{**} See the report of Captain Blakeley, the first correspondent of The Times in the Austrian camp, in that paper, reporting this fact[f]. The Darmstadt Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung presents a defence of Gyulay giving as the reason for the five-hour halt an event which cannot be revealed owing to official considerations and with which Gyulay had nothing to do, and ascribing the loss of the battle to this event. But Blakeley had already reported on the nature of the event.

Title page of Frederick Engels' pamphlet
Savoy, Nice and the Rhine

II

When the French press asserts that Savoy is French in language and customs, that is at least as true as if the same were said of French Switzerland, the Walloon part of Belgium and the Anglo-Norman islands in the Channel. The people of Savoy speak a Southern French dialect, and the cultivated and written language is French everywhere. So far from there being any question of an Italian element in Savoy, the French (that is, the Southern French or Provencal) vernacular is spoken on the other side of the Alps deep into Piedmont, as far as the upper valleys of the Dora Riparia and the Dora Baltea. Nevertheless, before the war there was hardly a trace of sympathy for being joined to France; that sort of thought was entertained only by isolated individuals in the lowlands of Savoy, which have commercial relations with France, but was as alien to the mass of the population here as in all the other French-speaking lands bordering on France. It is noteworthy that none of the countries that were incorporated into France from 1792 to 1812 has the slightest desire to come under the wings of the eagle again. People had assimilated the fruits of the first French Revolution, but were sick and tired of the rigid centralisation of the administration, the rule by prefects, the infallibility of the apostles of civilisation sent down from Paris. The sympathies that had been revived by the July and February revolutions were at once suppressed again by Bonapartism. No one has any wish to import Lambessa, Cayenne, the loi des suspects[431]. In addition, there is the Chinese walling-off of France from almost all import trade, which is felt most keenly on the border. The First Republic found, on all its borders, provinces oppressed and sucked dry, peoples that had been dismembered and robbed of all common natural interests, and it brought them emancipation of the peasantry, agriculture, industry and trade. The Second Empire comes up, on all its borders, against greater freedom than it has to offer; in Germany and Italy it comes up against stronger national feeling, and in the smaller countries against consolidated separate interests, which have grown big in forty-five years of unprecedentedly rapid industrial development and are interwoven with world trade on all sides; it brings with it nothing but the despotism of the age of the Roman Caesars, the incarceration of trade and industry in the huge prison of its customs line, and at best, in addition, free passage to the country where pepper grows.

Savoy, separated from Piedmont by the main chain of the Alps, supplies almost all its needs from the north, from Geneva and in part from Lyons, just as on the other hand the canton of Ticino, which lies south of the Alpine passes, draws on Genoa and Venice. If this circumstance is a motive for separation from Piedmont, it is not one for annexation to France, for the commercial metropolis of Savoy is Geneva; that was taken care of, apart from the geographical situation, by the wisdom of the French tariff laws and the chicanery of the French customs.

But despite the language, the blood relationship and the chain of the Alps, the Savoyards do not seem to have the slightest desire to be blessed with the imperialist institutions of the great French motherland. They have the traditional feeling that Italy has not conquered Savoy, but Savoy Piedmont. Starting from little Lower Savoy, the small nation of warlike mountaineers of the entire province concentrated themselves into a state and then descended into the Italian plain and, by conquest and policy, annexed Piedmont, Monferrato, Nice, the Lomellina, Sardinia and Genoa, one after the other. The dynasty settled in Turin and became Italian, but Savoy remained the cradle of the state, and today the cross of Savoy is the coat of arms of North Italy from Nice to Rimini and from Sondrio to Siena. France conquered Savoy in the campaigns of 1792 to 1794, and until 1814 the country was called the Département du Mont-Blanc. But in 1814 it was not at all inclined to remain French; the only question was whether to join Switzerland or to return to the old relationship to Piedmont. Nonetheless, the lowlands remained French until after the Hundred Days[432], at which time they were given back to Piedmont. Naturally, the old historical tradition had faded with time; Savoy was neglected, as the Italian provinces of the state gained too great a predominance; the interests of Piedmontese policy pointed more and more south and east. It is all the more remarkable that precisely that class of the population harboured separatist desires most which professed to be the primary bearer of historical tradition: the old conservative and ultramontane nobility; and these desires aimed at union with Switzerland, so long as the old oligarchical patrician constitutions prevailed there; only since the general introduction of democracy in Switzerland do they seem to have taken a different orientation; under Louis Napoleon France became reactionary and ultramontane enough to be regarded by the nobility of Savoy as a refuge from the revolutionary policy of Piedmont.

