Citizen Emperor (15 page)

One could be forgiven then for thinking that Bonaparte was slightly jealous. He did not send a letter of congratulations to Moreau, and not much was made of the victory in the press; a letter recounting the victory was published in the
Moniteur
,
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and mention was made of a delegation sent by the Tribunate to Bonaparte to propose that 3 December become a national feast day.
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The most Bonaparte conceded was a letter to the Legislative Corps in which he referred to the ‘victory of Hohenlinden resounding throughout Europe’, but Moreau’s name, interestingly, was never once mentioned.
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In fact, the battle was almost never cited in the press in conjunction with the name of Moreau and was never celebrated in painting the way other Bonapartist victories were commemorated.
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This was ungenerous to say the least and demonstrates how much Bonaparte may have felt threatened by Moreau’s success.

Contemporaries believed that Bonaparte now saw Moreau as a dangerous rival.
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The general was annoyed by Bonaparte’s lack of acknowledgement, and some would have it that he too was jealous of the First Consul’s ascendancy.
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Slights received by his wife at Josephine’s summer residence west of Paris, the Château de Malmaison – on one occasion, Bonaparte did not ask her how her husband was doing, on another Josephine kept her waiting before receiving her – did not help matters.
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When, a month after the battle, Bonaparte finally did write to Moreau, it was a very brief response to a letter he had received about the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Poland, and only then did he refer indirectly to the campaign in which the general had ‘surpassed’ himself.
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France was not big enough for two heroes. Moreau’s victories were never allowed to outshine that of Marengo. Two articles appeared in the
Moniteur
that suggested Moreau had not paid the Army of the Rhine in seven or eight months, and that it was going to be paid from the Public Treasury.
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The story was entirely incorrect; Bonaparte may have had these little bits of information inserted in order to discredit Moreau. The general had in effect paid his men through contributions that had been imposed on the German population, to the tune of forty-four million francs. The suggestion, vague in nature but clear to contemporaries, was that either Moreau was a drain on the public coffers, or he had pocketed the money for himself. Given that the state controlled the press, Moreau was unable to reply to these accusations. Instead, he had a response published at his own expense.
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‘We Blessed the Name of Bonaparte’

While various offensives and counter-offensives were being undertaken in Switzerland, the Tyrol and northern Italy, the peace negotiations with Austria continued at a sluggish pace.
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Joseph had been sent by his brother to represent France; he entertained the Austrian envoy, Count Cobenzl, at Mortefontaine, his house north of Paris, in a series of dinners, balls, theatre outings and excursions to neighbouring sites.
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Joseph was not without some diplomatic experience; he had been ambassador to Rome during the Directory and had negotiated peace with the United States earlier in the year, but if Bonaparte sent his brother to Lunéville it was not because of his negotiating skills. He wanted rather to maintain control over foreign policy. Bonaparte, through Talleyrand, controlled Joseph tightly, corresponding with him every day, placing by his side trusted, experienced aides who could help him out.
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Talks did not start in earnest until December, after the French victory at Hohenlinden. Vienna now found itself fighting virtually alone; Russia had to all intents and purposes left the Second Coalition and no further help (financial or otherwise) could be expected from Britain. Paul I of Russia was so keen for Austria to make peace with France that he took the extraordinary step of moving a Russian army to the Austrian border as a threat.
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The court of Vienna, on the other hand, was divided about what to do and what kind of peace it wanted.
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The diplomats nevertheless reached an agreement on 9 February 1801, based on the Treaty of Campo Formio.
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Austria recognized France’s annexation of the left bank of the Rhine, the annexation of Belgium and the ‘independence’ of Holland, Helvetia and the Cisalpine and Ligurian Republics (which were reconstituted and expanded).
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The former Grand Duke of Tuscany was to be compensated in Germany. France retained Venice and the Venetian possessions in the Adriatic. A new kingdom was established – Etruria – and given to a member of the Spanish House of Bourbon, Luis, whose capital was Florence.

Germany also underwent some dramatic modifications, although not for the last time. Francis II acted in his capacity as ruler of the Habsburg monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire. An Imperial Diet was convened to look at the question of compensating the German princes affected by the French annexations, but it was understood (although never put in writing) that compensation would be achieved through the secularization of the German ecclesiastical states. The German Diet, which sat at Regensburg, would be the scene of two years of negotiating, bribing, persuading and general diplomacy that kept the smaller German princes and some of the more powerful European courts extremely busy. The Holy Roman Empire became to all intents and purposes defunct, central Europe fell under French rather than Austrian influence, while northern Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and the territories on the left bank of the Rhine now fell firmly within the French orbit.

Austrian politicians complained from the start of the harshness of the terms of Lunéville. ‘Here is this wretched treaty that I have been sadly obliged to sign. It is dreadful,’ wrote Cobenzl, ‘both in its form and in its substance.’
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Historians since have reiterated how severe were the clauses of the treaty, and argue that the seeds of future conflict were to be found within them.
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This is to take the complaints of Austrian diplomats at face value when Austria really had nothing to complain about. It had gone to war and lost. The treaty signed at Lunéville was not all that different to Campo Formio. In fact, the court of Vienna, much like other European courts at the time, was not acting in good faith. Vienna had dragged its feet at the negotiating table and, when it realized it had to come to terms, did so grudgingly, bitterly resenting having to give up territory in Italy. Bonaparte and the French did not understand the depth of Austria’s resentment and hatred at having lost the war and at having its great-power status damaged as a result.

No matter how conciliatory the French may have been, resentment would have festered until the Austrians found an excuse to go to war against France at some time in the future, in the hope of clawing back whatever territories they had lost. However, the treaty and the annexations did not diverge in any way from the policies of other revolutionary governments. All Bonaparte did was adopt and carry through somewhat more successfully policies that had been the mainstay of French governments, royalist or republican, for many decades. It was the culmination of a Continental policy that France had striven after ever since the government of Richelieu in the seventeenth century – that is, the diminution of Austrian power, the French domination of northern Italy, an alliance with Spain, and the exclusion of Britain from Continental affairs. At this stage of his rule, then, Bonaparte’s policies did not differ from traditional French foreign political interests.

The reaction among the French people on hearing the news of the signing of peace with Austria in February 1801 was elation. ‘What a magnificent peace! What a start to the century,’ wrote the
Journal des Débats
.
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Many years later, an artillery officer, Jean-Nicolas-Auguste Noël, reminisced that ‘The Peace [of Lunéville] was welcomed everywhere with rapture, and everywhere, I can assert, the name of Bonaparte was blessed.’
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A telling sign of Bonaparte’s popularity is that the price of his image in popular engravings doubled, tripled in the space of a few days.
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Celebrations in Paris were orchestrated by the regime for 21 March, when the peace treaty was published and made officially public: entry to theatres was free of charge; the palace and the Tuileries gardens were illuminated; the prefect of police, Dubois, ordered the façades of all households to be illuminated.
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Letters of congratulation came pouring in from all over the country, mostly written by officials. Their declamations of joy – ‘Oh, immortal glory to the illustrious and beneficent genius who gave the land peace and France happiness’
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– may therefore be a little suspect, but this should not devalue the outbursts of authentic jubilation with which the news was greeted around the country. The curé of Saint-Colombe, in Castillon, a village in Provence, wrote to say, ‘It is through you, O Bonaparte, that the heavens fill today with joy, the Church and the state of France. What joy in the hearts of all faithful Christians and good French citizens! Europe and the whole universe admire you.’
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A few letters even came from countries outside France, such as Holland, Italy and Prussia. A certain Pieter Pypers from Amsterdam wrote, ‘All the inhabitants of the earth owe you their respect: You are their liberator . . . their father.’
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The months leading up to the signing of the treaty had built up expectations that there would be a general European peace, expectations that continued for some time. The festivities celebrating the declaration of peace with Austria lasted a whole month, in both Paris and the provinces, and regained momentum when the treaty was ratified by Austria in March 1801. In Germany, the poet Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin wrote the ‘Friedensfeier’ (Peace celebration) and what was in hindsight a somewhat rash letter to his friend Christian Lanauer asserting that with Bonaparte’s proclamation of the end of the Revolution and the signing of peace the spirit of conquest in Europe would be eclipsed.
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Hölderlin reflected a certain optimism among most texts published on Lunéville.
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In southern Germany in particular, the theatre of war for the last decade, the peace of Lunéville was enthusiastically welcomed and was attributed to the genius of Bonaparte.
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‘The August Pacifier of the World’

Over the coming months, Bonaparte consolidated his position on the international scene, and attempted to isolate Britain, France’s only remaining enemy. First, he carried off a diplomatic coup by persuading Spain, as an ally, to invade Portugal.
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The treaty that resulted from the short-lived War of the Oranges, a non-event in military terms, saw Portugal close its ports to British trade. Although the treaty was not entirely to Bonaparte’s liking – his brother Lucien signed an agreement, the Treaty of Badajoz, which sent Bonaparte into a rage and which he at first refused to ratify
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– France’s only remaining enemy was isolated even further with the formation of a League of Armed Neutrality in northern Europe. Made up of neutral Russia, Prussia, Denmark and Sweden, the league was exasperated by British incursions on shipping and the interference with trade that resulted. The British maintained their right to search and confiscate any ship carrying what they loosely termed contraband – that is, any goods that might assist the French in their war effort. Between 1796 and February 1801, the British navy captured over 600 fishing boats and merchant ships.
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Although France played no direct role in the formation of the league, Bonaparte certainly encouraged it, and it helped bring about a rapprochement with Paul I of Russia. Paul sent Stepan A. Kolychev to Paris, the first ambassador since Catherine the Great withdrew her representative in 1792. Kolychev was welcomed by a detachment of troops at the French border and escorted all the way to Paris.
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It was a strange choice by a tsar who purportedly wanted to heal relations between the two countries. Kolychev was staunchly Francophobe, and behaved in such a way that both Bonaparte and Talleyrand soon came to the conclusion that he did not represent the views of the Tsar.
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Finally, France brought the Quasi-War – an undeclared war with the United States (1798–1800) fought mostly at sea – to an end (the Treaty of Mortefontaine), thereby eliminating the possibility of another ally for the British.
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