Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Napoleon was invited to stay at the gorgeous Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan by the Duke of Serbelloni, who had thirty indoor servants and one hundred staff in the kitchens. He needed them, because his guest began to entertain on a lavish scale, receiving writers, editors, aristocrats, scientists, academics, intellectuals, sculptors and opinion-formers, and revelling in Milan’s opera, art and architecture. There was a political purpose to all this. ‘As a celebrated artist you have a right to the special protection of the Army of Italy,’ he wrote to the sculptor Antonio Canova in Rome. ‘I have given orders for your board and lodging to be paid at once.’64 Wishing to appear as an enlightened liberator, rather than just the latest in a long line of conquerors, Napoleon held out the hope of an eventually independent, unified nation-state and thereby kindled the sparks of Italian nationalism. To that end, the day after his arrival in Milan, he declared the creation of a Lombardic Republic. It would be governed by Italian pro-French giacobini (Jacobins, or ‘patriots’) and he encouraged political clubs to mushroom throughout the region (the one in Milan soon included eight hundred lawyers and merchants). He also abolished Austrian governing institutions, reformed Pavia University, held provisional municipal elections, founded a National Guard and conferred with the leading Milanese advocate of Italian unification, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, to whom he handed over as much power as possible. None of this prevented Napoleon and Saliceti from levying a 20-million franc ‘contribution’ from Lombardy, ironically on the same day he issued an Order of the Day stating that he had ‘too lively an interest in the honour of the army to allow any individual to violate the rights of property’.65

  Italy in 1796 was, as Metternich would later observe, ‘merely a geographical expression’, a notion far more than a nation, despite her shared culture and slowly developing common language. Lombardy was now a theoretically independent republic, albeit now a French protectorate, but Venetia was still an Austrian province and Mantua was occupied by the Austrian army. Tuscany, Modena, Lucca and Parma were ruled by Austrian dukes and grand dukes; the Papal States (Bologna, Romagna, Ferrara, Umbria) were owned by the Pope; Naples and Sicily formed a single kingdom ruled by the Bourbon Ferdinand IV, and the Savoyard monarchy still reigned in Piedmont and Sardinia. Italians such as Melzi who dreamed of a unified state had no alternative but to place their hopes in Napoleon, despite his demands for ‘contributions’.

  Over the course of the next three years, known as the triennio, Italians saw the emergence of the giacobini in a series of ‘sister-republics’ that Napoleon was to set up. He wanted to establish a new Italian political culture based on the French Revolution that would prize meritocracy, nationhood and free-thinking over privilege, city-state localism and Tridentine Catholicism.66 This was the Directory’s political agenda too, although Napoleon increasingly imposed his views with less and less deference to theirs. The giacobini were imbued with the principles of the Revolution, and during the triennio Napoleon gave them a chance to exercise limited power. Yet much of the old order remained; the Italians, as so often under past occupations, had a way of blunting the zeal of their conquerors. Very often the actual sway of giacobini governments never extended much beyond the cities, and rarely for long. French power was too naked, too centralized, too demanding (especially of money and art) and too foreign for most Italians. Yet it is worth noting that but for a few months in Lombardy in the summer of 1796, and later in rural, southern, ultra-Catholic Calabria, there was no mass rebellion against Napoleonic rule in Italy in the way that there was to be in the Tyrol and Spain, because overall the Italians accepted that the French methods of government were better for them than the Austrian ones had been.

  Reforms that Napoleon imposed on the newly conquered territories included the abolition of internal tariffs, which helped to stimulate economic development, the ending of noble assemblies and other centres of feudal privilege, financial restructurings aimed at bringing down state debt, ending the restrictive guild system, imposing religious toleration, closing the ghettos and allowing Jews to live anywhere, and sometimes nationalizing Church property. These modernizing measures, which were repeated in most of the territories he conquered over the coming decade, were applauded by middle-class progressives in many lands beyond France, including by people who hated Napoleon. Voltaire’s view that European civilization was on a progressive course was fairly universally held in France in Napoleon’s time, and underlay his civilizing mission. Where he abolished the Inquisition, obscure feudal practices, anti-Semitic regulations and restraints on trade and industry such as the guilds, Napoleon also brought genuine enlightenment to peoples who, without his armies’ victories, would have remained often without rights or equality before the law.

