Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  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 constant 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.

  Just as General Jean-Joseph Pijon’s brigade was being driven from Lonato, with Pijon himself being captured, Napoleon arrived leading elements of Masséna’s division. He ordered the 32nd Line into ‘columns of platoons’ and without pause, and with drummers and musicians playing, sent them into a bayonet charge, supported by the 18th Line. Despite losing both battalion commanders, they hurled the Austrians back towards Desenzano, straight into the path of Napoleon’s escort company of cavalry, together with elements of the 15th Dragoons and 4th Légère. Junot received six wounds, but this did not prevent him from accepting the surrender of the entire Austrian brigade. On hearing of the disaster, Quasdanovich retreated right around the north side of the lake to rejoin Wurmser. He would remain out of action for the next ten days. ‘I was tranquil,’ Napoleon wrote in his post-battle bulletin. ‘The brave 32nd Demi-Brigade was there.’ The 32nd had those words embroidered in large gold letters on its colours, and their pride spurred them to greater courage. ‘It is astonishing what power words have over men,’ Napoleon said of the 32nd years later.30

  Augereau retook Castiglione on August 3, after sixteen hours’ hard fighting on the hot, arid plain. For years afterwards, whenever Augereau was criticized by his entourage for disloyalty, Napoleon would say: ‘Ah, but let us not forget that he saved us at Castiglione.’31 By the time the French had regrouped there on August 4, Wurmser had lost any opportunity he might have had to attack Napoleon in the rear. The best he could hope for, as he slowly moved up around Solferino with some 20,000 men, was to buy time for Mantua to prepare for another siege. On the morning of August 4, Napoleon was at Lonato with only 1,200 men when more than 3,000 lost Austrians, who had been cut off from Quasdanovich’s command, suddenly blundered into the town. Napoleon calmly informed their parlementaire (officer sent to parley) that his ‘whole army’ was present, and that ‘If in eight minutes his division had not laid down its arms, I would not spare a man.’32 He supported this ruse by issuing orders to Berthier about grenadier and artillery units that Berthier knew were entirely bogus. The Austrians only discovered once they had surrendered and been disarmed that there were no French forces nearby, and that they could have captured Napoleon with ease.

  The second battle of Lonato saw the first use by Napoleon of the bataillon carré system. Although proposed by Guibert and Bourcet in textbook form in the 1760s and 1770s, it was Napoleon who first put it into practice successfully on the battlefield. Under its diamond-shaped formation of units, if the main body of the enemy was encountered, say, on the right flank, the division on the right became the new advance guard whose job it was to fix the enemy in place. The divisions that had formed the old vanguard and rearguard automatically became the masse de manoeuvre, the central strike force capable of supporting the new advance division, with the aim of enveloping the enemy’s flanks. The army could therefore turn 90 degrees in either direction with relative ease; the system had the additional advantage of being capable of magnification, as applicable to entire corps as to divisions. The key point was what Bourcet called ‘controlled dispersion’, and it permitted Napoleon hugely increased flexibility, allowing the battlefront to be constantly adapted according to changing circumstances.33

  The battaillon carré also was employed by Napoleon at the second battle of Castiglione, 20 miles north-west of Mantua, on Friday, August 5. Wurmser was deployed between Solferino on his right flank and a strong redoubt on the Monte Medolano hill on the Mantua–Brescia road on his left, with between 20,000 and 25,000 men. Napoleon had over 30,000 men, Masséna’s 10,000 massed in line and column on his left, Augereau’s 8,000 drawn up in two lines in front of the town of Castiglione, Kilmaine’s cavalry in reserve on the right, Despinoy’s 5,000 men returning from Salò, and General Pascal Fiorella’s 7,500 men coming from the south, hoping to deliver a decisive blow to the Austrian rear. He planned to draw Wurmser’s reserves northwards by feigning to withdraw. Castiglione was a very complicated battle, best understood from atop the magnificent castle of Lonato and the La Rocca bell-tower at Solferino, which command superb views of the whole countryside.

