773 



BONAPARTE. NAPOLEON I. 



BONAPARTE. NAPOLEON I. 



77-1 



Belluno at the foot of the Norio Alps. Soon after, Wunnser being 

 reduced to extremities for want of provisions, the garrison having 

 exhausted their last supply of horae-flesh, and being much reduced by 

 disease, offered to capitulate. Bonaparte granted him honourable 

 conditions, and behaved to the old marshal with the considerate regard 

 due to his age and his bravery. 



During these hard-fought campaigns the condition of the unfortunate 

 inhabitants of North Italy, and especially of the Venetian provinces, 

 where the seat of war lay, was miserable in the extreme : both armies 

 treated them as enemies. The Austrian soldiers, especially in their 

 hurried retreats, when discipline became relaxed, plundered and killed 

 those who resisted. The French plundered, violated the women, and 

 committed murder too in the villages and scattered habitations; the 

 towns were laid under a more regular system of plunder by the French 

 commissaries, by requisitions of provisions, clothes, horses and carts, 

 and forced contributions of money. At the game time the greater part 

 of these enormous exactions contributed little to the comforts of the 

 soldiers, but went to enrich commissaries, purveyors, contractors, and 

 all the predatory crew that follows an invading army. Bonaparte, 

 although he resorted to the system of forced contributions, was indig- 

 nant at the prodigal waste of the resources thus extorted from the 

 nativn, while his soldiers were in a state of utter destitution. " Four 

 million* of English goods," he wrote to the Directory in October and 

 November ] 796 from Milan, " have been seized at Leghorn, the Duke 

 of Modena has paid two millions more, Ferrara and Bologna have made 

 large payments, and yet the soldiers are without shges, in want of 

 clothes, the cliest u without money, the sick in the hospitals sleeping 

 on the ground. . . . The town of Cremona has given 50,000 ells of 

 linen cloth fur the hospitals, and the commissaries, agents, &e., have 

 8"ld it : they sell everything. One has sold even a chest of bark pent 

 ua from Spain ; others have sold the mattresses furnished for the 

 hospital?. I am continually arresting some of them and sending them 

 before the military courts, but they bribe the judges ; it is a complete 

 fair : everything is sold. An employ!?, charged with having levied for 

 his own profit a contribution of 18,000 francs on the town of Salo in 

 the Venetian states, has been condemned only to two months' imprison- 

 ment ;" and he goes on naming the different commissaries, contractors, 

 &c., concluding that, with very few exceptions, "they are all thieves." 

 He recommends the Directory to dismiss them and replace them by 

 more honest men, or at least more discreet ones. " Had I a month's 

 time to attend to these matters, there is hardly one of these fellows 

 but I could have shot; but I am obliged to set off to-morrow for the 

 army, which is a great matter of rejoicing for the thieves, whom I have 

 just had time to notice by casting my eyes on the accounts." The 

 system of plunder however went on during the whole of these and the 

 following campaigns until Bonaparte became First Consul, when he 

 found means to repress in some degree the odious abuse ; still the 

 commissariat continued, even under the empire, to be the worst- 

 administered department of the French armies. 



Bonaparte being now secure from the Austrians in the nnrth turned 

 against the pope, who had refused the heavy terms imposed upon him 

 by the Directory. The papal troops, to the number of about 8000, 

 were poated along the river Senio between Imola and Faenza, but after 

 a short resistance they gave way before the French, who immediately 

 occupied Ancona and the Marches. Bonaparte advanced to Tolentino, 

 where he received deputies from Pins VI., who sued for peace. The 

 conditions dictated were fifteen millions of livres, part in cash, part in 

 diamonds, within one month, and as many again within two months, 

 betides horses, cattle, &c. ; tho possession of the town of Ancona till 

 the general peace; and an additional number of paintings, statue.', and 

 manuscripts. On these terms the pope was allowed to remain at Home 

 a little longer. 



Austria had meantime assembled a new army on the frontiers of 

 Italy, and the command was given to the Archduke Charles, who had 

 acquired a military reputation in the campaigns of the Rhine. But 

 this fourth Austrian army no longer consisted of veteran regiments 

 like those that had fought under Beaulieu, Wurmser, and Alvinzi ; it 

 was made up chiefly of recruits joined with the remnants of those 

 troops that had survived the disasters of the former campaigns. 

 Bonaparte, on the contrary, had an army now superior in numbers to 

 that of the Austrians, flushed with success, and reinforced by a 

 corps of 20,000 men from the Rhine under the command of General 

 Bernadotte. 



Bonaparte attacked the archdnke on the river Tagliamento, the 

 pass of which he forced ; ho then pushed on Massena, who forced 

 the pass of La Ponteba in the Noric Alps, which was badly defended 

 by the Austrian General Ocksay. The archduke made a stout resist- 

 ance at Tarvis, where he fought in person ; but was at last obliged to 

 retire, which he did slowly and in an orderly manner, being now 

 intent only on gaining time to receive reinforcements and to defend 

 the road to Vienna. Bonaparte's object was to advance rapidly upon 

 the capital of Austria and to frighten the emperor into a peace. He 

 wan m.t himself very secure concerning his rear, as he could not 

 trti-t in the neutrality of Venice which he had Mmelf openly violated. 

