CHAPTER XXI
Napoleon Bonaparte187 was a Corsican, and thus a man of the Mediterranean. When he was born in 1769, Corsica had been French for only a few months; in its language–apart from a characteristic local accent–and culture it remained wholly Italian. His father, Carlo Maria, had been one of Pasquale Paoli’s most trusted lieutenants, and the boy grew up a fervent Corsican patriot, detesting the French as oppressors of his island. The family was, by Corsican standards, well-to-do and highly educated: Carlo Maria had strong literary inclinations, though these had not stopped him taking to the hills with Paoli for the long guerrilla war against the French. It was only after their final victory that he accepted the inevitable. The Bonapartes were not noble–Corsican nobility was a contradiction in terms–but they were landowners with a few small and scattered agricultural estates, and somehow Carlo Maria managed to scrape together the four heraldic quarterings which enabled his son to qualify, at the age of nine, for a free primary education in a so-called military college–it was in fact run by a monastic order–at Brienne.
Despised by his fellows for what they considered his humble birth, Corsican origins and still heavily accented French, Napoleon not surprisingly became surly and withdrawn, given to occasional outbursts of violent temper. But he was a good scholar and a hard worker, and his brilliance in mathematics earned him in October 1784 a place at the national Ecole Militaire in Paris.188 Even here he made no secret of his Corsican patriotism, lashing out with his fists or any weapon that came to hand against all who mocked him; but he worked harder than ever, and in September 1785, when still only sixteen, he passed out as an officer. He was sent first to the artillery training school at Valence, and then in 1788 to Auxonne in Burgundy; it was in Auxonne that he heard the news that was to transform his life. On 14 July 1789 the Bastille had fallen: France was in revolution. A month later his regiment mutinied.
As an instinctive hater of the ancien régime, Napoleon flung himself with enthusiasm into the revolutionary cause. He considered going straight to Paris, but in view of the general chaos in the capital he decided instead to return temporarily to his home, where he was confident of his ability to shape events. His father had died, aged only thirty-eight, in 1784; back in Corsica, despite the presence of his elder brother Joseph, Napoleon now effectively made himself head of his family, advancing its interests in true Corsican style in any way he could. Before long his influence extended well beyond family limits. It was he who drafted, and was the first to sign, a letter to the National Assembly in Paris demanding that action be taken against the royalists who were still in charge of the island–a letter which seems to have been largely responsible for the Assembly’s decision shortly afterwards to declare Corsica an integral part of the French state. He remained there throughout 1790, during which time republican-dominated municipalities were elected in Ajaccio and the other principal towns, and when the Ajaccio Jacobin Club189 was established in January 1791 he became a founder member. In October, after a flagrantly dishonest election, he acquired command of the local volunteer militia. Sadly, however, he and his family fell out with the returned Paoli who, while still striving for Corsican independence, was now de facto ruler of the island under the French and had no patience with the revolutionary adventurers which he now conceived the Bonapartes to be.
He was certainly right where Napoleon was concerned. Matters came to a head when the bumptious young officer proposed that his battalion of militia should replace the French garrison in the Ajaccio citadel. Paoli, outraged, refused to consider the idea, whereupon Napoleon launched an attack on the fortress on his own initiative. The fighting went on for three days, during which several men were killed; then French reinforcements arrived and the besiegers were forced to retire. A report was sent to the Ministry of War in Paris, where Napoleon had already been recorded as having seriously overstayed his leave. If he wished to continue his military career, he would have to return and explain himself. By the end of May 1792 he was back in Paris.
His reception at the Ministry was warmer than he might have expected. The authorities were inclined to accept the various specious documents which he had brought from Corsica to explain his long absence. They had little choice: France was now at war and needed every man she could get. Since the outbreak of the revolution vast numbers of royalist officers had left the army in disgust, and its present depleted strength–particularly in the cavalry and the artillery–was causing grave concern. Of the fifty-six officers of Napoleon’s own class, only six now remained. He too had been given up for lost, and now that the prodigal son had returned the authorities had no intention of losing him again. The incident of the Ajaccio citadel was conveniently forgotten. He was restored to duty, and promoted to captain.
He made one more visit to Corsica–how he was permitted to take such a vast amount of leave has never been properly explained, especially since he had shown himself apt to exceed his allowance by several months–this time ostensibly to escort his sister Marianna back from the royal convent school at Saint-Cyr, which circumstances had forced to close down. They sailed from Marseille on 10 October. There was, predictably, no welcome from Paoli; ignoring him completely, Napoleon at once reinstated himself as lieutenant-colonel in the volunteers–a rank which he had had to renounce on his return to the army in Paris. He then flung himself into a campaign to get his brother Joseph elected as a Corsican representative to the National Convention.
But Corsica, he realised, was rapidly becoming a backwater. The revolution was no longer purely French: it was beginning to involve all Europe. In April 1792, despite the ruinous state of her finances, the depletion of her armed forces and the chaos still prevailing throughout the country, France had declared war on Austria. Two months later she had done the same to Prussia and to Sardinia. One reason for these displays of naked aggression was, paradoxically enough, economic: in their present state, the only way the French armies could support themselves was by commandeering food and all their other needs from countries they invaded. Inevitably, however, revolutionary idealism played its part: the theory that under the shock of war all the peoples of Europe would rise up against their sovereigns, and the spirit of the revolution would spread across the world. This, fortunately, failed to happen, but the initial success of the French armies certainly surpassed anything that could have been expected. An Austrian and Prussian invading army was turned back at Valmy in September; in October a French army swept through the Rhineland, and a month later another defeated the Austrians at Jemappes, occupied Brussels and part of the Netherlands, while a fourth annexed Savoy. In February 1793 the Convention declared war on England, and a month later on Spain. Meanwhile, on 21 January, King Louis XVI had been beheaded on the guillotine in the Place de la Concorde, before a cheering crowd.
