After a lithograph by Motte. Bonaparte, master of Toulon, had already attained fame when the events of Thermidor imposed a sudden check on his career. His relations with the younger Robespierre laid him open to suspicion; he was suspended from his functions and put under arrest by the deputies of the Convention.
Love as well as failure caused his melancholy. All about him, indeed, turned thoughts to marriage. Joseph was now married, and his happiness made him envious. “What a lucky rascal Joseph is!” he said. Junot, madly in love with Pauline, was with him. The two young men wandered through the alleys of the Jardin des Plantes and discussed Junot’s passion. In listening to his friend, Napoleon thought of himself. He had been attracted by Désirée Clary, Joseph’s sister-in-law. Why not try to win her? And he began to demand news of her from Joseph. Désirée had asked for his portrait, and he wrote: “I shall have it taken for her; you must give it to her, if she still wants it; if not, keep it yourself.” He was melancholy when he did not have news of her, accused Joseph of purposely omitting her name from his letters, and Désirée herself of forgetting him. At last he consulted Joseph: “If I remain here, it is just possible that I might feel inclined to commit the folly of marrying. I should be glad of a line from you on the subject. You might perhaps speak to Eugénie’s [Désirée’s] brother, and let me know what he says, and then it will be settled.” He waited the answer to his overtures “with impatience”; urged his brother to arrange things so that nothing “may prevent that which I long for.” But Désirée was obdurate. Later she married Bernadotte and became Queen of Sweden.
Yet in these varying moods he was never idle. As three years before, he and Bourrienne indulged in financial speculations; he tried to persuade Joseph to invest his wife’s dot in the property of the émigrés. He prepared memorials on the political disorders of the times and on military questions, and he pushed his brothers as if he had no personal ambition. He did not neglect to make friends either. The most important of those whom he cultivated was Paul Barras, revolutionist, conventionalist, member of the Directory, and one of the most influential men in Paris at that moment. He had known Napoleon at Toulon, and showed himself disposed to be friendly. “I attached myself to Barras,” said Napoleon later, “because I knew no one else. Robespierre was dead; Barras was playing a rôle: I had to attach myself to somebody and something.” One of his plans for himself was to go to Turkey. For two or three years, in fact, Napoleon had thought of the Orient as a possible field for his genius, and his mother had often worried lest he should go. Just now it happened that the Sultan of Turkey asked the French for aid in reorganizing his artillery and perfecting the defences of his forts, and Napoleon asked to be allowed to undertake the work. While pushing all his plans with extraordinary enthusiasm, even writing Joseph almost daily letters about what he would do for him when he was settled in the Orient, he was called to do a piece of work which was to be of importance in his future.
The war committee needed plans for an Italian campaign; the head of the committee was in great perplexity. Nobody knew anything about the condition of things in the South. By chance, one day, one of Napoleon’s acquaintances heard of the difficulties and recommended the young general. The memorial he prepared was so excellent that he was invited into the topographical bureau of the Committee of Public Safety. His knowledge, sense, energy, fire, were so remarkable that he made strong friends and became an important personage.
Such was the impression he made, that when in October, 1795, the government was threatened by the revolting sections, Barras, the nominal head of the defence, asked Napoleon to command the forces which protected the Tuileries, where the Convention had gone into permanent session. He hesitated for a moment. He had much sympathy for the sections. His sagacity conquered. The Convention stood for the republic; an overthrow now meant another proscription, more of the Terror, perhaps a royalist succession, an English invasion.
“I accept,” he said to Barras; “but I warn you that once my sword is out of the scabbard I shall not replace it till I have established order.”
It was on the night of 12th Vendémiaire that Napoleon was appointed. With incredible rapidity he massed the men and cannon he could secure at the openings into the palace and at the points of approach. He armed even the members of the Convention as a reserve. When the sections marched their men into the streets and upon the bridges leading to the Tuileries, they were met by a fire which scattered them at once. That night Paris was quiet. The next day Napoleon was made general of division. On October 26th he was appointed general-in-chief of the Army of the Interior.
At last the opportunity he had sought so long and so eagerly had come. It was a proud position for a young man of twenty-six, and one may well stop and ask how he had obtained it. The answer is not difficult for one who, dismissing the prejudices and superstitions which have long enveloped his name, studies his story as he would that of an unknown individual. He had won his place as any poor and ambitious boy in any country and in any age must win his—by hard work, by grasping at every opportunity, by constant self-denial, by courage in every failure, by springing to his feet after every fall.
