An Insubordinate Conqueror and Diplomatist.
Bonaparte's Assertion of Independence -- Helplessness of the
Directory -- Threats and Proclamations -- The General and
His Officers -- Bonaparte's Comprehensive Genius -- The
Devotion of France -- Uneasiness in Italy -- The Position of
the Austrians -- Bonaparte's Strategy -- His Conception of
the Problem in Italy -- Justification of His Foresight --
Modena, Parma, and the Papacy -- The French Radicals and the
Pope -- Bonaparte's Policy -- His Ambition.
[Sidenote: 1796.]
When the news of the successes in Piedmont reached Paris, public
festivals were decreed and celebrated; but the democratic spirit of
the directors could brook neither the contemptuous disregard of their
plan which Bonaparte had shown, nor his arrogant assumption of
diplomatic plenipotence. Knowing how thoroughly their doctrine had
permeated Piedmont, they had intended to make it a republic. It was
exasperating, therefore, that through Bonaparte's meddling they found
themselves still compelled to carry on negotiations with a monarchy.
The treaty with the King of Sardinia was ungraciously dictated and
signed by them on May fifteenth, but previous to the act they
determined to clip the wings of their dangerous falcon. This they
thought to accomplish by assigning Kellermann to share with Bonaparte
the command of the victorious army, and by confirming Salicetti as
their diplomatic plenipotentiary to accompany it. The news reached the
conqueror at Lodi on the eve of his triumphant entry into Milan. "As
things now are," he promptly replied to the Directory, "you must have
a general who possesses your entire confidence. If I must refer every
step to government commissioners, if they have the right to change my
movements, to withdraw or send troops, expect nothing good hereafter."
To Carnot he wrote at the same time: "I believe one bad general to be
worth two good ones.... War is like government, a matter of tact.... I
do not wish to be hampered. I have begun with some glory; I wish to
continue worthy of you." Aware probably that his own republican virtue
could not long withstand the temptations opening before him, he began
the latter missive, as if to excuse himself and anticipate possible
accusations: "I swear I have nothing in view but the country. You will
always find me on the straight road. I owe to the republic the
sacrifice of all my own notions. If people seek to set me wrong in
your esteem, my answer is in my heart and in my conscience." It is of
course needless to add that the Directory yielded, not only as to the
unity of command, but also in the fatal and vital matter of intrusting
all diplomatic negotiations to his hands.
In taking this last step the executive virtually surrendered its
identity. Such, however, was the exultation of the Parisian populace
and of the soldiery, that the degradation or even the forced
resignation of the conquering dictator would have at once assured the
fall of the directors. They could not even protest when, soon after,
there came from Bonaparte a despatch announcing that the articles of
"the glorious peace which you have concluded with the King of
Sardinia" had reached "us," and significantly adding in a later
paragraph that the troops were content, having received half their pay
in coin. Voices in Paris declared that for such language the writer
should be shot. Perhaps those who put the worst interpretation on the
apparently harmless words were correct in their instinct. In reality
the Directory had been wholly dependent on the army since the previous
October; and while such an offensive insinuation of the fact would be,
if intentional, most unpalatable, yet those who had profited by the
fact dared not resent a remote reference to it.
The farce was continued for some time longer, Bonaparte playing his
part with singular ability. He sent to Kellermann, in Savoy, without
the form of transmitting it through government channels, a subsidy of
one million two hundred thousand francs. As long as he was unhampered,
his despatches to Paris were soldierly and straightforward, although
after the passage of the Po they began to be somewhat bombastic, and
to abound in his old-fashioned, curious, and sometimes incorrect
classical or literary allusions. But if he were crossed in the least,
if reinforcements did not arrive, or if there were any sign of
independence in Paris, they became petulant, talking of ill-health,
threatening resignation, and requesting that numbers of men be sent
out to replace him in the multiform functions which in his single
person he was performing. Of course these tirades often failed of
immediate effect, but at least no effort was made to put an effective
check on the writer's career. Read a century later in a cold and
critical light, Bonaparte's proclamations of the same period seem
stilted, jerky, and theatrical. In them, however, there may still be
found a sort of interstitial sentimentality, and in an age of romantic
devotion to ideals the quality of vague suggestiveness passed for
genuine coin. Whatever else was lacking in those compositions, they
had the one supreme merit of accomplishing their end, for they roused
the French soldiers to frenzied enthusiasm.