  When he heard cannon-fire to the south at 9 a.m. on August 5, Napoleon assumed it signalled Fiorella’s arrival, but in fact it was just his 8th Dragoons sacking the Austrian baggage train at Guidizzolo. He launched Masséna and Augereau into the attack, and Marmont was sent with a 12-gun battery towards Monte Medolano. Fighting developed along the whole line, with Augereau taking Solferino and Despinoy arriving in time to help the left-centre, as Wurmser was forced to move infantry away to check Fiorella. Wurmser thus found himself trapped between two armies with a third threatening his rear. He was forced to withdraw, and only narrowly avoided being captured by French light cavalry. Only the exhaustion of the hard-marching French prevented the complete destruction of the Austrian army, which fled across the Mincio.

  The Austrians lost 2,000 killed and wounded that day, and 1,000 more were captured along with twenty guns. When Napoleon’s officers counted the French dead they found around 1,100 had been killed or wounded or were missing.* ‘So there we are,’ Napoleon reported to the Directory on August 6, ‘in five days another campaign has been completed.’34 Two days later, as he reoccupied Verona, he added: ‘The Austrian army … has disappeared like a dream and the Italy that it threatened is now quiet.’35 He resumed the siege of Mantua on August 10. It still held 16,400 Austrian soldiers within its 10-foot-thick walls, although only 12,200 of them were fit for duty.

  Napoleon used the three remaining weeks of August to refit his army, and send Sauret and Sérurier, two of his generals who had been wounded and whom he greatly admired, back home. He replaced them with the veteran artilleryman General Claude-Henri de Vaubois and the recently promoted thirty-year-old General Jean-Joseph de Sahuguet, with a minimum of input from Paris. His reputation in France was growing with each victory and the Directory increasingly suspected he could not be contained. ‘If there be in France a single pure-minded and honest man
capable of suspecting my political intentions,’ he told Carnot and Barras, ‘I shall at once renounce the happiness of serving my country.’36 By then he knew there was little danger they could call his bluff. Previously, he had had to negotiate with them over which generals he could promote, as they had a pool of 343 on the active list. The more successful he was on the battlefield, however, and the more the Directory depended on him for their solvency and prestige, the less interference he would face over his choices.

  His domestic affairs were distinctly less secure. He tried to track down Josephine on holiday, writing ‘My wife has been running around Italy for the last two weeks; I believe she is in Livorno, or in Florence.’ He also asked that his ‘considerably spirited, but also headstrong’ brother Lucien, for whom he had found a war commissary job at Marseilles but who had suddenly gone to Paris without the permission of his commander-in-chief (and brother), be sent to the Army of the North within twenty-four hours of his being found.37

  In late August Napoleon learned that Wurmser was about to make a second attempt to relieve Mantua. Combing out his lines of communication and receiving some men from the Army of the Alps gave him a total of over 50,000 troops. Since he did not know which of the three possible routes Wurmser would take, he sent Vaubois with 11,000 men up the west side of Lake Garda to block that approach, and Masséna with 13,000 men and Augereau with 9,000 to Rivoli and Verona respectively as his central masse de manoeuvre. Kilmaine watched the eastern approaches with 1,200 infantry and most of the cavalry. Napoleon himself stayed with a 3,500 reserve at Legnago while Sahuguet besieged Mantua with 10,000 men and a further 6,000 troops watched for rebellions around Cremona. Once Napoleon had divined Wurmser’s route of attack, he would concentrate his force; until then he devoted himself to ensuring that there were plentiful supplies of brandy, flour, fodder, ammunition and army biscuit (hard-tack squares of baked bread).

