13 Vendémiaire — the grapeshot of Saint-Roch — 5 octobre 1795

The royalist sections of Paris marched on the Convention. Barras entrusted its defence to General Bonaparte, who had Murat bring up the guns from the Sablons camp and swept the insurgents away with grapeshot outside the church of Saint-Roch. Within hours he had won command of the Army of the Interior and the lasting attention of the emerging Directory.

The decree of two thirds

The dying Convention wanted to secure the Republic against a royalist return, the royalists being in the majority in the Paris sections since the Thermidorian reaction. In August 1795 it voted the decree of two thirds, reserving two thirds of the future legislature's seats for its own members. The sections saw this as a confiscation and rose.

The guns of the Sablons

On 12 Vendémiaire some twenty-five thousand insurgents marched on the Tuileries; the Convention had only five thousand men to oppose them. Barras, charged with the defence, remembered a young Corsican general in disgrace since Thermidor and sent for him. Bonaparte accepted on one condition: a free hand.

During the night he sent a squadron commander named Murat to fetch the forty guns parked at the Sablons camp in Neuilly; they arrived ahead of the insurgents, who had had the same idea. He then placed the artillery at the approaches to the Tuileries, among them the Rue Saint-Honoré, overlooked by the great staircase of the church of Saint-Roch.

A career revived in an hour

On the evening of 13 Vendémiaire, 5 October 1795, the sectional columns refused to disperse. Grapeshot fired at point-blank range; in under an hour the rising was broken, at the cost of about three hundred dead. The marks on the façade of Saint-Roch are still visible.

Days later Bonaparte was a divisional general and commander-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, at twenty-six. It was in the salons of this period that he met Joséphine; in March 1796 he was given the Army of Italy.