Napoleon married Josephine on 9 March 1796. Two days later
he left Paris for the frontiers of Piedmont, having the previous month been
appointed to the command of the Army of Italy. For the overly cynical, this was
‘Barras’s dowry’ – Napoleon’s reward for having relieved the Director of his
old mistress. But this is clearly to go too far. The plan of campaign for 1796
for the first time involved an offensive in Italy, and in this theatre of war
the Corsican general was the French army’s chief expert: indeed, the few weeks
he had spent in the Bureau Topographique had largely been spent in drawing up
fresh plans for operations there. Furthermore, although he had gained a
substantial victory at Loano on 23-4 November 1795, the current commander of
the Army of Italy, General Schérer, was opposed to any further advance. That
said, however, Napoleon was eager for a field command. In the first place, as
he said himself, ‘A general twenty-five years of age cannot stay for long at
the head of an army of the interior.’ Apart from sheer love of glory, his sudden
emergence from obscurity had yet to be matched by the respect of many of his
fellow generals, some of whom, at least, were now his declared enemies (one
such was the equally young and energetic Lazare Hoche, who had just won great
renown by pacifying the Vendée and was also another former lover of Rose de
Beauharnais). And, though by no means too proud to reject his patronage,
Napoleon clearly disliked Barras. He later remarked, ‘Barras . . . had neither
the talent of leadership, nor the habit of work . . . Having left the service
as a captain, he had never made war, whilst he possessed nothing in the way of
military knowledge. Elevated to the Directory by the events of Thermidor and
Vendémiaire, he did not have any of the qualities necessary for such a post.’
The feeling was mutual – according to the Director, his protégé was an
‘oily-tongued wheedler’ – but for the time being the alliance persisted and
Barras urged his fellow Directors to give Napoleon the Italian command. For a
particularly interesting slant on the situation, we may turn to the memoirs of
Lavallette, who was soon to become one of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp:
The duties of commander-in-chief in Paris conferred great
power on General Bonaparte . . . but soon the government felt annoyed and even
humiliated by the yoke imposed on them by the young general. As a matter of
fact he only acted on his own initiative, concerning himself with everything,
making every decision himself, and only acting as he himself thought best. The
activity and wide range of his mind, the domineering quality of his character
would not lend themselves to obedience on any matter at all. The Directory
still wished to handle the Jacobins with tact; the general ordered the hall in
which they met to be closed, and the government only heard that this had been
done when it was about to debate the question. The residence in Paris of
members of the former nobility appeared to be dangerous. The Directory wanted
to expel them, but the general protected them. The government had to yield. He
issued regulations, recalled certain generals who had been disgraced, dismissed
every impulsive suggestion summarily, ruffled the vanity of all, set all
hatreds at defiance, and stigmatized as clumsiness the slow and uncertain
policy of the government. And when the Directory made up their minds to protest
mildly, he . . . explained his ideas and his plans so clearly and easily, and
with such eloquence, that there was no answering him, and two hours afterwards
everything he had said was carried out. However, if the Directory was tired of
him, General Bonaparte was no less tired of life in Paris, which offered no
scope for his ambition, no opportunity for glory such as his genius craved. A
long time ago he had made plans for the conquest of Italy. A lengthy period of
service with the Army of Nice [sic] had given him the time necessary to mature
his schemes, to calculate all difficulty and to weigh all hazards; he applied
to the government for the command of that army, for money and for troops. He
was appointed commander-in-chief and was given the troops, but only the
moderate sum of a hundred thousand crowns. It was with such meagre resources
that he was to conquer Italy at the head of an army which had not been paid for
six months and was without shoes. But Bonaparte knew his own strength, and,
embracing a tremendous future with exhilaration, he bade farewell to the
Directory, which watched him go with secret pleasure, happy to be rid of a man
whose character mastered them, and whose vast schemes were merely, in the eyes
of most of its members, the impulse of a young man full of pride and
effrontery.
