[Austria and England continue the war, 1795.]

Humiliating such a peace certainly was; yet it would probably have been the happiest issue for Europe had every Power been forced to accept its conditions. The territory gained by France was not much more than the very principle of the Balance of Power would have entitled it to demand, at a moment when Russia, victorious over the Polish rebellion, was proceeding to make the final partition of Poland among the three Eastern Monarchies; and, with all its faults, the France of 1795 would have offered to Europe the example of a great free State, such as the growth of the military spirit made impossible after the first of Napoleon's campaigns. But the dark future was withdrawn from the view of those British statesmen who most keenly felt the evils of the present; and England, resolutely set against the course of French aggression, still found in Austria an ally willing to continue the struggle. The financial help of Great Britain, the Russian offer of a large share in the spoils of Poland, stimulated the flagging energy of the Emperor's government. Orders were sent to Clerfayt to advance from the Rhine at whatever risk, in order to withdraw the troops of the Republic from the west of France, where England was about to land a body of Royalists. Clerfayt, however, disobeyed his instructions, and remained inactive till the autumn. He then defeated a French army pushing beyond the Rhine, and drove back the besiegers of Mainz; but the British expedition had already failed, and the time was passed when Clerfayt's successes might have produced a decisive result. [42]

[Landing at Quiberon, June 27, 1795.]

[France in 1795.]

A new Government was now entering upon power in France. The Reign of Terror had ended in July, 1794, with the life of Robespierre. The men by whom Robespierre was overthrown were Terrorists more cruel and less earnest than himself, who attacked him only in order to save their own lives, and without the least intention of restoring a constitutional Government to France. An overwhelming national reaction forced them, however, to represent themselves as the party of clemency. The reaction was indeed a simple outburst of human feeling rather than a change in political opinion. Among the victims of the Terror the great majority had been men of the lower or middle class, who, except in La Vendee and Brittany, were as little friendly to the old regime as their executioners. Every class in France, with the exception of the starving city mobs, longed for security, and the quiet routine of life. After the disorders of the Republic a monarchical government naturally seemed to many the best guarantee of peace; but the monarchy so contemplated was the liberal monarchy of 1791, not the ancient Court, with its accessories of a landed Church and privileged noblesse. Religion was still a power in France; but the peasant, with all his superstition and all his desire for order, was perfectly free from any delusions about the good old times. He liked to see his children baptised; but he had no desire to see the priest's tithe-collector back in his barn: he shuddered at the summary marketing of Conventional Commissioners; but he had no wish to resume his labours on the fields of his late seigneur. To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of Paris or the farmers of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a political system capable of subsisting for twelve months together, and resting on some other basis than forced loans and compulsory sales of property. But among the men of the Convention, who had abolished monarchy and passed sentence of death upon the King, the restoration of the Crown seemed the bitterest condemnation of all that the Convention had done for France, and a sentence of outlawry against themselves. If the will of the nation was for the moment in favour of a restored monarchy, the Convention determined that its will must be overpowered by force or thwarted by constitutional forms. Threatened alternately by the Jacobin mob of Paris and by the Royalist middle class, the Government played off one enemy against the other, until an ill-timed effort of the emigrant noblesse gave to the Convention the prestige of a decisive victory over Royalists and foreigners combined. On the 27th of June, 1795, an English fleet landed the flower of the old nobility of France at the Bay of Quiberon in southern Brittany. It was only to give one last fatal proof of their incapacity that these unhappy men appeared once more on French soil. Within three weeks after their landing, in a region where for years together the peasantry, led by their landlords, baffled the best generals of the Republic, this invading army of the nobles, supported by the fleet, the arms, and the money of England, was brought to utter ruin by the discord of its own leaders. Before the nobles had settled who was to command and who was to obey, General Hoche surprised their fort, beat them back to the edge of the peninsula where they had landed, and captured all who were not killed fighting or rescued by English boats (July 20). The Commissioner Tallien, in order to purge himself from the just suspicion of Royalist intrigues, caused six hundred prisoners to be shot in cold blood. [43]

[Project of Constitution, 1795.]

At the moment when the emigrant army reached France, the Convention was engaged in discussing the political system which was to succeed its own rule. A week earlier, the Committee appointed to draw up a new constitution for France had presented its report. The main object of the new constitution in its original form was to secure France against a recurrence of those evils which it had suffered since 1792. The calamities of the last three years were ascribed to the sovereignty of a single Assembly. A vote of the Convention had established the Revolutionary Tribunal, proscribed the Girondins, and placed France at the mercy of eighty individuals selected by the Convention from itself. The legislators of 1795 desired a guarantee that no party, however determined, should thus destroy its enemies by a single law, and unite supreme legislative and executive power in its own hands. With the object of dividing authority, the executive was, in the new draft-constitution, made independent of the legislature, and the legislature itself was broken up into two chambers. A Directory of five members, chosen by the Assemblies, but not responsible except under actual impeachment, was to conduct the administration, without the right of proposing laws; a Chamber of five hundred was to submit laws to the approval of a Council of two hundred and fifty Ancients, or men of middle life; but neither of these bodies was to exercise any influence upon the actual government. One director and a third part of each of the legislative bodies were to retire every year. [44]

[Constitution of 1795. Insurrection of Vendemiaire, Oct. 4.]

The project thus outlined met with general approval, and gained even that of the Royalists, who believed that a popular election would place them in a majority in the two new Assemblies. Such an event was, however, in the eyes of the Convention, the one fatal possibility that must be averted at every cost. In the midst of the debates upon the draft-constitution there arrived the news of Hoche's victory at Quiberon. The Convention gained courage to add a clause providing that two-thirds of the new deputies should be appointed from among its own members, thus rendering a Royalist majority in the Chambers impossible. With this condition attached to it, the Constitution was laid before the country. The provinces accepted it; the Royalist middle class of Paris rose in insurrection, and marched against the Convention in the Tuileries. Their revolt was foreseen; the defence of the Convention was entrusted to General Bonaparte, who met the attack of the Parisians in a style unknown in the warfare of the capital. Bonaparte's command of trained artillery secured him victory; but the struggle of the 4th of October (13 Vendemiaire) was the severest that took place in Paris during the Revolution, and the loss of life in fighting greater than on the day that overthrew the Monarchy.

[The Directory, Oct., 1795.]

The new Government of France now entered into power. Members of the Convention formed two-thirds of the new legislative bodies; the one-third which the country was permitted to elect consisted chiefly of men of moderate or Royalist opinions. The five persons who were chosen Directors were all Conventionalists who had voted for the death of the King; Carnot, however, who had won the victories without sharing in the cruelties of the Reign of Terror, was the only member of the late Committee of Public Safety who was placed in power. In spite of the striking homage paid to the great act of regicide in the election of the five Directors, the establishment of the Directory was accepted by Europe as the close of revolutionary disorder. The return of constitutional rule in France was marked by a declaration on the part of the King of England of his willingness to treat for peace. A gentler spirit seemed to have arisen in the Republic. Although the laws against the emigrants and non-juring priests were still unrepealed, the exiles began to return unmolested to their homes. Life resumed something of its old aspect in the capital. The rich and the gay consoled themselves with costlier luxury for all the austerities of the Reign of Terror. The labouring classes, now harmless and disarmed, were sharply taught that they must be content with such improvement in their lot as the progress of society might bring.

[What was new to Europe in the Revolution.]

[Absolute governments of 18th century engaged in reforms.]