In fact, if the Directory stood on the army, the army belonged
henceforth to Bonaparte. On the very day that Milan was entered,
Marmont heard from his leader's lips the memorable words, "Fortune is
a woman; the more she does for me, the more I shall exact from her....
In our day no one has conceived anything great; it falls to me to give
the example." This is the language that soldiers like to hear from
their leader, and it was no doubt repeated throughout the army. "From
this moment," wrote the same chronicler, a few months later, "the
chief part of the pay and salaries was in coin. This led to a great
change in the situation of the officers, and to a certain extent in
their habits." Bonaparte was incorruptible. Salicetti announced one
day that the brother of the Duke of Modena was waiting outside with
four chests containing a million of francs in gold, and urged the
general, as a friend and compatriot, to accept them. "Thank you," was
the calm and significant answer, "I shall not put myself in the hands
of the Duke of Modena for such a sum." But similar propositions were
made by the commander-in-chief to his subordinates, and they with less
prudence fell into the trap, taking all they could lay hands upon and
thus becoming the bond-slaves of their virtuous leader. There were
stories at the time that some of the generals, not daring to send
their ill-gotten money to France, and having no opportunity for
investing it elsewhere, actually carried hundreds of thousands of
francs in their baggage. This prostitution of his subordinates was
part of a system. Twenty million francs was approximately the sum
total of all contributions announced to the Directory, and in their
destitution it seemed enormous. They also accepted with pleasure a
hundred of the finest horses in Lombardy to replace, as Bonaparte
wrote on sending his present, the ordinary ones which drew their
carriages. Was this paltry four million dollars the whole of what was
derived from the sequestrations of princely domains and the
secularization of ecclesiastical estates? By no means. The army chest,
of which none knew the contents but Bonaparte, was as inexhaustible as
the widow's cruse. At the opening of the campaign in Piedmont, empty
wagons had been ostentatiously displayed as representing the military
funds at the commander's disposal: these same vehicles now groaned
under a weight of treasure, and were kept in a safe obscurity. Well
might he say, as he did in June to Miot, that the commissioners of the
Directory would soon leave and not be replaced, since they counted for
nothing in his policy.
With the entry into Milan, therefore, begins a new epoch in the
remarkable development we are seeking to outline. The military genius
of him who had been the Corsican patriot and the Jacobin republican
had finally asserted dominion over all his other qualities. In the
inconsistency of human nature, those former characters now and then
showed themselves as still existent, but they were henceforth
subordinate. The conquered Milanese was by a magical touch provided
with a provisional government, ready, after the tardy assent of the
Directory, to be changed into the Transpadane Republic and put under
French protection. Every detail of administration, every official and
his functions, came under Bonaparte's direction. He knew the land and
its resources, the people and their capacities, the mutual relations
of the surrounding states, and the idiosyncrasies of their rulers.
Such laborious analysis as his despatches display, such grasp both of
outline and detail, such absence of confusion and clearness of vision,
such lack of hesitance and such definition of plan, seem to prove that
either a hero or a demon is again on earth. All the capacity this man
had hitherto shown, great as it was, sinks into insignificance when
compared with the Olympian powers he now displays, and will continue
to display for years to come. His sinews are iron, his nerves are
steel, his eyes need no sleep, and his brain no rest. What a captured
Hungarian veteran said of him at Lodi is as true of his political
activity as of his military restlessness: "He knows nothing of the
regular rules of war: he is sometimes on our front, sometimes on the
flank, sometimes in the rear. There is no supporting such a gross
violation of rules." His senses and his reason were indeed untrammeled
by human limitations; they worked on front, rear, and flank, often
simultaneously, and always without confusion.
