Map
Illustrating the Campaign
Preceding the
Treaty of Campo-Formio
1797.
While Murat was straining up the slopes of Monte Baldo, Bonaparte, giving no rest to the weary feet of Masséna's division,—the same men who two days before had marched by night from Verona,—was retracing his steps on that well-worn road past the city of Catullus and the Capulets onward toward Mantua. Provera had crossed the Adige at Anghiari with ten thousand men. Twice he had been attacked: once in the front by Guieu, once in the rear by Augereau. On both occasions his losses had been severe, but, nevertheless, on the same morning which saw Alvinczy's flight into the Tyrol, he finally appeared with six thousand men in the suburb of St. George, before Mantua. He succeeded in communicating with Wurmser, but was held in check by the blockading French army throughout the day and night until Bonaparte arrived with his reinforcements. Next morning there was a general engagement, Provera attacking in front, and Wurmser, by preconcerted arrangement, sallying out from behind at the head of a strong force. The latter was thrown back into the town by Sérurier, who commanded the besiegers, but only after a fierce and deadly conflict on the causeway. This was the road from Mantua to a country-seat of its dukes known as "La Favorita," and was chosen for the sortie as having an independent citadel. Victor, with some of the troops brought in from Rivoli, the "terrible fifty-seventh demi-brigade," as Bonaparte designated them, attacked Provera at the same time, and threw his ranks into such disorder that he was glad to surrender his entire force. This conflict of January sixteenth, before Mantua, is known as the battle of La Favorita, from the stand made by Sérurier on the road to that residence. Its results were six thousand prisoners, among them the Vienna volunteers with the Empress's banner, and many guns. In his fifty-fifth year this French soldier of fortune had finally reached the climax of his career. Having fought in the Seven Years' War, in Portugal and in Corsica, the Revolution gave him his opening. He assisted Schérer in the capture of the Maritime Alps, and fought with leonine power at Mondovi and these succeeding movements. While his fortunes were linked with Bonaparte's they mounted higher and higher. As governor of Venice he was so upright and incorruptible as to win the sobriquet "Virgin of Italy." The discouragement of defeat under Moreau in 1798 led him to retire into civil life, where he was a stanch Bonapartist and faithful official to the end of the Napoleonic epoch, when he rallied to the Bourbons.
Bonaparte estimated that so far in the Italian campaigns the army of the republic had fought within four days two pitched battles, and had besides been six times engaged; that they had taken, all told, nearly twenty-five thousand prisoners, including a lieutenant-general, two generals, and fifteen colonels; had captured twenty standards, with sixty pieces of artillery, and had killed or wounded six thousand men.
This short campaign of Rivoli was the turning-point of the war, and may be said to have shaped the history of Europe for twenty years. Chroniclers dwell upon those few moments at St. Mark and the plateau of Rivoli, wondering what the result would have been if the Austrian corps which came to turn the rear of Rivoli had arrived five minutes sooner. But an accurate and dispassionate criticism must decide that every step in Bonaparte's success was won by careful forethought and by the most effective disposition of the forces at his command. So sure was he of success that even in the crises when Masséna seemed to save the day on the left, and when the Austrians seemed destined to wrest victory from defeat on the right, he was self-reliant and cheerful. The new system of field operations had a triumphant vindication at the hands of its author. The conquering general meted out unstinted praise to his invincible squadrons and their leaders, but said nothing of himself, leaving the world to judge whether this were man or demon who, still a youth, and within a public career of but one season, had humiliated the proudest empire on the Continent, had subdued Italy, and on her soil had erected states unknown before, without the consent of any great power, not excepting France. It is not wonderful that this personage should sometimes have said of himself, "Say that my life began at Rivoli," as at other times he dated his military career from Toulon.
