the revolutionary government of France, Austria and Russia were
actively inimical, and there was no prospect of coming to terms with
them, unless all the conquered territories recently acquired by France
were sacrificed. The idea of natural boundaries had become by this time
a dogma of political faith, and even the Directory, confronted as it
was by a demoralized administration, by bad business conditions, and
by an inflated currency, had no thought of making peace. Armies were
operating along the eastern frontiers; and as soon as Napoleon reached
Nice, he prepared, along the lines he had so frequently urged, to take
the offensive against the vulnerable Austrian provinces of northern
Italy.
The force he took over now numbered 38,000 men, out of a nominal
six divisions of 60,282. They were poorly equipped, insufficiently
nourished, and had not received their pay. The manifesto issued to
them, according to Napoleon’s report of it at St. Helena, held out
an immediate change of fortune. It is a document characteristic in
contents and form of the new era of glory and conquest on which France
was now to embark under Napoleon’s leadership. “Soldiers,” he said,
“you are ill-fed and almost naked; the government owes you much; it
can give you nothing. Your patience, the courage which you exhibit
in the midst of these mountains, are worthy of admiration; but they
bring you no atom of glory; not a ray is reflected upon you. I will
conduct you into the most fertile places of the world. Rich provinces,
great cities, will be in your power; there you will find honor, glory,
and wealth. Soldiers of Italy, will you be lacking in courage or
perseverance?”
These promises were made good in the remarkable campaign that followed,
in which Napoleon’s soldiers found their material wants amply satisfied
and their ambitious wishes for a career of glory more than answered
in the brilliant victories of their general. Napoleon’s plan of
operations was guided by the principles he had outlined two years
before to the Robespierre régime. “In the management of war, as in the
siege of a city,” he said, “the method should be to direct the fire
upon a single point. The breach once made, equilibrium is destroyed,
all further effort is useless, and the place is taken. Attacks should
not be scattered, but united. An army should be divided for the sake
of subsistence and concentrated for combat. Unity of command is
indispensable to success. Time is everything.”
The last mentioned condition was fully vindicated, for before the end
of April the French had beaten in a succession of quickly delivered
attacks and effective battles, the Austrian army occupying Piedmont and
also their Piedmontese allies. With the retreat of the Austrians from
his kingdom, King Victor Amadeus made peace, and Napoleon hurried on
to deal finally with the Austrians on their own territory in Lombardy.
With the winning of the battle of Lodi on the 10th of May, Lombardy was
soon evacuated by the enemy, and Napoleon entered the capital of the
province, Milan, on the 16th of May. The commander of the victorious
army paid little attention to the policy outlined at Paris for his
conduct in Italy; he negotiated independently of the Directory and
oftentimes contrary to their expressed wishes. When they proposed to
divide his command by sharing it with General Kellermann, he wrote,
“Each person has his own way of making war. General Kellermann has had
more experience and will do it better than I; but both together will
do it badly.” By this plain statement, the Directors were brought to
terms; they were unwilling to let Napoleon resign his command, for the
campaign was giving the government the prestige it badly needed, and
what was equally valuable in their eyes was Napoleon’s novel method of
conducting warfare without making any demands on the central treasury.
In the meantime there were further successes to be recorded against
the Austrians. Wherever they made a stand they were defeated; a large
number of their men were blocked up in the great citadel at Mantua,
and, for months, armies in succession were sent down from the Tyrol to
relieve that city. The ability of Napoleon was tested in many hard-won
fights against superior numbers; he was often in critical situations,
especially at the battle of Arcola where, for three days (November
17-20, 1796), the stubbornness of the Austrians held the French in
check. During one of the critical incidents of the fight, Napoleon had
personally to rally his men, and, when they were thrown into confusion
by the Austrian fire, he was in danger of capture and was saved only by
the presence of mind of his aide, Marmont, and of his own brother Louis.
