by T E Crowdy
The next obstacle was the Ticino, a wide river with steep banks, numerous rivulets forming wooded islands. There were two main crossing points over this river; the first at Turbigo and the second further downstream at Boffalora. The Austrians had retreated by the latter route and had burned the bridge there. The Austrians were also able to bring up additional forces to contest the crossing. After spending 30 May at Novara reorganizing, the French pursuit continued at dawn the following day. Murat took the bulk of his forces towards Turbigo, Duhesme heading to Boffalora with the 9th Light Infantry. Arriving at the river, Murat was able to procure some boats from sympathetic locals. He was able to ferry two companies of grenadiers from the 59th Line over to one of the wooded islands. These troops fired on the Austrian position while additional troops were ferried across. The Austrians quickly withdrew behind the Naviglio Canal, where they received reinforcements from FML Vukassovich. The Austrians mounted a counter-attack and were able to drive the French out of Turbigo. A fierce contest ensued, with neither party gaining an advantage.
Meanwhile, Duhesme reached Boffalora. Although the Austrians had destroyed the bridge, they had moored several boats on the riverbank and these were seen by the French. The 9th Light had organized a company of swimmers, and these were directed into the water to seize the craft. Under enemy fire, the swimmers faltered. One of them was swept away by the strong current and drowned. Witnessing this hesitation, one of the Ninth’s surgeons, Charles Vanderbach, threw himself into the water and made for the boats. Eight more Frenchmen jumped in and followed him, their comrades providing covering fire. The boat was secured and taken back to the right bank; it was quickly filled with soldiers and sent across to secure another boat. At this the Austrians withdrew, reporting to Vukassovich that his flank had been turned. Under the cover of night, the Austrian commander withdrew towards Milan, garrisoning the citadel and then withdrawing to Lodi.
On 2 June, Murat entered Milan unopposed at 4.00 pm, riding at the head of six cavalry regiments. Monnier’s infantry division was directed to blockade the citadel, while Boudet was sent to secure the Romana Gate on the south-eastern side of the city. Elsewhere, the detachment from the Army of the Rhine was already on its way to the Lombard capital. Much smaller than Bonaparte had anticipated, General Moncey had begun to cross the St Gotthard on 28 May with the divisions of Lapoype and Lorge, with a cavalry reserve, all amounting to around 11,000 men. Bethencourt had also entered Italy, crossing the Simplon Pass on 26 May with another 1,000 men. The capture of Milan was therefore a key strategic objective achieved. They had entirely wrong-footed the Austrians by marching to Milan, and there was more good news to follow. On 2 June, the garrison at Fort Bard surrendered after two weeks’ resistance. The remainder of the French artillery was at last able to enter Italy. Earlier that day, after five days’ march, Lannes had entered Pavia. He was stunned to discover the contents of one of the main Austrian stores. This included 200 guns of various calibre with their carriages and wagons (all had been spiked), shells and cannonballs, 1,000 barrels of gunpowder, infantry cartridges, muskets, stores of bed sheets and blankets, grain, flour, and 4,000‑5,000 quintals (hundredweight) of candles. Lannes had also learned Genoa still held out, but was under heavy bombardment and on the verge of surrender. Lannes wrote to Bonaparte: ‘There is not a moment to lose if you want to march on him.’
Zach’s master plan had been to park the imperial army outside Turin and await the arrival of Berthier’s army. The Austrian quartermaster general had assumed the Army of the Reserve would march to the relief of Genoa and the Riviera. Now the First Consul had turned eastwards, Zach was utterly at a loss to know Bonaparte’s intentions. From Milan, would the French strike towards the Hereditary Lands of the Habsburgs directly or march to cut off the Austrian line of retreat? According to Stutterheim, Zach sent a ‘very well-tried spy’ to find out. Stutterheim also states this spy had been used for deceiving the French army in the previous campaign. His name was Carlo Gioelli.11
Before describing the encounter of the spy and the First Consul, we must first retrace Bonaparte’s steps. From Lausanne he moved to Martigny on 17 May, and for three days remained with the monks who had their headquarters in the town. It was at Martigny that Bonaparte heard about the difficulties posed by Fort Bard. On 20 May, he set out to rejoin the army, riding a mule conducted by a local guide named Pierre Nicolas Dorsaz. A day later he was at Aosta, where he remained for four days, before reaching Verrès on 25 May. He was at Ivrea on 27 May, Vercelli on 30 May, Novara on 1 June and then entered Milan on the following evening.
On 3 June, the day after the First Consul’s arrival in Milan, Gioelli requested an audience with Bonaparte. The details of this meeting are given in Bourrienne’s memoir. Although this secret agent is not named in the text, when Stutterheim read Bourrienne’s account in 1830 he immediately realized it was Gioelli, writing: ‘It is amusing to read in the fourth part of the memoirs of de Bourrienne, what the latter relates about the spy, and gives a benign proof of the slyness of that Italian.’ The account reads:12
‘The First Consul passed six days at Milan. On the second day, a spy, who had served us very well in the first and admirable campaigns in Italy, was announced. The First Consul recollected him, and ordered him to be shown into his cabinet.