The state of affairs seems at present to be as follows: In general there is no desire to separate Savoy from Piedmont. In the uplands, in Maurienne, Tarentaise and Upper Savoy, the population is decidedly for the status quo. In the Genévois, Faucigny and Chablais, union with Switzerland is preferred to anything else, if any change at all is to be made. It is only here and there in Lower Savoy, and then only among the local reactionary nobility, that any desire for union with France can be observed[k]. But these voices are so isolated that even in Chambéry the vast majority of the population is strongly opposed to them and the reactionary nobility (see the statement of Costa de Beauregard[l]) does not dare to admit its sympathies.

So much on the question of nationality and the will of the people.

Now what is the situation as regards the military question? What strategic advantages does possession of Savoy give Piedmont, and what advantages would it give France? And how does a change of mastery in Savoy affect the third contiguous state, Switzerland?

From Basle to Briancon the French border forms a large markedly inward-bending arc; a good bit of Switzerland and all of Savoy project into French territory here. If we draw the chord of this arc, we find that the segment of the circle is almost exactly filled by French Switzerland and Savoy. If France's frontier were pushed forward up to this chord, it would make, by and large, just as straight a line from Lauterburg to Fréjus as from Lauterburg to Dunkirk; but this line would be of much different significance for defence. Whereas the northern frontier is quite open, the northern part of the, eastern frontier would be covered by the Rhine and the southern part by the Alps. Between Basle and Mont Blanc, no section of land would mark the borderline; rather, the "natural frontier" would be formed here by the Jura down to Fort de l'Ecluse and from there on by the branch of the Alps bounding the Arve valley in the south from Mont Blanc onwards and likewise ending at Fort de l'Ecluse. But if the natural frontier forms a concave arc bending inward, it no longer fulfils its purpose and so is no longer a natural frontier. And if it happens that this inward-bending segment of a circle, pressing our frontier so unnaturally back, is inhabited by people, into the bargain, who are French "by language, customs and civilisation"[m], must not the mistake that Nature made here be rectified, must not the theoretically required convexity or at least rectilinearity be restored in practice here, can the French living on the other side of the natural frontier be sacrificed to a lusus naturae?[n]

That this sort of Bonapartist reasoning is not entirely without significance is proved by the First Empire, which went on from annexation to annexation until an end was put to it; the most perfect frontier has its weak points, where it can be improved and given a push; and if one does not have to stand on ceremony, one can go on annexing without end. At any rate, it follows from the foregoing line of argument that what can be said for the annexation of Savoy, either as regards nationality or the military interests of France, holds good for French Switzerland as well.

The Alps, which run north-northwest from the Col di Tenda, turn by and large north-northeast at Mont Thabor, which marks the boundary between Piedmont, Savoy and France, and then bend still more eastward at Mont Géant, the boundary point between Piedmont, Savoy and Switzerland. Accordingly, from Mont Thabor to Mont Géant the Alps can only form the natural frontier of France if this frontier proceeds in a straight line from Mont Géant to Basle. In other words: The demand for the annexation of Savoy to France entails the demand for the annexation of French Switzerland.

Along the entire sector in which the main ridge of the Alps forms the present border of the two states, there is only one paved pass, Mont Genèvre. Besides this, only the Col d'Argentera, which leads from Barcelonnette into the valley of the Stura, is passable by artillery, and it might be possible, with some difficulty, to make Savoy, still more bridle-paths practicable for all arms. But so long as Savoy and Nice each provide two paved passes over the main chain of the Alps, any French attacker, if he is not yet in possession of these provinces, must conquer at least one of them before he crosses the Alps. Now there is the additional factor that for an attack from France, the Mont Genèvre permits only a direct thrust at Turin, whereas the Mont Cenis and still more the Little St. Bernard, the two Savoy passes, have a flanking effect; and that the Mont Genèvre makes a large detour necessary for an attacking Italian army aiming at the heart of France, while the Mont Cenis is the great high road from Turin to Paris. Accordingly, no commander would dream of using the Mont Genèvre except for auxiliary columns; the major operational line will always pass through Savoy.

Possession of Savoy would therefore at once give France a terrain that is essential to it for an aggressive war against Italy, and which it would otherwise have to conquer first. An Italian army on the defensive would of course never defend Savoy by a decisive battle, but it could hold up the attacker to some extent by vigorously conducted mountain warfare and destruction of the roads, even as early as in the upper valleys of the Arc and the Isère (through which the Mont Cenis and St. Bernard roads run), and then hold the northern slope of the main chain of the Alps for some time more, backed up by the forts blocking the passes. Of course, there cannot be any question of an absolute defence here any more than in mountain warfare in general; the decisive battle is reserved for the descent of the enemy into the plain. But time will certainly be won, which can be decisive for concentrating forces for the main battle, and which is particularly important for so elongated a country with so few railways as Italy, as opposed to a compact country like France, covered with an excellent strategic railway network; and this time will certainly be lost if France already possesses Savoy before the war. But Italy will never wage war alone against France; and if it has Allies, there is the possibility that the two armies in Savoy could already keep the balance. The consequence of this would be that the struggle for control of the Alpine chain would be long drawn out; that at the worst the Italians could hold the northern slope of the ridge for some time and, after losing it, fight the French for the southern slope, for only he is master of a ridge who controls both slopes and can cross it. Whether the attacker would then still be strong and decided enough to follow the defender into the plain is very uncertain.

