Читать книгу The Life and Legacy of Napoleon Bonaparte: All 4 Volumes - William Milligan Sloane - Страница 34

Table of Contents

Bonaparte's Assertion of Independence—Helplessness of the Directory—Threats and Proclamations—The General and His Officers—Bonaparte's Comprehensive Genius—The Devotion of France—Uneasiness in Italy—The Position of the Austrians—Bonaparte's Strategy—His Conception of the Problem in Italy—Justification of His Foresight—Modena, Parma, and the Papacy—The French Radicals and the Pope—Bonaparte's Policy—His Ambition.

1796.

When the news of the successes in Piedmont reached Paris, public festivals were decreed and celebrated; but the democratic spirit of the directors could brook neither the contemptuous disregard of their plan which Bonaparte had shown, nor his arrogant assumption of diplomatic plenipotence. Knowing how thoroughly their doctrine had permeated Piedmont, they had intended to make it a republic. It was exasperating, therefore, that through Bonaparte's meddling they found themselves still compelled to carry on negotiations with a monarchy. The treaty with the King of Sardinia was ungraciously dictated and signed by them on May fifteenth, but previous to the act they determined to clip the wings of their dangerous falcon. This they thought to accomplish by assigning Kellermann to share with Bonaparte the command of the victorious army, and by confirming Salicetti as their diplomatic plenipotentiary to accompany it. The news reached the conqueror at Lodi on the eve of his triumphant entry into Milan. "As things now are," he promptly replied to the Directory, "you must have a general who possesses your entire confidence. If I must refer every step to government commissioners, if they have the right to change my movements, to withdraw or send troops, expect nothing good hereafter." To Carnot he wrote at the same time: "I believe one bad general to be worth two good ones. … War is like government, a matter of tact. … I do not wish to be hampered. I have begun with some glory; I wish to continue worthy of you." Aware probably that his own republican virtue could not long withstand the temptations opening before him, he began the latter missive, as if to excuse himself and anticipate possible accusations: "I swear I have nothing in view but the country. You will always find me on the straight road. I owe to the republic the sacrifice of all my own notions. If people seek to set me wrong in your esteem, my answer is in my heart and in my conscience." It is of course needless to add that the Directory yielded, not only as to the unity of command, but also in the fatal and vital matter of intrusting all diplomatic negotiations to his hands.

In taking this last step the executive virtually surrendered its identity. Such, however, was the exultation of the Parisian populace and of the soldiery, that the degradation or even the forced resignation of the conquering dictator would have at once assured the fall of the directors. They could not even protest when, soon after, there came from Bonaparte a despatch announcing that the articles of "the glorious peace which you have concluded with the King of Sardinia" had reached "us," and significantly adding in a later paragraph that the troops were content, having received half their pay in coin. Voices in Paris declared that for such language the writer should be shot. Perhaps those who put the worst interpretation on the apparently harmless words were correct in their instinct. In reality the Directory had been wholly dependent on the army since the previous October; and while such an offensive insinuation of the fact would be, if intentional, most unpalatable, yet those who had profited by the fact dared not resent a remote reference to it.

The farce was continued for some time longer, Bonaparte playing his part with singular ability. He sent to Kellermann, in Savoy, without the form of transmitting it through government channels, a subsidy of one million two hundred thousand francs. As long as he was unhampered, his despatches to Paris were soldierly and straightforward, although after the passage of the Po they began to be somewhat bombastic, and to abound in his old-fashioned, curious, and sometimes incorrect classical or literary allusions. But if he were crossed in the least, if reinforcements did not arrive, or if there were any sign of independence in Paris, they became petulant, talking of ill-health, threatening resignation, and requesting that numbers of men be sent out to replace him in the multiform functions which in his single person he was performing. Of course these tirades often failed of immediate effect, but at least no effort was made to put an effective check on the writer's career. Read a century later in a cold and critical light, Bonaparte's proclamations of the same period seem stilted, jerky, and theatrical. In them, however, there may still be found a sort of interstitial sentimentality, and in an age of romantic devotion to ideals the quality of vague suggestiveness passed for genuine coin. Whatever else was lacking in those compositions, they had the one supreme merit of accomplishing their end, for they roused the French soldiers to frenzied enthusiasm.