“Here you are,” he exclaimed. “So, you have not been shot yet?”
“General,” replied the spy, “when the war recommenced, I determined to serve the Austrians, because you were far from Europe. I always follow the fortunate; but the truth is, I am tired of the trade. I wish to have done with it, and to get enough to enable me to retire. I have been sent to your lines by General Melas, and I can render you an important service. I will give an exact account of the force and the position of all the enemy’s corps, and the names of their commanders. I can tell you the situation in which Alessandria now is. You know me: I will not deceive you; but, I must carry back some report to my general. You are strong enough to give me some true intelligence, which I can communicate to him.”
“Oh! as to that,” resumed the First Consul, “the enemy is welcome to know my forces, and my positions, provided I know his, and he be ignorant of my plans. You shall be satisfied; but do not deceive me: I will give you a thousand Louis, if you serve me well.”
‘I then wrote down, from the dictation of the spy, the names of the corps, their amount, their positions, and the names of the generals commanding them. The First Consul stuck pins in the map to mark his plans on places, respecting which he received information from the spy. We also learned that Alessandria was without provisions, that Melas was far from expecting a siege, that many of his troops were sick, and that he lacked medicines. Berthier was ordered to draw up for the spy a nearly accurate statement of our positions.’
To recap, we first met Gioelli at Mantua in 1799 when he was working for MacDonald as his chief of secret correspondence. We then had his involvement in the Battle of Genola and his audacious coup causing the surrender of Cuneo in December 1799. Stutterheim confirms ‘Zach’s spy’ was still active in 1800 and was travelling as far as Dijon to report on the Army of the Reserve. We also have the testimony of Crossard, who remembered Gioelli as a Turin lawyer who had fallen in with the French on the fall of the Piedmontese republic and the capture of Turin by Suvorov’s Russians. We also cautioned that the back story given by the spy might very probably be false, albeit, like all good deceptions, hung on some elements of truth. If one closely scrutinises Crossard’s description of Gioelli, it never really rang true – Turin fell to the coalition on 26 May 1799. How could Gioelli have reached MacDonald in Tuscany, and then been at Mantua on 16 June where he first met Radetzky? Physically, the journey could have been made; but to suppose MacDonald appointed a recently arrived Piedmontese civilian as his chief of secret correspondence and entrusted him with a captain’s epaulettes and a vital message to Foissac-Latour does not seem credible. We must therefore conclude that Gioelli had been working for the French far longer th
an he admitted to Crossard.
From Bourrienne, we now know Gioelli was previously known to Bonaparte and had clearly worked with him before during the 1796‑1797 campaign. Gioelli was from Alba, part of the province of Cuneo, in Piedmont. The people of Alba proclaimed themselves an independent republic on 26 April 1796 after the arrival of Bonaparte’s army. Many Italians supported the French Revolution, but the republic was very short-lived. Bonaparte surprised the revolutionaries by signing the armistice of Cherasco on 28 April, restoring all of Piedmont to Victor Amadeus III. The more ardent revolutionaries scattered, and many joined the French or acted as spies on their behalf. It appears Gioelli was one of these young men who found themselves displaced.
It should be stated at this point that Bonaparte was an avid user of spies, both militarily and politically. His handling of secret intelligence was brilliant and one of the cornerstones of his success (something nineteenth-century writers wrongly downplayed because of the dishonour associated with espionage). In his first campaigns in Italy, Bonaparte employed Jean Landrieux as head of his bureau secret, which looked at military and political intelligence.13 In 1800, Bonaparte was similarly disposed to employing spies. Although the registers of secret expenditure were generally burned at the end of a campaign, plenty of references to the employment of spies exist in de Cugnac’s compilation of documents relating to the Marengo campaign. Below is a selection:
26 May: Watrin’s spies reported Melas’ arrival in Turin the day before, and his being stunned by the movement of the French army. A spy in Vercelli reported the arrival of 20,000 Austrian troops, confirming their quartermasters had arrived to prepare supplies and lodgings.
27 May: Berthier instructed Duhesme to send spies in the direction of Casale, providing 1,000 francs to pay for them.
29 May: Brigadier General Bethencourt wrote to the First Consul asking for money to pay for spies and local guides.
31 May: Kellermann reported a Piedmontese ‘patriot’ (i.e. pro-revolutionary) had informed them Casale and Valenza were poorly defended. That same day, Citizen Cavalli reported: ‘A trusted person, having arrived from Turin, brought the following news: General Melas had departed on the night of the 9th for Alessandria, on the road to Asti; All the guns of the city have been taken away, and they have been carried into the citadel; The Austrian outposts are at Settimo; The government Supreme Council was insulted by the people at the moment when they were about to visit General Melas; The city is in a great fermentation.’
1 June: Lechi informed Murat everyone believed General Moncey had come down from Bellinzona, but his spies had not returned to confirm this.
2 June: General of Brigade Carra-Saint-Cyr at Ivrea reported his spies believed the Austrians were going to move against Ivrea, but he was not persuaded.
