‘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 actually 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
Napoleon told the Directory in early May that he intended to cross the River Po, and that it would be a tough operation. He warned them not to listen to ‘the soldiers of the clubs, who believe we can swim across broad rivers’.46 Beaulieu, the commander of the Austrian forces, had retreated into the angle of the Po and Ticino rivers, covering Pavia and Milan with his lines of communication running north of the Po. He had swallowed Napoleon’s bait and had been closely watching Valenza. Napoleon made a dash for Piacenza in the dukedom of Parma, bypassing several river defence lines and threatening Milan. This was the first example of what was to become another favoured strategy, the manoeuvre sur les derrières, getting behind the enemy. Both the ‘dashes’ for Vienna in 1805 and 1809 and his strategic movements in Poland in 1806 and 1807 were to mirror this original dash to cross the Po.
Beaulieu was a day’s march closer to Piacenza, so Napoleon would need two or preferably three days’ advantage to cross the Po safely. He asked the army to move even faster, confident that he had calculated every supply requirement in detail. While Sérurier and Masséna moved to Valenza to deceive Beaulieu, and Augereau added to the confusion by taking up a post midway between Valenza and Piacenza, cutting all cross-river communications, Napoleon rushed forward with Laharpe and General Claude Dallemagne – to whom he had promised a consignment of new shoes, as many of his men were only wearing rags on their feet – and General Charles ‘Brave’ Kilmaine’s cavalry. Technically they would be marching through neutral Parma, but Napoleon knew her duke to be hostile and didn’t allow the niceties of international law, such as it existed at the time, to detain him.
By dawn on May 7, the French army were ready to cross the Po where it joins the Trebbia. The intrepid General Jean Lannes scoured the riverbank for miles, gathering every boat and all bridging materials. He found a ferry that could take five hundred men at a time across the 500-yard-wide river, whereupon Augereau (who was 20 miles away), Masséna (35 miles) and Sérurier (70 miles) were all recalled to rejoin Napoleon as soon as possible. Napoleon himself crossed on the 8th and made for Piacenza, whose governor opened the city gates for him after a short but frank explanation of what would happen to his city otherwise. ‘One more victory,’ Napoleon predicted to Carnot that day, ‘and we are masters of Italy.’47 Horses were forcibly requisitioned so that mules no longer had to pull the artillery, indeed many of the cannon Napoleon used at the coming battle were drawn by the coach-horses of the Piacenza nobility.
After concluding an armistice with the Duke of Parma, whose territory he had so casually invaded, Napoleon sent to Paris twenty paintings, including works by Michelangelo and Correggio, as well as Francesco Petrarch’s manuscript of the works of Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil.48 Not content with that, the French also removed flora and fauna: the scientists Gaspard Monge and Claude-Louis Berthollet and the botanist André Thouin were sent to Pavia to take specimens of various plants and animals back to Paris’s Jardin des Plantes. Napoleon even found some mercury for Berthollet to use in his experiments.49
By May 10, the Austrian army was retreating towards Milan via the town of Lodi, 22 miles south-east of Milan on the right bank of the River Adda. It was there that Napoleon decided to intercept them. Marmont led a hussar regiment and Lannes a battalion of grenadiers and chased the Austrian rearguard through the town. Both were abruptly halted by canister shot from the other end of a 200-yard-long and 10-yard-wide wooden bridge. Napoleon commandeered the first two guns he could find, brought them up to the bridge and directed fire in order to prevent the enemy from destroying the bridge, while sending for more guns and setting up sniper fire from the riverbank and nearby houses. He then went on to direct the battle from the bell-tower of the church directly behind the bridge.*
The Austrian rearguard commander, General Sebottendorf, had three battalions and fourteen guns covering the bridge, with eight battalions and fourteen cavalry squadrons in reserve, about 9,500 men in all. To turn the position might take days, ruining any chance of catching Beaulieu’s retreating army. Napoleon decided that the bridge would have to be stormed immediately. He had thirty guns in place by 5 p.m., and sent 2,000 cavalrymen north and south to try to find a ford across the river. Then he formed up Dallemagne’s column of 3,500 men in the backstreets of Lodi and gave them an inspirational harangue. (‘One must speak to the soul,’ he once said of his battlefield speeches, ‘it is the only way to electrify the men.’50) He ordered Berthier to double the rate of artillery fire, and at 6 p.m. he sent the 27th and 29th Légère demi-brigades onto the bridge in the teeth of Austrian grapeshot. Colonel Pierre-Louis Dupas’ combined companies of carabiniers had actually volunteered to lead the attack, an almost suicidal mission and certainly foreign to any natural instinct for self-preservation. Yet it was this frenzied spirit – known as ‘the French fury’ – that often gave Napoleon an edge in battle once his harangue had played on regimental pride and whipped up patriotic fervour.
