Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

the expulsion of Austria from Italy after three centuries of Habsburg rule.

‘There is but one step from triumph to downfall. I have seen, in the most significant of circumstances, that some little thing always decides great events.’

when the French troops arrived in the Papal States in June 1796

The Directory offered few reinforcements, still considering the Rhine to be much the more important theatre of operations.

With breathtaking gall, Josephine also brought along her boudoir-hussar Hippolyte Charles.

Josephine arrived at the Serbelloni Palace on July 10,

He was oblivious to Hippolyte Charles – neither Junot, Murat nor Joseph was about to tell him – and Josephine appears to have responded warmly to his attentions, however she might have been feeling emotionally.

His orders for his intelligence officers were:

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.

The second battle of Lonato

the first use by Napoleon of the bataillon carré system.

He resumed the siege of Mantua on August 10.

His reputation in France was growing with each victory and the Directory increasingly suspected he could not be contained.

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.

In late August

By September 2

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.

Bassano,

Legnago

Napoleon was back in Milan with Josephine on September 19,

the best kind of propaganda tool: twenty-two captured Austrian standards for display at Les Invalides.

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.

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.

Risorgimento

The French were starting to bring about a political unity to a peninsula that hadn’t known it for centuries.

In one area, however, French revolutionary institutions never had much hope of prevailing in Italy, and that was in their efforts to reduce the powers of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Hungarian veteran General József Alvinczi

On November 6,

Austrian inactivity after the victory at Bassano allowed Napoleon to regroup.

On November 13 both armies rested.

I no longer dare expose myself as my death would discourage the troops.

Visiting the bridge today, one can see how Napoleon could have been pushed down into the large drainage ditch just adjacent to it, which for all the indignity probably have saved his life.

As winter closed in and the fighting season ended with Mantua still under siege, the Austrians would make a fourth attempt to relieve the city.

Recognizing that after the fall of Livorno they could no longer defend Corsica from the French, the British under the brilliant thirty-eight-year-old Commodore Horatio Nelson had conducted a model evacuation of the island in October. Paoli and his supporters left with them.

Between September and December 1796, nearly 9,000 people died of disease and starvation in Mantua.

Rivoli,

He assumed the campaign would be decided in the foothills of the Italian Alps along the Adige river,

Napoleon arrived at 2 a.m. on Saturday, January 14 1797 at the plateau above the gorges of Rivoli, which would be the key deciding place

Napoleon wasn’t present to witness his triumph. He went on to Verona and then Bologna to punish the Papal States for threatening to rise in Austria’s support despite the armistice they had signed the previous June.

By February 17 the Pope was suing for peace.

‘We will have everything that is beautiful in Italy,’ Napoleon told the Directory, ‘with the exception of a small number of objects in Turin and Naples.’

On February 18, 1797 the Army of Italy launched a news-sheet

Napoleon was highly conscious of the power of propaganda, and he now made a conscious effort to influence public opinion, which was already heavily in his favour.

With the Rhine front much closer to France, Napoleon did not want the Italian campaign to be sidelined in the public imagination, and he thought his men would appreciate news from Paris.

In Paris the Moniteur reported the celebration of Napoleon’s victories with dances, cantatas, public banquets and processions. These were arranged by his growing cadre of supporters who, the Directors privately noted, did not always support them too.

The scores, perhaps even hundreds, of different representations of him by 1798 prove that the cult of personality had already begun.

On Friday, March 10, 1797,

Without a major battle being fought between Napoleon and Archduke Charles, the Austrians – who were also now facing a reinvigorated assault through Germany by Moreau – decided not to take the risk of losing their capital to Napoleon, and accepted his offer of an armistice at Leoben on April 2, a little over one hundred miles south-west of Vienna.

Since the campaign had begun a year earlier, Napoleon had crossed the Apennines and the Alps, defeated a Sardinian army and no fewer than six Austrian armies, and killed, wounded or captured 120,000 Austrian soldiers. All this he had done before his twenty-eighth birthday.