At the close of this first period of the Revolutionary War we may pause to make an estimate of the new influences which the French Revolution had brought into Europe, and of the effects which had thus far resulted from them. The opinion current among the French people themselves, that the Revolution gave birth to the modern life not of France only but of the Western Continent generally, is true of one great set of facts; it is untrue of another. There were conceptions in France in 1789 which made France a real contrast to most of the Continental monarchies; there were others which it shared in common with them. The ideas of social, legal, and ecclesiastical reform which were realised in 1789 were not peculiar to France; what was peculiar to France was the idea that these reforms were to be effected by the nation itself. In other countries reforms had been initiated by Governments, and forced upon an unwilling people. Innovation sprang from the Crown; its agents were the servants of the State. A distinct class of improvements, many of them identical with the changes made by the Revolution in France, attracted the attention in a greater or less degree of almost all the Western Courts of the eighteenth century. The creation of a simple and regular administrative system; the reform of the clergy; the emancipation of the Church from the jurisdiction of the Pope, and of all orders in the State from the jurisdiction of the Church; the amelioration of the lot of the peasant; the introduction of codes of law abolishing both the cruelties and the confusion of ancient practice,—all these were purposes more or less familiar to the absolute sovereigns of the eighteenth century, whom the French so summarily described as benighted tyrants. It was in Austria, Prussia, and Tuscany that the civilising energy of the Crown had been seen in its strongest form, but even the Governments of Naples and Spain had caught the spirit of change. The religious tolerance which Joseph gave to Austria, the rejection of Papal authority and the abolition of the punishment of death which Leopold effected in Tuscany, were bolder efforts of the same political rationalism which in Spain minimised the powers of the Inquisition and in Naples attempted to found a system of public education. In all this, however, there was no trace of the action of the people, or of any sense that a nation ought to raise itself above a state of tutelage. Men of ideas called upon Governments to impose better institutions upon the people, not upon the people to wrest them from the Governments.

[In France, the nation itself acted.]

In France alone a view of public affairs had grown up which impelled the nation to create its reforms for itself. If the substance of many of the French revolutionary changes coincided with the objects of Austrian or of Tuscan reform, there was nothing similar in their method. In other countries reform sprang from the command of an enlightened ruler; in France it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and aimed at the creation of local authority to be exercised by the citizens themselves. The source of this difference lay partly in the influence of England and America upon French opinion, but much more in the existence within France of a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by commerce, and keenly interested in all the speculation and literary activity of the age. This was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other classes inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For the flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up monarchical Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed privilege nor stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing itself into power. The nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the Crown sought to reduce them; the nation, elsewhere than in France, did not intervene and lay hands upon power for itself, because the nation was nothing but the four mutually exclusive classes of the landlords who commanded, the peasants who served, the priests who idled, and the soldiers who fought. France differed from all the other monarchies of the Continent in possessing a public which blended all classes and was dominated by none; a public comprehending thousands of men who were familiar with the great interests of society, and who, whether noble or not noble, possessed the wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly desire a share in power.

[Movements against governments outside France.]

Liberty, the right of the nation to govern itself, seemed at the outset to be the great principle of the Revolution. The French people themselves believed the question at issue to be mainly between authority and popular right; the rest of Europe saw the Revolution under the same aspect. Hence, in those countries where the example of France produced political movements, the effect was in the first instance to excite agitation against the Government, whatever might be the form of the latter. In England the agitation was one of the middle class against the aristocratic parliamentary system; in Hungary, it was an agitation of the nobles against the Crown; on the Rhine it was an agitation of the commercial classes against ecclesiastical rule. But in every case in which the reforming movement was not supported by the presence of French armies, the terrors which succeeded the first sanguine hopes of the Revolution struck the leaders of these movements with revulsion and despair, and converted even the better Governments into engines of reaction. In France itself it was seen that the desire for liberty among an enlightened class could not suddenly transform the habits of a nation accustomed to accept everything from authority. Privilege was destroyed, equality was advanced; but instead of self-government the Revolution brought France the most absolute rule it had ever known. It was not that the Revolution had swept by, leaving things where they were before: it had in fact accomplished most of those great changes which lay the foundation of a sound social life: but the faculty of self-government, the first condition of any lasting political liberty, remained to be slowly won.

[Reaction.]

Outside France reaction set in without the benefit of previous change. At London, Vienna, Naples, and Madrid, Governments gave up all other objects in order to devote themselves to the suppression of Jacobinism. Pitt, whose noble aims had been the extinction of the slave-trade, the reform of Parliament, and the advance of national intercourse by free trade, surrendered himself to men whose thoughts centred upon informers, Gagging Acts, and constructive treasons, and who opposed all legislation upon the slave-trade because slaves had been freed by the Jacobins of the Convention. State trials and imprisonments became the order of the day; but the reaction in England at least stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna and Naples fear was more cruel. The men who either were, or affected to be, in such fear of revolution that they discovered a Jacobinical allegory in Mozart's last opera, [45] did not spare life when the threads of anything like a real conspiracy were placed in their hands. At Vienna terror was employed to crush the constitutional opposition of Hungary to the Austrian Court. In Naples a long reign of cruelty and oppression began with the creation of a secret tribunal to investigate charges of conspiracy made by informers. In Mainz, the Archbishop occupied the last years of his government, after his restoration in 1793, with a series of brutal punishments and tyrannical precautions.

These were but instances of the effect which the first epoch of the Revolution produced upon the old European States. After a momentary stimulus to freedom it threw the nations themselves into reaction and apathy; it totally changed the spirit of the better governments, attaching to all liberal ideas the stigma of Revolution, and identifying the work of authority with resistance to every kind of reform. There were States in which this change, the first effect of the Revolution, was also its only one; States whose history, as in the case of England, is for a whole generation the history of political progress unnaturally checked and thrown out of its course. There were others, and these the more numerous, where the first stimulus and the first reaction were soon forgotten in new and penetrating changes produced by the successive victories of France. The nature of these changes, even more than the warfare which introduced them, gives its interest to the period on which we are about to enter.



CHAPTER III.

Triple attack on Austria—Moreau, Jourdan—Bonaparte in Italy—Condition of the Italian States—Professions and real intentions of Bonaparte and the Directory—Battle of Montenotte—Armistice with Sardinia—Campaign in Lombardy—Treatment of the Pope, Naples, Tuscany—Siege of Mantua— Castiglione, Moreau and Jourdan in Germany Their retreat—Secret Treaty with Prussia—Negotiations with England—Cispadane Republic—Rise of the idea of Italian Independence—Battles of Arcola and Rivoli—Peace with the Pope at Tolentino—Venice—Preliminaries of Leoben—The French in Venice—The French take the Ionian Islands and give Venice to Austria—Genoa—Coup d'etat of 17 Fructidor in Paris—Treaty of Campo Formio—Victories of England at sea—Bonaparte's project against Egypt.

[Armies of Italy, the Danube, and the Main, 1796.]

With the opening of the year 1796 the leading interest of European history passes to a new scene. Hitherto the progress of French victory had been in the direction of the Rhine: the advance of the army of the Pyrenees had been cut short by the conclusion of peace with Spain; the army of Italy had achieved little beyond some obscure successes in the mountains. It was the appointment of Napoleon Bonaparte to the command of the latter force, in the spring of 1796, that first centred the fortunes of the Republic in the land beyond the Alps. Freed from Prussia by the Treaty of Basle, the Directory was now able to withdraw its attention from Holland and from the Lower Rhine, and to throw its whole force into the struggle with Austria. By the advice of Bonaparte a threefold movement was undertaken against Vienna, by way of Lombardy, by the valley of the Danube, and by the valley of the Main. General Jourdan, in command of the army that had conquered the Netherlands, was ordered to enter Germany by Frankfort; Moreau crossed the Rhine at Strasburg: Bonaparte himself, drawing his scanty supplies along the coast-road from Nice, faced the allied forces of Austria and Sardinia upon the slopes of the Maritime Apennines, forty miles to the west of Genoa. The country in which he was about to operate was familiar to Bonaparte from service there in 1794; his own descent and language gave him singular advantages in any enterprise undertaken in Italy. Bonaparte was no Italian at heart; but he knew at least enough of the Italian nature to work upon its better impulses, and to attach its hopes, so long as he needed the support of Italian opinion, to his own career of victory.

[Condition of Italy.]