In March 1796, then, the personal history of Napoleon
Bonaparte at last meshed with the march of international relations. Before
engaging with the conflict in which he became a combatant, however, it would be
advisable to take a step back and survey the picture that has emerged from this
discussion of the future emperor’s early years. Let us first be entirely
honest. The years from 1769 to 1796 are extremely difficult to chronicle:
unpublished primary material is in short supply, while such memoirs that exist,
not to mention the recollections of Napoleon himself, are uniformly partisan
and in some instances little better than inventions. Nor is this an end to the
problem, for much of the material that we have is so ambiguous that it is
susceptible to entirely contradictory interpretations. No Napoleon, then, is in
the end likely to be anything more than a reflection of the personal
inclinations of its creator. Yet it does remain much harder to accept the image
of Napoleon the idealist than it does that of Napoleon the opportunist. Whether
it was the neglected child born to a mother who had suffered a difficult
pregnancy, the scion of a family of inveterate social climbers, the second son
engaged in endless rivalry with his elder brother, Joseph, the despised
outsider at Brienne, the gawky officer cadet teased by girls as
‘Puss-in-Boots’, the failed Corsican politician, the exiled refugee, the hero
of the hour deprived of his rightful glory, the penniless brigadier touting
frantically for a post in Paris, the ‘Vendémiaire general’ in debt to the
despicable Barras, or the young husband enamoured of a wife who was as ardent
as she was grasping – a whole succession of Napoleons conspired to produce a
genuinely frightening figure. To use the word ‘megalomaniac’ at this stage
would probably be unwise, but all the same what we see is a man filled by
loathing of the mob, contemptuous of ideology, obsessed by military glory, convinced
that he had a great destiny and determined to rise to the top. Added to this
was jealousy of the many generals who had won far more laurels on the
battlefield than he had, and, in particular, of General Hoche. ‘It is a fact,’
wrote Barras, ‘that of all the generals Hoche was the one who most absorbed
Bonaparte’s thoughts . . . On arriving in Italy he asked all new-comers, “Where
is Hoche? What is Hoche doing?”’ It was a dangerous combination. Marmont
recalled his first meeting with Napoleon after Vendémiaire, when the new
commander radiated ‘extraordinary aplomb’, while being marked by ‘an air of
grandeur that I had not noted before’. As to the question of whether he could
be kept under control, this seemed doubtful: ‘This man who knew how to command
so well could not possibly be destined by Providence to obey.’
Such was the young man who in 1796 found himself at the head
of the Army of Italy. What, though, of the conflict, or rather series of
conflicts, into which he was now plunged? Let us begin by making one thing very
clear. The French Revolutionary Wars were not a struggle between liberty on the
one hand and tyranny on the other. As we have seen, indeed, they were not
wholly about the French Revolution at all. Of course, this does not mean that ideology
played no role in the spread of conflict: on various occasions, it intensified
tension. But it was not the chief cause of trouble. The diplomatic history of
the 1790s (and indeed, the 1800s) suggests that few of the great powers of
Europe had any problems with the concept of peace with France, or even an
alliance with her. Nor did the 1790s bring any real change in the aims of the
great powers, who in each case pursued goals that would have been
comprehensible to rulers of fifty or even a hundred years before. This should
not be taken to mean that these goals were fixed. Every state at one time or
another had choices to make in terms of their priorities and partners, or felt
that it had no option but to sacrifice one goal in favour of another. Much the
same was true of the structures within which they operated: the dynamic of
international relations in Europe altered very considerably over the course of
the eighteenth century, and continued to change after 1789. But until the
beginning of the nineteenth century, at least, the general range of those
choices remained substantially the same, the implication being, of course, that
the French Revolution did not suddenly engage the exclusive attention of every
ancien-régime chancellory and ministry of war.
One might with some justice go well beyond this. Not until
1814 did the powers finally set aside their differences and concentrate all
their forces and energies in a fight to the finish with Napoleon. For the time
being, though, our priority must rather be to examine the age of conflict that
formed the eighteenth-century context. For over a hundred years before 1789
there had hardly been a year when the whole of Europe had been at peace. Why
this was so is again a question that need not detain us here for too long.
