They key word being had, as it had been previously conquered by Napoleon´s Italian army. (Also, ofcourse, Austrian previous control of Lombardy wasn´t contended, whereas post-Napoleonic control of Lombardy-Venice would very much be so.)
Well, yes, it had been conquered...in 1796. The Peace of Campo Formio was made in 1797. Austrian control of Italian territories was therefore continuous; as I noted earlier, Venetia was an explicit substitute for Lombardy. So Austria had possessions in Italy continuously. Napoleon wasn't "embroiling" Austria in anything; the Austrians had already been "embroiled" there for a long time. Politically, Napoleon had a hard enough time pushing through the treaty as it was: the Directors had wanted him to use his Italian victories to secure Austrian acquiescence to the seizure of Belgium and the Rhineland, and didn't give a crap about Bonaparte's new Italian empire. It was only through his usual trickery (including the German, but not the Italian, terms in the Truce of Leoben, then promptly overthrowing the Venetian government and presenting the Habsburgs with a
fait accompli to force them to revise the peace and except both) that he managed to get what he did. Had Napoleon simply decided to destroy the Republic and deny Austria a share,
and to create his Cisalpine Republic into the bargain, the Austrians would not have agreed to peace and would have kept fighting.
JEELEN said:
It should have been obvious that the use of ´foresight´ with regard to subsequent 19th century history was sarcastic. Napoleon wasn´t much of a foresighted man, outside the battlefield, that is.
If your use of 'foresight' was sarcastic, that post has no meaning. Glad to see you're honest about being a spammer.
Now that you mention it, how exactly did Napoleon do it? I guess there wasn't actual fighting in the marshes and the Venetians just gave up faced with overwhelming enemies who had already taken a portion of its hinterland, and out of diplomatic options?
French troops had already occupied most of the
terra firma in the course of fighting against the Austrians in early 1797. During Easter, there was rioting in Verona against the French occupation, and Bonaparte used that as an excuse to occupy the rest of the Republic during the truce of Leoben. At that point, there was little that the Venetians could do to prevent the French from bombarding Venice itself, and most of them didn't care enough to try to stop them; with his artillery commanding the Lagoon, Napoleon easily slipped a division or so across and overthrew the Doge's government.
