Citizen Emperor (7 page)

Anonymous,
The Corsican Crocodile dissolving the Council of Frogs
, 1799. A popular British caricature of Bonaparte’s coup. Metamorphosed into a crocodile, having come straight from Egypt, he is holding in each hand a deputy-frog. Two elements of the black legend are already present: Bonaparte wearing a crown and therefore as usurper of legitimate power; and as a monster devouring his own people. Bonaparte, and later Napoleon, became the first major European figure in the history of satire.

Prime Minister William Pitt decided there should be no official answer, and indeed led a personal attack against the First Consul in the Commons on 3 February 1800, condemning Bonaparte, the French Revolution and the Republic.
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He insisted that Britain could make peace with France only if the Bourbon monarchy were restored. He was, under the circumstances, a little short-sighted; the British cabinet had placed far too much faith in their allies and had grossly underestimated Bonaparte’s position. The British foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, one of many Britons convinced that France was still Jacobin, wrote to Talleyrand (and not Bonaparte) to say that if France truly wished peace, it had to recall its legitimate dynasty forthwith.
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The reply from the Austrian minister of foreign affairs, Johann Amadeus Baron von Thugut, was a little less haughty but no less discouraging.
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In fact, Britain and Austria made the same mistake as in 1792 and 1793, when they went to war against France under the misguided impression that the country was far weaker than it really was. Admittedly, Austria, like Britain, was speaking from a position of strength – it dominated most of northern Italy at this stage, having won back Bonaparte’s hard-fought gains from his first campaign – and wanted to negotiate on that basis. Bonaparte, on the other hand, wanted to negotiate on the basis of the Treaty of Campo Formio of 1797.
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He was effectively asking Austria to give up all its gains in northern Italy and to hand them back to the French. This was a less than sincere offer on the part of Bonaparte, one that Austria naturally rejected. The traditional explanation for Austria’s behaviour – that it had territorial ambitions in Italy which only a successful war could bring about – is valid, but the real reason was Austria’s desire to remain a great power.
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One could hardly blame the European powers for not warmly embracing Bonaparte’s peace overtures. He was a relatively unknown factor, and doubts about the regime’s stability and viability predominated in the courts of Europe. In view of the rapid turnover of political personalities in France since 1789, it would have been rash to make any predictions about the durability of the new regime; many people did not expect Bonaparte to last very long. In February 1800, for example, the royalist Hyde de Neuville was told by one of his collaborators that Bonaparte’s fall was both imminent and certain.
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Most historians have assumed that in writing these letters to the kings of Britain and Austria Bonaparte was looking for a propaganda coup, that it was an attempt to portray himself as the champion of peace rather than earnestly looking for a settlement through negotiations. There is an element of this; even he later admitted that he needed the war, that the Republic would have been ‘lost’ without it, and that it was necessary to continue the momentum sparked by Brumaire in order to end the Revolution.
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Bonaparte’s true intentions are revealed in a proclamation to the army issued the same day he sent his peace overtures. He stated that now it was a question not of defending the borders of France, but of invading the states of the enemy. When the time came, he promised, he would be among his troops.
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The same day too he sent a letter to the minister of war, Louis-Alexandre Berthier, advising him that he intended to form what he dubbed the ‘Army of Reserve’, made up of recruits and troops freed up after the cessation of hostilities in the west of France as well as units from the Rhine.
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Officially, the army was placed under the command of Berthier; the new Constitution forbade a consul from taking command of any army. Bonaparte got around this by serving in the coming campaign in an unofficial, advisory capacity.

Given the attitude of the European courts towards France and the fact that, militarily speaking, Bonaparte was on the back foot, a negotiated settlement was highly unlikely at this stage. A military solution was the only option left to him in 1800. To prepare public opinion for the coming campaign, the French press published the British (and Austrian) rebuffs thereby bolstering Bonaparte’s position, underlining the extent to which his desire for peace had been sincere. In the face of the rejection of peace, his preparations for war were justified.
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The stratagem worked; the peace initiative made the First Consul popular not only inside France but in much of Europe, while the replies received from London and Vienna made those powers appear to be bent on continuing the war.
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Soon after the rebuff from Britain, a proclamation was issued to the people of France in which Bonaparte clearly blamed England for the continuation of the war and promised them peace through victory.
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According to the police reports, the public was worried about the resumption of fighting.
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The hope for peace was still very much alive, as it had been throughout the final years of the Directory.