Further attempts on the part of Austria to preserve its Italian
possessions proved unavailing. After a decisive engagement fought
at Rivoli early in the year 1797, the Austrian garrison at Mantua
capitulated, and with the fall of this fortress, Austrian rule in Italy
was brought to an end. Later on Napoleon followed up these successes by
moving towards Vienna with a force of 34,000 men. He was ably seconded
by his subordinate generals, among whom was Moreau, with the result
that the remaining Austrian forces, gathered to defend their capital,
were defeated, and by the preliminaries of peace signed at Leoben,
Austria lost her Italian possessions, was deprived of her predominant
influence in the peninsula, and agreed to the cession of Belgium. As
a compensation she was to receive the possessions of Venice on the
mainland, on both sides of the Adriatic.
These manipulations of territory, so far as Italy was concerned, were
directed entirely in accordance with the personal will of Napoleon,
who had already acted on his own initiative in his dealings with the
petty Italian states. During the course of the campaign he had forced
Tuscany and Naples to accept French sovereignty in the peninsula
practically on his own terms, he had deprived the Pope of a large
part of his territory and, after the terms of the treaty were signed,
but before they were publicly announced, he had sought a quarrel with
Venice, in order to put an end to the republic and so to find an excuse
for annexing part of her territory to France. In this way he could hand
over to Austria the fragments that had been secretly assigned to that
power at Leoben. The brilliancy of these military operations, by which
the whole face of the traditional situation in Italy was altered in the
short space of one year, set Napoleon in such a secure position that
his critics and detractors hesitated to call in question his autocratic
acts, though Mallet du Pan tells us that the praise showered by the
Directory on the young conqueror was recognized as insincere, adding,
“There were voices in favor of sending the young hero to the Place de
la Révolution to have a score of bullets lodged in his pate.”
Napoleon himself, contrasting his success with the inefficiency of
the Austrians, describes his victories in the following passage: “My
military successes have been great; but then consider the servants of
the Emperor! His soldiers are good and brave, though heavy and inactive
compared with mine; but what generals! a Beaulieu, who had not the
slightest knowledge of localities in Italy; Wormser, deaf and eternally
slow; or Alvinzy, who was altogether incompetent. They have been
accused of being bribed by me; these are nothing but falsehoods, for I
never had such a thing in view. But I can prove that no one of these
three generals had a single staff on which several of the superior
officers were not devoted to me and in my pay. Hence I was apprised not
only of their plans but of their designs, and I interfered with them,
while they were still under deliberation.”
With the states wrested from the Pope, there were taken from the Duke
of Modena and from Austria territories sufficient to found a republic
entitled the Cisalpine, and with this, there was a new rearrangement
of the territories on the west coast by which the ancient republic of
Genoa ceased to exist and reappeared with the Napoleonic brand as
the Ligurian Republic. Both of these creations were after the French
model, but the general of the army drew up the constitutions, chose the
officials, and exercised the irresponsible powers of a dictator. The
final terms of the treaty with Austria were not settled till October,
1797, but nothing was gained by the shrewd diplomatic fencings of the
Viennese representatives. Napoleon, in a theatrical scene, at which he
passionately broke in pieces a valuable porcelain vase in the presence
of Coblentzl, the Austrian envoy, threatened to smash the Austrian
monarchy if the parleyings were too long continued. The liberation of
Italy appealed to the patriotic sentiment of the Italians, until the
political realism of their conqueror manifested itself by enforcing on
them contributions of money, art treasures, valuable manuscripts, all
of which were sifted and collected by the experts Napoleon carried with
his army. Even mathematical instruments and natural history collections
did not escape his vigilance.
In the imposition of these exactions, the Papacy fared no better
than the secular princes. While the dukes of Parma and Modena paid
12,000,000 francs and 20 pictures, the Pope was mulcted to the extent
of 21,000,000 francs, 15,000,000 in cash, the rest to be made up by the
surrender of 100 pictures, 500 manuscripts, and the bust of the patriot
Brutus. This original method of making war pay for itself pleased
the Directory. Great fêtes were prepared for the conqueror, when he
appeared in Paris, to celebrate his victories. The official orator of
the occasion was Talleyrand, who selected as the chief points of his
eulogy Napoleon’s modesty, his taste for the poems of Ossian, and his
fondness for mathematics.