However, in brief, for all the monarchies of Europe the battlefield was at one
and the same time a gauge of their power and a theatre for their glorification
and, by extension, an important means of legitimizing their power at home where
they were frequently challenged by feudal aristocracies and powerful religious
hierarchies. Meanwhile, war bred more war. To some extent the ever greater
demands which it imposed – for the eighteenth century was an age when armies
and navies grew steadily bigger and more demanding in terms of their equipment
– could be financed by internal reform. Hence the ‘enlightened absolutism’
which was so characteristic of the period from 1750 to 1789 and beyond, not to
mention the efforts of both Britain and Spain to exploit their American
colonies more effectively. But a variety of problems, including not least the
resistance of traditional elites – a factor that could in itself generate armed
conflict – meant that there were only limited advantages to be derived from
such solutions, and thus it was that most rulers looked at one time or another
to territorial gains on their frontiers or the acquisition of fresh colonies.
This, of course, implied war in Europe (which given its cost in turn implied
territorial gain or at the very least financial compensation). No major state
would ever have agreed to relinquish even the smallest province voluntarily
and, while the weaker ones could sometimes be overawed into doing so, a
unilateral gain for one monarch was not acceptable to any of the others: if,
say, Sweden took over Norway, Russia would have expected to take over a slice
of Poland. Nor was this an end to the problem. To go to war successfully, it
was necessary to possess allies, and allies in turn expected to be paid for
their services, either in money or in land. As this set off a fresh chain of
demands for compensation, many of the conflicts of the eighteenth century
turned into truly continental affairs that drew in states from Portugal to
Russia and from Sweden to Sicily. Nor, by the same token, could any peace
settlement ever be definitive. Thus, no war was ever fought with the aim of
obtaining total victory. Aside from the question of cost, no dynastic monarch
would ever have sought to beggar another altogether, if only because the ruler
concerned might prove a useful ally in the next crisis. Yet this in turn meant
that the loser of any conflict was almost always in a position to seek to
overturn the result of one war by seeking victory in another, and so a game
that was essentially pointless continued to fascinate and mesmerize.
Many factors, then, conspired to make war endemic in
eighteenth-century Europe. However, the pressures that led to conflict were
increasing, not least through changes in the structure of international
relations. Very, very gradually, foreign policy was moving from being an affair
of dynasties to being an affair of nations. This development must not be
exaggerated: indeed, it affected only a few states and made limited progress
even in them. Yet, for all that, it cannot be completely ignored. In a very
vague and general sense it was everywhere understood that there ought to be a
connection between foreign policy and the well-being of the subject, but in
most cases little more than lip service was paid to the idea, while there was
no sense that the populace had a right either to be consulted on the issue of
war or peace or to expect concrete benefits in the event of victory. The
peoples of Europe were in effect mere pawns to be mobilized or called to endure
suffering exactly as their rulers thought fit. Starting in England in the
seventeenth century, however, a new pattern began to emerge in that we see the
first stirrings of public opinion. As early as the 1620s, for example, Charles
I caused outrage among many of his subjects by failing to intervene effectively
in favour of the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War. In this instance,
the stimulus was religious, but as the establishment of the American colonies,
the penetration of India and Africa and the slave trade brought wealth to
Britain, so the issue shifted rather to matters of commerce, the state
increasingly being expected to use its power to protect the investments of the
oligarchy (and beyond them the well-being of a much broader section of society).
In practice, of course, the British state did not need much in the way of
urging when it came to defending its colonial possessions and increasing their
extent, but it would now find it much harder to back away from doing so.
Similar pressures, meanwhile, had been generated in the United Provinces,
France and, to a lesser extent, Spain, while elsewhere particular groups had
emerged that remained too isolated from the rest of society to deserve the
label ‘public opinion’ and yet had a considerable stake in foreign policy (a
good example is the Russian nobility’s strong interest in the Baltic trade with
Britain).
