CHAPTER EIGHTNapoleon's Italian campaign of 1796--- 97 has always provoked military
historians to superlatives. His contemporaries were equally enthusiastic.
In October 1797 the Directory presented the Army of Italy with an
inscribed flag. This recorded that the Army had taken 15o,ooo prisoners,
170 enemy standards, 540 cannon and howitzers, five pontoon trains, nine
64-gun ships of the line, twelve frigates, eighteen galleys, in addition to
sending to Paris masterpieces by Michelangelo, Guercino, Titian, Paolo
Veronese, Corregio Albano, Raphael and the Caracci. More saliently, the
army had fought sixty-seven actions and triumphed in eighteen pitched
battles enumerated as follows: Montenotte, Millesimo, Mondovi, Lodi,
Borghetto, Lonato, Castiglione, Rovereto, Bassano, St George, Fontana
Viva, Caldiero, Arcola, Rivoli, La Favorita, Tagliamento, Tarnis and
Neumarcht.
What enabled Napoleon to win so many battles and with such apparent
ease? Did luck or military genius play the greater part? Were the
revolutionary armies different in kind from the Austrian forces? Was
Napoleon a tactical or strategic innovator? Was he a political visionary
who used his victories to promote a pilot form of Italian federation? Or
was he just a glorified pillager? And what precisely was it that made him
an object of fear, envy and hatred by the Directory, who by their actions
tacitly acknowledged that he was already the single most powerful man in
France?
There were four main factors that contributed to Napoleon's
remarkable military success: technology, the effects of the French
Revolution, the superior morale of his men, and his own genius as
tactician and strategist. Overwhelming defeat in the Seven Years War had
the result that the French thereafter bent their energies to be abreast of
all the latest military technology. The most encouraging results were in
the field of artillery, which Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval had first begun
modernizing in 1763. Lighter gun-barrels and carriages made it possible
to produce 12- or 24-pounder calibres for field-guns, which was the
ordnance hitherto thought possible only for siege-guns.