Preparations for War

Bonaparte had a number of armies at his disposal: in Holland there was General Charles-Pierre Augereau at the head of 20,000 men whose job was to prevent an eventual English invasion of that coast; in Germany General Jean-Victor Moreau commanded 100,000 men; in Switzerland, General Etienne-Jacques Macdonald was in charge of 14,000 men; then in Italy, where the French position was precarious to say the least, there was an army around 40,000 strong under the orders of General Masséna. The formation of the Army of Reserve was meant to bring another 56,000–60,000 men into campaign. By the end of 1799, almost all of Italy had been evacuated by the French while Russian and Austrian troops had occupied Milan. Masséna held on in the last French stronghold in Italy, Genoa, in what was to become one of the most horrific sieges of the revolutionary period; more than 30,000 people died there of starvation and disease.
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The problems facing Bonaparte were formidable. The French army was not in very good shape in 1800. Reports from the Army of the Rhine asserted that ‘The soldier is naked . . . most corps have not been paid in six, eight, ten
décadis
’ (that is, for sixty, eighty, one hundred days), and that the troops were ‘neither armed, nor clothed; their needs are enormous’. In Switzerland, the troops lived from hand to mouth.
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Not only did the army suffer from considerable material shortages, but many of the officers, it was claimed, were ‘apathetic’; the non-commissioned officers were even worse. ‘The majority is ignorant, pretentious and slack,’ noted a report from the inspector general.
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Reorganization was badly needed, and that is what Bonaparte embarked upon. He now had complete control over the direction of the army and could thus reform it and co-ordinate the coming campaign as he saw fit.

Possibly the most significant reform was the adoption of the
corps d’armée
(army corps of anywhere between 20,000 and 30,000 men, and 5,000 cavalry) at the beginning of March 1800. These were units with integrated cavalry and artillery, allowing them to manoeuvre independently of each other until it was time to unite a number of corps in battle. The army corps was a system Bonaparte inherited rather than introduced, but he nevertheless systematically formalized it.
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He also continued the practice of having his armies live off the countryside, something that had been adopted during the revolutionary wars in response to the enormous logistical problems in supplying hundreds of thousands of volunteers. In addition, the conscription system was streamlined, although it was a number of years before it was perfected.
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On 25 January, the order came for the Army of Reserve to gather at Dijon, halfway between the Rhine and Italy.
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In this way, Bonaparte hoped to keep the Austrians guessing about the army’s final destination, since from there it could strike anywhere between Mainz in Germany and Genoa in Italy. He does not yet appear to have made up his mind about where the main theatre of operations would be, although everything points to Germany.
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That made sense. As Moreau, commander of the Army of the Rhine, aptly pointed out in a letter to the First Consul, it was much easier to march on Munich than on Verona, and Austria was much more likely to sue for peace once the French had occupied Bavaria than if they occupied northern Italy.
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In other words, at this stage of Bonaparte’s thinking, Italy was to be a secondary theatre of operations, subordinated to Germany and its army. He tried, therefore, to work with Moreau, and sent his aide-de-camp, Michel Duroc, to get an exact idea of the situation on the ground.
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Moreau was described by a German visitor to Paris as an ‘excellent man’, open, honest and pleasant. He had a dark complexion, a full oval face, dark eyes that were clear and looked straight ahead, a strong, virile nose, somewhat sensual lips, a round but well-formed chin, and a deep, well-modulated voice. He was of medium height, but solid and vigorous, always calm and poised.
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When he first met Bonaparte at the Luxembourg Palace after the latter’s return from Egypt in October 1799, he had already earned a reputation as a competent general. He had volunteered in 1791 and two years later had fought at the battle of Neerwinden (which was a severe defeat for the French forces). Under the wing of General Jean Pichegru, Moreau rose through the ranks to take command of the Army of the North by the age of twenty-eight, despite not having any formal military training.

Approached by the conspirators before Brumaire, Moreau had actually declined to play an active part in the coup, thereby paving the way for Bonaparte. In fact, it was Moreau who recommended Bonaparte to them. Once in power, Bonaparte offered him the Army of the Rhine. Moreau appears as a consequence genuinely to have co-operated with Bonaparte, at least for the first few months after Brumaire. Relations between the two men were tested when the supplies Moreau badly needed for his army did not eventuate, or at least not quickly enough, when his troops were depleted to strengthen the Army of the Reserve, and when Bonaparte began directly interfering in the Army of the Rhine.
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The real sticking point came over the forthcoming campaign plan and the command of the Army of the Rhine. Rumour had it that Bonaparte intended taking command himself, something that he was indeed considering. That kind of rumour offended Moreau, resentful that it meant he would have to play a secondary role. Worse, however, since Moreau was a much more conservative commander, he rejected Bonaparte’s plan of campaign. Instead, in March 1800, he sent his own plans, along with his chief of staff, Jean-Joseph Dessolles, to Paris to explain the details. Dessolles was also to tell Bonaparte that if he persisted in his ideas then he should name someone else commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine.
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After three days of arguing with Dessolles, Bonaparte let Moreau have his way. It was perhaps the only time in his career that Bonaparte allowed himself to be contradicted, supposedly retorting that what Moreau was not capable of doing in Germany he would do in Italy.
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Only months after Brumaire, he was more inclined to be conciliatory, especially with someone who had supported the coup, and he certainly wanted to avoid an ugly rupture with such a prominent commander. Both men, it has to be said, went to some trouble to plaster over the cracks and to suggest publicly that all was well.
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A convention was eventually signed between the two on 16 April 1800 (the Convention of Basle) – a sign that Bonaparte was almost dealing with a separate entity within the army – in which Moreau agreed to begin the attack by 20 April at the latest and, after having pushed the Austrians back to the city of Ulm, to send a fifth of his men (25,000 men led by the able General Claude-Jacques Lecourbe) to join the Army of Italy.
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