Though by no means unimportant, these issues were outweighed
by other more pressing matters. Particularly for the eastern powers, there was
the issue of the rising costs of their military establishments. As the
eighteenth century advanced, so their armies increased: Russia and Prussia more
than doubled the size of their armies between 1700 and 1789, with Austria not
far behind. What had mattered in the early part of the century had been
dynastic prestige and in particular the question of which reigning families
should rule the many states that were bedevilled by succession crises. But
beginning with Frederick II of Prussia’s invasion of Silesia in 1740 what
mattered now was territory. Conquest was essential, and because this was the
case all considerations of legality and morality began to go by the board. But
so long as all the major states in Europe were playing the same game, it was
held (at least by many of their rulers and statesmen) that universal conquest
brought with it universal good. The weaker states of the Continent would
suffer, certainly, but as none of the great powers would lose out in relation
to one another, the net result would be a balance of power that made for
general security. To put it another way, conquest was a moral duty from which
all would benefit, and war, by extension, an act of benevolence. Nor did war
seem especially threatening. In 1789 the standing armies of Europe may have
been much bigger than they had been in 1700, but new crops, better transport,
improved bureaucracies, more productive fiscal systems, harsher discipline and
tighter procedures in the field all ensured that the horrors of the Thirty
Years War, in which masses of unpaid men had simply surged from one side of
Germany to the other, living off the country and denying the authority of
political masters that had lost all ability to pay and supply them, would not
be repeated. At the same time, war was also less costly in another sense.
Thanks to developments in the art of generalship, it was assumed that battle
would be less frequent. Enemy armies would be manoeuvred out of their
positions, and their commanders – products of an age of reason – would tamely
accept the logic of their position and march away, leaving their opponents to
move in unopposed. If battles could largely be avoided, sieges, too, would
become less of an endurance test, for it was widely accepted that once a
fortress had had its walls breached, its governor would capitulate without
further resistance so as to save the lives of both the townsfolk and his men.
But in reality Europe was no more getting safer than she was
becoming more civilized. Given that every possible territorial solution that
could be worked out for the Continent of Europe was bound to upset one or other
of the great powers, continual conquest led not to perpetual peace but rather
perpetual war, and therefore produced not security, but insecurity. As the
Seven Years War had shown, as the stakes grew ever higher, so rulers with their
backs against the wall would habitually resort to battle rather than simply
accepting the logic of superior numbers or generalship, just as they would be
inclined to put fortress governors under great pressure to resist the enemy to
the utmost: this was the conflict that gave rise to the phrase ‘pour encourager
les autres’. As the War of the Bavarian Succession had shown, late
eighteenth-century regular armies were much less likely than those, say, of the
War of the Spanish Succession to be able to pull off the sort of feats of
manoeuvre that would have been required to decide the issue of wars without a
battle: Marlborough’s march to the Danube in 1704 could never have been
replicated seventy years later. And there was certainly no diminution in the
sufferings of the civilian population, nor in the damage which an army’s
passage could inflict on a district. On the wilder fringes of warfare – the
Balkans, the frontiers of the American colonies – torture and massacre were
very much the order of the day while large parts of Germany had been devastated
by the Seven Years War. The overall picture is a grim one: war may not have
been the monster of the seventeenth century, but it was still a savage beast.
Many rulers and statesmen were well aware of this reality, and a few even tried
to back away from the traditional power game. But in the end they were
helpless, for the only weapon they could fall back upon was the same mixture of
alliance and armed force that had caused the problem in the first place.
