Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [58]
In mid April, as Alvise had expected, Bonaparte agreed to a six-day armistice with the Austrians, later extended by another ten days:
Clearly he is beginning to see the extreme imprudence of his deep advance into Austrian territory. The common view is that, as a result of his position in the field, he will be forced to accept less advantageous conditions for France than if he had stopped on the bank of the Tagliamento.7
After a few days of negotiations in the castle of Eckenwald, near the town of Leoben, Bonaparte and his Austrian counterparts reached a preliminary peace agreement. The terms might well have seemed disadvantageous to France, but they were devastating for Venice. According to a set of secret clauses, which Alvise and the Venetian government were unaware of, Austria recognised French rule over Lombardy and the western part of the Venetian Republic. In exchange, Austria obtained control over the eastern part of the Venetian mainland, the Istrian peninsula and the Dalmatian coast. On paper, France and Austria had already carved the Republic in two, leaving to the Venetians a mere skeleton of a state, consisting of Venice proper and a narrow strip of land across the lagoon.
Alvise, meanwhile, faced the daunting task of governing a province that Bonaparte’s fraying back-lines were tearing apart. French food commissars raided granaries and flourmills while marauders roamed the countryside, infiltrating small villages and taking the law in their hands. A French army engineer confiscated all the timber in one village, ordered the peasants to build a bridge over the Tagliamento, and then forced them to pay a toll to pass across the bridge. The post system, Alvise lamented, was breaking down because French officers rode horses “to heaven knows where,” leaving the stables empty for those coming behind them. He warned the Senate that Venetian authority in Friuli risked a complete breakdown. His anguished pleas fell on deaf ears. The Senate had no money or men to send him, and was incapable of providing any kind of guidance. It sent off perfunctory replies, thanking Alvise, in stolid, over-wrought prose, for his “zeal,” his “patriotic fervour,” his “unstinting dedication” to the cause of the Republic.8
The Republic, however, was already in a state of semi-collapse. According to the news reaching Alvise and Lucia in Udine, the situation in the rest of the Venetian mainland was even more out of control than it was in Friuli. In Bergamo, Brescia and Crema—three cities near the western border—Italian supporters of Bonaparte, instigated by French agents, ousted the Venetian authorities and lowered the flag with the lion of Saint Mark. But these local coups d’état did not have the support of the conservative peasantry, whose hostility against the invading French troops only sharpened. French officers and soldiers were taunted and harassed everywhere they went. In the countryside they were often ambushed and killed. News of this random violence against his men enraged Bonaparte, who was still in Austria. He turned against the old Venetian oligarchy in a fury and sent his aide, Andoche Junot, a fiery twenty-five-year-old officer known as “the Tempest,” to deliver an ultimatum in Venice. Junot gave a spellbinding performance, spreading terror among the senators as he filled the hall with Bonaparte’s own frightening words. Junot read:
Do you really believe that even as I find myself in the heart of Germany, I cannot obtain respect for the first nation of the universe? Do you really believe that our legions in Italy will continue to endure the massacres that you incite?…If you do not disband these groups immediately, if you do not arrest and hand over to me the perpetrators of these assassinations, I will declare war on you.9
Stunned by Bonaparte’s threat, the government sent two senators, Francesco Donà and Leonardo Giustinian, to the general’s headquarters in Austria to assure