The first soldiers on the bridge were cut down and flung back, but some jumped into the shallow river and continued to fire from under and around the bridge, as Napoleon sent in further waves of men. With great bravery, the bridge was taken and held, despite cavalry and infantry counter-attacks. When a French chasseur regiment appeared on the right bank of the river, having found a ford across it, the Austrians fell back in good order, as was generally their wont. Five days later the Austrians had been forced back to the Adige river and Napoleon was in Milan.†
The storming of the bridge at Lodi quickly became a central story in the Napoleonic legend, even though Napoleon faced only the Austrian rearguard and both sides lost around nine hundred men. It took tremendous courage to charge down a long, narrow bridge in the face of repeated grapeshot cannonades, and several of the officers who led the attacks that day – Berthier, Lannes and Masséna among them – became Napoleon’s greatest commanders.* (Berthier acted as chief-of-staff, artillery captain and column commander that day, but it wa
s the last time he was allowed to lead troops in a tactical capacity, as he was rightly considered too valuable to be risked in battle.) From the battle of Lodi on, Napoleon’s men gave him the nickname le petit caporal, in that ancient tradition of soldiers affectionately teasing commanders they admire: Julius Caesar’s men sang songs about ‘the bald adulterer’ (according to Suetonius), Wellington was called ‘Nosey’, Robert E. Lee ‘Granny’ and so on. ‘The little corporal’ was a soubriquet that Napoleon liked and encouraged, emphasizing as it did a republican ordinariness of which he was in fact divesting himself. After Lodi, all mutinous rumblings disappeared, and that vital sense of esprit de corps took its place and never left for the rest of the campaign.
‘I no longer regarded myself as a simple general,’ Napoleon later said of his victory, ‘but as a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples. It came to me then that I really could become a decisive actor on our national stage. At that point was born the first spark of high ambition.’51 He repeated this to so many different people on so many different occasions throughout his life that Lodi really can be taken as a watershed moment in his career. Vaunting ambition can be a terrible thing, but if allied to great ability – a protean energy, grand purpose, the gift of oratory, near-perfect recall, superb timing, inspiring leadership – it can bring about extraordinary outcomes.
‘I hope soon to send you the keys of Milan and Pavia,’ Napoleon told the Directory on May 11, in one of fifteen letters he wrote that day. He told Carnot separately that if he could take the near-impregnable Mantua – where Beaulieu was heading – he thought he could be ‘in the heart of Germany’ within two décades (the republican ten-day week).52 He reported that he had lost 150 men against Austria’s two to three thousand, even though casualty lists and the counting of corpses had undoubtedly told him the true numbers. The systematic exaggeration of enemy losses and diminution of his own was to be a persistent feature throughout all Napoleon’s campaigns, and had of course been a feature of the writings of the classical authors with whom he was so familiar. He even did this in his private letters to Josephine, expecting that she would disseminate the information and that it would be given added credence due to its source. (Writing to Josephine after one battle he put down the number of his wounded as 700 before scribbling it out and inserting 100 instead.53) He knew that with no real means of obtaining corroboration, the French people would (at least initially) believe the figures he chose to tell them, not just about the killed and wounded, but also about the numbers of prisoners, cannon and standards captured. He didn’t consider himself to be on oath when writing military bulletins.
Napoleon has been criticized for lying in his post-battle reports, but it is absurd to ascribe conventional morality to these reports since disinformation has been an acknowledged weapon of war since the days of Sun-tzu. (Winston Churchill once observed that in wartime, truth is so precious that she needs to be defended by a bodyguard of lies.) Where Napoleon did err, however, was in making the exaggerations so endemic that in the end even genuine victories came to be disbelieved, or at least discounted; the phrase ‘to lie like a bulletin’ entered the French language. When he could, Napoleon gave the French people hard evidence, sending captured enemy standards to be displayed at the military church of Les Invalides, but throughout his career he displayed an extraordinary ability to present terrible news as merely bad, bad news as unwelcome but acceptable, acceptable news as good, and good news as a triumph.
