Napoleon Bonaparte

by Alan Schom

  As usual, in the ensuing battle Bonaparte was in the heaviest part of the fighting, and after clearing Lodi he brought up twenty-four guns and concentrated on the Austrian troops on the far side of the Adda. A brief Austrian charge quickly collapsed as Masséna and Berthier headed a powerful French column against them, ultimately breaking the center of the Austrian position. Overwhelmed by vastly superior forces, the brave Austrians retreated to Brescia, having achieved their objective of delaying the French.

  In the brief battle at Lodi, the Austrians had lost 153 dead and many hundreds of wounded and prisoners, compared with a much higher French casualty list. But with Lodi now theirs, and the Austrians gone, the road to Milan lay open. “They [the Directory] have seen nothing yet,” an exhilarated Napoleon exclaimed to Captain Marmont. “That evening, for the first time, I no longer considered myself a mere general, but a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples,” Bonaparte later remarked.[57]

  But no sooner had he spoken than he received fresh orders from the five members of the Directory in Paris, informing him that Gen. François Etienne Christophe Kellermann would be transferred from Germany to take command of the principal part of the Army of Italy. Furious that a mere sideshow was to be allotted to him, Napoleon wrote back that same day: “I believe that to unite Kellermann and myself under joint command in Italy will prove fatal to us. I cannot serve with a man who believes himself to be Europe’s finest general...[Moreover,] unity of command is the most important thing in war.”[58] To the flamboyant Corsican a competitor here was quite unacceptable. Instead he would leave the army, he informed the Directory. Off went the special courier to the French capital that same night, as Napoleon hurriedly marched on Milan before Kellermann could come to replace him. The Directory gave in: “Immortal glory to the conqueror of Lodi. Your plan is after all the only one to follow!” Kellermann would not be superseding him.[59]

  On May 15 the magistrates of Milan duly threw open their gates to their liberator, treating him as a real hero who had released them from their long Austrian bondage. But instead of taking advantage of the goodwill of this large, prosperous capital, Napoleon, at the urging of the French commissars, including Salicetti, unleashed thousands of hungry, tired, victorious, womanless troops on the unsuspecting people of Milan, who became victims of an orgy of destroying, rapine, and killing. He had promised his men riches back at Nice, and now they were taking him at his word.

  After veritable fortunes were stolen from the private citizens of this city in “war contributions,” another ten million livres were taken from the dukes of Parma and Modena.[60] And the trains of war booty — gold, silver, jewels, and works of art — soon to be synonymous with the name of Bonaparte were making their long journey over the Alps to Paris. The French treasury, literally bankrupt at this point, welcomed Napoleon Bonaparte as its savior. To be sure, Napoleon paid a high price for the looting when large-scale revolts broke out at Milan and Pavia following his departure with the army on May 22. He ordered them to be put down brutally, followed by threats, imprisonment, executions, rape, and more days of looting. He even ordered Colonel Lannes to burn the nearby village of Biansco to the ground and round up all the boys and men and murder them. (Lannes, as usual, could be relied on to carry out his instructions with enthusiastic dedication.) Thereafter Bonaparte’s name, along with that of the French, was dreaded and despised throughout the land. “The whole of Italy has been shaken,” Commissar Salicetti glowed in a letter to Barras. “Our success everywhere, the bravery of the troops, along with Bonaparte’s audacity and military operations frighten it. I think you should be well pleased with this army that everyone formerly dismissed as good for nothing and that instead has in such a short time accomplished everything.”[61]

  But Napoleon did not rest on his laurels. On May 28, at the head of an army of thirty thousand men, he set out from Brescia, determined to bring the Austrians to bay once and for all. It was not that easy, of course. After narrowly escaping capture by a detachment of Austrian cavalry on June 1 — he was literally saved by his own aides-de-camp’s swordsmanship — Napoleon decided to form his Guides (which later would be known as the famous Consular, then Imperial, Guard, commanded by Captain Bessières) to escort the commander-in-chief wherever he went thereafter.

  Onward the French marched, seizing Peschiera, Castelnuovo, and Verona as they proceeded to their next major objective, the stout fortress of Mantua. Continuing to inform his superiors of his inability to face the French, the elusive Baron de Beaulieu remained on the run. After leaving a twelve-thousand-man garrison at Mantua, he marched north past Rovereto to Trent. Meanwhile Napoleon prepared to lay siege to Mantua, the last important city in Lombardy not yet in French hands. This impregnable citadel was surrounded and protected by two large lakes and malarial swamps, which would prove deadly to both sides. As for Genoa, it was now occupied and its senate threatened by the swaggering Murat and his troopers.

