his wife's money, though everyone knew the Clarys did not have money
on that scale. The rest of the Bonapartes received substantial handouts:
Letizia received enough to rebuild and refurbish the family home in
Ajaccio, Caroline and Jerome were sent to expensive schools, and Pauline
and Elisa received lavish dowries. On his own account Napoleon
purchased the house in the rue de la Victoire which he had previously
rented, acquired a large estate in Belgium and, when he was in Egypt in
1798, had Joseph buy a vast country house with three hundred acres of
parkland for Josephine at Malmaison on the banks of the Seine, just six
miles west of Paris, at a price of 335,000 francs. Napoleon used Joseph as
the family banker: only his elder brother knew all the secret accounts
where the treasure looted from Italy was stored. Napoleon's apologists
also like to divert attention to his experiments with Italian republicanism
but here the record is less clear than it needs to be to sustain the case for
Bonaparte as Revolutionary liberator. Officially Napoleon was supposed
to be exporting the values and ideals of the Revolution to Italy as well as
looting it, but the Directory was always ambivalent about the political
side of the programme. Their only true ideological aim was a desire to
humble the Pope but thereafter the project to republicanize Italy scarcely
interested them, if only because it would make it more difficult to
exchange the conquered territories with Austria. Napoleon was under
strict instructions to make no binding promises to the Italians that could
in any way impede a cut-and-run peace with the Austrians if the military
campaign went wrong.
However, Napoleon had ideas of his own. His Army needed to be
supplied, its communications required safeguarding and its situation was
potentially perilous, between hostile armies and sullen and superficially
subdued Italian city-states. Napoleon had to carry out the difficult
balancing act of encouraging the pro-French party without provoking a
backlash from the conservative, aristocratic and pro-Austrian factions. To
his mind, the best way to find equilibrium was to co-opt the conquered
Italians in a new scheme for Italian federation; it would be time enough to
dwell on the ultimate reality of the plan when military victory in Italy was
secure.
He began in May 1796 by abolishing the Austrian machinery of
government in Lombardy and enacting a new constitution, with a
Congress of State and municipal councils under the direction of French
military governors. 'Milan is very eager for liberty,' he wrote to the
Directory. 'There is a club of eight hundred members, all business men
or lawyers.' After the Lombardy experiment, in October 1796 he