The campaigns in Savoy from 1792 to 1795 provide an example of such an indecisive mountain war, even though the action on both sides was loose, uncertain and fumbling.

On September 21, 1792 General Montesquiou invaded Savoy. The 10,000 Sardinians defending it were so dispersed in a chain of posts, as was the favourite custom of the time, that they could not bring sufficient forces together to resist anywhere. Chambéry and Montmélian were occupied and the French passed through the valleys up to the foot of the main chain of the Alps. The ridge itself remained entirely in the hands of the Sardinians, who, under General Gordon, after some minor engagements, on August 15, 1793 pushed back the French, who had been weakened by sending detachments to the siege of Lyons, and drove them back out of the Arc and Isère valleys to Montmélian. There the beaten columns were joined by their reserves; Kellermann returned from Lyons, went over to the attack immediately (September 11) and threw the Sardinians back again to the Alpine passes without much trouble; but here his strength too was exhausted and he had to come to a standstill at the foot of the range. But in 1794 the army of the Alps was brought up to 75,000 men, to which the Piedmontese could oppose only 40,000, with a possibly available reserve of 10,000 Austrians. Despite this, the first attacks of the French were unsuccessful at both the Little St. Bernard and the Mont Cenis, until finally the St. Bernard was taken on April 23 and the Mont Cenis on May 14, which put the entire ridge into their hands.

Thus, it took three campaigns to wrest entrance into Italy from the Piedmontese on this side. Even though today it would be impossible to conduct such an indecisive war on such a limited terrain, and have it drag out over several campaigns, it still will always be difficult for' the French, given any sort of balance of forces, not only to force the Alpine passes but also to remain strong enough to descend at once into the plain. Savoy does not offer more than that to Italy, but that is already enough.

Now let us assume that Savoy is united with France. How does Italy stand then? The northern slope of the Alpine chain is in the hands of the French, and the Italians can only defend the southern slope, whose strong points and positions are dominated by the high ridge or else can be observed and in most cases turned at a fairly short distance. Defence of the mountains is reduced to its last, weakest and also most costly act. The opportunities for gathering intelligence that mountain warfare in Savoy gives disappear. And that is not all. So long as Savoy had to be conquered, France might under certain circumstances be content with doing that and thereby confining Italy to the passive defensive; one result would already be in hand; the troops might perhaps be better used elsewhere; France would have an interest in not engaging too great forces in that theatre of war. If on the other hand Savoy is definitively a French province, it is worth while to defend it offensively, in the French manner. Passive defence could cost as many losses in a campaign as an attack on Italy; not so very many more troops would be needed for the attack, and what entirely different results would be in prospect!

The day after annexation; French general staff officers will be seen travelling up the valleys of the Arc and Isère, investigating the lateral valleys, climbing the mountain ridges, questioning the best Alpine guides, pacing off distances, measuring gradients and noting everything down carefully; all of this not out of tourists' whims but according to a visible plan, probably already prepared by now. They will soon be followed by engineers and contractors, and it will not be long before roads have been laid and masonry structures built in the highest mountains of which neither the inhabitants nor travellers will be able to say what they are for. They do, not concern either peasants or tourists; their only purpose is to develop the natural strategic capabilities of Savoy.

Both the Mont Cenis pass and that of the Mont Genèvre lead to Susa. If the southern slopes of both are attacked by French columns, the Italian detachments defending them will be completely cornered. They will have no way of knowing which side the main attack will come from; but they will know this much in advance, that if one of the two passes is forced and Susa taken, the troops defending the other pass will be cut off. If the Mont Cenis is forced first, the troops at the Mont Genèvre can at the worst escape by footpaths into the valley of Fenestrelle, leaving behind their artillery, baggage and horses; but if the attackers push to Susa over the Mont Genèvre, the troops at the Mont Cenis have no way of retreat. Under such circumstances, defence of these two passes is reduced to a mere demonstration. Now, into the bargain, the operational lines of the two French forces, the roads from Grenoble to Briancon and from Chambéry to Lans-le-Bourg, run parallel on the whole and are separated only by a mountain ridge which branches from the Mont Thabor and over which there are many foot- and bridle-paths. As soon as the French have cut over this ridge a side road, which need be no more than four German miles in length, they can shift their masses from one road to the other at will, the cornering will be even more effective, and the defence of the line of the Alps against an attack from Italy will become enormously stronger on this side.

