Marengo Read online

  One wonders if, amid the pomp and splendour of the day, Napoleon allowed himself a moment of introspection. Did he recall the field before him as it appeared on the evening of the battle, with corpses piled amid trampled crops, horse cadavers, smashed carriages and wagons, with the barns and courtyards of Marengo piled high with hundreds of young wounded soldiers and their pitiful cries for water? In his private thoughts, did Napoleon remember how near defeat had come that day; how much of a surprise the Austrian attack had been; how tenuous his grasp on victory really was? He had not expected the Austrians to attack him the way they did, and he split his modest forces on the eve of battle, thus breaking one of his own tactical golden rules. True, all the signs indicated the Austrians were preparing to take flight. So strong was his belief the Austrians might elude him, bolting off to Genoa or marching northward over the Po, that even after his advanced guard was assailed and driven back, he still did not commit himself to battle until it was more than three hours engaged. If the ill-fated Desaix had not been delayed crossing a raging torrent the night before, if his reserve forces had been two or three hours’ march further away, how different would Napoleon’s fate have been? Would he have maintained his place as head of state, or would he have been replaced by a more successful general, like Moreau? One wonders if Napoleon truly believed, as the official account of the battle came to record, that the victory had been preordained; that the movement of retreat was nothing but a calculated manoeuvre designed to bring about the ruin of his Austrian foes?

  It is impossible for us to truly know another man’s mind, but if Napoleon had banished any thoughts of doubt, he did at least pay homage and acknowledge his debt to his fallen braves. In 1805, Napoleon was still prone to moments of idealism and grandiose fancy. He issued a decree after the ceremony to raise a monument to the brave dead on the plain of Marengo. Harking back to his Egyptian campaign, the monument would be a replica of the Great Pyramid at Giza, made from large stones and matching exactly the dimensions of the original. Inside the pyramid would be a chamber inscribed with the names of the fallen. A sum of 300,000 francs was allocated to the pyramid’s construction, which Napoleon expected would take about three years. In fact it did not proceed beyond architects’ drawings and the laying of a foundation stone some weeks later.

  In another act of remembrance connected to the battle, the artist Vivant Denon arranged for the transfer of the remains of General Desaix from Milan to a sepulchre on the Great St Bernard Pass. The death of Desaix at Marengo was one of the most iconic moments of the battle, perhaps even the whole Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Shot down at the moment of victory, Napoleon lost a man who would have been elevated to the front rank in the empire; a general totally dependable with independent command. In the thick of battle, Napoleon had to hold back the tears when told of his demise. The formal burial of Desaix’s earthly remains also took inspiration from antiquity. It was to be marked with funereal music and the reading of excerpts from Pericles’ eulogies for the warriors killed in the Peloponnesian Wars. After the burial there, feats would be staged recalling the funeral games of Achilles on the death of Patroclus. The victors would be awarded specially created medals. This festival of commemoration was scheduled to occur on 14 June, the fifth anniversary of the battle, nearly a month after Napoleon’s coronation on 16 May. Napoleon did not actually ascend the Alps a second time to attend. He sent Berthier to represent him instead and the ceremony took place five days late. By then, Napoleon and Josephine were off on an imperial progress through the cities of northern Italy.

  Having paid his dues to the battle and the fallen, Napoleon had more pressing things on his mind. War was brewing. He had his Grand Army assembled on the Channel coast and was waiting for the right moment to strike at England, march his army on London and dictate peace terms at the gates of St James’s. In the meantime, he was at pains to reassure his new subjects that the visit to Italy was not a prelude to further conflict. Mindful not to provoke the Austrians at this stage, Napoleon had ordered Marshal Jourdan to send an intelligent officer ‘with much ear and little tongue’ to reassure the Austrian commander in the country of Venice not to view his presence as a threat.3 Of course, we know these denials were in fact the lull before ten years of near perpetual war, raging on land and sea from the port of Cadiz to the streets of Moscow, terminating only in 1815 on the muddy and blood-soaked slopes of Mont St Jean at the Battle of Waterloo.