Was it astonishing that the French nation, just recovering from a
debauch of irreligion and anarchy, should begin insensibly to yield to
the charms of a wooer so seductive? For some time past the soldiers,
as the Milan newspapers declared, had been a pack of tatterdemalions
ever flying before the arms of his Majesty the Emperor; now they were
victors, led by a second Cæsar or Alexander, clothed, fed, and paid at
the cost of the conquered. To ardent French republicans, and to the
peoples of Italy, this phenomenal personage proclaimed that he had
come to break the chains of captives, while almost in the same hour he
wrote to the Directory that he was levying twenty million francs on
the country, which, though exhausted by five years of war, was then
the richest in the civilized world. Nor was the self-esteem of France
and the Parisian passion for adornment forgotten. There began a course
of plunder, if not in a direction at least in a measure hitherto
unknown to the modern world--the plunder of scientific specimens, of
manuscripts, of pictures, statues, and other works of art. It is
difficult to fix the responsibility for this policy, which by the
overwhelming majority of learned and intelligent Frenchmen was
considered right, morally and legally. Nothing so flattered the
national pride as the assemblage in Paris of art treasures from all
nations, nothing so humiliated it as their dispersion at the behest of
the conquering Allies. In the previous year a few art works had been
taken from Holland and Belgium, and formal orders were given again and
again by the Directory for stripping the Pope's galleries; but there
is a persistent belief, founded, no doubt, in an inherent probability,
that the whole comprehensive scheme of art spoliation had been
suggested in the first place by Bonaparte, and prearranged between
himself and the executive before his departure. At any rate, he asked
and easily obtained from the government a commission of scholars and
experts to scour the Italian cities; and soon untold treasures of art,
letters, and science began to pour into the galleries, cabinets, and
libraries of Paris. A few brave voices among the artists of the
capital protested against the desecration; the nation at large was
tipsy with delight, and would not listen. Raphael, Leonardo, and
Michelangelo, Correggio, Giorgione, and Paul Veronese, with all the
lesser masters, were stowed in the holds of frigates and despatched by
way of Toulon toward the new Rome; while Monge and Berthollet
ransacked the scientific collections of Milan and Parma for their
rarest specimens. Science, in fact, was to flourish on the banks of
the Seine as never before or elsewhere; and the great investigators of
Italy, forgetful of their native land, were to find a new citizenship
in the world of knowledge at the capital of European liberties. Words
like these, addressed to the astronomer Oriani, indicate that on
Bonaparte's mind had dawned the notion of a universal federated state,
to which national republics would be subordinate.
No scene in the history of warfare was more theatrical than the entry
of the French into Milan. The pageant was arranged on the lines of a
Roman triumph and the distances so calculated that Bonaparte was the
one impressive figure. With his lean face and sharp Greek profile, his
long, lank, unpowdered locks, his simple uniform, and awkward seat in
the saddle, he looked like a new human type, neither angel nor devil
but an inscrutable apparition from another sphere. To officers and men
the voluptuous city extended wide its arms, and the shabby soldiery
were incongruous figures where their entertainers were elegant and
fastidious beyond what the guests had dreamed. With stern impartiality
the liberator repressed all excess in his army, but immediately the
question of contributions, billeting, indemnity, and fiscal
organization was taken up, settled, and the necessary measures
inaugurated. The rich began to hide their possessions and the burghers
to cry out. Ere long there was opposition, first sullen, then active,
especially in the suburban villages where the French were fiercely
attacked. One of these, Binasco, was burned and sacked as an example
to the rest and to the city. Order was restored and the inexorable
process of seizures went on. Pavia bade defiance; the officials were
threatened with death, many leading citizens were taken as hostages,
and the place was pillaged for three days. "Such a lesson would set
the people of Italy right." They did not need a second example, it was
true, but the price of "liberation" was fearful.
Italian rebellion having been subdued, the French nation roused to
enthusiasm, independent funds provided, and the Directory put in its
place, Bonaparte was free to unfold and consummate his further plans.
Before him was the territory of Venice, a state once vigorous and
terrible, but now, as far as the country populations were concerned,
an enfeebled and gentle ruler. With quick decision a French corps of
observation was sent to seize Brescia and watch the Tyrolean passes.
It was, of course, to the advantage of Austria that Venetian
neutrality should not be violated, except by her own troops. But the
French, having made a bold beginning of formal defiance, were quick to
go further. Beaulieu had not hesitated on false pretenses to seize
Peschiera, another Venetian town, which, by its situation at the
outlet of Lake Garda, was of the utmost strategic value. He now stood
confronting his pursuers on a strong line established, without
reference to territorial boundaries, behind the whole course of the
Mincio. Such was the situation to the north and east of the French
army. Southeastward, on the swampy banks of the same river, near its
junction with the Po, was Mantua. This city, which even under ordinary
circumstances was an almost impregnable fortress, had been
strengthened by an extraordinary garrison, while the surrounding
lowlands were artificially inundated as a supreme measure of safety.