  For Napoleon to convince Europe of the essential superiority of the French model of government, he would need active collaboration and not mere submission. He could win the war, but his administrators would have to move in swiftly afterwards to win the peace. As zealous leaders of what they truly considered to be a new form of civilization – although the actual word ‘civilization’ itself had only entered the French lexicon in the 1760s and was very little used in the Napoleonic era – the French revolutionary elites genuinely believed they were advancing the welfare of Europe under French leadership. They were offering a new design for living whose prerequisite was, of course, unchallenged French military might. Since Louis XIV’s time France had called itself the ‘Great Nation’, and in August 1797 the Army of Italy’s newspaper trumpeted the view that ‘Every step of the Great Nation is marked by blessings!’67 Under the Directory, French officers drank such toasts at patriotic banquets as ‘To the unity of French republicans; may they follow the Army of Italy’s example and, supported by it, regain the energy that is fitting for the leading nation on Earth!’68 Although this didn’t have the brevity essential to the best toasts, it exuded that sense of civilizational superiority necessary to any serious imperial enterprise.

  ‘All men of genius, everyone distinguished in the republic of letters, is French, whatever his nationality,’ Napoleon wrote from Milan in May 1796 to the eminent Italian astronomer Barnaba Oriani. ‘Men of learning in Milan have not enjoyed proper respect. They hid themselves in their laboratories and thought themselves lucky if … priests left them alone. All is changed today. Thought in Italy is free. Inquisition, intolerance, despots have vanished. I invite scholars to meet and propose what must be done to give science and the arts a new flowering.’69 Academics were impressed by the abolition of censorship, though of course this didn’t extend to criticism of the French occupation.

  Yet, for any of these promises to bear fruit, Napoleon would need to capture northern Italy altogether. In May 1796 a large Austrian force was inside Mantua, with little prospect of being dislodged and every possibility of being relieved. ‘Soldiers,’ read one of Napoleon’s proclamations to his troops soon after entering Milan,

  you have rushed like a torrent from the top of the Apennines. You have overthrown and scattered all that opposed your march … The Dukes of Parma and Modena owe their political existence to your generosity alone … These great successes have filled the heart of your country with joy … There your fathers, your mothers, your wives, sisters and loved-ones rejoiced in your good fortune, and proudly boasted of belonging to you.70

  The praise was fulsome, but any soldier hoping to rest and recuperate in Milan was immediately disabused:

  An effeminate repose is tedious to you: the days that are lost to glory are lost to your happiness. Well then, let us set forth! We still have forced marches to make, enemies to subdue, laurels to gather, injuries to avenge … You will then return to your homes and your country. Men will say as they point you out: ‘He belonged to the Army of Italy.’71

  On May 23 a revolt against the French occupation in Pavia led by Catholic priests was put down harshly by Lannes, who simply shot the town council.72 A similar incident took place the following day at Binasco, 10 miles south-west of Milan.73 The village h
ad been fortified by armed peasants who launched attacks on the French lines of communication: ‘As I was half way to Pavia, we met a thousand peasants at Binasco and defeated them,’ Napoleon reported to Berthier. ‘After killing one hundred of them we burned the village, setting a terrible but efficient example.’74 The burning of Binasco was similar to the kind of anti-guerrilla action that was then taking place across the Vendée, where massacres and village-burnings were employed against Chouans.75 Napoleon believed that ‘bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine’, but he also thought that quick and certain punishments meant that large-scale repression could largely be avoided.76 He almost never indulged in brutality for its own sake, and could be sensitive to people’s suffering. A week after Binasco he told the Directory: ‘Although necessary, this spectacle was nevertheless horrible; I was painfully affected by it.’77 Ten years later Napoleon would write in a postscript of a letter to Junot: ‘Remember Binasco; it brought me tranquillity in all of Italy, and spared shedding the blood of thousands. Nothing is more salutary than appropriately severe examples.’78 ‘If you make war,’ he would say to General d’Hédouville in December 1799, ‘wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.’79

