Of the great Continental Powers which had formed a coalition against the revolutionary government of France, Austria and Russia were actively inimical, and there was no prospect of coming to terms with them, unless all the conquered territories recently acquired by France were sacrificed. The idea of natural boundaries had become by this time a dogma of political faith, and even the Directory, confronted as it was by a demoralized administration, by bad business conditions, and by an inflated currency, had no thought of making peace. Armies were operating along the eastern frontiers; and as soon as Napoleon reached Nice, he prepared, along the lines he had so frequently urged, to take the offensive against the vulnerable Austrian provinces of northern Italy.
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.
There was no intention to diminish the weight of the military element as the predominant partner. By the premature death of Hoche, Napoleon was left without a rival, and he did not hesitate to speak of the Directory as a makeshift government. The immediate question was to prevent an outbreak between the victorious general and his superiors, by which a return to the monarchy might be made easy. France was still at war with Great Britain; therefore, when Napoleon proposed to attack the vulnerable point of British influence in Egypt, with the ultimate purpose of advancing from there on the British domains in India, the plan was eagerly accepted by the Directors, despite the obviously utopian character of the proposal. Napoleon spoke in his best sententious style of the East as the only place where real glory could be acquired. The Directors were willing that he should absent himself from France, glad to purchase freedom from his control by assigning him a new important command over the best troops in France.
It is not probable that Napoleon was at all in earnest in planning an expedition to India; he appreciated the weakness of the home government, and from Egypt it would not be difficult to return, whenever he was needed, in the rôle of the sole savior of the country. The scale of preparation for this unique military adventure was most imposing; there was an air of mystery about it; people talked of its destination being Constantinople or India. Ships, to the number of 500, were gathered at Toulon, manned by 10,000 sailors and fitted to transport 35,000 veteran troops, taken mostly from the army of Italy. All of Napoleon’s best generals were to be with him, Berthier, Murat, Lannes, Davout, Marmont, Duroc, and the two popular commanders from the army of the Rhine, Kléber and Desaix. Great care was given to the material and scientific side of the expedition. Scholars and scientific experts were to accompany it, either for the purpose of antiquarian research in Egypt, or to develop the unused powers of the soil of the fertile Nile valley. There was plenty of money, for Berthier was sent to Rome to exact additional contributions from churches and convents. He called himself the treasurer of the Egyptian expedition and promised to fill his treasure chests.
The great fleet set sail on the 19th of May, 1798; only when the ships were at sea did the troops know what was to be their destination. The first point reached was Malta, where the famous Knights, so long the residuary legatees of the great crusading tradition, surrendered without resistance and received a French garrison. By good fortune the French armada escaped the vigilance of the English fleet which was cruising in the Mediterranean; and the army was landed at Alexandria on June 30th.
At this time Turkey had only the nominal sovereignty in Egypt, the real power being in the hands of a military caste, the Mamelouks, who exercised an oppressive rule over the cultivators of the soil, and the Arab chieftains, who represented the ancient conquerors of the country. Napoleon proclaimed himself as a liberator, promising to respect the customs and religion of the land, and offering his help in the development of its natural resources. After the easy capture of Alexandria there was a long, weary march across the desert to Cairo, during which the troops so suffered from intense heat, fatigue, and lack of food that there was discontent among both officers and men.
The final stand of the Mamelouks was made near Cairo within sight of the Pyramids, where they tried to rush the French squares with their cavalry. But the French artillery with its murderous fire decimated the advancing squadrons before they could come in contact with the French troops, with the result that on the French side the loss was only about thirty men, while the Mamelouks reckoned theirs by the thousand. Many of them, too, were drowned in the Nile. The French soldiers bent their bayonets and fished the bodies out in order to get the gold pieces in the belts of the dead warriors. Napoleon grimly reported that “the army was becoming reconciled to Egypt.” In the midst of these brilliant achievements, the victory of Nelson at Aboukir on the 1st of August came like a bolt from the blue, for the French admiral’s fleet was virtually annihilated, and by this disaster the French army was cut off from its base and, as it were, imprisoned in the land it had conquered. Yet Nelson could not follow up his victory; he had no frigates and, therefore, could not enter the harbor of Alexandria to destroy the provisions and the transport ships which were collected there.
One of the results of the naval battle was an uprising at Cairo, which was ruthlessly repressed, 5000 of the insurgents losing their lives. After an expedition had been sent into upper Egypt as far as the cataracts of Syene, the country was reduced to some kind of order, but there were further difficulties to deal with from another quarter, for, under the instigation of England, the Turks were preparing to retake Egypt, and two armies were now on the way with this object. One of them was to proceed through Asia Minor and Syria; to meet the enemy Napoleon, with the bulk of his army, advanced through Syria, conquering towns as he proceeded with his usual unbroken fortune. The march was signalized by spectacular deeds of personal prowess on the part of his subordinate generals. But he also shocked his admirers by the horrible massacre of 3000 prisoners at Jaffa. The excuse for this deed of bloodshed was that the victims had been previously released on parole and had broken it by taking part in the defense of Jaffa. The first failure in this unexampled course of success came at St. John d’Acre, an important seaport which was obstinately defended by its Turkish garrison, aided by an English commodore, Sidney Smith. After two unsuccessful assaults had been made by the French, with heavy losses, Napoleon withdrew in unconcealed disgust at his failure. He never forgot Sidney Smith, and spoke of him always as the man who had spoiled his luck; “that idiot [bicoque] was the only thing,” he said, “that prevented me from entering India and striking a deathblow at England.”
After the raising of the siege hope of further progress through Syria was abandoned, and the army, suffering from illness and discontent, had a miserable march back to Egypt, their route being marked by dead and dying. Napoleon showed great constancy in this disastrous experience, exposing himself to the ravages of the plague and restoring the confidence of his men by his coolness. On reaching Egypt the French found that a Turkish army of 18,000 men had disembarked at Alexandria; these, however, were soon disposed of at the second battle of Aboukir, fought almost a year after the first (July 25, 1799). The Turkish soldiers who refused, or were not able, to reembark on their transports were thrown into the sea.
While the expedition was marked by such deeds of barbarism, it had a more justifiable side because of the civilized and progressive administration given to Egypt by its French conquerors. Intelligent efforts were made to conciliate the Mussulman population; justice, finance, and administration were reformed; even a beginning was made in establishing something resembling representative government. Works of public utility were encouraged, some planned on a large scale, such as the building of a canal at Suez, a project only realized many decades afterwards. Remarkable also were the scientific results attained through the foundation of an Egyptian Institute consisting of French specialists in archeology, architecture, and art. Among its members were men who devoted themselves to promoting an industrial reformation, while others accomplished hygienic improvements for the cities. Indeed, the most durable result of this extraordinary scheme of Oriental conquest was the primacy of culture it gave to France in Egypt, a primacy she has continued to maintain even in the face of the military occupation of the country by England.