Citizen Emperor

by Philip Dwyer

  Given the attitude of the European courts towards France and the fact that, militarily speaking, Bonaparte was on the back foot, a negotiated settlement was highly unlikely at this stage. A military solution was the only option left to him in 1800. To prepare public opinion for the coming campaign, the French press published the British (and Austrian) rebuffs thereby bolstering Bonaparte’s position, underlining the extent to which his desire for peace had been sincere. In the face of the rejection of peace, his preparations for war were justified.45 The stratagem worked; the peace initiative made the First Consul popular not only inside France but in much of Europe, while the replies received from London and Vienna made those powers appear to be bent on continuing the war.46 Soon after the rebuff from Britain, a proclamation was issued to the people of France in which Bonaparte clearly blamed England for the continuation of the war and promised them peace through victory.47 According to the police reports, the public was worried about the resumption of fighting.48 The hope for peace was still very much alive, as it had been throughout the final years of the Directory.

  Preparations for War

  Bonaparte had a number of armies at his disposal: in Holland there was General Charles-Pierre Augereau at the head of 20,000 men whose job was to prevent an eventual English invasion of that coast; in Germany General Jean-Victor Moreau commanded 100,000 men; in Switzerland, General Etienne-Jacques Macdonald was in charge of 14,000 men; then in Italy, where the French position was precarious to say the least, there was an army around 40,000 strong under the orders of General Masséna. The formation of the Army of Reserve was meant to bring another 56,000–60,000 men into campaign. By the end of 1799, almost all of Italy had been evacuated by the French while Russian and Austrian troops had occupied Milan. Masséna held on in the last French stronghold in Italy, Genoa, in what was to become one of the most horrific sieges of the revolutionary period; more than 30,000 people died there of starvation and disease.49

  The problems facing Bonaparte were formidable. The French army was not in very good shape in 1800. Reports from the Army of the Rhine asserted that ‘The soldier is naked . . . most corps have not been paid in six, eight, ten décadis’ (that is, for sixty, eighty, one hundred days), and that the troops were ‘neither armed, nor clothed; their needs are enormous’. In Switzerland, the troops lived from hand to mouth.50 Not only did the army suffer from considerable material shortages, but many of the officers, it was claimed, were ‘apathetic’; the non-commissioned officers were even worse. ‘The majority is ignorant, pretentious and slack,’ noted a report from the inspector general.51 Reorganization was badly needed, and that is what Bonaparte embarked upon. He now had complete control over the direction of the army and could thus reform it and co-ordinate the coming campaign as he saw fit.

  Possibly the most significant reform was the adoption of the corps d’armée (army corps of anywhere between 20,000 and 30,000 men, and 5,000 cavalry) at the beginning of March 1800. These were units with integrated cavalry and artillery, allowing them to manoeuvre independently of each other until it was time to unite a number of corps in battle. The army corps was a system Bonaparte inherited rather than introduced, but he nevertheless systematically formalized it.52 He also continued the practice of having his armies live off the countryside, something that had been adopted during the revolutionary wars in response to the enormous logistical problems in supplying hundreds of thousands of volunteers. In addition, the conscription system was streamlined, although it was a number of years before it was perfected.53

  On 25 January, the order came for the Army of Reserve to gather at Dijon, halfway between the Rhine and Italy.54 In this way, Bonaparte hoped to keep the Austrians guessing about the army’s final destination, since from there it could strike anywhere between Mainz in Germany and Genoa in Italy. He does not yet appear to have made up his mind about where the main theatre of operations would be, although everything points to Germany.55 That made sense. As Moreau, commander of the Army of the Rhine, aptly pointed out in a letter to the First Consul, it was much easier to march on Munich than on Verona, and Austria was much more likely to sue for peace once the French had occupied Bavaria than if they occupied northern Italy.56 In other words, at this stage of Bonaparte’s thinking, Italy was to be a secondary theatre of operations, subordinated to Germany and its army. He tried, therefore, to work with Moreau, and sent his aide-de-camp, Michel Duroc, to get an exact idea of the situation on the ground.57

