Citizen Emperor (8 page)

‘Like a Thunderbolt’

It was only after the decision to leave Moreau in charge of Germany that Bonaparte resolved to make Italy the main area of operations. It was a lucky choice. Without Bonaparte knowing, the Austrians had also decided to make Italy their main theatre of operations and began reinforcing the army there under General Michael von Melas,
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at seventy-one the oldest general on staff, a Dutchman in the service of the Austrian army.

Bonaparte left Paris on 6 May at two o’clock in the morning, after having spent the evening at the Opera. He had received two messages. The first was that Moreau had won a victory on the Rhine the previous day, at Stockach, north of Lake Constance, after a bloody thirteen-hour battle that ended at nine in the evening. (Between 3 May and 19 June, Moreau had occupied Bavaria and inflicted a number of defeats on the Austrians.) It was more or less the news Bonaparte was waiting for; now his flank would be secure while he fought in Italy. The second was a secret message from Masséna, which he had managed to smuggle out of Genoa where the Austrians were besieging him. It stated that he could not hope to hold out for longer than fifteen days.

Bonaparte handed over power to Cambacérès, who for the next two months effectively and efficiently ran the country in his absence. There was a bit of a commotion when news of the First Consul’s sudden departure became known in Paris: his detractors saw it as a chance to wrest power from him; his supporters, anticipating a successful outcome to the campaign, were already talking about reinforcing his personal powers.
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Travelling in his berline (covered carriage), alone with his secretary Bourrienne, Bonaparte made rapid progress, reaching Dijon on the morning of 7 May. Starting from Dijon on his way to Italy gave him the opportunity to see what impact Brumaire had had on the French population, but he also used the occasion to make himself personally known to a large number of the French outside Paris. The reaction, if a letter from a witness by the name of Emmanuel Jober can be believed, was quite remarkable. Jober saw Bonaparte at Morez in the Jura where he arrived in the evening of 8 May:

All the windows were illuminated. The mayor, Perrad, told him: ‘Citizen First Consul, be kind enough to show yourself to us.’ He appeared at the door. He stopped for half an hour. We cried out: ‘Bonaparte, show yourself to the good citizens of the Jura! Is it really you? Are you going to give us peace?’ He replied in a faltering voice, ‘Yes, yes . . .’ He seemed happy. A smile remained on his lips, but his great pallor and the traces of tiredness and work imprinted on his forehead overwhelmed us with tenderness and brought tears to our eyes . . . You will not be able to imagine the profound effect this scene had on our spirits. We will still be talking of it with feeling to our children’s children.
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The emotion seems utterly out of proportion to the encounter, but Bonaparte was a celebrity, and his fame was growing. Eventually, that celebrity would transform itself into something deeper until a cult would develop around him.

When he arrived in Geneva the next day, he would have noticed as he drove through one of the city gates an arch erected in haste by the Prefect Eymard, with the inscription, ‘To Bonaparte and the Armies’, and, ‘To Victory and Peace’.
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Bonaparte spent the next three days in Geneva organizing the coming offensive. The army was to march from Geneva into Piedmont and Lombardy as fast as possible by passing through either the Saint-Bernard or the Simplon Pass. On 24 April, Bonaparte was still hesitating between the two options. It was not until late in the day, on 27 April, that he decided on the Saint-Bernard. The plan to cross the Alps may not even have come from him; it may have been the brainchild of another general, Paul Thiébault.
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The decision was kept secret for two weeks – only a few superior officers were in the know – for it could work only if there were no resistance from the Austrians.

In order to outflank the enemy Bonaparte had decided on a feat that was difficult to accomplish. Other generals and their armies had crossed the Alps since Hannibal’s achievement during the Second Punic War in 218 bc: Charlemagne did so in 773 in order to attack the kingdom of the Lombards, while the French king, Francis I, did so on two occasions, in 1515 and again in 1524, in order to attack Italy.
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One of the more recent crossings was by the Russian commander Alexander Suvorov, who went over the St Gotthard Pass in September 1798, although his 23,000 men did not pass at a point as high as the Saint-Bernard, and the weather was more clement. Lecourbe – nicknamed ‘General Fish’ by the Austrians because of the ease with which he forded rivers – gave battle around St Gotthard in August 1799, while six months after Bonaparte’s feat, and in the continuing campaign against the Austrians in Italy, General Jacques Macdonald received the order to cross the Splügen, a narrow mountain pass 2,000 metres high, in a snow storm in December 1800 with the loss of more than a hundred men to avalanches.
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If Bonaparte’s crossing resonated with the public to a degree that others did not, it was in large part due to the propaganda campaign that followed. The Saint-Bernard consequently took on symbolic meaning not associated with previous military feats (other than Hannibal’s), denoting a victory of the new over the old.
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The mountain, the ice and the snow represented the obstacles against which the revolutionaries had to struggle. Overcoming those obstacles would lead to a new beginning, a new order.

