He was about to sign a fifth. On May 23 street fighting had broken out in Genoa between pro-French giacobini democrats and the forces of the Genovese doge and senate. The authorities prevailed, and documents were discovered revealing Saliceti and Faipoult’s part in fomenting the botched uprising. Napoleon was furious with the Genoese democrats for rising too early, but he used the excuse of the deaths of some Frenchmen to send his aide-de-camp Lavalette to cajole the Genovese government. Like their Venetian counterparts, they soon capitulated and Napoleon personally drew up a constitution for a new Ligurian Republic – again without any input from the Directory.* This was based on the French constitution of 1795 and introduced a bicameral legislature of 150 and 300 members respectively, religious liberty, civic equality and measures of local self-government, principles which reflected neither the strict Jacobinism of his earlier days, nor (as some contemporaries suggested) a Corsican spirit of vendetta against Genoa. Indeed, after the democrats had destroyed the statue of Genoa’s great hero, Andrea Doria, Napoleon admonished them, writing that Doria had been ‘a great sailor and a great statesman. Aristocracy was liberty in his day. The whole of Europe envies your city the honour of having produced that celebrated man. You will, I doubt not, take pains to rear his statue again: I pray you to let me bear a part of the expense which that will entail.’13
• • •
Napoleon’s main residence in the spring of 1797 was the palazzo of Mombello outside Milan, where he summoned Miot de Melito for discussions. Miot noted the grandeur of Napoleon’s daily life there. Not only did Napoleon bring his family to live with him – Madame Mère, Joseph, Louis, Pauline and his uncle Joseph Fesch in the first wave, with more to come – but he also introduced a quasi-courtly etiquette. Italian nobility appeared at his table instead of his aides-de-camp, dining took place in public as it had at Versailles under the Bourbons, and Napoleon betrayed a very un-republican taste for flunkeys. These were paid for out of a fortune that he himself stated amounted at that time to 300,000 francs. Bourrienne claimed it was more than 3 million francs – equivalent to the entire monthly pay of the Army of Italy. In either case, it suggests that it was not just his generals who had mulcted Italy.14
Miot claimed in his memoirs (largely written by his son-in-law General Fleischmann) that on June 1, 1797 Napoleon took him for a walk in the garden of Mombello, and said: ‘Do you believe that I triumph in Italy in order to aggrandize the pack of lawyers who form the Directory, for the likes of Carnot and Barras? What an idea! . . . I wish to undermine the Republican party, but only for my own profit . . . As for me, my dear Miot, I have tasted authority and I will not give it up.’ He is further reported to have said of the French: ‘Give them baubles – that suffices them; they will be amused and let themselves be led, so long as the end to which they are going is skilfully hidden from them.’15 Yet this whole cynical speech – which many historians have taken at face value – fails to ring true. Would so subtle a statesman as Napoleon simply have blurted out the extent of his (at that time treacherous) ambitions to undermine French republicanism to a public functionary like Miot de Melito, whose loyalty could not be known and who supposedly recalled the conversation perfectly decades later?16
It was at this time, with many of them under his eye at Mombello, that Napoleon began his persistent interference in the love-lives of his siblings. On May 5, 1797 the twenty-year-old Elisa married the Corsican noble Captain Felice Baciocchi, who thereafter found swift promotion in the army and ultimately became a senator and Prince of Lucca, sensibly ignoring her several infidelities. The next month, on June 14, under Napoleon’s similar encouragement and prompting, the seventeen-year-old Pauline married the twenty-five-year-old General Charles Leclerc, whom Napoleon had served with at Toulon and who had also fought at Castiglione and Rivoli. Napoleon knew that Pauline was in love with someone else at the time, whom their mother Letizia thought unsuitable, but he supported the nuptials regardless. He also encouraged the cavalryman Murat to court his other sister, Caroline, and they married in January 1800.