Wurmser's retreat to Mantua in September had been successful because of the strong cavalry force which accompanied it. He had been able to hold out for four months only by means of the flesh of their horses, five thousand in number, which had been killed and salted to increase the garrison stores. Even this resource was now exhausted, and after a few days of delay the gallant old man sent a messenger with the usual conventional declarations as to his ability for further resistance, in order, of course, to secure the most favorable terms of surrender. There is a fine anecdote in connection with the arrival of this messenger at the French headquarters, which, though perhaps not literally, is probably ideally, true. When the Austrian envoy entered Sérurier's presence, another person wrapped in a cloak was sitting at a table apparently engaged in writing. After the envoy had finished the usual enumeration of the elements of strength still remaining to his commander, the unknown man came forward, and, holding a written sheet in his hand, said: "Here are my conditions. If Wurmser really had provisions for twenty-five days, and spoke of surrender, he would not deserve an honorable capitulation. But I respect the age, the gallantry, and the misfortunes of the marshal; and whether he opens his gates to-morrow, or whether he waits fifteen days, a month, or three months, he shall still have the same conditions; he may wait until his last morsel of bread has been eaten." The messenger was a clever man who afterward rendered his own name, that of Klenau, illustrious. He recognized Bonaparte, and, glancing at the terms, found them so generous that he at once admitted the desperate straits of the garrison. This is substantially the account of Napoleon's memoirs. In a contemporary despatch to the Directory there is nothing of it, for he never indulged in such details to them; but he does say in two other despatches what at first blush militates against its literal truth. On February first, writing from Bologna, he declared that he would withdraw his conditions unless Wurmser acceded before the third: yet, in a letter of that very date, he indulges in a long and high-minded eulogium of the aged field-marshal, and declares his wish to show true French generosity to such a foe. The simple explanation is that, having sent the terms, Bonaparte immediately withdrew from Mantua to leave Sérurier in command at the surrender, a glory he had so well deserved, and then returned to Bologna to begin his final preparations against Rome. In the interval Wurmser made a proposition even more favorable to himself. Bonaparte petulantly rejected it, but with the return of his generous feeling he determined that at least he would not withdraw his first offer. Captious critics are never content, and they even charge that when, on the tenth, Wurmser and his garrison finally did march out, Bonaparte's absence was a breach of courtesy. It requires no great ardor in his defense to assert, on the contrary, that in circumstances so unprecedented the disparity of age between the respective representatives of the old and the new military system would have made Bonaparte's presence another drop in the bitter cup of the former. The magnanimity of the young conqueror in connection with the fall of Mantua was genuine, and highly honorable to him. So at least thought Wurmser himself, who wrote a most kindly letter to Bonaparte, forewarning him that a plot had been formed in Bologna to poison him with that noted, but never seen, compound so famous in Italian history—aqua tofana.[Back to Contents]
CHAPTER XXXII.
Humiliation of the Papacy and of Venice[69].
Rome Threatened — Pius VI Surrenders — The Peace of Tolentino — Bonaparte and the Papacy — Designs for the Orient — France Reassured — The Policy of Austria — The Archduke Charles — Bonaparte Hampered by the Directory — His Treatment of Venice — Condition of Venetia — The Commonwealth Warned.
1797.
Bonaparte seems after Rivoli to have reached the conviction that a man who had brought such glory to the arms of France was at least as firm in the affections of her people as was the Directory, which had no hold on them whatever, except in its claim to represent the Revolution. Clarke had reached Milan on November twenty-ninth, 1796. Bonaparte read him like an open scroll, discovering instantly that this graceful courtier had been commissioned to keep the little general in his place as a subordinate, and use him to make peace at any price. Possessing the full confidence of Carnot and almost certainly of the entire Directory, the easily won diplomat revealed to his lean, long-haired, ill-clad, penetrating, and facile inquisitor the precious contents of the governmental mind. The religious revolution in France had utterly failed, riotous vice had spread consternation even in infidel minds, there was in the return a mighty flood tide of orthodoxy; if the political revolution was to be saved at all, it was at the price of peace, and peace very quickly. The Directory had had little right to its distinction as savior of the republic from the beginning, and even that was daily disputed by ever increasing numbers: the most visible and dazzling representative of the Revolution was now the Army of Italy. It was not for "those rascally lawyers," as Bonaparte afterward called the directors, that his great battle of Rivoli had been fought. With this fact in view, the short ensuing campaign against Pius VI, and its consequences, are easily understood. It was true, as the French general proclaimed, that Rome had kept the stipulations of the armistice neither in a pacific behavior nor in the payment of her indemnity, and was fomenting resistance to the French arms throughout the peninsula. To the Directory, which had desired the entire overthrow of the papacy, Bonaparte proposed that with this in view, Rome should be handed over to Spain. Behind these pretexts he gathered at Bologna an indifferent force of eleven thousand soldiers, composed, one half of his own men, the other half of Italians fired with revolutionary zeal, and of Poles, a people who, since the recent dismemberment of their country, were wooing France as a possible ally in its reconstruction. The main division marched against Ancona; a smaller one of two thousand men directed its course through Tuscany into the valley of the Tiber.