stretched too far to explain the Bonapartist triumph. Napoleon's
willpower should not be discounted as a factor in his success: he never
abandoned the tactical offensive for a single day and devoted fiendish
energy to bringing the greatest possible number of men on to the
battlefield by unremitting mobility and surprise; time and again he
contrived to defeat the Austrians in detail.
There were other factors in Italy that produced the result where
Napoleon, mistakenly, thought it was his destiny always to be Fortune's
darling. The plethora of talent unleashed by the Revolutionary meritoc
racy and the short-lived period of social mobility played to Napoleon's
strength. So too did his idea that the army should live off the land. His
army never carried more than three days' supplies, while the Austrians
always carried nine. The sheer size of the armies of 1793-96, making it
impossible for any conventional commissariat to supply them, forced
them to live off the land, even if the Directory had been able to pay for
the campaign in Italy instead of being bankrupt. Long-term, the seizures,
requisitioning and plundering by Napoleon's armies would provoke a
terrible civilian backlash, where hideous atrocities became the norm.
Again Napoleon was lucky in 1796--97 in that he did not elicit this
reaction from the Italians.
The second caveat one must enter about the Italian campaign is that
Napoleon did not manage to carry out his own prescriptions. He neither
destroyed the enemy's armies nor sapped his will to resist further. Partly
this was because of the obsession with Mantua - again in defiance of his
own principles. In 1796--97 he wavered between making the siege of
Mantua his supreme objective and searching out and destroying the
enemy armies. Nor did he break the Austrians' will, for they resumed the
military struggle in Italy in 18oo.
There are many who hold, with Stendhal, that the Italian campaign
was Napoleon's finest achievement and that with the occupation of
Venice the greatest chapter of his life came to an en d. Yet no account of
Napoleon in Italy is complete without a discussion of the massive sums in
cash and kind he expropriated from the conquered territories. Napoleon,
it is true, was under orders from the Directory to make the war pay for
itself and to remit any surplus obtained to Paris. One of the reasons the
Directors connived at his frequent defiance of them was the multi
million-franc sweeteners he sent them. But he went far beyond this and
extracted the kind of surplus from Italy for which the only proper word is
exploitation. He turned a blind eye to the peculations and embezzlements
of notorious money-grubbers like Augereau and Massena, provided he
got his cut from them. An authentic story from Hamelin about some
marcin
(Marcin)
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