In fact, if the Directory stood on the army, the army belonged henceforth to Bonaparte. On the very day that Milan was entered, Marmont heard from his leader's lips the memorable words, "Fortune is a woman; the more she does for me, the more I shall exact from her. … In our day no one has conceived anything great; it falls to me to give the example." This is the language that soldiers like to hear from their leader, and it was no doubt repeated throughout the army. "From this moment," wrote the same chronicler, a few months later, "the chief part of the pay and salaries was in coin. This led to a great change in the situation of the officers, and to a certain extent in their habits." Bonaparte was incorruptible. Salicetti announced one day that the brother of the Duke of Modena was waiting outside with four chests containing a million of francs in gold, and urged the general, as a friend and compatriot, to accept them. "Thank you," was the calm and significant answer, "I shall not put myself in the hands of the Duke of Modena for such a sum." But similar propositions were made by the commander-in-chief to his subordinates, and they with less prudence fell into the trap, taking all they could lay hands upon and thus becoming the bond-slaves of their virtuous leader. There were stories at the time that some of the generals, not daring to send their ill-gotten money to France, and having no opportunity for investing it elsewhere, actually carried hundreds of thousands of francs in their baggage. This prostitution of his subordinates was part of a system. Twenty million francs was approximately the sum total of all contributions announced to the Directory, and in their destitution it seemed enormous. They also accepted with pleasure a hundred of the finest horses in Lombardy to replace, as Bonaparte wrote on sending his present, the ordinary ones which drew their carriages. Was this paltry four million dollars the whole of what was derived from the sequestrations of princely domains and the secularization of ecclesiastical estates? By no means. The army chest, of which none knew the contents but Bonaparte, was as inexhaustible as the widow's cruse. At the opening of the campaign in Piedmont, empty wagons had been ostentatiously displayed as representing the military funds at the commander's disposal: these same vehicles now groaned under a weight of treasure, and were kept in a safe obscurity. Well might he say, as he did in June to Miot, that the commissioners of the Directory would soon leave and not be replaced, since they counted for nothing in his policy.

With the entry into Milan, therefore, begins a new epoch in the remarkable development we are seeking to outline. The military genius of him who had been the Corsican patriot and the Jacobin republican had finally asserted dominion over all his other qualities. In the inconsistency of human nature, those former characters now and then showed themselves as still existent, but they were henceforth subordinate. The conquered Milanese was by a magical touch provided with a provisional government, ready, after the tardy assent of the Directory, to be changed into the Transpadane Republic and put under French protection. Every detail of administration, every official and his functions, came under Bonaparte's direction. He knew the land and its resources, the people and their capacities, the mutual relations of the surrounding states, and the idiosyncrasies of their rulers. Such laborious analysis as his despatches display, such grasp both of outline and detail, such absence of confusion and clearness of vision, such lack of hesitance and such definition of plan, seem to prove that either a hero or a demon is again on earth. All the capacity this man had hitherto shown, great as it was, sinks into insignificance when compared with the Olympian powers he now displays, and will continue to display for years to come. His sinews are iron, his nerves are steel, his eyes need no sleep, and his brain no rest. What a captured Hungarian veteran said of him at Lodi is as true of his political activity as of his military restlessness: "He knows nothing of the regular rules of war: he is sometimes on our front, sometimes on the flank, sometimes in the rear. There is no supporting such a gross violation of rules." His senses and his reason were indeed untrammeled by human limitations; they worked on front, rear, and flank, often simultaneously, and always without confusion.