 He wa also informed that an Austrian corps in the Tyrol under 

 General Laudon, after driving back the French opposed to it, had 

 advanced again by the valley of the Adige towards Lombardy. Had 

 tbia movement been supported by a rising in the Venetian territory, 



Bonaparte's communications with Italy would have been cut oif. Ho 

 therefore, dissembling his anxiety, wrote to the archduke from Kla- 

 genfurth a flattering letter, in which, after calling him the Saviour of 

 Germany, he appealed to his feelings in favour of humanity at large. 

 To this note the archduke returned a civil answer, saying he had no 

 commission for treating of peace, but that he had written to Vienna 

 to inform the emperor of his (Bonaparte's) overtures. Meantime 

 Bonaparte continued to advance towards Vienna and the archduke to 

 retire before him, without any regular engagement between them. It 

 would appear that the archduke's advice was to draw the enemy 

 farther and farther into the interior of the hereditary states, and then 

 make a bold stand under the walls of Vienna, while fresh troops 

 would have time to come from Hungary and from the lihine, and the 

 whole population would rise in the rear of the French army and 

 place Bonaparte in a desperate situation. But there was a party at 

 the court of Vienna anxious for peace. Bonaparte had now arrived 

 at Judenburg in Upper Styria, about eight days' march from Vienna. 

 The citizens of that capital, 'who had not seen an enemy under their 

 walls for more than a century, were greatly alarmed. The cabinet of 

 Vienna resolved for peace, and Generals Bellegarde and Meerfeldt 

 were sent to Bonaparte's head-quarters to arrange the preliminaries. 

 After a suspension of arms was agreed upon on the "th April 1797, 

 the negociations began at the village of Leoben, and the preliminaries 

 of the peace were signed by Bonaparte on tho 18th. Of the con- 

 ditions of this convention some articles only were made known at 

 the time, such as the cession by the emperor of the Austrian Nether- 

 lands and of Lombardy. The secret articles were tliat Austria should 

 have a compensation for the above losses out of the territory of 

 neutral Venice. This is a transaction which has been justly stigma- 

 tised R3 disgraceful to all parties concerned in it, in spite of the 

 palliation attempted by Bonaparte's advocates, who pretend that the 

 Venetian senate had first violated their neutrality, and that they had 

 organised an insurrection in the rear of the French army while Bona- 

 parte was engaged with the Archduke Charles in CarinthU. A careful 

 attention to dates is sufficient to refute every attempt to palliate tho 

 dishonesty of the French Directory and of Bonaparte iu their conduct 

 towards Venice. In 1796 Bonaparte had seized upon the castles of 

 Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, and other fortified places of the Venetian 

 state, he made the country support hia army, and meantime ho 

 favoured the disaffected against the senate, who at last, ftttirted by 

 the Lombards and Poles in his army, revolted at Bergamo and Brescia 

 and drove away the Venetian authorities. When the senate armed to 

 put down the insurrection, the French officers stationed on the Vene- 

 tian territory obstructed its measures, and accused it of arming ngainst 

 the French. They dispersed by force the militia who assembled in 

 obedience to the senate. At last the conduct of the French having 

 driven the people of Verona to desperation, a dreadful insurrection 

 broke out in April 1797, which ended by Verona being plundered by 

 the French. Bonaparte now insisted upou a total change in the Vene- 

 tian government, and French troops being surreptitiously introduced 

 into Venice, the Doge and all authorities resigned. 



A provisional government was then formed, but meantime Bona- 

 parte bartered away Venice to Austria, and thus settled the account 

 with both aristocrats and democrats. By tho definitive treaty of peace 

 signed at Campoformio near Udine on the 17th October 1797, the 

 emperor ceded to France the Netherlands and the left bank of the 

 Rhine with the city of Mainz ; he acknowledged the independence of 

 the Milanese and Mantuan states under the name of the Cisalpine 

 republic : and he consented that the French republic should have the 

 Ionian Islands and the Venetian possessions in Albania. The French 

 republic on its part consented (such was the word) that the emperor 

 should have Venice and its territory as far as the Adige, with Istria 

 and Dalmatia. The provinces betweeu the Adige and the Adda were 

 to be incorporated with the Cisalpine republic. The emperor was 

 also to have an increase of territory at the expense of the Klector of 

 Bavaria, and the Duke of Modena was to have the Brisgau. 



All this time the democrats of Venice were still thinking of a 

 republic and independence : they had planted, with great solemnity, 

 the tree of liberty in the square of St. Mark, and the French garrison 

 graced the show. At last the time approached when the French were 

 to evacuate Venice. Bonaparte wrote to Villetard, the French secre- 

 tary of legation, a young enthusiastic republican, who had been a 

 main instrument of the Venetian revolution, that all the Venetian 

 democrats who chose to emigrate would find a refuge at Milan, and 

 that the naval and military stores and other objects belonging to the 

 late Venetian government might be sold to make a fund for their 

 support. Villetaru" communicated this last proposal to the municipal 

 council, but it was at ones rejected ; " They had not accepted," thsy 

 said, " a brief authority for the sake of concurring in tiie spoliation 

 of their country. They had been too confiding, it was true, but they 

 would not prove themselves guilty also;" and they gave in their 

 resignation. Villetard, sincere in his principles, wrote a strong letter 

 to Bonaparte, in which he made an affecting picture of the despair of 

 these men, who had trusted in him and now found themselves cruelly 

 deceived. This drew from Bonaparte an answer which has been often 

 quoted for its unfeeling sneering tone. Serrurier was ordered by 

 Bonaparte to complete the sacrifice of Venice. Having emptied the 

 arsenal, and the stores of biscuit and salt, having sent to sea the ships 