  Major General Bonaparte also received orders from Paris to attack the pope and his domains, the Papal States, with the purpose of sending more loot to the thirsty French treasury. Napoleon’s advance into the Papal States and Tuscany that June did indeed prove successful, thanks to Generals Augereau and Vaubois, and on the twenty-third Pope Pius VI requested, and was granted, an armistice. The terms were steep — an enormous indemnity in the form of gold and paintings from the Vatican and the occupation of Ancona. Terrified and utterly undefended, Florence, Ferrara, and Leghorn opened their gates to French military occupation as well. Among the categories of indemnity demanded of these latter cities were cannon, which were then hauled by mule and horse up to Mantua.

  Throughout this period, literally from the moment he had left Nice, Napoleon had been imploring Josephine to join him as quickly as possible. With the capture of Milan, he had become more insistent and she more evasive. “I beseech you, do leave today with Murat [whom he had dispatched to Paris],” he had written following the Armistice of Cherasco.[62] “My happiness is knowing that you are happy, my joy that you are gay, my only pleasure in knowing that you are enjoying some as well.” And then more passionately, “Never has a woman been loved with more devotion, fire, and tenderness.” But he added, if she ever left him, “I would feel, that in losing your love, your heart, your adorable person, that I will have lost everything that makes life dear and worthwhile.”

  Napoleon wrote to her at least once a day for 127 days straight! Sometimes she did not even bother to read his letters immediately. And when she did, she often read aloud some of his more passionate, intimate passages to her friends, male and female alike. “Bonaparte,” as she always referred to him, was “si drôle!” She grudgingly wrote a brief note usually once or twice a week, but sometimes not for two weeks. “Josephine, no letter from you,” he chided her again from Milan on May 24. “No news from my good friend! Has she forgotten me already?” “All couriers arrive without a single letter from you...mi dolce amore...Clearly your professed love for me was but a caprice...It seems that you have made your choice, and you know with whom you want to replace me.” He was dejected, and very jealous, thinking she was resuming her affair with Barras. “Drowning in my sorrow, perhaps I have written too harshly,” he wrote again on June 14, now from Tortona, still without a sign of his wife, who had used for her excuse this time her alleged pregnancy. She could not possibly travel. (She was not pregnant.)

  He was eating his heart out over her. “I went to Tortona to await your arrival. I waited every day, in vain.” He literally rode up the highway several miles looking for her coach:

  I have just received your brief letter informing me that you are not coming here after all...Ah, I had not realized that it was possible to suffer so deeply, so much pain, such frightful torment...I send you a million kisses, and just remember that there is nothing as powerful as my love for you, which will last forever...I feel from your lips, your heart, a flame that consumes me...I kiss your heart, and then a little lower, and then much lower still.[63]

/>   For the first — and only — time in his life, Napoleon Bonaparte was madly in love, while tormented by jealousy and uncertainty.

  It was not just the opera, the theater, and the social gatherings of Paris that Josephine was so reluctant to forgo. Milan was an important, civilized capital as well, and the palace that the duke of Strebello put at Bonaparte’s disposition was large and comfortable, with dozens of servants. At the same time, serving as the very nerve center of the French occupation, there was much activity there, with interesting people coming and going all the time. But it was only when Barras finally forced Josephine to join her husband that she did so. “She left as though she were going to a torture chamber instead of to Italy to reign as a sovereign,” one friend recalled.[64]

  She finally arrived at Milan at the end of June, in the company of one Lt. Hippolyte Charles, about to spend the third day of her almost-four-month-old marriage with her husband. If his initial joy in seeing her again was sumptuous, nevertheless duty beckoned and he was off again in a few days. “I am dying of boredom here,” she wrote Thérésia Tallien. “My husband does not merely love me, he absolutely worships me. I think he will go mad!”[65]

  Napoleon’s paranoia and mistrust of Josephine had in fact not been far off the mark, but instead of returning to Barras, she had begun a new passionate affair with Lieutenant Charles, nine years her junior. She had been seeing him daily, and no one had dared to say a word to Napoleon (nor would they for another two years). Indeed, Napoleon’s need of, and hunger for, her presence was more ardent than ever. “My happiness,” he wrote her, “is being near you. What nights together, ma bonne amie!...Oh, but surely you must have some faults in your character. Tell me!” Little did he realize what he was asking for.[66]