He succeeded because he knew every detail of his business (“There is nothing I cannot do for myself. If there is no one to make powder for the cannon I can do it”); because neither ridicule nor coldness nor even the black discouragement which made him write once to Joseph, “If this state of things continues I shall end by not turning out of my path when a carriage passes,” could stop him; because he had profound faith in himself. “Do these people imagine that I want their help to rise? They will be too glad some day to accept mine. My sword is at my side, and I will go far with it.” That he had misrepresented conditions more than once to secure favor, is true; but in doing this he had done simply what he saw done all about him, what he had learned from his father, what the oblique morality of the day justified. That he had shifted opinions and allegiance, is equally true; but he who in the French Revolution did not shift opinion was he who regarded “not what is, but what might be.” Certainly in no respect had he been worse than his environment, and in many respects he had been far above it. He had struggled for place, not that he might have ease, but that he might have an opportunity for action; not that he might amuse himself, but that he might achieve glory. Nor did he seek honors merely for himself; it was that he might share them with others.
By Gros. This drawing, which I discovered among the portfolios of the Louvre, is one of the most precious documents of Napoleonic portraiture. It was the gift of Monsieur Delestre, the pupil and biographer of Gros. In this clear profile we see already all that characteristic expression sought for by Gros above everything, and superbly rendered by him soon after in the portrait of Bonaparte at Arcola. I imagine that this pen sketch was preparatory to a finished portrait.—A. D.
The first use Bonaparte made of his power after he was appointed general-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, was for his family and friends. Fifty or sixty thousand francs, assignats, and dresses go to his mother and sisters; Joseph is to have a consulship; “a roof, a table, and carriage” are at his disposal in Paris; Louis is made a lieutenant and his aide-de-camp; Lucien, commissioner of war; Junot and Marmont are put on his staff. He forgets nobody. The very day after the 13th Vendémiaire, when his cares and excitements were numerous and intense, he was at the Permons, where Monsieur Permon had just died. “He was like a son, a brother.” This relation he soon tried to change, seeking to marry the beautiful widow Permon. When she laughed merrily at the idea, for she was many years his senior, he replied that the age of his wife was a matter of indifference to him so long as she did not look over thirty.
The change in Bonaparte himself was great. Up to this time he had gone about Paris “in an awkward and ungainly manner, with a shabby round hat thrust down over his eyes, and with curls (known at that time as oreilles des chiens) badly powdered and badly combed, and falling over the collar of the iron-gray coat which has since become so celebrated; his hands, long, thin, and black, without gloves, because, he said, they were an unnecessary expense; wearing ill-made and ill-cleaned boots.” The majority of people saw in him only what Monsieur de Pontécoulant, who took him into the War Office, had seen at their first interview; “A young man with a wan and livid complexion, bowed shoulders, and a weak and sickly appearance.”
But now, installed in an elegant hôtel, driving his own carriage, careful of his person, received in every salon where he cared to go, the young general-in-chief is a changed man. Success has had much to do with this; love has perhaps had more.
CHAPTER IV
NAPOLEON’S COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE—HIS DEVOTION TO JOSEPHINE
In the five months spent in Paris before the 13th Vendémiaire, Bonaparte saw something of society. One interesting company which he often joined, was that gathered about Madame Permon at a hotel in the Rue des Filles Saint-Thomas. This Madame Permon was the same with whom he had taken refuge frequently in the days when he was in the military school of Paris, and whom he had visited later, in 1792, when lingering in town with hope of recovering his place in the army. On this latter occasion he had even exposed himself to aid her and her husband to escape the fury of the Terrorists and to fly from the city. Madame Permon had returned to Paris in the spring of 1795 for a few weeks, and numbers of her old friends had gathered about her as before the Terror, among them, Bonaparte.
Another house—and one of very different character—at which he was received, was that of Barras. The 9th Thermidor, as the fall of Robespierre is called, released Paris from a strain of terror so great that, in reaction, she plunged for a time into violent excess. In this period of decadence Barras was sovereign. Epicurean by nature, possessing the tastes, culture, and vices of the old régime, he was better fitted than any man in the government to create and direct a dissolute and luxurious society. Into this set Napoleon was introduced, and more than once he expressed his astonishment to Joseph at the turn things had taken in Paris.
“The pleasure-seekers have reappeared, and forget, or, rather, remember only as a dream, that they ever ceased to shine. Libraries are open, and lectures on history, chemistry, astronomy, etc., succeed each other. Everything is done to amuse and make life agreeable. One has no time to think; and how can one be gloomy in this busy whirlwind? Women are everywhere—at the theatres, on the promenades, in the libraries. In the study of the savant you meet some that are charming. Here alone, of all places in the world, they deserve to hold the helm. The men are mad over them, think only of them, live only by and for them. A woman need not stay more than six months in Paris to learn what is due her and what is her empire.... This great nation has given itself up to pleasure, dancing, and theatres, and women have become the principal occupation. Ease, luxury, and bon ton have recovered their throne; the Terror is remembered only as a dream.”
Bonaparte took his part in the gayeties of his new friends, and was soon on easy terms with most of the women who frequented the salon of Barras, even with the most influential of them all, the famous Madame Tallien, the great beauty of the Directory.