• • •
In Paris, the Directory was in a precarious position. With inflation out of control – shoes cost forty times more by 1797 than they had in 1790 – and paper money, assignats, trading at 1 per cent of its face value, politics were in a febrile state.17 Discontent with the government was evident on May 26, when the Marquis de Barthélemy, a constitutional royalist, became a Director after royalist gains in elections. The Directory now consisted of Barras and Carnot, the lawyers Reubell and Louis de La Révellière-Lépeaux, and Barthélemy, the first four of whom were regicides, although Carnot was now tacking strongly towards the more liberal, non-royalist moderates. Napoleon had not taken such a prominent part in saving the Republic at Vendémiaire only to see it replaced by royalists, so he sent Lavalette to Paris to observe political developments there. Lavalette found plots for the return of the Bourbons, one of which involved General Charles Pichegru, a former military instructor at Brienne and the conqueror of Holland, but also conspiracies on the extreme left, the uncovering of one of which led to the guillotining in late May of the journalist and agitator François-Noël Babeuf, whose ideas were essentially communist (although neither the term nor the concept had yet been invented).
Napoleon was particularly sensitive to opposition to his own actions in the National Assembly. When a moderate ex-Girondin deputy called Joseph Dumolard made a speech complaining that Venice had been unfairly treated, that the Assembly had been kept in ignorance of Napoleon’s treaties and that ‘France’ (by which he meant Napoleon) had violated international law with her interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states, Napoleon reacted explosively. ‘Ignorant and garrulous lawyers have asked why we occupied Venice,’ he told the Directory, ‘but I warn you, and I speak in the name of eighty thousand men, that the time when cowardly lawyers and wretched babblers guillotined soldiers is past; and if you oblige them, the troops of Italy will march on Clichy, and woe to you!’18 Clichy was the name both of the royalist club in the rue de Clichy and of the Parisian gate through which an army might march into the city.
Napoleon used his Bastille Day proclamation to the army to warn the domestic opposition that ‘The Royalists, as soon as they show themselves, will cease to exist.’ He promised ‘Implacable war to the enemies of the Republic and of the constitution!’19 Five days later he held big celebrations in Milan, which aimed to convey the message to France that the Army of Italy were more trustworthy as republicans than the messieurs (‘gentlemen’) of the Army of the Rhine. Such was the mutual dislike between the two forces that when Bernadotte’s division came from Germany to Italy in early 1797, fights broke out between the officers, and when Napoleon gave Bernadotte the honour of taking the standards captured at Rivoli back to Paris, some suggested it had been a ploy to remove him from Italy. Napoleon’s relations with the ambitious and independent Bernadotte had always been strained, and were to become far more so the following year when Bernadotte married Napoleon’s ex-fiancée, Désirée Clary.
• • •
On July 7, 1797, Napoleon published the constitution of the new Cisalpine (‘on this side of the Alps’) Republic. Comprising Milan (its capital), Como, Bergamo, Cremona, Lodi, Pavia, Varese, Lecco and Reggio, it represented a greater step towards the creation of an Italian national identity and consciousness than had the Cispadane Republic, as the large numbers of Italians who volunteered for its military units indicated.20 Napoleon appreciated that a large, unified, pro-French Italian state covering the Lombardy plain and beyond would provide protection against Austrian revanchism, and offer him the opportunity to strike once more against Styria, Carinthia and Vienna should the need arise. Its constitution, based on that of France, was drawn up by four committees under his direction, but because the first elections of the Cispadane Republic had seen many priests voted into office, this time Napoleon appointed its five Directors and all 180 of its legislators himself, with the Duke
of Serbelloni as its first president.
By mid-July the situation in Paris had become dangerous. When the republican General Hoche was appointed war minister in the hope of cowing opposition to the government, he was accused by members of the Assembly of violating the constitution as he was not yet thirty, the minimum age for government office – except for Directors, who had to be forty – and he was forced to resign after only five days in the post. Napoleon, who was then twenty-seven, took note. ‘I see that the Clichy Club means to trample over my corpse to the destruction of the republic,’ he histrionically told the Directory on July 15 after Dumolard went so far as to table a motion critical of him in the Assembly.21 The separation of powers under the Constitution of the Year III of August 1795 had meant that while the Directory could not dissolve the Assembly, the Assembly could not force policy on the Directors. There being no court of higher appeal, politics in Paris had reached a deadlock.
