French expedition to Sardinia

• 1. Introduction

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  The French expedition to Sardinia turned bloody on the 22nd of January 1793, when defenders at Cagliari opened fire on an approaching French boat crew. The party, an officer and 20 men, lost 17 killed, and survivors sheltered behind a neutral Swedish merchantman.

  Laurent Jean François Truguet, the French counter-admiral commanding the operation, had sent the boat to demand Cagliari's surrender. The town's defenders were gathered that day for the feast of Saint Ephesius, and refused to yield. Sardinia was neutral in the new war among European powers, and Paris expected an easy victory there. The island was strategically placed in the Mediterranean and thought ripe for quick capture.

  Instead the French were beaten back twice, once at Cagliari in the south and again at La Maddalena in the north. At La Maddalena, an unknown Corsican lieutenant named Napoleon Bonaparte saw his first military action. What turned a campaign built on confidence into a double defeat? And how did the failure on Sardinia ripple all the way back to the French naval base at Toulon?

• 2. A Doomed Errand

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  In April 1792 France declared war on the Austrian Empire and its ally, the Kingdom of Prussia, opening what became the French Revolutionary Wars. The Kingdom of Sardinia, split between Savoy and Piedmont on the mainland and the island itself, took no part in that coalition. Even so, French planners marked the island as a primary target for their first Mediterranean offensive. French strategists believed capturing the island would frighten the Sardinian mainland and the rest of the Italian peninsula, while spreading republicanism beyond French borders. Orders went out for an expeditionary force to assemble at Toulon, France's main Mediterranean naval base.

  Truguet struggled for months to raise enough troops, since France and its navy were consumed by social and political upheaval. It was not until December 1792 that a sufficient force had been prepared. Truguet's squadron then sailed with the army aboard transport ships, reaching Cagliari on the southern coast on the 21st of December 1792.

  On Sardinia, word of the coming French attack had arrived months earlier, yet King Victor Amadeus III in Turin sent little reinforcement. He worried that a larger garrison might look like a provocation to the French. The Sardinian people, devout Catholics, were angered by the persecution of Catholic clergy that followed the French Revolution. In response, the local government, known as the Stamenti, raised more than 4,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry, though the garrison was very short of artillery.

• 3. Storms Over Cagliari

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  Thirty-six French vessels had barely entered the Golfo di Cagliari when a violent storm scattered them, sinking several troop transports outright. The rest of the battered fleet was driven to Palmas, on Sardinia's southwestern coast. There Truguet landed troops on the small islands of San Pietro and Sant'Antioco, both of which surrendered without a fight. Landing parties sent onto the Sardinian mainland fared worse, driven off by militia sniping down from the hillsides.

  Sardinians credited their salvation to Saint Thomas the Apostle, since the storm had struck on his feast day. Truguet spent a month gathered off Palmas, rebuilding his battered fleet for a second attempt.

  Truguet, furious over the bloodshed, ordered a heavy bombardment of Cagliari on the 25th of January. By then his fleet had grown to 82 vessels, including 41 troop transports, the largest force he would muster in the campaign. Sardinian shore batteries, firing heated shot, badly damaged several French ships without the French managing to seriously damage the town. Truguet's ships withdrew battered from the harbor, but his soldiers were about to try their luck on land at Quartu Sant'Elena.

• 4. Blood At Quartu Sant'Elena

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  On the 11th of February a French detachment put 1,200 soldiers ashore at Quartu Sant'Elena, advancing west toward Cagliari. Sardinian cavalry drove them back, while separate attacks on the Cagliari lazaretto and a tower at Calamosca were also beaten off.

  Truguet kept landing reinforcements until 5,000 French troops were encamped outside Quartu Sant'Elena. On the 15th of February his fleet's heavy artillery supported a fresh attack on the town and Calamosca, but again without success. Grapeshot fired from improvised barricades tore into the force attacking Quartu Sant'Elena, sending it retreating in disarray, while a Sardinian counter-attack defeated the other column.

  Truguet pulled his men back to the beachhead, leaving 300 dead and 100 prisoners in Sardinian hands. The victorious Sardinians were said to have dismembered the dead French soldiers and carried their body parts around as trophies.

  On the 16th and the 17th of February Truguet bombarded Cagliari once more, to little effect. On the second day another storm scattered his fleet, wrecking the 74-gun ship of the line Léopard after it was driven ashore. Truguet then abandoned the entire operation, loading his soldiers back onto the ships and sailing for France. He left 800 men and two frigates behind to hold San Pietro and Sant'Antioco. That garrison's fate would not be settled for another three months.