Among the women whom he met in the salon of Madame Tallien and at Barras’s own house, was the Viscountess de Beauharnais (née Tascher de la Pagerie), widow of the Marquis de Beauharnais, guillotined on the 5th Thermidor, 1794. At the time of the marquis’s death his wife was a prisoner. She was released soon after and had become a intimate friend of Madame Tallien. All Madame Tallien’s circle had, indeed, become attached to Josephine de Beauharnais, and with Barras she was on terms of intimacy which led to a great amount of gossip. Without fortune, having two children to support, still trembling at the memory of her imprisonment, indolent and vain, it is not remarkable that Josephine yielded to the pleasures of the society which had saved her from prison and which now opened its arms to her, nor that she accepted the protection of the powerful Director Barras. She was certainly one of the regular habitués of his house, and every week kept court for him at her little home at Croissy, a few miles from Paris. The Baron Pasquier, afterwards one of the members of Napoleon’s Council of State, was at that moment living in poverty at Croissy—and was a neighbor of Josephine. In his “Memoirs” he has left a paragraph on the gay little outings taken there by Barras and his friends.
“Her house was next to ours,” says Pasquier. “She did not come out often at that time, rarely more than once a week, to receive Barras and the troop which always followed him. From early in the morning we saw the hampers coming. Then mounted gendarmes began to circulate on the route from Nanterre to Croissy, for the young Director came usually on horseback.
“Madame de Beauharnais’s house had, as is often the case among creoles, an appearance of luxury; but, the superfluous aside, the most necessary things were lacking. Birds, game, rare fruits, were piled up in the kitchen (this was the time of our greatest famine), and there was such a want of stewing-pans, glasses, and plates, that they had to come and borrow from our poor stock.”
There was much about Josephine de Beauharnais to win the favor of such a man as Barras. A creole past the freshness of youth—Josephine was thirty-two years old in 1795—she had a grace, a sweetness, a charm, that made one forget that she was not beautiful, even when she was beside such brilliant women as Madame Tallien and Madame Récamier. It was never possible to surprise her in an attitude that was not graceful. She was never ruffled or irritable. By nature she was perfection of ease and repose. Artist enough to dress in clinging stuffs made simply, which harmonized perfectly with her style, and skilful enough to use the arts of the toilet to conceal defects which care and age had brought, the Viscountess de Beauharnais was altogether one of the most fascinating women in Madame Tallien’s circle.
Profile in plaster. By David d’Angers. Collection of Monsieur Paul le Roux. This energetic profile presents considerable artistic and iconographic interest. It is the first rough cast of the face of Bonaparte on the pediment of the Pantheon at Paris. Some months ago, Baron Larrey told me an interesting anecdote regarding this statue. The Baron, son of the chief surgeon to Napoleon I., and himself ex-military surgeon to Napoleon III., happening to be with the emperor at the camp of Châlons conceived the noble idea of trying to save the pediment of the Pantheon, then about to be destroyed to satisfy the Archbishop of Paris, who regarded with lively displeasure the image of Voltaire figuring on the façade of a building newly consecrated to religion. At the emperor’s table, Baron H. Larrey adroitly turned the conversation to David, and informed the sovereign, to his surprise, that the proudest effigy of Napoleon was to be seen on this pediment. Bonaparte, in fact, is represented as seizing for himself the crowns distributed by the Fatherland, while the other personages receive them. On hearing this, Napoleon III. was silent; but the next day the order was given to respect the pediment. The plaster cast I reproduce here is signed J. David, and dates from 1836. The Pantheon pediment was inaugurated in 1837.—A. D.
The goodness of Josephine’s heart undoubtedly won her as many friends as her grace. Everybody who came to know her at all well, declared her gentle, sympathetic, and helpful. Everybody except, perhaps, the Bonaparte family, who never cared for her, and whom she never tried to win. Lucien, indeed, draws a picture of her in his “Memoirs” which, if it could be regarded as unprejudiced, would take much of her charm from her:
“Josephine was not disagreeable, or perhaps I better say, everybody declared that she was very good; but it was especially when goodness cost her no sacrifice.... She had very little wit, and no beauty at all; but there was a certain creole suppleness about her form. She had lost all natural freshness of complexion, but that the arts of the toilet remedied by candle-light.... In the brilliant companies of the Directory, to which Barras did me the honor of admitting me, she scarcely attracted my attention, so old did she seem to me, and so inferior to the other beauties which ordinarily formed the court of the voluptuous Directors, and among whom the beautiful Tallien was the true Calypso.”
But if Lucien was not attracted to Josephine, Napoleon was from the first; and when, one day, Madame de Beauharnais said some flattering things to him about his military talent, he was fairly intoxicated by her praise, followed her everywhere, and fell wildly in love with her; but by her station, her elegance, her influence, she seemed inaccessible to him, and then, too, he was looking elsewhere for a wife. When he first knew her, he was thinking of Désirée Clary; and he had known Josephine some time when he sought the hand of the widow Permon.
Though he dared not tell her his love, all his circle knew of it, and Barras at last said to him, “You should marry Madame de Beauharnais. You have a position and talents which will secure advancement; but you are isolated, without fortune and without relations. You ought to marry; it gives weight,” and he asked permission to negotiate the affair.
