The Clandestine Efforts of the Italian War
From Attempts at a New Warfare, by R. de Villeneuve
More than any other figure of the Ancien Regime, Henri III de Bourbon-Orleans possessed what we could call the most modern awareness of strategy. Perhaps because such a large proportion of his ambassadors and ministers were men of the third estate, his time as king was marked by a nearly complete lack of respect for the tendencies and common senses of his time, a lack of respect which resulted in the destruction of the Holy Coalition and nearly two decades of French world hegemony, and as such it would almost be accurate to refer to his actions in the Mediterranean as revolutionary.
But he could not go far enough, because no matter how progressive his ambassadors were, despite the growing influence of the third estate in Versailles, it was still an aristocratic regime, and one which was far more concerned with protecting the ancien regime in general than it was in self aggrandizement. Furthermore, Henri’s regime lacked any sort of modern military command structure, and as such conflicts between the Army and Navy, And while I have no proof of this
*, the emergence of the naval fraction in Versailles certainly led to a competitive mentality among the Army and the Navy, with each action by one prompting an attempt by the other to move out and gain more glory, not for the nation but for itself. In Italy these contradictions--between an overly aggressive military policy born of miscoordination and a diplomatic policy constitutionally incapable of succeeding in its goals--meant that instead of completely dismantling her foe,France suffered from her greatest military defeat since the death of Henri II.
Regardless of this, the Italian Campaign, in its near success and its horrid failure, show us the horrifying potentiality of a new kind of warfare, which transcends the merely military and attacks the enemy directly at its
political core. Such a strategy breaks past the dialectic of defense and offense so common to purely military actions, breaks the strength of defensive terrain, fortresses, lines of supply. Warfare fought through sabotage, through propaganda, through assassinations and mobilizations, cannot be effectively counteracted, and leaves wounds which last longer than battles. And because it attacks directly at the contradictions of the enemy state it cannot be defended against like a normal physical attack. The Second Republic has, multiple times, benefitted from such actions, if only accidentally. If we could
purposefully embark on such a strategy, as Henri almost did in Italy, I believe that we could hold the world in our hands, despite our volunteer army, despite being beset on all sides by tyrants petty and imperial.
Humbert von Rundstedt, the dreaded lord commander of the German Empire’s Italian possessions.
And Italy was a land rife with tensions and contradictions. This may be difficult to the contemporary reader, for whom “Italy” means ‘the first nation’, a land of deeply suspicious and independent men, but the Italian crown was gifted to the house of Medici by the Holy Roman Emperor and under Cosimo III and the regent Victor von Habsburg Italy was practically a puppet for the Habsburgs, even closer to Vienna than Spain. But in order for this alliance to continue the Italians had to make some horrid compromises. The burgher republic of Venice, once the center of the majority of a great trade empire, had been reduced to a degenerate wreck, corrupted by Habsburg money and the long destruction of their free will. Two separate times Venetians had rebelled in the later 17th century, and after the Delassatri Revolt of 1679 the majority of Venice lost even the vague semblances of independence it once had, with only the city choosing its own leaders and the rest of the republic being ruled by the Brigadier-Constable Humbert von Rundstedt.
If the Medici’s inability to unify northern Italy infuriated large portions of the Umbrians and Florentines who were most supportive of the Italian state and most strongly represented in the Italian bureaucracy, not all of Italy’s subjects were so enamored to their ‘nation’. The Savoyards, who had long been oriented primarily towards the French, were as a majority opposed to attempts to curtail their independence and after unification a majority of the Savoyard nobility had left for Lyon or Paris. But even the burgers who remained in Turin and Alessandria had major issues with Florence, particularly with the military rule imposed during the unification which had never once abated.
These exiles wanted a state for their own and were willing to fight for it, and after the Campaign of Savoy led to the quick capture of Ciamberi (which, due to the Alps, was far closer to Lyon that any Italian city), Henri began setting up a new court to threaten the Medici’s hold over northern Italy. To this court in Ciamberi flocked Italian militants from Europe over, from all walks of life.
