Napoleon

by Andrew Roberts

  On April 2, 1796, Napoleon moved the army’s headquarters forward to Albenga on the Gulf of Genoa. On that same day Chauvet died of fever in Genoa. This was ‘a real loss to the army’, Napoleon reported; ‘he was active, enterprising. The army sheds a tear for his memory.’18 Chauvet was the first of a large number of his friends and lieutenants who were to die on campaign with him, and for whom he felt genuine grief.

  The Austrians – who had dominated northern Italy since 1714 – were sending a large army westwards to Piedmont to engage the French, and the Piedmontese were being supplied by the Royal Navy from Corsica. This forced Napoleon to haul everything he needed over the high mountain passes of Liguria. When he reached Albenga on April 5 he told Masséna and Laharpe his plan to cut the enemy off between Carcare, Altare and Montenotte. The Austrian commander, Johann Beaulieu, had much experience and some talent, but he was seventy-one and had been beaten by French armies before. A keen student of past campaigns, Napoleon knew that Beaulieu was cautious, a flaw he planned to exploit. The Austrian alliance with the Piedmontese was weak, and Beaulieu had been warned not to trust too much to it. (‘Now that I know about coalitions,’ Marshal Foch was to joke during the First World War, ‘I respect Napoleon rather less!’) 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. To add to Beaulieu’s problems, he had to answer to the unwieldy and bureaucratic Aulic Council in Vienna, which tended to give orders so late that by the time they arrived they had been overtaken by events. By contrast, Napoleon planned to adopt a daring manoeuvre now known in military academies as ‘the strategy of the central position’: he would remain between the two forces opposing him and would strike first at one and then at the other before they could coalesce. It was a strategy to which he would adhere throughout his career. ‘It is contrary to all principle to make corps which have no communication act separately against a central force whose communications are open’, was one of his maxims of war.19

  ‘I am very busy here,’ he wrote to Josephine from Albenga. ‘Beaulieu is moving his army. We are face-to-face. I’m a little tired. I’m every day on horseback.’20* His daily letters to Josephine continued throughout the campaign, covering hundreds of pages of passionate scrawl. Some were written on the same day as major battles. He would constantly switch from romantic protestations (‘I’ve not passed a day without loving you’) to more self-centred considerations (‘I’ve not taken a cup of tea without cursing that glory and that ambition which keep me separated from the soul of my life’), to maudlin reflections on why she hardly ever wrote back. When she did, she called him ‘vous’, which greatly irritated him. Napoleon’s letters were full of coy erotic allusions to his desire to ravish her as soon as she would come out to join him in Italy. ‘A kiss on your breast, and then a little lower, then much much lower,’ he wrote in one.21 There is some debate as to whether ‘la petite baronne de Kepen’ (occasionally ‘Keppen’) in his letters was a Napoleonic soubriquet for Josephine’s sexual parts. Sadly, the etymology of the ‘Baronne de Kepen’ is lost to history, although it may simply have been the name of one of Josephine’s many lap-dogs, so that ‘Respectful compliments to the little baroness de Kepen’ might have had no sexual overtones.22 There is not much doubt about the less imaginative ‘little black forest’, as in: ‘I give it a thousand kisses and wait with impatience the moment of being there.’23 Somewhat unromantically these letters were often signed ‘Bonaparte’ or ‘BP’, just like his orders.24 ‘Adieu, woman, torment, joy, hope and soul of my life, whom I love, whom I fear, who inspires in me tender feelings which summon up Nature and emotions as impetuous and volcanic as thunder’, is an entirely representative sentence from one of them.

  • • •

  ‘The army is in a terrible state of destitution,’ Napoleon reported to the Directory on April 6 from Albenga. ‘I have still great obstacles to surmount, but they are surmountable. Distress has led to insubordination, and without discipline, victory is out of the question. I hope all this will be changed in the course of a few days.’25 The Army of Italy numbered 49,300 men, against some 80,000 Austrians and Piedmontese. Fortunately, by then Berthier had mastered the immediate supply problems. Napoleon had planned to launch his offensive on April 15, but the Austro-Piedmontese forces started theirs five days earlier, coming up the same road Napoleon had intended to go down. Despite this unforeseen move, within forty-eight hours Napoleon had turned the situation around. Once he got his troops back from the town of Savona largely unscathed, he was able to organize a counter-attack. On the evening of April 11, realizing that the Austrian line was overextended, he fixed the enemy in place with an attack at Montenotte, a mountain village 12 miles north-west of Savona in the valley of the River Erro and then sent Masséna around the right flank in the pouring rain at 1 a.m. to envelop them. It was a tough environment in which to fight: a ridge runs down from Montenotte Superiore to a series of peaks between 2,000 and 3,000 feet high and there was (and still is) thick vegetation all around, climbing up exhausting slopes. Many redoubts had been built by the Austrian army, which were now captured by the swift-moving French infantry columns.