Let us go further. Savoy has still another pass over the Alps, the Little St. Bernard. Many French authorities hold that Napoleon would have done better to take this pass for his crossing of the Alps instead of the Great St. Bernard. The pass is lower, and so is free of snow earlier in the spring and is in general easier to negotiate. The columns from Lyons and Besançon converge on Albertville at least as easily as on Lausanne; and both passes lead to Aosta and Ivrea. The mere fact that a polemic could arise as to the advisability of one or the other pass for Napoleon's purposes in the 1800 campaign proves how important this Little St. Bernard is for warfare. Quite special conditions, to be sure, are presupposed before the Little St. Bernard can be used to repeat the strategic outflanking of Marengo. Armies are larger today, and they could never pass through high mountains in a single column; nowadays a flanking manoeuvre with only 30,000 men would in most cases lead to disaster. All this is true for the first and second campaigns. But if, as seems likely, all wars waged pertinaciously by both sides assume a different, protracted character because of modern groups of fortresses and entrenched camps, when a war can really no longer be fought out until the combatants have slowly ground one another down in a number of campaigns, the armies will also get gradually smaller. Let us assume that a war has moved to and fro in the upper Italian plain for several years; that the French, who in the process had taken Casale or Alessandria or both, have been thrown back across the Alps, and the struggle has come to a standstill there with fairly depleted forces on both sides.-Will it then be such a feat, with our railways and with the artillery now lighter in all armies, quickly to throw 30,000 to 40,000 men and even more over the Little St. Bernard to Ivrea? From Ivrea they will be within reach of their permanent depot in the plain, where they will find their essential supplies and can get reinforcements from the garrison; if this should not be possible, their road to Turin and their line of retreat over the two adjoining passes could certainly not be blocked by a stronger force. But at such a time these 30,000 to 40,000 men, with the garrisons, would be a very respectable force, and at the worst, after crushing the nearest corps of the enemy, could carry the war on from their entrenched camp with every prospect of success. It should be recalled how the armies had already shrunk in 1814 and with what slender forces Napoleon accomplished such great things in that year.

The road over the St. Bernard leads, as has been said, into the valley of the Isère, as the one over the Mont Cenis into that of the Arc. Both rivers rise on the Mont Iseran. Above Bourg-Saint-Maurice the St. Bernard road leaves the river and turns straight over the mountain, while the gorge (Val de Tignes) goes to the right southward. Below Lans-le-Bourg, at Termignon, a small lateral valley (Val Saint-Barthélemy) runs into the Arc valley. From the Val de Tignes there are three footpaths over the ridge, between the Mont Iseran and the Mont Chaffequarré, into the Val Saint-Barthelemy. One of these three saddle-shaped passes must certainly be capable of being paved. If a road were built here, then, in conjunction with the previously mentioned side road, the strategic road system of Savoy—as a French border province—would already be fairly well developed. A road would run just behind the main ridge of the Alps linking the three most important passes and making it possible to shift the main bodies of troops from the St. Bernard and the Mont Genèvre to the neighbourhood of the Mont Cenis in two days, and from one flank to the other in four to five days. If the system is further completed by a road from Moutiers over the Pralognan pass to Saint-Barthélemy and Lans-le-Bourg and another one from Moutiers to Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, there will hardly be any-thing to add. Then it will only be necessary to set up the fortifications needed for support—not for absolute blocking—and to ensure the security of Moutiers, the principal highway hub, as the central depot before the powerful attack. In this there will be a total of less than twenty-five German miles of new road construction.

If these or similar arrangements are made—and there can be no doubt that the French general staff has already prepared a plan for the total strategic utilisation of Savoy—what happens then to the defence of the southern slope of the Alps? And, in the case of defence, what powerful strokes could not. a new Lecourbe, relying on a secure central depot and small forts, deliver when his mobility was assured by such a network of roads? It should not be argued that mountain warfare cannot occur any longer with the great armies of today. So long as the armies are really large and there is decisive superiority on one side, that is true enough. But the armies will soon be ground down on the modern fortresses, and there will be plenty of cases in which superiority will give way to equilibrium. Naturally, no one will take to the mountains if he can help it, but the way from Paris to Italy and from Italy to Paris will always lead through Savoy or the Valais.

We sum up. Because of its geographical location and especially because of its Alpine passes, Savoy as a French province would allow an only slightly superior French army to take possession of the Italian slope of the Alps, make sweeps into the valleys and take on an importance much greater than its actual military forces would indicate. But if the theatre of war had been prepared to some extent, the French army would be so favourably situated that with otherwise fully equal forces it would have immediate superiority over its adversary; and in addition the Little St. Bernard would force the Italians to send off a detachment to a long distance, while the same pass would under certain circumstances give the French the opportunity to make more decisive offensive thrusts.