Was it astonishing that the French nation, just recovering from a debauch of irreligion and anarchy, should begin insensibly to yield to the charms of a wooer so seductive? For some time past the soldiers, as the Milan newspapers declared, had been a pack of tatterdemalions ever flying before the arms of his Majesty the Emperor; now they were victors, led by a second Cæsar or Alexander, clothed, fed, and paid at the cost of the conquered. To ardent French republicans, and to the peoples of Italy, this phenomenal personage proclaimed that he had come to break the chains of captives, while almost in the same hour he wrote to the Directory that he was levying twenty million francs on the country, which, though exhausted by five years of war, was then the richest in the civilized world. Nor was the self-esteem of France and the Parisian passion for adornment forgotten. There began a course of plunder, if not in a direction at least in a measure hitherto unknown to the modern world—the plunder of scientific specimens, of manuscripts, of pictures, statues, and other works of art. It is difficult to fix the responsibility for this policy, which by the overwhelming majority of learned and intelligent Frenchmen was considered right, morally and legally. Nothing so flattered the national pride as the assemblage in Paris of art treasures from all nations, nothing so humiliated it as their dispersion at the behest of the conquering Allies. In the previous year a few art works had been taken from Holland and Belgium, and formal orders were given again and again by the Directory for stripping the Pope's galleries; but there is a persistent belief, founded, no doubt, in an inherent probability, that the whole comprehensive scheme of art spoliation had been suggested in the first place by Bonaparte, and prearranged between himself and the executive before his departure. At any rate, he asked and easily obtained from the government a commission of scholars and experts to scour the Italian cities; and soon untold treasures of art, letters, and science began to pour into the galleries, cabinets, and libraries of Paris. A few brave voices among the artists of the capital protested against the desecration; the nation at large was tipsy with delight, and would not listen. Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, Correggio, Giorgione, and Paul Veronese, with all the lesser masters, were stowed in the holds of frigates and despatched by way of Toulon toward the new Rome; while Monge and Berthollet ransacked the scientific collections of Milan and Parma for their rarest specimens. Science, in fact, was to flourish on the banks of the Seine as never before or elsewhere; and the great investigators of Italy, forgetful of their native land, were to find a new citizenship in the world of knowledge at the capital of European liberties. Words like these, addressed to the astronomer Oriani, indicate that on Bonaparte's mind had dawned the notion of a universal federated state, to which national republics would be subordinate.

No scene in the history of warfare was more theatrical than the entry of the French into Milan. The pageant was arranged on the lines of a Roman triumph and the distances so calculated that Bonaparte was the one impressive figure. With his lean face and sharp Greek profile, his long, lank, unpowdered locks, his simple uniform, and awkward seat in the saddle, he looked like a new human type, neither angel nor devil but an inscrutable apparition from another sphere. To officers and men the voluptuous city extended wide its arms, and the shabby soldiery were incongruous figures where their entertainers were elegant and fastidious beyond what the guests had dreamed. With stern impartiality the liberator repressed all excess in his army, but immediately the question of contributions, billeting, indemnity, and fiscal organization was taken up, settled, and the necessary measures inaugurated. The rich began to hide their possessions and the burghers to cry out. Ere long there was opposition, first sullen, then active, especially in the suburban villages where the French were fiercely attacked. One of these, Binasco, was burned and sacked as an example to the rest and to the city. Order was restored and the inexorable process of seizures went on. Pavia bade defiance; the officials were threatened with death, many leading citizens were taken as hostages, and the place was pillaged for three days. "Such a lesson would set the people of Italy right." They did not need a second example, it was true, but the price of "liberation" was fearful.

Italian rebellion having been subdued, the French nation roused to enthusiasm, independent funds provided, and the Directory put in its place, Bonaparte was free to unfold and consummate his further plans. Before him was the territory of Venice, a state once vigorous and terrible, but now, as far as the country populations were concerned, an enfeebled and gentle ruler. With quick decision a French corps of observation was sent to seize Brescia and watch the Tyrolean passes. It was, of course, to the advantage of Austria that Venetian neutrality should not be violated, except by her own troops. But the French, having made a bold beginning of formal defiance, were quick to go further. Beaulieu had not hesitated on false pretenses to seize Peschiera, another Venetian town, which, by its situation at the outlet of Lake Garda, was of the utmost strategic value. He now stood confronting his pursuers on a strong line established, without reference to territorial boundaries, behind the whole course of the Mincio. Such was the situation to the north and east of the French army. Southeastward, on the swampy banks of the same river, near its junction with the Po, was Mantua. This city, which even under ordinary circumstances was an almost impregnable fortress, had been strengthened by an extraordinary garrison, while the surrounding lowlands were artificially inundated as a supreme measure of safety.

