5

Victory

‘In order to lead an army you have ceaselessly to attend to it, be ahead of the news, provide for everything.’

Napoleon to Joseph, April 1813

‘There is but one step from triumph to downfall. I have seen, in the most significant of circumstances, that some little thing always decides great events.’

Napoleon to Talleyrand, October 1797

Although Napoleon’s main enemy was always Austria during the Italian campaign, he was able to use the short moments when the Austrians posed no danger to protect his rear. It has been said that when the French troops arrived in the Papal States in June 1796 they lit their pipes with altar-candles, though the sheer vividness of the image smacks of Francophobic propaganda.¹ What is true is that Pope Pius VI had denounced the French Revolution and supported, but not formally joined, the First Coalition against France. He would soon be made to pay heavily for this insult. The seventy-eight-year-old Pope had already reigned for twenty-one years, and hadn’t the military or personal capacity to prevent Napoleon entering Modena on June 18 and Bologna the next day, where he expelled the papal authorities and forced them to come to terms within a week. In late June Napoleon agreed an armistice with the Pope, with a ‘contribution’ of 15 million francs that was enough to bring round the Directory to the idea of a peace treaty. Saliceti also negotiated the handing over of ‘One hundred pictures, vases, busts, or statues, as the French commissioners shall determine’, including a bronze bust of Junius Brutus and a marble one of Marcus Brutus, plus five hundred manuscripts from the Vatican library.² On August 11 Napoleon’s eagle eye spotted the library trying to reduce its commitment and wrote to François Cacault, the French agent in Rome, to say: ‘The treaty included five hundred manuscripts, not three hundred.’³

On June 21, the twenty-six-year-old Napoleon wrote no fewer than four letters to the Directory in Paris, warning that he had only a ‘middling’ army with which ‘to face all emergencies; to hold the [Austrian] armies in check; to besiege forts, to protect our rear, to overawe Genoa, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples; we must be in force everywhere.’⁴ It was true: the great cities of Italy – he could also have included Milan and Turin – were held in check as much by the awe aroused by his seeming invincibility as by any immediate military force. He was vulnerable to a properly co-ordinated revolt. The Directory offered few reinforcements, still considering the Rhine to be much the more important theatre of operations.

A judicious interplay between threats and insouciance played an important part in Napoleon’s Italian statecraft at this time. ‘Here, one must burn and shoot in order to establish terror,’ he wrote on June 21, ‘and there one must pretend not to see because the time has not arrived for action.’⁵ He appealed to the pride of those he would conquer but gave them no doubt as to the consequences of resistance. ‘The French army loves and respects all peoples, especially the simple and virtuous inhabitants of the mountains,’ read a proclamation to the Tyrolese that month. ‘But should you ignore your own interests and take up arms, we shall be terrible as the fire from heaven.’⁶

He leaned heavily on Berthier, but was not shy of asserting his own capacities. When he saw Miot de Melito in Bologna on June 22, Napoleon asked the diplomat about the rumour ‘that it is to Berthier that I owe my success, that he directs my plans, and that I only execute what he has suggested to me’. Miot, who had known Berthier as a youth in Versailles, denied it, whereupon Napoleon said, with warmth, ‘You are right, Berthier is not capable of commanding a battalion!’⁷ This was not something he actually believed – he handed command of the Army of Italy to Berthier in 1798 and the Army of the Reserve in 1800 – but it shows how deeply conscious he was of his public image. In a similar vein he would now alter the wording of proclamations to turn the phrase ‘Commanders of the French Army’ into the singular.

The British, who had been friendly trading partners with the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, were expelled from Livorno on June 27 and £12 million of their merchandise captured; the Milan Citadel fell after a forty-eight-hour bombardment on the 29th. When the British responded on July 11 by seizing the island of Elba off the coast of Italy, a former possession of the Grand Duchy, Napoleon sensibly remarked: ‘We shall have no right to complain of a violation of neutrality, of which we ourselves have set the example.’⁸Soon afterwards Napoleon extracted a ‘contribution’ from the Grand Duke Ferdinand III of Tuscany, Emperor Francis’s younger brother, who had given English merchants trading privileges at Livorno. When Napoleon went to Florence on July 1, the streets from the San Fridiano to the Pitti Palace gates were ‘filled with the whole population’ trying to catch a glimpse of him.⁹ Napoleon visited Ferdinand at the Palace there in the Boboli Gardens and saw the gorgeous Pietro da Cortona ceiling paintings commissioned by the Medici, which could not be easily removed to Paris, as well as paintings by Rubens, Raphael, Titian, Van Dyck and Rembrandt, which could. He told the Grand Duke, who received him with all politesse, ‘Your brother no longer has a foot of land in Lombardy.’ It wasn’t true: Mantua was still holding out. But although Ferdinand ‘was so master of himself as to betray no concern’, he knew that its fall would soon be followed by the loss of his throne.¹⁰

 • • •

On June 26, Josephine finally left Paris for Milan, in tears. She was accompanied by Joseph Bonaparte (who was nursing a sexually transmitted disease), her demoiselle-de-compagnie Louise Compoint, Joseph’s brother-in-law Nicolas Clary, the financier Antoine Hamelin (who wanted a job from Napoleon and was sponged off by Josephine), Junot, four servants, a cavalry escort and Josephine’s small mongrel Fortuné, which had once bitten Napoleon in bed and later fell in unequal combat to his cook’s larger and fiercer dog.¹¹ With breathtaking gall, Josephine also brought along her boudoir-hussar Hippolyte Charles. Junot seduced Louise on the journey, so Josephine dismissed her when they reached Milan, making an enemy of Junot. Two years later she would come bitterly to regret this.

Napoleon inundated her with long love letters on her journey south, a typical one ending ‘Farewell, my love, a kiss on your mouth – another on your heart’ and looking forward to the moment when ‘I could be in your arms, at your feet, on your breasts.’¹² He wrote from Pistoia in Tuscany to tell her that he had pockets ‘full of letters which I have never sent you because they are too foolish, too silly – bête is the word’.¹³ Considering the nature of the letters he did send, these must have been trop bête indeed. In a reprise of his earlier emotional masochism he wrote: ‘Mock me as you like, stay in Paris, take lovers and let all the world know it, never write to me – Well! I’ll only love you ten times more!’¹⁴

Josephine arrived at the Serbelloni Palace on July 10, and Napoleon joined her there three days later, having marched 300 miles from Milan through the Habsburg, Papal, Venetian and independent cities of Peschiera, Brescia, Tortona, Modena, Bologna, Livorno, Florence, Roverbella, Verona and back to Milan in six weeks, cowed all of central Italy, and seized ‘contributions’ totalling well over 40 million francs. He was oblivious to Hippolyte Charles – neither Junot, Murat nor Joseph was about to tell him – and Josephine appears to have responded warmly to his attentions, however she might have been feeling emotionally. Hamelin recalled that ‘From time to time he would leave his study in order to play with her as if she were a child. He would tease her, cause her to cry out, and overwhelm her with such rough caresses that I would be obliged to go to the window and observe the weather outside.’¹⁵ It was certainly a very tactile relationship; the playwright Carrion de Nisas recorded that ‘Madame Bonaparte is neither young nor pretty, but she is extremely modest and engaging. She frequently caresses her husband, who seems devoted to her. Often she weeps, sometimes daily, for very trivial reasons.’¹⁶

Napoleon had summoned Joseph, for whom Saliceti had obtained the rank of commissary-general in the Army of Italy, in order to have someone near him whom he could trust with delicate confidential negotiations. In that capacity Joseph was to be used by his brother for missions to Livorno, Parma and Rome, and he later went with Miot de Melito to re-establish French control over Corsica. In the course of these expeditions, Joseph discovered a genuine capacity for diplomacy.

Napoleon could stay only two nights: Wurmser was on his way south with 50,000 men and the French needed to capture Mantua from Beaulieu before he could relieve it. ‘I propose making a bold stroke,’ he told the Directory.¹⁷ Then he informed them of Murat’s plan to cross one of the four artificial lakes protecting Mantua at night with men disguised in Austrian uniforms, hoping to open the city gates for long enough for Napoleon’s troops to get inside. Napoleon was probably thinking of the Capitoline geese that saved Ancient Rome when he wrote of Murat’s ‘sudden attack, which, like all of a similar nature, will depend upon luck – a dog or a goose’.¹⁸ In the event an unexpected drop in the level of the Po lowered the water in the lakes enough to stymie the plan.