Indeed, the situation was even worse than this suggested. By
the mid-s a major conflagration was in the making. Let us begin by considering
France. Once mighty, since 1763 she had suffered a series of major catastrophes
and humiliations. In the East the first partition of Poland of 1772 gravely
weakened her chief allies in Eastern Europe. Stripped of her enormous American
territories in the Seven Years War, she had gained a certain degree of revenge
by assisting the nascent United States of America in the American War of
Independence, only to find that this action had shattered her financial
position beyond repair. And finally, without money, Louis XVI was repeatedly
humbled, being forced both to accept a profoundly unfavourable commercial
treaty by the British and to stand by helplessly while Prussian forces crushed
the pro-French regime established by the Dutch revolution of 1785-7. To say
that on the eve of the Revolution France was bent on a war that could reverse
these disasters would be a wild over-statement – her statesmen were actually
pursuing a variety of courses, some of them quite contradictory – but
nevertheless this was certainly an option that was being kept open and prepared
for. While a massive programme of military reform transformed the army and
prepared it for offensive operations, French diplomats sought to bolster the
position of Austria – France’s chief ally – by seeking an alliance with Persia
that might make Russia think twice about going on the offensive in the West. At
the same time, efforts were made to dissuade Vienna from embarking on military
adventures in the Balkans and also to build up the Turks against Russia. As for
Britain, she too was threatened by French alliances with the rulers of Egypt
(in theory, a province of the Ottoman Empire, but in practice a
quasi-independent dominion), Oman and Hyderabad.
It was not just France that was threatening to overthrow the
status quo, however. Among the eastern powers, too, there were worrying
stirrings. In Austria, Joseph II had been engaged in an aggressive attempt to
build a powerful, centralized state, but he had run into increasing opposition
and was inclined to seek redress not only in plans that would have involved
taking over Bavaria in exchange for giving her rulers the Austrian Netherlands
(i.e. the western half of present-day Belgium), but in launching an attack on
the Ottoman Empire alongside Russia. Also contemplated was a renewed war with
Prussia, which had been asking for trouble in recent years by frustrating a
series of Austrian attempts to reinforce her position in the Holy Roman Empire,
and was also no longer ruled by the mighty Frederick the Great, who had died in
1786. Yet, now under Frederick William II, the Prussians were also on the move.
Their gains in the first partition of Poland had been much smaller than those
obtained by either Russia or Austria and failed to include a number of key
objectives. Still worse, while Russia had gone on to make further gains in the Russo-Turkish
war of 1768-74, the War of the Bavarian Succession of 1778 had brought Prussia
precisely nothing. In the first place, the means used were to be peaceful ones
– like Vienna, Potsdam was quite capable of working out fanciful plans for
territorial exchanges and Frederick William II himself was no warlord – but it
is clear that there was to be no drawing back. In Sweden there was a situation
parallel to that of Austria in that a reformist monarch – in this case Gustav
III – had run into serious opposition at home, and wished to reinforce the
power of the throne by a flight to the front vis-à-vis Russia. And last but not
least there was the Russia of Catherine the Great, which was proving so
aggressive in its interpretation of the treaty that had ended the previous war
with Turkey that Constantinople was being pushed ever closer towards a
counter-stroke.
This is not the place to retell the long and complicated
story of the events that followed. In brief the inevitable crisis exploded in
August 1787 when Turkey attacked Russia. This in turn provoked a general war in
Eastern Europe with Austria and Russia pitched against Turkey, Sweden pitched
against Russia, and Denmark pitched against Sweden. By 1790 most of the
fighting had died down, but in the midst of the general confusion revolution
had broken out in Poland where a reformist faction was anxious to restore her
fortunes and build a modern state. Until now, events in France had for the most
part been ignored, but in the course of 1791 she too was dragged into the
crisis on account of Leopold II of Austria’s desperate attempts to stave off a
further round of hostilities and, in particular, a further partition of Poland.
