Treaty of Campo Formio

• 1. Introduction

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  The Treaty of Campo Formio was signed on the 17th of October 1797 in an old house on the main square of a small village west of Udine. Napoleon Bonaparte put his name to the document alongside Count Philipp von Cobenzl, representing the Austrian monarchy. The building belonged to a local merchant named Bertrando Del Torre. Nobody passing through Campo Formio that autumn would have guessed that a deal struck here would erase one of Europe's oldest republics from the map, hand France territories it had never previously controlled, and plant the seeds of the next war before the ink had dried on this one. Who decided the fate of Venice, and why? What did the treaty actually promise, and what did it hide? The answers lie in the gap between the public articles and the secret ones.

• 2. A Village Between Two Powers

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  Campo Formio sat geographically in the middle, which was the point. Austrian headquarters were in Udine to the east, and Napoleon had taken up residence at Villa Manin to the west near Codroipo. Villa Manin was the country mansion of Ludovico Manin, the last Doge of Venice. Napoleon's choice of lodgings was not accidental; it placed him in the ancestral seat of the very state he was about to dissolve. The village itself, in the historical region of Friuli in north-eastern Italy, gave both sides a neutral ground close enough to their respective bases to allow swift communication. Five months of negotiations preceded the signing, a prolonged process that both parties extended for reasons of their own. During those same months, France had to suppress the Coup of 18 Fructidor in September, a royalist uprising that the Directory used as a pretext to arrest and deport royalist and moderate deputies. The diplomatic calendar was never truly separate from the political turbulence at home.

• 3. What the Public Articles Said

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  Austria received substantial territorial compensation in the public terms of the treaty. The city of Venice, the Terraferma, Venetian Istria, Venetian Dalmatia, and the Bay of Kotor region all passed to the Habsburg emperor. France, in exchange, took the Austrian Netherlands, covering most of what is now Belgium. Certain Mediterranean islands including Corfu and other Venetian possessions in the Ionian Sea went to France as well. Austria formally recognized the Cisalpine Republic and the newly created Ligurian Republic, formed of Savoyard state and Genoese territories, as independent powers. One constitutional consequence went further than most observers expected: the Italian states formally ceased to owe fealty to the Holy Roman Emperor, ending the Kingdom of Italy as a legal entity. That kingdom had existed de jure but not de facto since at least the 14th century, making the treaty's declaration the formal close of a centuries-old fiction. The public articles also called for a Congress of Rastatt to negotiate a final peace for the Holy Roman Empire as a whole.

• 4. The Hidden Bargain

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  Napoleon and representatives of the Holy Roman emperor also signed secret clauses that divided up additional territories and agreed to extend France's borders to the Rhine, the Nette, and the Roer. Free French navigation was guaranteed on the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Moselle. These rivers had long defined the practical limits of French commercial reach. In the secret articles, Austria as the personal state of the emperor also promised to work with France toward certain ends at the forthcoming Congress of Rastatt. The French Republic had, through these hidden commitments, expanded into areas it had never governed before. Napoleon's biographer Felix Markham later wrote that the partition of Venice was not only a moral blot on the peace settlement but left Austria a foothold in Italy that could only lead to further war.

• 5. The End of Venice

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  The Republic of Venice had existed as an independent state for roughly a thousand years before this treaty disbanded and partitioned it. Neither signatory at Campo Formio was Venetian; both simply divided what had been Venice's. On the 18th of January 1798, Austrian troops entered the city. Three days later they held an official reception at the Doge's Palace, and Ludovico Manin, the last Doge, attended as a guest of honour at the celebration of his own republic's obliteration. By passing Venetian possessions in Greece, such as the Ionian Islands, to French rule, the treaty produced effects on later Greek history that neither Napoleon nor Cobenzl intended or anticipated at the time. One further consequence reached a man far from Italy: Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, who had been held as a prisoner from the French Revolution in Austrian captivity, was released as a direct result of the treaty's terms.

• 6. A Respite, Not a Peace

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  The armistice of Leoben on the 18th of April 1797 had been forced on the Habsburgs after Napoleon's victorious Italian campaign, and the Treaty of Campo Formio largely reflected the terms agreed at Leoben in April of that year. The War of the First Coalition was over, and Great Britain was left fighting alone against revolutionary France. The Congress of Rastatt, called for in the public articles, failed to achieve the broader peace it was meant to deliver. By early 1799, France and Austria were at war again in the War of the Second Coalition. That conflict ended not with a revision of Campo Formio but with an entirely new agreement: the Peace of Luneville in 1801, which settled terms for the whole empire. One downstream consequence of Campo Formio that arrived sooner was the Peasants' War, which erupted in the Southern Netherlands in 1798 after the French introduced conscription into territories they had newly acquired under the treaty.