Three centuries separated the Italy of that day from the bright and vigorous Italy which, in the glow of its Republican freedom, had given so much to Northern Europe in art, in letters, and in the charm of life. A long epoch of subjection to despotic or foreign rule, of commercial inaction, of decline in mind and character, had made the Italians of no account among the political forces of Europe. Down to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 their provinces were bartered between the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs; and although the settlement of that date left no part of Italy, except the Duchy of Milan, incorporated in a foreign empire, yet the crown of Naples was vested in a younger branch of the Spanish Bourbons, and the marriage of Maria Theresa with the Archduke Francis made Tuscany an appanage of the House of Austria. Venice and Genoa retained their independence and their republican government, but little of their ancient spirit. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Austrian influence was dominant throughout the peninsula, Marie Caroline, the Queen and the ruler of Ferdinand of Naples, being the sister of the Emperor Leopold and Marie Antoinette. With the exception of Piedmont, which preserved a strong military sentiment and the tradition of an active and patriotic policy, the Italian States were either, like Venice and Genoa, anxious to keep themselves out of danger by seeming to hear and see nothing that passed around them, or governed by families in the closest connection with the great reigning Houses of the Continent. Neither in Italy itself, nor in the general course of European affairs during the Napoleonic period, was anything determined by the sentiment of the Italian people. The peasantry at times fought against the French with energy; but no strong impulse, like that of the Spaniards, enlisted the upper class of Italians either on the side of Napoleon or on that of his enemies. Acquiescence and submission had become the habit of the race; the sense of national unity and worth, the personal pride which makes the absence of liberty an intolerable wrong, only entered the Italian character at a later date.

[Revival after 1740.]

Yet, in spite of its political nullity, Italy was not in a state of decline. Its worst days had ended before the middle of the eighteenth century. The fifty years preceding the French Revolution, if they had brought nothing of the spirit of liberty, had in all other respects been years of progress and revival. In Lombardy the government of Maria Theresa and Joseph awoke life and motion after ages of Spanish torpor and misrule. Traditions of local activity revived; the communes were encouraged in their works of irrigation and rural improvement; a singular liberality towards public opinion and the press made the Austrian possessions the centre of the intellectual movement of Italy. In the south, progress began on the day when the last foreign Viceroy disappeared from Naples (1735), and King Charles III., though a member of the Spanish House, entered upon the government of the two Sicilies as an independent kingdom. Venice and the Papal States alone seemed to be untouched by the spirit of material and social improvement, so active in the rest of Italy before the interest in political life had come into being.

Nor was the age without its intellectual distinction. If the literature of Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century had little that recalled the inspiration of its splendid youth, it showed at least a return to seriousness and an interest in important things. The political economists of Lombardy were scarcely behind those of England; the work of the Milanese Beccaria on "Crimes and Punishments" stimulated the reform of criminal law in every country in Europe; an intelligent and increasing attention to problems of agriculture, commerce, and education took the place of the fatuous gallantries and insipid criticism which had hitherto made up the life of Italians of birth and culture. One man of genius, Vittorio Alfieri, the creator of Italian tragedy, idealised both in prose and verse a type of rugged independence and resistance to tyrannical power. Alfieri was neither a man of political judgment himself nor the representative of any real political current in Italy; but the lesson which he taught to the Italians, the lesson of respect for themselves and their country, was the one which Italy most of all required to learn; and the appearance of this manly and energetic spirit in its literature gave hope that the Italian nation would not long be content to remain without political being.

[Social condition.]

[Tuscany.]

Italy, to the outside world, meant little more than the ruins of the Roman Forum, the galleries of Florence, the paradise of Capri and the Neapolitan coast; the singular variety in its local conditions of life gained little attention from the foreigner. There were districts in Italy where the social order was almost of a Polish type of barbarism; there were others where the rich and the poor lived perhaps under a happier relation than in any other country in Europe. The difference depended chiefly upon the extent to which municipal life had in past time superseded the feudal order under which the territorial lord was the judge and the ruler of his own domain. In Tuscany the city had done the most in absorbing the landed nobility; in Naples and Sicily it had done the least. When, during the middle ages, the Republic of Florence forced the feudal lords who surrounded it to enter its walls as citizens, in some cases it deprived them of all authority, in others it permitted them to retain a jurisdiction over their peasants; but even in these instances the sovereignty of the city deprived the feudal relation of most of its harshness and force. After the loss of Florentine liberty, the Medici, aping the custom of older monarchies, conferred the title of marquis and count upon men who preferred servitude to freedom, and accompanied the grant of rank with one of hereditary local authority; but the new institutions took no deep hold on country life, and the legislation of the first Archduke of the House of Lorraine (1749) left the landed aristocracy in the position of mere country gentlemen. [46] Estates were not very large: the prevalent agricultural system was, as it still is, that of the mezzeria, a partnership between the landlord and tenant; the tenant holding by custom in perpetuity, and sharing the produce with the landlord, who supplied a part of the stock and materials for farming. In Tuscany the conditions of the mezzeria were extremely favourable to the tenant; and if a cheerful country life under a mild and enlightened government were all that a State need desire, Tuscany enjoyed rare happiness.

[Naples and Sicily.]

[Piedmont.]

Far different was the condition of Sicily and Naples. Here the growth of city life had never affected the rough sovereignty which the barons exercised over great tracts of country withdrawn from the civilised world. When Charles III. ascended the throne in 1735, he found whole provinces in which there was absolutely no administration of justice on the part of the State. The feudal rights of the nobility were in the last degree oppressive, the barbarism of the people was in many districts extreme. Out of two thousand six hundred towns and villages in the kingdom, there were only fifty that were not subject to feudal authority. In the manor of San Gennaro di Palma, fifteen miles from Naples, even down to the year 1786 the officers of the baron were the only persons who lived in houses; the peasants, two thousand in number, slept among the corn-ricks. [47] Charles, during his tenure of the Neapolitan crown, from 1735 to 1759, and the Ministers Tanucci and Caraccioli under his feeble successor Ferdinand IV., enforced the authority of the State in justice and administration, and abolished some of the most oppressive feudal rights of the nobility; but their legislation, though bold and even revolutionary according to an English standard, could not in the course of two generations transform a social system based upon centuries of misgovernment and disorder. At the outbreak of the French Revolution the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was, as it still in a less degree is, a land of extreme inequalities of wealth and poverty, a land where great estates wasted in the hands of oppressive or indolent owners, and the peasantry, untrained either by remunerative industry or by a just and regular enforcement of the law, found no better guide than a savage and fanatical priesthood. Over the rest of Italy the conditions of life varied through all degrees between the Tuscan and the Neapolitan type. Piedmont, in military spirit and patriotism far superior to the other Italian States, was socially one of the most backward of all. It was a land of priests, nobles, and soldiers, where a gloomy routine and the repression of all originality of thought and character drove the most gifted of its children, like the poet Alfieri, to seek a home on some more liberal soil.

[Professions and real intentions of the Directory and Bonaparte, 1796.]

During the first years of the Revolution, an attempt had been made by French enthusiasts to extend the Revolution into Italy by means of associations in the principal towns; but it met with no great success. A certain liberal movement arose among the young men of the upper classes at Naples, where, under the influence of Queen Marie Caroline, the Government had now become reactionary; and in Turin and several of the Lombard cities the French were not without partisans; but no general disaffection like that of Savoy existed east of the Alps. The agitation of 1789 and 1792 had passed by without bringing either liberty or national independence to the Italians. When Bonaparte received his command, that fervour of Republican passion which, in the midst of violence and wrong, had seldom been wanting in the first leaders of the Revolutionary War, had died out in France. The politicians who survived the Reign of Terror and gained office in the Directory repeated the old phrases about the Rights of Man and the Liberation of the Peoples only as a mode of cajolery. Bonaparte entered Italy proclaiming himself the restorer of Italian freedom, but with the deliberate purpose of using Italy as a means of recruiting the exhausted treasury of France. His correspondence with the Directory exposes with brazen frankness this well-considered system of pillage and deceit, in which the general and the Government were cordially at one. On the further question, how France should dispose of any territory that might be conquered in Northern Italy, Bonaparte and the Directory had formed no understanding, and their purposes were in fact at variance. The Directory wished to conquer Lombardy in order to hand it back to Austria in return for the Netherlands; Bonaparte had at least formed the conception that an Italian State was possible, and he intended to convert either Austrian Lombardy itself, or some other portion of Northern Italy, into a Republic, serving as a military outwork for France.

[Bonaparte separates the Austrian and Sardinian Armies, April, 1796.]

[Armistice and peace with Sardinia.]

