CHAPTER SEVENThe grand strategy for the 1796 campaign against Austria was the
brainchild of Lazare Carnot, though he drew heavily on the thinking of
others, Napoleon not least. Including Kellermann's 20,000-strong Army
of the Alps and a reserve of 15,000 stationed in Provence and the Var,
France could put 240,000 men into the field. The French offensive was
three-pronged: 70,000 troops, then in the Lower Rhine under Jourdan's
command, would strike along the Main valley, invest the fortress of
Mainz and then advance into Franconia; another 70,000 under Moreau
would advance into Swabia and the Danube valley; and the third, under
Napoleon, would engage the Austrians in the Po valley. The Italian
campaign was designed as a sideshow, but if it proved unexpectedly
successful, there was provision in Carnot's plan for an advance up the
Adige valley to Trent and the Tyrol, there to link with Moreau for the
coup de grace.
Two days after his wedding Napoleon left Paris with Junot and arrived
in Marseilles on the night of 20--21 March. Along the road they had
discussed Carnot's threefold intention in the great campaign against
Austria: to divert growing unrest at home with a foreign adventure; to
consolidate the Revolution and export its principles; and, most impor
tantly, to stop the drain on the French treasury by getting the nation's
armies to live off the soil or by plunder and thus in effect exporting
France's military expenses. Napoleon has often been censured for turning
the Italian campaign into a gigantic quest for booty, but this possibility
was already implicit in the Directory's grand strategy.
At Marseilles he visited his mother. She told him that the sixteen
year-old beauty, Pauline Bonaparte, was now beyond parental control
and had a magnetic effect on men. Napoleon's idea of using Stanislas
Freron as his agent to tidy up loose ends in the south, principally the
Desiree business, had backfired disastrously. Freron, a notorious rake
with syphilis, had been smitten with the luscious Pauline, and she with
him. If Napoleon had not already known of the forty-year-old's
unsavoury past, Josephine would have enlightened him. It was bad