With exquisitely bad timing, the very day after Napoleon moved into the Tuileries, Louis XVI’s younger brother, the Comte de Provence, who had styled himself King Louis XVIII after the death of his nephew in 1795, wrote to Napoleon from exile at the Jelgava Palace in Courland (present-day Latvia) with a request to be allowed to return to France. Louis suggested that Napoleon could take any post in the kingdom if he would only restore him to the French throne. Napoleon took more than six months to reply. ‘Thank you for the honest things you wrote in it,’ he finally wrote, in terms more sympathetic than one might have expected of a former Jacobin, but his message was clear and unflinching: ‘You must not wish for your return to France; you would have to march over a hundred thousand corpses. Sacrifice your interest to the peace and happiness of France. History will recognize it. I am not insensitive to the misfortunes of your family … I will gladly contribute to the sweetness and tranquillity of your retirement.’78 Napoleon informed Roederer and Maret of Louis’ letter: ‘The letter is very beautiful, very beautiful indeed!’ he wrote. ‘But I have my answer in consequence, and it is also very fine.’79 When Josephine teasingly told Napoleon that her royalist friends promised if he restored the Bourbons they would erect a statue in the Place du Carrousel in which he would be represented as a genius placing the crown upon the king’s head, Napoleon joked: ‘Yes, and my body will be under the pedestal!’80 But the Bourbons would not so easily accept a life of exile. The finality of Napoleon’s reply to Louis meant that from the autumn of 1800 onwards they started plotting against his life.
In less than fifteen weeks Napoleon had effectively ended the French Revolution, seen off the Abbé Sieyès, given France a new constitution, established her finances on a sound footing, muzzled the opposition press, started to end both rural brigandage and the long-running war in the Vendée, set up a Senate, Tribunate, Legislative Body and Conseil d’État, appointed a talented government regardless of past political affiliations, rebuffed the Bourbons, made spurned peace offers to Britain and Austria, won a plebiscite by a landslide (even accounting for the fraud), reorganized French local government and inaugurated the Banque de France.
‘Today I’m a sort of mannequin figure that’s lost its liberty and happiness,’ Napoleon wrote to Moreau, the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine, on March 16 as France prepared to re-engage Austrian forces. ‘Grandeur is all very well, but only in retrospect and in the imagination. I envy your happy lot; you are going to accomplish grand things with your gallant men. I would willingly exchange my consular purple for the epaulette of a brigadier under your orders … I strongly hope that the circumstances may allow me to come and give you a helping hand.’81 Three weeks later circumstances would allow just that, when the Austrian General Michael von Melas defeated General Nicolas Soult at the battle of Cadibona, pushing him back towards Savona and forcing Masséna into Genoa, which was subsequently besieged. It was time to return to the battlefield.
11
Marengo
‘We are struggling against ice, snow, storms and avalanches. The St Bernard Pass, astonished to see so many persons crossing it, throws obstacles in our way.’
Napoleon to the Second and Third Consuls, May 18, 1800
‘Caesar was right to cite his good fortune and to appear to believe in it. That is a means of acting on the imagination of others without offending anyone’s self-love.’
Napoleon, Caesar’s Wars
Napoleon began to prepare for a renewed outbreak of fighting against Austria from the moment he became First Consul, sending Berthier, soon to be his chief-of-staff again, twenty-eight memoranda on the subject over the next six weeks. On January 7, 1800 he ordered the covert formation of a 30,000-strong Army of the Reserve based at Dijon. Many of its soldiers were veterans who knew the hardships of war, others were brought in from demi-brigades on garrison duty in the provinces. Some were transferred from the Vendée, but there was also a large number of conscripts who would learn how to load and fire their muskets only after the campaign had begun. The ‘canteen’ system, whereby groups of eight veterans and eight recruits would march, eat and bivouac together under the command of a corporal, allowed the recruits to learn soldiering fast.
