by Alan Schom
Born at Versailles in 1753, Alexandre Berthier also served as a regular army officer under Louis XV. His father had been commanding officer of the Royal Army Engineers, leading to his ennoblement in 1763. Unlike Augereau and Masséna, Berthier was well educated and welcome in drawing rooms, despite his emotional, high-strung nature. He took a commission as an engineering officer in 1770, serving under Lafayette in the American War of Independence. He continued his career under the revolutionary government, as a major general of the Versailles National Guard, and was now acting as Major General Bonaparte’s chief of staff at Nice. He would remain at Napoleon’s side, ever obedient, despite a constant flow of abuse from his chief, until the spring of 1814. But from the beginning the aloof Berthier disliked most of the French army commanders, a feeling they fully reciprocated.[47]
Lower on the totem pole was Napoleon’s old friend and current aide-de-camp Captain Marmont. Born at Châtilion-sur-Seine in 1774, of an old aristocratic Burgundian family, he emerged from his royal military school in 1790 a second lieutenant and then went on to the artillery school at Châlons. He had met Bonaparte during the siege of Toulon, and they remained close thereafter.[48]
Joachim Murat’s background also differed from that of his fellow commanding officers. Born in 1767 at La Bastide-Fortunière, in the Department of the Lot, the son of an estate steward with enough money to ensure his getting a reasonably good education at religious schools and seminaries, he then ran off at the age of twenty to enlist as a private in the cavalry. Thanks to the Revolution, he was promoted to second lieutenant in 1792, then major the following year. After serving in the north and Champagne, he worked under Napoleon’s orders during the Paris rebellion of 13 Vendémiaire (October 4, 1795) and was promoted to colonel and senior aide-de-camp in 1796. Tall, broad-shouldered, relatively good-looking, and a boastful womanizer with an extraordinary taste for the bizarre in clothes, within a few weeks he was to grate on Bonaparte’s nerves, a situation later aggravated by his seduction of Josephine. Murat’s and Napoleon’s relationship would be tenuous thereafter, in part because of the former’s marriage to Napoleon’s sister Caroline in 1800.[49]
There remained a few more officers with whom Bonaparte would soon be coming into contact who would also be rewarded with a marshal’s baton. Capt. Jean Baptiste Bessières, the son of a barber, was born at Prayssac, in the Lot, in 1768. Like Murat he attended the College Saint-Michel of Cahors, where he did well, in preparation for the School of Medicine at Montpellier. But when he was only nineteen, his father’s bankruptcy forced him to withdraw from his studies to take up the less inspiring trade of barber-surgeon. Soon — when he was elected second-in-command of a small local National Guard unit, where he was a close friend of Murat — he became yet another individual saved by the Revolution, whose blessings he fully supported. Joining the Army of the Western Pyrenees as a private, he was later elected an officer, when he first met General Augereau, who in turn brought him along to Nice for the expedition into Italy.
Jean Lannes quickly became a favorite of Napoleon.[50] Born in Lectoure in 1769, the son of a peasant who had neither the money nor the interest to educate the boy, he did not seem to have a promising future. Fortunately one of his brothers, a priest, taught him to read, write, add, and subtract, so that unlike Augereau and Masséna in their youth, he at least was literate, if at the most elementary level. He was apprenticed early, like many working-class boys of his generation, as a dyer, work he found so humiliating that he privately pressed on with his studies. Like most of Bonaparte’s future generals, the young, handsome Lannes — before his numerous battle wounds disfigured him — too was saved from an anonymous, humdrum existence by the fruits of revolution. He joined the revolutionary army only to return to civilian life, working in a cloth shop until 1792. Then, at the age of twenty-three, he was elected second lieutenant in a volunteer battalion fighting with the Army of the Western Pyrenees, rising to the rank of major by the spring of 1796, although still personally unknown to his new commander in chief at Nice.