Savoy in French hands is, as against Italy, an exclusively offensive tool.

Now what is the situation as regards the interests of Switzerland?

In the present state of affairs Switzerland cannot be attacked by any of its neighbours except frontally. In saying this we count South Germany without Austria as one bordering state and Austria as another, for we have just seen that the two do not always of necessity act together. South Germany can attack only on the Basle-Constance line, Austria only on the Rheineck-Münster line, Italy on the Poschiavo-Geneva line and France on the Geneva-Basle line. Everywhere the Swiss army has its line of retreat perpendicularly behind its front; everywhere neutral border territory more or less covers its flanks. Consequently, strategic outflanking cannot be started before fighting has begun, so long as only one of the countries bordering on Switzerland is attacking. Only Austria has an advantageous position for outflanking the Grisons, but the Swiss would in any case never fight their decisive battle against an Austrian attack in the Grisons, but more to the northwest, in the spurs of the Alps. Austria's cession of Lombardy has greatly reinforced this advantage of the Swiss; up to a year ago Austria certainly had the means for a concentric attack on Southwestern Switzerland that would not be negligible in the high mountains, given superior forces. At the same time the effect of such an attack would be limited to only the Grisons, Ticino, Uri and Glarus, that is, the most thinly populated and poorest part of the country, and would presuppose that the enemy forces were already badly dispersed if they were-to go over the St. Gotthard coming from Italy. The existing favourable distribution of the bordering countries is worth more to Switzerland than the European guarantees of neutrality. It gives it the chance in the event of an attack by only one of its neighbours to prolong the defence as long as possible, and that is after all the only thing that so small a country can count on.

From the moment that Savoy becomes French or even is only occupied by French troops, there is no question any more of defending all of French Switzerland, from the Bernese Jura to the Lower Valais. Even now Geneva can be turned into a French depot within 24 hours; the Jura is turned, as well as the line of the Zihl and the lakes of Neuchâtel and Biel; the French, instead of having to struggle in the defiles and then force the narrow way between the two lakes and through the Grosse Moos, will march at their ease through the rich hilly land of the Vaud, and the first position for serious resistance coincides with the position in which the first main battle will have to be fought, before Berne behind the Saane and the Sense; for a flanking column from Savoy via Villeneuve and Vevey would make any resistance in the Vaud useless.

Up to now Switzerland's first defence line against France has been the Jura, an excellent terrain for raw militiamen who know the country and are supported by the population. It cannot be held effectively, however, if only because of the much-indented frontier which often cuts across its parallel ridges. The second, and more important, line is that of the Zihl, which connects the lakes of Neuchâtel and Biel and flows from of the Lake of Biel into the Aare. On the right the line is continued by the lower course of the Aare, and on the left by the Orbe, which flows into the Lake of Neuchâtel at its upper end, at Yverdon. The Zihl is only a half mile long between the lakes and only a mile from the Lake of Biel to the Aare. The true front of the position lies between the lakes and is further strengthened by the Grosse Moos in the low ground, extending from the Lake of Neuchâtel to near Aarberg and passable only on the main road. A right flanking of this front via Bürglen could be paralysed by the reserve at Aarberg; a flanking manoeuvre with a wider swing presupposes throwing a bridge over the Aare and tends to expose its lines of communication. A left flanking movement can only be carried out through the Vaud and can be held up successively at the Orbe, the Mentue and the Broye. This resistance cannot be undermined by a flanking operation along the Lake of Geneva towards Fribourg because the Swiss drawing back along the Lake of Neuchâtel would always have the shorter road to travel to get there. Thus the position on the Zihl can be used for a major battle only under special conditions, if the enemy makes serious mistakes, but it still does everything that Switzerland could demand of it: It gives an opportunity to hold up the enemy and, in particular, to bring up the contingents from Southwestern Switzerland.

But once Savoy is in the hands of the enemy, a column advancing from Saint-Gingolph via Villeneuve and Châtel-Saint-Denis would make all resistance in the Vaud useless, for even at Vevey the column would be hardly two miles further from Fribourg than the Swiss on the Orbe and could therefore bar their retreat. From Saint-Gingolph to Fribourg is about twelve miles; Fribourg lies a day's march behind the left flank of the position on the Zihl between the lakes and three miles from Peterlingen (Payerne), where the French columns marching through the Vaud could join up with the column from Savoy. Thus, in three or four days the attacker can, if Savoy is at his disposal, cut the line of communication of the Valais through the valley of the Rhône, capture Geneva, the Vaud and Fribourg up to the Saane and emerge with his main forces in the rear of the Zihl position, which would let Basle, Solothurn, the Bernese Jura and Neuchâtel fall into his hands. And these are no barren high mountain districts but the richest and most industrial cantons of Switzerland.