In all this stirring international drama, Napoleon Bonaparte’s first role was one of almost laughable insignificance. Pasquale Paoli had received instructions from Paris to support an invasion of Sardinia. He was loath to do anything of the kind. Sardinia was Corsica’s neighbour and natural ally; her Piedmontese king had always been the friend of the Corsicans and of their cause, and had in the past often been generous with supplies and munitions. Still, orders were orders, and he gave his reluctant approval to an expedition by the Ajaccio battalion of the militia to seize and fortify the small island of La Maddelena, opposite Corsica off the north Sardinian coast; at the same time, however, he murmured to the expedition’s leader, his nephew Colonel Colonna-Cesari, that it would be an excellent thing if the whole enterprise went up in smoke.
The Colonel took the hint. The battalion, hopelessly ill-equipped, sailed on 20 February, and by the 24th was strategically placed to take the island. Captain Bonaparte, it need hardly be said, was of the company. From the start he distinguished himself by his sheer professionalism–a quality in lamentably short supply among his fellows–and was confident that within a matter of hours La Maddelena would be theirs; but Cesari identified a few grumbling sailors as an incipient mutiny and ordered the expedition’s immediate return to Corsica. Napoleon objected fiercely, but was overruled. As a final humiliation, he was obliged to spike two of his guns and consign them to the sea. He addressed a letter of furious protest to Paoli, sending copies to the War Minister in Paris as well as to the two Corsican representatives. Almost simultaneously Paoli was the subject of another attack, this time by Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte, in a speech to the Jacobin Club at Toulon. Paoli, declared Lucien, was a traitor to France whose only object was to deliver Corsica to the British. His words made a deep impression on the Convention in Paris, who ordered the General’s immediate arrest and sent three commissioners to investigate the charges.
The commissioners found the island openly hostile. Paoli somehow was Corsica, and his people were prepared to fight for him–against the Bonapartes, against the Convention, against anyone. To make matters worse, Lucien had stupidly sent his brother a letter, in which he had written: ‘Paoli and Pozzo190 are to be arrested; our fortune is made.’ This letter was intercepted by Paoli’s police before the commissioners arrived, as a result of which the Bonapartes were condemned to ‘perpetual execration and infamy’–tantamount, in the Corsican code of honour, to a death sentence. To remain on the island was to risk assassination. Besides, Paoli had now begun an armed insurrection against the French, and the island was on the verge of civil war. For a moment Napoleon considered a republican counter-rising of his own, with the object of taking over Ajaccio and turning the tables on his enemies, but it was too late. Clearly, there was no longer a future for him in Corsica. By the middle of June he and his whole family were on their way to France.
On his arrival Napoleon rejoined the army and, finding himself in Nice at the beginning of September, made contact with his old friend and fellow Corsican Jean-Christophe Saliceti. Saliceti was one of the two ‘representatives of the people’ with the revolution’s Army of Italy; it was at that time besieging Toulon, which had been occupied a week or two before by royalist, British and Spanish forces. It chanced that some days previously the French artillery commander had been badly wounded; a replacement was urgently needed, and Saliceti saw that Captain Bonaparte was just the man. Napoleon asked nothing better. From one moment to the next, his Corsican patriotism was forgotten. Henceforth he was a Frenchman–a Frenchman, indeed, such as there had never been before.
The state of the army which he found drawn up before Toulon was enough to make any trained officer weep. Most of the old royalists had emigrated, to be replaced by republican volunteers with virtually no experience; the artillery consisted of a few broken-down old cannon and mortars, all of which were dangerously short of ammunition. On the credit side there was only Napoleon himself, one of the few officers in the whole Army of Italy who was a professional through and through. True, he was only a captain, but he had the powerful support of Saliceti, and his genius did the rest. One of his first actions was to send for more heavy guns from Nice and Marseille (which also provided 5,000 sandbags); others he requisitioned from the forts at Martigues, Antibes and Monaco. Wood was ordered from Le Ciotat for the construction of proper platforms; at Ollioules he created a veritable arsenal and repair centre with eighty blacksmiths, wheel-wrights and carpenters. From the outset, however, he found himself at loggerheads with his commander, the politically irreproachable but militarily idiotic General Carteaux, whose only idea was to pour as much shot as possible into the town. Napoleon, on the other hand, seeing at once that the key to its continued resistance was the British fleet under Admiral Lord Hood which lay just off the coast, pressed insistently for the capture of the little peninsula of Le Caire, from which red-hot cannonballs could be fired into Hood’s ships. Finally, with the help of Saliceti, he obliged a grudging Carteaux to give his permission.