By late July Napoleon had learned from a paid informer on the Austrian staff that Wurmser was taking his army, which now included excellent veteran units drawn from the Rhine campaign, down both sides of Lake Garda to relieve Mantua, where sickness was starting to wear down Beaulieu’s garrison. Napoleon relied a good deal on intelligence in his campaigns, which he insisted on analysing personally rather than getting it through staff officers, so he could decide for himself how much credence to attach to each piece.¹⁹ Methods of gaining intelligence included interrogating deserters and prisoners, sending out cavalry patrols, and even dressing soldiers as farm labourers after having taken the real labourers’ wives hostage. Napoleon was conscious of the way that spies and officers on scouting missions could mistake corps for detachments and vice versa and often repeated what they had heard from ‘panic-stricken or surprised people’ rather than what they had witnessed.²⁰ His orders for his intelligence officers were: ‘To reconnoitre accurately defiles and fords of every description. To provide guides that may be depended upon. To interrogate the priest and the postmaster. To establish rapidly a good understanding with the inhabitants. To send out spies. To intercept public and private letters . . . In short, to be able to answer every question of the general-in-chief when he arrives at the head of the army.’²¹

In this instance the spies were right: Wurmser was moving down the eastern side of Lake Garda with 32,000 men in five columns, while the Croatian-born cavalryman General Peter von Quasdanovich was coming down the western side with 18,000. Napoleon left Sérurier with 10,500 men to maintain the siege of Mantua. This gave him 31,000 men to meet the new threats. He sent 4,400 under General Pierre-François Sauret to Salo to slow down Quasdanovich, ordered Masséna with 15,400 men to the eastern side, deployed General Hyacinthe Despinoy with 4,700 to protect the Peschiera–Verona line, sent Augereau’s 5,300 to watch the roads from the east and kept Kilmaine’s 1,500 cavalry in reserve. He himself then moved continually between Brescia, Castelnuovo, Desenzano, Roverbella, Castiglione, Goïto and Peschiera, taking his mobile headquarters to wherever gave him the best idea of the way the campaign was progressing. This constant activity in the often severe heat led to his losing five horses to exhaustion in quick succession.²² One of his Polish aides-de-camp, Dezydery Adam Chlapowski, recalled that he ‘never used his spurs or knees to make his horse gallop, but always applied his whip’.²³

On July 29 Quasdanovich drove Sauret out of Salò as expected, although the town changed hands three times. At 3 a.m. the same day, east of Lake Garda, Masséna was attacked at La Corona and Rivoli by large numbers and had to conduct a long fighting retreat down the Adige to Bussolengo by nightfall. The Austrians pushed on boldly and took Rivoli. ‘We shall recover tomorrow, or afterwards, what you have lost today,’ Napoleon reassured Masséna. ‘Nothing is lost while courage remains.’²⁴ On July 30, however, in an operation known as the ‘Surprise of Brescia’, the Austrians captured Brescia’s garrison and hospitals with only three killed and eleven wounded. The sick included Murat (who had caught venereal disease from a Madame Rugat), Lannes and Kellermann’s brilliant cavalryman son, François-Étienne. Josephine, who had gone to Brescia from Milan at Napoleon’s request as he had considered the city safely behind the lines, was nearly captured, prompting Napoleon to swear, ‘Wurmser shall pay dearly for those tears.’²⁵

‘We’ve suffered some setbacks,’ Napoleon acknowledged to the Directory, while sending all non-essential equipment to the rear.²⁶ At noon on July 29 he assumed the enemy were descending from Bassano in strength and ordered a concentration at Villanova, east of Verona. Augereau’s division covered 60 miles in fifty-five hours of marching and counter-marching, but by noon the next day Napoleon realized that the main body of the enemy were in fact to his north and west. If he faced Wurmser’s main advance and didn’t achieve a complete victory he would lose Mantua anyway, so he decided to deal with Quasdanovich first. On July 30 therefore he ordered Sérurier to abandon the siege of Mantua to increase his numbers in the field by adding General Louis Pelletier’s brigade to Augereau’s force and Dallemagne’s to Masséna’s.²⁷ His order to Augereau to retreat to Roverbella read: ‘Every moment is precious . . . The enemy has broken through our line at three places: he is master of the important points of Corona and Rivoli . . . You will see that our communications with Milan and Verona have been cut. Await new orders at Roverbella; I will go there in person.’²⁸ Augereau lost no time.

Ending the siege of Mantua involved abandoning no fewer than 179 cannon and mortars that couldn’t be removed, and dumping their ammunition in the lakes. It pained Napoleon to do this, but he knew that decisive victories in the field, not fortresses, were the key to modern warfare. ‘Whatever happens, and however much it costs, we must sleep in Brescia tomorrow,’ he told Masséna.²⁹ That day, the 31st, his constant movements nearly came to grief when he narrowly missed being ambushed by a Croatian unit on the road from Roverbella to Goato.

The terrain between Brescia and Mantua includes 3,000-foot-high mountains and lines of morainic hills through Lonato, Castiglione and Solferino to Volta, very broken country dropping to a broad, flat plain. On July 31 the French army marched west at 3 a.m. and there was a sharp fight at dawn for the town of Lonato between Sauret and the Austrian General Ott that went on for four hours. Meanwhile, Masséna deployed between Desenzano and Lonato with the 32nd Line Demi-Brigade on his left. Heavily outnumbered, Ott fell back. With Augereau coming up as quickly as he could, Quasdanovich’s 18,000 men now faced 30,000 French, so he promptly retreated. That night Napoleon, fearing for his lines of communication, marched with Augereau to Brescia, reaching it by ten o’clock the next morning.

By now Wurmser, who had heard that Napoleon was both marching westwards for Brescia and massing at Roverbella to defend the siege lines at Mantua (which in fact he had abandoned), was thoroughly confused, and he lost the initiative through inaction. The next day General Antoine La Valette, who panicked and fled from Castiglione, was stripped of his command in front of his men of the 18th Légère Demi-Brigade. The enthusiasm of the troops that day helped decide Napoleon to try to crush Quasdanovich. At the second battle of Lonato, on August 3, he sent Despinoy’s force from Brescia to turn Quasdanovich’s right flank at Gavardo, and a reinforced Sauret to attack his left flank at Salò, with Dallemagne’s brigade marching between them as a link. When Sauret’s men complained they were hungry, Napoleon told them they could find food in the enemy camp.

Just as General Jean-Joseph Pijon’s brigade was being driven from Lonato, with Pijon himself being captured, Napoleon arrived leading elements of Masséna’s division. He ordered the 32nd Line into ‘columns of platoons’ and without pause, and with drummers and musicians playing, sent them into a bayonet charge, supported by the 18th Line. Despite losing both battalion commanders, they hurled the Austrians back towards Desenzano, straight into the path of Napoleon’s escort company of cavalry, together with elements of the 15th Dragoons and 4th Légère. Junot received six wounds, but this did not prevent him from accepting the surrender of the entire Austrian brigade. On hearing of the disaster, Quasdanovich retreated right around the north side of the lake to rejoin Wurmser. He would remain out of action for the next ten days. ‘I was tranquil,’ Napoleon wrote in his post-battle bulletin. ‘The brave 32nd Demi-Brigade was there.’ The 32nd had those words embroidered in large gold letters on its colours, and their pride spurred them to greater courage. ‘It is astonishing what power words have over men,’ Napoleon said of the 32nd years later.³⁰

Augereau retook Castiglione on August 3, after sixteen hours’ hard fighting on the hot, arid plain. For years afterwards, whenever Augereau was criticized by his entourage for disloyalty, Napoleon would say: ‘Ah, but let us not forget that he saved us at Castiglione.’³¹ By the time the French had regrouped there on August 4, Wurmser had lost any opportunity he might have had to attack Napoleon in the rear. The best he could hope for, as he slowly moved up around Solferino with some 20,000 men, was to buy time for Mantua to prepare for another siege. On the morning of August 4, Napoleon was at Lonato with only 1,200 men when more than 3,000 lost Austrians, who had been cut off from Quasdanovich’s command, suddenly blundered into the town. Napoleon calmly informed their parlementaire (officer sent to parley) that his ‘whole army’ was present, and that ‘If in eight minutes his division had not laid down its arms, I would not spare a man.’³² He supported this ruse by issuing orders to Berthier about grenadier and artillery units that Berthier knew were entirely bogus. The Austrians only discovered once they had surrendered and been disarmed that there were no French forces nearby, and that they could have captured Napoleon with ease.

 • • •

The second battle of Lonato saw the first use by Napoleon of the bataillon carré system. Although proposed by Guibert and Bourcet in textbook form in the 1760s and 1770s, it was Napoleon who first put it into practice successfully on the battlefield. Under its diamond-shaped formation of units, if the main body of the enemy was encountered, say, on the right flank, the division on the right became the new advance guard whose job it was to fix the enemy in place. The divisions that had formed the old vanguard and rearguard automatically became the masse de manoeuvre, the central strike force capable of supporting the new advance division, with the aim of enveloping the enemy’s flanks. The army could therefore turn 90 degrees in either direction with relative ease; the system had the additional advantage of being capable of magnification, as applicable to entire corps as to divisions. The key point was what Bourcet called ‘controlled dispersion’, and it permitted Napoleon hugely increased flexibility, allowing the battlefront to be constantly adapted according to changing circumstances.³³

The battaillon carré also was employed by Napoleon at the second battle of Castiglione, 20 miles north-west of Mantua, on Friday, August 5. Wurmser was deployed between Solferino on his right flank and a strong redoubt on the Monte Medolano hill on the Mantua–Brescia road on his left, with between 20,000 and 25,000 men. Napoleon had over 30,000 men, Masséna’s 10,000 massed in line and column on his left, Augereau’s 8,000 drawn up in two lines in front of the town of Castiglione, Kilmaine’s cavalry in reserve on the right, Despinoy’s 5,000 men returning from Salò, and General Pascal Fiorella’s 7,500 men coming from the south, hoping to deliver a decisive blow to the Austrian rear. He planned to draw Wurmser’s reserves northwards by feigning to withdraw. Castiglione was a very complicated battle, best understood from atop the magnificent castle of Lonato and the La Rocca bell-tower at Solferino, which command superb views of the whole countryside.

