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seemed by far the safest option, for it at least locked in the Russians - also theoretically at war with France - into their alliance with Vienna, and thereby protected the gains Austria had made from the recent partitions of Poland and helped dissuade the Prussians from joining France (a real possibility that was certainly pursued by French diplomacy in the wake of Prussia’s signature of a peace treaty with France in 1795). As for Britain, despite growing domestic unrest and the personal desire for peace of the prime minister, William Pitt, she too had no option but to fight on: secret contacts held with France in 1795 having suggested that, Carnot notwithstanding, the Directory would never abandon the Low Countries unless absolutely forced to do so, anything but victory would signal complete humiliation.

So, with neither Britain nor Austria capable of taking the offensive at this point, the initiative lay with France, who could in any case afford to attack given the withdrawal of Prussia and Spain from the First Coalition in 1795. Napoleon naturally wanted to win the war on the Italian front - Barras claims that he bombarded ‘the Directorate and Ministers with demands for men, money and clothing’.38 This help was not forthcoming, for the Directory intended its main blows against the enemy to be rather a major invasion of Ireland and an offensive in southern Germany. Yet Napoleon still came to the fore. The expedition to Ireland was turned back by a ‘Protestant wind’, and the invasion of Germany defeated by the Austrians. In Italy, however, matters were very different: striking across the frontier from its base at Nice in April

1796, within a few short months Napoleon’s ragged little army - at the beginning of the campaign he had only some 40,000 men, who Marmont describes as ‘dying of hunger and almost without shoes’39 - had forced Piedmont, Tuscany, Modena and the Papal States to make peace, overrun northern Italy, and beaten a succession of Austrian armies. With Vienna itself threatened with occupation, the badly shaken Austrians asked for an armistice, and an initial peace settlement was duly signed at Leoben on 18 April 1797.

By this time, moreover, Napoleon had become much more than a simple general. Very early on in the campaign, success in battle, the devotion of his troops, and a growing sense of his own power convinced him that he was a man of destiny. After the battle of Lodi - a relatively small action fought on 10 May 1796 in which Napoleon’s forces launched a heroic attack across a narrow bridge defended by large numbers of Austrians - he claimed to have been filled with the sudden realization that ‘I could well become . . . a decisive actor in our political scene’.40 At the same time, French failures elsewhere - to which his own victories provided a vivid contrast - reinforced his importance to the Directory, and thus his political independence. Stimulated by the need to provide his small army with a secure base for its operations, not to mention a desire to play to the gallery and discredit his more pragmatic superiors, Napoleon therefore deliberately encouraged republican feeling, the result being the formation of, first, the temporary Cispadane and Transpadane Republics in October 1796 (which eight months later were united with still more territory as the Milan-based Cisalpine Republic) and then the Genoa-based Ligurian Republic in June 1797. With the initiative firmly in his hands, Napoleon was also effectively left to offer the Austrians peace terms of his own making, these finally being agreed in the Treaty of Campo Formio of 17 October 1797.

Though badly defeated militarily, Austria did remarkably well out of this settlement, gaining the bishopric of Salzburg and large parts of the old Venetian Republic, which was partitioned between her, the Cisalpine Republic and France (who took the Ionian islands). Indeed, Vienna’s only loss other than Lombardy - the chief basis of the Cisalpine Republic - and such territories as she controlled on the left bank of the Rhine, was the Austrian Netherlands. Furthermore,