  Josephine or no Josephine, the war continued, as the dithering General Beaulieu was replaced as Austrian commander-in-chief by the younger, more dynamic Graf Würmser, who arrived at the end of June along with twenty-five-thousand fresh troops from the Rhine. With a total of fifty thousand men, Würmser had orders to destroy the French army and clear Italy of the invaders once and for all. A man of action, Würmser swept down from the north on both sides of Lake Garda. Taken unawares for a second time, Masséna was routed from the critically important stronghold of Verona on July 29,[67] while eighteen thousand Austrians descending along the western shore of the lake took the town of Salo, though they were finally stopped at Brescia on August 1 by Augereau. Meanwhile Napoleon rushed up all his reserves, including Sérurier’s entire force besieging Mantua.

  “I must take serious measures in the event of our defeat,” Bonaparte confided to Berthier at the end of July. “The enemy have broken through our [French] lines in three places, cutting our communications with Milan and Verona.” Then came the disastrous news of the fall of Verona, along with Salo, Rivoli, and Corona.[68] To prevent a complete collapse of the overextended French position, Bonaparte had to stop Würmser’s separate troops from joining each other.

  By August 5 Napoleon had brought up Sérurier’s division to the heights overlooking Castiglione, giving him twenty-five thousand men (although Sérurier, ill with malaria, had been evacuated to France). In a little surprise of his own, Napoleon struck. In a night march Masséna and Augereau, attacked, forcing a startled Würmser to retreat over the Mincio. Bonaparte’s rapid forced marches had once again paid off. Maintaining his momentum, he reached Verona on the night of August 7. Immediately Würmser — who had just arrived himself — and his men beat a panicky retreat.[69] Verona, Lonato, and Castiglione were now secured by Napoleon.

  Both sides had paid a high price in the retaking of the plain, the French suffering some ten thousand casualties to the Austrians’ seventeen thousand. The number of civilians dead, wounded, and displaced is not known, nor are the numbers of houses and buildings destroyed and women raped. Napoleon, realizing that not only his campaign but also his career were at stake, drove himself furiously, not to mention his horses, five of them dropping dead under him in just three days. Meanwhile, an exhausted and defeated Würmser fell back to Bassano, as Napoleon reassembled his troops at Verona. There, to bolster French morale and display his might and determination before the hostile Italian population, he gave his first full military review since entering Italy.[70] Another Austrian column also retreated north, Masséna and Vaubois catching up with and defeating twenty-five thousand men at Rovereto on September 4. Two days later Napoleon force-marched his men to Bassano, where Lannes and Murat led French forces to another complete victory on September 8.

  Now Würmser marched on Mantua. Napoleon responded by cutting the Austrians’ line of communications with their most powerful fortress at Trieste. Nevertheless, Bonaparte was unable to prevent Würmser’s larger force from defeating Masséna at Castellero and reaching Mantua safely on September 12. Würmser with his garrison of twenty-three thousand men at Mantua remained a force to be reckoned with. They had been partially successful in drawing Napoleon southward and preventing him from joining the French Army of the Rhine and Moselle, then on its way up the Danube to Vienna. Meanwhile that force was hurled back by a strong attack by Archduke Karl on September 19, however, ending the French threat to the Habsburg capital at least for the moment.

  By now malaria and typhus were epidemic in the camps of both Würmser and Bonaparte. Fourteen thousand of Napoleon’s men were incapacitated, leaving only nine thousand French troops permanently besieging Mantua again and another eighteen thousand available as a field force.

  Nevertheless, after seizing Modena, Napoleon pulled off an important coup. By signing a treaty with Naples on October 10, he forestalled Neapolitan troops from coming to the aid of the pope. Taking advantage of the moment, Napoleon created three temporary artificial republics: the Cisalpine (around Milan), the Cispadena (combining Reggio and Modena), and the Transpadena (linking Bologna and Ferrara). He was gradually consolidating his hold over northern Italy.

  Unknown to the French, however, Würmser’s replacement, the fifty-year-old Hungarian-born Austrian commander, Baron Nicolas von Alvinzi, was descending from the north with another forty-six thousand men, with orders to advance on Verona in a pincer movement with the eighteen thousand Austrian soldiers already there. If they attacked in the north, and Würmser held down a large French force around Mantua, Napoleon’s smaller divided army could be destroyed in isolated sections.