When he heard cannon-fire to the south at 9 a.m. on August 5, Napoleon assumed it signalled Fiorella’s arrival, but in fact it was just his 8th Dragoons sacking the Austrian baggage train at Guidizzolo. He launched Masséna and Augereau into the attack, and Marmont was sent with a 12-gun battery towards Monte Medolano. Fighting developed along the whole line, with Augereau taking Solferino and Despinoy arriving in time to help the left-centre, as Wurmser was forced to move infantry away to check Fiorella. Wurmser thus found himself trapped between two armies with a third threatening his rear. He was forced to withdraw, and only narrowly avoided being captured by French light cavalry. Only the exhaustion of the hard-marching French prevented the complete destruction of the Austrian army, which fled across the Mincio.

The Austrians lost 2,000 killed and wounded that day, and 1,000 more were captured along with twenty guns. When Napoleon’s officers counted the French dead they found around 1,100 had been killed or wounded or were missing.* ‘So there we are,’ Napoleon reported to the Directory on August 6, ‘in five days another campaign has been completed.’³⁴ Two days later, as he reoccupied Verona, he added: ‘The Austrian army . . . has disappeared like a dream and the Italy that it threatened is now quiet.’³⁵ He resumed the siege of Mantua on August 10. It still held 16,400 Austrian soldiers within its 10-foot-thick walls, although only 12,200 of them were fit for duty.

Napoleon used the three remaining weeks of August to refit his army, and send Sauret and Sérurier, two of his generals who had been wounded and whom he greatly admired, back home. He replaced them with the veteran artilleryman General Claude-Henri de Vaubois and the recently promoted thirty-year-old General Jean-Joseph de Sahuguet, with a minimum of input from Paris. His reputation in France was growing with each victory and the Directory increasingly suspected he could not be contained. ‘If there be in France a single pure-minded and honest man capable of suspecting my political intentions,’ he told Carnot and Barras, ‘I shall at once renounce the happiness of serving my country.’³⁶ By then he knew there was little danger they could call his bluff. Previously, he had had to negotiate with them over which generals he could promote, as they had a pool of 343 on the active list. The more successful he was on the battlefield, however, and the more the Directory depended on him for their solvency and prestige, the less interference he would face over his choices.

His domestic affairs were distinctly less secure. He tried to track down Josephine on holiday, writing ‘My wife has been running around Italy for the last two weeks; I believe she is in Livorno, or in Florence.’ He also asked that his ‘considerably spirited, but also headstrong’ brother Lucien, for whom he had found a war commissary job at Marseilles but who had suddenly gone to Paris without the permission of his commander-in-chief (and brother), be sent to the Army of the North within twenty-four hours of his being found.³⁷

 • • •

In late August Napoleon learned that Wurmser was about to make a second attempt to relieve Mantua. Combing out his lines of communication and receiving some men from the Army of the Alps gave him a total of over 50,000 troops. Since he did not know which of the three possible routes Wurmser would take, he sent Vaubois with 11,000 men up the west side of Lake Garda to block that approach, and Masséna with 13,000 men and Augereau with 9,000 to Rivoli and Verona respectively as his central masse de manoeuvre. Kilmaine watched the eastern approaches with 1,200 infantry and most of the cavalry. Napoleon himself stayed with a 3,500 reserve at Legnago while Sahuguet besieged Mantua with 10,000 men and a further 6,000 troops watched for rebellions around Cremona. Once Napoleon had divined Wurmser’s route of attack, he would concentrate his force; until then he devoted himself to ensuring that there were plentiful supplies of brandy, flour, fodder, ammunition and army biscuit (hard-tack squares of baked bread).

By September 2 Napoleon knew for certain that Wurmser was coming down the Vallagarina valley of the Adige. He planned to attack once he heard that General Moreau, commanding the Army of Germany, had arrived at Innsbruck, because, if possible, Napoleon’s advances should be co-ordinated with what was happening in Germany. However, Archduke Charles defeated General Jourdan at Würzburg on September 3 and Moreau was raiding Munich, deep in southern Bavaria, so neither could be of any help. Napoleon needed to guard against the danger of being forced to fight Archduke Charles’s and Wurmser’s armies simultaneously, something he simply did not have the manpower to do.

Napoleon advanced to Rovereto, 15 miles south of Trento, where he intercepted Wurmser’s advance guard on the 4th. At daybreak he was before the strongly held defile of Marco (just below Rovereto), while another enemy force was across the Adige at the entrenched camp of Mori. Pijon’s light infantry gained the heights to the left of Marco and after two hours’ stubborn resistance, the Austrian line gave way. Around 750 Frenchmen were killed, wounded or missing. The Austrian General Baron Davidovich lost 3,000 (mostly captured), 25 guns and 7 colours.³⁸

With the Austrian army now in full retreat, four more battles were fought up the same valley over the next week. At Calliano poor Austrian picketing meant that the French surprised the Austrians while they were cooking their breakfast and forced them out of their positions. On September 7 at Primolano the French attacked a seemingly impregnable position and carried it by sheer élan. The two sides of the valley come dramatically together in a U-shape with only half a mile between the high cliffs on both sides. The Austrians should have been able to defend the pass easily, but that afternoon columns of French light infantry swarmed up both sides of the mountain, waded through the fast-flowing Brenta up to their waists and simply charged the Austrians, sending them fleeing down to Bassano.

That night Napoleon slept with Augereau’s division, wrapped in his cloak under the stars and sharing their rations, as he often did in his early campaigns. The next day he captured 2,000 Austrians and 30 guns at Bassano, along with several ammunition wagons. Only at Cerea on the 11th did Masséna suffer a minor defeat – four hundred French killed and wounded – when he overreached in the pursuit of the enemy. The next day Augereau captured Legnago and twenty-two Austrian guns without loss, releasing five hundred French prisoners-of-war. Then, only three days later, on September 15, at La Favorita outside Mantua, Kilmaine inflicted a defeat on Wurmser that forced the Austrian commander-in-chief into the city.

 • • •

Napoleon was back in Milan with Josephine on September 19, and remained there nearly a month, sending Marmont to Paris with the best kind of propaganda tool: twenty-two captured Austrian standards for display at Les Invalides. The sheer tempo of the operations ensured that he had always kept the initiative, bowling unstoppably along a narrow valley gorge replete with places where the Austrians should have been able to slow or halt him. This lightning campaign up the valley of the Brenta was the perfect illustration of why esprit de corps was so valuable. Napoleon had used his command of Italian to question local people, and employed the bataillon carré system to send his army in any direction at a moment’s notice. He had split the Austrian army at Rovereto and forced it to march away separately, leaving each part to be defeated in the classic manoeuvre from the central position and keeping up the pressure on Wurmser with regular dawn attacks.

Wurmser had started the campaign with 20,000 men and three days’ head start; he ended it when his 14,000 men joined the 16,000 already bottled up in Mantua. By October 10 Mantua was fully under siege again, only this time Wurmser was inside. Four thousand of his men died of wounds, malnutrition and disease in six weeks, and a further 7,000 were hospitalized. With only thirty-eight days of food left, Wurmser had to make sorties for supplies from the countryside, though one cost him nearly 1,000 casualties.

Mantua could not hold out very much longer, but the wider war did not augur well for Napoleon’s chances of taking the city. Jourdan had been beaten back across the Rhine by Archduke Charles on September 21, and it was likely that the Austrians would soon make a third attempt to relieve Mantua, this time with a much larger force. Napoleon asked the Directory for 25,000 more reinforcements in case the Papal States and Naples declared war, adding that fortunately ‘The Duke of Parma is behaving quite well; he is also useless, in all respects.’³⁹ On October 2 Napoleon offered peace terms to Emperor Francis, hoping to cajole him to the negotiating table with a mixture of flattery and threat. ‘Majesty, Europe wants peace,’ he wrote. ‘This disastrous war has lasted too long.’ He then warned that the Directory had ordered him to close Trieste and other Austrian ports along the Adriatic, adding: ‘Until now, I have stayed the execution of this plan in the hope of not increasing the number of innocent victims of this war.’⁴⁰ Emperor Francis of Austria – who was also head of the politically separate but Austrian-dominated Holy Roman Empire, a loose conglomeration of semi-independent states that stretched across much of Germany and central Europe – was a proud, ascetic, calculating man, who hated the Revolution that had beheaded his aunt Marie Antoinette and who had briefly commanded the Austrian army in the Flanders campaign of 1794, before handing over to his militarily much more talented brother Archduke Charles. Napoleon received no reply to his peace offer.