  Chapter 1

  1799: A Secret History

  For the French armies in Italy, 1799 was a calamitous year. With the conqueror of Italy, General Napoleon Bonaparte, marooned somewhere between Egypt and Syria, an alliance known to history as the Second Coalition was formed against France. This coalition included the Habsburg Empire, Russia, Ottoman Turkey and Great Britain. While the Royal Navy swept the seas, a formidable Austro-Russian force under the command of veteran Russian Field Marshal Alexander Suvorov ploughed across northern Italy. Defeat followed defeat for the French; the largest coming at the Trebbia (17‑20 June) and Novi (15 August), where the French commander, Barthélemy-Catherine Joubert, was killed in a preliminary skirmish. The republicans were driven back along the River Po and ousted from the great cities of Milan and Turin, so by the end of 1799, with the exception of the narrow Ligurian Riviera and the port of Genoa, the French had lost all the territorial gains made by Bonaparte in his famous campaign of 1796‑1797. Suvorov and his Russians then marched over the Alps into Switzerland, leaving the mopping up to the Austrians under their commander-in-chief, General der Kavalerie (GdK) Michael Melas. Everywhere the allied armies went, the republican liberty trees were torn down and the revolutionary Giacobino firebrands forced to flee. Desperate for some respite from conflict, and with their art treasures mercilessly plundered by the French, the Italian peoples cheered the allies as liberators for unshackling them from the so-called liberty of the revolution.

  On the French side, one of the chief scapegoats of this disastrous year was General François Philippe de Foissac-Latour. In his fiftieth year in 1799, a military engineer and veteran of Rochambeau’s expedition to assist the rebels in Britain’s American colonies, Foissac-Latour was charged with the defence of the fortress city of Mantua. Sat between two large lakes fed by the Minico River, Mantua was one of the great bastions of north-eastern Italy. Surrounded by swamps, it had held out against Bonaparte’s army for eight months in 1796‑1797. In strategic terms, it was the key to northern Italy. Yet despite its importance, Foissac-Latour surrendered this fortress to the Austrians on 27 July after a three-month blockade. This was nothing short of a national scandal.

  After his return from Egypt, and on becoming head of state in November 1799, First Consul of the French Republic, Napoleon Bonaparte savaged Foissac-Latour’s decision to capitulate. Mantua, Bonaparte believed, should have been provisioned to hold out for a year at least. Mantua could have held out, he argued; it should have held out. It was damned near impregnable under the care of a tenacious defender. Treachery was suspected. In the circumstances, it would have been far kinder to have shot Foissac-Latour; but Bonaparte did worse. When Foissac-Latour was eventually released by the Austrians in 1800, Bonaparte cancelled the general’s court martial and by an executive consular decree cashiered and humiliated him, stating he was unfit to wear a French uniform. The poor man was never rehabilitated and was dead within four years. Even Napoleon would later concede his treatment of the general was tyrannical and completely illegal; although by the end of this account, we may suspect Napoleon had an ulterior motive in not wanting a formal investigation into the circumstances of Mantua’s fall.

  But the disgraced general did have a case to answer. Firstly, there were acts of apparent incompetence. Like a good republican, Foissac-Latour had marked the national celebration of 14 July – Bastille Day. He even took the trouble to write to his opponents forewarning them the garrison was marking the fete day and there would be a great deal of firing on the French part. The Austrians were not to be concerned,
Foissac-Latour assured them, because the guns would not be loaded with ball: powder and wadding only – a feu de joie. The commander of the besieging forces, Hungarian Feldzeugmeister Paul von Kray,1 acknowledged this advanced warning and quickly rounded up thousands of peasants and soldiers to spend the night working on the siege trenches, safe in the knowledge the French were distracted with political sermons and ceremony. When the garrison awoke on 15 July, the first parallel of the siege lines was more or less complete. After the garrison surrendered, Kray lavished praise upon Foissac-Latour, and even awarded him the right to keep a flag of his choice. Why were the Austrians being so good to him? This favour smacked of treachery; but the thing that really did for Foissac-Latour, the hammer blow against him, was a letter he sent to General Jacques MacDonald, commander of the French Army of Naples. MacDonald recalled the note in his memoirs:

  ‘While at Lucca I received a note from the commandant of the fortress of Mantua informing me that he was blockaded, but not attacked; that he had a good and well-disposed garrison and that the place was sufficiently well provisioned to stand a long siege.’2

