The affairs, however, of the Austrians were in such a condition, that it could hardly be said whether the party who declared for peace, to obtain some respite from the distresses of the country, or those who wished to continue war with the chances of success which we have indicated, advised the least embarrassing course. The Court of Vienna finally adopted the alternative of treaty, and that of Leoben was set on foot.
Generals Bellegarde and Merfield, on the part of the Emperor, presented themselves at the headquarters of Buonaparte, 13th April, 1797, and announced the desire of their sovereign for peace. Buonaparte granted a suspension of arms, to endure for five days only; which was afterwards extended, when the probability of the definitive treaty of peace was evident.
It is affirmed, that in the whole discussions respecting this most important armistice, Napoleon—as a conqueror, whose victories had been in a certain degree his own, whose army had been supported and paid from the resources of the country which he conquered, who had received reinforcements from France only late and reluctantly, and who had recruited his army by new levies among the republicanized Italians—maintained an appearance of independence of the Government of France. He had, even at this period, assumed a freedom of thought and action, the tenth part of the suspicion attached to which would have cost the most popular general his head in the times of Danton and Robespierre. But, though acquired slowly, and in counteraction to the once overpowering, and still powerful, democratic influence, the authority of Buonaparte was great; and, indeed, the power which a conquering general attains, by means of his successes, in the bosom of his soldiers, becomes soon formidable to any species of government, where the soldier is not intimately interested in the liberties of the subject.
Yet it must not be supposed that Napoleon exhibited publicly any of that spirit of independence which the Directory appear to have dreaded, and which, according to the opinion which he himself intimates, seems to have delayed the promised co-operation, which was to be afforded by the eastern armies on the banks of the Rhine. Far from testifying such a feeling, his assertion of the rights of the Republic was decidedly striking, of which the following is a remarkable instance. The Austrian commissioner, in hopes to gain some credit for the admission, had stated in the preliminary articles of the convention, as a concession of consequence, that his Imperial Majesty acknowledged the French Government in its present state. "Strike out that condition," said Buonaparte sternly, "the French Republic is like the sun in heaven. The misfortune lies with those who are so blind as to be ignorant of the existence of either."[274] It was gallantly spoken; but how strange to reflect, that the same individual, in three or four years afterwards, was able to place an extinguisher on one of those suns, without even an eclipse being the consequence.[275]
It is remarkable also, that while asserting to foreigners this supreme dignity of the French Republic, Buonaparte should have departed so far from the respect he owed its rulers. The preliminaries of peace were proposed for signature on the 18th April. But General Clarke, to whom the Directory had committed full powers to act in the matter, was still at Turin. He was understood to be the full confidant of his masters, and to have instructions to watch the motions of Buonaparte, nay, to place him under arrest, should he see cause to doubt his fealty to the French Government. Napoleon, nevertheless, did not hesitate to tender his individual signature and warrantry, and these were readily admitted by the Austrian plenipotentiaries;—an ominous sign of the declension of the powers of the Directory, considering that a military general, without the support even of the commissioners from the government, or proconsuls, as they were called, was regarded as sufficient to ratify a treaty of such consequence. No doubt seems to have been entertained that he had the power to perform what he had guaranteed; and the part which he acted was the more remarkable, considering the high commission of General Clarke.[276]
TREATY OF LEOBEN.
The articles in the treaty of Leoben remained long secret; the cause of which appears to have been, that the high contracting parties were not willing comparisons should be made between the preliminaries as they were originally settled, and the strange and violent altercations which occurred in the definitive treaty of Campo Formio. These two treaties of pacification differed, the one from the other, in relation to the degree and manner how a meditated partition of the territory of Venice, of the Cisalpine republic, and other smaller powers was to be accomplished, for the mutual benefit of France and Austria. It is melancholy to observe, but it is nevertheless an important truth, that there is no moment during which independent states of the second class have more occasion to be alarmed for their security, than when more powerful nations in their vicinity are about to conclude peace. It is so easy to accommodate these differences of the strong at the expense of such weaker states, as, if they are injured, have neither the power of making their complaints heard, nor of defending themselves by force, that, in the iron age in which it has been our fate to live, the injustice of such an arrangement has never been considered as offering any counterpoise to its great convenience, whatever the law of nations might teach to the contrary.
It is unnecessary to enter upon the subject of the preliminaries of Leoben, until we notice the treaty of Campo Formio, under which they were finally modified, and by which they were adjusted and controlled. It may be, however, the moment to state, that Buonaparte was considerably blamed, by the Directory and others, for stopping short in the career of conquest, and allowing the House of Austria terms which left her still formidable to France, when, said the censors, it would have cost him but another victory to blot the most constant and powerful enemy of the French Republic out of the map of Europe; or, at least, to confine her to her hereditary states in Germany. To such criticism he replied, in a despatch to the Directory from Leoben, during the progress of the treaty: "If, at the commencement of these Italian campaigns, I had made a point of going to Turin, I should never have passed the Po—had I insisted prematurely on advancing to Rome, I could never have secured Milan—and now, had I made an indispensable object of reaching Vienna, I might have destroyed the Republic."[277]
Such was his able and judicious defence of a conduct, which, by stopping short of some ultimate and extreme point apparently within his grasp, extracted every advantage from fear, which despair perhaps might not have yielded him, if the enemy had been driven to extremity. And it is remarkable, that the catastrophe of Napoleon himself was a corollary of the doctrine which he now laid down; for, had he not insisted upon penetrating to Moscow, there is no judging how much longer he might have held the empire of France.
The contents of the treaty of Leoben, so far as they were announced to the representatives of the French nation by the Directory, only made known, as part of the preliminaries, that the cession of the Belgic provinces, and of such a boundary as France might choose to demand upon the Rhine, had been admitted by Austria; and that she had consented to recognise a single republic in Italy, to be composed out of those which had been provisionally established. But shortly afterwards it transpired, that Mantua, the subject of so much and such bloody contest, and the very citadel of Italy, as had appeared from the events of these sanguinary campaigns, was to be resigned to Austria, from whose tenacious grasp it had been wrenched with so much difficulty. This measure was unpopular; and it will be found that Buonaparte had the ingenuity, in the definitive treaty of peace, to substitute an indemnification, which he ought not to have given, and which was certainly the last which the Austrians should have accepted.