There was no desire for war with the French Revolution per se – indeed, in
Leopold’s case there was no desire for war at all – but in April 1792 clumsy
Austrian tactics combined with political manoeuvrings in France herself
initiated the French Revolutionary Wars. Initially, the belligerents were
limited to France on the one hand and Austria and Prussia on the other, but
within a year events had drawn most of the states of Europe into a great
coalition against France. But this was no counter-revolutionary crusade: none
of the powers that fought France had any desire to restore the ancien régime as
it had existed in 1789, and many either limited their commitment to the
struggle or dropped out of it altogether; within a short time of Napoleon
taking over the Army of Italy, indeed, Spain was actually fighting on France’s
side. For most powers, in fact, the war against the Revolution was either
subordinated to long-standing foreign policy aims or waged in accordance with
those aims. Thus Russia and Prussia always put the acquisition of territory in
Poland (which was completely wiped off the map by two further partitions in
1792 and 1795) before the struggle against France, while in Prussia’s case she
only entered the conflict at all because she thought that it would bring her
territorial gains in Germany. Austria was still thinking in terms of the
‘Bavarian exchange’. And as for Britain, she went to war to prevent France from
taking over the Low Countries, did so all the more willingly because war with
Paris offered her a way out of the diplomatic isolation that had made her so
vulnerable in the American War of Independence, and for much of the time
prosecuted the struggle by means of tactics that gave a further boost to her
colonial and maritime superiority. This was not to say that ideology was
lacking. No ruler wanted revolution at home – there was, indeed, genuine horror
at the events of 1792-4 – and many governments clamped down hard on freedom of
debate. At the same time, the defence of the ancien régime or the international
order was made use of as a handy means of legitimizing the war effort, just as
counter-revolution was employed – most notably, by the British – as a means of
stirring up revolt inside France. But engaging in a total war to restore Louis
XVIII (Louis XVI’s successor) was quite another matter. A Bourbon on the throne
of France might be a good thing in many respects, but in the end it was
something that could be sacrificed to expediency, especially as the
belligerents were divided as to what ‘restoration’ should actually mean, with
the British, at least, advocating some sort of constitutional settlement and
others looking to a reconstituted absolutism.
In France the concept of an ideological war was certainly
much stronger than elsewhere. In 1791-2 there had been real fears of a
counter-revolutionary crusade, while the Brissotins – the radical faction that
had championed the cause of war – had accompanied their demands with much talk
of sweeping the tyrants from their thrones. But appearances are deceptive. In
large part the fears of foreign intervention were a deliberate creation of the
Brissotins, for whom war was primarily a political tool designed to consolidate
the Revolution and further their personal ambition. And, despite their
rhetoric, when France went to war in April 1792, she did so only against
Austria. Every effort was made to avoid conflict with Prussia, and get the
Prussians to turn on their old enemies. The war the Brissotins got, then, was
not at all the one they really wanted. With France hopelessly unprepared for
such a struggle – her army was in disarray and the famous Volunteers of 1791
and 1792 a distinctly unreliable weapon – revolutionizing the Continent now
gained real importance. But it was not just this: to some extent Brissot and
his own followers simply became carried away with their own speech-making and
drunk with vainglory; hence the glorious abandon with which they declared war
on country after country in early 1793. Yet in the end their crusade amounted
to very little. Late 1792 saw France offer to give help to any people who
wished to recover their liberty, denounce the principles that lay behind such
acts as the partition of Poland, and set up a variety of foreign legions whose
task it was to raise the peoples of their home countries in revolt. But there
were plenty of clear-sighted realists in Paris who realized that this was
hopelessly impractical and unlikely to achieve anything in the way of results.
