EVENING
XVII
THE LAST HOUR
The end was at hand when Bonaparte crossed the river Po. One is apt to forget that he had already showed himself to be much more than a victorious
1796. Rom. ix. 284.
general, and that throughout the campaign he displayed that marvellous skill in dealing with men which so often ensured him an enthusiastic reception in places where he could not have been expected to be welcome.
He had soon realised the horrible impression produced everywhere outside of France by the Revolution, the Terror, and the Committee of Public Safety, and he hastened, by his numberless agents, to exalt the virtues of the Directory. They were not a herd of bloodthirsty ruffians, he taught, but an assemblage of the future saviours of mankind, who were to emancipate the world from all those ancient political and social prejudices which had so long held it in bondage.
He could not unteach the scum of the Italian populace what the agents of the Revolution had taught it with such lavish expenditure in disreputable taverns and worse resorts, but he could control the teachers and gradually change the direction of the education. The Venetian gondoliers could be taught something, too, and the Venetian Barnabotti could be bribed to learn anything, and to impart what they learned.
‘No organisation,’ says Bonnal, ‘was ever superior to his (Bonaparte’s), no revolutionary organisation was ever more formidable. We mean “revolutionary” as regards the legitimate governments
Bonnal, Chute d’une République, 273-274.
existing in Italy, with which we were not at war, and as regards the means used.... It was at Milan that his system became a definite official service, both political and military. Thence arose two principal offices exactly answering the aim he was pursuing, that is, the political propaganda and the military propaganda. By means of the political propaganda he sought to bring about either the substitution of one domination for another, or the modification of the forms of government.... Lombardy is an example of the first case, the Italian Duchies of the second. By his military propaganda he roused the populations to arms, sometimes against the legitimate sovereign, as happened in Venice and Parma, sometimes against a foreign power, as at Milan.’