But to the clear intelligence of Napoleon, forms of adulation, real
or insincere, meant little. He was making rapid progress towards the
goal of personal rule. The government already suspected his loyalty to
them, but they were weak and without moral influence. Besides, they
were under obligations, even more binding than those based or the money
contributions which flowed in from Italy, for when the reactionary
party was about to get the upper hand, both among the Legislative Body
and among the Directors themselves, it was Napoleon’s agent, Augereau,
who had coöperated actively with the radical element and made its
continued predominance in the control of national affairs possible.
There was no intention to diminish the weight of the military element
as the predominant partner. By the premature death of Hoche, Napoleon
was left without a rival, and he did not hesitate to speak of the
Directory as a makeshift government. The immediate question was to
prevent an outbreak between the victorious general and his superiors,
by which a return to the monarchy might be made easy. France was
still at war with Great Britain; therefore, when Napoleon proposed to
attack the vulnerable point of British influence in Egypt, with the
ultimate purpose of advancing from there on the British domains in
India, the plan was eagerly accepted by the Directors, despite the
obviously utopian character of the proposal. Napoleon spoke in his best
sententious style of the East as the only place where real glory could
be acquired. The Directors were willing that he should absent himself
from France, glad to purchase freedom from his control by assigning him
a new important command over the best troops in France.
It is not probable that Napoleon was at all in earnest in planning
an expedition to India; he appreciated the weakness of the home
government, and from Egypt it would not be difficult to return,
whenever he was needed, in the rôle of the sole savior of the country.
The scale of preparation for this unique military adventure was most
imposing; there was an air of mystery about it; people talked of its
destination being Constantinople or India. Ships, to the number of
500, were gathered at Toulon, manned by 10,000 sailors and fitted to
transport 35,000 veteran troops, taken mostly from the army of Italy.
All of Napoleon’s best generals were to be with him, Berthier, Murat,
Lannes, Davout, Marmont, Duroc, and the two popular commanders from
the army of the Rhine, Kléber and Desaix. Great care was given to the
material and scientific side of the expedition. Scholars and scientific
experts were to accompany it, either for the purpose of antiquarian
research in Egypt, or to develop the unused powers of the soil of the
fertile Nile valley. There was plenty of money, for Berthier was sent
to Rome to exact additional contributions from churches and convents.
He called himself the treasurer of the Egyptian expedition and promised
to fill his treasure chests.
The great fleet set sail on the 19th of May, 1798; only when the ships
were at sea did the troops know what was to be their destination.
The first point reached was Malta, where the famous Knights, so long
the residuary legatees of the great crusading tradition, surrendered
without resistance and received a French garrison. By good fortune the
French armada escaped the vigilance of the English fleet which was
cruising in the Mediterranean; and the army was landed at Alexandria on
June 30th.
At this time Turkey had only the nominal sovereignty in Egypt, the
real power being in the hands of a military caste, the Mamelouks, who
exercised an oppressive rule over the cultivators of the soil, and
the Arab chieftains, who represented the ancient conquerors of the
country. Napoleon proclaimed himself as a liberator, promising to
respect the customs and religion of the land, and offering his help in
the development of its natural resources. After the easy capture of
Alexandria there was a long, weary march across the desert to Cairo,
during which the troops so suffered from intense heat, fatigue, and
lack of food that there was discontent among both officers and men.
