Napoleon
Page 20
The next day, as Napoleon prepared to move up and crush Provera, he learned at 10 p.m. that Joubert was facing a major offensive and pulling back to Rivoli in good order, leaving his campfires burning behind him. Realizing that Provera’s advance was thus a feint and that the main attack would be coming via Rivoli, Napoleon rode there fast from Verona, issuing a completely new set of orders. Now Joubert was to hold Rivoli at all costs; Sérurier was to put the siege lines on high alert, but also to send cavalry, artillery and six hundred infantry to Rivoli at once; Masséna was to march the 18th, 32nd and 75th demi-brigades to take up position on Joubert’s left; Augereau was to detain Provera on the Adige but send some cavalry and artillery to Rivoli. Everyone was told that a decisive battle was in the immediate offing. With General Gabriel Rey’s two brigades, Napoleon expected to concentrate 18,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry and 60 guns at Rivoli by noon on January 14, leaving 16,000 on the Adige and 8,000 at Mantua. The old maxim ‘March separately, fight together’ could not have been better followed. Alvinczi had failed to bring any more forces to Rivoli than the 28,000 and 90 guns with which he had started out.
Napoleon arrived at 2 a.m. on Saturday, January 14 1797 at the plateau above the gorges of Rivoli, which would be the key deciding place – the point d’appui or Schwerpunkt – of the battle. It was a clear, very cold, brightly moonlit night and he interpreted the number and positions of the campfires as meaning that the Marquis de Lusignan, an energetic, Spanish-born Austrian general, was too far off to engage until mid-morning. He knew the area intimately, having ridden across it often over the previous four months. If he could retain the Osteria gorge and the slope containing the chapel of San Marco on the eastern side of the battlefield, he believed he could hold off the main attack relatively easily. He needed to let Masséna’s division rest and to buy time for Rey to arrive, so he decided on a spoiling attack to concentrate Alvinczi’s attention. Joubert was ordered to march back onto the Rivoli plateau and send one brigade to Osteria before attacking in the centre, covered by all the French guns on the plateau. Meanwhile Masséna was told to send one brigade to hold Lusignan off for as long as possible.
At 4 a.m., three hours before dawn, General Honoré Vial’s brigade of the 4th, 17th and 22nd Légère drove the Austrians back on San Giovanni and Gamberon, capturing the San Marco chapel. At daybreak, Joubert attacked at Caprino and San Giovanni but his line was very thin and was checked by greatly superior numbers. The Austrians counter-attacked at 9 a.m., routing Vial’s brigade, whereupon Napoleon immediately sent one of Masséna’s brigades to rescue the centre, thereby recovering the village of Trambassore. This fighting in the centre continued non-stop for a marathon ten hours.
By 11 a.m. Lusignan had arrived with 5,000 men. He had driven off Masséna’s detached brigade, and penetrated deep into the French left-rear near Affi, preventing any reinforcements from arriving. Napoleon was only just holding his centre, was under huge pressure on his right flank and Lusignan had turned his left. He had only one brigade in reserve and Rey was still an hour away. When the news arrived that Lusignan had got behind him, staff officers looked anxiously at the preternaturally calm Napoleon, who simply remarked: ‘We have them now.’65 Deciding the Austrians in the centre were a spent force and that Lusignan was still too far off to affect the battle, Napoleon concentrated on Quasdanovich in the east as the main threat. He thinned out Joubert’s line and sent every man he could spare to San Marco. When the dense Austrian columns, covered by artillery, assailed the gorge and reached the plateau, they were struck by French artillery firing canister shot into their close ranks from all sides, then bayonet-charged by an infantry column, and then attacked by all the French cavalry available. As they recoiled into the gorge, a lucky shot hit an ammunition wagon – all the more devastating in the narrow space – whereupon Quasdanovich ordered the attack aborted.
Napoleon immediately shifted his own attack to the centre, where the Austrians had next to no artillery or cavalry. Having gained the plateau at great cost, all three Austrian columns were driven off it. Lusignan was checked on his arrival on the battlefield, just as Rey suddenly appeared to his rear. He barely escaped with some 2,000 men. By 2 p.m. the Austrians were in full retreat, and the pursuit was abandoned only when news came from Augereau that Provera had crossed the Adige and was heading for Mantua, whereupon Masséna was sent off to help Augereau prevent its relief.