The 1st and 2nd Italian Regiments were the first regiments of the French Royal Marines, a military unit which had an influence which went far beyond its small size
The army officers suggested using these exiles to reinforce the Army of Germany, but le Brix had a different use for them. By recruiting these exiles directly into the newly formed French Royal Marine, le Brix had a military unit already predisposed to the kind of offensive he saw as deeply necessary, both in order to help break the standstill which had characterized this immensely expensive war for the last 7 years and to justify Cantillion’s proposal to transfer 20% of the army’s budget to the navy.
The heroics of the First and Second Italian Royal Marines have been recounted numerous times and are not the subject of this essay. What I intend to speak of here was the Third Italian Royal Marine, a far smaller group which none the less had a massive effect on the progress of the war. A group of recent exiles from Italy hired for their hatred of the Medici, the 3rd IRM included Republicans, Guildsmen, and Noblemen, and were assigned to the task of weakening the Italian Kingdom from within while France’s armies attacked it from without. They began striking Medici administrators and governors the moment that the French Marine embarked for Corsica, and by 1729 had succeeded in assassinating the leader of the Turin garrison, spreading sedition among the local militias.
This left northwestern Italy an easy target for a pair of French armies under de la Chartes and de Savoie, newly returned from their conflicts in Prussia and Spain. With the combined weight of 75,000 men and the weakened defenses provided by the Italian Exiles, success came swiftly, with the capture of Turin and Genoa in early 1730. After the capture of Turin the regiment was sent further afield, with two groups (the Groupe Vénitien and the Groupe Milanese) working to protect the French army’s western flank through a second campaign of subterfuge in the German Empire’s territories.
The Italian Front, late 1730
But the Exiles did more than simply cut lines of communication and scorch the earth. They contacted and coordinated the anti-Habsburg dissenters, eventually creating an alliance between the Veronese peasants who were suppressed in the last revolt with Venetian and Milanese dissenters. Protests rapidly turned into riots, and riots into an outright attack on Imperial buildings. In the fall the Imperial garrisons were either converted to the Republican cause or thrown out of Milan, Verona, and Venice. Peasant revolters took the surrounding areas, and the 3rd IRM began organizing the revolters into armies, and in Verona, the city council, aided by IRM member Aldo Morretti, founded the Republic of Italy, hoping to gain the support of Henri III.
Let us take a second to survey what this could have meant, what this could mean, for our republic. Henri could have completely destroyed the Kingdom of Italy as a viable power, replaced it with a buffer state comprising one of the richest parts of Europe, and driven a stake into the heart of the Holy Coalition. But merely voicing this possibility shows, also, the impossible nature such a venture under the state of Henri III. Henri, that arch-royalist, could go to the very edge of supporting rebellion in the states which opposed him but was constitutionally incapable of bringing these achievements to a head. He had already decided that his Italian venture would be towards the goal of establishing a Kingdom for his childhood friend, Eugen de Savoie. Beyond this, after the Revolt of the Parlementaires in Paris Henri would not fathom supporting republics. And so at the last moment Henri gave orders for Eugene de Savoie to march to the east, to support the Habsburgs in their war against the Republic of Italy.
The planned march towards Florence, and the march which ended up occurring.
The planned march into Tuscany had de la Chartes working on the western flank, marching to Santa Marinella, which was the last fortress before Rome, while de Savoie would take the old Italian capitol of Florence, a target defended by fifteen thousand men led by d’Ostra. The assumption was that resistance would be low and that Rome could be captured before the larger contingent arrived from Naples. What Henri and de Savoie underestimated was the skill of d’Ostra, and this underestimation led to the greatest military loss in French history.