  Receiving this note, MacDonald communicated the message to the other French commanders in Italy and rather than rushing to Mantua’s relief, instead went to Genoa, where the armies of Naples and Italy could combine to meet the Austro-Russian threat. MacDonald was somewhat dumbfounded when he subsequently learnt ‘by private means’ the cataclysmic news Mantua had fallen. Having been earlier instructed the fortress was in such good shape, MacDonald’s fellow generals Moreau and Joubert, and his chief of staff, Suchet, said the news was false and had been spread by the Austrians as a ruse. MacDonald was adamant the news was true:

  ‘The details of this event were so precise, the means through which I had received the information so trustworthy, that doubt was to my mind impossible … Of course, I wished to believe them [Moreau, etc]; but on the other hand, I could not doubt the honesty of my informant.’3

  MacDonald did not reveal the identity of his source, but in the parlance of the day, an ‘informant’ or a ‘trusted source’ generally meant a spy. Indeed, MacDonald had a very good Piedmontese spy; very convincing, as this account will reveal, but also capable of great duplicity, to say the least.

  Shortly before MacDonald received the fateful note from Foissac-Latour, a chance encounter had occurred outside the walls of Mantua. It was the evening of 16 June 1799. Making a reconnaissance of the marshes was the recently promoted Oberstleutenant (Lieutenant Colonel) Josef Radetzky. Then in his thirty-fourth year, Radetzky was riding with an old Walloon trooper from the de Bussy Jäger Regiment zu Pferde (Light Horse). This regiment enjoyed a certain notoriety as it contained a number of French émigrés, outcasts from the revolution who would only return to their pays natal under pain of death. Scouring the marshes, Radetzky’s keen eye spotted the figure of a man scurrying through the darkness. The Austrian officer went off in pursuit. Just as he caught up with his quarry, the unidentified figure spun round to face Radetzky, holding a brace of cocked pistols pointed squarely at the Austrian.

  Speaking French, the man introduced himself: ‘As you want, your friend or your enemy. Before you arrest me, I’ll kill you.’

  As the man motioned threateningly to Radetzky, the Austrian saw the uniform of a French officer beneath his overcoat and the epaulettes of a captain. At such close range, Radetzky could neither fight nor take flight without the risk of being shot from his saddle, so he dismounted and engaged the stranger in conversation … and what a conversation it turned out to be.4

  The man was an Italian claiming to be MacDonald’s chief of secret correspondence. He claimed to have given up on the French, whom he professed to hate, and wished nothing more than to serve the imperial cause. Hidden in a hollow compartment in the heel of his boot, he claimed, was a message to Foissac-Latour from MacDonald. The Italian now offered to work for the Austrians and to ensure that not a single message in and out of Mantua would pass without the Austrians having knowledge of it.

  The Italian agreed to follow Radetzky back to his headquarters at Roverbella, approximately 10km north of Mantua. The commander of the siege force was the Hungarian Feldzeugmeister Paul von Kray. Matters relating to intelligence were the preserve of the chief of staff, so Radetzky handed the Italian over to Generalmajor (GM) Anton Zach. Along with Radetzky, one of the principal characters of the Marengo story, Zach’s background and character will be explored more fully later in this account; but for now it is enough to know Zach was something of an intellectual, in truth more suited to academic pursuits than life in the field; and he loved a good piece of intrigue, the more complex the better.

  With the Italian safely delivered to Zach, something of an interrogation followed. In this case the spy’s name was later recorded as ‘Karl Giovelli’, from Alba in Piedmont, the son of a doctor still living there. Karl was the Austrian rendition of Carlo, and although Giovelli was how the name of the spy was written by the Austrians, elsewhere the name is given as Giojelli, or more properly, Gioelli.5

  Dealing with spies in a military context went back to the days of biblical history, and was a dangerous business on all parts. There were many types of spy. At the most basic level were spies bribed or coerced (preferably a combination of both) into passing through hostile territory and reporting back on enemy troop movements. There were then professional spies; people who made a vocation from the obtaining and selling of information either through some notion of patriotism, or more likely for the thrill and financial reward. Some were even double spies, agents who served both parties and who acted, in modern intelligence parlance, as something of a backchannel between rival commanders. Such complex individuals required careful handling. One of Zach’s staff officers in 1800, the Marquis de Faverges, described the chief of staff as a ‘crafty old man’, and declared, ‘I knew no one more skilful at handling traitors and spies.’ We may come to reappraise this assertion.

