At one point he asked her not to wash for three days before they met so he could steep himself in her scent.89 By June 15 he was frankly telling her, ‘I could not tolerate a lover, much less allow you to take one.’ He said he recalled a dream ‘in which I took off your boots, your dress, and made you enter bodily into my heart’.90
Although Napoleon wrote hundreds of pages of emotional rhapsodies to Josephine, endlessly suggesting that he would kill himself if anything were to happen to her, he rarely told her anything about the war that couldn’t be gleaned from the public gazettes. Nor did he trust her with his innermost thoughts about people or events. It might have been because he feared that his letters, which took two weeks to reach Paris by special courier, might be captured by the enemy. Perhaps, as the British politician John Wilson Croker suggested in the Quarterly Review in 1833, when 238 of Napoleon’s letters to Josephine were first published, it was because he thought her ‘frivolous, capricious, and giddy – too vain not to be flattered, too indiscreet to be trusted’. Croker was harsh, but not unfair, in denouncing the letters as showing: ‘No real confidence, no interchange of mind . . . no communication of serious thoughts, no identity of interests.’91
Napoleon was capable of compartmentalizing his life, so that one set of concerns never spilled over into another – probably a necessary attribute for any great statesman, but one he possessed to an extraordinary degree. ‘Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard,’ he once said. ‘When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am – asleep.’92 An aide-de-camp wrote of how much his staff ‘admired the strength of mind and the facility with which he could take off or fix the whole force of his attention on whatever he pleased’.93 In the middle of this hurricane in his private life and the growing, gnawing realization that the woman he worshipped was at best lukewarm in her affections towards him, Napoleon was putting the finishing touches to a bold campaign plan that would lead to a string of seven more victories on top of the five already won, the capture of Mantua and the expulsion of Austria from Italy after three centuries of Habsburg rule.
5
Victory
‘In order to lead an army you have ceaselessly to attend to it, be ahead of the news, provide for everything.’
Napoleon to Joseph, April 1813
‘There is but one step from triumph to downfall. I have seen, in the most significant of circumstances, that some little thing always decides great events.’
Napoleon to Talleyrand, October 1797
Although Napoleon’s main enemy was always Austria during the Italian campaign, he was able to use the short moments when the Austrians posed no danger to protect his rear. It has been said that when the French troops arrived in the Papal States in June 1796 they lit their pipes with altar-candles, though the sheer vividness of the image smacks of Francophobic propaganda.1 What is true is that Pope Pius VI had denounced the French Revolution and supported, but not formally joined, the First Coalition against France. He would soon be made to pay heavily for this insult. The seventy-eight-year-old Pope had already reigned for twenty-one years, and hadn’t the military or personal capacity to prevent Napoleon entering Modena on June 18 and Bologna the next day, where he expelled the papal authorities and forced them to come to terms within a week. In late June Napoleon agreed an armistice with the Pope, with a ‘contribution’ of 15 million francs that was enough to bring round the Directory to the idea of a peace treaty. Saliceti also negotiated the handing over of ‘One hundred pictures, vases, busts, or statues, as the French commissioners shall determine’, including a bronze bust of Junius Brutus and a marble one of Marcus Brutus, plus five hundred manuscripts from the Vatican library.2 On August 11 Napoleon’s eagle eye spotted the library trying to reduce its commitment and wrote to François Cacault, the French agent in Rome, to say: ‘The treaty included five hundred manuscripts, not three hundred.’3
On June 21, the twenty-six-year-old Napoleon wrote no fewer than four letters to the Directory in Paris, warning that he had only a ‘middling’ army with which ‘to face all emergencies; to hold the [Austrian] armies in check; to besiege forts, to protect our rear, to overawe Genoa, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples; we must be in force everywhere.’4 It was true: the great cities of Italy – he could also have included Milan and Turin – were held in check as much by the awe aroused by his seeming invincibility as by any immediate military force. He was vulnerable to a properly co-ordinated revolt. The Directory offered few reinforcements, still considering the Rhine to be much the more important theatre of operations.
