Despite the excesses
which he ever deplored, this second Revolution appeared to him to be
the dawn of a new and intelligent age. The clear-cut definitions of
the new political creed dovetailed in with his own rigid views of
life. Mankind was to be saved by law, society being levelled down and
levelled up until the ideals of Lycurgus were attained. Consequently
he regarded the Republic as a mighty agency for the social
regeneration not only of France, but of all peoples. His insular
sentiments were gradually merged in these vaster schemes.
Self-interest and the differentiating effects of party strifes
undoubtedly assisted the mental transformation; but it is clear that
the study of the "Social Contract" was the touchstone of his early
intellectual growth. He had gone to Rousseau's work to deepen his
Corsican patriotism: he there imbibed doctrines which drew him
irresistibly into the vortex of the French Revolution, and of its wars
of propaganda and conquest.

* * * * *

CHAPTER III

TOULON

When Buonaparte left Corsica for the coast of Provence, his career had
been remarkable only for the strange contrast between the brilliance
of his gifts and the utter failure of all his enterprises. His French
partisanship had, as it seemed, been the ruin of his own and his
family's fortunes. At the age of twenty-four he was known only as the
unlucky leader of forlorn hopes and an outcast from the island around
which his fondest longings had been entwined. His land-fall on the
French coast seemed no more promising; for at that time Provence was
on the verge of revolt against the revolutionary Government. Even
towns like Marseilles and Toulon, which a year earlier had been noted
for their republican fervour, were now disgusted with the course of
events at Paris. In the third climax of revolutionary fury, that of
June 2nd, 1793, the more enlightened of the two republican factions,
the Girondins, had been overthrown by their opponents, the men of the
Mountain, who, aided by the Parisian rabble, seized on power. Most of
the Departments of France resented this violence and took up arms. But
the men of the Mountain acted with extraordinary energy: they
proclaimed the Girondins to be in league with the invaders, and
blasted their opponents with the charge of conspiring to divide France
into federal republics. The Committee of Public Safety, now installed
in power at Paris, decreed a _levee en mass