Josephine was distressed. Barras was her protector. She felt the wisdom of his advice, but Napoleon frightened and wearied her by the violence of his love. In spite of her doubts she yielded at last, and on the 9th of March, 1796, they were married. Shortly before, Napoleon had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Army of Italy, and two days later he left his wife for his post.
From every station on his route he wrote her passionate letters:
“Every moment takes me farther from you, and every moment I feel less able to be away from you. You are ever in my thoughts; my fancy tires itself in trying to imagine what you are doing. If I picture you sad, my heart is wrung and my grief is increased. If you are happy and merry with your friends, I blame you for so soon forgetting the painful three days separation; in that case you are frivolous and destitute of deep feeling. As you see, I am hard to please; but, my dear, it is very different when I fear your health is bad, or that you have any reasons for being sad; then I regret the speed with which I am being separated from my love. I am sure that you have no longer any kind feeling toward me, and I can only be satisfied when I have heard that all goes well with you. When any one asks me if I have slept well, I feel that I cannot answer until a messenger brings me word that you have rested well. The illnesses and anger of men affect me only so far as I think they may affect you. May my good genius, who has always protected me amid great perils, guard and protect you! I will gladly dispense with him. Ah! don’t be happy, but be a little melancholy, and, above all, keep sorrow from your mind and illness from your body. You remember what Ossian says about that. Write to me, my pet, and a good long letter, and accept a thousand and one kisses from your best and most loving friend.”
Arrived in Italy he wrote:
“I have received all your letters, but none has made such an impression on me as the last. How can you think, my dear love, of writing to me in such a way? Don’t you believe my position is already cruel enough, without adding to my regrets and tormenting my soul? What a style! What feelings are those you describe! It’s like fire; it burns my poor heart. My only Josephine, away from you there is no happiness; away from you, the world is a desert in which I stand alone, with no chance of tasting the delicious joy of pouring out my heart. You have robbed me of more than my soul; you are the sole thought of my life. If I am worn out by all the torments of events, and fear the issue, if men disgust me, if I am ready to curse life, I place my hand on my heart; your image is beating there. I look at it, and love is for me perfect happiness; and everything is smiling, except the time that I see myself absent from my love. By what art have you learned how to captivate all my faculties, to concentrate my whole being in yourself? To live for Josephine! That’s the story of my life. I do everything to get to you; I am dying to join you. Fool! Do I not see that I am only going farther from you? How many lands and countries separate us! How long before you will read these words which express but feebly the emotions of the heart over which you reign!...”
“Don’t be anxious; love me like your eyes—but that’s not enough—like yourself; more than yourself, than your thoughts, your mind, your life, your all. But forgive me, I’m raving. Nature is weak when one loves....”
“I have received a letter which you interrupt to go, you say, into the country; and afterwards you pretend to be jealous of me, who am so worn out by work and fatigue. Oh, my dear!... Of course, I am in the wrong. In the early spring the country is beautiful; and then the nineteen-year old lover was there, without a doubt. The idea of wasting another moment in writing to the man three hundred leagues away, who lives, moves, exists only in memory of you; who reads your letters as one devours one’s favorite dishes after hunting for six hours!”
JUNOT (1771–1813).
CHAPTER V
THE FIRST ITALIAN CAMPAIGN—NAPOLEON’S WAY OF MAKING WAR
But Napoleon had much to occupy him besides his separation from Josephine. Extraordinary difficulties surrounded his new post. Neither the generals nor the men knew anything of their new commander. “Who is this General Bonaparte? Where has he served? No one knows anything about him,” wrote Junot’s father when the latter at Toulon decided to follow his artillery commander.
In the Army of Italy they were asking the same questions, and the Directory could only answer as Junot had done: “As far as I can judge, he is one of those men of whom nature is avaricious, and that she permits upon the earth only from age to age.”
He was to replace a commander-in-chief who had sneered at his plans for an Italian campaign and who might be expected to put obstacles in his way. He was to take an army which was in the last stages of poverty and discouragement. Their garments were in rags. Even the officers were so nearly shoeless that when they reached Milan and one of them was invited to dine at the palace of a marquise, he was obliged to go in shoes without soles and tied on by cords carefully blacked. They had provisions for only a month, and half rations at that. The Piedmontese called them the “rag heroes.”
Worse than their poverty was their inactivity. “For three years they had fired off their guns in Italy only because war was going on, and not for any especial object—only to satisfy their consciences.” Discontent was such that counter-revolution gained ground daily. One company had even taken the name of “Dauphin,” and royalist songs were heard in camp.