The first attempt on Le Caire failed, as Carteaux–furious at having been overruled–had released only 400 men for the task. Thanks largely to the influence of the newly promoted Major Bonaparte, the hopeless old general was dismissed in October; his successor, General Jacques-François Dugommier, who had joined the army at thirteen and was another thoroughgoing professional, immediately recognised his subordinate’s genius and backed him to the hilt. The result was a full-scale assault on Fort Mulgrave, recently constructed by the British on the highest point of Le Caire. It took place on 17 December, in pouring rain, but was ultimately successful; in the early hours of the following morning the British garrison evacuated the fort, while Hood’s ships hastily weighed anchor and made for the open sea. On the following day, 19 December 1793, Toulon was French again.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind to whom the credit belonged. Napoleon Bonaparte–who had had his horse shot under him and had been wounded by a bayonet in the thigh–had been proved right. Dugommier had already sent urgent–and prophetic–advice to the War Minister in Paris: ‘Récompensez, avancez ce jeune homme; car, si l’on était ingrat envers lui, il s’avancerait de lui-même.’191 Three days after the recovery of Toulon he was appointed brigadier. He was just twenty-four years old.
The long-delayed Corsican expedition took place in March 1795. It proved a fiasco: the British fleet was standing off the island in force, and took so severe a toll of the French transports that they were unable to land. Once again, for a moment, Bonaparte’s luck seemed to have deserted him. He returned to Paris, officially on sick leave, and awaited his next opportunity. It came on 5 October–13 vendémiaire, in the new republican calendar–when he was ordered by Paul Barras, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Interior, to put down a threatened royalist rising. With the memory of Corsican insurrections behind him, he did not hesitate. There would be no negotiation; he preferred to put his faith in heavy artillery. Fierce fighting broke out at the Tuileries, with heavy casualties on both sides, but the final issue was never in doubt. When the Directory was established just a week or two later, Barras was nominated the first of its five members and Bonaparte appointed second-in-command of the Army of the Interior. In March 1796, when the Directory resolved to launch a new campaign against Austria through Italy, the slim, solemn young Corsican, bilingual in Italian, seemed the obvious choice to lead it.
Shortly before his departure, in a civil ceremony held on 8 March 1796, Napoleon Bonaparte married one of the many ‘widows of the guillotine’: Josephine de Beauharnais, a cast-off mistress of his friend Barras. (Both lied about their ages, the twenty-six-year-old groom actually producing the birth certificate of his elder brother, Joseph.) Two days later he bid his bride farewell and headed south to Nice, there to take up his new command. This was to be the beginning of his first prolonged campaign, which was also to prove one of his greatest. Its intention was to mop up northern Italy, then to advance through the Tyrol into Austria and finally to meet up with the Army of the Rhine, carrying the war into Bavaria. It started with an advance into Piedmont. Nobody–except possibly Bonaparte himself–could have foreseen the measure and speed of his success: almost every day brought news of another victory. Towards the end of April Piedmont was annexed to France, King Charles Emmanuel IV abdicating and retiring to Sardinia, which remained under his authority. On 8 May the French crossed the Po, and two days later forced the narrow bridge over the Adda at Lodi. On the 15th Bonaparte made his formal entry into Milan.
His army was of course living off the conquered land, requisitioning food and accommodation as necessary, but for the members of the Directory this was not enough. Their instructions were to levy huge contributions both from the Italian states and from the Church, not just to support the troops but to send back to Paris, and Napoleon obeyed them to the letter. The neutral Duke of Parma, to take but one example, was obliged to hand over two million French livres and twenty of his best pictures, to be chosen personally by the Commander-in-Chief; few of the major towns escaped having to give up their Raphaels, their Titians and their Leonardos. Many of these found their way to the Louvre or to other French museums, where they still hang today.
With the occupation of Milan all Lombardy was now in French hands, save only Mantua. But the Austrians fought back, with such determination that by 13 November we find Bonaparte confessing to the Directory, in a mixture of exhaustion and despair, his fears that all Italy might soon be lost. Only in early 1797 did his spirits begin to recover. On 14 January he engaged the Austrians at Rivoli, a village some fourteen miles north of Verona between the Adige river and Lake Garda. He lost 2,200 men in the action, but his army inflicted 3,300 casualties on the enemy and took 7,000 prisoners. The following day his general Joubert, pursuing the fleeing Austrians, captured another 6,000; meanwhile, Joubert’s colleague André Masséna, having marched southward all night, surrounded and captured a second Austrian column now isolated outside Mantua. From that day Mantua was cut off, without hope of relief. On 2 February its starving garrison surrendered. Another 16,000 men and 1,500 guns were taken.
At last the way was clear for the invasion of Austria. True, it lay across the neutral territory of Venice, but that could not be helped. Such considerations were certainly not heeded by the Austrians, who were regularly crossing Venetian lands without let or hindrance. But if Venice did not protest–and her imperial sympathies were well known–Napoleon certainly did, taking every opportunity to browbeat and even threaten the local Venetian authorities. What they did not know was that his anger on these occasions was nothing but a simulated display, and that most of his threats were empty. His real purpose in his dealings with Venice at this time was not to enlist her aid or even to persuade her to take a more firmly neutral line; rather it was to frighten her, to put her in the wrong, to make her feel guilty and inadequate, to erode her pride, confidence and self-respect to the point where her moral resistance would be reduced to the same level as her physical.
Towards the end of March 1797 Napoleon led his army north over the Brixen Pass and into the Tyrol. There he took the road to Vienna, leaving behind him only a few light garrisons in Bergamo and Brescia, with a rather more considerable force in Verona. He seems, however, to have had a secret purpose in mind: to stir up, throughout the Veneto, a revolutionary mood and to promote, wherever possible, open risings against Venice. The danger was, of course, that such risings might back-fire against the French themselves–which indeed they did. On Easter Monday, 17 April, despite the strength of the garrison, the people of Verona came out in open insurrection and, in what came to be known as the pâques véronaises–the Veronese Easter–massacred a considerable number of Frenchmen, both soldiers and civilians. Similar though less serious outbreaks took place in Bergamo and Brescia, though these were principally directed against Venice. If, as is generally believed, all this was the work of French agents provocateurs, Napoleon would certainly have deemed the losses well worth while; they would have provided him with a further excuse for attacking the Venetian Republic, which he was by now determined to eradicate once and for all.