The final stand of the Mamelouks was made near Cairo within sight of
the Pyramids, where they tried to rush the French squares with their
cavalry. But the French artillery with its murderous fire decimated the
advancing squadrons before they could come in contact with the French
troops, with the result that on the French side the loss was only about
thirty men, while the Mamelouks reckoned theirs by the thousand. Many
of them, too, were drowned in the Nile. The French soldiers bent their
bayonets and fished the bodies out in order to get the gold pieces in
the belts of the dead warriors. Napoleon grimly reported that “the army
was becoming reconciled to Egypt.” In the midst of these brilliant
achievements, the victory of Nelson at Aboukir on the 1st of August
came like a bolt from the blue, for the French admiral’s fleet was
virtually annihilated, and by this disaster the French army was cut off
from its base and, as it were, imprisoned in the land it had conquered.
Yet Nelson could not follow up his victory; he had no frigates and,
therefore, could not enter the harbor of Alexandria to destroy the
provisions and the transport ships which were collected there.
One of the results of the naval battle was an uprising at Cairo, which
was ruthlessly repressed, 5000 of the insurgents losing their lives.
After an expedition had been sent into upper Egypt as far as the
cataracts of Syene, the country was reduced to some kind of order, but
there were further difficulties to deal with from another quarter, for,
under the instigation of England, the Turks were preparing to retake
Egypt, and two armies were now on the way with this object. One of
them was to proceed through Asia Minor and Syria; to meet the enemy
Napoleon, with the bulk of his army, advanced through Syria, conquering
towns as he proceeded with his usual unbroken fortune. The march was
signalized by spectacular deeds of personal prowess on the part of his
subordinate generals. But he also shocked his admirers by the horrible
massacre of 3000 prisoners at Jaffa. The excuse for this deed of
bloodshed was that the victims had been previously released on parole
and had broken it by taking part in the defense of Jaffa. The first
failure in this unexampled course of success came at St. John d’Acre,
an important seaport which was obstinately defended by its Turkish
garrison, aided by an English commodore, Sidney Smith. After two
unsuccessful assaults had been made by the French, with heavy losses,
Napoleon withdrew in unconcealed disgust at his failure. He never
forgot Sidney Smith, and spoke of him always as the man who had spoiled
his luck; “that idiot [bicoque] was the only thing,” he said, “that
prevented me from entering India and striking a deathblow at England.”
After the raising of the siege hope of further progress through Syria
was abandoned, and the army, suffering from illness and discontent, had
a miserable march back to Egypt, their route being marked by dead and
dying. Napoleon showed great constancy in this disastrous experience,
exposing himself to the ravages of the plague and restoring the
confidence of his men by his coolness. On reaching Egypt the French
found that a Turkish army of 18,000 men had disembarked at Alexandria;
these, however, were soon disposed of at the second battle of Aboukir,
fought almost a year after the first (July 25, 1799). The Turkish
soldiers who refused, or were not able, to reembark on their transports
were thrown into the sea.
While the expedition was marked by such deeds of barbarism, it had
a more justifiable side because of the civilized and progressive
administration given to Egypt by its French conquerors. Intelligent
efforts were made to conciliate the Mussulman population; justice,
finance, and administration were reformed; even a beginning was made in
establishing something resembling representative government. Works of
public utility were encouraged, some planned on a large scale, such as
the building of a canal at Suez, a project only realized many decades
afterwards. Remarkable also were the scientific results attained
through the foundation of an Egyptian Institute consisting of French
specialists in archeology, architecture, and art. Among its members
were men who devoted themselves to promoting an industrial reformation,
while others accomplished hygienic improvements for the cities. Indeed,
the most durable result of this extraordinary scheme of Oriental
conquest was the primacy of culture it gave to France in Egypt, a
primacy she has continued to maintain even in the face of the military
occupation of the country by England.
III THE FALL OF THE DIRECTORY
During the long absence of Napoleon from France, the incapacity
of the government of the Directory at home and abroad had been
continually manifested; there were internal disorders due to royalist
insurrections, which seemed for a time most threatening in the
southwest, in the Garonne valley, while at Paris the radicals, who
represented what was left of the Terrorist element, were restless
under a system which they charged with disloyalty to the revolutionary
tradition. There was, besides, no harmony between the legislative and
executive organs of government; the Directors were not respected, some
being manifestly incompetent, others, like Barras, mere intriguers.