Napoleon saw at a glance all these difficulties, and set himself to conquer them. With his generals he was reserved and severe. “It was necessary,” he explained afterward, “in order to command men so much older than myself.” His look and bearing quelled insubordination, restrained familiarity, even inspired fear. “From his arrival,” says Marmont, “his attitude was that of a man born for power. It was plain to the least clairvoyant eyes that he knew how to compel obedience, and scarcely was he in authority before the line of a celebrated poet might have been applied to him:
General Decrès, who had known Napoleon well at Paris, hearing that he was going to pass through Toulon, where he was stationed, offered to present his comrades. “I run,” he says, “full of eagerness and joy; the salon opens; I am about to spring forward, when the attitude, the look, the sound of his voice are sufficient to stop me. There was nothing rude about him, but it was enough. From that time I was never tempted to pass the line which had been drawn for me.”
Lavalette says of his first interview with him: “He looked weak, but his regard was so firm and so fixed that I felt myself turning pale when he spoke to me.” Augereau goes to see him at Albenga, full of contempt for this favorite of Barras who has never known an action, determined on insubordination. Bonaparte comes out, little, thin, round-shouldered, and gives Augereau, a giant among the generals, his orders. The big man backs out in a kind of terror. “He frightened me,” he tells Masséna. “His first glance crushed me.”
He quelled insubordination in the ranks by quick, severe punishment, but it was not long that he had insubordination. The army asked nothing but to act, and immediately they saw that they were to move. He had reached his post on March 22d; nineteen days later operations began.
The theatre of action was along that portion of the maritime Alps which runs parallel with the sea. Bonaparte held the coast and the mountains; and north, in the foot-hills, stretched from the Tende to Genoa, were the Austrians and their Sardinian allies. If the French were fully ten thousand inferior in number, their position was the stronger, for the enemy was scattered in a hilly country where it was difficult to unite their divisions.
As Bonaparte faced his enemy, it was with a youthful zest and anticipation which explains much of what follows. “The two armies are in motion,” he wrote Josephine, “each trying to outwit the other. The more skilful will succeed. I am much pleased with Beaulieu. He manœuvres very well, and is superior to his predecessor. I shall beat him, I hope, out of his boots.”
The first step in the campaign was a skilful stratagem. He spread rumors which made Beaulieu suspect that he intended marching on Genoa, and he threw out his lines in that direction. The Austrian took the feint as a genuine movement, and marched his left to the sea to cut off the French advance. But Bonaparte was not marching to Genoa, and, rapidly collecting his forces, he fell on the Austrian army at Montenotte on April 12th, and defeated it. The right and left of the allies were divided, and the centre broken.
By a series of clever feints, Bonaparte prevented the various divisions of the enemy from reënforcing each other, and forced them separately to battle. At Millesimo, on the 14th, he defeated one section; on the same day, at Dego, another; the next morning, near Dego, another. The Austrians were now driven back, but their Sardinian allies were still at Ceva. To them Bonaparte now turned, and, driving them from their camp, defeated them at Mondovi on the 22d.
It was phenomenal in Italy. In ten days the “rag heroes,” at whom they had been mocking for three years, had defeated two well-fed armies ten thousand stronger than themselves, and might at any moment march on Turin. The Sardinians sued for peace.
The victory was as bewildering to the French as it was terrifying to the enemy, and Napoleon used it to stir his army to new conquests.
“Soldiers!” he said, “in fifteen days you have gained six victories, taken twenty-one stands of colors, fifty-five pieces of cannon, and several fortresses, and conquered the richest part of Piedmont. You have made fifteen hundred prisoners, and killed or wounded ten thousand men.
“Hitherto, however, you have been fighting for barren rocks, made memorable by your valor, but useless to the nation. Your exploits now equal those of the conquering armies of Holland and the Rhine. You were utterly destitute, and have supplied all your wants. You have gained battles without cannons, passed rivers without bridges, performed forced marches without shoes, bivouacked without brandy, and often without bread. None but republican phalanxes—soldiers of liberty—could have borne what you have endured. For this you have the thanks of your country.
“The two armies which lately attacked you in full confidence, now fly before you in consternation.... But, soldiers, it must not be concealed that you have done nothing, since there remains aught to do. Neither Turin nor Milan is ours.... The greatest difficulties are no doubt surmounted; but you have still battles to fight, towns to take, rivers to cross....”
Not less clever in diplomacy than in battle, Bonaparte, on his own responsibility, concluded an armistice with the Sardinians, which left him only the Austrians to fight, and at once set out to follow Beaulieu, who had fled beyond the Po.
As adroitly as he had made Beaulieu believe, three weeks before, that he was going to march on Genoa, he now deceives him as to the point where he proposes to cross the Po, leading him to believe it is at Valenza. When certain that Beaulieu had his eye on that point, Bonaparte marched rapidly down the river, and crossed at Placentia. If an unforeseen delay had not occurred in the passage, he would have been on the Austrian rear. As it was, Beaulieu took alarm, and withdrew the body of his army, after a slight resistance to the French advance, across the Adda, leaving but twelve thousand men at Lodi.