A judicious interplay between threats and insouciance played an important part in Napoleon’s Italian statecraft at this time. ‘Here, one must burn and shoot in order to establish terror,’ he wrote on June 21, ‘and there one must pretend not to see because the time has not arrived for action.’5 He appealed to the pride of those he would conquer but gave them no doubt as to the consequences of resistance. ‘The French army loves and respects all peoples, especially the simple and virtuous inhabitants of the mountains,’ read a proclamation to the Tyrolese that month. ‘But should you ignore your own interests and take up arms, we shall be terrible as the fire from heaven.’6
He leaned heavily on Berthier, but was not shy of asserting his own capacities. When he saw Miot de Melito in Bologna on June 22, Napoleon asked the diplomat about the rumour ‘that it is to Berthier that I owe my success, that he directs my plans, and that I only execute what he has suggested to me’. Miot, who had known Berthier as a youth in Versailles, denied it, whereupon Napoleon said, with warmth, ‘You are right, Berthier is not capable of commanding a battalion!’7 This was not something he actually believed – he handed command of the Army of Italy to Berthier in 1798 and the Army of the Reserve in 1800 – but it shows how deeply conscious he was of his public image. In a similar vein he would now alter the wording of proclamations to turn the phrase ‘Commanders of the French Army’ into the singular.
The British, who had been friendly trading partners with the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, were expelled from Livorno on June 27 and £12 million of their merchandise captured; the Milan Citadel fell after a forty-eight-hour bombardment on the 29th. When the British responded on July 11 by seizing the island of Elba off the coast of Italy, a former possession of the Grand Duchy, Napoleon sensibly remarked: ‘We shall have no right to complain of a violation of neutrality, of which we ourselves have set the example.’8 Soon afterwards Napoleon extracted a ‘contribution’ from the Grand Duke Ferdinand III of Tuscany, Emperor Francis’s younger brother, who had given English merchants trading privileges at Livorno. When Napoleon went to Florence on July 1, the streets from the San Fridiano to the Pitti Palace gates were ‘filled with the whole population’ trying to catch a glimpse of him.9 Napoleon visited Ferdinand at the Palace there in the Boboli Gardens and saw the gorgeous Pietro da Cortona ceiling paintings commissioned by the Medici, which could not be easily removed to Paris, as well as paintings by Rubens, Raphael, Titian, Van Dyck and Rembrandt, which could. He told the Grand Duke, who received him with all politesse, ‘Your brother no longer has a foot of land in Lombardy.’ It wasn’t true: Mantua was still holding out. But although Ferdinand ‘was so master of himself as to betray no concern’, he knew that its fall would soon be followed by the loss of his throne.10
• • •
On June 26, Josephine finally left Paris for Milan, in tears. She was accompanied by Joseph Bonaparte (who was nursing a sexually transmitted disease), her demoiselle-de-compagnie Louise Compoint, Joseph’s brother-in-law Nicolas Clary, the financier Antoine Hamelin (who wanted a job from Napoleon and was sponged off by Josephine), Junot, four servants, a cavalry escort and Josephine’s small mongrel Fortuné, which had once bitten Napoleon in bed and later fell in unequal combat to his cook’s larger and fiercer dog.11 With breathtaking gall, J
osephine also brought along her boudoir-hussar Hippolyte Charles. Junot seduced Louise on the journey, so Josephine dismissed her when they reached Milan, making an enemy of Junot. Two years later she would come bitterly to regret this.