  By September 2 Napoleon knew for certain that Wurmser was coming down the Vallagarina valley of the Adige. He planned to attack once he heard that General Moreau, commanding the Army of Germany, had arrived at Innsbruck, because, if possible, Napoleon’s advances should be co-ordinated with what was happening in Germany. However, Archduke Charles defeated General Jourdan at Würzburg on September 3 and Moreau was raiding Munich, deep in southern Bavaria, so neither could be of any help. Napoleon needed to guard against the danger of being forced to fight Archduke Charles’s and Wurmser’s armies simultaneously, something he simply did not have the manpower to do.

  Napoleon advanced to Rovereto, 15 miles south of Trento, where he intercepted Wurmser’s advance guard on the 4th. At daybreak he was before the strongly held defile of Marco (just below Rovereto), while another enemy force was across the Adige at the entrenched camp of Mori. Pijon’s light infantry gained the heights to the left of Marco and after two hours’ stubborn resistance, the Austrian line gave way. Around 750 Frenchmen were killed, wounded or missing. The Austrian General Baron Davidovich lost 3,000 (mostly captured), 25 guns and 7 colours.38

  With the Austrian army now in full retreat, four more battles were fought up the same valley over the next week. At Calliano poor Austrian picketing meant that the French surprised the Austrians while they were cooking their breakfast and forced them out of their positions. On September 7 at Primolano the French attacked a seemingly impregnable position and carried it by sheer élan. The two sides of the valley come dramatically together in a U-shape with only half a mile between the high cliffs on both sides. The Austrians should have been able to defend the pass easily, but that afternoon columns of French light infantry swarmed up both sides of the mountain, waded through the fast-flowing Brenta up to their waists and simply charged the Austrians, sending them fleeing down to Bassano.

  That night Napoleon slept with Augereau’s division, wrapped in his cloak under the stars and sharing their rations, as he often did in his early campaigns. The next day he captured 2,000 Austrians and 30 guns at Bassano, along with several ammunition wagons. Only at Cerea on the 11th did Masséna suffer a minor defeat – four hundred French killed and wounded – when he overreached in the pursuit of the enemy. The next day Augereau captured Legnago and twenty-two Austrian guns without loss, releasing five hundred French prisoners-of-war. Then, only three days later, on September 15, at La Favorita outside Mantua, Kilmaine inflicted a defeat on Wurmser that forced the Austrian commander-in-chief into the city.

  Napoleon was back in Milan with Josephine on September 19, and remained there nearly a month, sending Marmont to Paris with the best kind of propaganda tool: twenty-two captured Austrian standards for display at Les Invalides. The sheer tempo of the operations ensured that he had always kept the initiative, bowling unstoppably along a narrow valley gorge replete with places where the Austrians should have been able to slow or halt him. This lightning campaign up the valley of the Brenta was the perfect illustration of why esprit de corps was so valuable. Napoleon had used his command of Italian to question local people, and employed the bataillon carré system to send his army in any direction at a moment’s notice. He had split the Austrian army at Rovereto and forced it to march away separately, leaving each part to be defeated in the classic manoeuvre from the central position and keeping up the pressure on Wurmser with regular dawn attacks.

  Wurmser had started the campaign with 20,000 men and three days’ head start; he ended it when his 14,000 men joined the 16,000 already bottled up in Mantua. By October 10 Mantua was fully under siege again, only this time Wurmser was inside. Four thousand of his men died of wounds, malnutrition and disease in six weeks, and a further 7,000 were hospitalized. With only thirty-eight days of food left, Wurmser had to make sorties for supplies from the countryside, though one cost him nearly 1,000 casualties.

