Marengo

Context

First Consul for only seven months, Bonaparte needed a victory to secure a power born of a coup. He crossed the Great St Bernard in May 1800 with the Army of Reserve and appeared in the rear of Melas, who was besieging Genoa. Convinced the Austrians were fleeing, he scattered his forces to cut every road.

Forces

France: about 28,000 men present at the start of the day, part of the corps being detached far off.

Austria: about 31,000 men and much superior artillery, under the old General Melas.

Course of the battle

On the morning of 14 June it was Melas who attacked, and the surprise was complete. Victor's and Lannes's divisions gave ground for six hours; by three o'clock the French army had been pushed back five kilometres, and Melas, wounded and exhausted, left the pursuit to his chief of staff and rode back to Alessandria to announce the victory.

Desaix's division, hastily recalled, arrived about five. Desaix threw out the famous line about a battle lost but time enough to win another, attacked head-on, and fell in the first minutes. At the same moment Kellermann the younger charged the flank of the Austrian column with four hundred heavy cavalry. In an hour everything was reversed.

Consequences

Melas signed the convention of Alessandria the very next day and evacuated northern Italy. Politically everything depended on it: the victory consolidated the Consulate and opened the way to the peace of Lunéville. The first bulletin would be rewritten three times to give the day the look of a prepared plan — one of the clearest examples of Napoleonic narrative manufacture.