Switzerland felt the strategic pressure Savoy exerts on it so strongly that in 1814 it effected the well-known neutralisation of its northern portion and in 1816 obtained from Sardinia the contractual undertaking never to cede the Chablais, Faucigny and Genévois to another power than Switzerland itself. Louis Napoleon also has the rumour spread about everywhere that he wants only Southern Savoy; the Chablais, Faucigny and a part of the Genévois, up to the Usses brook, are to go to Switzerland. Since one gift deserves another, he uses Herr Vogt, according to The Times, to inquire confidentially of the Swiss National Assembly whether he could not get free use of the Simplon road in exchange. A first hint that the Simplon too is a natural frontier post of France, as in fact it was under the First Empire.

Let us assume that Switzerland is enriched by the new canton of North Savoy. The frontier would be formed by the mountain ridge that separates from the main chain between the Little St. Bernard and the Mont Blanc and extends to the Rhône defile (Fort de l'Ecluse); it would thus appear to be quite "natural". But the following roads run from the valleys of the Isère and Rhône over this ridge: (1) Seyssel to Geneva; (2) Annecy to Geneva; (3) Annecy to Bonneville; (4) Albertville to Sallanches. Roads run from Bonneville and from Sallanches over the north ridge of the Arve valley to Thonon. Thus, the region lies quite open to an offensive directed against Thonon on the south bank of the Lake of Geneva, and since the distances from Seyssel or Albertville to Thonon are not over fifteen miles, possession of North Savoy would only give the Swiss defensive five days more at most. But since it is out of the question that this new canton could be defended by any other troops than the Landsturm, the attacking column could just as well go directly from Geneva to Thonon—five miles—at which place it would be only some four miles from Saint-Gingolph. In this case North Savoy would provide Switzer-land with only three days grace. In addition, it could only have the effect of dividing the Swiss defensive forces. The line of retreat of -a Swiss army attacked from France obviously goes through Berne and the lowlands, where possible along the Aare to Zurich, and where that is not possible, to Lucerne, and from those two places into the Upper Rhine valley. Accordingly, the army cannot take up a position so far to the south that it can be forced out of these lines and up into the high mountains. As we saw, the Vaud can be incorporated to advantage into the Swiss defensive system; North Savoy and the Valais, laid open by the abrogation of the neutrality of Savoy, can certainly not be. We know, however, that in a threatened federative state defended by militias everyone will want to have his own home district defended. We know that the troops will grumble, the national assemblies will cry out, if entire cities and cantons are given up without resistance, and especially in the case of a new canton, which Switzerland will have received only for the sake of its defence! In the general staff itself everyone will do what he can to see that his district is specially protected, and in a militia army, in which the discipline is lax enough at best because of the comfortable tavern atmosphere of peacetime, all these influences will make it hard enough for the commander to hold his troops together. In nine cases out of ten it is a good bet that the commander will let himself be swayed or have to give way, and that North Savoy will be occupied by troops who will be no use at all for its defence but will in any event suffer during the retreat and be thrown in part into the Valais, where they may then try to see how they can get back to the main army over the Gemmi or the Furka.

The only security for Switzerland is that North Savoy belong neither to it nor to France; in that case it would really be neutral in a war between those two states, and really cover Switzerland. However, if it belonged to Switzerland this would not be much better for the Swiss than if it belonged to France. Its value comes to a gain of three, or at most five, days, the greater part of which, however, would be lost again in defending the Vaud. What is that against the security that they could be attacked, under any circumstances, only between Basle and the Lake of Geneva?

North Savoy, is a gift of the Greeks[o] for the Swiss; it is more than that: This gift implies a threat. In the case that has been presumed, France is militarily master of all of French Switzerland and interdicts any even half serious defence of it. Annexation of South Savoy by France immediately raises the demand for incorporation of French Switzerland.

III

As we know, the county of Nice lies at the foot of the Maritime Alps, and its border towards the district of Genoa drops to the sea a mile east of Oneglia, at Cervo. The western half speaks a Provençal dialect and the eastern half, beyond the Roya, an Italian one. With the exception of some villages on the Var, however, Italian is the written language everywhere; only in the city of Nice, because of the large influx of foreigners, is it counterbalanced by French.

If we are to treat the national question correctly here, we must go into the language relationships of the Western Alps for a moment.

