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By Root 2478 0

his strategic objectives. Demoralized and exhausted, Vienna sued for peace, and on 8 February 1801 her representatives duly signed the treaty of Lunéville, by which Austria was again forced to accept France’s annexation of Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine and to recognize the independence of the various satellite states. But now there were also further conditions. Austria had to agree to destroy a number of fortresses on the right bank of the Rhine, and to give up the Habsburg-ruled duchies of Modena and Tuscany, together with some of the territory she had acquired from Venice in 1797 (of these territories, Modena and the Venetian lands went to the Cisalpine Republic, and, in a gesture intended to conciliate Spain, Tuscany was given to the son of the Duke of Parma - a son-in-law of Charles IV - as the Kingdom of Etruria). As if all this was not bad enough, the Austrians were also made to agree that the Duke of Tuscany should receive compensation in Germany, from which it followed that the ecclesiastical states that made up Vienna’s chief powerbase in the Holy Roman Empire should be put up for ‘secularization’ or annexation. In principle, Austria had already agreed to this process at Campo Formio in that she had accepted that the rulers of the territories lost in France’s annexation of the left bank of the Rhine should also be compensated from within the Empire. But what Lunéville meant was that the reorganization of Germany was now likely to be wholesale rather than partial, for such was Austria’s need for compensation that the Prussians would have to be drawn in too. Add to this Vienna’s failure to impose any clause in the treaty to the effect that the emperor - i.e. Francis II - should have a controlling interest in the settlement of the new frontiers, still less that foreign powers should be excluded, and it can be seen that Austria had suffered a shattering blow. As Metternich later lamented, ‘With the conclusion of the Peace of Lunéville, the weakness and vacillation of the Austrian cabinet reached their height . . . The German empire visibly approached its dissolution.’23 And, in effect, gone too was Austrian influence in Naples. In the words of the commander of the Neapolitan army that had invaded central Italy, Comte Roger de Damas:

The Queen . . . was in Vienna. The moment that the question arose of an armistice between the Austrian and the French armies she secured an official promise in writing that the ministry would consent to no treaty that did not include her army and her states. The emperor owed this return to the King of Naples after the active support that the latter had given him. However . . . before the ink was dry [he] put his name to an armistice that entirely ignored us. M. de Bellegarde wrote to me, ‘I have just concluded an armistice in which you do not appear [and could] only obtain a promise that you should not be attacked. You know how these people keep their promises: take precautions.’24

This warning could not have been more timely. A Neapolitan foray into Tuscany was duly defeated at Siena on 14 January 1801, and Ferdinand IV was left with no option but to sue for peace. Dictated by Damas’s French counterpart, Joachim Murat, the terms of the resultant treaty of Florence were predictably harsh: Naples had to cede Elba, Piombino and several small enclaves of territory that she held in Tuscany to the Kingdom of Etruria; to pay an indemnity of 120,000 ducats within three months; to close her ports to British ships; to amnesty and restore the property of all those who had been involved in the short-lived Parthenopaean Republic of 1798; to allow the occupation of the Adriatic coast for the duration of the war with Britain by a French army that would be paid and supplied by the Neapolitans themselves; and to surrender, again until peace was signed with London, three frigates to the French navy. Only narrowly did Ferdinand IV manage to retain the services of his chief minister, Baron Acton, an English soldier of fortune who had secured the favour of the Neapolitan court in the 1770s and ever