One can see there was a web of espionage following the French advance across northern Italy. Most of these spies were local ones, recruited by the various column commanders, or pro-French informants they encountered. It would take a special spy to have dealt directly with the opposing commanders. The Austrian author Hermann Hüffer also recognized the hand of the Cuneo spy in Milan, although not from Bourrienne, but another source entirely. There is a second version of the meeting with the spy written by French author Édouard Gachot in his 1899 work La deuxième campaign d’Italie (1800). Gachot wrote extensively on the Italian campaigns and based much of his richly written accounts on information he said he collected in travels through Italy and Switzerland. These local sources collected within 100 years of Marengo are extremely interesting, but equally difficult to verify today. Gachot claimed to have found a pamphlet (opuscule) called l’art d’espionnage (the art of spying) while travelling through the Aosta valley. He claims this work was published in Milan in 1807, with a limited print run of twenty copies. The document was, Gachot claimed, the first-hand account of a spy he named as François or Francesco Toli (or Tolli).14 Although much of the dialogue is different, it substantially follows the same content, with Toli exchanging information on the Austrians in return for the strength and location of Bonaparte’s army. It concludes with the two men agreeing to meet on 10 June at the city of Pavia.
Where Gachot’s account is wildly different from Bourrienne is its description of an earlier meeting between Bonaparte and the spy, while the First Consul was at Martigny on the Swiss side of the Great St Bernard. The account includes a fantastic description of the spy infiltrating the French army by climbing the Alps. When interviewed after being captured, the spy provided Bonaparte with the following account:
‘You know, General, I know my profession. Disguised as a priest, I had presented myself at the Great St Bernard. A sentinel aimed at me, and would have fired, I presume, if I had not executed a prompt retreat. Unable to arrive at Vélan, I ran to Gignod, at the entrance to Valpelline. A guide of my friends accompanied me to the path of Col de la Balme. I spent sixty hours crossing Mont Avril in the snow and on the ice. Exhausted and injured, I descended, clinging to the rocks, towards the Val d’Entremont, and then on the path to Bagnes. Thirty soldiers guarded the bridge at Mauvoisin; I was able to thwart their surveillance by crawling at dawn. I was about to see the village of Orsières when some cavalrymen sent for reconnaissance fell upon me. They would have killed me if I had not asked to be taken to General Bonaparte.’15
There is much about this account which rings true, albeit circumstantially. It is entirely plausible for Zach to have used Gioelli in Switzerland and beyond, rather than in the Riviera, where he was known. The route described by the spy is extremely accurate, and is traceable today using modern mapping software and satellite photography. If one couldn’t get past French sentries on the Great St Bernard, the next valley to the east does lead to Mont Vélan via Étroubles. Failing that, one has to travel almost all the way back to Aosta before taking the branch to Valpelline. The spy’s epic sixty-hour climb over Mont Avril is also a viable track, still in use by mountain walkers today. In Gachot’s account, the spy states he was working for Vukassovich, and sure enough, this general was responsible for collating the intelligence on Switzerland. The spy then provides Bonaparte with a description of Vukassovich’s strength and position. If this account is true, it perhaps changes our understanding of the First Consul’s decision-making after crossing the Alps. If Bonaparte was indeed told of Vukassovich’s dispositions and intentions, then perhaps his lightning march on Milan is all the more understandable.
However, this first encounter is not mentioned in Bourrienne. Nor has it been possible to locate the principal sources cited by Gachot. For example, in 1898, Gachot told the editor of la Revue du Foyer de Lyon he had seen a note by the prévot of the religious order at Martigny stating the spy had visited Martigny on 18 May, and the prévot (Louis-Antoine Luder) had stated that the spy Toli had been known to Bonaparte in 1796‑1797. This note does not appear to be among the archives today. In fact the accounts written by the monks indicate Bonaparte arrived and locked himself away in silence for three days, and was only seen to leave the room to go to the refectory. He is said to have ordered some movements to confuse enemy spies, but there is no record of him actually meeting a spy.16 Bourrienne writes how they waited in solitude for three days in the greatest boredom. Surely the arrival of a spy in such sensational circumstances would have merited comment, particularly as Bourrienne later refers to the spy as ‘famous’. In the absence of the original documents to corroborate this account, one suspects Gachot used an element of artistic licence, perhaps even amalgamating several stories into one. For the purposes of this account, the most important fact is that we definitely know Zach sent his most trusted spy to investigate Bonaparte’s strength and intentions. This spy met Bonaparte in Milan and returned to Austrian headquarters with a somewhat inflated order of battle, also revealing the French were bringing troops down the St Gotthard. However, even with this information, it would have been very difficult at this stage to establish what Bonaparte’s intentions were. Was Mantua his real target, or Genoa?
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To conclude this section, another contemporary source appears to confirm the presence of the spy in Milan as reported. General Duhesme commanded what had become the French advanced guard, which had pressed on from Milan to Lodi. It comprised the infantry divisions of Loison and Boudet, and was supported by the cavalry reserve under Murat. In his 1814 work on light infantry, Essai historique sur l’infanterie légère, Duhesme described the confusion Melas must have experienced trying to understand Bonaparte’s objectives, with his fast-moving columns seemingly advancing on all fronts: