The War of Wars (50 page)

The battle began at nine in the morning and after hours of fierce fighting, with the reserve of 800 Consular Guard being thrown in at three o’clock, the French were in retreat and the battle seemed over. At that moment Desaix and his small force and 18 guns arrived in support. At four o’clock Napoleon staged his last throw, initiating a small artillery barrage with Desaix’s guns and his few remaining ones, and blowing up an ammunition wagon.

The Austrians in the plain below, pursuing him, were caught by surprise: their right began to give way and then they fled in disarray at 9 p.m. Napoleon remarked: ‘The fate of a battle depends on a single moment.’ But the heroic Desaix had been mortally wounded: of all Napoleon’s generals before or since he was one of the greatest and most attractive. Napoleon was devastated. He spoke of his ‘deep anguish for the death of the man I loved and esteemed more than anyone’. Some 6,000 Austrians were killed and 8,000 taken prisoner, and 40 guns were captured. The French lost about 6,000 men.

Napoleon had won by the skin of his teeth, having made several disastrous mistakes, primarily in dispersing his men. His decision not to relieve Masséna was perhaps his greatest error: if he had, Mélas might not have been able to force him to surrender and been diverted. Although he had shown his usual flair for reacting quickly under pressure, Napoleon’s career had very nearly been cut short at Marengo; for if he had lost the battle his enemies in Paris would have closed in upon him. The battle was not particularly big or skilfully fought by the French, but its repercussions were far greater than its size. It was a turning point.

In a double stroke of luck for the French, Mélas decided to negotiate the next day, even though the blow to his army was far from mortal. At the Convention of Alessandria, all Austrian armies were withdrawn east of the Ticino river and all strongholds were given up west of Milan. Yet behind the Mincio the Austrians still had 55,000 men and 300 guns. Napoleon followed up his success by sending Murat to occupy the Papal States and sent a small army to take Tuscany.

To the north, however, Francis decided to appoint his young
brother, the eighteen-year-old Archduke John, in place of Charles, who had fallen ill, in a push across the central European front. John attacked across the river Inn against Moreau’s army and, more by accident than design, confronted it at Hohenlinden. General Ney, Moreau’s most brilliant subordinate, pulverized him: a colossal 18,000 Austrians were killed or taken prisoner. This was a far more decisive battle than any of Napoleon’s up to then.

Marengo and Hohenlinden came as bitter blows to the Austrians. At the delightful summer palace of the Habsburgs at Schönbrunn, resplendent yet with the lightness of a Viennese waltz, the Austrian royal family would play hide and seek, row on the lake, and chase their favourite dog, Tisbe. The Emperor Francis was to be seen carrying his son around in a wheelbarrow. A delightful family man, Francis was weak and entirely lacked the intelligence of his father, Emperor Leopold II, who had sought to avoid war with France at all costs. Shallow, verbose, with a paranoid predilection for his secret services, he had dismissed the octogenarian chancellor, Wenzel von Aunitz, who had arranged the dynastic marriage of Marie Antoinette, Leopold’s sister, to Louis XVI of France and instead relied on the advice of Baron Thugut and his former tutor, Count von Colloredo, an able man although a curiously affected dandy. Thugut was bent on war with France, while Colloredo was more pragmatic. After the disaster of Hohenlinden, the capable Archduke Charles and Colloredo assumed power.

Charles was ordered to come to the rescue: but in just a fortnight Moreau’s forces had advanced nearly 200 miles and just before Christmas they were only fifty miles from Vienna. At this stage Archduke Charles wisely pressed for an armistice, which was signed on Christmas Day. Thugut was dismissed. In February 1801, the Treaty of Luneville was signed, which was similar to that of Campo Formio, with three key differences: the King of Naples was to be allowed to return from Sicily; Parma was ceded to the French, but its Duke was allowed to become ruler of Tuscany; and Austria had to agree to accept the Rhine as the natural frontier of France.

It seemed a relatively fair basis for a European settlement, one that might provide a foundation for a lasting European peace; and Moreau,
not Napoleon, was clearly the French general who had made it possible, winning the decisive victory. But Napoleon held the strings in Paris: Marengo, in spite of the narrow margin and small scale of victory, was hugely inflated as his triumph (it was largely that of the slain Desaix), cementing his hold on France.