Because the Italian army was moving north from Naples, and d’Orsa was one of the most skilled officers Italy has produced since Caesar. As de Savoie moved west to lay siege to Milan, d’Orsa began intercepting the communiques between de Savoie and de la Chartes, giving de la Chartes the idea that de Savoie was actually marching alongside him, at least for the first three days of de la Chartes’ march towards Santa Marinella. De la Chartes was a deeply aggressive general, perhaps the most aggressive the army possessed at the time, but he was not particularly skilled. In Spain he had a tendency to march forward in a single column, just sending scouts forward and relying on supporting armies to support his flanks. But this aggression had given him a great deal of prestige in a period when the army was, for the first time, facing competition within the halls of the capital, when it needed someone to prove that the army wasn’t a den of complacency. De la Chartes was not simply acting aggressive because it was in his nature, he was ordered to strike towards Rome as swiftly as possible, because Marshal de Lautries had heard that the Navy planned a landing at Fiumincino, a quarter day’s march from Rome. Such an offensive would have definiteively weakened the army’s influence in Versailles and placed the Physiocrats at the highest levels of government. The march of de la Chartes was not just a product of a government systematically incapable of completing its goals, it was a product of an army which was systemically predisposed against cooperating with its fellow military arms.
By the time de la Chartes realized his mistake, he was already caught. Rain had made large parts of the Arno uncrossable and d’Ostra had retaken Pisa over the night just as the prince of Medici’s army arrived to the south of Rome. Pinned, de la Chartes began shifting a part of his army to the rear, trying to fight his way back to friendly ground. Avoiding the Arno, he tried to move through the Apennines, the mountain range which stretched through central Italy, in order to come closer to de Savoie’s army.
Crossing the Apennines with 35,000 men created numerous occasions for ambushes, and over the course of a single week de la Chartes lost 5,000 men along his flanks to such attacks. After a week of haphazard retreats and after giving up most of his cannon to the approaching Italians, de la Chartes camped in Camerino, in a valley just on the border of the Anconan coastal plains. But as dawn came, it was revealed that d’Ostra had marched overnight and now possessed a command over the northern pass out of the valley. De la Chartes swiftly created a rearguard and moved towards the narrow eastern pass. But as he led his troops towards the pass he began to come under artillery fire from the hills. Within an hour it was revealed who they were: the forces of the Prince Medici, who had mounted their cannon on wagons and brought them rapidly up the coast of the Adriatic. Faced with artillery to his front and an army to his rear, de la Chartes surrendered the whole of his force.
The Battle of Camerino, in which France lost 28,000 men in a morning, remains to this day the greatest military failure in the history of the French Army. This is not to say that it was a strategic defeat; Eugene de Savoie had been spending this whole time negotiating with his counterpart in the Habsburg army for an ending to the Austrian participation in the war, and act which would completely change the diplomatic landscape of Europe. The Treaty of Ferrara, a ceasefire which would lead to the more extensive Treaty of Bern, was signed by von Runstendt and one of the highest ranked French commanders a stone’s throw away from the gallows they built together to strangle a revolution France had unknowingly started. The Treaty of Bern did not just destroy the Holy Coalition, or the Franco-Turkish alliance built as a counter to it; it marked the end of Henri’s flirtations with progressive or republican ideas. The first item of the Treaty was something both parties earnestly agreed to, that is the choice to never again attempt to promulgate revolts in the state of one’s enemies and the immediate liquidation of “any and all clandestine groups formed by the engaged parties”, and this meant the Third Italian Royal Marine. Over the 1730s nearly all of them were caught and murdered by French and Imperial authorities, with some very few finding refuge in Switzerland.
The Battle of Camerino marked the end of the Mediterranean War as well as the end of a whole era of European diplomacy. The power of the Habsburgs was ended, and now the hegemon of Europe resided in Versailles. But Henri resided on a fragile throne. The Battle of Camerino was a major embarrassment for the French army, and Henri, now swayed to the Physiocrats, cut the army’s funding and allowed for a large drawback in troop numbers; down to 100,000 in 1734. Italy, infuriated by her betrayal by the French and the Hapsburgs, broke her alliance with Vienna and began orienting towards two other powers spurned in the Treaty of Bern: Britain and Prussia.
We can surpass this. With but a few hundred men and a willingness to strike at the political contradictions of his enemies Henri was able to defeat an alliance which existed for nearly a century. If we were to purposefully and systematically work towards these goals we can gain far more than that.
* = de Villeneuve was writing this in the 1790s during his period in exile before being made leader of the Voltigeurs, and as such he did not have access to the archives which would have proven him correct