Bonaparte intended to hurl Beaulieu back, and seize the line of the Adige, far stronger than that of the Mincio for repelling an Austrian invasion from the north. What to him was the neutrality of a weak government, and what were the precepts of international law with no force behind it but a moral one? Austria, according to treaty, had the right to move her troops over two great military roads within Venetian jurisdiction, and her defeated armies had just used one of them for retreat. The victorious commander could scarcely be expected to pause in his pursuit for lack of a few lines of writing on a piece of stamped paper. Accordingly, by a simple feint, the Austrians were led to believe that his object was the seizure of Peschiera and the passes above Lake Garda; consequently, defying international law and violating their treaties, they massed themselves at that place to meet his attack. Then with a swift, forced march the French were concentrated not on the enemy's strong right, but on his weak center at Borghetto. Bonaparte's cavalry, hitherto badly mounted and timid, but now reorganized, were thrown forward for their easy task. Under Murat's command they dashed through, and, encouraged by their own brilliant successes, were thenceforward famous for efficiency. Bonaparte, with the main army, then hurried past Mantua as it lay behind its bulwarks of swamp-fever, and the Austrian force was cut in two. The right wing fled to the mountains; the left was virtually in a trap. Without any declaration of war against Venice, the French immediately occupied Verona, and Legnago a few days later; Peschiera was fortified, and Pizzighettone occupied as Brescia had been, while contributions of every sort were levied more ruthlessly even than on the Milanese. The mastery of these new positions isolated Mantua more completely than a formal investment would have done; but it was, nevertheless, considered wise to leave no loophole, and a few weeks later an army of eight thousand Frenchmen sat down in force before its gates.

It was certain that within a short time a powerful Austrian force would pour out from the Alpine passes to the north. Further advance into Venetian lands would therefore be ruin for the French. There was nothing left but the slow hours of a siege, for Mantua had become the decisive point. In the heats of summer this interval might well have been devoted to ease; but it was almost the busiest period of Bonaparte's life. According to the Directory's rejected plan for a division of command in Italy, the mission assigned to Kellermann had been to organize republics in Piedmont and in the Milanese, and then to defend the Tyrolean passes against an Austrian advance from the north. Bonaparte was to have moved southward along the shore to revolutionize Genoa, Tuscany, the Papal States, and Naples successively. The whole idea having been scornfully rejected by Bonaparte, the Directory had been forced by the brilliant successes of their general not merely to condone his disobedience, but actually to approve his policy. He now had the opportunity of justifying his foresight. Understanding, as the government did not, that Austria was their only redoubtable foe by land, the real bulwark of the whole Italian system, he had first shattered her power, at least for the time. The prop having been removed, the structure was toppling, and during this interval of waiting, it fell. His opportunity was made, his resolution ripe.

In front, Venice was at his mercy; behind him, guerrilla bands of so-called Barbets, formed in Genoese territory and equipped by disaffected fugitives, were threatening the lately conquered gateway from France where the Ligurian Alps and the Apennines meet. Bonaparte's first step was to impose a new arrangement upon the submissive Piedmont, whereby, to make assurance doubly sure, Alessandria was added to the list of fortresses in French hands; then, as his second measure, Murat and Lannes appeared before Genoa at the head of an armed force, with instructions first to seize and shoot the many offenders who had taken refuge in her territory after the risings in Lombardy, and then to threaten the Senate with further retaliatory measures, and command the instant dismissal of the imperial Austrian plenipotentiary. From Paris came orders to drive the English fleet out of the harbor of Leghorn, where, in spite of the treaty between Tuscany and France, there still were hostile arsenals and ships. It was done. Naples did not wait to see her territories invaded, but sued for mercy and was humbled, being forced to withdraw her navy from that of the coalition, and her cavalry from the Austrian army. For the moment the city of Rome was left in peace. The strength of papal dominion lay in Bologna, and the other legations beyond the Apennines, comprising many of the finest districts in Italy; and there a master-stroke was to be made.

