plunged into the deepest anguish from the death of the man whom I
loved and esteemed more than anyone.'
By 10 p.m. the defeated Austrians were streaming back across the
Bormida. They had lost 6,ooo dead together with 8,ooo prisoners and
forty guns at Marengo. It was a great victory for Napoleon, but hardly
the stunning success depicted in his official propaganda. In reality
Napoleon rewrote history after a series of botches. He had been duped by
Melas, he had detached Desaix and Lapoype against his own military
principles, he had wrongly divined Melas's intentions as regards Genoa,
and in general had risked destruction of his numerically inferior troops at
the very climax of the campaign. The real victory, as he knew, was
Desaix's. In the bulletins issued immediately after the battle Napoleon
was too shrewd to deny Desaix's role but disingenuously claimed that his
return had been preplanned. Much later, on St Helena, he tried to write
Desaix out of the scenario altogether. With Lannes he followed an
opposite course. Initially he denied him credit for Montebello, but later
tacitly conceded the point by making him Duke of Montebello.
However, in evaluating the second Italian campaign we should not
omit to mention the areas in which Napoleon evinced a singular talent:
the eye for detail, for instance, and the talent for administration which
made the crossing of the Alps a success. The refusal to aid Massena in
Genoa may seem callous, but Napoleon justified his action as a desire to
avoid Wurmser's mistake over Mantua in 1796; for a man like Napoleon
the destruction of the enemy was always going to loom larger than the
relief of a friend. Moreover, critics of Napoleon consistently discount the
fact that he fought at Marengo with 4o,ooo fewer men than he planned,
simply because of Moreau's delays, his refusal to cooperate or to send
Lacourbe with the requested force. Massena, too, could be faulted for
splitting his army into three and pointlessly dispersing the wings under
Soult and Suchet.
Victory at Marengo was no Cannae-style annihilation, and there
seemed no good reason why the Austrians should not have continued the
struggle. But Melas lost heart and immediately asked for an armistice. By
the convention of Alessandria the Austrians undertook to withdraw all
their armies to the east of the Ticino and to surrender all remaining
forces in Piedmont, Lombardy, Liguria and the territory of Milan. Defeat
for Napoleon at Marengo would not have been a military disaster, but
politically it would have been a catastrophe. Without Marengo Napoleon
could not have become consul for life and, ultimately, Emperor.
He knew very well the political risks he was taking. He had left Paris
secretly at the beginning of May to mitigate the inevitable period of
marcin
(Marcin)
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