The defenders fired on the crowd in a long, rolling crackle of shots that echoed back from the surrounding buildings and then the cannon boomed out again, dashing swaths of men to the ground. Miraculously the royalist officer still lived, and he paused at the barricade to plant his banner before he drew his sword and swept it overhead to rally his nearest men.

‘Come on! One charge and the palace is ours!’

Junot calmly drew and cocked his pistol, stepped up to the barricade, thrust the weapon towards the man’s chest, and fired. The royalist fell back, a livid red stain spreading across his white coat. His sword clattered to the ground as the standard slipped and fell into Junot’s grasp. At once he snatched it and threw it on to the ground a short distance behind the barricade.

‘First blood to us, and one colour already taken,’ he called out to Napoleon.

But Napoleon’s attention was fixed on the enemy. He was standing with the nearest cannon directing the crew to aim to the left, where a section of the mob, having managed to escape the earlier blasts of grapeshot, was edging towards the barricade.The sergeant in charge of the gun stepped back and fired the weapon. The concussion from the blast punched into Napoleon’s ears as the cone of deadly lead shot cut the leading ranks to bloody shreds. All the time the infantry on either side of Napoleon loaded and fired their muskets into the mob at point-blank range, cutting the rebels down. Slowly, the mob stopped moving forward. A few amongst them still had the presence of mind to fire back, and some of them just waved their weapons and screamed with fury or tried to sound defiant as they cried their royalist slogans. But already scores of them were falling back, wide-eyed with horror at the slaughter and terrified of sharing the fate of the dead and mangled littering the cobbles of the Carrousel. The panic spread through the crowd like a wind rippling across a field of wheat and then they were all in retreat, more falling all the time as Napoleon’s men continued to fire after them.

He waited until only a handful of the rebels were left, huddled down behind the wagons in the square, before he gave the order to cease fire.The last patches of smoke cleared and revealed to the defenders the full scale of the destruction they had caused. The ground in front of the palace was covered with the still forms of the dead and the writhing bodies of the injured. Blood pooled around them, and lay splashed over clothes and flesh. Thin cries of agony and low moans rose from the carnage.

‘Good God, what have we done?’ muttered one of the gunners.