Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/210

198 NAPOLEON [1797. nothing of neutrality. Thus Tuscany, the first of all states to conclude a treaty with the French republic, is not thereby saved from invasion. Bonaparte s troops march in, seize Leghorn, and take possession of all the English property found in that port. More remarkable still is the treatment of Venice. The territory of the republic is turned unceremoniously into a field of battle between France and Austria, and at the end of the war the Venetian republic is blotted out of the map. Further is to be remarked the curious development which was given to the principle of plunder. The financial distress of France and the impoverishment of the army at the opening of the campaign might account for much simple spoliation, But Bonaparte introduced the practice of transferring pictures and statues from the Italian palaces and galleries to France. This singular revival of primitive barbaric modes of making war becomes more striking when we reflect that the spoiler of Italy was himself an Italian. Altogether these campaigns brought to light a personality entirely without precedent in modern European history. True, the Revolution behind him and the circumstances around him were absolutely unprecedented. Marmont remarked at the time the rapid and continual development which just then showed itself in Bonaparte s character. " Every day," he writes, " he seemed to see before him a new horizon." An ambitious man had suddenly become aware that a career entirely unparalleled was open to him, if only he could find audacity and unscrupulous energy to enter upon it. Add to this that he had lived for three years in the midst of disorders and horrors such as might well have dissipated all principles, beliefs, and restraints. Even as early as the 13th Vende miaire we find him impressed with a fatalist belief in his own luck (" I received no hurt ; I am always lucky," he writes), and there are indications that his wonderful escape at Arcola greatly heightened this belief in a mind naturally some what superstitious. At this moment, as Bonaparte s private political views begin to appear, his Jacobinism, even his republicanism, slips from him like a robe. As early as May 1797 he said to Miot and Melzi, " Do you suppose that I triumph in Italy for the glory of the lawyers of the Directory, a Carnot or a Barras 1 Do you suppose I mean to found a republic 1 What an idea ! a republic of thirty millions of people ! with our morals, our vices ! how is such a thing possible 1 The nation wants a chief, a chief covered with glory, not theories of government, phrases, ideological essays that the French do not understand. They want some playthings ; that will be enough ; they will play with them and let themselves be led, always supposing they are cleverly prevented from seeing the goal towards which they are moving." His contempt for the French char acter and his opinion of their unfitness for republican institutions was sincere ; it was the opinion of a Corsican accustomed to more primitive, more masculine ways of life ; we meet with it in Bonaparte s earliest letters, written before the thought of himself ruling France had occurred to him. Advance When the fall of Mantua had established the French on ... power in North Italy, Bonaparte s next thought was to Austria. s t r ike at the heart of Austria from this new basis. Early in March, having secured his position in Italy by the treaty of Tolentino with Rome and by a treaty with Sardinia, he set his troops in motion. He sent Joubert with 18,000 men into Tyrol, while he prepared to march in person upon Vienna from Friuli through Carinthia and Styria. The archduke Charles had been called to the command of the troops opposed to him, but these were thoroughly demoralized. Bonaparte dislodged him from the line of the Tagliamento, then from that of the Isonzo, and advanced steadily until he reached Leoben in Styria on April 7th. Here began negotiations. There has been much misconception of the preliminaries Prelimin- of Leoben, because Bonaparte s position and objects have aries of not been properly understood. We expect to find these Le b en - preliminaries containing conditions most triumphant for France, since they were won by an invasion which stopped little short of Vienna, and followed a series of victories most ruinous to the Austrian military power. But it was not France that imposed these conditions, it was Bonaparte, whose interest was not by any means identical with that of France. His object was not so much to vanquish Austria as to eclipse the French generals on the Rhine and wrest from them the honour of concluding the war. In order to do this it was necessary to surprise Austria by his modera tion, and this he did in the preliminaries of Leoben. The object of the war on the part of France had long been to obtain definitive possession of Belgium and the Rhine frontier; this might now have been obtained at the expense of Bonaparte s Italian conquests. At Leoben, however, no such arrangement was made. Belgium indeed, so far as it belonged to Austria, was ceded, and the emperor agreed to " recognize the limits of France as decreed by the laws of the republic." This expression afterwards was made to seem ambiguous, but at the time it appears to have been understood to refer almost exclusively to the Belgian terri tories, which had been organized by the French into nine departments. It seems certainly not to have included that large territory limited by the Rhine which it was not com petent to Austria to cede, since in the main it did not belong to Austria but to the Germanic empire. But what was to become of Bonaparte s conquests in Lombardy? Here we meet with a principle of action which, though not invented by him, was mainly instrumental in found ing his empire. An independent republic was to be set up in Lombardy, and for this Austria was to receive as an indemnity the continental possessions of the Venetian republic as far as the Oglio, with Istria and Dalmatia. But how came this territory to be at the disposal of Bonaparte, since the Venetian republic was a neutral state 1 The answer is that its neutrality had been utterly disre garded by Bonaparte during the war, and that, as its territory had been freely trampled on by his troops, irrita tion had necessarily arisen among the Venetians, thence quarrels with the French, thence on the side of the French an attack on the aristocratic government and the setting up of a democracy. Of all this the result was now found to be that the Venetian empire was a conquered territory, which in her next treaty France could cede in exchange for any desired advantage. This had been the principle of the partition of Poland; it was now to be the principle of a universal conquest. The summer of 1797 was passed by Bonaparte at Montebello near Milan. Here he rehearsed in Italy the part of emperor, formed his court, and accustomed himself to all the functions of government. He was chiefly engaged at this time in accomplishing the dissolution of the Venetian republic. He had begun early in the spring by provoking insurrections in Brescia and Bergamo. In April the insolence of a French officer provoked a rising against the French at Salo, for which Junot, sent by Bonaparte, demanded satisfaction of the senate on the 15th. The French now attempted to disarm all the Venetian garrisons that remained on the terra firma, and this led to a rising at Verona in which some hundreds of French men were massacred (April 17th). On the 19th a French Occupa- sea-captain, violating the customs of the port at the tion of Lido, was fired upon from a Venetian fort. Bonaparte Venice - now declared that he would be a new Attila to Venice,