‘You will keep thoroughly secret the formation of the said army,’ Napoleon ordered Berthier on January 25, ‘even among your office staff, from whom you will ask nothing beyond the absolutely necessary information.’1 The thoroughness of this secrecy may be inferred from the fact that even General Moreau assumed the force being assembled really was a reserve, rather than an army that Napoleon was going to lead over the Italian Alps to attack the exposed right flank of the septuagenarian Austrian General Michael von Melas. (Napoleon was being kept abreast of Austrian movements by French detachments in Italy, particularly those stationed in Genoa.) Despite his age von Melas was a formidable opponent, a senior lieutenant of the great Russian commander Marshal Alexander Suvorov, who never lost a battle but who had died in St Petersburg on May 18.
Napoleon would have to choose by which pass to cross the Alps into northern Italy. He would have preferred the easternmost ones – Splügen or St Gothard – so that he could carry out his favoured manoeuvre sur le derrière, but the speed of the Austrians’ westward advance through northern Italy towards southern France forced him to choose between the 8,100-foot Great St Bernard or the 7,100-foot Little St Bernard. The Little St Bernard was too far west, so Napoleon sent only one division there and decided on the Great St Bernard for the main body of the army. He also sent one division under General Adrien Moncey over the St Gothard Pass.
He was counting on an element of surprise: no one had taken an army over the Alps since Charlemagne, and before him Hannibal. Although Napoleon wouldn’t be travelling with elephants, he did have Gribeauval 8-pounder and 4-pounder cannon, whose barrels weighed over a quarter of a ton, to heave over the mountain range. Snow was still thick on the ground in early May, when the advance began, so Marmont devised sledges for the barrels made out of hollowed-out tree-trunks, which one hundred men at a time hauled up the Alps and then down again, to drumbeats. (Since the Italian side is much steeper than the French, they found it harder going down than up.) Money and supplies were sent ahead to the monasteries and hostelries along the route, and local guides were hired and sworn to secrecy. Napoleon, Berthier and, after April 2, Carnot – who had been appointed minister of war when Napoleon despatched Berthier to the Army of the Reserve – together organized every facet of an operation that was to become one of the wonders of military history. ‘An army can pass always, and at all seasons,’ Napoleon told a sceptical General Dumas, ‘wherever two men can set their feet’.2
On March 17 Napoleon held a consuls’ meeting, which he did most days at this time, a Conseil d’État, which he did every couple of days, and then a military strategy session with his chief cartographer, General Bacler de l’Albe, kneeling on huge large-scale maps of Piedmont spread out on the floor and covered in red and black wax-tipped pins to show the positions of the armies. (Sometimes, when crawling around the floor together on the maps, Napoleon and de l’Albe would bump heads.) In the strategy meeting he allegedly asked Bourrienne where he thought the decisive battle would be fought. ‘How the devil should I know?’ answered his Brienne-educated private secretary. ‘Why, look here, you fool,’ said Napoleon, pointing to the plains of the River Scrivia at San Giuliano Vecchio, explaining how he thought Melas would manoeuvre once the French had crossed the Alps.3 It was precisely there that the battle of Marengo was fought three months later.
On April 19 the 24,000 men under the Austrian General Karl von Ott laid siege to Masséna’s 12,000 men inside Genoa. There was little food to be had in the city, which the Royal Navy was blockading. Lieutenant Marbot recalled that over the following weeks they had to live on a ‘bread’ that was ‘a horrible compound of bad flour, sawdust, starch, hair powder, oatmeal, linseed, rancid nuts, and other nasty substances, to which a modicum of solidity was given by a little cocoa’.4
General Thiébault likened it to peat mixed with oil. Grass, nettles and leaves were boiled with salt, all the dogs and cats were eaten, and ‘rats fetched a high price’. Civilians and soldiers started to die in their thousands of starvation and the diseases associated with malnutrition. Whenever more than four Genoans were gathered together, French troops had orders to fire on them for fear they might surrender the port.