  When the fighting was over, the Austrians had lost 2,500 men, many of whom were captured. Napoleon had lost 800. Though it was a relatively modest engagement, 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. Several of his future battles were to follow the same parameters: an elderly opponent lacking energy; a nationally and linguistically diverse enemy confronting the homogeneous French army; a vulnerable spot which he would latch on to and not let go. The French had moved significantly faster than their enemy, and he had employed a concentration of forces that reversed the numerical odds for just long enough to be decisive.

  Another recurring feature was the fast follow-up after victory: the day after Montenotte, Napoleon fought another engagement at Millesimo, a hamlet on the River Bormida, where he managed to prise the retreating Austrian and Piedmontese forces apart. The Austrians wanted to retreat eastwards to protect Milan, and the Piedmontese westwards to protect their capital of Turin. Napoleon was able to exploit their differing strategic imperatives. In order to escape the river valley, both had to fall back to the fortified village of Dego, where on April 14 Napoleon won his third victory in three days. Austro-Piedmontese losses numbered around 5,700 while the French lost 1,500 men, most due to Napoleon’s impatience to capture the well-defended castle of Cosseria.

  A week later at the battle of Mondovì, a town on the River Ellero, Napoleon vigorously fixed the Piedmontese front while attempting a double-envelopment. It was an ambitious and difficult manoeuvre to pull off but devastating to enemy morale when, as now, it succeeded. The next day the Piedmontese sued for peace. This was fortunate as Napoleon had no heavy siege weaponry with which to besiege Turin. One of the reasons why he maintained such a fluid campaign was that he had no resources for anything else. He complained to Carnot that he had been ‘seconded neither by the artillery nor the engineers, as, in spite of your orders, I have not a single one of the officers I asked for’.26 Conducting (or withstanding) a siege would have been impossible.

  On April 26 Napoleon made a stirring proclamation to his army from Cherasco: ‘Today you equal by your services the armies of Holland and the Rhine. Devoid of everything, you supplied everything. You have won battles without guns; passed rivers without bridges; accomplished forced marches without shoes; bivouacked without brandy and often without bread . . . Today you are amply provided for.’27 He continued: ‘I promise you the conquest of Italy, but on one condition. You must swear to respect the people you deliver, and repress the horrible pillage in which scoundrels, excited by the enemy, have indulged.’28

  A victorious, hungry army pillages. Napoleon was genuinely concerned by the conduct of his troops a
nd wanted to keep the devastation in check. Four days earlier he had published an Order of the Day blaming ‘fearful pillage’ on ‘perverse men, who join their corps only after the battle, and who commit excesses which dishonour the army and the French name’. He authorized generals to shoot any officers who allowed it, though there are no examples of this actually happening. He wrote privately to the Directory two days after his proclamation: ‘I intend to make terrible examples. I shall restore order, or shall cease to command these brigands.’29 It was the first of many hyperbolic threats of resignation he was to make over the course of this campaign.

  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. Often in the future he would blame Austrian, British and Russian armies for pillaging in a manner that he must have known his army had on many occasions greatly exceeded.* ‘We lived upon what the soldiers found,’ recalled an officer of the time. ‘A soldier never steals anything, he only finds it.’ One of Napoleon’s most competent commanders, General Maximilien Foy, would later point out that if Napoleon’s troops had ‘waited for food till the administration of the army caused rations of bread and meat to be distributed, they might have starved’.31

  ‘Living off the land’ allowed Napoleon a speed of manoeuvre that was to become an essential element of his strategy. ‘The strength of the army,’ he stated, ‘like power in mechanics, is the product of multiplying the mass by the velocity.’32 He encouraged everything that permitted faster movement, including the use of forced marches which more or less doubled the 15 miles per day a demi-brigade could move. ‘No man ever knew how to make an army march better than Napoleon,’ recalled one of his officers. ‘These marches were frequently very fatiguing; sometimes half the soldiers were left behind; but, as they never lacked goodwill, they did arrive, though they arrived later.’33

  In warm weather the French army didn’t sleep in tents at night, because, as a veteran recalled, the armies ‘marched so rapidly that they could not have carried with them all the requisite baggage’.34 The only thing that followed them at pace were the wagons carrying ammunition. 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. Lighter field guns, more roads, smaller baggage-trains and far fewer camp-followers helped Napoleon’s armies to move at what he calculated to be twice the speed of Julius Caesar’s.

  • • •

  Armistice negotiations with the Piedmontese at Cherasco began immediately. In one exchange, Napoleon sardonically told a plenipotentiary who had suggested terms that left him with fewer fortresses than he desired: ‘The Republic, in entrusting to me the command of an army, has credited me with possessing enough discernment of what that army requires without having recourse to the advice of my enemy.’35 One of the two negotiators, the Savoyard colonel Marquis Henry Costa de Beauregard, later wrote a memoir in which he described the encounter: ‘[He was] always cold, polished and laconic’.36 At 1 a.m. on April 28 he took out his watch and said: ‘Gentlemen, I give you notice that the general attack is ordered for two o’clock, and if I am not assured that [the fortress of] Coni will be placed in my hands before the end of the day, this attack will not be delayed for a moment.’

