The world's leading conquerors

by Wilson Lloyd Bevan

The force he took over now numbered 38,000 men, out of a nominal six divisions of 60,282. They were poorly equipped, insufficiently nourished, and had not received their pay. The manifesto issued to them, according to Napoleon’s report of it at St. Helena, held out an immediate change of fortune. It is a document characteristic in contents and form of the new era of glory and conquest on which France was now to embark under Napoleon’s leadership. “Soldiers,” he said, “you are ill-fed and almost naked; the government owes you much; it can give you nothing. Your patience, the courage which you exhibit in the midst of these mountains, are worthy of admiration; but they bring you no atom of glory; not a ray is reflected upon you. I will conduct you into the most fertile places of the world. Rich provinces, great cities, will be in your power; there you will find honor, glory, and wealth. Soldiers of Italy, will you be lacking in courage or perseverance?”

These promises were made good in the remarkable campaign that followed, in which Napoleon’s soldiers found their material wants amply satisfied and their ambitious wishes for a career of glory more than answered in the brilliant victories of their general. Napoleon’s plan of operations was guided by the principles he had outlined two years before to the Robespierre régime. “In the management of war, as in the siege of a city,” he said, “the method should be to direct the fire upon a single point. The breach once made, equilibrium is destroyed, all further effort is useless, and the place is taken. Attacks should not be scattered, but united. An army should be divided for the sake of subsistence and concentrated for combat. Unity of command is indispensable to success. Time is everything.”

The last mentioned condition was fully vindicated, for before the end of April the French had beaten in a succession of quickly delivered attacks and effective battles, the Austrian army occupying Piedmont and also their Piedmontese allies. With the retreat of the Austrians from his kingdom, King Victor Amadeus made peace, and Napoleon hurried on to deal finally with the Austrians on their own territory in Lombardy. With the winning of the battle of Lodi on the 10th of May, Lombardy was soon evacuated by the enemy, and Napoleon entered the capital of the province, Milan, on the 16th of May. The commander of the victorious army paid little attention to the policy outlined at Paris for his conduct in Italy; he negotiated independently of the Directory and oftentimes contrary to their expressed wishes. When they proposed to divide his command by sharing it with General Kellermann, he wrote, “Each person has his own way of making war. General Kellermann has had more experience and will do it better than I; but both together will do it badly.” By this plain statement, the Directors were brought to terms; they were unwilling to let Napoleon resign his command, for the campaign was giving the government the prestige it badly needed, and what was equally valuable in their eyes was Napoleon’s novel method of conducting warfare without making any demands on the central treasury.

In the meantime there were further successes to be recorded against the Austrians. Wherever they made a stand they were defeated; a large number of their men were blocked up in the great citadel at Mantua, and, for months, armies in succession were sent down from the Tyrol to relieve that city. The ability of Napoleon was tested in many hard-won fights against superior numbers; he was often in critical situations, especially at the battle of Arcola where, for three days (November 17-20, 1796), the stubbornness of the Austrians held the French in check. During one of the critical incidents of the fight, Napoleon had personally to rally his men, and, when they were thrown into confusion by the Austrian fire, he was in danger of capture and was saved only by the presence of mind of his aide, Marmont, and of his own brother Louis.

Further attempts on the part of Austria to preserve its Italian possessions proved unavailing. After a decisive engagement fought at Rivoli early in the year 1797, the Austrian garrison at Mantua capitulated, and with the fall of this fortress, Austrian rule in Italy was brought to an end. Later on Napoleon followed up these successes by moving towards Vienna with a force of 34,000 men. He was ably seconded by his subordinate generals, among whom was Moreau, with the result that the remaining Austrian forces, gathered to defend their capital, were defeated, and by the preliminaries of peace signed at Leoben, Austria lost her Italian possessions, was deprived of her predominant influence in the peninsula, and agreed to the cession of Belgium. As a compensation she was to receive the possessions of Venice on the mainland, on both sides of the Adriatic.