During the two months he had been away, Carnot, the army minister, Bernadotte, his perennial Jacobin rival, and even Lafayette, still active, had variously plotted to seize power. But the news of Marengo was used by Napoleon’s supporters to provoke an explosion of popular celebration in Paris which consolidated the First Consul’s position. Followed as it was by Austria’s suing for peace, the French could at last believe that peace was at hand: ironically, Napoleon was being hailed not as a victor but as a man of peace.

As the Austrian armistice coincided with the decision of the erratic Tsar Paul to withdraw from the war against Napoleon, Britain was left again as France’s sole opponent. Napoleon had been making overtures for peace. ‘Frenchmen,’ he proclaimed. ‘You want peace. Your government wants it even more than you.’ Why did Napoleon want peace? He had just won two victories, one great one under Moreau and a smaller one under himself, and he was not disposed to risk defeat until his rule was much more firmly entrenched in France. The country’s borders were now reestablished as far as the Rhine, and Napoleon’s old gains in Italy had largely been restored. He wanted to extinguish the remaining royalists in western France. The country’s finances were exhausted. Above all, he knew the French people were yearning for peace after more than a decade of internal bloodletting and fighting outside wars for survival. With both Austrian and Russia out of the war, it was time to do a deal with Britain.

Napoleon is widely considered by historians to have been duplicitous in seeking peace: he was thought to be after a respite so that he could resume the war rearmed and more aggressively; the British too are said to have considered the peace no more than a lull. Yet this is not how it seemed at the time. Napoleon may have genuinely believed that peace was possible now that France’s continental enemies were neutralized, and that France needed to settle down behind defensible borders after nearly a decade of war.

At first, though, neither Pitt nor the King would consider ending the war. Pitt had desperately tried to keep Austria in the war, offering further bribes. Meanwhile the British captured Malta in September 1800, as well as inflicting a decisive defeat on France’s allies in India. Napoleon tried to outflank the stubborn British by seeking an alliance with the Tsar – until recently France’s bitter enemy. Paul took the bait and formed a League of Neutral Nations which included Sweden, Denmark and Prussia to close the Baltic to British trade, a further ratcheting up of Napoleon’s Continental System. Paul also suggested an alliance with France to destroy Russia’s oldest enemy, Turkey, and a joint expedition to take India from the British. Some 35,000 Russians on the Volga were to join up with 35,000 French troops to further these ambitious aims. Napoleon, reverting to his reckless dreamer mode, seems to have been captivated by the idea: an alliance of two madmen for huge and distant empires.

In a dramatic development in March 1801 Tsar Paul was found strangled, an act widely attributed to the British secret service. It is impossible to establish the truth of this mysterious event, other than that the principal plotters were General Benigsen, a Hanoverian officer of great ability who was pro-British and anti-French and who had been stripped of his rank by Tsar Paul; Prince Zoublow and his brother, from a major noble family, supported by much of the aristocracy; and a part of the imperial family that hated Paul and, in particular, the upstart French government.

Benigsen was certainly the chief executor of the conspiracy: the British ambassador in St Petersburg, Lord St Helens, provided this little-known but gripping account of the plot, and his intimate knowledge suggests at least British passive complicity. On the night of 23 March, according to St Helens:

Benigsen at the head of a group of armed officers in the plot, approached the new palace of St Michael, under the show of a relief from the Palace Guard. They passed the drawbridge and the first sentinels without interruption, but some alarm spreading from their arriving at so unusual an hour, it reached a private hussar, who usually slept in the Emperor’s ante-chamber. This man had time to
make himself heard through the door, which was, however, immediately burst open by the assailants, who found the Emperor attempting to make his escape through a private door which led to the Empress’s apartments; but which was instantly secured by General Benigsen, who cried out, ‘
Sire, vous êtes arrêtéz
’. The Emperor then lost all presence of mind, and while he was endeavouring to vent some unintelligible efforts of reproach, he was struck to the ground by some of the inferior conspirators, who afterwards strangled him with his sash. It is added that when a surgeon who lived in the palace examined the body and declared that he was not absolutely without some chance of recovery, some further and more violent means were immediately used to render it impossible.

Though the event in itself occasioned a general sensation of joy, both in the capital and throughout the empire, it appears that if the object of the Zoublow family was to acquire a large share of power under the new reign, that design has been entirely defeated, as they are looked upon with an eye of mistrust by the present Emperor, and are become universally unpopular, even with the soldiery.

Whatever the truth, the assassination dramatically altered the drift of events in Europe, as Napoleon was forced to shelve his eastern ambitions. Yet he was still riding high: by bullying he secured from the declining Spanish empire, always afraid of French attack and formally allied to France, the huge prize of Louisiana in North America for a pittance (the ‘Louisiana purchase’) and he reached an agreement of co-operation with the United States which barely bothered to conceal its hostility to Britain. Elba, which could not be defended, was also ceded to France by Naples. Talleyrand, the wily foreign minister, argued vociferously for peace with Britain; but as the French seemed to be doing well until the assassination of the Tsar, Napoleon was at first less enthusiastic. Another major setback however soon convinced him that even alone Britain was still a power to be reckoned with. Once again it was delivered by Horatio Nelson.

Nelson’s career had by now resumed its familiar pattern of a dizzying plunge after a soaring achievement. After the Battle of the Nile, his greatest triumph to date, he moored at Palermo, where he endured a bout of morbid depression. He wrote to Lady Parker, Sir Peter’s wife: ‘A few weeks will send me to that bourne from whence none return: but God’s will be done . . . You who remember me always laughing and gay, would hardly believe the change . . . Soon, very soon, we must all be content with a plantation of six feet by two, and I probably shall possess this estate much sooner than is generally thought.’

After the King and court had fled Naples, the working-class lazzaroni ran riot in the city, killing their enemies, releasing prisoners from the gaols and occupying the city’s castles. The French forces outside the city decided to intervene to install a middle-class French-style Jacobin republic, but in the bitter fighting that ensued 1,000 French soldiers were killed to some 4,000 lazzaroni. The French installed what they called a Parthenopean Republic after Naples’ name in classical times, which Nelson derided as a ‘Vesuvian Republic’. He despatched Troubridge to blockade the city and seized the offshore islands of Capri, Ischia and Procida.

Troubridge executed his orders with his customary vigour and ruthlessness. He mocked the softness of a judge towards his victims: ‘He talks of it being necessary to have a bishop to degrade the priests, before he can execute them. I told him to hang them first, and if he did not think the degradation of hanging sufficient, I would piss on their damned Jacobin carcasses, and recommended him to punish the
principal traitors the moment he passed sentence, no Mass, no confession, but immediate death, hell was the proper place for them.’ He apologized for not sending on the head of a leading republican to Nelson, as the weather was too hot. Nelson displayed a similar authoritarian streak. He wrote to one of his captains: ‘Your news of the hanging of thirteen Jacobins (at Procida) gave us great pleasure: and the three priests (sent to Palermo) I hope return in the Aurora, to dangle on the tree best adapted to the weight of their sins.’

Meanwhile the King had given his backing to Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, a former papal official, who had assembled a self-styled Christian Army of the Holy Faith in Calabria. This fought its way to the gates of Naples, where the French had left just 500 defenders in the Fort of St Elmo, while the republicans occupied the castles dominating the port, Nuovo and Uovo.

At this stage Nelson decided to sail to Naples with the Hamiltons. Arriving off the great port, he found that Ruffo had granted the French and their allies an armistice, which the infuriated British admiral considered tantamount to a capitulation. Nelson summoned Ruffo aboard his flagship – his fleet now consisted of nine warships, a formidable sight in the Bay of Naples – and insisted that the treaty be scrapped, which Ruffo refused to do.

The other British allies in Naples – Achmet on behalf of the Turks and the Russians – insisted that Nelson respect the treaty on the grounds that it ‘was useful, necessary, and honourable . . . seeing that the deadly civil and national war was ended by that treaty without further bloodshed, and that it facilitated the expulsion of the common alien enemy from the kingdom. That as it had been formally entered into by the representatives of the said powers, an abominable outrage would be committed against public honour if it were to be violated . . .’ At last the British admiral relented and peacefully occupied the castles of Nuovo and Uovo, the strongholds of the pro-French forces.