The campaign of 1796 commenced in April, in the mountains above the coast-road connecting Nice and Genoa. Bonaparte's own army numbered 40,000 men; the force opposed to it consisted of 38,000 Austrians, under Beaulieu, and a smaller Sardinian army, so placed upon the Piedmontese Apennines as to block the passes from the coast-road into Piedmont, and to threaten the rear of the French if they advanced eastward against Genoa. The Piedmontese army drew its supplies from Turin, the Austrian from Mantua; to sever the two armies was to force them on to lines of retreat conducting them farther and farther apart from one another. Bonaparte foresaw the effect which such a separation of the two armies would produce upon the Sardinian Government. For four days he reiterated his attacks at Montenotte and Millesimo, until he had forced his own army into a position in the centre of the Allies; then, leaving a small force to watch the Austrians, he threw the mass of his troops upon the Piedmontese, and drove them back to within thirty miles of Turin. The terror-stricken Government, anticipating an outbreak in the capital itself, accepted an armistice from Bonaparte at Cherasco (April 28), and handed over to the French the fortresses of Coni, Ceva, and Tortona, which command the entrances of Italy. It was an unworthy capitulation for Turin could not have been taken before the Austrians returned in force; but Bonaparte had justly calculated the effect of his victory; and the armistice, which was soon followed by a treaty of peace between France and Sardinia, ceding Savoy to the Republic, left him free to follow the Austrians, untroubled by the existence of some of the strongest fortresses of Europe behind him.

[Bridge of Lodi, May 10.]

In the negotiations with Sardinia Bonaparte demanded the surrender of the town of Valenza, as necessary to secure his passage over the river Po. Having thus led the Austrian Beaulieu to concentrate his forces at this point, he suddenly moved eastward along the southern bank of the river, and crossed at Piacenza, fifty miles below the spot where Beaulieu was awaiting him. It was an admirable movement. The Austrian general, with the enemy threatening his communications, had to abandon Milan and all the country west of it, and to fall back upon the line of the Adda. Bonaparte followed, and on the 10th of May attacked the Austrians at Lodi. He himself stormed the bridge of Lodi at the head of his Grenadiers. The battle was so disastrous to the Austrians that they could risk no second engagement, and retired upon Mantua and the line of the Mincio. [48]

[Bonaparte in Milan. Extortions.]

Bonaparte now made his triumphal entry into Milan (May 15). The splendour of his victories and his warm expressions of friendship for Italy excited the enthusiasm of a population not hitherto hostile to Austrian rule. A new political movement began. With the French army there came all the partisans of the French Republic who had been expelled from other parts of Italy. Uniting with the small revolutionary element already existing in Milan, they began to form a new public opinion by means of journals and patriotic meetings. It was of the utmost importance to Bonaparte that a Republican party should be organised among the better classes in the towns of Lombardy; for the depredations of the French army exasperated the peasants, and Bonaparte's own measures were by no means of a character to win him unmixed goodwill. The instructions which he received from the Directory were extremely simple. "Leave nothing in Italy," they wrote to him on the day of his entry into Milan, "which will be useful to us, and which the political situation will allow you to remove." If Bonaparte had felt any doubt as to the meaning of such an order, the pillage of works of art in Belgium and Holland in preceding years would have shown him that it was meant to be literally interpreted. Accordingly, in return for the gift of liberty, the Milanese were invited to offer to their deliverers twenty million francs, and a selection from the paintings in their churches and galleries. The Dukes of Parma and Modena, in return for an armistice, were required to hand over forty of their best pictures, and a sum of money proportioned to their revenues. The Dukes and the townspeople paid their contributions with good grace: the peasantry of Lombardy, whose cattle were seized in order to supply an army that marched without any stores of its own, rose in arms, and threw themselves into Pavia, killing all the French soldiers who fell in their way. The revolt was instantly suppressed, and the town of Pavia given up to pillage. In deference to the Liberal party of Italy, the movement was described as a conspiracy of priests and nobles.

[Venice.]

[Battle on the Mincio, May 29.]

The way into Central Italy now lay open before Bonaparte. Rome and Naples were in no condition to offer resistance; but with true military judgment the French general declined to move against this feeble prey until the army of Austria, already crippled, was completely driven out of the field. Instead of crossing the Apennines, Bonaparte advanced against the Austrian positions upon the Mincio. It suited him to violate the neutrality of the adjacent Venetian territory by seizing the town of Brescia. His example was followed by Beaulieu, who occupied Peschiera, at the foot of the Lake of Garda, and thus held the Mincio along its whole course from the lake to Mantua. A battle was fought and lost by the Austrians half-way between the lake and the fortress. Beaulieu's strength was exhausted; he could meet the enemy no more in the field, and led his army out of Italy into the Tyrol, leaving Mantua to be invested by the French. The first care of the conqueror was to make Venice pay for the crime of possessing territory intervening between the eastern and western extremes of the Austrian district. Bonaparte affected to believe that the Venetians had permitted Beaulieu to occupy Peschiera before he seized upon Brescia himself. He uttered terrifying threats to the envoys who came from Venice to excuse an imaginary crime. He was determined to extort money from the Venetian Republic; he also needed a pretext for occupying Verona, and for any future wrongs. "I have purposely devised this rupture," he wrote to the Directory (June 7th), "in case you should wish to obtain five or six millions of francs from Venice. If you have more decided intentions, I think it would be well to keep up the quarrel." The intention referred to was the disgraceful project of sacrificing Venice to Austria in return for the cession of the Netherlands, a measure based on plans familiar to Thugut as early as the year 1793. [49]

[Armistice with Naples, June 6.]

[Armistice with the Pope, June 23.]

The Austrians were fairly driven out of Lombardy, and Bonaparte was now free to deal with southern Italy. He advanced into the States of the Church, and expelled the Papal Legate from Bologna. Ferdinand of Naples, who had lately called heaven and earth to witness the fury of his zeal against an accursed horde of regicides, thought it prudent to stay Bonaparte's hand, at least until the Austrians were in a condition to renew the war in Lombardy. He asked for a suspension of hostilities against his own kingdom. The fleet and the sea-board of Naples gave it importance in the struggle between France and England, and Bonaparte granted the king an armistice on easy terms. The Pope, in order to gain a few months' truce, had to permit the occupation of Ferrara, Ravenna, and Ancona, and to recognise the necessities, the learning, the taste, and the virtue of his conquerors by a gift of twenty million francs, five hundred manuscripts, a hundred pictures, and the busts of Marcus and Lucius Brutus. The rule of the Pope was unpopular in Bologna, and a Senate which Bonaparte placed in power, pending the formation of a popular Government gladly took the oath of fidelity to the French Republic. Tuscany was the only State that remained to be dealt with. Tuscany had indeed made peace with the Republic a year before, but the ships and cargoes of the English merchants at Leghorn were surely fair prey; and, with the pretence of punishing insults offered by the English to the French flag, Bonaparte descended upon Leghorn, and seized upon everything that was not removed before his approach. Once established in Leghorn, the French declined to quit it. By way of adjusting the relations of the Grand Duke, the English seized his harbour of Porto Ferraio, in the island of Elba.

[Battles of Lonato and Castiglione, July, Aug., 1796.]

Mantua was meanwhile invested, and thither, after his brief incursion into Central Italy, Bonaparte returned. Towards the end of July an Austrian relieving army, nearly double the strength of Bonaparte's, descended from the Tyrol. It was divided into three corps: one, under Quosdanovich, advanced by the road on the west of Lake Garda; the others, under Wurmser, the commander-in-chief, by the roads between the lake and the river Adige. The peril of the French was extreme; their outlying divisions were defeated and driven in; Bonaparte could only hope to save himself by collecting all his forces at the foot of the lake, and striking at one or other of the Austrian armies before they effected their junction on the Mincio. He instantly broke up the siege of Mantua, and withdrew from every position east of the river. On the 30th of July, Quosdanovich was attacked and checked at Lonato, on the west of the Lake of Garda. Wurmser, unaware of his colleague's repulse, entered Mantua in triumph, and then set out, expecting to envelop Bonaparte between two fires. But the French were ready for his approach. Wurmser was stopped and defeated at Castiglione, while the western Austrian divisions were still held in check at Lonato. The junction of the Austrian armies had become impossible. In five days the skill of Bonaparte and the unsparing exertions of his soldiery had more than retrieved all that appeared to have been lost. [50] The Austrians retired into the Tyrol, beaten and dispirited, and leaving 15,000 prisoners in the hands of the enemy.

