13 Vendémiaire

Journée du 13 Vendémiaire. Artillery fire in front of the Église Saint-Roch, Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris

Following the fall of the Robespierres in the July 1794 Thermidorian Reaction, Bonaparte was put under house arrest at Nice for his association with the brothers. He was released within two weeks and due to his technical skills was asked to draw-up plans to attack Italian positions in the context of France's war with Austria. He also took part in an expedition to take back Corsica from the British, but the French were repulsed by the Royal Navy.
Bonaparate became engaged to Désirée Clary, whose sister, Julie Clary, married Bonaparte's elder brother Joseph; the Clarys were a wealthy merchant family from Marseilles. In April 1795, he was assigned to the Army of the West, which was engaged in the War in the Vendée—a civil war and royalist counter-revolution in Vendée, a region in west central France, on the Atlantic Ocean. As an infantry command, it was a demotion from artillery general - for which the army already had a full quota - and he pleaded poor health to avoid the posting. He was moved to the Bureau of Topography of the Committee of Public Safety and sought, unsuccessfully, to be transferred to Constantinople in order to offer his services to the Sultan. During this period he wrote a romantic novella, Clisson et Eugénie, about a soldier and his lover, in a clear parallel to Bonaparte's own relationship with Désirée. On 15 September, Bonaparte was removed from the list of generals in regular service for his refusal to serve in the Vendée campaign. He now faced a difficult financial situation and reduced career prospects.
On 3 October, royalists in Paris declared a rebellion against the National Convention after they were excluded from a new government, the Directory. One of the leaders of the Thermidorian Reaction, Paul Barras, knew of Bonaparte's military exploits at Toulon and gave him command of the improvised forces in defence of the Convention in the Tuileries Palace. Bonaparte had witnessed the massacre of the King's Swiss Guard there three years earlier and realised artillery would be the key to its defence. He ordered a young cavalry officer, Joachim Murat, to seize large cannons and used them to repel the attackers on 5 October 1795—13 Vendémiaire An IV in the French Republican Calendar. One thousand four hundred royalists died, and the rest fled. He had cleared the streets with "a whiff of grapeshot", according to the 19th century historian Thomas Carlyle in The French Revolution: A History.
The defeat of the Royalist insurrection extinguished the threat to the Convention and earned Bonaparte sudden fame, wealth, and the patronage of the new Directory; Murat would become his brother-in-law and one of his generals. Bonaparte was promoted to Commander of the Interior and given command of the Army of Italy. Within weeks he was romantically attached to Barras's former mistress, Joséphine de Beauharnais, whom he married on 9 March 1796 after he had broken off his engagement to Désirée Clary.