  The fresh Austrian offensive began on November 4, attacking Trent and sending a small French force fleeing southward. Although inflicting serious casualties on Alvinzi’s army, Masséna was unable to prevent the more powerful twenty-nine-thousand-man Austrian force from continuing toward Vicenza. All Napoleon’s plans were a complete shambles.[71] At this point he prepared a fourth plan of operations. He would divide and attack the Austrian forces around Lake Garda (coincidentally Alvinzi had precisely the same objective against the French). Setting out in the rain from Verona on November 11 with fifteen thousand men, Napoleon arrived at Caldiero only to find it already securely in Alvinzi’s hands. Attacking in the continuing rain the next day, Masséna was defeated and the principal battery of French artillery captured. Although Alvinzi’s army was suffering heavy casualties, they nevertheless succeeded in throwing Bonaparte back, thereby remaining masters of not only the Tyrol but also of all the territory between Trent and the Adige. Napoleon himself, now down to an effective force of just thirteen thousand men, was obliged to return in defeat to Verona. “We were no longer in a position to take the offensive anywhere,” he later admitted. “That Caldiero business, and that of the Tyrol had strongly lowered the Army’s morale...[Moreover,] a large number of men had been wounded two or three times at various battles. Morale thus plummeted.”[72]

  “Perhaps the hour...of my own death is at hand,” an unusually discouraged Napoleon warned the Directory, even ordering Josephine to evacuate imperiled Milan for Genoa. But, when he finally dried off after several days in the rain, Bonaparte’s spirits rebounded. “We have to make just one more effort and Ital
y is ours. To be sure Alvinzi outnumbers us, but half his troops are green recruits...Some reinforcements have reached us and the rest will soon be on their way...You beat Alvinzi,” Napoleon urged his men, “and I shall answer for the rest!”[73]

  And with that General Bonaparte, at the head of twelve thousand men, marched silently out of the “Camp of Verona” on the night of November 14, across the Adige River, following its open right bank in the direction of Arcola to the east, one column advancing via Albaredo to Alpone, while the main column reached Arcola itself at dawn. Between Arcola and Villanuova just a few miles to the north lay a vast swampy area largely devoid of roads, intersected instead by a mesh of dikes wide enough to serve as paths. Alvinzi, with his twenty-two thousand men at nearby Caldiero, apparently felt quite secure for the moment.

  Bonaparte’s aim was to bypass Arcola and strike hard at Villanuova, locking Alvinzi between the troops at Verona and Villanuova and cutting off both his advance and retreat. “We are perhaps on the eve of losing Italy,” Napoleon had written the Directory before setting out now, because despite all his brave words, few reinforcements had arrived. Given the extremely weak position in which he found himself, Napoleon felt he had only two choices: to face inevitable defeat or to attack.

  He had made his choice and now watched as General Andréossy completed a temporary wooden bridge over the Adige at the village of Ronco, Augereau’s column crossing and marching northward. But they never reached Villanuova; they were stopped by heavy Austrian fire from Arcola on the opposite shore of the Ronco River. If this could not be overcome immediately, Napoleon’s surprise plan for cutting off the Austrian rear would fail. Desperate, Bonaparte himself seized the French tricolor and prepared to lead Augereau’s troops to the approaches of the well-defended bridgehead at Arcola. Augereau and others grabbed their impetuous commander-in-chief, roughly pulling him back, arguing with him to use a little common sense. The continuing hail of musket balls and cannon fire won the argument for them. In the chaos Napoleon lost his footing and fell off the crowded narrow dike into the surrounding swamp. Two officers immediately leapt in after him to haul out their weed- and mud-covered commander-in-chief, water gushing out of his high black boots. More or less simultaneously, Masséna marched out of the swamp to attack Arcola from another dike. Again and again Bonaparte urged Augereau to take the bridge at Arcola, but the Austrian defenders continued to beat back his attacks. Colonel Lannes, who had just arrived from Milan where he had been convalescing from a battle wound, personally intervened during one heavy fusillade, leaping before Napoleon and receiving three more musket balls intended for the French commander. Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Muiron was killed trying to protect him, as was Gen. Jean Robert, while two other officers, Belliard and Vignelles, were badly wounded. Meanwhile, warned off, Alvinzi abandoned Caldiero with most of his army, escaping over the Alpone River. Arcola was still firmly in Austrian hands, and the French had been completely repulsed on all sides. But at least Verona was no longer threatened, and the Austrians were prevented from joining forces.[74]