When the news of these risings, and of many others which followed them, reached Venice, it caused something akin to panic. All the terra firma west of the Mincio river was effectively lost. The new frontier must be defended at any price; armed militias raised among the local peasantry were the only hope. The local French commander, General Balland, was informed of Venice’s intentions, it being emphasised to him that the measures proposed were to be purely defensive, directed not against the French but against rebellious citizens of the Republic. What nobody seems to have foreseen was that these peasants–there were probably at least 10,000 of them–finding themselves for the first time with weapons in their hands, might not be over-conscientious in the manner of using them. They had no quarrel with the Italian rebels; they did, on the other hand, have plenty of outstanding scores to settle with the French, whose foraging parties regularly made free with their crops, their livestock and, as often as not, their wives and daughters into the bargain. It was not long before the serious sniping began. Balland’s reprisals were swift and savage, but they had no effect. By early April every pretence of civility between French and Italians was gone.
Napoleon, on the road to Vienna, had been kept fully informed of the worsening situation. Already on 10 April he had dictated an ultimatum to the Doge, to be delivered in person by his aide-de-camp General Andoche Junot. Junot arrived in Venice on the evening of Good Friday, the 14th, and demanded an audience with the Doge early the following morning. The reply was polite but firm. Holy Saturday was a day traditionally set aside for religious observances, and neither then nor on Easter Sunday itself could any government business be transacted. The Doge and his full Collegio192 would however be happy to receive the General early on Monday morning. But Junot was not interested in religious observances and said so. His orders were to see the Doge within twenty-four hours, and he intended to obey them. If he were not accorded an audience within that time, he would leave and Venice would have to take the consequences. They would not, he suggested, be pleasant.
Thus, when the Collegio reluctantly received him early on the Saturday morning, its dignity was already bruised. Ignoring the seat to which he was shown, on the Doge’s right hand, the General remained standing; then, without preliminary, he pulled Bonaparte’s letter from his pocket and began to read:
Judenberg, 20 Germinal, year V
All the mainland of the Most Serene Republic is in arms. On every side, the rallying-cry of the peasants whom you have armed is ‘Death to the French!’ They have already claimed as their victims several hundred soldiers of the Army of Italy. In vain do you try to shuffle off responsibility for the militias that you have brought into being. Do you think that just because I am in the heart of Germany I am powerless to ensure respect for the foremost people of the universe? Do you expect the legions of Italy to tolerate the massacres that you have stirred up? The blood of my brothers-in-arms shall be avenged, and there is not one French battalion that, if charged with such a duty, would not feel the doubling of its courage, the trebling of its powers.
The Venetian Senate has answered the generosity we have always shown with the blackest perfidy…Is it to be war, or peace? If you do not take immediate measures to disperse these militias, if you do not arrest and deliver up to me those responsible for the recent murders, war is declared.
The Turk is not at your gates. No enemy threatens you. You have deliberately fabricated pretexts in order to pretend to justify a rally of the people against my army. It shall be dissolved within twenty-four hours.
We are no longer in the reign of Charles VIII. If, against the clearly stated wishes of the French government, you impel me to wage war, do not think that the French soldiers will follow the example of your own militias, ravaging the countryside of the innocent and unfortunate inhabitants of the terra firma. I shall protect those people, and the day will come when they shall bless the crimes that obliged the army of France to deliver them from your tyranny.
BONAPARTE
In the shocked silence that followed, Junot flung the letter on the table in front of him, turned on his heel and strode from the room.
Napoleon, meanwhile, continued his march. His manner with his men was, as always, cheerful and confident; in his heart, however, there must have been a growing anxiety–on two counts. The first was strategic. His army was now poorly supplied, dangerously strung out in narrow mountain valleys where there was little hope of forage–let alone pillage–with a hostile population around it and a formidable Austrian army awaiting it in front. The second, to him, was more serious still. His army formed only one prong of the French attack. There was also the Army of the Rhine, commanded by his brilliant young contemporary and chief rival Lazare Hoche, which was now advancing eastwards through Germany at terrifying speed and threatening to reach Vienna before him. This was a possibility that he refused to contemplate. He, and no one else, must be the conqueror of the Habsburg Empire; his whole future career depended on it. He could not allow Hoche to steal his triumph.
He was wrestling with these two problems when suddenly–and to him almost miraculously–the imperial government panicked and sued for an armistice. It must have been difficult to conceal his delight: his signature on such a document would stop Hoche in his tracks. Thus it came about that on 18 April 1797, at the castle of Eckenwald just outside Leoben, a provisional peace was signed between Napoleon Bonaparte, acting in the name of the French Directory–although in fact he had never bothered to consult it–and the Austrian Empire. By its terms (details of which remained secret until they were confirmed six months later at Campo Formio) Austria was to renounce all claims to Belgium and to Lombardy, in return for which she would receive Istria, Dalmatia and all the Venetian terra firma bounded by the Oglio, the Po and the Adriatic. Venice was to be compensated–most inadequately–by the formerly papal territories of Romagna, Ferrara and Bologna.
