutionĭiscontent grew in Paris due to the unfavorable means of implementing the new constitution introduced by the National Convention. He was assigned to fight a rebellion in Vendée but refused the order to focus instead on the topographic section of the army.
However, during the same year, due to allegations that he was part of a faction that supported the revolutionary albeit radical leader Maximilien Robespierre of the Montagnard Convention that led the National Convention, he was briefly imprisoned but later released. Napoleon was specifically assigned to the French Army in Italy in 1794. The French Republic rewarded Napoleon by promoting him as general of the brigade. The Republican forces emerged victoriously. This new government had tasked Napoleon to command an artillery brigade during the Siege of Toulon in 1793 in which the Republican forces clashed against a Royalist rebellion. Take note that the French Republic already existed in 1792 following the establishment of the National Assembly and the abolishment of the French monarchy. However, note that he and his family fled to Marseilles in 1793 after he came into conflict with Corsican nationalist Pasquale Paoli. He subsequently aligned himself with the French Revolution in 1789. Napoleon was later assigned to the Valence garrison in the southeast of France where he spent most of the next seven years on furlough in Corsica. He later became a second lieutenant in the first artillery regiment in 1785. Take note that prior to the insurgency, he was training to become a member of the French Army. It is important to highlight the fact that Napoleon did not play a principal role during the formative years of the French Revolution. Read the legislative texts which established le Calendrier Républicain.The Role of Napoleon in the French Army During the Early Years of the French Revolution The calendar was one of the great reforms undertaken by the national Convention, like the Metric system. The Eiffel Tower shown at right was built in commemoration of the French Revolution, and was built for the Paris World’s Fair in 1889. The poets contributed the name of the days, choosing the names of plants, domestic animals and tools the months rhyme three by three, according to the "sonority" of the seasons. The mathematicians contributed equal month division, and a decimal measures of time. The calendar was adopted more than one year after the advent of the First Republic (there was no year 1), after a long debate involving the mathematicians Romme and Monge, the poets Chénier and Fabre d’ Eglantine and the painter David. The French also established a new clock, in which the day was divided in ten hours of a hundred minutes of a hundred seconds - exactly 100,000 seconds per day. It was used again briefly during under the Paris Commune in 1871. The French Revolutionary Calendar (or Republican Calendar) was officially adopted in France on Octoand abolished on 1 January 1806 by Emperor Napoleon I.