  Gioelli unscrewed the heel of his boot and passed Zach the secret message. It was dated Reggio, 14 June 1799, from Léopold Berthier, chief of staff to MacDonald. It described how the Army of Naples was approaching Parma, having taken Modena by storm. Meanwhile, General Moreau’s Army of Italy had received considerable reinforcements and was marching on Alessandria with the intention of joining MacDonald. Once the junction of the two armies was complete, the French would ‘have all eyes fixed on Mantua’. This was interesting and concerning news, but Zach did not act immediately; he decided to hang on to the spy for a little longer as he digested the facts. This pause was most opportune, because on the very day Gioelli arrived in the Austrian camp, MacDonald’s army encountered coalition forces near the city of Piacenza. Over the next four days, a series of engagements took place between Suvorov and MacDonald known as the Battle of the Trebbia. In this bruising encounter, the junction between MacDonald and Moreau failed to occur, and MacDonald was forced to retreat. When Zach learned of the defeat, and knew MacDonald was unable to come to Mantua’s relief, the wily chief of staff decided to allow Gioelli to fulfil his mission.

  The arrival of the spy was recorded by Foissac-Latour in a work published in 1800 setting out a defence of his handling of the siege. The meeting apparently took place on 24 June. First, Gioelli was interrogated by acting General of Brigade Louis Claude Monnet, then by Foissac-Latour himself. The letter was read and Gioelli verbally gave a very optimistic appraisal of the French army’s condition and prospects. By the time of 14 July, the garrison of Mantua should, according to Gioelli, be in a state of preparedness to mount operations in support of MacDonald’s advance. He offered to deliver Foissac-Latour’s news back to MacDonald and said that he would be returning in the near future with further instructions. The spy made no mention of the Battle of the Trebbia and the fact MacDonald had already been defeated and pushed back in the direction of Tuscany (it is almost inconceivable Gioelli had not heard about the battle while residing in the Austrian camp).

  To lend credence to his account, Gioelli v
olunteered he had met with Austrian officers outside Mantua and, in ‘confidential conversations’, had learned there was a traitor in Mantua named Carlo Speranza who was corresponding with a former servant outside the city. Employed in the postal service, this Speranza was, according to Gioelli, the Austrians’ principal source of intelligence during the siege.6 The betrayal of Speranza was an interesting move on the part of the spy. On the one hand it demonstrated his trustworthiness and continued loyalty to the French, but it also eliminated a rival source of intelligence to his new Austrian paymasters. Knowing there was a strong likelihood of Speranza being shot, it also demonstrates a cold ruthlessness in Gioelli. As it turned out, Foissac-Latour was not prepared to have Speranza executed on hearsay alone, but as a precaution had him arrested and secretly locked up in the dungeons of the castle of San Giorgio until the end of the siege.

  Foissac-Latour took stock of Gioelli and the news he brought. The Frenchman was immediately suspicious of MacDonald’s emissary, writing in his account: ‘What a spy adds in such a case is always ambiguous, because honour and truth are rarely the virtues of those who get themselves hanged for money.’7 Why had it taken the spy ten days to cover a distance of about 60km between Reggio and Mantua?8 How had Gioelli made it through Austrian lines at all, and why did he seem so sure he would be able to leave and return in the future? How did the Italian have such detailed knowledge about MacDonald’s strength and intentions? Why would this level of detail be entrusted to a Piedmontese spy? Did MacDonald really trust him, or was the matter dealt with only by Léopold Berthier? There were so many doubts Foissac-Latour entertained on the matter that one wonders why he did not simply lock the spy up or have him shot? The truth is, Gioelli was very convincing and Foissac-Latour was probably not the first, and certainly not the last, to be taken in by him. He states as much in his letter of response to MacDonald dated Mantua, 26 June: ‘The letter of your chief of staff, my dear general, very fortunately reached me by your emissary, a very skilful and very intelligent man.’9