Napoleon lost 2,200 men at the battle of Rivoli and 1,000 more were captured, but the Austrian toll was far higher: 4,000 killed and wounded and 8,000 captured, along with 8 guns and 11 standards. It was an impressive feat, though not quite the 6,000 killed and wounded, 60 guns and 24 standards – ‘embroidered by the hand of the Empress’ – that Napoleon claimed when he wrote home, nor, for that matter, had he faced 45,000 Austrians.66 But Alvinczi’s retreat gradually turned into a rout as a further 11,000 prisoners were taken over the following days.
At noon on January 15, Provera reached La Favorita with his relief column of 4,700 men, many of them half-trained recruits. At first light the next day, Wurmser attempted to sally out of Mantua, but he was stopped short. By the time Napoleon arrived, Provera was caught between Masséna and Augereau at La Favorita, a village outside Mantua. He fought bravely, but surrendered before a massacre ensued and his entire force was captured. In Mantua the food had finally run out. Wurmser had managed to eke it out for a fortnight longer than expected in the vain hope that Alvinczi might miraculously appear, but on Thursday, February 2, 1797 he surrendered the city and its emaciated garrison. Some 16,300 Austrians had died in Mantua over the course of the previous eight months, and many more civilians, who had been reduced to eating rats and dogs. The French captured 325 Austrian guns and retook the 179 they had abandoned back in August. Wurmser and five hundred of his staff were allowed to march out with the honours of war and return to Austria, on condition that they would not fight against France until there was a prisoner exchange. The rest went into captivity in France, where they were put to work in agriculture and building projects. The news of the fall of Mantua caused a sensation in Paris, where it was announced to the sound of trumpets by, as a contemporary recalled, ‘the public officer, who proclaimed the glory of French arms in the midst of an immense multitude’.67
Napoleon wasn’t present to witness his triumph. He went on to Verona and then Bologna to punish the Papal States for threatening to rise in Austria’s support despite the armistice they had signed the previous June. Shamelessly usurping the Directory’s powers, on January 22 he asked the French envoy to Rome, Cacault, ‘to leave Rome within six hours of receiving this letter’ in order to pressurize the Vatican. The same day he wrote to the papal negotiator, Cardinal Alessandro Mattei, to say that Austrian and Neapolitan influence over Rome’s foreign policy must cease. But he softened his tone in closing and asked him to ‘assure His Holiness that he can remain in Rome without the least uneasiness’ on account of his being ‘the first minister of religion’.68 Napoleon feared, as he told the Directory, that ‘If the Pope and all the cardinals were to fly from Rome I should never be able to obtain what I demanded.’ He also knew that storming the Vatican would earn him the ire, even the lifetime enmity, of Europe’s devout Catholics. ‘If I went to Rome I should lose Milan,’ he told Miot.69
Napoleon issued a proclamation on February 1 stating that all priests and monks who failed to ‘conduct themselves according to the principles of the New Testament’ would be dealt with ‘more severely than other citizens’, hoping to blunt their opposition to French rule in Italy.70 Ludicrously, but undeniably bravely, the troops of the Papal States nevertheless tried to put up a fight. At Castel Bolognese on February 3, General Claude Victor-Perrin (known as Victor) easily overpowered the soldiers he encountered, and a week later he captured the papal garrison of Ancona without loss. By February 17 the Pope was suing for peace. He sent Mattei to Napoleon’s headquarters at Tolentino to sign a treaty under which he ceded Romagna, Bologna, Avignon a
nd Ferrara to France, closed all ports to the British, and promised to pay a ‘contribution’ of 30 million francs and one hundred works of art. ‘We will have everything that is beautiful in Italy,’ Napoleon told the Directory, ‘with the exception of a small number of objects in Turin and Naples.’71
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On February 18, 1797 the Army of Italy launched a news-sheet entitled Journal de Bonaparte et des Hommes Vertueux, whose masthead proclaimed ‘Hannibal slept at Capua, but Bonaparte doesn’t sleep at Mantua’.72 Napoleon was highly conscious of the power of propaganda, and he now made a conscious effort to influence public opinion, which was already heavily in his favour. He began his new career as a press proprietor and journalist by dictating such sentences as ‘Bonaparte flies like lightning and strikes like a thunderbolt.’ Within ten days the Journal was obliquely criticizing the Directory, which it would not have done without Napoleon’s permission. Later in the year he also set up two army news-sheets, the Courrier de l’Armée d’Italie, edited by the ex-Jacobin Marc-Antoine Jullien, and the less substantial La France Vue de l’Armée d’Italie, edited by Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, excerpted regularly in the Parisian papers. With the Rhine front much closer to France, Napoleon did not want the Italian campaign to be sidelined in the public imagination, and he thought his men would appreciate news from Paris. D’Angély was a former parliamentarian and lawyer who ran Army of Italy hospitals and was to become one of Napoleon’s senior lieutenants. Jullien’s appointment was a sign of Napoleon’s readiness to ignore past political stances if the individual in question was talented and showed a willingness to bury the past. In a polity as fluid as France’s, this was not so much tolerance as common sense. Napoleon had, after all, been a Jacobin himself only three years before.