Napoleon again threatened to resign on October 8, this time on the basis of general exhaustion. ‘I cannot ride a horse anymore,’ he wrote, ‘only courage remains to me, which is not enough in a post like this.’ He also declared that Mantua couldn’t be taken before February, and ‘Rome is arming, and arousing the fanaticism of the people.’ He believed the Vatican’s influence to be ‘incalculable’.⁴¹ He demanded the right to sign a ‘most essential’ final treaty with Naples and a ‘necessary’ alliance with Genoa and Piedmont, warning that the autumn rains had brought illnesses that were filling his hospitals. His central message was ‘Above all send troops.’ Yet he also wanted Paris to know that ‘Whenever your general in Italy is not the centre of everything you run great risks.’

Two days later, and without the Directory’s prior agreement, Napoleon signed a comprehensive peace treaty with Naples that permitted the Bourbons to retain their throne unmolested if they agreed not to take part in any activities against the French. If the Austrians were going to invade from the north, Napoleon needed to be safe in the south. He also ensured that his lines of communication ran through the more trustworthy Genoa, rather than Piedmont, whose new king, Charles Emmanuel IV, was an unknown quantity.

Napoleon was conscious of the whispers circulating in Paris, where some were saying that he was driven solely by ambition and might one day overthrow the government. In his letters to the Directory he ridiculed his detractors, saying: ‘If two months ago I wished to be Duke of Milan, today I desire to be King of Italy!’⁴² Yet they were unconvinced; although Barras and Carnot recognized his undeniable military capacity, all the Directors feared how he might use his growing popularity with the people once the Italian campaign was over. Napoleon’s principal preoccupation at the time was the devious unreliability of army contractors, whom he regularly described as swindlers, especially the influential Compagnie Flachat, which was ‘nothing but a bunch of fraudsters with no real credit, no money and no morality’. He wished he could have them shot, writing on October 12 to the Directory: ‘I never cease having them arrested and tried by courts martial, but they buy the judges; it’s a complete fair here, where everything is sold.’⁴³

On October 16 Napoleon called upon Wurmser to surrender Mantua. ‘The brave should be facing danger, not swamp plague,’ he wrote, but he was flatly turned down.⁴⁴ The same day, again with the minimum of input from the Directory, he proclaimed the establishment of the Cispadane Republic, formed from Bologna, Ferrara, Modena and Reggio (which involved overthrowing the Duke of Modena who had allowed a convoy of supplies to get into Mantua) with a new 2,800-strong Italian Legion to guard it. The Cispadane Republic (whose name translates as ‘By the banks of the Po’) abolished feudalism, decreed civil equality, instituted a popularly elected assembly and began the Risorgimento (resurgence) unification movement which was eventually – albeit three-quarters of a century later – to create a unified, independent Italy. The writing of its constitution took no fewer than thirty-eight meetings, a testament to Napoleon’s patience since he was actively involved. The French were starting to bring about a political unity to a peninsula that hadn’t known it for centuries.

In one area, however, French revolutionary institutions never had much hope of prevailing in Italy, and that was in their efforts to reduce the powers of the Roman Catholic Church. Italians opposed Napoleon’s religious reforms passionately, and in what is called the epoca francese in Italian history, Napoleon’s Church reforms were hated as much as the introduction of his administrative culture was admired.⁴⁵ His attempted bullying of the Vatican began early. In October 1796 Napoleon warned Pius VI not to oppose the Cispadane Republic, let alone attack the French once the Austrians returned. He ominously informed the Pope that ‘to destroy the temporal power of the Pope, the will alone is wanting,’ but in peacetime ‘everything may be arranged’. He then warned him that if he declared war it would mean ‘the ruin and death of the madmen who would oppose the Republican phalanxes’.⁴⁶ With the Directory unable to spare the 25,000 troop reinforcements he needed so desperately after Jourdan and Moreau’s defeats in Germany – barely 3,000 arrived for the coming campaign – Napoleon had to buy time. As he told Cacault in Rome: ‘The game really is for us to throw the ball from one to the other, so as to deceive that old fox.’⁴⁷

In early November the Austrians were ready for their third attempt to relieve Mantua, using a strategic plan that could have been thought up only by a committee, in this case the Aulic Council in Vienna. The Hungarian veteran General József Alvinczi and his 28,000 men were to drive the French back from Rivoli to Mantua, while General Giovanni di Provera was to advance with 9,000 men from Brenta to Legnago as a diversion, and 10,000 men at Bassano would try to prevent Napoleon from concentrating his forces. To have 19,000 men essentially taking part in diversionary attacks, with only 28,000 in the main force, showed that the Council had not learned the lessons of the previous six months. Napoleon later said that the sixty-one-year-old Alvinczi, who had fought in Bavaria, Holland and Turkey in his long career, was the best general he had fought thus far, which was why he never said anything either positive or negative about him in his bulletins (by contrast he praised Beaulieu, Wurmser and Archduke Charles whom he didn’t rate). He also showed great respect to General Provera in his proclamations and Orders of the Day because he thought him the worst of the lot and hoped he wouldn’t be dismissed.

 • • •

Napoleon now had 41,400 men. He positioned them as far back as possible to give him maximum warning of where and when the Austrians were coming. In addition he had 2,700 men garrisoning Brescia, Peschiera and Verona, and the 40th Demi-Brigade of 2,500 men were en route from France. Alvinczi crossed the Piave on November 2. He instructed Quasdanovich and Provera to make their way to Vicenza, Quasdanovich via Bassano, and Provera via Treviso. The Austrian advance had begun.

Much to his chagrin, Masséna had to obey Napoleon’s orders to fall back on Vicenza without a fight. He had followed Augereau in coming to appreciate Napoleon as a leader and soldier, but he was also jealous of his own reputation as one of France’s best generals and proud of his nickname ‘the darling child of victory’. He didn’t like being ordered to retreat, even before larger forces. On November 5 Napoleon brought Augereau up to Montebello and, seeing the Austrian vanguards crossing the Brenta river well in front of their columns, decided to attack them the next day. Meanwhile Masséna hit Provera’s column at Fontaniva, driving them back onto some islands in the river but not completely across it.

On November 6, Augereau attacked Quasdanovich’s force as it emerged from Bassano, but despite hard fighting he failed to push it back over the Brenta. The village of Nove changed hands several times over the course of the day and Napoleon, now outnumbered by 28,000 to 19,500, had to withdraw. There are several ways to ascribe victory: number of casualties, retention of the battlefield, stymying of the enemy’s plans among them. Whichever way the battle of Bassano is viewed it was Napoleon’s first defeat, albeit not a serious one.

Falling back to Vicenza, Napoleon received news of Vaubois’ defeat at Davidovich’s hands over five days of skirmishes in the villages of Cembra and Calliano. Over 40 per cent of his force had been killed or were wounded or missing. Augereau was immediately ordered back to the Adige, south of Verona, Masséna to Verona itself, and General Barthélemy Joubert – a lawyer’s son who had run away from home at fifteen to join the artillery – was told to send a brigade from Mantua to Rivoli to help Vaubois rally there. Napoleon then harangued Vaubois’ men: ‘Soldiers of the 39th and 85th Infantry, you are no longer fit to belong to the French Army. You have shown neither discipline nor courage; you have allowed the enemy to dislodge you from a position where a handful of brave men could have stopped an army. The chief-of-staff will cause to be inscribed upon your flags: “These men are no longer of the Army of Italy”.’⁴⁸ With his acute sense for what would energize and what demoralize a unit, Napoleon correctly gauged that this public shaming would ensure that both demi-brigades would fight harder and with more determination over the next few days than ever before.

Austrian inactivity after the victory at Bassano allowed Napoleon to regroup. By the 12th he held Verona with 2,500 men and the banks of the Adige river with 6,000, while the disgraced Vaubois contained Davidovich at Rivoli and Kilmaine continued besieging Mantua. This left Masséna with 13,000 men on the right flank and Augereau with 5,000 on the left to attack Alvinczi at Caldiero, a village 10 miles east of Verona. With rain pouring straight into their faces, they showed none of the usual dash of the Army of Italy. The wind blew gunpowder away, their shoes slipped in the mud and their attacks throughout the morning gained only a little ground on the right, which they had to concede once Austrian reinforcements arrived at 3 p.m. About 1,000 were killed or wounded on both sides. Although he naturally claimed it as a victory, it was telling that when Napoleon had medals struck to commemorate Montenotte, Millesimo and Castiglione that year, he didn’t order one for Caldiero.