Bonaparte intended to hurl Beaulieu back, and seize the line of the
Adige, far stronger than that of the Mincio for repelling an Austrian
invasion from the north. What to him was the neutrality of a weak
government, and what were the precepts of international law with no
force behind it but a moral one? Austria, according to treaty, had the
right to move her troops over two great military roads within Venetian
jurisdiction, and her defeated armies had just used one of them for
retreat. The victorious commander could scarcely be expected to pause
in his pursuit for lack of a few lines of writing on a piece of
stamped paper. Accordingly, by a simple feint, the Austrians were led
to believe that his object was the seizure of Peschiera and the
passes above Lake Garda; consequently, defying international law and
violating their treaties, they massed themselves at that place to meet
his attack. Then with a swift, forced march the French were
concentrated not on the enemy's strong right, but on his weak center
at Borghetto. Bonaparte's cavalry, hitherto badly mounted and timid,
but now reorganized, were thrown forward for their easy task. Under
Murat's command they dashed through, and, encouraged by their own
brilliant successes, were thenceforward famous for efficiency.
Bonaparte, with the main army, then hurried past Mantua as it lay
behind its bulwarks of swamp-fever, and the Austrian force was cut in
two. The right wing fled to the mountains; the left was virtually in a
trap. Without any declaration of war against Venice, the French
immediately occupied Verona, and Legnago a few days later; Peschiera
was fortified, and Pizzighettone occupied as Brescia had been, while
contributions of every sort were levied more ruthlessly even than on
the Milanese. The mastery of these new positions isolated Mantua more
completely than a formal investment would have done; but it was,
nevertheless, considered wise to leave no loophole, and a few weeks
later an army of eight thousand Frenchmen sat down in force before its
gates.
It was certain that within a short time a powerful Austrian force
would pour out from the Alpine passes to the north. Further advance
into Venetian lands would therefore be ruin for the French. There was
nothing left but the slow hours of a siege, for Mantua had become the
decisive point. In the heats of summer this interval might well have
been devoted to ease; but it was almost the busiest period of
Bonaparte's life. According to the Directory's rejected plan for a
division of command in Italy, the mission assigned to Kellermann had
been to organize republics in Piedmont and in the Milanese, and then
to defend the Tyrolean passes against an Austrian advance from the
north. Bonaparte was to have moved southward along the shore to
revolutionize Genoa, Tuscany, the Papal States, and Naples
successively. The whole idea having been scornfully rejected by
Bonaparte, the Directory had been forced by the brilliant successes of
their general not merely to condone his disobedience, but actually to
approve his policy. He now had the opportunity of justifying his
foresight. Understanding, as the government did not, that Austria was
their only redoubtable foe by land, the real bulwark of the whole
Italian system, he had first shattered her power, at least for the
time. The prop having been removed, the structure was toppling, and
during this interval of waiting, it fell. His opportunity was made,
his resolution ripe.
In front, Venice was at his mercy; behind him, guerrilla bands of
so-called Barbets, formed in Genoese territory and equipped by
disaffected fugitives, were threatening the lately conquered gateway
from France where the Ligurian Alps and the Apennines meet.
Bonaparte's first step was to impose a new arrangement upon the
submissive Piedmont, whereby, to make assurance doubly sure,
Alessandria was added to the list of fortresses in French hands; then,
as his second measure, Murat and Lannes appeared before Genoa at the
head of an armed force, with instructions first to seize and shoot the
many offenders who had taken refuge in her territory after the risings
in Lombardy, and then to threaten the Senate with further retaliatory
measures, and command the instant dismissal of the imperial Austrian
plenipotentiary. From Paris came orders to drive the English fleet out
of the harbor of Leghorn, where, in spite of the treaty between
Tuscany and France, there still were hostile arsenals and ships. It
was done. Naples did not wait to see her territories invaded, but sued
for mercy and was humbled, being forced to withdraw her navy from that
of the coalition, and her cavalry from the Austrian army. For the
moment the city of Rome was left in peace. The strength of papal
dominion lay in Bologna, and the other legations beyond the Apennines,
comprising many of the finest districts in Italy; and there a
master-stroke was to be made.