Bonaparte was jubilant. “We have crossed the Po,” he wrote the directory. “The second campaign has commenced. Beaulieu is disconcerted; he miscalculates, and continually falls into the snares I set for him. Perhaps he wishes to give battle, for he has both audacity and energy, but not genius.... Another victory, and we shall be masters of Italy.”
Determined to leave no enemies behind him, Bonaparte now marched against the twelve thousand men at Lodi. The town, lying on the right bank of the Adda, was guarded by a small force of Austrians; but the mass of the enemy was on the left bank, at the end of a bridge some three hundred and fifty feet in length, and commanded by a score or more of cannon.
Rushing into the town on May 10th the French drove out the guarding force, and arrived at the bridge before the Austrians had time to destroy it. The French grenadiers pressed forward in a solid mass, but, when half way over, the cannon at the opposite end poured such a storm of shot at them that the column wavered and fell back. Several generals in the ranks, Bonaparte at their head, rushed to the front of the force. The presence of the officers was enough to inspire the soldiers, and they swept across the bridge with such impetuosity that the Austrian line on the opposite bank allowed its batteries to be taken, and in a few moments was in retreat. “Of all the actions in which the soldiers under my command have been engaged,” wrote Bonaparte to the Directory, “none has equalled the tremendous passage of the bridge at Lodi. If we have lost but few soldiers, it was merely owing to the promptitude of our attacks and the effect produced on the enemy by the formidable fire from our invincible army. Were I to name all the officers who distinguished themselves in this affair, I should be obliged to enumerate every carabinier of the advanced guard, and almost every officer belonging to the staff.”
The Austrians now withdrew beyond the Mincio, and on the 15th of May the French entered Milan. The populace greeted their conquerors as liberators, and for several days the army rejoiced in comforts which it had not known for years. While it was being fêted, Bonaparte was instituting the Lombard Republic, and trying to conciliate or outwit, as the case demanded, the nobles and clergy outraged at the introduction of French ideas. It was not until the end of May that Lombardy was in a situation to permit Bonaparte to follow the Austrians.
After Lodi, Beaulieu had led his army to the Mincio. As usual, his force was divided, the right being near Lake Garda, the left at Mantua, the centre about halfway between, at Valeggio. It was at this latter point that Bonaparte decided to attack them. Feigning to march on their right, he waited until his opponent had fallen into his trap, and then sprang on the weakened centre, broke it to pieces, and drove all but twelve thousand men, escaped to Mantua, into the Tyrol. In fifty days he had swept all but a remnant of the Austrians away from Italy. Two weeks later, having taken a strong position on the Adige, he began the siege of Mantua.
The French were victorious, but their position was precarious. Austria was preparing a new army. Between the victors and France lay a number of feeble Italian governments whose friendship could not be depended upon. The populace of these states favored the French, for they brought promises of liberal government, of equality and fraternity. The nobles and clergy hated them for the same reason. It was evident that a victory of the Austrians would set all these petty princes on Bonaparte’s heels. The Papal States to the south were plotting. Naples was an ally of Austria. Venice was neutral, but she could not be trusted. The English were off the coast, and might, at any moment, make an alliance which would place a formidable enemy on the French rear.
While waiting for the arrival of the new Austrian army, Bonaparte set himself to lessening these dangers. He concluded a peace with Naples. Two divisions of the army were sent south, one to Bologna, the other into Tuscany. The people received the French with such joy that Rome was glad to purchase peace. Leghorn was taken. The malcontents in Milan were silenced. By the time a fresh Austrian army of sixty thousand men, under a new general, Wurmser, was ready to fight, Italy had been effectually quieted.
The Austrians advanced against the French in three columns, one to the west of Lake Garda, under Quasdanovich, one on each side of the Adige, east of the lake, under Wurmser. Their plan was to attack the French outposts on each side of the lake simultaneously, and then envelop the army. The first movements were successful. The French on each side of the lake were driven back. Bonaparte’s army was inferior to the one coming against him, but the skill with which he handled his forces and used the blunders of the enemy more than compensated for lack of numbers. Raising the siege of Mantua, he concentrated his forces at the south of the lake in such a way as to prevent the reunion of the Austrians. Then, with unparalleled swiftness, he fell on the enemy piecemeal. Wherever he could engage a division he did so, providing his own force was superior to that of the Austrians at the moment of the battle. Thus, on July 31st, at Lonato, he defeated Quasdanovich, though not so decisively but that the Austrian collected his division and returned towards the same place, hoping to unite there with Wurmser, who had foolishly divided his divisions, sending one to Lonato and another to Castiglione, while he himself went off to Mantua to relieve the garrison there. Bonaparte engaged the forces at Lonato and at Castiglione on the same day (August 3d), defeating them both, and then turned his whole army against the body of Austrians under Wurmser, who, by his time, had returned from his relief expedition at Mantua. On August 5th, at Castiglione, Wurmser was beaten, driven over the Mincio and into the Tyrol. In six days the campaign has been finished. “The Austrian army has vanished like a dream,” Bonaparte wrote home.