At every point at which 'Italian competes with other languages in the Alps it is proved to be the weaker. There is no point at which it crosses the Alps; the Romance dialects of the Grisons and the Tyrol are entirely independent of Italian. On the other hand, all the bordering languages have won territory from it south of the Alps. Krain-Slovenian is spoken in the western mountain districts of the Venetian province of Udine. In the Tyrol the German element is master of the entire southern slope and all of the Upper Adige valley; further to the south, in the middle of the Italian region, there are the German-language islands of the Sette comuni and the Tredici comuni[433]; at the southern foot of the Gries Pass, as well as in the Val di Cavergno in the Ticino and the Val Formazza in Piedmont, in. the Upper Valdi Vedro at the foot of the Simplon, and finally on the entire southeastern slope of the Monte Rosa, in the Val de Lys, the Upper Val Sesia and Val Anzasca, German is spoken. From the Val de Lys on the French language border begins; it comprises the entire Val d'Aosta and the eastern slope of the Cottian Alps, from the Mont Cenis Pass on, so that the common understanding is that the sources of all the rivers of the Upper Po basin belong to it. It is usually accepted that this border runs from Demonte (on the Stura) somewhat westerly from the Col di Tenda to the Roya and follows that river down to the sea.

There can be no doubt as to the boundaries between Italian and German or Slavic-speaking peoples. It is different, however, where two Romance languages meet, and to be sure not the Italian literary language, il vero toscano[p], nor the cultured North French, but the Piedmontese dialect of Italian and the South French of the troubadours, degenerated into a thousand patois, which we shall designate, for the sake of brevity, with the imprecise but familiar name of Provençal. Anyone who has ever studied, even superficially, the comparative grammar of the Romance languages or Provençal literature, must be struck immediately by the great similarity of the vernacular in Lombardy and Piedmont to Provençal. In Lombard, it is true, this similarity is limited to the external habitus of the dialect; the dropping of the masculine vowel endings, while the feminine ones are kept in the singular, as well as of most of the vowel endings in conjugation, give it a Provençal ring, while on the other hand the nasal n, the pronunciation of the u and oeu are reminiscent of North French. But the word formation and phonology are essentially Italian, and where divergences occur they are often strangely reminiscent, as in Rhaeto-Romanic[434], of Portuguese{*} The Piedmontese dialect agrees fairly well with the Lombard in its basic features, while coming closer to the Provençal and no doubt approaching it so closely in the Cottian and Maritime Alps that it would be hard to draw a definite line{**}. Further, most of the South French patois are not much closer to the North French written language than Piedmontese itself. Here, therefore, the vernacular can hardly be decisive for nationality; the Provençal-speaking Alpine peasant learns Italian as easily as French and uses one as seldom as the other; Piedmontese is perfectly comprehensible to him, and he gets along well enough with it. If some point of support had to be found, it could be only the written language, and this is Italian in all of Piedmont and Nice, the only exception being probably the Val d'Aosta and the Waldensian valleys, where French is the dominant written language here and there.

To try to assert the French nationality of Nice on the basis of a Provençal patois, which covers only half the province at that, is, therefore, nonsense from the start. The assertion becomes still more nonsensical if we recall that the Provençal language extends across the Pyrenees as well, covers Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, and in these Spanish provinces, despite some Castilian echoes, not only is preserved on the whole in a much purer form than anywhere in France, but also still has an existence as a written language in the popular literature. What would become of Spain if Louis Bonaparte one day claimed these three regions too as being of French nationality?

It seems to be even harder to create French sympathies in the county of Nice than in Savoy. One hears nothing from the country; in the city every attempt falls even flatter than in Chambéry, although it is much easier to concentrate a crowd of Bonapartists in this seaside resort. The idea of making Garibaldi, the man from Nice, into a Frenchman is not at all bad.

If Savoy is of supreme importance for the defence of Piedmont, Nice is still more so. Three roads lead from Nice to Italy: the Corniche road along the coast to Genoa, the road over the Col di Nava from Oneglia to the valley of the Tanaro and Ceva, and the road over the Col di Tenda to Cuneo (Coni). The first one is, to be sure, finally barred by Genoa, but as early as at Albenga and again at Savona gives an advancing column the opportunity of crossing the Apennines on good paved roads, and in addition provides a number of bridle-paths and footpaths over the mountains; in 1796 Napoleon gave an example of how they are to be used in war. The third one, over the Col di Tenda, is for Nice what the Mont Cenis is for Savoy; it leads directly to Turin, but affords few or no flanking advantages. On the other hand, the middle road over the Col di Nava leads straight to Alessandria and so has the same sort of effect in the south that the Little St. Bernard has in the north, only much more directly and with far fewer obstacles. It has the additional advantage that it is near enough to the coast road to get significant support from it in the attack. As early as at Garessio the column advancing on the Nava road can make contact again with the column which has advanced to Albenga on the coast road, since the crossroad from Albenga comes out there; if it has passed Ceva, the road to Alessandria leads through Carcare, where the road from Savona comes out and which is half way between Ceva and Savona. However, there are high mountains between Ceva, Savona and Oneglia, where the defence cannot make a stand. In addition, the north slope of the Col di Nava, with the sources of the Tanaro, lies in the territory of Nice, so that the pass belongs from the outset to whoever has Nice before the war.

