The Napoleonic Period.

Napoleon
Bonaparte
(b. 1769), a
Corsican by
birth, an
Italian by
descent.

The young Bonaparte in a French military school.

CHAPTER XXXVII

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

238. The aristocratic military leaders of old France had either run away or been discredited along with the noble class to which they belonged. Among the commanders who, through exceptional ability, arose in their stead, one was soon to dominate the history of Europe as no man before him had ever done. For fifteen years, his biography and the political history of Europe are so nearly synonomous that the period that we are now entering upon may properly be called after him, the Napoleonic Period.

Napoleon Bonaparte was hardly a Frenchman in origin. It is true that the island of Corsica, where he was born August 15, 1769, had at that time belonged to France for a year. But Napoleon's native language was Italian, he was descended from Italian ancestors who had come to the island in the sixteenth century, and his career revives, on a magnificent scale, the ambitions and the policy of a condottiere despot of the fifteenth century.1

When he was ten years old he was taken to France by his father. After learning a little of the French language, which he is said never to have mastered perfectly, he was put into a military school where he remained for six years. He soon came to hate the young French aristocrats with whom he was associated. He wrote to his father, "I am tired of exposing my poverty and seeing these shameless boys laughing over it, who are superior to me only in their wealth, but infinitely beneath me in noble sentiments." Gradually the ambition 1 See above, pp. 326–327.

to free his little island country from French control developed in him.

On completing his course in the military school he was made second lieutenant. Poor and without influence, he had little hope of any considerable advance in the French army, and he was drawn to his own country both by a desire to play a political rôle there and to help his family, which had been left in straitened circumstances by his father's death. He therefore absented himself from his command as often and as long as he could, and engaged in a series of intrigues in Corsica with a hope of getting control of the forces of the island. He fell out, however, with the authorities, and he and his family were banished in 1793, and fled to France.

The following three years were for Bonaparte a period of great uncertainty. He had lost his love for Corsica and as yet he had no foothold in France. He managed, however, to demonstrate his military skill and decision on two occasions and gained thereby the friendship of the Directory. In the spring of 1796 he was made by the Directory commander-inchief of the army of Italy. This important appointment at the age of twenty-seven forms the opening of a military career which in extent and grandeur hardly finds a parallel in history, except that of Alexander the Great. And of all Bonaparte's campaigns, none is more interesting perhaps than his first, that in Italy in 1796-1797.

239. After the armies raised by the Committee of Public Safety had driven back their enemies in the autumn of 1793, the French occupied the Austrian Netherlands, Holland, and that portion of Germany which lies on the left, or west, bank of the Rhine. Austria and Prussia were occupied with a new, and this time complete, partition of Poland. As Prussia had little real interest in the war with France, she soon concluded peace with the new republic, April, 1795. Spain followed her example and left Austria, England, and Sardinia to carry on

The campaign in Italy, 1796-1797.

The treaty of Campo

the war.
General Bonaparte had to face the combined armies
of Austria and of the king of Sardinia. By marching north
from Savona he skillfully separated his two enemies, forced the
Sardinian troops back toward Turin, and compelled the king of
Sardinia to conclude a truce with France.

This left him free to advance against the Austrians. These he outflanked and forced to retreat. On May 15, 1796, he entered Milan. The Austrian commander then shut himself

up in the impregnable fortress of Mantua, where Bonaparte promptly besieged him. There is no more fascinating chapter in the history of warfare than the story of the audacious maneuvers by which Bonaparte successfully repulsed four attempts on the part of the Austrians to relieve Mantua, which was finally forced to capitulate at the beginning of February of the following year. As soon as he had removed all danger of

an attack in the rear, the young French general led his army toward Vienna, and by April, 1797, the Austrian court was glad to sign a preliminary peace.

The provisions of the definitive peace which was concluded Formio, 1797. at Campo-Formio, October 17, 1797, illustrate the unscrupulous manner in which Austria and the French republic disposed of the helpless lesser states. It inaugurated the bewilderingly

of the

rapid territorial redistribution of Europe, which was SO characteristic of the Napoleonic period. Austria ceded to France the Austrian Netherlands and secretly agreed to use its good offices to secure for France a great part of the left bank of the Rhine. Austria also recognized the Cisalpine Creation republic which Bonaparte had created out of the smaller Cisalpine republic. states of northern Italy, and which was under the "protection" of France. This new state included Milan, Modena, some of the papal dominions, and, lastly, a part of the possessions of the venerable and renowned but defenseless republic of Venice which Napoleon had iniquitously destroyed. Austria received as a partial indemnity the rest of the possessions of the Venetian republic, including Venice itself.

240. While the negotiations were going on at CampoFormio, the young general had established a brilliant court. "His salons," an observer informs us, "were filled with a throng of generals, officials, and purveyors, as well as the highest nobility and the most distinguished men of Italy, who came to solicit the favor of a glance or a moment's conversation." He appears already to have conceived the rôle that he was to play later. We have a report of a most extraordinary conversation which occurred at this time.

...

"What I have done so far," he declared, "is nothing. I am but at the opening of the career that I am to run. Do you suppose that I have gained my victories in Italy in order to advance the lawyers of the Directory? . . . Do you think either that my object is to establish a republic? What a notion!... What the French want is Glory and the satisfaction of their vanity; as for Liberty, of that they have no conception. Look at the army! The victories that we have just gained have given the French soldier his true character. I am everything to him. Let the Directory attempt to deprive me of my command and they will see who is the master. The nation must have a head, a head who is rendered illustrious by

General holds court;

Bonaparte

his analysis of the French

character and

of his own

aims.

Personal characteristics.

Sources of power in Napoleon's character.

glory and not by theories of government, fine phrases, or the talk of idealists, of which the French understand not a whit."

There is no doubt whom General Bonaparte had in mind when he spoke of the needed head of the French nation who should be "rendered illustrious by glory." This son of a poor Corsican lawyer, but yesterday a mere unlucky adventurer, had arranged his programme; two years and a half later he was the master of the French republic.

We naturally ask what manner of person this was who could frame such audacious schemes at twenty-eight and realize them at thirty years of age. He was a little man, less than five feet two inches in height. At this time he was extremely thin, but his striking features, quick, searching eye, abrupt, animated gestures and rapid speech, incorrect as it was, made a deep impression upon those who came in contact with him. He possessed in a supreme degree two qualities that are ordinarily incompatible. He was a dreamer, and at the same time a man whose practical skill and mastery of detail amounted to genius. He once told a friend that he was wont, when a poor lieutenant, to allow his imagination full play and fancy things just as he would have them. Then he would coolly consider the exact steps to be taken if he were to try to make his dream come true.

In order to explain Bonaparte's success it must be remembered that he was not hampered or held back by the fear of doing wrong. He was utterly unscrupulous, whether dealing with an individual or a nation, and appears to have been absolutely without any sense of moral responsibility. Affection for his friends and relatives never stood in the way of his personal aggrandizement. To these traits must be added unrivaled military genius and the power of intense and almost uninterrupted work.

But even Bonaparte, unexampled as were his abilities, could never have extended his power over all of western Europe, had it not been for the peculiar political weakness of most