Grapeshot at Saint-Roch

Napoleon first became famous for routing the British navy out of Toulon in 1793.   This is the view (without the cars) that he would have had in 1795 during his second great exploit, routing protesting Frenchmen in the streets of Paris.   He’d been charged with stopping royalist insurgents who were bent on bringing down the Revolutionary government.  The insurgents were warned that cannon were in place, yet they charged forward in the narrow streets.  Napoleon gave the order to fire, and small musket balls sprayed the rioting citizens.   The battle culminated in the royalists’ last stand in front of the Paris church of Saint-Roch.  To this day, the building bears pockmarks from the deadly grapeshot.

Should Napoleon be considered a war criminal for firing on his own country’s citizens?  It’s often a mistake to use today’s moral standards to judge historical events, plus this was a violent mob trying to bring down the government and reinstate former tyrants.  After all, some might consider Lincoln a war criminal for fighting the southern states’ succession. But then doesn’t Quaddafi use the same justification against Libyan insurgents today? Time and again, Napoleon walked the line between honorable and criminal.

Whatever the moral questions are, Napoleon’s swift actions on that day saved the French Revolution and quashed the return of the monarchy—until the fall of his own empire almost twenty years later.