On November 13 both armies rested. Napoleon used the time to write a despairing letter to the Directory from Verona, effectively blaming them for his predicament:

Perhaps we are on the verge of losing Italy. None of the relief I was waiting for has arrived . . . I am doing my duty, the army is doing its duty. My soul is in tatters, but my conscience is at peace . . . The weather continues to be bad; the entire army is excessively tired and without boots . . . The wounded are the elite of the army; all our superior officers, all our best generals are hors de combat. Everyone who comes to me is so inept and doesn’t even have a soldier’s confidence! . . . We have been abandoned to the depths of Italy . . . Perhaps my hour . . . has come. I no longer dare expose myself as my death would discourage the troops.⁴⁹

It was true that Sérurier and Sauret were wounded, and Lannes, Murat and young Kellermann were ill in hospital, but he had plenty of other fine generals serving under him. He certainly ended on a note so upbeat as to belie everything else he had written: ‘In a few days, we will try one last effort. If Fortune smiles upon us, Mantua will be taken, and with it, Italy.’

Napoleon had devised a bold plan: to get behind Alvinczi at Villanova and force him to fight for his line of retreat in country so flooded with rice fields that his larger numbers would count for little. Eschewing the easier crossing of the Adige at Albaredo, where Austrian cavalry could give the alarm, he chose to cross at Ronco, where a pontoon bridge had been built for the previous campaign; it had been dismantled but was stored safely nearby. On the night of November 14, Masséna left Verona by the west to fool Austrian spies in the city, but then turned south-east to join Augereau on the road there.

The causeways in that part of Italy were (and still are) remarkable, with very steep sides and standing well above the marshes, so the French approach and the building of the pontoon bridge went entirely unnoticed by the Austrian pickets. The 51st Line crossed in boats to secure the bridgehead at daybreak and the bridge was finished by seven o’clock the next morning. Where the road forked on the other side of the river, Augereau went off to the right alongside a dyke to the town of Arcole, intending to cross over the Alpone stream and march north towards Villanova, to attack Alvinczi’s artillery park. Meanwhile, Masséna went to the left towards Porcile to try to turn Alvinczi’s left flank from behind. Augereau advanced with General Louis-André Bon’s 5th Légère into the gloom, but soon found himself under fire all along the road running alongside the Alpone stream from two battalions of Croats and two guns protecting Alvinczi’s left-rear. Arcole was strongly held – loopholed and barricaded – and repulsed the first attack, as well as a second from the 4th Line directed by Augereau himself. Attackers had to slide down the steep banks to seek shelter from the fire. Meanwhile Masséna met another Croat battalion and an Austrian regiment under Provera halfway to Porcile and drove them back, thus securing the left of the bridgehead. Fighting in the Lombardy plains was different from the mountains, and afforded the Austrian cavalry more opportunity, but here the swift streams and networks of dykes worked in favour of a young commander with a feeling for tactical detail but far fewer cavalry.

Although Alvinczi was quickly informed of the French move, he assumed because of the marshlands that it was merely a light force effecting a diversion. When his patrols found Verona quiet, he sent them to see what was happening to his left, where Provera’s 3,000 troops had been beaten by Masséna. Another 3,000 had marched swiftly to Arcole, arriving just after noon. They placed two howitzers to bring the causeway under a plunging fire, where Lannes, having only just rejoined the army from hospital in Milan, was wounded again.

Napoleon arrived at the bridge at Arcole just as Augereau’s attempt to capture it had been beaten off. He ordered another attack, which stalled under heavy fire. Augereau then seized a flag and walked out fifteen paces in front of his skirmishers, saying, ‘Grenadiers, come and seek your colour.’ At that point Napoleon, surrounded by his aides-de-camp and bodyguard, grasped another flag and led the charge himself, haranguing the troops about their heroism at Lodi. For all his statements to the Directory two days earlier about not exposing himself to danger, he certainly did at Arcole. Yet it failed – the men displayed ‘extraordinary cowardice’ according to Sulkowski – and they didn’t rush the body-strewn bridge, although his aide-de-camp Colonel Muiron and others were killed on it at Napoleon’s side. During an Austrian counter-attack, Napoleon had to be bundled back into the marshy ground behind the bridge and was saved only by a charge of grenadiers. He was a brave man, but there was only so much anyone could do in the face of concentrated fire being directed by a stalwart Austrian resistance, which would continue for two more days. Visiting the bridge today, one can see how Napoleon could have been pushed down into the large drainage ditch just adjacent to it, which for all the indignity probably have saved his life.

Once it became clear that the bridge would not be taken, Napoleon ordered Masséna and Augereau to return south of the Adige, leaving campfires burning at Arcole to suggest that the French were still there. He needed to be ready to move against Davidovich if Vaubois retreated any further at Rivoli. From the church tower of the small village of Ronco, the French could see Alvinczi marching back to Villanova and deploying east of the Alpone. The bridge at Arcole wouldn’t be captured for another two days, by Augereau and Masséna, who returned there on the 17th, and Napoleon wasn’t present when it fell. Although French losses were significant – 1,200 were killed, including 8 generals, and 2,300 were wounded, against Austria’s 600 killed and 1,600 wounded – Arcole was ultimately a French victory, as they emerged with 4,000 captured Austrians and 11 cannon. ‘It took good luck to defeat Alvinczi,’ Napoleon later admitted.⁵⁰

As winter closed in and the fighting season ended with Mantua still under siege, the Austrians would make a fourth attempt to relieve the city. The campaign had cost Austria nearly 18,000 casualties, and the French over 19,000. The French were now short of everything – officers, shoes, medicine and pay. Some were so hungry that there was a mutiny in the 33rd Line, where three companies had to be imprisoned and two ringleaders shot. As soon as the fighting ceased Napoleon dismissed Vaubois and promoted Joubert to command the division covering Rivoli.

Napoleon’s report to Carnot of November 19 was far more optimistic than his previous one. ‘The destinies of Italy are beginning to become clear,’ he wrote. ‘I hope, before ten days are up, to be writing to you from headquarters based in Mantua. Never has a battlefield been more fought over than that of Arcole. I have almost no generals left; their devotion and courage know no equal.’ He ended by saying that he intended to march on ‘obstinate’ Rome as soon as Mantua capitulated.⁵¹ When in late November the Directory sent General Henri Clarke, Napoleon’s former boss at the Topographical Bureau, to Vienna to explore the possibilities of peace, Napoleon persuaded him that, as Mantua was about to fall, he shouldn’t sacrifice the Cispadane Republic in the negotiations.⁵²‘He is a spy whom the Directory have set upon me,’ Napoleon supposedly told Miot, ‘he is a man of no talent – only conceited.’⁵³ This was hardly Napoleon’s considered view, because he was to raise the highly competent Clarke, whom he later made the Duc de Feltre, to be his private secretary, then war minister and, by 1812, one of the most powerful men in France. ‘Send me 30,000 men and I will march on Trieste,’ Napoleon told the Directory, ‘carry the war into the Emperor’s lands, revolutionize Hungary, and go to Vienna. You will then have a right to expect millions, and a good peace.’⁵⁴

 • • •

‘I arrive at Milan,’ Napoleon told Josephine on 27 November, who was still holidaying with Hippolyte Charles in Genoa, ‘I rush to your apartment; I have left everything to see you, to press you in my arms . . . You were not there: you run from town to town after the fêtes; you leave as I am about to arrive; you do not concern yourself about your dear Napoleon anymore . . . The whole world is only too happy if it can please you, and your husband alone is very, very unhappy. Bonaparte.’⁵⁵ The next day he wrote again, saying: ‘When I require of you a love equal to mine I do wrong; how should one weigh lace in the scales against gold?’⁵⁶ Yet Josephine was good at allaying Napoleon’s suspicions. Antoine Lavalette, a relative by marriage who had taken the late Muiron’s place as one of Napoleon’s eight aides-de-camp, recalled how in Milan: ‘Madame Bonaparte used to take her husband upon her lap after breakfast, and hold him fast for a few minutes.’⁵⁷ Apart from anything else, it was an indication of how light he was in those days. An equally charming vignette from this period can be glimpsed in Napoleon’s letter to Jérôme de Lalande, the director of the Paris Observatory, to whom he mused: ‘To spend the night between a pretty woman and a fine sky, and spend the day recording observations and making calculations, seems to me to be happiness on earth.’⁵⁸

Less happy was the letter sent by Battaglia, the chief officer of neutral Venice, who had written in December to complain of the behaviour of French troops on Venetian soil. Napoleon indignantly denied that any women had been raped by French troops, asking, ‘Does the Republic of Venice really want to declare itself so openly against us?’⁵⁹ Battaglia immediately backed down and Napoleon’s reply two days later was calmer, promising ‘to punish in exemplary fashion any soldiers who stray from the regulations of severe discipline’.

Recognizing that after the fall of Livorno they could no longer defend Corsica from the French, the British under the brilliant thirty-eight-year-old Commodore Horatio Nelson had conducted a model evacuation of the island in October. Paoli and his supporters left with them. Napoleon sent Miot de Melito and Saliceti to organize the French departments that would be set up there once the British left. The same day he wrote to Battaglia, he also wrote to Joseph, who went with Melito, to say that he wanted the Casa Bonaparte to be made ‘clean and habitable. It needs to be put back to how it was’, that is, before it was ransacked by the Paolists four years before.⁶⁰ His years fighting the French bureaucracy over the pépinière would not be entirely wasted.