  Moreau was described by a German visitor to Paris as an ‘excellent man’, open, honest and pleasant. He had a dark complexion, a full oval face, dark eyes that were clear and looked straight ahead, a strong, virile nose, somewhat sensual lips, a round but well-formed chin, and a deep, well-modulated voice. He was of medium height, but solid and vigorous, always calm and poised.58 When he first met Bonaparte at the Luxembourg Palace after the latter’s return from Egypt in October 1799, he had already earned a reputation as a competent general. He had volunteered in 1791 and two years later had fought at the battle of Neerwinden (which was a severe defeat for the French forces). Under the wing of General Jean Pichegru, Moreau rose through the ranks to take command of the Army of the North by the age of twenty-eight, despite not having any formal military training.

  Approached by the conspirators before Brumaire, Moreau had actually declined to play an active part in the coup, thereby paving the way for Bonaparte. In fact, it was Moreau who recommended Bonaparte to them. Once in power, Bonaparte offered him the Army of the Rhine. Moreau appears as a consequence genuinely to have co-operated with Bonaparte, at least for the first few months after Brumaire. Relations between the two men were tested when the supplies Moreau badly needed for his army did not eventuate, or at least not quickly enough, when his troops were depleted to strengthen the Army of the Reserve, and when Bonaparte began directly interfering in the Army of the Rhine.59 The real sticking point came over the forthcoming campaign plan and the command of the Army of the Rhine. Rumour had it that Bonaparte intended taking command himself, something that he was indeed considering. That kind of rumour offended Moreau, resentful that it meant he would have to play a secondary role. Worse, however, since Moreau was a much more conservative commander, he rejected Bonaparte’s plan of campaign. Instead, in March 1800, he sent his own plans, along with his chief of staff, Jean-Joseph Dessolles, to Paris to explain the details. Dessolles was also to tell Bonaparte that if he persisted in his ideas then he should name someone else commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine.60

  After three days of arguing with Dessolles, Bonaparte let Moreau have his way. It was perhaps the only time in his career that Bonaparte allowed himself to be contradicted, supposedly retorting that what Moreau was not capable of doing in Germany he would do in Italy.61 Only months after Brumaire, he was more inclined to be conciliatory, especially with someone who had supported the coup, and he certainly wanted to avoid an ugly rupture with such a prominent commander. Both men, it has to be said, went to some trouble to plaster over the cracks and to suggest publicly that all was well.62 A convention was eventually signed between the two on 16 April 1800 (the Convention of Basle) – a sign that Bonaparte was almost dealing with a separate entity within the army – in which Moreau agreed to begin the attack by 20 April at the latest and, after having pushed the Austrians back to the city of Ulm, to send a fifth of his men (25,000 men led by the able General Claude-Jacques Lecourbe) to join the Army of Italy.63

  ‘Like a Thunderbolt’

  It was only after the decision to leave Moreau in charge of Germany that Bonaparte resolved to make Italy the main area of operations. It was a lucky choice. Without Bonaparte knowing, the Austrians had also decided to make Italy their main theatre of operations and began reinforcing the army there under General Michael von Melas,64 at seventy-one the oldest general on staff, a Dutchman in the service of the Austrian army.

  Bonaparte left Paris on 6 May at two o’clock in the morning, after having spent the evening at the Opera. He had rece
ived two messages. The first was that Moreau had won a victory on the Rhine the previous day, at Stockach, north of Lake Constance, after a bloody thirteen-hour battle that ended at nine in the evening. (Between 3 May and 19 June, Moreau had occupied Bavaria and inflicted a number of defeats on the Austrians.) It was more or less the news Bonaparte was waiting for; now his flank would be secure while he fought in Italy. The second was a secret message from Masséna, which he had managed to smuggle out of Genoa where the Austrians were besieging him. It stated that he could not hope to hold out for longer than fifteen days.

