For the time being, then, there was nothing to do but embark on a search for still more glory. Action, in fact, was essential, for, as he remarked, ‘In Paris nothing is remembered for long. If I remain doing nothing . . . I am lost.’57 To suggest that this restless energy and ambition now became the only factor in the determination of French policy would be incorrect, but the fact was that Napoleon had already had a massive impact on France’s relations with the rest of Europe and imparted a direction to the international history of the Continent that would otherwise have been lacking. At the beginning of 1796 the Directory had been set on a course that saw it bent on the military defeat of Britain and Austria and their remaining allies, most of which were to be found amongst the minor states of Italy. With Prussia out of the war, Russia little interested in the affairs of Western Europe and Spain on the brink of becoming a French ally, there was every reason to expect that France’s goal - the formal abandonment of the Bourbons and the confirmation of her acquisition of the Rhineland and the left bank of the Rhine - would be achieved through the exhaustion of her enemies alone. Austria was almost bankrupt, and even Britain was finding the demands of the war difficult to bear. Individual members of the Directory may have taken a different line, but no general plan of conquest - or, if it is preferred, liberation - was under consideration. And, when conquests were suddenly showered on Paris (from a totally unexpected direction), the plan was still to use them as bargaining counters that could be exchanged for France’s real aims. What changed all this was Napoleon. By embarking on a course of republicanization in Italy, while at the same time cynically partitioning the neutral Republic of Venice with Austria, he set off a chain reaction. As Vienna could not now be bought off by the return of Lombardy, she would instead have to be offered territory in Germany. But, given the Austrian insistence - acceded to by Napoleon - that Prussia should have no part in these proceedings, France was now risking war with Potsdam. In the event this danger was avoided, for at Rastatt the French delegation demanded the whole of the left bank of the Rhine, which in turn implied giving Prussia her place at the German trough. Yet all this meant was the probability of fresh trouble in Italy, where the Habsburgs resented the loss of Mantua, and were likely to respond to Prussian expansion in Germany with demands for the relevant strip of Lombardy.
For reasons that were not solely the fault of Napoleon, France was now also committed to further expansion. As the Cisalpine Republic now had to be protected, the occupation of Switzerland, or to put it another way, the direct route between Paris and Milan, had become an immediate necessity. All over Italy patriots were in a state of ferment. And in Paris the men associated with the coup of 18 Fructidor were in the first place terrified by the spectre of military intervention, in the second greedy for more gold, and in the third committed to a Jacobinism for whose social aspects they had no enthusiasm whatsoever. Whether it was to satisfy the generals, line their own pockets and those of the bankrupt French treasury, or live up to the radical image conjured up in the defeat of Carnot and the ‘royalists’, there was only one way forward. Within a few months, a new republic had been established in Rome, but all this did was to make some Austrian counterstroke more likely, and all the more so as Vienna’s agreement to territorial change in Germany was certain to strip it of most of its main supporters in the Holy Roman Empire and, by extension, likely to lead it to seek compensation in greater control in Italy. Also gone was the possibility of a compromise settlement with Britain: early in 1797 the British had opened peace negotiations with the Directory, but they had collapsed in the wake of Fructidor, while the radicalism of the next few months persuaded Pitt and his ministers that France was once again in