In this as in so many things, Bonaparte was lucky. Between 15 and 21 May, the week in which the passage took place, the weather could not have been better,
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despite what he declared in a letter to his fellow consuls: ‘We are fighting against the ice, the snow, tempests and avalanches.’
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That was to dramatize the feat for public consumption, making it seem a good deal more dangerous than it was; the letter was sent from Martigny where Bonaparte had set up headquarters, and was written before he had even attempted to cross the pass himself. The weather did not stop him from complaining to Josephine, ‘I have been here for three days, in the middle of the Valais and the Alps, in a Bernardine convent. One never sees the sun; judge for yourself if we are comfortable.’
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That week, across the Great Saint-Bernard Pass, almost 2,500 metres in altitude, could be seen a long line of soldiers and cavalry leading their horses by their bridles. The army was strung out over forty kilometres. The route was dangerous – narrow, winding roads on precipices – but it was also the shortest route across the Alps. Getting the artillery across presented a number of logistical difficulties; after experimenting with several methods, General Auguste Marmont, in command of the artillery, placed the guns in hollowed-out tree trunks that were then dragged through the snow, a task that took two days. The caissons (chests containing ammunition) posed even greater problems.
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On 16 May, General Jean Lannes crossed with the advance guard and occupied the town of Aosta after making short shrift of a Croatian detachment guarding the town. The rest of the army took three days to cross, held up for a while at Fort Bard, which stood across a single road leading out of the Alps. Bonaparte’s commanders were enterprising enough to bypass the position. The infantry could do that by following mule tracks; the artillery, however, had to pass right under the fort, and succeeded in getting only half a dozen pieces through over several nights. The rest of the artillery were tied down trying to reduce the fort (which they did not succeed in doing until early June).

Incognito and accompanied only by Bourrienne, Bonaparte made the crossing in the wake of the bulk of the army. On his arrival on 20 May 1800 at Bourg-Saint-Pierre in Switzerland on the other side of the Alps, more than 35,000 troops had already crossed. In all, around 45,000 men and 6,000 cavalry, as poorly equipped as the Army of Italy of 1796, were to take this narrow, badly kept road. Half were raw conscripts who received their training along the way. Desertion rates and sickness were probably on a par with most of the other campaigns of the revolutionary wars: the 43rd Demi-Brigade lost 180 to desertion and another 77 to sickness.
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The organization of the campaign was, moreover, chaotic. Some divisions managed to forget their cannon in the depots in France, while it generally proved difficult if not impossible to supply the troops with basic provisions.
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Ten days after the crossing began, on 26 May, Lannes took the village of Ivrea at the southern foot of the Alps. The way was now clear into the plains of Piedmont. This extraordinarily rapid movement across the highest natural barrier in Europe gave Bonaparte complete strategic surprise. ‘We have fallen like a thunderbolt,’ he wrote to his elder brother Joseph. ‘The enemy did not expect us and still seems scarcely able to believe it.’
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He spent a few days at Ivrea regrouping and awaiting reinforcements, leaving on 30 May. On the eve of his departure, he wrote another letter to Josephine: ‘I am in bed. In an hour’s time I leave for Vercelli . . . The enemy is completely baffled and still cannot guess what we are at. Within the next ten days I hope to be back in the arms of my Josephine, who is always good, when she isn’t crying and playing the
civetta
[coquette].’
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He was to prove himself right, but he first had to press on to Milan, where he hoped to pick up badly needed matériel.

When he got there two days later, on 2 June, at six-thirty in the evening in the rain, he received a less enthusiastic welcome than he had four years earlier. The planned grand entrance in a gilt-leafed coach drawn by six white horses was a washout; the locals, either taken by surprise or possibly expecting a return of the Austrians, were indifferent.
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Bonaparte was put out.
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It was not until a performance at La Scala opera house two nights later that he received a warm reception. His entry into Milan was meant to be a detour in an attempt to find cannon in the enemy’s arsenals, because most of the French artillery had been bottled up in the mountains, caught in the fighting around Fort Bard. As a result, he had to change his plans. His intention had been to descend into north Italy through Aosta to take the main Austrian army under General Melas from behind, thus trapping the Austrians between Masséna in Genoa and his own forces. At Milan, however, Bonaparte learnt from captured Austrian dispatches of Masséna’s capitulation at Genoa (on 4 June). At first, he did not believe it.
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Although he had given permission to Masséna to surrender, he had nevertheless hoped he would hold on and help him attack Melas in a pincer movement. Melas was now free to manoeuvre as he saw fit. Bonaparte decided to attack as soon as he could; he left Milan on 9 June to move on Alessandria. In the Order of the Day issued to the army, he predicted that the outcome of the fighting would be ‘a perfect glory and a solid peace’ (
gloire sans nuage et paix solide
).
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In Milan, in fact at La Scala, Bonaparte again ran into the twenty-seven-year-old singer Giuseppina Grassini, considered to have one of the finest voices in Italy. He slept with her that same night (Berthier found him the next morning at breakfast with her).
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Four years earlier, when Grassini had sung for Bonaparte at Mombello during the first Italian campaign, she offered herself to him but he rejected her out of love for Josephine. Now, he began a liaison, later taking her back to Paris and buying her a little house in the rue Chanteraine, the very same street where Josephine had once lived. That and the fact that Giuseppina is Italian for Josephine makes one wonder whether Bonaparte’s fling was not wrapped in nostalgia.