Such was the situation when Napoleon assumed command of his new army at the recently conquered capital of the former Comté de Nice. He immediately called for a full-dress review, which proved a long and painful ordeal, as he inspected every officer, every soldier, every cannon, and every caisson, his aides scribbling madly the mounting record of demerits. Nor was it entirely the fault of his subcommanders, for the Army of Italy — considered the least important of the French Republic’s five armies — had been given the lowest priority. The men lacked anything like a regular uniform, some wearing only an old blue army coat over a strange assembly of civilian apparel, many hundreds of them even lacking a musket and bayonet. And their pay as usual was months in arrears. There was little artillery, all of it in poor condition, and the horses, having been kept on half rations for the better part of a year, were thin and weak, seemingly incapable of any undertaking.
After summoning his commanders and informing them of his conclusions, Napoleon questioned them about the strength of their divisions — the number and caliber of guns, munitions, wagons and vehicles, horses and mules, and food and clothing supplies — all with a precision and in such great detail as to leave them with the realization that their Gallic scorn of Bonaparte had perhaps been rather premature. This Napoleon immediately further confirmed by brutally putting down and disbanding some mutinous battalions, leaving him with an effective field force of only thirty-seven thousand men. His commanders learned another very disconcerting lesson at this first meeting. When Napoleon Bonaparte gave an order, he expected it to be executed then and there, if not the day before. All smug or disparaging smiles quickly disappeared as he cracked the whip.
Accordingly, after ordering what improvements he could effect in less than one week, an impatient Major General Bonaparte set out from Nice at the head of the Army of Italy on April 2, 1796, for the plains of Piedmont.[51]
“Soldiers! You are hungry and naked,” he addressed them before setting out. “The government owes us much but can give us nothing...I will lead you into the most fertile plains on earth. Rich provinces, wealthy towns, all will be yours for the taking. There you will find honor, and glory and riches.” With morale at rock bottom, Napoleon was promising them full rations (for once), loot, and of course the inevitable gloire.[52] French army pay, even for junior officers, was hardly sufficient to keep one alive, and loot was the standard substitute of the day. They would return to France laden with riches and covered in fame, or so he said.
As for Napoleon, he was preoccupied with two subjects only: the bewitching Josephine, whom he had left on the third day of their marriage, and this campaign. His invasion plans for Italy would make or break him, but he considered this the opportunity of a lifetime. To be sure, just about everyone had been against naming him to this command over senior divisional generals with experience in the field — no one more so than Carnot, the rabid revolutionary and irate war minister, who argued constantly with Bonaparte on every subject, including one of Carnot’s own pet specialties, fortifications. Nevertheless, he had been overruled by Barras, and Napoleon was here. And thus, as he wrote Josephine, he was marching along the hilly coastal corniche filled “with memories of the one woman in my life, and my determination to triumph over destiny.”[53]
He reached Savona on April 9 and decided to concentrate his force near Carcare, where the two enemy armies joined. It was his hope to achieve a lightning victory — which would become a trademark of his military career.
With little help from Paris, Napoleon literally had to finance his own campaign as he proceeded. Accordingly, he had sent troops to invite the Senate and the wealthier merchants of the Republic of Genoa to provide war “loans” to the French, while demanding permission to continue on his way across their territory in order to attack their neighbors in Lombardy (with whom the Genoese were at peace).
Facing Napoleon were the combined forces of the Austrian and Piedmontese armies, about fifty-two thousand
men. His aim was first to sever all communications between the two allied forces, then defeat them one at a time, beginning with the smaller, less formidable Sardinian army, led by the fifty-eight-year-old general Baron di Colli-Marchi. The septuagenarian Belgian general, J. P. de Beaulieu, commanded the Austrian army, including General Colli.
When Beaulieu received word of Napoleon’s impending invasion, he was much alarmed and quickly set out from his GHQ at Milan down to Novi, ordering two divisions to move north and west to link up with him. The Austrian army was divided into three columns: a right wing, under General di Colli, was ordered to defend Stura and Tanaro; a center force, under Count d’Argenteau, was to cut off the left flank of the French army along the corniche at Savona; while Beaulieu himself headed the left wing en route for Voltri. From the outset, however, Beaulieu had problems with greatly dispersed troops, rarely in communication with one another or even with their own headquarters. Nor did the mountainous terrain help matters.