Bonaparte now prepared to force his way into Germany by the Adige, in fulfilment of the original plan of the campaign. In the first days of September he again routed the Austrians, and gained possession of Roveredo and Trent. Wurmser hereupon attempted to shut the French up in the mountains by a movement southwards; but, while he operated with insufficient forces between the Brenta and the Adige, he was cut off from Germany, and only escaped capture by throwing himself into Mantua with the shattered remnant of his army. The road into Germany through the Tyrol now lay open; but in the midst of his victories Bonaparte learnt that the northern armies of Moreau and Jourdan, with which he had intended to co-operate in an attack upon Vienna, were in full retreat.

[Invasion of Germany by Moureau and Jourdan, June-Oct. 1796.]

[The Archduke Charles overpowers Jourdan.]

Moreau's advance into the valley of the Danube had, during the months of July and August, been attended with unbroken military and political success. The Archduke Charles, who was entrusted with the defence of the Empire, found himself unable to bring two armies into the field capable of resisting those of Moreau and Jourdan separately, and he therefore determined to fall back before Moreau towards Nuremberg, ordering Wartensleben, who commanded the troops facing Jourdan on the Main, to retreat in the same direction, in order that the two armies might throw their collected force upon Jourdan while still at some distance north of Moreau. [51] The design of the Archduke succeeded in the end, but it opened Germany to the French for six weeks, and showed how worthless was the military constitution of the Empire, and how little the Germans had to expect from one another. After every skirmish won by Moreau some neighbouring State abandoned the common defence and hastened to make its terms with the invader. On the 17th of July the Duke of Wuertemberg purchased an armistice at the price of four million francs; a week later Baden gained the French general's protection in return for immense supplies of food and stores. The troops of the Swabian Circle of the Empire, who were ridiculed as "harlequins" by the more martial Austrians, dispersed to their homes; and no sooner had Moreau entered Bavaria than the Bavarian contingent in its turn withdrew from the Archduke. Some consideration was shown by Moreau's soldiery to those districts which had paid tribute to their general; but in the region of the Main, Jourdan's army plundered without distinction and without mercy. They sacked the churches, they maltreated the children, they robbed the very beggars of their pence. Before the Archduke Charles was ready to strike, the peasantry of this country, whom their governments were afraid to arm, had begun effective reprisals of their own. At length the retreating movement of the Austrians stopped. Leaving 30,000 men on the Lech to disguise his motions from Moreau, Charles turned suddenly northwards from Neuburg on the lyth August, met Wartensleben at Amberg, and attacked Jourdan at this place with greatly superior numbers. Jourdan was defeated and driven back in confusion towards the Rhine. The issue of the campaign was decided before Moreau heard of his colleague's danger. It only remained for him to save his own army by a skilful retreat. Jourdan's soldiers, returning through districts which they had devastated, suffered heavier losses from the vengeance of the peasantry than from the army that pursued them. By the autumn of 1796 no Frenchman remained beyond the Rhine. The campaign had restored the military spirit of Austria and given Germany a general in whom soldiers could trust; but it had also shown how willing were the Governments of the minor States to become the vassals of a foreigner, how little was wanting to convert the western half of the Empire into a dependency of France.

[Secret Treaty with Prussia, Aug. 5.]

With each change in the fortunes of the campaign of 1796 the diplomacy of the Continent had changed its tone. When Moreau won his first victories, the Court of Prussia, yielding to the pressure of the Directory, substituted for the conditional clauses of the Treaty of Basle a definite agreement to the cession of the left bank of the Rhine, and a stipulation that Prussia should be compensated for her own loss by the annexation of the Bishopric of Muenster. Prussia could not itself cede provinces of the Empire: it could only agree to their cession. In this treaty, however, Prussia definitely renounced the integrity of the Empire, and accepted the system known as the Secularisation of Ecclesiastical States, the first step towards an entire reconstruction of Germany. [52] The engagement was kept secret both from the Emperor and from the ecclesiastical princes. In their negotiations with Austria the Directory were less successful. Although the long series of Austrian disasters had raised a general outcry against Thugut's persistence in the war, the resolute spirit of the Minister never bent; and the ultimate victory of the Archduke Charles more than restored his influence over the Emperor. Austria refused to enter into any negotiation not conducted in common with England, and the Directory were for the present foiled in their attempts to isolate England from the Continental Powers. It was not that Thugut either hoped or cared for that restoration of Austrian rule in the Netherlands which was the first object of England's Continental policy. The abandonment of the Netherlands by France was, however, in his opinion necessary for Austria, as a step towards the acquisition of Bavaria, which was still the cherished hope of the Viennese Government. It was in vain that the Directory suggested that Austria should annex Bavaria without offering Belgium or any other compensation to its ruler. Thugut could hardly be induced to listen to the French overtures. He had received the promise of immediate help from the Empress Catherine; he was convinced that the Republic, already anxious for peace, might by one sustained effort be forced to abandon all its conquests; and this was the object for which, in the winter of 1796, army after army was hurled against the positions where Bonaparte kept his guard on the north of the still unconquered Mantua. [53]

[Malmesbury sent to Paris, Oct., 1796.]

In England itself the victory of the Archduke Charles raised expectations of peace. The war had become unpopular through the loss of trade with France, Spain, and Holland, and petitions for peace daily reached Parliament. Pitt so far yielded to the prevalent feeling as to enter into negotiations with the Directory, and despatched Lord Malmesbury to Paris; but the condition upon which Pitt insisted, the restoration of the Netherlands to Austria, rendered agreement hopeless; and as soon as Pitt's terms were known to the Directory, Malmesbury was ordered to leave Paris. Nevertheless, the negotiation was not a mere feint on Pitt's part. He was possessed by a fixed idea that the resources of France were exhausted, and that, in spite of the conquest of Lombardy and the Rhine, the Republic must feel itself too weak to continue the war. Amid the disorders of Revolutionary finance, and exaggerated reports of suffering and distress, Pitt failed to recognise the enormous increase of production resulting from the changes which had given the peasant full property in his land and labour, and thrown vast quantities of half-waste domain into the busy hands of middling and small proprietors. [54]

Whatever were the resources of France before the Revolution, they were now probably more than doubled. Pitt's belief in the economic ruin of France, the only ground on which he could imagine that the Directory would give up Belgium without fighting for it, was wholly erroneous, and the French Government would have acted strangely if they had listened to his demand.

[Bonaparte creates a Cispadane Republic, Oct., 1796.]

Nevertheless, though the Directory would not hear of surrendering Belgium, they were anxious to conclude peace with Austria, and unwilling to enter into any engagements in the conquered provinces of Italy which might render peace with Austria more difficult. They had instructed Bonaparte to stir up the Italians against their Governments, but this was done with the object of paralysing the Governments, not of emancipating the peoples. They looked with dislike upon any scheme of Italian reconstruction which should bind France to the support of newly-formed Italian States. Here, however, the scruples of the Directory and the ambition of Bonaparte were in direct conflict. Bonaparte intended to create a political system in Italy which should bear the stamp of his own mind and require his own strong hand to support it. In one of his despatches to the Directory he suggested the formation of a client Republic out of the Duchy of Modena, where revolutionary movements had broken out. Before it was possible for the Government to answer him, he published a decree, declaring the population of Modena and Reggio under the protection of the French army, and deposing all the officers of the Duke (Oct. 4). When, some days later, the answer of the Directory arrived, it cautioned Bonaparte against disturbing the existing order of the Italian States. Bonaparte replied by uniting to Modena the Papal provinces of Bologna and Ferrara, and by giving to the State which he had thus created the title of the Cispadane Republic. [55]

[Idea of free Italy.]