Bonaparte, it need hardly be said, had no conceivable right to dispose in such a way of the territory of a neutral state. He would probably have argued that Venice was a neutral state no longer; still, there was no escaping the fact that the laws of international diplomacy did not look kindly on arbitrary settlements of this kind. However hollow Venice’s professed neutrality might be, she would still have to be shaken out of it, and if, during the process, she could be made to appear in an unfavourable or even aggressive light, so much the better. Now, thanks to the complete demoralisation of her government, she offered Bonaparte a perfect opportunity.
We can have nothing but sympathy for Francesco Donà and Lunardo Giustinian, the two Venetian envoys sent off to Bonaparte with the reply to his letter and instructions to placate him as best they could. Even the physical aspect of their task was disagreeable enough. Napoleon was famous for the speed at which he travelled, and for two middle-aged Venetians those gruelling days and nights spent trying to catch up with him, the endless jolting over some of the worst mountain roads in Europe only occasionally interrupted by a few hours’ rest snatched at some verminous and foul-smelling inn, must have been a nightmare. Nor can their spirits have been improved by the prospect of the stormy scenes that they knew lay ahead of them when they finally ran their quarry to earth. And even that was not all: in every town and village at which they stopped, the same rumours besieged their ears. France had made peace with Austria, and on the altar of that peace Venice was to be sacrificed.
The pursuit lasted over a week; it was not until 21 April, at Graz, that the two exhausted deputies finally drew up before the French camp. Bonaparte received them courteously enough, and listened in silence to their protestations of friendship. Then, suddenly, his mood changed. Striding back and forth across the room, he launched into a searing diatribe against Venice, her government and her people, accusing them of perfidy, hypocrisy, incompetence, injustice, ‘medieval barbarities’ and–most serious of all in his eyes–hostility to himself and to France. He demanded the immediate release of all political prisoners–threatening, if this were not done, to break open the prisons himself. What, he continued, of all the Frenchmen whom the Venetians had murdered? His soldiers were determined to have their revenge, and he would not deny it to them. Any government unable to restrain its own subjects was an imbecile government and had no right to survive. He ended with those terrible words that were soon to echo in the heart of every Venetian: ‘Io sarò un Attila per lo stato veneto’–‘I shall be an Attila to the state of Venice.’
When the two envoys returned to Venice with their report, Doge Lodovico Manin and his colleagues saw that the Republic was doomed. War was imminent; further negotiation was impossible; the terra firma was as good as lost. The only hope of saving the city itself from destruction lay in capitulation to the conqueror’s demands, and these demands were terrible indeed: nothing less than the abdication of the entire government and the abandonment of a constitution that had lasted more than a thousand years–the suicide, in fact, of the state.
On Friday, 12 May 1797, the Great Council of Venice met for the last time. Many of its members having already fled the city, it fell short–by sixty-three–of its constitutional quorum of 600, but the time for such niceties was past. The Doge was just completing his opening speech when the sound of firing was heard outside the palace. At once, all was in confusion. To those present, such sounds could mean one thing only: the popular uprising that they had so long dreaded had begun. Their only hope of survival was to escape from the palace while there was still time. Within minutes, the true source of the firing had been established: some of the Dalmatian troops, who were being removed from Venice on Bonaparte’s orders, had symbolically discharged their muskets into the air as a parting salute to the city. But the panic had begun; reassurances were useless. Leaving their all-too-distinctive robes of office behind them, the remaining legislators of the Venetian Republic slipped discreetly out of the palace by the side entrances. The Serenissima was no more.
Lodovico Manin himself made no attempt to flee. In the sudden stillness that followed the break-up of the meeting, he slowly gathered up his papers and withdrew to his private apartments. There he removed his corno–that curiously shaped cap which was the principal symbol of his office–and handed it to his valet. ‘Take this,’ he said, ‘I shall not be needing it again.’
From the inauguration of the first Doge in 726 to the resignation of the last in 1797, the Venetian Republic had lasted 1,071 years–only half a century less than the Empire of Byzantium. For much of that time Venice had been the acknowledged mistress of the Mediterranean–politically, constitutionally, commercially, artistically and architecturally a wonder of the world. How pleasant it would be to record a less ignominious end, with her people showing, as their Republic began to totter, some spark of that endurance and courage that they had shown often enough in defending their colonies against the Turks–or that their own grandchildren were to show against the Austrians half a century later. One would not have asked for–and certainly not have expected–a heroic resistance such as had been seen on the walls of Constantinople in 1453: merely a flash of the old Venetian spirit, which would have allowed the Serenissima to pass into history with some semblance of honour. But even that was lacking. The last tragedy of Venice was not her death; it was the manner in which she died.
Thus it was that when the Treaty of Campo Formio was signed on 17 October, Austria received even more than she had expected at Leoben: not just the Venetian terra firma, but the city itself. Napoleon Bonaparte, however, was well pleased. He had always believed–probably rightly–that he could master Italy so long as it remained divided. Already in December 1796 he had formed his Cispadane Republic193 out of the merger of the duchies of Reggio and Modena and the papal states of Bologna and Ferrara. The following June he had established his Ligurian Republic with its capital in Genoa, and in July his Cisalpine Republic based on Milan. As for Venice, he himself had never set foot there and had no desire to; he saw it–quite erroneously–in his mind’s eye as a brutally repressive police state, its dungeons bursting with political prisoners. Meanwhile, there was peace all over continental Europe. Only England remained an enemy. It was England, now, that must be invaded and destroyed. The Directory agreed, appointing Bonaparte Commander-in-Chief of the Army of England, but after the best part of a year’s consideration he reluctantly decided against the project. The expense would be too great, the necessary manpower unavailable; above all, the French navy was in a deplorable state, no match for the British and with no commander who could hold a candle to Hood, Rodney or St Vincent–still less to Nelson.