With this weakness at home there had been displayed towards other
European powers a consistent policy of provocation and aggression. To
all of its weaker neighbors, France, in the hands of the Directory,
played the rôle of an absolute dictator; all of them were to be forced,
willing or unwilling, to organize themselves on the model of the French
Republic. Napoleon had set the fashion in Italy; this example was
followed through French influence and by French aggression. When the
Swiss cantons rose to defend their ancient rights, they met with no
more consideration than the absolute monarch, King Charles Emmanuel IV
of Piedmont, whose Italian dominions were annexed to France, or the
clerical oligarchy of Rome, who had to see themselves despoiled of
their temporal power, when the Roman Republic was proclaimed from the
Forum by General Berthier.
A new European coalition was brought into existence to resist the
general movement of French expansion and to restore the Bourbon
monarchy by invading French territory. Much was hoped from the
accession of Russia, which along with Austria, engaged to put in the
field the largest masses of men. At the opening of the campaign the
French met discouraging defeats; Italy was soon lost through the
inability of the French generals to withstand the united Russians and
Austrians. In Switzerland, Masséna, by brilliant strategy kept the
coalition armies in check; while by the superior initiative of a much
smaller French force, a British army, operating in Holland, was obliged
to sign an ignominious treaty and to evacuate Dutch territory.
With some of these vicissitudes of the Directorial government, Napoleon
became acquainted at a dinner, at which he and Sidney Smith met to
discuss matters relative to the exchange of prisoners and where the
commander of the French army in Egypt received the public papers and
letters intended for him which had been seized by English warships.
Napoleon saw the necessity of leaving Egypt, where he was cooped up
by an English fleet, and also he must have realized that the chance
of a permanent French occupation was infinitesimal. With a few of his
generals he left the country suddenly on the 22d of August, 1799,
and, avoiding by skilful navigation the danger of being captured by
the British warships, disembarked on French soil at Fréjus on October
16th. All parties greeted his return; his trip to Paris was a triumph;
the _Moniteur_ reported that the crowd on the roads was so great that
vehicular traffic was completely blocked. All the places through
which he passed from Fréjus as far as Paris were illuminated. Even
the Directory disguised their real feelings and gave the hero of the
Egyptian campaign a cordial welcome back. Bonaparte won much favor by
a discreet modesty of demeanor, ingratiating himself with the generals
who were defending France against the coalition, while he represented
the Egyptian campaign as an affair undertaken simply for scientific
purposes. His popularity was as unrestrained as it was real. The press
was filled with stories about him; he dressed as an ordinary citizen
rather than as a soldier, wearing a semi-civilian costume at social
functions.
But under this ingenuous pose much political intriguing was being
set in motion. Napoleon, who was described by one of his brothers
as “just as much a manipulator as a general,” was planning with
Director Siéyès, now recognized as the chief political expert, to
be called in to prepare a new constitution. Napoleon cared nothing
for constitutions, but he was glad to have Siéyès’s influence in
overturning the Directory. Siéyès, on his side, recognized the civic
virtues of his friend, General Bonaparte, but at the same time
anticipated that the result of all this scheming would be to establish
him in a position where he would exercise sole autocratic rule.
As to whether the opportunity was favorable, there was a difficulty.
France was no longer directly menaced by the coalition since the
splendid campaign of Masséna in Switzerland; besides, the royalist
insurrections had been suppressed, and the extremists muzzled. The
middle classes, to whom the wealth of the nation now belonged, felt
secure. At this time the Prussian Minister at Paris wrote that
confidence was being restored throughout the country, and that
even religious dissensions had become less acute. Some of the most
questionable and unpopular legislation, passed against the fortunes and
persons of citizens who were suspected by the Directory, was on the
point of being withdrawn by the legislative body. The debate on these
measures was to conclude on the 17th Brumaire.