The event was no insignificant one. It is from this time that the idea of Italian independence, though foreign to the great mass of the nation, may be said to have taken birth as one of those political hopes which wane and recede, but do not again leave the world. A class of men who had turned with dislike from the earlier agitation of French Republicans in Italy rightly judged the continued victories of Bonaparte over the Austrians to be the beginning of a series of great changes, and now joined the revolutionary movement in the hope of winning from the overthrow of the old Powers some real form of national independence. In its origin the French party may have been composed of hirelings and enthusiasts. This ceased to be the case when, after the passage of the Mincio, Bonaparte entered the Papal States. Among the citizens of Bologna in particular there were men of weight and intelligence who aimed at free constitutional government, and checked in some degree the more numerous popular party which merely repeated the phrases of French democracy. Bonaparte's own language and action excited the brightest hopes. At Modena he harangued the citizens upon the mischief of Italy's divisions, and exhorted them to unite with their brethren whom he had freed from the Pope. A Congress was held at Modena on the 16th of October. The representatives of Modena, Reggio, Bologna, and Ferrara declared themselves united in a Republic under the protection of France. They abolished feudal nobility, decreed a national levy, and summoned a General Assembly to meet at Reggio two months later, in order to create the Constitution of the new Cispadane Republic. It was in the Congress of Modena, and in the subsequent Assembly of Reggio (Dec. 23), that the idea of Italian unity and independence first awoke the enthusiasm of any considerable body of men. With what degree of sincerity Bonaparte himself acted may be judged from the circumstance that, while he harangued the Cispadanes on the necessity of Italian union, he imprisoned the Milanese who attempted to excite a popular movement for the purpose of extending this union to themselves. Peace was not yet made with Austria, and it was uncertain to what account Milan might best be turned.

[Rivoli, Jan. 14, 15, 1797.]

[Arcola, Nov. 15-17.]

Mantua still held out, and in November the relieving operations of the Austrians were renewed. Two armies, commanded by Allvintzy and Davidovich, descended the valleys of the Adige and the Piave, offering to Bonaparte, whose centre was at Verona, a new opportunity of crushing his enemy in detail. Allvintzy, coming from the Piave, brought the French into extreme danger in a three days' battle at Arcola, but was at last forced to retreat with heavy loss. Davidovich, who had been successful on the Adige, retired on learning the overthrow of his colleague. Two months more passed, and the Austrians for the third time appeared on the Adige. A feint made below Verona nearly succeeded in drawing Bonaparte away from Rivoli, between the Adige and Lake Garda, where Allvintzy and his main army were about to make the assault; but the strength of Allvintzy's force was discovered before it was too late, and by throwing his divisions from point to point with extraordinary rapidity, Bonaparte at length overwhelmed the Austrians in every quarter of the battle-field. This was their last effort. The surrender of Mantua on the 2nd February, 1797, completed the French conquest of Austrian Lombardy. [56]

[Peace of Tolentino, Feb. 19, 1797.]

The Pope now found himself left to settle his account with the invaders, against whom, even after the armistice, he had never ceased to intrigue. [57] His despatches to Vienna fell into the hands of Bonaparte, who declared the truce broken, and a second time invaded the Papal territory. A show of resistance was made by the Roman troops; but the country was in fact at the mercy of Bonaparte, who advanced as far as Tolentino, thirty miles south of Ancona. Here the Pope tendered his submission. If the Roman Court had never appeared to be in a more desperate condition, it had never found a more moderate or a more politic conqueror. Bonaparte was as free from any sentiment of Christian piety as Nero or Diocletian; but he respected the power of the Papacy over men's minds, and he understood the immense advantage which any Government of France supported by the priesthood would possess over those who had to struggle with its hostility. In his negotiations with the Papal envoys he deplored the violence of the French Executive, and consoled the Church with the promise of his own protection and sympathy. The terms of peace which he granted, although they greatly diminished the ecclesiastical territory were in fact more favourable than the Pope had any right to expect. Bologna, Ferrara, and the Romagna, which had been occupied in virtue of the armistice, were now ceded by the Papacy. But conditions affecting the exercise of the spiritual power which had been proposed by the Directory were withdrawn; and, beyond a provision for certain payments in money, nothing of importance was added to the stipulations of the armistice.

The last days of the Venetian Republic were now at hand. It was in vain that Venice had maintained its neutrality when all the rest of Italy joined the enemies of France; its refusal of a French alliance was made an unpardonable crime. So long as the war with Austria lasted, Bonaparte exhausted the Venetian territory with requisitions: when peace came within view, it was necessary that he should have some pretext for seizing it or handing it over to the enemy. In fulfilment of his own design of keeping a quarrel open, he had subjected the Government to every insult and wrong likely to goad it into an act of war. When at length Venice armed for the purpose of protecting its neutrality, the organs of the invader called upon the inhabitants of the Venetian mainland to rise against the oligarchy, and to throw in their lot with the liberated province of Milan. A French alliance was once more urged upon Venice by Bonaparte: it was refused, and the outbreak which the French had prepared instantly followed. Bergamo and Brescia, where French garrisons deprived the Venetian Government of all power of defence, rose in revolt, and renounced all connection with Venice. The Senate begged Bonaparte to withdraw the French garrisons; its entreaties drew nothing from him but repeated demands for the acceptance of the French alliance, which was only another name for subjection. Little as the Venetians suspected it, the only doubt now present to Bonaparte was whether he should add the provinces of Venetia to his own Cispadane Republic or hand them over to Austria in exchange for other cessions which France required.

[Preliminaries of Leoben, April 18.]

Austria could defend itself in Italy no longer. Before the end of March the mountain-passes into Carinthia were carried by Bonaparte. His army drove the enemy before it along the road to Vienna, until both pursuers and pursued were within eighty miles of the capital. At Leoben, on the 7th of April, Austrian commander asked for a suspension of arms. It was granted, and negotiations for peace commenced. [58] Bonaparte offered the Venetian provinces, but not the city of Venice, to the Emperor. On the 18th of April preliminaries of peace were signed at Leoben, by which, in return for the Netherlands and for Lombardy west of the river Oglio, Bonaparte secretly agreed to hand over to Austria the whole of the territory of Venice upon the mainland east of the Oglio, in addition to its Adriatic provinces of Istria and Dalmatia. To disguise the act of spoliation, it was pretended that Bologna and Ferrara should be offered to Venice in return. [59]

[French enter Venice.]

But worse was yet to come. While Bonaparte was in conference at Leoben, an outbreak took place at Verona, and three hundred French soldiers, including the sick in the hospital, perished by popular violence. The Venetian Senate despatched envoys to Bonaparte to express their grief and to offer satisfaction; in the midst of the negotiations intelligence arrived that the commander of a Venetian fort had fired upon a French vessel and killed some of the crew. Bonaparte drove the envoys from his presence, declaring that he could not treat with men whose hands were dripping with French blood. A declaration of war was published, charging the Senate with the design of repeating the Sicilian Vespers, and the panic which it was Bonaparte's object to inspire instantly followed. The Government threw themselves upon his mercy. Bonaparte pretended that he desired no more than to establish a popular government in Venice in the place of the oligarchy. His terms were accepted. The Senate consented to abrogate the ancient Constitution of the Republic, and to introduce a French garrison into Venice. On the 12th of May the Grand Council voted its own dissolution. Peace was concluded. The public articles of the treaty declared that there should be friendship between the French and the Venetian Republics; that the sovereignty of Venice should reside in the body of the citizens; and that the French garrison should retire so soon as the new Government announced that it had no further need of its support. Secret articles stipulated for a money payment, and for the usual surrender of works of art; an indefinite expression relating to an exchange of territory was intended to cover the surrender of the Venetian mainland, and the union of Bologna and Ferrara with what remained of Venice. The friendship and alliance of France, which Bonaparte had been so anxious to bestow on Venice, were now to bear their fruit. "I shall do everything in my power," he wrote to the new Government of Venice, "to give you proof of the great desire I have to see your liberty take root, and to see this unhappy Italy, freed from the rule of the stranger, at length take its place with glory on the scene of the world, and resume, among the great nations, the rank to which nature, destiny, and its own position call it." This was for Venice; for the French Directory Bonaparte had a very different tale. "I had several motives," he wrote (May 19), "in concluding the treaty:—to enter the city without difficulty; to have the arsenal and all else in our possession, in order to take from it whatever we needed, under pretext of the secret articles; ... to evade the odium attaching to the Preliminaries of Leoben; to furnish pretexts for them, and to facilitate their execution."