Napoleon inundated her with long love letters on her journey south, a typical one ending ‘Farewell, my love, a kiss on your mouth – another on your heart’ and looking forward to the moment when ‘I could be in your arms, at your feet, on your breasts.’12 He wrote from Pistoia in Tuscany to tell her that he had pockets ‘full of letters which I have never sent you because they are too foolish, too silly – bête is the word’.13 Considering the nature of the letters he did send, these must have been trop bête indeed. In a reprise of his earlier emotional masochism he wrote: ‘Mock me as you like, stay in Paris, take lovers and let all the world know it, never write to me – Well! I’ll only love you ten times more!’14
Josephine arrived at the Serbelloni Palace on July 10, and Napoleon joined her there three days later, having marched 300 miles from Milan through the Habsburg, Papal, Venetian and independent cities of Peschiera, Brescia, Tortona, Modena, Bologna, Livorno, Florence, Roverbella, Verona and back to Milan in six weeks, cowed all of central Italy, and seized ‘contributions’ totalling well over 40 million francs. He was oblivious to Hippolyte Charles – neither Junot, Murat nor Joseph was about to tell him – and Josephine appears to have responded warmly to his attentions, however she might have been feeling emotionally. Hamelin recalled that ‘From time to time he would leave his study in order to play with her as if she were a child. He would tease her, cause her to cry out, and overwhelm her with such rough caresses that I would be obliged to go to the window and observe the weather outside.’15 It was certainly a very tactile relationship; the playwright Carrion de Nisas recorded that ‘Madame Bonaparte is neither young nor pretty, but she is extremely modest and engaging. She frequently caresses her husband, who seems devoted to her. Often she weeps, sometimes daily, for very trivial reasons.’16
Napoleon had summoned Joseph, for whom Saliceti had obtained the rank of commissary-general in the Army of Italy, in order to have someone near him whom he could trust with delicate confidential negotiations. In that capacity Joseph was to be used by his brother for missions to Livorno, Parma and Rome, and he later went with Miot de Melito to re-establish French control over Corsica. In the course of these expeditions, Joseph discovered a genuine capacity for diplomacy.
Napoleon could stay only two nights: Wurmser was on his way south with 50,000 men and the French needed to capture Mantua from Beaulieu before he could relieve it. ‘I propose making a bold stroke,’ he told the Directory.17 Then he informed them of Murat’s plan to cross one of the four artificial lakes protecting Mantua at night with men disguised in Austrian uniforms, hoping to open the city gates for long enough for Napoleon’s troops to get inside. Napoleon was probably thinking of the Capitoline geese that saved Ancient Rome when he wrote of Murat’s ‘sudden attack, which, like all of a similar nature, will depend upon luck – a dog or a goose’.18 In the event an unexpected drop in the level of the Po lowered the water in the lakes enough to stymie the plan.
By late July Napoleon had learned from a paid informer on the Austrian staff that Wurmser was taking his army, which now included excellent veteran units drawn from the Rhine campaign, down both sides of Lake Garda to relieve Mantua, where sickness was starting to wear down Beaulieu’s garrison. Napoleon relied a good deal on intelligence in his campaigns, which he insisted on analysing personally rather than getting it through staff officers, so he could decide for himself how much credence to attach to each piece.19 Methods of gaining intelligence included interrogating deserters and prisoners, sending out cavalry patrols, and even dressing soldiers as farm labourers after having taken the real labourers’ wives hostage. Napoleon was conscious of the way that spies and officers on scouting missions could mistake corps for detachments and vice versa and often repeated what they had heard from ‘panic-stricken or surprised people’ rather than what they had witnessed.20 His orders for his intelligence officers were: ‘To reconnoitre accurately defiles and fords of every description. To provide guides that may be depended upon. To interrogate the priest and the postmaster. To establish rapidly a good understanding with the inhabitants. To send out spies. To intercept public and private letters . . . In short, to be able to answer every question of the general-in-chief when he arrives at the head of the army.’21