Napoleon was itching to act, writing to Berthier on April 25, ‘The day when, either because of events in Italy or because of those on the Rhine, you think my presence will be necessary I will leave an hour after receiving your letter.’5 In order to calm speculation and deal with the wider logistical problems of the coming campaign, Napoleon stayed at Malmaison and in Paris, reviewing his worst-equipped troops in full view of the populace (and Austrian spies) and going to the opera on the night of Monday, May 5. The whole balance of the war seemed to be tipped towards the German theatre, where Moreau had far larger forces and was doing well, crossing the Rhine on April 25 to Napoleon’s effusive and almost deferential private congratulations. To those unversed in the realities of power-politics, it might even have seemed that Napoleon was the Grand Elector and Moreau his consul for war.
Then Napoleon struck. Leaving Paris at 2 a.m. only a few hours after the end of the opera, he was in Dijon the next morning, and by 3 a.m. on May 9 he was in Geneva. Once there he made himself conspicuous at parades and reviews, and gave out that he was going to Basle, despite the fact that the vanguard of General François Watrin’s division was already starting to ascend the Great St Bernard Pass, soon followed by the forces under Lannes, Victor and General Philibert Duhesme. Napoleon kept Bessières’ Consular Guard and Murat’s cavalry back with him.6 (Duhesme, who owned a vineyard, sent Napoleon some wine, receiving the reply: ‘We’ll drink it in honour of the first victory you win.’7)
It had been a hard winter and the track – there was no road over the St Bernard until 1905 – was icy and banked high with snow, yet Napoleon was extremely lucky with the weather, which was much worse both before the army started crossing the Alps on May 14 and after it had finished eleven days later (half the time it took Hannibal). Only one cannon out of forty was lost to avalanche. ‘Since Charlemagne, it has never seen such a large army,’ Napoleon told Talleyrand on the 18th, ‘it wanted above all to block the passage of our large campaign equipment, but finally, half our artillery is in Aosta.’8 Napoleon didn’t lead his army over the Alps, but he followed it once the most important logistical issues – food, ammunition and mules – had been dealt with.9 He kept a constant pressure on the ordonnateurs, with warnings such as ‘We risk dying in the valley of Aosta, where there is only hay and wine.’10 He himself crossed the most difficult part, at Saint-Pierre, on May 20, by which time Watrin and Lannes were 40 miles inside Piedmont.
In all 51,400 men crossed the Alps, with 10,000 horses and 750 mules. They went by single file in some places, and had to start at dawn every day to reduce the risk of avalanches once the sun had risen.11 When they reached the formidable Fort Bard at the entrance to the Aosta valley, which commands a narrow gorge high above the Dora Baltea river, four hundred Hungarians under Captain Joseph Bernkopf held out for twelve days, blocking the advance of almost all of Napoleon’s heavy traffic – the guns, thirty-six caissons and one hundred other vehicles – which therefore fell far behind, severely disrupting the campaign. Some wagons managed to get past at night, with dung and straw strewn in the path of the covered wheels to deaden the noise, but it was not until the walls of the fort were breached in several places and it fell on June 2, at the cost of half of Bernkopf’s forces, that the rest were able to follow. The delay at Fort Bard meant that Napoleon went forward desperately short of artillery and ammunition, and had to scour Lombardy and Tuscany to requisition whatever he could.
Managing expectations was a vital part of Napoleon’s statecraft, and he knew better than to allow his countrymen’s to be stoked up after his departure from Paris. Angry that the newspapers there were claiming he had predicted he would capture Milan within a month, he wrote on May 19, ‘That is not in my character. Very often I do not say what I know: but never do I say what will happen.’12 He ordered that ‘a jocular note’ to that effect be inserted in the Moniteur. In fact, he was indeed in Milan within a month of leaving Paris.