[French seize Ionian islands.]

[Venice to be given to Austria.]

As the first fruits of the Venetian alliance, Bonaparte seized upon Corfu and the other Ionian Islands. "You will start," he wrote to General Gentili, "as quickly and as secretly as possible, and take possession of all the Venetian establishments in the Levant.... If the inhabitants should be inclined for independence, you should flatter their tastes, and in all your proclamations you should not fail to allude to Greece, Athens, and Sparta." This was to be the French share in the spoil. Yet even now, though stripped of its islands, its coasts, and its ancient Italian territory, Venice might still have remained a prominent city in Italy. It was sacrificed in order to gain the Rhenish Provinces for France. Bonaparte had returned to the neighbourhood of Milan, and received the Austrian envoy, De Gallo, at the villa of Montebello. Wresting a forced meaning from the Preliminaries of Leoben, Bonaparte claimed the frontier of the Rhine, offering to Austria not only the territory of Venice upon the mainland, but the city of Venice itself. De Gallo yielded. Whatever causes subsequently prolonged the negotiation, no trace of honour or pity in Bonaparte led him even to feign a reluctance to betray Venice. "We have to-day had our first conference on the definitive treaty," he wrote to the Directory, on the night of the 26th of May, "and have agreed to present the following propositions: the line of the Rhine for France; Salzburg, Passau for the Emperor; ... the maintenance of the Germanic Body; ... Venice for the Emperor. Venice," he continued, "which has been in decadence since the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and the rise of Trieste and Ancona, can scarcely survive the blows we have just struck. With a cowardly and helpless population in no way fit for liberty, without territory and without rivers, it is but natural that she should go to those to whom we give the mainland." Thus was Italy to be freed from foreign intervention; and thus was Venice to be regenerated by the friendship of France!

[Genoa.]

In comparison with the fate preparing for Venice, the sister-republic of Genoa met with generous treatment. A revolutionary movement, long prepared by the French envoy, overthrew the ancient oligarchical Government; but democratic opinion and French sympathies did not extend below the middle classes of the population; and, after the Government had abandoned its own cause, the charcoal-burners and dock-labourers rose in its defence, and attacked the French party with the cry of "Viva Maria," and with figures of the Virgin fastened to their hats, in the place where their opponents wore the French tricolour. Religious fanaticism won the day; the old Government was restored, and a number of Frenchmen who had taken part in the conflict were thrown into prison. The imprisonment of the Frenchmen gave Bonaparte a pretext for intervention. He disclaimed all desire to alter the Government, and demanded only the liberation of his countrymen and the arrest of the enemies of France. But the overthrow of the oligarchy had been long arranged with Faypoult, the French envoy; and Genoa received a democratic constitution which place the friends of France in power (June 5).

[France in 1797.]

While Bonaparte, holding Court in the Villa of Montebello, continued to negotiate with Austria upon the basis of the Preliminaries of Leoben, events took place in France which offered him an opportunity of interfering directly in the government of the Republic. The elections which were to replace one-third of the members of the Legislature took place in the spring of 1797. The feeling of the country was now much the same as it had been in 1795, when a large Royalist element was returned for those seats in the Councils which the Convention had not reserved for its own members. France desired a more equitable and a more tolerant rule. The Directory had indeed allowed the sanguinary laws against non-juring priests and returning emigrants to remain unenforced; but the spirit and traditions of official Jacobinism were still active in the Government. The Directors themselves were all regicides; the execution of the King was still celebrated by a national fete; offices, great and small, were held by men who had risen in the Revolution; the whole of the old gentry of France was excluded from participation in public life. It was against this revolutionary class-rule, against a system which placed the country as much at the mercy of a few directors and generals as it had been at the mercy of the Conventional Committee, that the elections of 1797 were a protest. Along with certain Bourbonist conspirators, a large majority of men were returned who, though described as Royalists, were in fact moderate Constitutionalists, and desired only to undo that part of the Revolution which excluded whole classes of the nation from public life. [60]

[Opposition to the Directory.]

Such a party in the legislative body naturally took the character of an Opposition to the more violent section of the Directory. The Director retiring in 1797 was replaced by the Constitutionalist Barthelemy, negotiator of the treaty of Basle; Carnot, who continued in office, took part with the Opposition, justly fearing that the rule of the Directory would soon amount to nothing more than the rule of Bonaparte himself. The first debates in the new Chamber arose upon the laws relating to emigrants; the next, upon Bonaparte's usurpation of sovereign power in Italy. On the 23rd of June a motion for information on the affairs of Venice and Genoa was brought forward in the Council of Five Hundred. Dumolard, the mover, complained of the secrecy of Bonaparte's action, of the contempt shown by him to the Assembly, of his tyrannical and un-republican interference with the institutions of friendly States. No resolution was adopted by the Assembly; but the mere fact that the Assembly had listened to a hostile criticism of his own actions was sufficient ground in Bonaparte's eyes to charge it with Royalism and with treason. Three of the Directors, Barras, Rewbell, and Lareveillere, had already formed the project of overpowering the Assembly by force. Bonaparte's own interests led him to offer them his support. If the Constitutional party gained power, there was an end to his own unshackled rule in Italy; if the Bourbonists succeeded, a different class of men would hold all the honours of the State. However feeble the Government of the Directory, its continuance secured his own present ascendency, and left him the hope of gaining supreme power when the public could tolerate the Directory no longer.

[Coup d'eta, 17 Fructidor (Sep. 3).]

The fate of the Assembly was sealed. On the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille, Bonaparte issued a proclamation to his army declaring the Republic to be threatened by Royalist intrigues. A banquet was held, and the officers and soldiers of every division signed addresses to the Directory full of threats and fury against conspiring aristocrats. "Indignation is at its height in the army," wrote Bonaparte to the Government; "the soldiers are asking with loud cries whether they are to be rewarded by assassination on their return home, as it appears all patriots are to be so dealt with. The peril is increasing every day, and I think, citizen Directors, you must decide to act one way or other." The Directors had no difficulty in deciding after such an exhortation as this; but, as soon as Bonaparte had worked up their courage, he withdrew into the background, and sent General Augereau, a blustering Jacobin, to Paris, to risk the failure or bear the odium of the crime. Augereau received the military command of the capital; the air was filled with rumours of an impending blow; but neither the majority in the Councils nor the two threatened Directors, Carnot and Barthelemy, knew how to take measures of defence. On the night of the 3rd September (17 Fructidor) the troops of Augereau surrounded the Tuileries. Barthelemy was seized at the Luxembourg; Carnot fled for his life; the members of the Councils, marching in procession to the Tuileries early the next morning, were arrested or dispersed by the soldiers. Later in the day a minority of the Councils was assembled to ratify the measures determined upon by Augereau and the three Directors. Fifty members of the Legislature, and the writers, proprietors, and editors of forty-two journals, were sentenced to exile; the elections of forty-eight departments were annulled; the laws against priests and emigrants were renewed; and the Directory was empowered to suppress all journals at its pleasure. This coup d'etat was described as the suppression of a Royalist conspiracy. It was this, but it was something more. It was the suppression of all Constitutional government, and all but the last step to the despotism of the chief of the army.

[Peace signed with Austria, Oct. 17.]