In this instance the spies were right: Wurmser was moving down the eastern side of Lake Garda with 32,000 men in five columns, while the Croatian-born cavalryman General Peter von Quasdanovich was coming down the western side with 18,000. Napoleon left Sérurier with 10,500 men to maintain the siege of Mantua. This gave him 31,000 men to meet the new threats. He sent 4,400 under General Pierre-François Sauret to Salo to slow down Quasdanovich, ordered Masséna with 15,400 men to the eastern side, deployed General Hyacinthe Despinoy with 4,700 to protect the Peschiera–Verona line, sent Augereau’s 5,300 to watch the roads from the east and kept Kilmaine’s 1,500 cavalry in reserve. He himself then moved continually between Brescia, Castelnuovo, Desenzano, Roverbella, Castiglione, Goïto and Peschiera, taking his mobile headquarters to wherever gave him the best idea of the way the campaign was progressing. This constant activity in the often severe heat led to his losing five horses to exhaustion in quick succession.22 One of his Polish aides-de-camp, Dezydery Adam Chlapowski, recalled that he ‘never used his spurs or knees to make his horse gallop, but always applied his whip’.23
On July 29 Quasdanovich drove Sauret out of Salò as expected, although the town changed hands three times. At 3 a.m. the same day, east of Lake Garda, Masséna was attacked at La Corona and Rivoli by large numbers and had to conduct a long fighting retreat down the Adige to Bussolengo by nightfall. The Austrians pushed on boldly and took Rivoli. ‘We shall recover tomorrow, or afterwards, what you have lost today,’ Napoleon reassured Masséna. ‘Nothing is lost while courage remains.’24 On July 30, however, in an operation known as the ‘Surprise of Brescia’, the Austrians captured Brescia’s garrison and hospitals with only three killed and eleven wounded. The sick included Murat (who had caught venereal disease from a Madame Rugat), Lannes and Kellermann’s brilliant cavalryman son, François-Étienne. Josephine, who had gone to Brescia from Milan at Napoleon’s request as he had considered the city safely behind the lines, was nearly captured, prompting Napoleon to swear, ‘Wurmser shall pay dearly for those tears.’25
‘We’ve suffered some setbacks,’ Napoleon acknowledged to the Directory, while sending all non-essential equipment to the rear.26 At noon on July 29 he assumed the enemy were descending from Bassano in strength and ordered a concentration at Villanova, east of Verona. Augereau’s division covered 60 miles in fifty-five hours of marching and counter-marching, but by noon the next day Napoleon realized that the main body of the enemy were in fact to his north and west. If he faced Wurmser’s main advance and didn’t achieve a complete victory he would lose Mantua anyway, so he decided to deal with Quasdanovich first. On July 30 therefore he ordered Sérurier to abandon the siege of Mantua to increase his numbers in the field by adding General Louis Pelletier’s brigade to Augereau’s force and Dallemagne’s to Masséna’s.27 His order to Augereau to retreat to Roverbella read: ‘Every moment is precious . . . The enemy has broken through our line at three places: he is master of the important points of Corona and Rivoli . . . You will see that our communications with Milan and Verona have been cut. Await new orders at Roverbella; I will go there in person.’28 Augereau lost no time.
Ending the siege of Mantua involved abandoning no fewer than 179 cannon and mortars that couldn’t be removed, and dumping their ammunition in the lakes. It pained Napoleon to do this, but he knew that decisive victories in the field, not fortresses, were the key to modern warfare. ‘Whatever happens, and however much it costs, we must sleep in Brescia tomorrow,’ he told Masséna.29 That day, the 31st, his co
nstant movements nearly came to grief when he narrowly missed being ambushed by a Croatian unit on the road from Roverbella to Goato.
The terrain between Brescia and Mantua includes 3,000-foot-high mountains and lines of morainic hills through Lonato, Castiglione and Solferino to Volta, very broken country dropping to a broad, flat plain. On July 31 the French army marched west at 3 a.m. and there was a sharp fight at dawn for the town of Lonato between Sauret and the Austrian General Ott that went on for four hours. Meanwhile, Masséna deployed between Desenzano and Lonato with the 32nd Line Demi-Brigade on his left. Heavily outnumbered, Ott fell back. With Augereau coming up as quickly as he could, Quasdanovich’s 18,000 men now faced 30,000 French, so he promptly retreated. That night Napoleon, fearing for his lines of communication, marched with Augereau to Brescia, reaching it by ten o’clock the next morning.
By now Wurmser, who had heard that Napoleon was both marching westwards for Brescia and massing at Roverbella to defend the siege lines at Mantua (which in fact he had abandoned), was thoroughly confused, and he lost the initiative through inaction. The next day General Antoine La Valette, who panicked and fled from Castiglione, was stripped of his command in front of his men of the 18th Légère Demi-Brigade. The enthusiasm of the troops that day helped decide Napoleon to try to crush Quasdanovich. At the second battle of Lonato, on August 3, he sent Despinoy’s force from Brescia to turn Quasdanovich’s right flank at Gavardo, and a reinforced Sauret to attack his left flank at Salò, with Dallemagne’s brigade marching between them as a link. When Sauret’s men complained they were hungry, Napoleon told them they could find food in the enemy camp.
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