  During the Pavia revolt, which spread over much of Lombardy, five hundred hostages from some of the richest local families were taken to France as ‘state prisoners’ to ensure good behaviour. In the country around Tortona, Napoleon destroyed all the church bells that had been used to summon the revolt, and had no hesitation in shooting any village priest caught leading peasant bands. Although his earlier anti-clericalism in Corsica was enough to make him resent what he called la prêtraille (canting priesthood), it was confirmed now by the way in which parish priests encouraged uprisings. Yet it also instilled in him a respect for the power of the Church as an institution, which he realized that he could not wholly oppose. He promised to protect those priests who did not mix religion and politics.

  By late May Napoleon was in torment. Josephine had stopped writing to him, despite his stream of long letters asking ‘Are you coming? How is your pregnancy going?’ and calling her his dolce amor five times in one letter alone.80 ‘I have a presentiment that you have left to come here,’ he wrote in one,

  that idea fills me with joy … As for me, your coming will make me so happy that I shall be quite out of my senses. I am dying with the wish to see how you carry children … No, sweet love, you will come here, you will be very well; you will give birth to a child as pretty as its mother, which will love you like its father, and, when you are old, when you are a hundred, it will be your consolation and your joy … come quickly to hear good music and to see beautiful Italy. There is nothing lacking to it except the sight of you.81

  Josephine wouldn’t leave Paris for another month, so fascinated was she by Hippolyte Charles’s sky-blue uniform, red morocco boots, tight Hungarian-style breeches and puerile practical jokes.

  On June 2, 1796, Napoleon began his siege of the well-provisioned Mantua. His forces were stretched thin, for he had yet to capture Milan’s castle, known as the Citadel, and was watching for the return of the Austrians from the Tyrol while simultaneously quelling the revolt in the north. He had been told by the government in Paris to spread the revolution southwards into the Papal States, and to expel the Royal Navy from the papal city of Livorno. He also had to threaten Venice to ensure she would not compromise her neutrality by helping Austria. He called up his siege equipment from Antibes to Milan, hoping to add to it with guns he would capture in Bologna, Ferrara and Modena in a sudden southern sweep against the Papal States in mid-June.

  At the battle of Borghetto on May 30, Napoleon crossed the Mincio river and forced Beaulieu to retreat northwards up the Adige valley towards Trento. After he had nearly been captured during the fighting, Napoleon dismissed his bodyguards and appointed a new company of chasseurs to protect him, the forerunner of his Chasseurs à Cheval de la Garde, under the cool and cautious General Jean-Baptiste Bessières. After Borghetto, Emperor Francis relieved the hapless Beaulieu of his command of the Austrian field army – though he stayed in command of Mantua – and appointed Field Marshal General Dagobert von Wurmser, an Alsatian and yet another septuagenarian who had won his reputation in the Seven Years War, which had ended six years before Napoleon was born.

  Four fortresses, known as the Quadrilateral, held the key to Austrian power in northern Italy: Mantua, Peschiera, Legnagno and Verona. Together they protected the entrance to the Alpine passes to the north and east and the approaches to the Po and Lake Garda. Napoleon generally liked to keep his movements fluid and to avoid sieges, but now he had no choice. He had only 40,400 men with which to besiege Mantua, keep communication routes open and hold the line of the River Adige. Between June 1796 and February 1797 Mantua lay under siege for all but five weeks. Protected on three sides by a wide lake and on the fourth by high thick walls, it presented a formidable challenge to any attacker. The besieged heavily outnumbered the besiegers, and, at least initially, the Austrians fired twice as many cannonballs at the French as the French could fire back. But by early June Napoleon was so well provisioned from the Lombardy plains and by ‘contributions’ that he could send to the Directory one hundred carriage horses, to ‘replace the mediocre horses that draw your coaches’.82 He also sent them a much-needed 2 million francs in gold.