The effect of the movement was instantly felt in the negotiations with Austria and with England. Lord Malmesbury was now again in France, treating for peace with fair hopes of success, since the Preliminaries of Leoben had removed England's opposition to the cession of the Netherlands, the discomfiture of the moderate party in the Councils brought his mission to an abrupt end. Austria, on the other hand, had prolonged its negotiations because Bonaparte claimed Mantua and the Rhenish Provinces in addition to the cessions agreed upon at Leoben. Count Ludwig Cobenzl, Austrian ambassador at St. Petersburg, who had protected his master's interests only too well in the last partition of Poland, was now at the head of the plenipotentiaries in Italy, endeavouring to bring Bonaparte back to the terms fixed in the Preliminaries, or to gain additional territory for Austria in Italy. The Jacobin victory at Paris depressed the Austrians as much as it elated the French leader. Bonaparte was resolved on concluding a peace that should be all his own, and this was only possible by anticipating an invasion of Germany, about to be undertaken by Augereau at the head of the Army of the Rhine. It was to this personal ambition of Bonaparte that Venice was sacrificed. The Directors were willing that Austria should receive part of the Venetian territory: they forbade the proposed cession of Venice itself. Within a few weeks more, the advance of the Army of the Rhine would have enabled France to dictate its own terms; but no consideration either for France or for Italy could induce Bonaparte to share the glory of the Peace with another. On the 17th of October he signed the final treaty of Campo Formio, which gave France the frontier of the Rhine, and made both the Venetian territory beyond the Adige and Venice itself the property of the Emperor. For a moment it seemed that the Treaty might be repudiated at Vienna as well as at Paris. Thugut protested against it, because it surrendered Mantua and the Rhenish Provinces without gaining for Austria the Papal Legations; and he drew up the ratification only at the absolute command of the Emperor. The Directory, on the other hand, condemned the cession of Venice. But their fear of Bonaparte and their own bad conscience left them impotent accessories of his treachery; and the French nation at large was too delighted with the peace to resent its baser conditions. [61]

[Treaty of Campo Formio, Oct. 17.]

By the public articles of the Treaty of Campo Formio, the Emperor ceded to France the Austrian possessions in Lombardy and in the Netherlands, and agreed to the establishment of a Cisalpine Republic, formed out of Austrian Lombardy, the Venetian territory west of the Adige, and the districts hitherto composing the new Cispadane State. France took the Ionian Islands, Austria the City of Venice, with Istria and Dalmatia, and the Venetian mainland east of the Adige. For the conclusion of peace between France and the Holy Roman Empire, it was agreed that a Congress should meet at Rastadt; but a secret article provided that the Emperor should use his efforts to gain for France the whole left bank of the Rhine, except a tract including the Prussian Duchies of Cleve and Guelders. With humorous duplicity the French Government, which had promised Prussia the Bishopric of Muenster in return for this very district, now pledged itself to Austria that Prussia should receive no extension whatever, and affected to exclude the Prussian Duchies from the Rhenish territory which was to be made over to France. Austria was promised the independent Bishopric of Salzburg, and that portion of Bavaria which lies between the Inn and the Salza. The secular princes dispossessed in the Rhenish Provinces were to be compensated in the interior of the Empire by a scheme framed in concert with France.

[Austria sacrifices Germany.]

The immense advantages which the Treaty of Campo Formio gave to France—its extension over the Netherlands and the Rhenish Provinces, and the virtual annexation of Lombardy, Modena, and the Papal Legations under the form of a client republic—were not out of proportion to its splendid military successes. Far otherwise was it with Austria. With the exception of the Archduke's campaign of 1796, the warfare of the last three years had brought Austria nothing but a series of disasters; yet Austria gained by the Treaty of Campo Formio as much as it lost. In the place of the distant Netherlands and of Milan it gained, in Venice and Dalmatia, a territory touching its own, nearly equal to the Netherlands and Milan together in population, and so situated as to enable Austria to become one of the naval Powers of the Mediterranean. The price which Austria paid was the abandonment of Germany, a matter which, in spite of Thugut's protests, disturbed the Court of Vienna as little as the betrayal of Venice disturbed Bonaparte. The Rhenish Provinces were surrendered to the stranger; German districts were to be handed over to compensate the ejected Sovereigns of Holland and of Modena; the internal condition and order of the Empire were to be superseded by one framed not for the purpose of benefiting Germany, but for the purpose of extending the influence of France.

[Policy of Bonaparte.]

As defenders of Germany, both Prussia and Austria had been found wanting. The latter Power seemed to have reaped in Italy the reward of its firmness in prolonging the war. Bonaparte ridiculed the men who, in the earlier spirit of the Revolution, desired to found a freer political system in Europe upon the ruins of Austria's power." I have not drawn my support in Italy," he wrote to Talleyrand (Oct. 7), "from the love of the peoples for liberty and equality, or at least but a very feeble support. The real support of the army of Italy has been its own discipline, ... above all, our promptitude in repressing malcontents and punishing those who declared against us. This is history; what I say in my proclamations and speeches is a romance.... If we return to the foreign policy of 1793, we shall do so knowing that a different policy has brought us success, and that we have no longer the great masses of 1793 to enrol in our armies, nor the support of an enthusiasm which has its day and does not return." Austria might well, for the present, be left in some strength, and France was fortunate to have so dangerous an enemy off her hands. England required the whole forces of the Republic. "The present situation," wrote Bonaparte, after the Peace of Campo Formio, "offers us a good chance. We must set all our strength upon the sea; we must destroy England; and the Continent is at our feet."

[Battles of St. Vincent, Feb. 14, 1797, and Camperdown, Oct. 6.]

It had been the natural hope of the earlier Republicans that the Spanish and the Dutch navies, if they could be brought to the side of France, would make France superior to Great Britain as a maritime Power. The conquest of Holland had been planned by Carnot as the first step towards an invasion of England. For a while these plans seemed to be approaching their fulfilment, Holland was won; Spain first made peace, and then entered into alliance with the Directory (Aug. 1796). But each increase in the naval forces of the Republic only gave the admirals of Great Britain new material to destroy. The Spanish fleet was beaten by Jarvis off St. Vincent; even the mutiny of the British squadrons at Spithead and the Nore, in the spring and summer of 1797, caused no change in the naval situation in the North Sea. Duncan, who was blockading the Dutch fleet in the Texel when his own squadron joined the mutineers, continued the blockade with one ship beside his own, signalling all the while as if the whole fleet were at his back; until the misused seamen, who had lately turned their guns upon the Thames, returned to the admiral, and earned his forgiveness by destroying the Dutch at Camperdown as soon as they ventured out of shelter.

[Bonaparte about to invade Egypt.]

It is doubtful whether at any time after his return from Italy Bonaparte seriously entertained the project of invading England. The plan was at any rate soon abandoned, and the preparations, which caused great alarm in the English coast-towns, were continued only for the purpose of disguising Bonaparte's real design of an attack upon Egypt. From the beginning of his career Bonaparte's thoughts had turned towards the vast and undefended East. While still little known, he had asked the French Government to send him to Constantinople to organise the Turkish army; as soon as Venice fell into his hands, he had seized the Ionian Islands as the base for a future conquest of the Levant. Every engagement that confirmed the superiority of England upon the western seas gave additional reason for attacking her where her power was most precarious, in the East. Bonaparte knew that Alexander had conquered the country of the Indus by a land-march from the Mediterranean, and this was perhaps all the information which he possessed regarding the approaches to India; but it was enough to fix his mind upon the conquest of Egypt and Syria, as the first step towards the destruction of the Asiatic Empire of England. Mingled with the design upon India was a dream of overthrowing the Mohammedan Government of Turkey, and attacking Austria from the East with an army drawn from the liberated Christian races of the Ottoman Empire. The very vagueness of a scheme of Eastern conquest made it the more attractive to Bonaparte's genius and ambition. Nor was there any inclination on the part of the Government to detain the general at home. The Directory, little concerned with the real merits or dangers of the enterprise, consented to Bonaparte's project of an attack upon Egypt, thankful for any opportunity of loosening the grasp which was now closing so firmly upon themselves.



CHAPTER IV.

Congress of Rastadt—The Rhenish Provinces ceded—Ecclesiastical States of Germany suppressed—French intervention in Switzerland—Helvetic Republic— The French invade the Papal States—Roman Republic—Expedition to Egypt— Battle of the Nile—Coalition of 1798—Ferdinand of Naples enters Rome—Mack's defeats—French enter Naples—Parthenopean Republic—War with Austria and Russia—Battle of Stokach—Murder of the French Envoys at Rastadt—Campaign in Lombardy—Reign of Terror at Naples—Austrian designs upon Italy—Suvaroff and the Austrians—Campaign in Switzerland—Campaign in Holland—Bonaparte returns from Egypt—Coup d'etat of 18 Brumaire— Constitution of 1799—System of Bonaparte in France—Its effect on the influence of France abroad.