Between September and December 1796, nearly 9,000 people died of disease and starvation in Mantua. Of the 18,500 soldiers garrisoned inside the city only 9,800 were now fit for duty. The last rations were due to run out on January 17. The next Austrian attack must therefore come soon, and Napoleon’s main concern was to get his army ready for it. He sent forty letters to Berthier from Milan over the course of eighteen days in December, and begged the Directory for more reinforcements. ‘The enemy is withdrawing his troops from the Rhine to send them to Italy. Do the same, help us,’ he wrote on the 28th. ‘We are only asking for more men.’⁶¹ In the same letter he said he had captured an Austrian spy who had carried a letter for Emperor Francis in a cylinder in his stomach. ‘If they have diarrhoea,’ Napoleon added helpfully, ‘they make sure to take the little cylinder, soak it in liqueur and swallow it again. The cylinder is dipped in Spanish wax mixed with vinegar.’

There was no aspect of Napoleon’s soldiers’ lives and welfare that didn’t concern him. When he discovered that some of Joubert’s men weren’t presenting themselves to their quartermasters on pay-day, he wanted to be told why, suspecting a swindle of some kind. ‘The more I delve, in my leisure moments, into the incurable sores of the administration of the Army of Italy,’ he wrote to the Directory on January 6, 1797, ‘the more I’m convinced of the necessity of applying a prompt and fool-proof remedy.’ Claiming that ‘the principal actresses of Italy are all being kept by French army contractors’, and that ‘luxury and embezzlement are at their height’, he repeated his request ‘to have any administrator of the army shot’.⁶² (The Directory were too sensible, or keen on self-preservation, to give a general the arbitrary power of life and death over other Frenchmen.) Napoleon did not hesitate to use the powers he did hold ruthlessly when he could. On January 7 he ordered General Jean-Baptiste Rusca to have the chiefs of a rebellion in Modena shot, and the house of its leader, the Duke of Modena’s confessor, destroyed. A pyramid was erected on the rubble with a sign reading: ‘The punishment of a raving priest who abused his ministry and preached revolt and murder.’⁶³*

Napoleon received news the same day that Alvinczi was on the move south, this time with 47,000 troops. Once again the Austrians split their forces: Alvinczi’s main force of 28,000 (which included Quasdanovich) marched down the east side of Lake Garda in six columns, using all available roads and tracks, thus avoiding having to face the French on the plain, while Provera’s 15,000 advanced across the plain from the east, heading for Verona. Over 4,000 were posted to the west of Lake Garda. Alvinczi ordered Wurmser to break out of Mantua and head to the south-east to join them. Napoleon immediately left Milan and made multiple visits to Bologna, Verona and his headquarters at Roverbella, trying to divine Alvinczi’s intentions. He had 37,000 men in the field and 8,500 under Sérurier in the Mantuan siege lines.

On January 12 Joubert reported an attack at La Corona, well to the north of Rivoli, which misfired in the very deep fresh snow. ‘General Brune has had seven bullets through his clothing without his being touched at all,’ Napoleon told Josephine, ‘he deals in luck.’⁶⁴ He assumed the campaign would be decided in the foothills of the Italian Alps along the Adige river, but he needed far more information before launching his counter-attack. While he waited, he ordered Masséna to garrison Verona and pull 7,000 men back over the Adige; General Gabriel Rey was to concentrate two brigades at Castelnuovo. Lannes was to leave his Italian soldiers in the south and march his 2,000 French troops back to Badia to prevent any Austrian move southwards, while Augereau defended Ronco.

The next day, as Napoleon prepared to move up and crush Provera, he learned at 10 p.m. that Joubert was facing a major offensive and pulling back to Rivoli in good order, leaving his campfires burning behind him. Realizing that Provera’s advance was thus a feint and that the main attack would be coming via Rivoli, Napoleon rode there fast from Verona, issuing a completely new set of orders. Now Joubert was to hold Rivoli at all costs; Sérurier was to put the siege lines on high alert, but also to send cavalry, artillery and six hundred infantry to Rivoli at once; Masséna was to march the 18th, 32nd and 75th demi-brigades to take up position on Joubert’s left; Augereau was to detain Provera on the Adige but send some cavalry and artillery to Rivoli. Everyone was told that a decisive battle was in the immediate offing. With General Gabriel Rey’s two brigades, Napoleon expected to concentrate 18,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry and 60 guns at Rivoli by noon on January 14, leaving 16,000 on the Adige and 8,000 at Mantua. The old maxim ‘March separately, fight together’ could not have been better followed. Alvinczi had failed to bring any more forces to Rivoli than the 28,000 and 90 guns with which he had started out.

Napoleon arrived at 2 a.m. on Saturday, January 14 1797 at the plateau above the gorges of Rivoli, which would be the key deciding place – the point d’appui or Schwerpunkt – of the battle. It was a clear, very cold, brightly moonlit night and he interpreted the number and positions of the campfires as meaning that the Marquis de Lusignan, an energetic, Spanish-born Austrian general, was too far off to engage until mid-morning. He knew the area intimately, having ridden across it often over the previous four months. If he could retain the Osteria gorge and the slope containing the chapel of San Marco on the eastern side of the battlefield, he believed he could hold off the main attack relatively easily. He needed to let Masséna’s division rest and to buy time for Rey to arrive, so he decided on a spoiling attack to concentrate Alvinczi’s attention. Joubert was ordered to march back onto the Rivoli plateau and send one brigade to Osteria before attacking in the centre, covered by all the French guns on the plateau. Meanwhile Masséna was told to send one brigade to hold Lusignan off for as long as possible.

At 4 a.m., three hours before dawn, General Honoré Vial’s brigade of the 4th, 17th and 22nd Légère drove the Austrians back on San Giovanni and Gamberon, capturing the San Marco chapel. At daybreak, Joubert attacked at Caprino and San Giovanni but his line was very thin and was checked by greatly superior numbers. The Austrians counter-attacked at 9 a.m., routing Vial’s brigade, whereupon Napoleon immediately sent one of Masséna’s brigades to rescue the centre, thereby recovering the village of Trambassore. This fighting in the centre continued non-stop for a marathon ten hours.

By 11 a.m. Lusignan had arrived with 5,000 men. He had driven off Masséna’s detached brigade, and penetrated deep into the French left-rear near Affi, preventing any reinforcements from arriving. Napoleon was only just holding his centre, was under huge pressure on his right flank and Lusignan had turned his left. He had only one brigade in reserve and Rey was still an hour away. When the news arrived that Lusignan had got behind him, staff officers looked anxiously at the preternaturally calm Napoleon, who simply remarked: ‘We have them now.’⁶⁵ Deciding the Austrians in the centre were a spent force and that Lusignan was still too far off to affect the battle, Napoleon concentrated on Quasdanovich in the east as the main threat. He thinned out Joubert’s line and sent every man he could spare to San Marco. When the dense Austrian columns, covered by artillery, assailed the gorge and reached the plateau, they were struck by French artillery firing canister shot into their close ranks from all sides, then bayonet-charged by an infantry column, and then attacked by all the French cavalry available. As they recoiled into the gorge, a lucky shot hit an ammunition wagon – all the more devastating in the narrow space – whereupon Quasdanovich ordered the attack aborted.

Napoleon immediately shifted his own attack to the centre, where the Austrians had next to no artillery or cavalry. Having gained the plateau at great cost, all three Austrian columns were driven off it. Lusignan was checked on his arrival on the battlefield, just as Rey suddenly appeared to his rear. He barely escaped with some 2,000 men. By 2 p.m. the Austrians were in full retreat, and the pursuit was abandoned only when news came from Augereau that Provera had crossed the Adige and was heading for Mantua, whereupon Masséna was sent off to help Augereau prevent its relief.

Napoleon lost 2,200 men at the battle of Rivoli and 1,000 more were captured, but the Austrian toll was far higher: 4,000 killed and wounded and 8,000 captured, along with 8 guns and 11 standards. It was an impressive feat, though not quite the 6,000 killed and wounded, 60 guns and 24 standards – ‘embroidered by the hand of the Empress’ – that Napoleon claimed when he wrote home, nor, for that matter, had he faced 45,000 Austrians.⁶⁶ But Alvinczi’s retreat gradually turned into a rout as a further 11,000 prisoners were taken over the following days.