The alternative was Egypt. As early as July 1797 the Foreign Minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord,194 had proposed an Egyptian expedition, and seven months later had produced a long memorandum on the subject. Inevitably this contained a section deploring the cruelty of the local beys and pressing the necessity of delivering the Egyptian people from the oppression that it had so long endured; more worthy of attention was the suggestion that with an army of 20–25,000, which would land at Alexandria and occupy Cairo, a further expedition could be launched against India–possibly through a hastily dug Suez Canal. On 2 March 1798 the Directory gave its formal approval. Not only would the proposal keep the army employed and their terrifying young general at a safe distance from Paris; it also offered an opportunity to take over the British role in India, while providing France with an important new colony in the eastern Mediterranean. Finally, if a little more problematically, it would achieve a major diversion of English sea power to the east, which might make the delayed invasion possible after all.
Napoleon, it need hardly be said, accepted the command with enthusiasm. Since his childhood he had been fascinated by the Orient, and he was determined that the expedition should have objectives other than the purely political and military. To this end he recruited no less than 167 savants to accompany it, including scientists, mathematicians, astronomers, engineers, architects, painters and draughtsmen. Egypt had preserved her ancient mysteries for too long; she was a fruit more than ready for the plucking. The country had been effectively under the Mamelukes since 1250. In 1517 it had been conquered by the Turks and absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, part of which, technically, it still remained; by the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the Mameluke beys were once again in control. A French invasion would doubtless evoke an indignant protest from the Sultan in Constantinople, but his empire, though not yet known as ‘the sick man of Europe’, was a decadent and demoralised shadow of its former self and unlikely to represent much of a threat. Unfortunately there were other risks a good deal more serious. The 300 French transport ships were poorly armed, their crews practically untrained. True, they had a naval escort of twenty-seven ships of the line195 and frigates, but Nelson was already known to be cruising in the Mediterranean. Were he to intercept them, their chances of escape–and those of the 31,000 men aboard them–would be negligible.
The fleet sailed in four separate divisions, the largest from Toulon, the other three from Marseille, Genoa and Civitavecchia just north of Rome. Napoleon himself left Toulon in his flagship L’Orient on 19 May 1798. His first objective was Malta. The island had been in the possession of the Order of the Knights of St John since 1530. The Knights had conscientiously maintained their hospital and had heroically withstood the dreadful Turkish siege of 1565, but as fighters for Christendom they had grown soft. When Bonaparte reached the island on 9 June and sent messengers ashore to the Grand Master, a German named Ferdinand Hompesch, to demand the admission of all his ships into the harbour to take on water, he received a reply stating that, according to the regulations of the Order, states that were at war with other Christian countries might send in only four vessels at a time. A message was returned swiftly from L’Orient: ‘General Bonaparte is resolved to obtain by force that which ought to have been accorded to him by virtue of the principles of hospitality, the fundamental rule of your order.’
At dawn on 10 June the assault on the island began. The 550 Knights–nearly half of them were French, and many more too old to fight–resisted for only two days. On the morning of the 12th they requested a truce; that same night a delegation came on board the flagship. The Order would give up its sovereignty over Malta and Gozo, so long as the French government used its good offices to find Grand Master Hompesch some small principality to which he could retire, together with a pension of 300,000 francs to enable him to live in a style that befitted his rank. Napoleon accepted, and immediately set to work on a programme of reform. In less than a week he managed to convert the island into something tolerably like a French département. The people were ordered to wear the red, white and blue cockade; slavery–such as it was–was abolished; 600 Turks and 1,400 Moors were to be repatriated; the number of monasteries was reduced and the power of the clergy drastically restricted. All gold and silver was to be removed from the churches, and all the treasure from the palace of the Knights–which included the famous silver service regularly used by the Order to feed the sick in the hospital–melted down into 3,500 pounds of bullion for Napoleon’s war chest. Three thousand French soldiers under General Claude Vaubois were left behind to provide a garrison, and within a week of its arrival the fleet was ready to continue its journey. On the 19th, Napoleon himself set sail.
France, however, was not to keep the unhappy island for long. In 1800, enraged by the behaviour of Vaubois, who had even tried to impose French as the official language and who now proposed to auction the entire contents of the Carmelite church in Mdina, the Maltese–led by their clergy–rose in revolt, hurling the French commander of militia out of a window. Vaubois quickly ordered all his men to Valletta, where he locked the city gates. Thenceforth the French found themselves under siege. Meanwhile, the Maltese appealed to the British navy for help, and several ships arrived to blockade any French vessels that might attempt to relieve their garrison. These were followed shortly afterwards by 1,500 British troops. Vaubois held out heroically, until–thanks to the blockade–he had only three days’ rations left. He was then allowed an honourable surrender and safe repatriation for the garrison, taking with him–to the further fury of the Maltese, who were not consulted–much of the treasure that his men had looted during their stay.