Amongst them was Robespierre, and so practically the first act of the Committee
of Public Safety was to make it quite clear that its watchword was France and
France alone: amongst those who died under the guillotine in the summer of 1793
were a number of over-enthusiastic foreign revolutionaries. Under the
Thermidorian regime and the Directory the pendulum swung back in the direction
of aggression, but liberation was now but a word, albeit a useful one that
allowed France’s rulers to prove their revolutionary credentials. In Belgium
and the left bank of the Rhine, it was code for annexation, and in Holland,
where the first of a series of satellite republics were established, a
euphemism for political, military and economic exploitation. And if revolution
was supported elsewhere, most notably in Ireland, it was clearly little more
than a device to weaken and disrupt the enemy. As for the specific goals of
French policy, it was clear that many of them fitted in very closely with goals
that had been enunciated at one time or another under the ancien régime. Also
visible was an intellectual structure that had nothing revolutionary about it
at all. At least one member of the Directory – Reubell – saw Belgium and the
left bank of the Rhine simply as France’s compensation for the gains made by
the eastern powers in Poland. Ideological commitment to expansion was not
completely dead: inside the Directory Reubell was challenged by the fiery
Larevellière-Lépeaux, who was not only an erstwhile Brissotin, but the deputy
who on 19 November 1972 had introduced the decree promising assistance to any
people that wished to recover its liberty. But in general the watchword was
calculation. Indeed, it is Schroeder’s contention that, under the influence of
the prime realist Carnot, the Directory wanted not a continuation of the war,
but rather a general peace settlement: so anxious was the ‘architect of
victory’ for this outcome, that he was even ready to forsake the Rhine
frontier.
If peace was to be obtained, however, at the beginning of
1796 it appeared that it was going to have to be by force of arms, for Austria
and Britain – the twin linchpins of opposition to the Republic – were by no
means ready to make peace. Although under serious financial pressure, Austria
was not yet desperate enough to consider a separate peace. In many ways this
made sense: aside from the need to escape impending bankruptcy, by 1796
Austria’s chief war aim was the acquisition of Bavaria in exchange for her
territories in the Low Countries, and this, as Schroeder has shown, was more
likely to be achieved through a deal with France than by any other means. But
in reality, dropping out of the war was impossible. Should peace talks with
France fail and Britain find out about Austria’s double-dealing, Vienna could
probably bid farewell to both British support for the so-called Bavarian
exchange and, more importantly, a large loan she was currently trying to
negotiate with London. Nor would a successful deal with France be much help:
Austria might rationalize her frontiers in the west, but in doing so she would
almost certainly risk war with Prussia and Russia, who were both likely to
press for territorial compensation. In the circumstances then, fighting on,
which in any case meshed with the personal fear and antipathy felt by the
Austrian chancellor, Thugut, for the Revolution, seemed by far the safest
option, for it at least locked in the Russians – also theoretically at war with
France – into their alliance with Vienna, and thereby protected the gains
Austria had made from the recent partitions of Poland and helped dissuade the
Prussians from joining France (a real possibility that was certainly pursued by
French diplomacy in the wake of Prussia’s signature of a peace treaty with
France in 1795). As for Britain, despite growing domestic unrest and the
personal desire for peace of the prime minister, William Pitt, she too had no
option but to fight on: secret contacts held with France in 1795 having
suggested that, Carnot notwithstanding, the Directory would never abandon the
Low Countries unless absolutely forced to do so, anything but victory would
signal complete humiliation.
So, with neither Britain nor Austria capable of taking the
offensive at this point, the initiative lay with France, who could in any case
afford to attack given the withdrawal of Prussia and Spain from the First
Coalition in 1795. Napoleon naturally wanted to win the war on the Italian
front – Barras claims that he bombarded ‘the Directorate and Ministers with
demands for men, money and clothing’. This help was not forthcoming, for the
Directory intended its main blows against the enemy to be rather a major
invasion of Ireland and an offensive in southern Germany. Yet Napoleon still
came to the fore. The expedition to Ireland was turned back by a ‘Protestant
wind’, and the invasion of Germany defeated by the Austrians. In Italy,
however, matters were very different: striking across the frontier from its
base at Nice in April
1796, within a few short months Napoleon’s ragged little
army – at the beginning of the campaign he had only some 40,000 men, who
Marmont describes as ‘dying of hunger and almost without shoes’ – had forced
Piedmont, Tuscany, Modena and the Papal States to make peace, overrun northern
Italy, and beaten a succession of Austrian armies. With Vienna itself
threatened with occupation, the badly shaken Austrians asked for an armistice,
and an initial peace settlement was duly signed at Leoben on 18 April 1797.
