408 Chapter 21
had left the war against France and Britain had no
troops on the continent. Victory in the Vendée freed
French armies.
Napoleon decided to force the Austrians to accept
peace by driving them from northern Italy. His victory
at the battle of Arcola (November 1796), where the
Austrians lost more than 40 percent of their army, did
just that (see table 21.3). Within a few months,
Napoleon had created two sister republics in Italy—the
Ligurian republic (formerly Genoa) and the Cisalpine
republic (Lombardy, Modena, and part of Venetia). Ital-
ian nationalists began to dream that Bonaparte was the
hero who would liberate Italy and unify the small Italian
states into a strong modern state. In October 1797 Fran-
cis I signed the Treaty of Campo-Formio, accepting
French expansion and the sister republics. Other sister
republics soon followed, in Switzerland (the Helvetian
republic), central Italy (the Roman republic), and south-
ern Italy (the Neapolitan, or Parthenopean republic).
Napoleon next sought a strategy to use against the
British. He chose to challenge their global position by
invading Egypt—a threat to British control of the
Mediterranean and to British India. He arrived there in
1798 with an army of thirty-eight thousand and a corps
of archeologists who helped found the study of Egyp-
tology. A sweeping victory in the battle of the Pyra-
mids gave him Cairo, but a British fleet commanded by
Horatio Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the battle
of Aboukir Bay.
When Napoleon Bonaparte returned to France in
1799, he was a national hero and he was dangerous. He
combined aristocratic birth with a Jacobin youth. He
had won great battles against foreign enemies and had
saved the Directory from its royalist enemies. Now he
delivered learned lectures on ancient Egypt and met
with prominent scholars. Politicians soon had visions of
the “man on horseback” saving France from the Direc-
tory, and Napoleon seized that opportunity. He over-
threw the Directory in a military coup d’état in
Brumaire (November) 1799. The coup had the support
of several leaders of the Directory, notably Sieyès (the
dominant director), Napoleon’s brother Lucien (presi-
dent of the legislature), and the unscrupulous minister
of police, Joseph Fouché (a mathematics teacher who
had been a Jacobin during the Reign of Terror and a
leader of the Thermidorean reaction). Napoleon
blithely announced that “the Revolution is at an end,”
and within one month he had produced the Constitu-
tion of the Year VIII (1799), dissolving the republic.France under Napoleon
The Constitution of 1799 created the Consulate, an au-
thoritarian regime with some democratic elements. It
put executive power in the hands of three consuls but
added that “the decision of the First Consul (Napoleon)
shall suffice.” Legislative power was fragmented among
many bodies: one to draft bills, a separate body to de-
bate them, another to vote on them, and a fourth to
rule on the constitutionality of these acts. All were
elected by universal manhood suffrage, but it was di-
luted by three stages of indirect voting: voters choseDecisive States Army
battle at war size Losses
Italian campaign
Arcola France 20,000 4,500
(1796) Austria 17,000 7,000
Egyptian campaign
Pyramids France 25,000 300
(1798) Turks 21,000 5,000
Italian campaign
Marengo France 28,000 7,000
(1800) Austria 31,000 14,000
War of Third Coalition
Austerlitz France 73,200 9,000
(1805) Austria 85,400 27,000
Jena France 96,000 5,000
(1806) Prussia 53,000 25,000
Friedland France 80,000 8,000
(1807) Russia 60,000 20,000
Austrian campaign
Wagram France 170,000 32,000
(1809) Austria 146,000 40,000
Russian campaign
Borodino France 133,000 30,000
(1812) Russia 120,000 44,000
Battle of the Nations
Leipzig France 195,000 73,000
(1813) Allies 365,000 54,000
The 100 days
Waterloo France 72,000 32,000
(1815) Allies 120,000 22,000TABLE 21.3The Military Campaigns of Napoleon,
1796–1815