For two weeks Napoleon had been asking Josephine to join him in Italy. ‘I now beg you to leave with Murat,’ he had written, asking her to go via Turin,
thus you would shorten your journey by fifteen days … My happiness is to see you happy; my joy, to see you gay; my pleasure, to see you pleased. There was never a woman loved with more devotion, passion or tenderness. Never again can I be the complete master of my heart, dictating thereto all its tastes, its inclinations, forming all its desires … No letter from you; I only get one every four days; instead of which, if you loved me, you would write to me twice a day … Adieu, Josephine, you are to me a monster I can’t make out … I love you more every day. Absence cures the small passions; it increases the great … Think of me, or tell me disdainfully that you do not love me, and then perhaps I shall find in my spirit the means of making myself less pitiable … That will be a happy day … the day you pass the Alps. It will be the finest compensation for my sufferings, the happiest reward for my victories.54
Josephine had no intention of making the journey. She came up with a particularly cruel excuse – if that is what it was – telling Murat that she thought she was pregnant. This news sent Napoleon into transports of delight and excitement. He wrote to her from his headquarters at Lodi on May 13: ‘Would it were possible that I might have the happiness of seeing you with your little belly! … Soon you will give life to a being who will love you as much as me. Your children and I, we shall always be around you to convince you of our care and love. You will never be cross, will you? No humphs!!! except for fun. Then three or four faces; nothing is prettier, and then a little kiss patches up everything.’55
It is possible that Josephine either had a phantom pregnancy or a genuine miscarriage, but there would be no child. There were in fact other distractions preventing her from joining her husband in Italy: she was pursuing an affair with an hussar lieutenant called Hippolyte Charles, a dapper wit and practical joker who was nine years younger than her. ‘You will be mad about him,’ she wrote to a friend, saying that his face ‘is so beautiful! I think that no-one before him has ever known how to tie a cravat.’56 The financier Antoine Hamelin, who knew Charles fairly well, thought him ‘a little shrimp of a man whose only advantage was his good figure’, and said he possessed ‘the elegance of a wigmaker’s boy’.57 Although this makes him sound like a mere lounge-lizard, it must be acknowledged that Lieutenant Charles did have some courage to cuckold Napoleon Bonaparte in an era when duelling was common.
Even before the Directory had received the news of Napoleon’s victory at Lodi, they conceived a plan to try to force him to share the glory of the Italian campaign, not least because the lacklustre performances of Generals Moreau and Jourdan in Germany meant that public adulation was starting to concentrate dangerously around him. Ever since General Dumouriez’s treason in 1793, no government had wanted to accord too much power to any one general. When Napoleon requested that reinforcements of 15,000 men be taken from General Kellermann’s Army of the Alps, the Directory replied that the men could indeed be sent to Italy, but Kellermann must go with them and command of the Army of Italy would be split. Replying on May 14, four days after Lodi and the day before he captured Milan, Napoleon told Barras: ‘I will resign. Nature has given me a lot of character, along with some talents. I cannot be useful here unless I have your full confidence.’ He described Kellermann, the victor of the battle of Valmy, as ‘a German for whose tone and principles I have no respect’.58 At the same time he told Carnot: ‘I cannot serve willingly with a man who believes himself the first general of Europe, and furthermore I believe it would be better to have one bad general than to have two good ones. War, like government, is a matter of tact.’59
Napoleon showed considerably more tact in his official reply to the Directory: ‘Each to his own way of making war. General Kellermann has more experience and will do it better than myself; but both of us doing it together will do it extremely badly.’60 Coupled with that faux modesty came the arrogance of youth: ‘I have conducted the campaign without consulting anyone. I should have accomplished nothing worth the trouble had I been obliged to reconcile my ideas with those of another … Because I was persuaded of your entire confidence, my moves were as prompt as my thought.’61 Napoleon was right that the two men would soon have clashed; he would have made an impossible co-commander, let alone subordinate. The campaign so far had proven that a single commander-in-chief had a major advantage over the unwieldy Austrian command structure.* His resignation threat, coming upon the news o
f the victory at Lodi and capture of Milan, ensured that no more was heard of the scheme. Afterwards, Napoleon knew that if he continued to win battles he would have the whip hand over the Directory, a body to which he continued to pay proper rhetorical obedience but which he was increasingly coming to despise.
Napoleon’s letters to the Directory were heavily censored when they were published in the Moniteur, excising all the jokes and gossip. Of the weak and unimpressive Duke Hercules III of Modena, for example, Napoleon had written that he was ‘as unworthy of his baptismal name as of his descent from the noble house of Este’. He then suggested that the duke’s chief negotiator, Seignor Frederic, was his illegitimate brother by a Spanish dancer.62 Barras later claimed to have been shocked by the ‘humiliating’ and ‘sarcastic’ remarks in Napoleon’s reports, but it is safe to assume that he enjoyed them at the time.
On Sunday, May 15, 1796 Napoleon entered Milan in triumph.* The carabiniers had the honour of entering first, in recognition of their heroism in capturing the bridge at Lodi, and ‘were covered with flowers and received with joy’ by the populace.63 Although Napoleon was cheered loudly as he rode through the streets, he understood that conquerors always tended to be welcomed into cities they were about to occupy. While many Italians were delighted that the Austrians had been expelled, they felt little real warmth and plenty of apprehension towards their French replacements. A small but nonetheless significant group, however, was genuinely excited about the effect that French revolutionary ideas might have on Italian politics and society. As a rule, the educated, professional and secularized elites were more likely to regard Napoleon as a liberating force than the Catholic peasantry, who saw the French armies as foreign atheists.
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