  Bonaparte handed over power to Cambacérès, who for the next two months effectively and efficiently ran the country in his absence. There was a bit of a commotion when news of the First Consul’s sudden departure became known in Paris: his detractors saw it as a chance to wrest power from him; his supporters, anticipating a successful outcome to the campaign, were already talking about reinforcing his personal powers.65 Travelling in his berline (covered carriage), alone with his secretary Bourrienne, Bonaparte made rapid progress, reaching Dijon on the morning of 7 May. Starting from Dijon on his way to Italy gave him the opportunity to see what impact Brumaire had had on the French population, but he also used the occasion to make himself personally known to a large number of the French outside Paris. The reaction, if a letter from a witness by the name of Emmanuel Jober can be believed, was quite remarkable. Jober saw Bonaparte at Morez in the Jura where he arrived in the evening of 8 May:

  All the windows were illuminated. The mayor, Perrad, told him: ‘Citizen First Consul, be kind enough to show yourself to us.’ He appeared at the door. He stopped for half an hour. We cried out: ‘Bonaparte, show yourself to the good citizens of the Jura! Is it really you? Are you going to give us peace?’ He replied in a faltering voice, ‘Yes, yes . . .’ He seemed happy. A smile remained on his lips, but his great pallor and the traces of tiredness and work imprinted on his forehead overwhelmed us with tenderness and brought tears to our eyes . . . You will not be able to imagine the profound effect this scene had on our spirits. We will still be talking of it with feeling to our children’s children.66

  The emotion seems utterly out of proportion to the encounter, but Bonaparte was a celebrity, and his fame was growing. Eventually, that celebrity would transform itself into something deeper until a cult would develop around him.

  When he arrived in Geneva the next day, he would have noticed as he drove through one of the city gates an arch erected in haste by the Prefect Eymard, with the inscription, ‘To Bonaparte and the Armies’, and, ‘To Victory and Peace’.67 Bonaparte spent the next three days in Geneva organizing the coming offensive. The army was to march from Geneva into Piedmont and Lombardy as fast as possible by passing through either the Saint-Bernard or the Simplon Pass. On 24 April, Bonaparte was still hesitating between the two options. It was not until late in the day, on 27 April, that he decided on the Saint-Bernard. The plan to cross the Alps may not even have come from him; it may have been the brainchild of another general, Paul Thiébault.68 The decision was kept secret for two weeks – only a few superior officers were in the know – for it could work only if there were no resistance from the Austrians.

  In order to outflank the enemy Bonaparte had decided on a feat that was difficult to accomplish. Other generals and their armies had crossed the Alps since Hannibal’s achievement during the Second Punic War in 218 bc: Charlemagne did so in 773 in order to attack the kingdom of the Lombards, while the French king, Francis I, did so on two occasions, in 1515 and again in 1524, in order to attack Italy.69 One of the more recent crossings was by the Russian commander Alexander Suvorov, who went over the St Gotthard Pass in September 1798, although his 23,000 men did not pass at a point as high as the Saint-Bernard, and the weather was more clement. Lecourbe – nicknamed ‘General Fish’ by the Austrians because of the ease with which he forded rivers – gave battle around St Gotthard in August 1799, while six months after Bonaparte’s feat, and in the continuing campaign against the Austrians in Italy, General Jacques Macdonald received the order to cross the Splügen, a narrow mountain pass 2,000 metres high, in a snow storm in December 1800 with the loss of more than a hundred men to avalanches.70 If Bonaparte’s crossing resonated with the public to a degree that others did not, it was in large part due to the propaganda campaign that followed. The Saint-Bernard consequently took on symbolic meaning not associated with previous military feats (other than Hannibal’s), denoting a victory of the new over the old.71 The mountain, the ice and the snow represented the obstacles against which the revolutionaries had to struggle. Overcoming those obstacles would lead to a new beginning, a new order.

  In this as in so many things, Bonaparte was lucky. Between 15 and 21 May, the week in which the passage took place, the weather could not have been better,72 despite what he declared in a letter to his fellow consuls: ‘We are fighting against the ice, the snow, tempests and avalanches.’73 That was to dramatize the feat for public consumption, making it seem a good deal more dangerous than it was; the letter was sent from Martigny where Bonaparte had set up headquarters, and was written before he had even attempted to cross the pass himself. The weather did not stop him from complaining to Josephine, ‘I have been here for three days, in the middle of the Valais and the Alps, in a Bernardine convent. One never sees the sun; judge for yourself if we are comfortable.’74