On the throne of Modena was an Austrian archduke: his government was
remorselessly shattered and virtually destroyed, the ransom being
fixed at the ruinous sum of ten million francs with twenty of the best
pictures in the principality. But on that of Parma was a Spanish
prince with whose house France had made one treaty and hoped to make a
much better one. The duke, therefore, was graciously allowed to
purchase an armistice by an enormous but yet possible contribution of
two million francs in money, together with provisions and horses in
quantity. The famous St. Jerome of Correggio was among the twenty
paintings seized in Modena. The archduke repeatedly offered to ransom
it for one million francs, the amount at which its value was
estimated, but his request was not granted. Next came Bologna and its
surrounding territory. Such had been the tyranny of ecclesiastical
control that the subjects of the Pope in that most ancient and famous
seat of learning welcomed the French with unfeigned joy; and the
fairest portion of the Papal States passed by its own desire from
under the old yoke. The successor of St. Peter was glad to ransom his
capital by a payment nominally of twenty-one million francs. In
reality he had to surrender far more; for his galleries, like those
of Modena, were stripped of their gems, while the funds seized in
government offices, and levied in irregular ways, raised the total
value forwarded to Paris to nearly double the nominal contribution.
All this, Bonaparte explained, was but a beginning, the idleness of
summer heats. "This armistice," he wrote to Paris on June
twenty-first, 1796, "being concluded with the dog-star rather than
with the papal army, my opinion is that you should be in no haste to
make peace, so that in September, if all goes well in Germany and
northern Italy, we can take possession of Rome."
[Illustration: Josephine, Empress of the French. From the painting by
Francois Gérard. In the Museum of Versailles.]
In fact, this ingenious man was really practising moderation, as both
he and the terrified Italians, considering their relative situations,
understood it. Whatever had been the original arrangement with the
directors, there was nothing they did not now expect and demand from
Italy; they wrote requiring, in addition to all that had hitherto been
mentioned, plunder of every kind from Leghorn; masts, cordage, and
ship supplies from Genoa; horses, provisions, and forage from Milan;
and contributions of jewels and precious stones from the reigning
princes. As for the papal power, the French radicals would gladly have
destroyed it. They had not forgotten that Basseville, a diplomatic
agent of the republic, had been killed in the streets of Rome, and
that no reparation had been made either by the punishment of the
assassin or otherwise. The Pope, they declared, had been the real
author of the terrible civil war fomented by the unyielding clergy,
and waged with such fury in France. Moreover, the whole sentimental
and philosophical movement of the century in France and elsewhere
considered the ecclesiastical centralization and hierarchical tyranny
of the papacy as a dangerous survival of absolutism.
But Bonaparte was wise in his generation. The contributions he levied
throughout Italy were terrible; but they were such as she could bear,
and still recuperate for further service in the same direction. The
liberalism of Italy was, moreover, not the radicalism of France; and a
submissive papacy was of incalculably greater value both there and
elsewhere in Europe than an irreconcilable and fugitive one. The Pope,
too, though weakened and humiliated as a temporal prince, was spared
for further usefulness to his conqueror as a spiritual dignitary.
Beyond all this was the enormous moral influence of a temperate and
apparently impersonal policy. Bonaparte, though personally and by
nature a passionate and wilful man, felt bound, as the representative
of a great movement, to exercise self-restraint, taking pains to live
simply, dress plainly, almost shabbily, and continuing by calm
calculation to refuse the enormous bribes which began and continued to
be offered to him personally by the rulers of Italy. His generals and
the fiscal agents of the nation were all in his power, because it was
by his connivance that they had grown enormously rich, he himself
remaining comparatively poor, and for his station almost destitute.
The army was his devoted servant; Italy and the world should see how
different was his moderation from the rapacity of the republic and its
tools, vandals like the commissioners Gareau and Salicetti.
Such was the "leisure" of one who to all outward appearance was but a
man, and a very ordinary one. In the medals struck to commemorate this
first portion of the Italian campaign, he is still the same slim
youth, with lanky hair, that he was on his arrival in Paris the year
previous. It was observed, however, that the old indifferent manner
was somewhat emphasized, and consequently artificial; that the gaze
was at least as direct and the eye as penetrating as ever; and that
there was, half intentionally, half unconsciously, disseminated all
about an atmosphere of peremptory command--but that was all. The
incarnation of ambition was long since complete; its attendant
imperious manner was suffered to develop but slowly. In Bonaparte was
perceptible, as Victor Hugo says, the shadowy outline of Napoleon.