  It might have been a classic Napoleonic bluff, but the Piedmontese couldn’t take the risk. The armistice was signed immediately. Tortona, Alessandria, Coni and Ceva were handed over to the French, along with the route to Valence and all the territory between Coni and the Stura, Tanaro and Po rivers. In a smart ploy, Napoleon insisted on a secret clause giving him the right to use the bridge over the River Po at Valenza, knowing the news would be leaked to the Austrians and that Beaulieu would send troops to cover the bridge. He actually planned to cross the river near Piacenza, 70 miles further east.

  Over bottles of celebratory Asti wine and a pyramid of cakes supplied by the nuns of Cherasco, Napoleon spoke openly of the events of the previous days, blaming himself for the loss of lives at Cosseria Castle during the battle of Millesimo, triggered by his ‘impatience to separate the Austrian and Piedmontese armies’. He recounted that he had been stationed at Dego two years earlier, when he had been in charge of an artillery column. He had proposed the same invasion strategy then, but it had been rejected by a council of war. Then he added ‘Nothing should ever be decided by this means in an army under [my] command’, and said that these councils were only ever resorted to as ‘a cowardly proceeding’ intended to distribute blame.37

  Napoleon told the Piedmontese he had executed a soldier for rape the previous night, and diplomatically praised them for their strategic withdrawals on April 17 and 21, saying: ‘You twice escaped very dexterously out of my claws.’ He showed Beauregard the small travelling case in which he kept all his personal belongings, and said: ‘I had a great deal more of these superfluities when I was a simple artillery officer than now when I am commander-in-chief.’ In their hour-long conversation while watching the sun rise, Beauregard was impressed with his knowledge of Piedmont’s history, artists and scholars. Napoleon likened his movement to ‘the combat of the younger Horatius, distancing his three enemies so as to disable them and kill them in succession’. He said he wasn’t actually the youngest French general, though he conceded that his age was an asset. ‘Youth is almost indispensable in commanding an army,’ he told Beauregard, ‘so necessary are high spirits, daring, and pride to such a great task.’38

  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. ‘It’s an armistice accorded to one wing of an army, giving me time to beat the other,’ he wrote. ‘My columns are on the march; Beaulieu is flying, but I hope to overtake him.’39 He hoped to quell any quibbles from Paris with cash, promising to levy what he euphemistically termed a ‘contribution’ of several million francs on the Duke of Parma and suggesting one of 15 million francs from Genoa. Such ‘contributions’, once levied right across northern Italy, would allow him to pay the army half its wages in silver, rather than the despised mandats territoriaux, paper money that constantly depreciated in value.40 Saliceti – for whom Napoleon had found a post organizing the Army of Italy, having clearly forgiven him for the incident in Antibes prison – appears to have hit upon the rather obvious recourse of paying the army first, before shipping the balance back to the cash-strapped Directory. Nothing short of military defeat demoralizes a country so totally as hyper-inflation, and the Directory, led by Barras since Vendémiaire, desperately needed the bullion that Napoleon was to send. This largely explains why, though they came to resent and even fear his successes in Italy and Austria, they made only one (feeble) attempt to replace him.

  ‘Leave nothing in Italy which our political situation will permit you to carry away,’ Napoleon was instructed, ‘and which may be useful to us.’41 Napoleon embraced this part of his remit enthusiastically. 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. On May 1 he wrote to Citizen Faipoult: ‘Send me a list of the pictures, statues, cabinets and curiosities at Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Modena and Bologna.’42 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.

  The French connoisseurs and curators appointed by Napoleon to choose which objets d’art to remove argued that bringing the greatest examples of Western art together in Paris act
ually made them far more accessible. ‘Formerly it was necessary to climb the Alps and wander over whole provinces in order to gratify this learned and dignified curiosity,’ wrote the Briton Rev. William Shephard in 1814, but ‘the spoils of Italy are now brought together almost under the same roof, and there thrown open to the whole world’.43* As the pro-Bonapartist English writer and translator Anne Plumptre pointed out at the time, much of what the French were removing were objects that Romans such as the consul Lucius Mummius had themselves taken from places like Corinth and Athens.44

  Napoleon wanted what became his museum – which he refurbished, gilded, filled with sculptures and turned into a ‘parade palace’ – to boast not only the world’s greatest art, but also its greatest collection of historical manuscripts. 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’. He later instructed Berthier to ask one of his generals in Spain to find out where the archives of Charles V and Philip II were kept, since they ‘would so nicely complete this vast European collection’.45