It had vanished, true, but only for a day. Reënforcements were soon sent, and a new campaign started early in September. Leaving Davidovich in the Tyrol with twenty thousand men, Wurmser started down the Brenta with twenty-six thousand men, intending to fall on Bonaparte’s rear, cut him to pieces, and relieve Mantua. But Bonaparte had a plan of his own this time, and, without waiting to find out where Wurmser was going, he started up the Adige, intending to attack the Austrians in the Tyrol, and join the army of the Rhine, then on the upper Danube. As it happened, Wurmser’s plan was a happy one for Bonaparte. The French found less than half the Austrian army opposing them, and, after they had beaten it, discovered that they were actually on the rear of the other half. Of course Bonaparte did not lose the opportunity. He sped down the Brenta behind Wurmser, overtook him at Bassano on the 8th of September, and of course defeated him. The Austrians fled in terrible demoralization. Wurmser succeeded in reaching Mantua, where he united with the garrison. The sturdy old Austrian had the courage, in spite of his losses, to come out of Mantua and meet Bonaparte on the 15th, but he was defeated again, and obliged to take refuge in the fortress. If the Austrians had been beaten repeatedly, they had no idea of yielding, and, in fact, there was apparently every reason to continue the struggle. The French army was in a most desperate condition. Its number was reduced to barely forty thousand, and this number was poorly supplied, and many of them were ill. Though living in the richest of countries, the rapacity and dishonesty of the army contractors were such that food reached the men half spoiled and in insufficient quantities, while the clothing supplied was pure shoddy. Many officers were laid up by wounds or fatigue; those who remained at their posts were discouraged, and threatening to resign. The Directory had tampered with Bonaparte’s armistices and treaties until Naples and Rome were ready to spring upon the French; and Venice, if not openly hostile, was irritating the army in many ways.
Bonaparte, in face of these difficulties, was in genuine despair:
“Everything is being spoiled in Italy,” he wrote the Directory. “The prestige of our forces is being lost. A policy which will give you friends among the princes as well as among the people, is necessary. Diminish your enemies. The influence of Rome is beyond calculation. It was a great mistake to quarrel with that power. Had I been consulted I should have delayed negotiations as I did with Genoa and Venice. Whenever your general in Italy is not the centre of everything, you will run great risks. This language is not that of ambition; I have only too many honors, and my health is so impaired that I think I shall be forced to demand a successor. I can no longer get on horseback. My courage alone remains, and that is not sufficient in a position like this.”
“BONAPARTE A LA BATAILLE D’ARCOLE, LE 27 BRUMAIRE, AN V.”
It was in such a situation that Bonaparte saw the Austrian force outside of Mantua, increased to fifty thousand men, and a new commander-in-chief, Alvinzi, put at its head. The Austrians advanced in two divisions, one down the Adige, the other by the Brenta. The French division which met the enemy at Trent and Bassano were driven back. In spite of his best efforts, Bonaparte was obliged to retire with his main army to Verona. Things looked serious. Alvinzi was pressing close to Verona, and the army on the Adige was slowly driving back the French division sent to hold it in check. If Davidovich and Alvinzi united, Bonaparte was lost.
“Perhaps we are on the point of losing Italy,” wrote Bonaparte to the Directory. “In a few days we shall make a last effort.” On November 14th this last effort was made. Alvinzi was close upon Verona, holding a position shut in by rivers and mountains on every side, and from which there was but one exit, a narrow pass at his rear. The French were in Verona.
On the night of the 14th of November Bonaparte went quietly into camp. Early in the evening he gave orders to leave Verona, and took the road westward. It looked like a retreat. The French army believed it to be so, and began to say sorrowfully among themselves that Italy was lost. When far enough from Verona to escape the attention of the enemy, Bonaparte wheeled to the southeast. On the morning of the 15th he crossed the Adige, intending, if possible, to reach the defile by which alone Alvinzi could escape from his position. The country into which his army marched was a morass crossed by two causeways. The points which it was necessary to take to command the defile were the town of Arcola and a bridge over the rapid stream on which the town lay. The Austrians discovered the plan, and hastened out to dispute Arcola and the bridge. All day long the two armies fought desperately, Bonaparte and his generals putting themselves at the head of their columns and doing the work of common soldiers. But at night Arcola was not taken, and the French retired to the right bank of the Adige, only to return on the 16th to reëngage Alvinzi, who, fearful lest his retreat be cut off, had withdrawn his army from near Verona, and had taken a position at Arcola. For two days the French struggled with the Austrians, wrenching the victory from them before the close of the 17th, and sending them flying towards Bassano. Bonaparte and his army returned to Verona, but this time it was by the gate which the Austrians, three days before, were pointing out as the place where they should enter.