On July 17, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand became foreign minister for the first of his four terms in the post. Clever, lazy, subtle, well travelled, club footed, a voluptuary and bishop of Autun (a bishopric he never visited) before he was excommunicated in 1791, Talleyrand could trace his ancestry back (at least to his own satisfaction) to the ninth-century sovereign counts of Angoulême and Périgord. He had contributed to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and had been forced into exile, which he spent in England and the United States between 1792 and 1796. Insofar as he had a guiding principle it was a soi-disant affection for the English constitution, though he would never have imperilled his own career or comforts for one moment in order to promote that or any other. For many years Napoleon held a seemingly unbounded admiration for him, writing to him often and confidentially and calling him ‘the King of European conversation’, although by the end of his life he had seen through him completely, saying, ‘He rarely gives advice, but can make others talk . . . I never knew anyone so entirely indifferent to right and wrong.’22 Talleyrand betrayed Napoleon in due course, as he did everyone else, and Napoleon took it very personally. The likelihood that he would die peacefully in his bed was proof for Napoleon later in life ‘that there can be no God who metes out punishment’.23
Yet this bitterness was all in the future. In July 1797 the first thing Talleyrand did on becoming foreign minister was to write to Napoleon asking oleaginously for his friendship – ‘The mere name of Bonaparte is an aid which ought to smooth away all my difficulties’ – eliciting a letter of equally embarrassing effusiveness in return.24 ‘Alexander triumphed perhaps only to enthuse the Athenians,’ replied Napoleon. ‘Other captains are the elite of society, you for example. I’ve studied the Revolution too much not to know what it owes you. The sacrifices that you made for it deserve recompense . . . You would not have to wait for it were I in power.’25 Amid the mutual flattery was the promise of what might come from a political alliance.
By late July, Napoleon had decided that he would support a Barras-led purge of the French government and legislature, ridding it of the royalists and moderates whom he thought were endangering the Republic. On the 27th he sent the strongly republican (indeed, neo-Jacobin) Augereau to Paris. He warned Lavalette of Augereau’s ambition – ‘Do not put yourself in his power: he has sown disorder in the Army; he is a factious man’ – but recognized that he was the right man to have in Paris at this time.26 He told the Directory that Augereau was ‘called by private affairs’ to Paris, but the truth was altogether more dramatic.27 With Pichegru taking the presidency of the lower house, the Five Hundred, and another crypto-royalist, the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, becoming president of the upper house, the Elders, and with Moreau hardly bothering to celebrate Bastille Day in his Army of the Rhine, Barras now needed Napoleon’s political support, his military muscle and his money. Lavalette is believed to have taken up to 3 million francs – the equivalent of Napoleon’s entire net worth if Bourrienne is to be believed – to Paris to buy influence prior to the coup which was now intended.28
The Fructidor coup took place in the early hours of September 4, 1797 (18 Fructidor in the republican calendar) and was a complete success. Augereau occupied the important strategic points in Paris, despite a law against troops approaching the capital without the Assembly’s permission. He placed soldiers around the Tuileries where the legislature sat, and arrested eighty-six deputies and several editors, whom he sent to the Temple prison. Many of these, including Barthélemy, Pichegru and Barbé-Marbois, were subsequently deported 4,400 miles away to the penal colony of Guiana. Carnot escaped the net, and managed to make it to Germany. Unsurprisingly, Dumolard was imprisoned too, though on the Île d’Oléron off the Atlantic coast of France rather than in South America. The rump of the legislative chambers then annulled the forthcoming elections in forty-nine pro-royalist departments and passed laws against named priests and unpardoned émigrés who had returned to France. The reliable republicans Philippe Merlin de Douai and François de Neufchâteau joined the Directory in place of the purged Carnot and Barthélemy, and the re-radicalized body took extra powers to close newspapers and political clubs (such as the Clichy). It was now as powerful as the old Committee of Public Safety had been in the days of the Terror. The Army of Italy had saved the Directory, at least for the moment; in Miot’s view, Napoleon’s adherence to the Fructidor purge ‘secured its triumph’.29 The Directory purged the officer corps too, sacking thirty-eight suspected crypto-royalist generals, including Napoleon’s former rival General Kellermann, commander of the Army of the Alps.