In Paris the Moniteur reported the celebration of Napoleon’s victories with dances, cantatas, public banquets and processions. These were arranged by his growing cadre of supporters who, the Directors privately noted, did not always support them too. Quite apart from politics, Napoleon made good copy; the conservative paper Nouvelles Politiques mentioned the Army of Italy sixty-six times in six months.73 Overall, Napoleon’s exploits were mentioned far more often than those of any other French general, to the increasing chagrin of the high commands of the Army of the Rhine and Moselle and the Army of the Sambre and Meuse, which resented being eclipsed by the Army of Italy.
Seventeen ninety-six was the first year when prints and engravings of Napoleon began to be produced and marketed, with titles such as ‘General Bonaparte á Lodi’, ‘Bonaparte Arrivant á Milan’ and so on. Some added an ‘e’ to his Christian name and ‘u’ to his surname, others read ‘Bounaparte’.74 The scores, perhaps even hundreds, of different representations of him by 1798 prove that the cult of personality had already begun. Artists felt no need to have set eyes on him before they drew him, so in some prints we find him depicted as a middle-aged man with grey hair, more in keeping with what one expected of a victorious general.75
It was after Montenotte that Napoleon first ordered a medal be struck to commemorate his victory, and these too became potent propaganda tools. Other generals did not do this, and he didn’t ask permission from the Directory. The best of the bronze medals were designed by the skilled engraver and former erotic novelist Vivant Denon, who later became director of the Louvre. The Montenotte medal, for example, was just over 11/2 inches in diameter, depicting a bust of Napoleon on the obverse side with his coat embroidered with oak leaves and acorns, and a figure representing the ‘Genius of War’ on the reverse.76 In all, 141 different official medals were struck by 1815 commemorating battles, treaties, coronations, river crossings, his marriage and entries into foreign capitals, and were distributed widely to the crowds at official events and celebrations. Some commemorated comparatively mundane events such as the creation of the Paris School of Medicine, the opening of the Ourcq Canal and the establishment of a mining school in the Mont Blanc department. A medal was even struck when Napoleon remained inactive at Osterode throughout March 1807, showing the notoriously cautious (but successful) Roman general Fabius Maximus ‘Cunctator’ on its reverse.
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On Friday, March 10, 1797, Napoleon set off on the northern campaign that he had promised the Directory; a risky expedition of only 40,000 men through the Tyrol to Klagenfurt and eventually to Leoben in Styria, from where, atop the Semmering hills, his advance guard could discern the spires of Vienna. Jourdan and Moreau’s armies – both twice the size – had been driven out of Germany by Archduke Charles; France now hoped Napoleon’s more modest forces would compel the Austrians to make peace by threatening the capital itself. Napoleon had originally intended to work in tandem with the Army of the Rhine in a pincer movement, and became increasingly concerned when he learned that neither Jourdan nor Moreau had managed to re-cross the Rhine after their defeats that autumn. To encourage his men he denounced Charles’s brother, the Emperor Francis, in one of his proclamations as ‘the paid servant of the merchants of London’ and claimed that the British, ‘strangers to the ills of war, smile with pleasure at the woes of the Continent’.77 This line of attack in Napoleon’s propaganda war against Austria came because the British government was about to furnish Austria with a £1.62 million loan, the equivalent of more than 40 million francs.78 Although the British made no attempt to land troops on the continent at this time, they were consistently generous in subsidizing whichever of France’s enemies were willing to take the field against her.