At noon on January 15, Provera reached La Favorita with his relief column of 4,700 men, many of them half-trained recruits. At first light the next day, Wurmser attempted to sally out of Mantua, but he was stopped short. By the time Napoleon arrived, Provera was caught between Masséna and Augereau at La Favorita, a village outside Mantua. He fought bravely, but surrendered before a massacre ensued and his entire force was captured. In Mantua the food had finally run out. Wurmser had managed to eke it out for a fortnight longer than expected in the vain hope that Alvinczi might miraculously appear, but on Thursday, February 2, 1797 he surrendered the city and its emaciated garrison. Some 16,300 Austrians had died in Mantua over the course of the previous eight months, and many more civilians, who had been reduced to eating rats and dogs. The French captured 325 Austrian guns and retook the 179 they had abandoned back in August. Wurmser and five hundred of his staff were allowed to march out with the honours of war and return to Austria, on condition that they would not fight against France until there was a prisoner exchange. The rest went into captivity in France, where they were put to work in agriculture and building projects. The news of the fall of Mantua caused a sensation in Paris, where it was announced to the sound of trumpets by, as a contemporary recalled, ‘the public officer, who proclaimed the glory of French arms in the midst of an immense multitude’.⁶⁷

Napoleon wasn’t present to witness his triumph. He went on to Verona and then Bologna to punish the Papal States for threatening to rise in Austria’s support despite the armistice they had signed the previous June. Shamelessly usurping the Directory’s powers, on January 22 he asked the French envoy to Rome, Cacault, ‘to leave Rome within six hours of receiving this letter’ in order to pressurize the Vatican. The same day he wrote to the papal negotiator, Cardinal Alessandro Mattei, to say that Austrian and Neapolitan influence over Rome’s foreign policy must cease. But he softened his tone in closing and asked him to ‘assure His Holiness that he can remain in Rome without the least uneasiness’ on account of his being ‘the first minister of religion’.⁶⁸ Napoleon feared, as he told the Directory, that ‘If the Pope and all the cardinals were to fly from Rome I should never be able to obtain what I demanded.’ He also knew that storming the Vatican would earn him the ire, even the lifetime enmity, of Europe’s devout Catholics. ‘If I went to Rome I should lose Milan,’ he told Miot.⁶⁹

Napoleon issued a proclamation on February 1 stating that all priests and monks who failed to ‘conduct themselves according to the principles of the New Testament’ would be dealt with ‘more severely than other citizens’, hoping to blunt their opposition to French rule in Italy.⁷⁰ Ludicrously, but undeniably bravely, the troops of the Papal States nevertheless tried to put up a fight. At Castel Bolognese on February 3, General Claude Victor-Perrin (known as Victor) easily overpowered the soldiers he encountered, and a week later he captured the papal garrison of Ancona without loss. By February 17 the Pope was suing for peace. He sent Mattei to Napoleon’s headquarters at Tolentino to sign a treaty under which he ceded Romagna, Bologna, Avignon and Ferrara to France, closed all ports to the British, and promised to pay a ‘contribution’ of 30 million francs and one hundred works of art. ‘We will have everything that is beautiful in Italy,’ Napoleon told the Directory, ‘with the exception of a small number of objects in Turin and Naples.’⁷¹

 • • •

On February 18, 1797 the Army of Italy launched a news-sheet entitled Journal de Bonaparte et des Hommes Vertueux, whose masthead proclaimed ‘Hannibal slept at Capua, but Bonaparte doesn’t sleep at Mantua’.⁷² Napoleon was highly conscious of the power of propaganda, and he now made a conscious effort to influence public opinion, which was already heavily in his favour. He began his new career as a press proprietor and journalist by dictating such sentences as ‘Bonaparte flies like lightning and strikes like a thunderbolt.’ Within ten days the Journal was obliquely criticizing the Directory, which it would not have done without Napoleon’s permission. Later in the year he also set up two army news-sheets, the Courrier de l’Armée d’Italie, edited by the ex-Jacobin Marc-Antoine Jullien, and the less substantial La France Vue de l’Armée d’Italie, edited by Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, excerpted regularly in the Parisian papers. With the Rhine front much closer to France, Napoleon did not want the Italian campaign to be sidelined in the public imagination, and he thought his men would appreciate news from Paris. D’Angély was a former parliamentarian and lawyer who ran Army of Italy hospitals and was to become one of Napoleon’s senior lieutenants. Jullien’s appointment was a sign of Napoleon’s readiness to ignore past political stances if the individual in question was talented and showed a willingness to bury the past. In a polity as fluid as France’s, this was not so much tolerance as common sense. Napoleon had, after all, been a Jacobin himself only three years before.

In Paris the Moniteur reported the celebration of Napoleon’s victories with dances, cantatas, public banquets and processions. These were arranged by his growing cadre of supporters who, the Directors privately noted, did not always support them too. Quite apart from politics, Napoleon made good copy; the conservative paper Nouvelles Politiques mentioned the Army of Italy sixty-six times in six months.⁷³ Overall, Napoleon’s exploits were mentioned far more often than those of any other French general, to the increasing chagrin of the high commands of the Army of the Rhine and Moselle and the Army of the Sambre and Meuse, which resented being eclipsed by the Army of Italy.

Seventeen ninety-six was the first year when prints and engravings of Napoleon began to be produced and marketed, with titles such as ‘General Bonaparte á Lodi’, ‘Bonaparte Arrivant á Milan’ and so on. Some added an ‘e’ to his Christian name and ‘u’ to his surname, others read ‘Bounaparte’.⁷⁴ The scores, perhaps even hundreds, of different representations of him by 1798 prove that the cult of personality had already begun. Artists felt no need to have set eyes on him before they drew him, so in some prints we find him depicted as a middle-aged man with grey hair, more in keeping with what one expected of a victorious general.⁷⁵

It was after Montenotte that Napoleon first ordered a medal be struck to commemorate his victory, and these too became potent propaganda tools. Other generals did not do this, and he didn’t ask permission from the Directory. The best of the bronze medals were designed by the skilled engraver and former erotic novelist Vivant Denon, who later became director of the Louvre. The Montenotte medal, for example, was just over 1¹/₂ inches in diameter, depicting a bust of Napoleon on the obverse side with his coat embroidered with oak leaves and acorns, and a figure representing the ‘Genius of War’ on the reverse.⁷⁶ In all, 141 different official medals were struck by 1815 commemorating battles, treaties, coronations, river crossings, his marriage and entries into foreign capitals, and were distributed widely to the crowds at official events and celebrations. Some commemorated comparatively mundane events such as the creation of the Paris School of Medicine, the opening of the Ourcq Canal and the establishment of a mining school in the Mont Blanc department. A medal was even struck when Napoleon remained inactive at Osterode throughout March 1807, showing the notoriously cautious (but successful) Roman general Fabius Maximus ‘Cunctator’ on its reverse.

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On Friday, March 10, 1797, Napoleon set off on the northern campaign that he had promised the Directory; a risky expedition of only 40,000 men through the Tyrol to Klagenfurt and eventually to Leoben in Styria, from where, atop the Semmering hills, his advance guard could discern the spires of Vienna. Jourdan and Moreau’s armies – both twice the size – had been driven out of Germany by Archduke Charles; France now hoped Napoleon’s more modest forces would compel the Austrians to make peace by threatening the capital itself. Napoleon had originally intended to work in tandem with the Army of the Rhine in a pincer movement, and became increasingly concerned when he learned that neither Jourdan nor Moreau had managed to re-cross the Rhine after their defeats that autumn. To encourage his men he denounced Charles’s brother, the Emperor Francis, in one of his proclamations as ‘the paid servant of the merchants of London’ and claimed that the British, ‘strangers to the ills of war, smile with pleasure at the woes of the Continent’.⁷⁷ This line of attack in Napoleon’s propaganda war against Austria came because the British government was about to furnish Austria with a £1.62 million loan, the equivalent of more than 40 million francs.⁷⁸ Although the British made no attempt to land troops on the continent at this time, they were consistently generous in subsidizing whichever of France’s enemies were willing to take the field against her.

On March 16 Napoleon crossed the Tagliamento river, inflicting a small defeat on Archduke Charles at Valvassone, which General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte the next day turned into a bigger one when he captured a sizeable detachment of Austrians who had become separated from the main body. At the Tagliamento Napoleon introduced the ordre mixte – a compromise between attacking in line and attacking in column first developed by Guibert to cope with the vagaries of a terrain which didn’t permit regular deployments. This was a technique he would use again a few days later while crossing the Isonzo into Austria; on both these occasions he intervened personally to put into operation a formation that combined the firepower of a battalion in line with the attack weight of two battalions in column.⁷⁹

‘Banish your uneasiness,’ he told the people of the Habsburg province of Görizia in north-east Italy, ‘we are good and humane.’⁸⁰ He was unimpressed by his new opponent, whose reputation as a strategist he found unjustified even though Charles had won battles in Holland in 1793 and had defeated Jourdan and Moreau in 1796. ‘Up to now Archduke Charles has manoeuvred worse than Beaulieu and Wurmser,’ Napoleon told the Directory, ‘he makes mistakes at every turn, and extremely stupid ones at that.’⁸¹Without a major battle being fought between Napoleon and Archduke Charles, the Austrians – who were also now facing a reinvigorated assault through Germany by Moreau – decided not to take the risk of losing their capital to Napoleon, and accepted his offer of an armistice at Leoben on April 2, a little over one hundred miles south-west of Vienna.

Since the campaign had begun a year earlier, Napoleon had crossed the Apennines and the Alps, defeated a Sardinian army and no fewer than six Austrian armies, and killed, wounded or captured 120,000 Austrian soldiers. All this he had done before his twenty-eighth birthday. Eighteen months earlier he had been an unknown, moody soldier writing essays on suicide; now he was famous across Europe, having defeated mighty Austria, wrung peace treaties from the Pope and the kings of Piedmont and Naples, abolished the medieval dukedom of Modena, and defeated in every conceivable set of military circumstances most of Austria’s most celebrated generals – Beaulieu, Wurmser, Provera, Quasdanovich, Alvinczi, Davidovich – and outwitted the Archduke Charles.

