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view is hard to sustain, however. To make a lasting peace with Austria, it would have been necessary to offer her a series of concessions that respected her interests as a great power. This would have involved the restoration of Italy as an Austrian sphere of influence-a move that would have entailed pulling the French forces of occupation back to the Alps and abandoning the Cisalpine Republic - the acceptance of Austrian territorial gains at the expense of Bavaria and France (who would have had to surrender the Adriatic ports and islands she had seized at Campo Formio), and the abandonment of any designs that France may have had with regard to the control of Germany. Yet none of these concessions were forthcoming. Nor, indeed, was anything else to be expected. The territories that would have had to be given up in the south - Piedmont, Lombardy, the Legations, Cisalpine Venetia and Venetian Dalmatia - had all fallen under France’s sway by virtue of personal conquest on the part of Napoleon and could not have been given up without seriously damaging his prestige, while in Germany, to have accepted an Austrian advance would have been seen as jeopardizing the Rhine frontier. If Napoleon wanted peace, it was peace through victory, rather than peace through compromise.

Hostilities, then, were soon resumed. Pleased though Napoleon would have been to drive Britain and Austria apart, the First Consul was only too willing to embark on a further continental campaign. Nor was this surprising: in the aftermath of Marengo, the populace had erupted in transports of joy:

The First Consul . . . continued a few days longer at Milan to settle the affairs of Italy, and then set out on his return to Paris . . . I shall say but little of the manifestations of joy and admiration with which Bonaparte met throughout his journey . . . On arriving at Lyons we alighted at the Hotel des Celestins, where the acclamations of the people were so great and the multitude so numerous . . . that Bonaparte was obliged to show himself at the balcony . . . We left Lyons in the evening, and continued our journey by Dijon, and there the joy of the inhabitants amounted to frenzy.18

At the same time, if the events of 14 June 1800 did not in themselves bring the First Consul any extra power in France, they did shatter all chance that the various politicians who had found themselves outmanoeuvred in the aftermath of Brumaire might put the Napoleonic jack back in its box. While Napoleon had been away on campaign, Sieyès had been conspiring with Fouché and others to overthrow him. With command of the Army of the Interior in the hands of Bernadotte - an almost equally ambitious figure who married jealousy of Napoleon with, on the surface at least, pronounced Jacobinism - defeat at Marengo would have sealed Napoleon’s fate. In the aftermath of victory, however, the situation was very different. Not only did a variety of malcontents rally to Napoleon’s standard, but Sieyès sank into obscurity, while talk began of making Napoleon First Consul for life. As he remarked to Bourrienne, ‘Well, a few more events like this campaign and I may perhaps go down to posterity.’19 Nor did one have to be a member of his intimate circle to observe the fresh development in his ambitions. In the words of Bertrand Barère - an erstwhile member of the Convention who was numbered among the first batch of proscribed Jacobins to be amnestied by Napoleon:

The tyrannical consul was not forgotten in the victorious general, especially as he now displayed a haughty selfishness, utterly incompatible with devotion to his country, and . . . had removed the gilded bronze letters which were placed over the principal entrance of the palace of the Tuileries. When it was seen that the words ‘French Republic’ were an eyesore to the First Consul, the more than royal ambition of the Corsican, and the destruction of the Republic, could no longer be doubted.20

What made the idea of fresh victories against Austria still more attractive was the fact that as First Consul Napoleon had access to far greater means