It was a month and a half before the Austrians could collect a fifth army to send against the French. Bonaparte, tormented on every side by threatened uprisings in Italy; opposed by the Directory, who wanted to make peace; and distressed by the condition of his army, worked incessantly to strengthen his relations, quiet his enemies, and restore his army. When the Austrians, some forty-five thousand strong, advanced in January, 1797, against him, he had a force of about thirty-five thousand men ready to meet them. Some ten thousand of his army were watching Wurmser and twenty thousand Austrians shut up at Mantua.
Alvinzi had planned his attack skilfully. Advancing with twenty-eight thousand men by the Adige, he sent seventeen thousand under Provera to approach Verona from the east. The two divisions were to approach secretly, and to strike simultaneously.
At first Bonaparte was uncertain of the position of the main body of the enemy. Sending out feelers in every direction, he became convinced that it must be that it approached Rivoli. Leaving a force at Verona to hold back Provera, he concentrated his army in a single night on the plateau of Rivoli, and on the morning of January 14th advanced to the attack. The struggle at Rivoli lasted two days. Nothing but Bonaparte’s masterly tactics won it, for the odds were greatly against him. His victory, however, was complete. Of the twenty-eight thousand Austrians brought to the field, less than half escaped.
While his battle was waging, Bonaparte was also directing the fight with Provera, who was intent upon reaching Mantua and attacking the French besiegers on the rear, while Wurmser left the city and engaged them in front. The attack had begun, but Bonaparte had foreseen the move, and sent a division to the relief of his men. This battle, known as La Favorita, destroyed Provera’s division of the Austrian army, and so discouraged Wurmser, whose army was terribly reduced by sickness and starvation, that he surrendered on February 2d.
The Austrians were driven utterly from Italy, but Bonaparte had no time to rest. The Papal States and the various aristocratic parties of southern Italy were threatening to rise against the French. The spirit of independence and revolt which the invaders were bringing into the country could not but weaken clerical and monarchical institutions. An active enemy to the south would have been a serious hindrance to Napoleon, and he marched into the Papal States. A fortnight was sufficient to silence the threats of his enemies, and on February 19, 1797, he signed with the Pope the treaty of Tolentino. The peace was no sooner made than he started again against the Austrians.
When Mantua fell, and Austria saw herself driven from Italy, she had called her ablest general, the Archduke Charles, from the Rhine, and given him an army of over one hundred thousand men to lead against Bonaparte. The French had been reënforced to some seventy thousand, and though twenty thousand were necessary to keep Italy quiet, Bonaparte had a fine army, and he led it confidently to meet the main body of the enemy, which had been sent south to protect Trieste. Early in March he crossed the Tagliamento, and in a series of contests, in which he was uniformly successful, he drove his opponent back, step by step, until Vienna itself was in sight, and in April an armistice was signed. In May the French took possession of Venice, which had refused a French alliance, and which was playing a perfidious part, in Bonaparte’s judgment, and a republic on the French model was established.
Italy and Austria, worn out and discouraged by this “war of principle,” as Napoleon called it, at last compromised, and on October 17th, one year, seven months, and seven days after he left Paris, Napoleon signed the treaty of Campo Formio. By this treaty France gained the frontier of the Rhine and the Low Countries to the mouth of the Scheldt. Austria was given Venice, and a republic called the Cisalpine was formed from Reggio, Modena, Lombardy, and a part of the States of the Pope.
The military genius that this twenty-seven-year-old commander had shown in the campaign in Italy bewildered his enemies and thrilled his friends.
“Things go on very badly,” said an Austrian veteran taken at Lodi. “No one seems to know what he is about. The French general is a young blockhead who knows nothing of the regular rules of war. Sometimes he is on our right, at others on our left; now in front, and presently in our rear. This mode of warfare is contrary to all system, and utterly insufferable.”
It is certain that if Napoleon’s opponents never knew what he was going to do, if his generals themselves were frequently uncertain, it being his practice to hold his peace about his plans, he himself had definite rules of warfare. The most important of these were:
“Attacks should not be scattered, but should be concentrated.”
“Always be superior to the enemy at the point of attack.”
“Time is everything.”
To these formulated rules he joined marvelous fertility in stratagem. The feint by which, at the beginning of the campaign, he had enticed Beaulieu to march on Genoa, and that by which, a few days later, he had induced him to place his army near Valenza, were masterpieces in their way.
His quick-wittedness in emergency frequently saved him from disaster. Thus, on August 4th, in the midst of the excitement of the contest, Bonaparte went to Lonato to see what troops could be drawn from there. On entering he was greatly surprised to receive an Austrian parlementaire, who called on the commandant of Lonato to surrender, because the French were surrounded. Bonaparte saw at once that the Austrians could be nothing but a division which had been cut off and was seeking escape; but he was embarrassed, for there were only twelve hundred men at Lonato. Sending for the man, he had his eyes unbandaged, and told him that if his commander had the presumption to capture the general-in-chief of the army of Italy he might advance; that the Austrian division ought to have known that he was at Lonato with his whole army; and he added that if they did not lay down their arms in eight minutes he would not spare a man. This audacity saved Bonaparte, and won him four thousand prisoners with guns and cavalry.