Paul Barras

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul Barras, born on the 30th of June 1755 in the small Provencal town of Fox-Amphoux, rose from a noble family to become the most powerful executive in revolutionary France. At a moment when the nation was tearing itself apart, he stood at the center of every critical turning point. He survived Robespierre. He crushed a royalist uprising in the streets of Paris. He introduced a young artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte to the woman Bonaparte would marry. And then, when that same Bonaparte seized power in 1799, Barras found himself discarded, confined, and exiled. How does a man go from commanding France to being interned in Montpellier? The answer runs through decades of revolution, war, ambition, and the kind of intimate political maneuvering that reshapes nations.

• 2. A Soldier Abroad

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  At sixteen, Barras entered the regiment of Languedoc as a gentleman cadet, beginning a military path that would carry him far from Provence. In 1776 he sailed for French India, and the voyage itself nearly ended everything. He was shipwrecked, yet still managed to reach Pondicherry. He arrived in time to take part in the city's defense during the Second Anglo-Mysore War, where British forces besieged the garrison. The city surrendered on the 18th of October 1778, and after the French garrison was released, Barras returned home. He was not finished with the region. In 1782 and 1783 he served again in the area, this time in the fleet of Admiral Pierre Andre de Suffren, a commander of considerable renown. After that second expedition, Barras spent several years back in France in relative obscurity, a nobleman between wars, waiting for the event that would change his life entirely.

• 3. Revolution and the Convention

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  When the Revolution broke out in 1789, Barras aligned himself with the democratic cause and became one of the administrators of the Var. In June 1792 he took his seat in the high national court at Orleans. Later that year, as the French Revolutionary Wars erupted, he was sent as a commissioner to the French Army facing Sardinian forces on the Italian Peninsula, and entered the National Convention as a deputy for the Var. In January 1793 he voted with the majority for the execution of Louis XVI. His work kept him largely away from Paris, on missions through the south-east of France. It was during one of those missions that he encountered Napoleon Bonaparte at the Siege of Toulon. The meeting would prove consequential, though Barras later went to considerable lengths to minimize it. In his Memoirs, he described the siege as 30,000 men against a minor royalist defending force; the real number of French troops was 12,000, a discrepancy that suggests just how deliberately he reshaped his own account when his rivalry with Bonaparte deepened.

• 4. The Fall of Robespierre

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  In 1794, Barras chose a side in what would become the defining political rupture of the Terror. He joined the men who moved against Maximilien Robespierre's faction, and the Thermidorian Reaction of the 27th of July 1794 lifted him directly into prominence. When the Convention found itself threatened by discontented National Guards of Paris the following year, it turned to Barras to command its defense. His decision to nominate Bonaparte for the task led to a forceful response in the streets near the Tuileries Palace. Royalists and malcontents were dispersed in what history records as the 13 Vendemiaire, the 5th of October 1795. That episode demonstrated something about Barras: he understood that political survival required choosing capable subordinates, then using them decisively. The Directory, the executive regime of five Directors that emerged in the aftermath, made Barras one of its members.

• 5. Joséphine and Bonaparte's Rise

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  Barras's intimate relationship with Josephine de Beauharnais became one of the most politically consequential personal connections of the era. He helped facilitate the marriage between Josephine and Bonaparte, a union that some of his contemporaries attributed directly to his desire to move Josephine toward a new arrangement. Whether or not that suspicion was well founded, Barras did nominate Bonaparte to command the Army of Italy early in 1796. Bonaparte's military successes there delivered something the Directory badly needed: stability. The regime had struggled to consolidate authority, but the Italian campaigns changed the calculus. When royalist and surviving Girondist opposition moved against the government in the summer of 1797, Bonaparte responded from afar. He dispatched General Charles-Pierre Augereau, a Jacobin officer, to Paris, where Augereau suppressed the opposition in the Coup of 18 Fructidor on the 4th of September 1797. The man Barras had promoted was now the instrument on which the entire government depended.

• 6. Corruption, Collapse, and Exile

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  Barras was alleged to have dozens of mistresses and male lovers, and the corruption of his administration was described as extraordinary even by the standards of the period. His reputation for personal excess and political venality became inseparable from the Directory's broader failures. When Bonaparte launched the 18 Brumaire coup in November 1799, he met little resistance, and Barras, who had supported the change of government, found himself set aside by the new First Consul. He had amassed a large fortune over the years, and he spent his later life in a luxury tainted by constraint. Napoleon confined him to the Chateau de Grosbois, which was Barras's own property, then exiled him to Brussels, then Rome, and finally in 1810 interned him in Montpellier. After the Empire fell, Barras was set free. He died in Chaillot, now part of Paris, and was interred in Pere Lachaise Cemetery on the 29th of January 1829. Though he had supported the Second Restoration, neither Louis XVIII nor Charles X extended him real influence. His Memoirs, the account he had labored to shape, were censored after his death.