Acting quickly while Napoleon and his main force were still along the corniche, Argenteau reached Montenotte on April 9, 1796, catching the French off guard the next day and attacking them — unsuccessfully — at Monte Legino. Meanwhile, the same day, Beaulieu reached Genoa and set off for Voltri, where he attacked a surprised Laharpe, who was forced to retreat to Savona.
At first thrown off balance by this Austrian attack, which had anticipated his own offensive, Bonaparte ordered Masséna and Augereau to set out at once to Montenotte, which they did during the night of April 10-11. Argenteau’s two thousand men suddenly found themselves in a disagreeable situation as dawn broke over the hills on the nth. Greatly outnumbering their foe, the French launched a large-scale attack from both the front and the rear. With his position no longer tenable, Argenteau had no choice but to break out, which he did, fleeing northward up the Bormida di Spigno.
Montenotte thus marked Bonaparte’s first battle and victory of the new campaign, and given the overall inordinate weaknesses of his army — no transport, guns, munitions, money, or even shoes or boots — he had to win rapidly and decisively at the outset or face defeat and expulsion from Italy. Speed was essential, and he was determined to maintain the momentum.
Meanwhile Beaulieu, having scattered the French along the coast at Voltri and learning of the minor defeat at Montenotte, set out for Dego on the twelfth. Napoleon was reassembling his troops around Carcare, assessing the changes — in particular concentrating on Colli’s Piedmontese, now deployed at Millesimo, and the Austrians gathering at Dego. Both these towns were of critical importance to the French, controlling as they did the two vital main routes through the hills leading to the open plains of Piedmont to the north, which in turn joined the plains of Lombardy. Beaulieu therefore had to stop the French then and there, while they could still be easily contained. Bonaparte, on the other hand, was equally determined to defeat the Austrians and march north. Ordering Augereau to head the French left wing and march on Millesimo, he gave Masséna the French center, with Dego as his objective; while Laharpe, forming the right wing, was directed to the heights overlooking Cairo, just south of Dego.
They got off to a good start, Laharpe and Masséna taking Dego from the Austrians on the fourteenth, only to lose their advantage by celebrating their victory prematurely, their troops getting drunk and sacking the town. And that is how an Austrian commander found them on reaching Dego at three o’clock on the morning of the fifteenth, after a forced march from Voltri. Masséna, like many of his staff, was literally caught in bed with a village girl, barely having time to grab his sword and boots before leaping through the window and bounding over the rear wall. He had left no pickets or outposts of any kind, and now he paid for it. Indeed, Dego was retaken on the seventeenth only with the arrival of a furious Napoleon Bonaparte. Thanks to Masséna’s ineptitude, the entire French schedule had been thrown out of kilter. Napoleon’s plans for launching twenty-four thousand men against Colli’s thirteen thousand Piedmontese was delayed by at least two days, long enough for Colli to get wind of these events and retreat from Ceva. A campaign that might have been concluded within a matter of weeks was now to extend many months. Nevertheless, with Ceva secured, the plains of Piedmont now lay open before the French, who had thus escaped Beaulieu’s trap. Looking beyond to the snow-covered Alps, Napoleon commented, “Hannibal had to climb over them; we merely walked around them.”[54]
Moving his camp to the castle of Lezegno, Napoleon watched as Sérurier pushed Colli back from San Michele to Mondovi. There Colli stopped just long enough to be defeated in a brief battle resulting in heavy casualties. But during the French pursuit that followed, Napoleon’s cavalry commander was killed, Murat taking his place. The French then advanced on Alba, Fossano, and Cherasco. The seizure of Cherasco — a major stronghold with large quantities of badly needed supplies and munitions, not to mention a few dozen cannon and fresh transport — on April 25 was another important coup. For the first time in many weeks the men could eat properly and even be paid.