Napoleon had fought against Austrian forces that were invariably superior in number, but which he had often outnumbered on the field of battle thanks to his repeated strategy of the central position. A profound study of the history and geography of Italy before he ever set foot there had proved extremely helpful, as had his willingness to experiment with others’ ideas, most notably the bataillon carré and the ordre mixte, and his minute calculations of logistics, for which his prodigious memory was invaluable. Because he kept his divisions within one day’s march of each other, he was able to concentrate them for battle and, once joined, he showed great calmness under pressure.

The fact that the Army of Italy was in a position to fight at all, considering the privations from which it was suffering when Napoleon took over its command, was another testament to his energy and organizational abilities. His leadership qualities – acting with harshness when he thought it deserved, but bestowing high praise on other occasions – produced the esprit de corps so necessary to victory. ‘In war,’ he was to say in 1808, ‘moral factors account for three-quarters of the whole; relative material strength accounts for only one-quarter.’⁸² His personal courage further bonded him to his men. Of course he was hugely helped by the fact that the Austrians kept sending septuagenarian commanders against him who continually split their forces and moved at around half the speed of the French. That would not continue for ever.

Napoleon was also fortunate in his lieutenants, especially the superb Joubert, Masséna and Augereau, with excellent contributions also from Lannes (at Lodi and Arcole), Marmont (at Castiglione), Victor (at La Favorita) and Sérurier (at Mantua) as well as from Brune, Murat and Junot. Napoleon deserves credit for identifying these able commanders, regardless of their age and background, and for sacking those like Meynier and Vaubois who were unable to rise to the level of events. It was no coincidence that when he came to power, former Army of Italy commanders found themselves promoted well. With the ‘immense multitude’ of Paris celebrating twelve victories in as many months, and northern and central Italy now firmly within the orbit of the French Republic, if anyone could be said to be ‘the darling child of victory’, it was Napoleon.

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It was in the early Italian campaigns that Napoleon’s military philosophy and habits first became visible. He believed above all in the maintenance of strong esprit de corps. Although this combination of spirit and pride is by its nature intangible, he knew an army that had it could achieve wonders. ‘Remember it takes ten campaigns to create esprit de corps,’ he was to tell Joseph in 1807, ‘which can be destroyed in an instant.’⁸³ He had formulated a number of ways to raise and maintain morale, some taken from his reading of ancient history, others specific to his own leadership style and developed on campaign. One was to foster a soldier’s strong sense of identification with his regiment. In March 1797, Napoleon approved the right of one, the 57th, to stitch onto its colours the words ‘Le Terrible 57ème demi-brigade que rien n’arrête’ (The Terrible 57th demi-brigade which nothing can stop), in recognition of its courage at the battles of Rivoli and La Favorita. It joined other heroic regiments known by their soubriquets such as ‘Les Braves’ (18th Line), ‘Les Incomparables’ (9th Légère) and ‘Un Contre Dix’ (One Against Ten) (84th Line) and showed how well Napoleon understood the psychology of the ordinary soldier and the power of regimental pride. Plays, songs, operatic arias, proclamations, festivals, ceremonies, symbols, standards, medals: Napoleon instinctively understood what soldiers wanted, and he gave it to them. And at least until the battle of Aspern-Essling in 1809 he gave them what they wanted most of all: victory.

On campaign Napoleon demonstrated an approachability that endeared him to his men. They were permitted to put their cases forward for being awarded medals, promotions and even pensions, after which, once he had checked the veracity of their claims with their commanding officer, the matter was quickly settled. He personally read petitions from the ranks, and granted as many as he could. Baron Louis de Bausset-Roquefort, who served him on many campaigns, recalled that Napoleon ‘heard, interrogated, and decided at once; if it was a refusal, the reasons were explained in a manner which softened the disappointment’.⁸⁴ Such accessibility to the commander-in-chief is impossible to conceive in the British army of the Duke of Wellington or in the Austrian army of Archduke Charles, but in republican France it was an invaluable means of keeping in touch with the needs and concerns of his men. Soldiers who shouted good-naturedly from the ranks would often be rewarded with a quip: when, during the Italian campaign, one called out a request for a new uniform, pointing to his ragged coat, Napoleon replied: ‘Oh no, that would never do. It will hinder your wounds from being seen.’⁸⁵ As Napoleon told Brune in March 1800: ‘You know what words can do to soldiers.’⁸⁶ He would later on occasion take off his own cross of the Légion d’Honneur to give to a soldier whose bravery he’d witnessed. (When Roustam, his Mamluk bodyguard, attempted to sew Napoleon’s cross onto his uniform, Napoleon stopped him – ‘Leave it; I do it on purpose.’⁸⁷)

Napoleon genuinely enjoyed spending time with his soldiers; he squeezed their earlobes, joked with them and singled out old grognards (literally ‘grumblers’, but also translatable as ‘veterans’), reminiscing about past battles and peppering them with questions. When campaign marches halted for lunch, Napoleon and Berthier would invite the aides-de-camp and orderlies to eat with them, which Bausset recalled as ‘truly a fête for every one of us’. He also ensured that wine from his dinner table was always given to his sentries. Small things, perhaps, but they were appreciated and helped breed devotion. His constant references to the ancient world had the intended effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense that their lives – and, should it come to that, their deaths in battle – mattered, that they were an integral part of a larger whole that would resonate through French history. There are few things in the art of leadership harder to achieve than this, and no more powerful impetus to action. Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come.

During military reviews, which could last up to five hours, Napoleon cross-examined his soldiers about their food, uniforms, shoes, general health, amusements and regularity of pay, and he expected to be told the truth. ‘Conceal from me none of your wants,’ he told the 17th Demi-Brigade, ‘suppress no complaints you have to make of your superiors. I am here to do justice to all, and the weaker party is especially entitled to my protection.’⁸⁸ The notion that le petit caporal was on their side against les gros bonnets (‘big-hats’) was generally held throughout the army.

Proper care of the wounded was a particular concern, in part because he needed them to return to the ranks as quickly as possible, but also because he knew how important prompt medical treatment was for morale. ‘If he happened to meet with convoys of wounded,’ recalled an aide-de-camp, ‘he stopped them, informed himself of their condition, of their sufferings, of the actions in which they had been wounded, and never quitted them without consoling them by his words or making them partakers in his bounty.’⁸⁹By contrast he regularly upbraided doctors, most of whom he regarded as quacks.

Napoleon learned many essential leadership lessons from Julius Caesar, especially his practice of admonishing troops he considered to have fallen below expectations, as at Rivoli in November 1796. In his book Caesar’s Wars, which he wrote in exile on St Helena, he recounts the story of a mutiny in Rome: Caesar had laconically agreed to his soldiers’ demands to be demobilized, but then he addressed them with ill-concealed contempt as ‘citizens’ rather than ‘soldiers’ or ‘comrades’. The impact was swift and telling. ‘Finally,’ he concludes, ‘the result of this moving scene was to win the continuation of their services.’⁹⁰ Far more often, of course, he lavished praise: ‘Your three battalions could be as six in my eyes,’ he called to the 44th Line in the Eylau campaign. ‘And we shall prove it!’ they shouted back.⁹¹

Napoleon’s addresses to his troops were posted up in camp on billboards and widely read. He enjoyed firing off series of statistics, telling the troops how many victories they had won in what length of time and how many fortresses, generals, cannon, flags and prisoners they had captured. Some of these proclamations might sound vainglorious, but they were written for the often uneducated soldiers. Napoleon flattered his troops with references to the ancient world – though only a tiny minority would have been conversant with the Classics – and when with a special flourish he compared them to eagles, or told them how much their families and neighbours would honour them, he captivated the minds of his men, often for life.

Napoleon’s rhetorical inspiration came mostly from the ancient world, but Shakespeare’s St Crispin Day’s speech from Henry V can also be detected in such lines as ‘Your countrymen will say as they point you out, “He belonged to the Army of Italy.”’⁹² The avalanche of praise he generally lavished on his troops was in sharp contrast to the acerbic tone he adopted towards generals, ambassadors, councillors, ministers and indeed his own family in private correspondence. ‘Severe to the officers,’ was his stated mantra, ‘kindly to the men.’⁹³

Efficient staff-work helped Napoleon to ‘recognize’ old soldiers from the ranks, but he also had a phenomenal memory. ‘I introduced three deputies of the Valais to him,’ recalled an interior minister, ‘he asked one of them about his two little girls. This deputy told me that he had only seen Napoleon once before, at the foot of the Alps, as he was on his way to Marengo. “Problems with the artillery forced him to stop for a moment in front of my house,” added the deputy, “he petted my two children, mounted his horse, and since then I had not seen him again.”’⁹⁴ The encounter had taken place ten years earlier.