On the throne of Modena was an Austrian archduke: his government was remorselessly shattered and virtually destroyed, the ransom being fixed at the ruinous sum of ten million francs with twenty of the best pictures in the principality. But on that of Parma was a Spanish prince with whose house France had made one treaty and hoped to make a much better one. The duke, therefore, was graciously allowed to purchase an armistice by an enormous but yet possible contribution of two million francs in money, together with provisions and horses in quantity. The famous St. Jerome of Correggio was among the twenty paintings seized in Modena. The archduke repeatedly offered to ransom it for one million francs, the amount at which its value was estimated, but his request was not granted. Next came Bologna and its surrounding territory. Such had been the tyranny of ecclesiastical control that the subjects of the Pope in that most ancient and famous seat of learning welcomed the French with unfeigned joy; and the fairest portion of the Papal States passed by its own desire from under the old yoke. The successor of St. Peter was glad to ransom his capital by a payment nominally of twenty-one million francs. In reality he had to surrender far more; for his galleries, like those of Modena, were stripped of their gems, while the funds seized in government offices, and levied in irregular ways, raised the total value forwarded to Paris to nearly double the nominal contribution. All this, Bonaparte explained, was but a beginning, the idleness of summer heats. "This armistice," he wrote to Paris on June twenty-first, 1796, "being concluded with the dog-star rather than with the papal army, my opinion is that you should be in no haste to make peace, so that in September, if all goes well in Germany and northern Italy, we can take possession of Rome."

Josephine, Empress of the French.

From the painting by Francois Gérard.

In the Museum of Versailles.

In fact, this ingenious man was really practising moderation, as both he and the terrified Italians, considering their relative situations, understood it. Whatever had been the original arrangement with the directors, there was nothing they did not now expect and demand from Italy; they wrote requiring, in addition to all that had hitherto been mentioned, plunder of every kind from Leghorn; masts, cordage, and ship supplies from Genoa; horses, provisions, and forage from Milan; and contributions of jewels and precious stones from the reigning princes. As for the papal power, the French radicals would gladly have destroyed it. They had not forgotten that Basseville, a diplomatic agent of the republic, had been killed in the streets of Rome, and that no reparation had been made either by the punishment of the assassin or otherwise. The Pope, they declared, had been the real author of the terrible civil war fomented by the unyielding clergy, and waged with such fury in France. Moreover, the whole sentimental and philosophical movement of the century in France and elsewhere considered the ecclesiastical centralization and hierarchical tyranny of the papacy as a dangerous survival of absolutism.

But Bonaparte was wise in his generation. The contributions he levied throughout Italy were terrible; but they were such as she could bear, and still recuperate for further service in the same direction. The liberalism of Italy was, moreover, not the radicalism of France; and a submissive papacy was of incalculably greater value both there and elsewhere in Europe than an irreconcilable and fugitive one. The Pope, too, though weakened and humiliated as a temporal prince, was spared for further usefulness to his conqueror as a spiritual dignitary. Beyond all this was the enormous moral influence of a temperate and apparently impersonal policy. Bonaparte, though personally and by nature a passionate and wilful man, felt bound, as the representative of a great movement, to exercise self-restraint, taking pains to live simply, dress plainly, almost shabbily, and continuing by calm calculation to refuse the enormous bribes which began and continued to be offered to him personally by the rulers of Italy. His generals and the fiscal agents of the nation were all in his power, because it was by his connivance that they had grown enormously rich, he himself remaining comparatively poor, and for his station almost destitute. The army was his devoted servant; Italy and the world should see how different was his moderation from the rapacity of the republic and its tools, vandals like the commissioners Gareau and Salicetti.

Such was the "leisure" of one who to all outward appearance was but a man, and a very ordinary one. In the medals struck to commemorate this first portion of the Italian campaign, he is still the same slim youth, with lanky hair, that he was on his arrival in Paris the year previous. It was observed, however, that the old indifferent manner was somewhat emphasized, and consequently artificial; that the gaze was at least as direct and the eye as penetrating as ever; and that there was, half intentionally, half unconsciously, disseminated all about an atmosphere of peremptory command—but that was all. The incarnation of ambition was long since complete; its attendant imperious manner was suffered to develop but slowly. In Bonaparte was perceptible, as Victor Hugo says, the shadowy outline of Napoleon.