On March 16 Napoleon crossed the Tagliamento river, inflicting a small defeat on Archduke Charles at Valvassone, which General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte the next day turned into a bigger one when he captured a sizeable detachment of Austrians who had become separated from the main body. At the Tagliamento Napoleon introduced the ordre mixte – a compromise between attacking in line and attacking in column first developed by Guibert to cope with the vagaries of a terrain which didn’t permit regular deployments. This was a technique he would use again a few days later while crossing the Isonzo into Austria; on both these occasions he intervened personally to put into operation a formation that combined the firepower of a battalion in line with the attack weight of two battalions in column.79
‘Banish your uneasiness,’ he told the people of the Habsburg province of Görizia in north-east Italy, ‘we are good and humane.’80 He was unimpressed by his new opponent, whose reputation as a strategist he found unjustified even though Charles had won battles in Holland in 1793 and had defeated Jourdan and Moreau in 1796. ‘Up to now Archduke Charles has manoeuvred worse than Beaulieu and Wurmser,’ Napoleon told the Directory, ‘he makes mistakes at every turn, and extremely stupid ones at that.’81 Without a major battle being fought between Napoleon and Archduke Charles, the Austrians – who were also now facing a reinvigorated assault through Germany by Moreau – decided not to take the risk of losing their capital to Napoleon, and accepted his offer of an armistice at Leoben on April 2, a little over one hundred miles south-west of Vienna.
Since the campaign had begun a year earlier, Napoleon had crossed the Apennines and the Alps, defeated a Sardinian army and no fewer than six Austrian armies, and killed, wounded or captured 120,000 Austrian soldiers. All this he had done before his twenty-eighth birthday. Eighteen months earlier he had been an unknown, moody soldier writing essays on suicide; now he was famous across Europe, having defeated mighty Austria, wrung peace treaties from the Pope and the kings of Piedmont and Naples, abolished the medieval dukedom of Modena, and defeated in every conceivable set of military circumstances most of Austria’s most celebrated generals – Beaulieu, Wurmser, Provera, Quasdanovich, Alvinczi, Davidovich – and outwitted the Archduke Charles.
Napoleon had fought against Austrian forces that were invariably superior in number, but which he had often outnumbered on the field of battle thanks to his repeated strategy of the central position. A profound study of the history and geography of Italy befor
e he ever set foot there had proved extremely helpful, as had his willingness to experiment with others’ ideas, most notably the bataillon carré and the ordre mixte, and his minute calculations of logistics, for which his prodigious memory was invaluable. Because he kept his divisions within one day’s march of each other, he was able to concentrate them for battle and, once joined, he showed great calmness under pressure.
The fact that the Army of Italy was in a position to fight at all, considering the privations from which it was suffering when Napoleon took over its command, was another testament to his energy and organizational abilities. His leadership qualities – acting with harshness when he thought it deserved, but bestowing high praise on other occasions – produced the esprit de corps so necessary to victory. ‘In war,’ he was to say in 1808, ‘moral factors account for three-quarters of the whole; relative material strength accounts for only one-quarter.’82 His personal courage further bonded him to his men. Of course he was hugely helped by the fact that the Austrians kept sending septuagenarian commanders against him who continually split their forces and moved at around half the speed of the French. That would not continue for ever.
Napoleon was also fortunate in his lieutenants, especially the superb Joubert, Masséna and Augereau, with excellent contributions also from Lannes (at Lodi and Arcole), Marmont (at Castiglione), Victor (at La Favorita) and Sérurier (at Mantua) as well as from Brune, Murat and Junot. Napoleon deserves credit for identifying these able commanders, regardless of their age and background, and for sacking those like Meynier and Vaubois who were unable to rise to the level of events. It was no coincidence that when he came to power, former Army of Italy commanders found themselves promoted well. With the ‘immense multitude’ of Paris celebrating twelve victories in as many months, and northern and central Italy now firmly within the orbit of the French Republic, if anyone could be said to be ‘the darling child of victory’, it was Napoleon.