Bourrienne recorded that Napoleon was ‘intoxicated with joy’ when he heard of the outcome.30 Although Carnot was one of the coup’s most prominent victims, he seems not to have held Fructidor against Napoleon personally. When he published his defence, from exile in 1799, he claimed that it had been he rather than Barras who had proposed Napoleon for the Italian command in 1796 and that by 1797 Barras had become an enemy of Napoleon, making ‘gross and calumnious sarcasms on a person who must be dear to Bonaparte’ (that is, Josephine).31 He claimed that for Barras, Reubell and La Révellière, ‘Bonaparte was ever odious to them, and they never lost sight of their determination to destroy him’ and said they had privately made ‘exclamations against the preliminaries of Leoben’.32 Napoleon clearly believed this, because when he seized power he recalled Carnot to the war ministry.
Napoleon himself had no wish to be seen intriguing and spent the day of the coup negotiating peace in Italy at Passeriano. But as soon as Lavalette – who had been with Barras on the night of 17 Fructidor – got back a few days later he was made to spend four hours recounting the events to Napoleon, describing in detail the ‘hesitations, fits of passion, and almost every gesture of the principal actors’.33 Carnot’s protégé Henri Clarke was recalled to Paris, leaving Napoleon the sole plenipotentiary for the Campo Formio peace negotiations.
Napoleon was regularly vexed by his discussions with the Austrian plenipotentiary, Count Ludwig von Cobenzl. ‘It would appear difficult to understand the stupidity and bad faith of the Court of Vienna,’ he told Talleyrand on September 12, calling the negotiations ‘just a joke’. After Fructidor he had no more interference from the Directory over issues such as Venice joining the Cisalpine Republic (which he opposed) and compensation for the Austrians in Germany for territorial losses in Italy (which he supported).34 The Austrians saw that there was no immediate hope of a Bourbon restoration, and so no further point in stalling negotiations. Demanding on September 26 that the Directory ratify his peace treaty with Piedmont, which stipulated that the kingdom send 10,000 men to serve alongside the French army, Napoleon predicted that in six months’ time King Charles Emmanuel IV of Piedmont would be dethroned. As he told Talleyrand, ‘When a giant embraces a pygmy and folding him in his arms, stifles him, he cannot be accused of having committed a crime.’35*
Napoleon’s letters from this period refer constantly to his supposed ill-health – ‘I can hardly get on
horseback; I require two years’ repose’ – and are replete once again with threats of resignation for not being properly appreciated by the government, especially after the ‘factious’ Augereau was given command of the Army of the Rhine after Hoche’s death from consumption on September 17. He also continually complained about the difficulty of negotiating with Cobenzl.* In the course of a frank discussion over the future of the Ionian Isles, Napoleon smashed on the floor either a beautiful piece of antique china (the Austrian version) or a cheap tea set (the Bonapartist version), or possibly Cobenzl’s ‘prized porcelain teacups that had been given him by sovereigns such as Catherine the Great’ (Napoleon’s own version twenty years after the event).36 His negotiating technique often involved such histrionics, usually put on for show. Whatever was broken, Cobenzl remained calm, merely reporting back to Vienna: ‘He behaved like a fool.’37 One of Napoleon’s private secretaries recorded how Napoleon’s anger worked:
When excited by any violent passion his face assumed a . . . terrible expression . . . his eyes flashed fire; his nostrils dilated, swollen with the inner storm . . . He seemed to be able to control at will these explosions, which, by the way, as time went on, became less and less frequent. His head remained cool . . . When in good humour, or when anxious to please, his expression was sweet and caressing, and his face was lighted up by a most beautiful smile.38
In a long and exasperated letter to Talleyrand on October 7, recounting to him yet again Cobenzl’s obstinacy, Napoleon openly wondered whether fighting for Italy had ultimately been worth it, calling it ‘an enervated, superstitious, pantalon and cowardly nation’ that was incapable of greatness and certainly ‘not worthy of having forty thousand Frenchmen die for it’.39* He added that he had had no aid from the Italians from the start of his campaign, and that the Cisalpine Republic had only a couple of thousand men under arms. ‘This is history,’ he wrote; ‘the remainder, which is all very fine in proclamations, printed discourses, etc., is so much romance.’ Napoleon’s letters to Talleyrand resemble streams of consciousness, so close had their epistolary relationship become in only a matter of weeks. ‘I write to you as I think,’ he told his new ally and confidant, ‘which is the greatest mark of esteem I can give you.’40
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