Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

Now he Gallicized it in a conscious move towards emphasizing his French over his Italian and Corsican identities.

Nice on March 26, 1796,

Jean Sérurier,

Pierre Augereau

André Masséna,

Amédée Laharpe

Jean-Baptiste Meynier

He also ordered Citizen Faipoult, France’s minister in Genoa, to solicit ‘without noise’ 3 million francs in loans from the Jewish financiers there

That same Order of the Day of March 29 announced that the forty-three-year-old Alexandre Berthier, a former engineer who had fought in the American War of Independence, was now Napoleon’s chief-of-staff, a position he was to retain until 1814.

Even within the Austrian army, the heterogeneous nature of the sprawling Habsburg Empire meant that its units often didn’t speak the same language; the common tongue employed by its officer corps was French.

‘the strategy of the central position’:

Montenotte was Napoleon’s first victory in the field as commander-in-chief, and was as good for his own morale as for that of his troops.

The next day the Piedmontese sued for peace.

On April 26

Napoleon always differentiated between ‘living off the land’, which his army had to do by dint of insufficient supply, and ‘fearful pillage’.30 This took some sophistry, but his supple mind was up to the task.

Armies moved much faster at the end of the eighteenth century than at the beginning due to improved road surfaces – especially after the recommendations of the French engineer Pierre Trésaguet, in his memorandum on scientific road-building of 1775, were taken up.

In their hour-long conversation while watching the sun rise, Beauregard was impressed with his knowledge of Piedmont’s history, artists and scholars.

The day after the armistice document was signed, Napoleon wrote to Paris, conscious that he had overstepped his authority in concluding a diplomatic agreement with a foreign power – let alone, as a good republican, allowing King Victor Amadeus III of Piedmont-Sardinia to stay on his throne.

He was determined that Italy – or at least the parts that had opposed him – would be mulcted not merely of cash, but also of its great art.

The rulers of those places had every cause to tremble, for many of their finest treasures were destined for the art gallery in Paris known as the Musée Central des Arts from its opening in 1793 until 1803, then as the Musée Napoléon until 1815, and after that as the Musée du Louvre.

A committed bibliophile, he would declare that he wanted to ‘collect in Paris in a single body the archives of the German Empire, those of the Vatican, of France, and of the United Provinces’.

This was the first example of what was to become another favoured strategy, the manoeuvre sur les derrières, getting behind the enemy.

After concluding an armistice with the Duke of Parma, whose territory he had so casually invaded, Napoleon sent to Paris twenty paintings, including works by Michelangelo and Correggio, as well as Francesco Petrarch’s manuscript of the works of Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil.

Five days later the Austrians had been forced back to the Adige river and Napoleon was in Milan.†

From the battle of Lodi on, Napoleon’s men gave him the nickname le petit caporal, in that ancient tradition of soldiers affectionately teasing commanders they admire: Julius Caesar’s men sang songs about ‘the bald adulterer’ (according to Suetonius), Wellington was called ‘Nosey’, Robert E. Lee ‘Granny’ and so on.

Vaunting ambition can be a terrible thing, but if allied to great ability – a protean energy, grand purpose, the gift of oratory, near-perfect recall, superb timing, inspiring leadership – it can bring about extraordinary outcomes.

(Winston Churchill once observed that in wartime, truth is so precious that she needs to be defended by a bodyguard of lies.)

There were in fact other distractions preventing her from joining her husband in Italy: she was pursuing an affair with an hussar lieutenant called Hippolyte Charles, a dapper wit and practical joker who was nine years younger than her.

it must be acknowledged that Lieutenant Charles did have some courage to cuckold Napoleon Bonaparte in an era when duelling was common.

On Sunday, May 15, 1796 Napoleon entered Milan in triumph.*

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

For Napoleon to convince Europe of the essential superiority of the French model of government, he would need active collaboration and not mere submission.

the French revolutionary elites genuinely believed they were advancing the welfare of Europe under French leadership.

Yet, for any of these promises to bear fruit, Napoleon would need to capture northern Italy altogether.

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.

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.’

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.

On June 2, 1796, Napoleon began his siege of the well-provisioned Mantua.

Four fortresses, known as the Quadrilateral, held the key to Austrian power in northern Italy: Mantua, Peschiera, Legnago 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.

He had already assumed his own place, and set others at a distance.’

Géraud Duroc,

Duroc would be one of the very few people outside Napoleon’s family to use ‘tu’ when addressing him.

he rarely told her anything about the war that couldn’t be gleaned from the public gazettes. Nor did he trust her with his innermost thoughts about people or events.

Napoleon was capable of compartmentalizing his life, so that one set of concerns never spilled over into another – probably a necessary attribute for any great statesman, but one he possessed to an extraordinary degree. ‘Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard,’ he once said. ‘When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am – asleep.’