  Mantua could not hold out very much longer, but the wider war did not augur well for Napoleon’s chances of taking the city. Jourdan had been beaten back across the Rhine by Archduke Charles on September 21, and it was likely that the Austrians would soon make a third attempt to relieve Mantua, this time with a much larger force. Napoleon asked the Directory for 25,000 more reinforcements in case the Papal States and Naples declared war, adding that fortunately ‘The Duke of Parma is behaving quite well; he is also useless, in all respects.’39 On October 2 Napoleon offered peace terms to Emperor Francis, hoping to cajole him to the negotiating table with a mixture of flattery and threat. ‘Majesty, Europe wants peace,’ he wrote. ‘This disastrous war has lasted too long.’ He then warned that the Directory had ordered him to close Trieste and other Austrian ports along the Adriatic, adding: ‘Until now, I have stayed the execution of this plan in the hope of not increasing the number of innocent victims of this war.’40 Emperor Francis of Austria – who was also head of the politically separate but Austrian-dominated Holy Roman Empire, a loose conglomeration of semi-independent states that stretched across much of Germany and central Europe – was a proud, ascetic, calculating man, who hated the Revolution that had beheaded his aunt Marie Antoinette and who had briefly commanded the Austrian army in the Flanders campaign of 1794, before handing over to his militarily much more talented brother Archduke Charles. Napoleon received no reply to his peace offer.

  Napoleon again threatened to resign on October 8, this time on the basis of general exhaustion. ‘I cannot ride a horse anymore,’ he wrote, ‘only courage remains to me, which is not enough in a post like this.’ He also declared that Mantua couldn’t be taken before February, and ‘Rome is arming, and arousing the fanaticism of the people.’ He believed the Vatican’s influence to be ‘incalculable’.41 He demanded the right to sign a ‘most essential’ final treaty with Naples and a ‘necessary’ alliance with Genoa and Piedmont, warning that the autumn rains had brought illnesses that were filling his hospitals. His central message was ‘Above all send troops.’ Yet he also wanted Paris to know that ‘Whenever your general in Italy is not the centre of everything you run great risks.’

  Two days later, and without the Directory’s prior
agreement, Napoleon signed a comprehensive peace treaty with Naples that permitted the Bourbons to retain their throne unmolested if they agreed not to take part in any activities against the French. If the Austrians were going to invade from the north, Napoleon needed to be safe in the south. He also ensured that his lines of communication ran through the more trustworthy Genoa, rather than Piedmont, whose new king, Charles Emmanuel IV, was an unknown quantity.

  Napoleon was conscious of the whispers circulating in Paris, where some were saying that he was driven solely by ambition and might one day overthrow the government. In his letters to the Directory he ridiculed his detractors, saying: ‘If two months ago I wished to be Duke of Milan, today I desire to be King of Italy!’42 Yet they were unconvinced; although Barras and Carnot recognized his undeniable military capacity, all the Directors feared how he might use his growing popularity with the people once the Italian campaign was over. Napoleon’s principal preoccupation at the time was the devious unreliability of army contractors, whom he regularly described as swindlers, especially the influential Compagnie Flachat, which was ‘nothing but a bunch of fraudsters with no real credit, no money and no morality’. He wished he could have them shot, writing on October 12 to the Directory: ‘I never cease having them arrested and tried by courts martial, but they buy the judges; it’s a complete fair here, where everything is sold.’43

  On October 16 Napoleon called upon Wurmser to surrender Mantua. ‘The brave should be facing danger, not swamp plague,’ he wrote, but he was flatly turned down.44 The same day, again with the minimum of input from the Directory, he proclaimed the establishment of the Cispadane Republic, formed from Bologna, Ferrara, Modena and Reggio (which involved overthrowing the Duke of Modena who had allowed a convoy of supplies to get into Mantua) with a new 2,800-strong Italian Legion to guard it. The Cispadane Republic (whose name translates as ‘By the banks of the Po’) abolished feudalism, decreed civil equality, instituted a popularly elected assembly and began the Risorgimento (resurgence) unification movement which was eventually – albeit three-quarters of a century later – to create a unified, independent Italy. The writing of its constitution took no fewer than thirty-eight meetings, a testament to Napoleon’s patience since he was actively involved. The French were starting to bring about a political unity to a peninsula that hadn’t known it for centuries.