These manipulations of territory, so far as Italy was concerned, were directed entirely in accordance with the personal will of Napoleon, who had already acted on his own initiative in his dealings with the petty Italian states. During the course of the campaign he had forced Tuscany and Naples to accept French sovereignty in the peninsula practically on his own terms, he had deprived the Pope of a large part of his territory and, after the terms of the treaty were signed, but before they were publicly announced, he had sought a quarrel with Venice, in order to put an end to the republic and so to find an excuse for annexing part of her territory to France. In this way he could hand over to Austria the fragments that had been secretly assigned to that power at Leoben. The brilliancy of these military operations, by which the whole face of the traditional situation in Italy was altered in the short space of one year, set Napoleon in such a secure position that his critics and detractors hesitated to call in question his autocratic acts, though Mallet du Pan tells us that the praise showered by the Directory on the young conqueror was recognized as insincere, adding, “There were voices in favor of sending the young hero to the Place de la Révolution to have a score of bullets lodged in his pate.”

Napoleon himself, contrasting his success with the inefficiency of the Austrians, describes his victories in the following passage: “My military successes have been great; but then consider the servants of the Emperor! His soldiers are good and brave, though heavy and inactive compared with mine; but what generals! a Beaulieu, who had not the slightest knowledge of localities in Italy; Wormser, deaf and eternally slow; or Alvinzy, who was altogether incompetent. They have been accused of being bribed by me; these are nothing but falsehoods, for I never had such a thing in view. But I can prove that no one of these three generals had a single staff on which several of the superior officers were not devoted to me and in my pay. Hence I was apprised not only of their plans but of their designs, and I interfered with them, while they were still under deliberation.”

With the states wrested from the Pope, there were taken from the Duke of Modena and from Austria territories sufficient to found a republic entitled the Cisalpine, and with this, there was a new rearrangement of the territories on the west coast by which the ancient republic of Genoa ceased to exist and reappeared with the Napoleonic brand as the Ligurian Republic. Both of these creations were after the French model, but the general of the army drew up the constitutions, chose the officials, and exercised the irresponsible powers of a dictator. The final terms of the treaty with Austria were not settled till October, 1797, but nothing was gained by the shrewd diplomatic fencings of the Viennese representatives. Napoleon, in a theatrical scene, at which he passionately broke in pieces a valuable porcelain vase in the presence of Coblentzl, the Austrian envoy, threatened to smash the Austrian monarchy if the parleyings were too long continued. The liberation of Italy appealed to the patriotic sentiment of the Italians, until the political realism of their conqueror manifested itself by enforcing on them contributions of money, art treasures, valuable manuscripts, all of which were sifted and collected by the experts Napoleon carried with his army. Even mathematical instruments and natural history collections did not escape his vigilance.

In the imposition of these exactions, the Papacy fared no better than the secular princes. While the dukes of Parma and Modena paid 12,000,000 francs and 20 pictures, the Pope was mulcted to the extent of 21,000,000 francs, 15,000,000 in cash, the rest to be made up by the surrender of 100 pictures, 500 manuscripts, and the bust of the patriot Brutus. This original method of making war pay for itself pleased the Directory. Great fêtes were prepared for the conqueror, when he appeared in Paris, to celebrate his victories. The official orator of the occasion was Talleyrand, who selected as the chief points of his eulogy Napoleon’s modesty, his taste for the poems of Ossian, and his fondness for mathematics.

But to the clear intelligence of Napoleon, forms of adulation, real or insincere, meant little. He was making rapid progress towards the goal of personal rule. The government already suspected his loyalty to them, but they were weak and without moral influence. Besides, they were under obligations, even more binding than those based or the money contributions which flowed in from Italy, for when the reactionary party was about to get the upper hand, both among the Legislative Body and among the Directors themselves, it was Napoleon’s agent, Augereau, who had coöperated actively with the radical element and made its continued predominance in the control of national affairs possible.