• 5. Napoleon's First Battle

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  While Truguet's fleet struggled off Cagliari, a second French force was preparing to strike La Maddalena, a small, heavily fortified island off Sardinia's northern coast. This force drew heavily on Corsica, the French-held island to the north under the de facto command of independence advocate Pasquale Paoli.

  Corsica had been invaded and captured by a French army in 1768, and Paoli was now pressing for greater autonomy after the Revolution. It was his plan to send the northern force as a diversion from Truguet's assault on the capital, aimed squarely at La Maddalena. 450 Corsican volunteers were mustered under the command of Paoli's nephew, Colonna Cesari. His second deputy was a young Corsican artillery officer and political rival of Paoli, the head of the Bonaparte family, Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Storms at Ajaccio delayed the force, and it did not reach La Maddalena until the 22nd of February 1793, anchoring in the Santo Stefano channel. Napoleon pushed for a night attack, but Cesari overruled him. The next morning French-Corsican troops seized Santo Stefano and used its fort to bombard La Maddalena on the 24th of February. Cesari announced plans for an amphibious landing the following day.

  That night, a mutiny was reported aboard a corvette accompanying the force, and Cesari immediately withdrew, abandoning both the attack and Santo Stefano. Napoleon was furious, since Cesari never warned him, nearly leaving him and his men stranded and exposed to a Sardinian counter-attack. During the retreat, his men were forced to spike and abandon their cannon when too few boats arrived to carry them off. Napoleon later accused Cesari of faking the mutiny on Paoli's orders, a suspicion that would poison Corsican politics in the months ahead.

• 6. Revolt, Rebellion, And An Emperor's Rise

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  Three months after Truguet and Cesari had both withdrawn, the campaign's final act unfolded on the islands of San Pietro and Sant'Antioco. A Spanish fleet of 23 ships under Admiral Juan de Lángara sailed from Cartagena and arrived off the islands on the 25th of May. Spain had gone to war with France in March 1793, and the vastly outnumbered French garrison surrendered. The frigate Hélène was captured trying to break the Spanish blockade. The Richmond's crew set her ablaze and scuttled her instead, rather than let her be captured.

  On Sardinia, the island's stubborn defense emboldened the Stamenti to press King Victor Amadeus III for greater autonomy, after he himself invited a formal appeal. A deputation presented a list of demands to the king, but he and Viceroy Carlo Balbiano flatly refused every point. Furious, the Sardinian people rose up. In April 1794 the Viceroy's arrest of two insurrection leaders sparked a riot. The rioters stormed the Castle of San Michele and freed the prisoners. Victor Amadeus was forced into concessions, though violence continued on the island until 1796. Two years later his successor, King Charles Emmanuel IV, would flee to Sardinia when the War of the Second Coalition broke out.

  On Corsica, the recriminations that followed the failure at La Maddalena drove the Buonaparte faction from the island, and Napoleon narrowly survived an assassination attempt. The National Convention's efforts to hold Paoli accountable broke down his relationship with the French government and triggered a large-scale rebellion. French troops on Corsica were pushed back into three fortified positions on the northern coast. A British force invaded Corsica in early 1794 and defeated the French there. Paoli seceded, agreeing to fold Corsica into the British Empire as a self-governing kingdom. Political conflict later drove Paoli into exile in late 1795. The British stayed on Corsica until late 1796, when the island rejoined the French Republic.

  In France, the defeat brought Truguet back to Paris to answer to the National Convention, with Trogoff de Kerlessy taking temporary command of the fleet. Morale collapsed among the sailors and civil authorities at Toulon, deepening tensions already stretched by the Revolution. A wave of mutinies and public executions followed as the Reign of Terror gathered pace. When ordered in June to attack Lángara's fleet off Toulon, Trogoff refused. He was certain his crews would not put to sea, and said he would wait for Truguet's return. In July a large British fleet arrived under Vice-Admiral Lord Hood, and political authority in Toulon collapsed entirely. The Girondist civil government declared for the exiled French monarchy. It invited the British to occupy the town and seize the fleet on the 18th of August. Trogoff went along with the occupation despite a revolt among his own sailors.

  French Republican forces then besieged the city. The climactic assault that retook the heights above Toulon in December 1793 was led by Napoleon Bonaparte, who was wounded in the fighting. The wounded lieutenant would go on to become one of the Republic's most effective generals, then seize control of France and crown himself Emperor.