nst
the French. The Austrian generals industriously circulated the most
sinister reports respecting the armies of the Sombre-et-Meuse and the
Rhine, and the position of the French troops in the Tyrol. These
impostures, printed in bulletins, were well calculated to instigate the
Italians, and especially the Venetians, to rise in mass to exterminate
the French, when the victorious army should penetrate into the Hereditary
States.

The pursuit of the Archduke Charles into the heart of Austria encouraged
the hopes which the Venetian Senate had conceived, that it would be easy
to annihilate the feeble remnant of the French army, as the troops were
scattered through the States of Venice on the mainland. Wherever the
Senate had the ascendency, insurrection was secretly fomented; wherever
the influence of the patriots prevailed, ardent efforts were made to
unite the Venetian terra firma to the Lombard Republic.

Bonaparte skillfully took advantage of the disturbances, and the
massacres consequent on them, to adopt towards the Senate the tone of an
offended conqueror. He published a declaration that the Venetian
Government was the most treacherous imaginable. The weakness and cruel
hypocrisy of the Senate facilitated the plan he had conceived of making a
peace for France at the expense of the Venetian Republic. On returning
from Leoben, a conqueror and pacificator, he, without ceremony, took
possession of Venice, changed the established government, and, master of
all the Venetian territory, found himself, in the negotiations of Campo
Formio, able to dispose of it as he pleased, as a compensation for the
cessions which had been exacted from Austria. After the 19th of May he
wrote to the Directory that one of the objects of his treaty with Venice
was to avoid bringing upon us the odium of violating the preliminaries
relative to the Venetian territory, and, at the same time, to afford
pretexts and to facilitate their execution.

At Campo Formio the fate of this republic was decided. It disappeared
from the number of States without effort or noise. The silence of its
fall astonished imaginations warmed by historical recollections from the
brilliant pages of its maritime glory. Its power, however, which had
been silently undermined, existed no longer except in the prestige of
those recollections. What resistance could it have opposed to the man
destined to change the face of all Europe?

CHAPTER V

1797.

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