  On June 5 Napoleon met the diplomat André-François Miot de Melito, the French minister to Tuscany. Miot would write of their encounter that Napoleon had an

  extremely spare figure. His powdered hair, oddly cut and falling squarely below the ears, reached down to his shoulders. He was dressed in a straight coat, buttoned up to the chin, and edged with very narrow gold embroidery, and he wore a tricoloured feather in his hat. At first sight he did not strike me as handsome, but his strongly marked features, his quick and piercing eyes, his brusque and animated gestures revealed an ardent spirit, while his wide and thoughtful brow was that of a profound thinker.83

  Miot noted that when Napoleon gave orders to Murat, Junot and Lannes, ‘Everyone maintained towards him an attitude of respect, I may even say one of admiration. I saw none of the marks of familiarity between him and his companions as I had observed in other cases, which was consonant with republican equality. He had already assumed his own place, and set others at a distance.’ This was deliberate; even at twenty-seven Napoleon was beginning to use his aides-de-camp, secretaries and domestic staff to regulate his accessibility and enhance his status. To this end he appointed two new aides-de-camp to join Junot, Marmont, Muiron and Murat. These were Joseph Sulkowski, a Polish captain in the revolutionary army, and Géraud Duroc, an artillery officer who had shown his efficiency as General Augustin de Lespinasse’s aide-de-camp. Napoleon was years later to describe Duroc as ‘the only man who had possessed his intimacy and entire confidence’.84 Duroc would be one of the very few people outside Napoleon’s family to use ‘tu’ when addressing him.

  The Directory had wanted Napoleon to move on Bourbon Naples, but he understood that to march south would be dangerous in light of the threat from the Tyrol, so now, instead of exceeding his orders from Paris as at Cherasco, he defied them. Napoleon ordered Miot to negotiate an armistice with Naples that would require her to withdraw her four cavalry regiments from the Austrian army and her ships from the Royal Navy squadron at Livorno. The alternative was an invasion of Naples by the Army of Italy. Once he was threatened with invasion, the Neapolitan negotiator, Prince de Belmonte-Pignatelli, signed the treaty that was put before him in two hours flat. Napoleon was by then willing to disparage the Directory, asking Pignatelli whether he really thought that he ‘was fighting for those scamps of lawyers’.85 (Although Napoleon liked and admired some individual lawyers, he utterly detested them en masse, and of the five Directors, three were former lawyers and one – Barras – a former judge. Only the mathematician Carnot had no legal background.)

  Back
in Milan on June 5, Napoleon wrote again to Josephine, who he still thought was pregnant and on her way to see him. The volcanic expressions of love, anger, confusion and self-pity, and the sheer number and length of his letters, suggest that writing them must have been a form of release, an escape from the political and military pressures crowding in upon him at the time. In an age of self-conscious Romantic letter-writing, Napoleon was clearly striving for the greatest possible effect and the boundary between what he was writing to his wife and the fantasy of Clisson et Eugénie is all but invisible. ‘My soul was all expectant of joy,’ reads one letter,

  it is filled with sorrow. The mails keep arriving without bringing anything from you. When you do write, it is only a few words, without any evidence of deep feeling. Your love for me was only a light caprice; you feel that it would have been ridiculous had your heart even deeply engaged … As for you, my only remaining hope is that the recollection of me will not be odious to you … My heart has never entertained commonplace feelings … it has steeled itself against love; you came and inspired a limitless passion, an intoxication which degrades. The thought of you has taken precedence of all else in my soul, the universe besides was nothing; your slightest caprice was to me a sacred mandate; to be able to see you was my supreme happiness. Beautiful you are, gracious; a sweet, a celestial soul expresses itself in heavenly tints through your face … Cruel!!! How could you have allowed me to imagine in you feelings you never entertained!!! But reproaches are unworthy of me. I have never believed in happiness. Death flutters about me every day … Is life worth all the fuss and clatter we make about it? Adieu, Josephine … A thousand daggers stab my heart; do not plunge them in deeper. Adieu my happiness, my life, all that had any real existence for me on this earth.86