Completely demoralized, undefended, and frankly terrified by the reports of pillaging and rapine that preceded the approaching French army, the representatives of King Victor Amadeus of Sardinia requested an armistice at Turin with this awesome Bonaparte, to which he agreed on April 28. The French were to be allowed to occupy Ceva, Cuneo, and Tortona (or else Alessandria) and at the same time were granted the right of free passage both to France and across Piedmontese territory to the Po and beyond. The Sardinian king was forced to break with his Austrian allies, while keeping his own troops in garrison with strict orders not to interfere with the French. Thus, with the Armistice of Cherasco, Bonaparte had a tentative legal foothold in Piedmont — but, until the Austrians could be neutralized permanently, far from a secure one. And they, for the moment at least, were as astonished as the Piedmontese at the amazing French advance.[55]
A proud Bonaparte now sent this armistice agreement back to Paris with his aide-de-camp Colonel Murat, accompanied by none other than Salicetti, the senior political commissar attached to his army, the very same Salicetti who had earlier demanded his arrest. (How this transformation occurred remains a mystery.) In any event, in less than two weeks Napoleon had captured a series of towns, broken the Piedmontese army, inflicted six thousand battle casualties, and taken thousands of prisoners. But all this was due chiefly to the enemy’s inferior numbers, poor leadership, and even poorer state of morale, determination, and confidence. Bonaparte therefore had yet to prove himself.
The victorious French army was still in pretty sad shape itself, forcing its commander to call for strong reinforcements from France, which did not, however, prevent him from preparing to launch the next stage of the campaign. As he now informed Carnot, “I intend to catch up with the Austrians and defeat them before you have time to reply to this letter.”
“Soldiers!” he addressed his troops:
In two weeks’ time you have won six victories, taken twenty-one flags, fifty-five pieces of artillery, several forts, and conquered the richest part of Piedmont. You have taken fifteen thousand prisoners and killed or wounded another ten thousand men [sic]...You have won battles without cannon, crossed rivers without bridges, made forced marches without shoes, drink or bread...But soldiers! do not deceive yourselves, you have still achieved nothing, because you still have everything to do, for neither Turin nor Milan are yet in our hands! Soldiers, your country has the right to expect great things of you! There remain battles to fight, cities to take, rivers to cross...And friends, I promise you will achieve it all!
And then, turning to the Piedmontese:
People of Italy! The French Army has just broken your chains of bondage. The French people are the friends of all peoples. Have confidence and work with us. Your property, your religion, and your customs will be respected.[56]
After occupying Alessandria, French troops continued their pursuit of the Austrians, and by April 30, 1796, had crossed the Po. With fresh reinforcements Napoleon now had almost forty
thousand men at his disposal, as he feinted a major crossing of the Po at Valenza with Sérurier’s force, opposite Beaulieu’s army concentrated on the north shore there. Instead, Napoleon would head the main force to strike at their rear farther downriver. And behind the Austrians lay Milan, the capital of Lombardy, his next objective.
By May 6 the army had moved up to its new positions, and before dawn the next morning, a special unit — including Colonel Lannes, 3,600 grenadiers, and 2,500 cavalry — set out for Piacenza, reaching it after a brisk five-hour march. If the troops were not fresh, they were willing, as Lannes led the first four battalions across the Po there. A few miles northwest, about halfway to Milan, lay the town of Lodi. Augereau was crossing the Po at Varetto, bringing news that Sérurier and Masséna were following.
That night, during violent, confused fighting between Napoleon’s and Beaulieu’s forces at Codogno, General Laharpe was mistakenly shot by his own men. Bonaparte hurriedly ordered his chief of staff, General Berthier, to replace him. Although his forces outnumbered the French, the indecisive seventy-three-year-old Beaulieu retreated to Lodi, on the River Adda. By the ninth, the last of Masséna’s and Sérurier’s divisions had crossed the Po after a forced march of sixty miles. Napoleon was bent on preventing Beaulieu from escaping once again, as he prepared for a final battle with the Austrian commander at Lodi. Alas, Beaulieu had already made good his retreat, crossing the Adda and falling back toward Cremona, leaving only one tough, largely Croatian division of ten thousand men to guard the vital bridgehead at Lodi as the French approached on May 10.