With the departure of both the Knights and the French, the Maltese found themselves under the authority of a British Civil Commissioner until such time as their long-term future could be settled. In 1802 the Treaty of Amiens–which declared peace between Britain and France, although Napoleon intended to observe it only for as long as it suited him196 –provided for the return of the island to the Order of St John; the Maltese, however, who had no more love for the Knights than they had for the French, let it be known that their own strong preference was for the security afforded by the British Crown–which, by the Peace of Paris in 1814, they were finally to obtain.
On the night of 1 July 1798, nearly two weeks after its departure from Malta, the French fleet dropped anchor off Marabout, some seven miles west of Alexandria. The landing of so many men, and so much equipment, in the small boats which were all that was available was a long and complicated task. It began only in the late afternoon, when a storm was already brewing. The vice-admiral, François-Paul Brueys d’Aigaïlliers, had advised delaying the operation until the following morning, but Napoleon had refused to listen. He himself did not reach the shore until shortly before midnight. Fortunately for him, there was no resistance until the army reached Alexandria, and even there the crumbling walls and the tiny garrison could do little to delay the inevitable. The whole city proved to be in a state of advanced decay, its population reduced from the 300,000 that it had boasted in Roman times to a sad and apathetic 6,000. Apart from ‘Pompey’s Pillar’ (which had nothing to do with Pompey) and ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’ (which had no association with Cleopatra),197 there was nothing to evoke its days of glory.
To the French army, therefore, the capture of Alexandria came as an anticlimax. The July heat was demoralising enough, but men who had expected a rich and magnificent city–with commensurate opportunities for pillage–and who had found only a heap of pestiferous hovels felt not only disappointed but betrayed. Napoleon saw that they must be given no time to brood, but must march at once on Cairo. Advancing along the western side of the Nile delta, they captured Rosetta without a struggle and on 21 July met the main body of the Mameluke army at Embabeh, just below Gezira Island. Napoleon’s exhortation to his troops, ‘Think, my soldiers, from the tops of these pyramids forty centuries look down upon you!’ has gone down in history, but was hardly necessary: the Battle of the Pyramids was a walkover. Mameluke swords, however valiantly wielded, were no match for French musketry. The following day he entered Cairo–to his men a slight improvement on Alexandria, but scarcely a vaut-le-voyage.
Nelson, meanwhile, had been pursuing the French ships across the Mediterranean. Misled by information from a Genoese vessel that Bonaparte had left Malta on 16 June–three days earlier than he actually did–he had hastened to Alexandria; then, finding to his astonishment no trace of the French fleet, he had sailed again on 29 June to search for it along the coast of Syria. As a result of this confusion, it was only around 2.30 p.m. on 1 August that he returned to Egypt, to find thirteen French men-of-war–he himself had fourteen–and four frigates anchored in a two-mile line in Aboukir Bay, one of the mouths of the Nile. But they were still nine miles away; it would take another two hours to reach them, and a lot longer still to draw up his own ships in a regular line of battle. Night encounters in those days were hazardous things; there was a danger of running aground in unknown waters, and a worse one of firing into one’s fellows by mistake. Most admirals, in such circumstances, would have elected to wait until morning; Nelson, however, seeing that the French were unprepared and that there was a favourable northwest wind running, decided on an immediate attack. He began by sending four ships inshore along one side of the French line, while he himself in his flagship, the Vanguard, led a parallel attack down the offshore side. Each enemy vessel was thus subjected to a simultaneous cannonade from both sides. That was at about six o’clock; the ensuing battle lasted through the night. By dawn all the French ships but four had been destroyed or captured, including their flagship, L’Orient, on which Admiral Brueys had been killed by a cannon shot. The vessel still lies beneath the waters of Aboukir Bay, together with all the treasure looted from the palaces and churches of Malta.
The Battle of the Nile, as it was called, was one of the greatest victories of Nelson’s career.198 At a stroke he had not only destroyed the French fleet; he had severed Napoleon’s line of communication with France, leaving him marooned and frustrating all his plans of conquest in the Middle East. His victory also had a serious effect on French morale–though not, apparently, on Bonaparte’s. Almost before the ships’ guns had cooled, Napoleon was at work transforming Egypt into a strategic base. What the British were attempting to achieve little by little in India, he set himself to complete in a few months. He devised new and more efficient systems of administration and taxation; he established land registries; he gave orders for hospitals, improved sanitation and even street lighting. The scientists and engineers whom he had brought with him were put to work on such problems as the purification of the Nile water and the local manufacture of gunpowder.
Where he failed, unsurprisingly, was in his attempts to win the trust and support of the Egyptians. He did his best, taking every opportunity to stress his admiration for Islam; he even issued a ‘Proclamation to the People of Egypt’, in which he seemed to go still further:
I, more than any Mameluke, worship God, glory be to Him, and respect His Prophet and the Great Koran…
O you sheikhs, judges, imams, tell your nation that the French are also sincere Muslims…
The fact remained, however, that his men were living off the country and behaving as if they owned it. Small-scale revolts were constantly breaking out, with attacks on isolated French garrisons or individual Frenchmen in the street. A more serious uprising in October was put down with brutal efficiency; over 3,000 Egyptians were killed and the entire al-Azhar quarter sacked, including its mosque. From that day forward Napoleon decreed that any Egyptian found carrying a firearm was to be beheaded and his body thrown into the Nile. It was no wonder that the longer the occupation continued, the more detested it became.