  That week, across the Great Saint-Bernard Pass, almost 2,500 metres in altitude, could be seen a long line of soldiers and cavalry leading their horses by their bridles. The army was strung out over forty kilometres. The route was dangerous – narrow, winding roads on precipices – but it was also the shortest route across the Alps. Getting the artillery across presented a number of logistical difficulties; after experimenting with several methods, General Auguste Marmont, in command of the artillery, placed the guns in hollowed-out tree trunks that were then dragged through the snow, a task that took two days. The caissons (chests containing ammunition) posed even greater problems.75 On 16 May, General Jean Lannes crossed with the advance guard and occupied the town of Aosta after making short shrift of a Croatian detachment guarding the town. The rest of the army took three days to cross, held up for a while at Fort Bard, which stood across a single road leading out of the Alps. Bonaparte’s commanders were enterprising enough to bypass the position. The infantry could do that by following mule tracks; the artillery, however, had to pass right under the fort, and succeeded in getting only half a dozen pieces through over several nights. The rest of the artillery were tied down trying to reduce the fort (which they did not succeed in doing until early June).

  Incognito and accompanied only by Bourrienne, Bonaparte made the crossing in the wake of the bulk of the army. On his arrival on 20 May 1800 at Bourg-Saint-Pierre in Switzerland on the other side of the Alps, more than 35,000 troops had already crossed. In all, around 45,000 men and 6,000 cavalry, as poorly equipped as the Army of Italy of 1796, were to take this narrow, badly kept road. Half were raw conscripts who received their training along the way. Desertion rates and sickness were probably on a par with most of the other campaigns of the revolutionary wars: the 43rd Demi-Brigade lost 180 to desertion and another 77 to sickness.76 The organization of the campaign was, moreover, chaotic. Some divisions managed to forget their cannon in the depots in France, while it generally proved difficult if not impossible to supply the troops with basic provisions.77

  Ten days after the crossing began, on 26 May, Lannes took the village of Ivrea at the southern foot of the Alps. The way was now clear into the plains of Piedmont. This extraordinarily rapid movement across the highest natural barrier in Europe gave Bonaparte complete strategic surprise. ‘We have fallen like a thunderbolt,’ he wrote to his elder brother Joseph. ‘The enemy did not expect us and still seems scarcely able to believe it.’78 He spent a few days at Ivrea regrouping and awaiting reinforcements, leaving on 30 May. On the eve of his departure, he wrote another letter to Josephine: ‘I am in bed. In an hour’s time I
leave for Vercelli . . . The enemy is completely baffled and still cannot guess what we are at. Within the next ten days I hope to be back in the arms of my Josephine, who is always good, when she isn’t crying and playing the civetta [coquette].’79 He was to prove himself right, but he first had to press on to Milan, where he hoped to pick up badly needed matériel.

  When he got there two days later, on 2 June, at six-thirty in the evening in the rain, he received a less enthusiastic welcome than he had four years earlier. The planned grand entrance in a gilt-leafed coach drawn by six white horses was a washout; the locals, either taken by surprise or possibly expecting a return of the Austrians, were indifferent.80 Bonaparte was put out.81 It was not until a performance at La Scala opera house two nights later that he received a warm reception. His entry into Milan was meant to be a detour in an attempt to find cannon in the enemy’s arsenals, because most of the French artillery had been bottled up in the mountains, caught in the fighting around Fort Bard. As a result, he had to change his plans. His intention had been to descend into north Italy through Aosta to take the main Austrian army under General Melas from behind, thus trapping the Austrians between Masséna in Genoa and his own forces. At Milan, however, Bonaparte learnt from captured Austrian dispatches of Masséna’s capitulation at Genoa (on 4 June). At first, he did not believe it.82 Although he had given permission to Masséna to surrender, he had nevertheless hoped he would hold on and help him attack Melas in a pincer movement. Melas was now free to manoeuvre as he saw fit. Bonaparte decided to attack as soon as he could; he left Milan on 9 June to move on Alessandria. In the Order of the Day issued to the army, he predicted that the outcome of the fighting would be ‘a perfect glory and a solid peace’ (gloire sans nuage et paix solide).83