Napoleon rode a horse for almost the whole journey over the Alps, and a mule (as it was more sure of foot) for the iciest stretch around Saint-Pierre.13 He wore civilian dress under his customary grey overcoat. When he asked his guide what he wanted for taking him over the mountains, he was told that, at twenty-two, all he desired was ‘the happiness of those who possessed a good house, a number of cattle, sheep, etc.’ which he needed in order to marry his girlfriend.14 When, having ordered that he be given 60,000 francs to purchase all those things, Napoleon discovered that the lad was twenty-seven, already married and owned his own house, he gave him 1,200 francs instead.15
By May 22 Lannes had taken Ivrea and Piedmont lay before the French army, yet the reports that von Melas (who had by then captured Nice) was receiving still maintained that there were only 6,000 Frenchmen in the valley of Aosta. In allowing Melas to take Nice, Napoleon was drawing the Austrian further and further westwards before unleashing his blow. By the 24th he was at Aosta with 33,000 men and Moncey’s division of 12,500 was on its way. ‘We have struck here like lightning,’ Napoleon told Joseph, who was now a member of the Legislative Body in Paris, ‘the enemy wasn’t expecting anything like it and can hardly believe it. Great events are going to take place.’16
It was at this stage of the campaign that the sheer ruthlessness that helped make Napoleon so formidable a commander revealed itself once again. Instead of marching south to relieve starving Genoa, as his troops and even his senior commanders assumed he would do, he wheeled eastwards towards Milan to seize the huge supply depot there and cut off Melas’s line of retreat towards the Mincio river and Mantua. Ordering Masséna to hold out for as long as possible so that he would tie down Ott’s besieging force, Napoleon outfoxed Melas, who had taken it for granted that Napoleon would try to save Genoa. He had therefore left Nice and marched back from Turin to Alessandria to try to head Napoleon off.
On June 2 Melas ordered Ott to lift the siege of Genoa in order to concentrate his army. Ott ignored him, as Masséna had just asked for terms of surrender. At 6.30 p.m. that same day Napoleon entered Milan by the Verceil Gate in the pouring rain and installed himself at the archducal palace, staying up until 2 a.m. dictating letters, receiving Francesco Melzi d’Eril, who had run the Cisalpine Republic, setting up a new city government and releasing political prisoners interned by the Austrians, who had used Milan as their regional headquarters. He also read Melas’s captured despatches from Vienna, which told him the enemy’s strengths, dispositions and state of morale. Moncey joined Napoleon in Milan with his division, but with few guns and little ammunition. Meanwhile Lannes entered Pavia, and although the thirty guns he captured there had been spiked, he managed to get five working again. To Napoleon’s amusement a letter was intercepted from Melas to his mistress in Pavia telling her not to worry, as a French army could not possibly appear in Lombardy.17 On both May 11 and 16 Napoleon wrote to Josephine, asking her about ‘the little cousin’ and sending her news of her son Eugène. On the 29th he wrote again, saying: ‘I hope to be in the arms of my Josephine in ten days, who is always good when she doesn’t cry and isn’t coquettish.’18
Genoa surrendered on June 4, by which time around 30,000 of its 160,000 inhabitants had died of starvation and of diseases associated with malnutrition, as had 4,000 French soldiers. Another 4,000 soldiers who were fit enough to march out were allowed to return to France with the honours of war, and a further 4,000 sick and wounded were transported to France in Royal Navy ships under Admiral Lord Keith, who had blockaded the port but saw the advantage of evacuating so many French away from the theatre of war.19 Masséna’s health was broken, not least because he had insisted on only
eating what his troops did. He never wholly forgave Napoleon for not rescuing him. Equally, Napoleon – who was never besieged in the whole of his career – criticized Masséna for not having held out for ten days longer, recalling when in exile on St Helena, ‘A few old men and some women might have died of hunger, but then he would not have surrendered Genoa. If one thinks always of humanity – only of humanity – one should give up going to war. I don’t know how war is to be conducted on the rosewater plan.’20 He even castigated Masséna in his memoirs, contrasting his actions with those of the Gauls under Vercingetorix when besieged by Caesar at Alesia. If Masséna had indeed managed to hold out another ten days, Ott might not have arrived in time at the battlefield of Marengo.
Napoleon was playing for far larger stakes than one city; he wanted to kill or capture every Austrian west of Milan.21 It was Genoa’s resistance that allowed him to get behind Melas, who then had to abandon his plans of taking Toulon in conjunction with Admiral Keith and somehow get back east to re-establish his severed lines of communication. Piacenza and Valenza were now the last major crossing-points over the Po that were not in French hands, so Melas despatched several columns towards both cities.
Napoleon the Great Page 33