Beyond the Egyptian frontiers, too, enemies were gathering. On 2 September 1798 the Ottoman Sultan Selim III declared war on France, and the Turkish governor of Syria, Djezzar (‘the Butcher’) Pasha, began to raise an army. This could easily march south, then turn across the Sinai peninsula and invade Egypt from the east; worse still, it could be carried by English ships straight to the Nile delta. Rather than risk such an eventuality, Napoleon decided to act first: to destroy Djezzar’s army even before it was fully formed. In early February 1799 he marched his men across the deserts of Sinai and up into Palestine. On 7 March Jedda fell; 2,000 Turks and Palestinians were put to the sword, another 2,000 taken down to the sea and shot. In an effort to improve his image after these atrocities, the Commander-in-Chief visited a plague hospital and, we are told, was ill-advised enough personally to carry a plague victim out to his grave. He was not infected; otherwise, this exercise in public relations does not seem to have been outstandingly successful.
Acre was his next objective; but Acre was well defended and well garrisoned, the Turkish commander having enlisted additional support from the British navy under the swashbuckling Commodore Sir Sidney Smith, famous for having escaped from the Temple prison in Paris during the revolution. Smith had brought with him his friend Colonel Phélippeaux, a military engineer who had been at the Ecole Militaire with Bonaparte and who was able to contribute invaluable expertise to the defence of the town. For two months the French army besieged the city; fortunately, however, Smith had succeeded in capturing the eight gunboats carrying their siege artillery, stores and ammunition. Napoleon had only his field guns, and it was not until 25 April that he was able to bring up six heavy cannon from Jaffa. On 10 May he launched his final assault. Like its predecessors, it was thrown back with heavy losses, and he had no course but retreat. By this time plague had taken hold in the army; he himself advocated killing all the patients with overdoses of opium, but his chief medical officer refused outright. The hundreds of stretchers carrying the sick and wounded considerably slowed the return journey; it was a miserable body of men that finally limped back into Cairo.
As always, Bonaparte did his best to dress up defeat as victory. Turkish prisoners were paraded, captured Turkish flags proudly displayed. What was left of the army, cleaned up as far as possible, staged a triumphal march through the city and, on 25 July, made short work of a Turkish force which, with British assistance, had been landed at Aboukir. But no one, least of all the Egyptians, was fooled. The Middle Eastern expedition had been a failure, and had done little for Napoleon’s reputation. He was alarmed, too, by reports reaching Cairo that Europe was once again at war, that the Italian Cisalpine Republic which he had established two years before was now under Austrian occupation, that the Russian army was on the march and that the domestic situation in France itself was once again critical. For the first time in his career–but not the last–he left his army to get home as best it could and, at five o’clock in the morning of 22 August 1799, slipped stealthily from his camp and sailed for France. Not even his successor in command, General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, knew of his departure until he was safely away.
In Paris, the coup d’état of 30 prairial (18 June) 1799 had expelled the moderates from the Directory and brought in men who were generally considered to be Jacobin extremists, but confusion continued to reign and one of the new Directors, Emmanuel Sieyès, declared that only a military dictatorship could now prevent a return of the monarchy. ‘Je cherche un sabre,’ he said–‘I am looking for a sabre.’ That sabre was soon to hand, and from the moment Napoleon arrived in Paris on 14 October–having almost miraculously escaped the British fleet–he and Sieyès started planning a coup of their own. It took place on 18–19 brumaire (November 9–10), abolished the Directory and established a new government, the Consulate. There were technically three consuls, but effectively only one: the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, was henceforth master of France.
He spent the winter reorganising his army, and–Russia having by now withdrawn from the anti-French coalition–preparing for a campaign against his principal remaining enemy, Austria. At that moment the Austrians were besieging Genoa, capital of one of his more ephemeral creations, the Ligurian Republic. A lesser general would have marched south from Paris and down the valley of the Rhône; Napoleon turned east at the Alps and took his men over the Great St Bernard Pass before the snow had melted, appearing in Italy behind the Austrian army and taking it entirely by surprise. The Austrian general Michael von Melas had no course but to leave Genoa and regroup, concentrating all his forces on Alessandria. Napoleon followed them, and on the evening of 13 June 1800 reached the village–it was in fact little more than a farm–of Marengo, some two and a half miles southeast of the town.
The encounter that followed might have spelled the end of Napoleon’s career. Melas did not wait to be attacked; the following morning, with a force of some 31,000, he lashed out at the 23,000 French, pounding them remorselessly with his eighty guns for over five hours. In the early afternoon their line began to give way; they were forced to retreat nearly four miles to the village of San Giuliano. The Austrians’ victory seemed certain; strangely enough, however–perhaps because the seventy-one-year-old Melas now retired to Alessandria, leaving the command to some relatively incapable subordinate–their pursuit was slow and half-hearted, giving Napoleon time to regroup and to welcome substantial reinforcements under General Louis Desaix which just then providentially arrived from the southeast. As evening drew on he launched a counter-attack. Desaix was killed almost immediately, but his 6,000 men, fresh and rested, gave new spirit to their fellows, and by nightfall the Austrians were in full retreat. When the battle ended they had lost 9,500 men, the French less than 6,000.199
Melas now had no choice but to come to terms, withdrawing all his troops east of the river Mincio and north of the Po, giving the French complete control of the Po valley as far as the Adige. Napoleon, his reputation unstained despite the narrowness of his victory, returned to Paris, where he took over both the military and the civil authority. In 1801 Austria was forced to sign the Treaty of Lunéville, whereby France regained the old frontiers that Julius Caesar had given to Gaul: the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees.
Napoleon’s star was now high in the sky–and was still rising.