A French army that had control of Nice even before war broke out threatens, from there, the flank, rear and lines of communication of any Italian force thrust forward westward from Alessandria. Cession of Nice to France would therefore mean, in war, drawing the assembly point of the Italian forces to Alessandria and abandoning the defence of Piedmont proper, which can only be conducted in Nice and Savoy.

Here too the history of the revolutionary war affords the best example.

On October 1, 1792 General Anselme crossed the Var with a division of 9,000 men, while at the same time the French fleet (12 ships of the line and frigates) cast anchor within 1,000 paces of Nice. The inhabitants, who favoured the revolution, rose in revolt and the weak Piedmontese garrison (2,000 men) retreated in haste to the Col di Tenda, where they took up a position at Saorge. The city of Nice received the French with open arms, but they plundered the entire country, burned the peasants' houses, raped their women and could not be kept within bounds either by Anselme's orders of the day or by the proclamations of the commissaries of the Convention. This was the original core of the later Army of Italy with which General Bonaparte won his first laurels. Bonapartism in its initial stages always seems to have to base itself on riff-raff; without a Society of December 10[435] it cannot get to its feet anywhere.

For a long time the warring parties remained inactive facing one another; the French - held the city and its surroundings; the Piedmontese, reinforced by an Austrian division, remained masters of the mountains and had a strong entrenched position with its centre at Saorge. In June 1793 the French made some attacks, on the whole fruitless; in July they took the Col d'Argentera, which leads into the rear of the enemy position. After the capture of Toulon (December 1793) the army of Italy received consider-able reinforcements and General Bonaparte was attached to it. The following spring he mounted an attack on the camp at Saorge, which was executed with complete success on April 28 and gave the French possession of all the passes in the Maritime Alps. Now Bonaparte proposed to combine the army of the Alps with the army of Italy in the valley of the Stura and to conquer Piedmont; but the plan was not accepted. Soon after Bonaparte lost his most powerful protector, the younger Robespierre, as a result of the ninth Thermidor[436], and with that his influence in the Council of War; he was left a simple divisional general. The army went over to the defensive, and it was only when the Austrian General Colloredo moved against Savona with habitual slowness in order to cut off the very important French line of communication with neutral Genoa that Bonaparte found an opportunity to fall upon and defeat him. Nonetheless, the road to Genoa remained in danger, and the campaign of 1795 began with the expulsion of the French from the entire Genoese Riviera. In the meantime the peace treaty with Spain[437] had made the army of the Eastern Pyrenees available; it was sent to Nice, where it was fully assembled by November. Schérer, who was now in command in the Maritime Alps, went over to the attack immediately under a plan worked out by Masséna. While Sérurier kept the Piedmontese busy at the Col di Tenda, Masséna advanced in the high mountains to flank Loano, which Augereau attacked frontally (November 23). The plan succeeded completely; the Austrians lost 2,000 killed, 5,000 prisoners and 40 guns and were totally separated from the Piedmontese. The line of communication with Genoa was now secure again, and the mountains remained firmly in French hands during the winter. In spring 1796 Bonaparte at last received command of the army of Italy, and now things took a different turn. Supported by possession of Nice and the Riviera di Ponente, he went up into the mountains from Savona, beat the Austrians at Montenotte, Millesimo and Dego[438] and thereby separated them from the Piedmontese, who now, outflanked by superior French forces and isolated, signed a treaty of peace immediately after a couple of rearguard actions. Thus, four successful engagements in the upper valleys of the Bormida and the Tanaro yielded the French military control of all Piedmont, without a direct thrust at Turin being required; the seat of war shifted at once to Lombardy, and Piedmont became a part of the French base of operations.

So during the first three years of the war Italy was completely protected by Nice. Only in the third campaign were the passes of the Maritime Alps lost, and only in the fourth did they come into play—but then in an immediately decisive manner. After the mountain engagements of the first week a strong demonstration against the Piedmontese was enough to make them realise their helpless position and the necessity of capitulation. The thrust itself could have continued almost without interruption in the direction of Milan; all the territory between the Bormida, the Ticino and the Alps fell without a fight into the hands of the French.

If Nice is a French province, Italy is in the same position vis-à-vis France that it was in at the end of the 1794 campaign. Not only is the valley of the Stura open to the French through the Col di Tenda, and the valley of the Tanaro through the Col di Nava; the way to Albenga and Savona cannot be contested to a superior attacking French army, and consequently, three or four days after the beginning of the campaign, it would be back where the campaign of 1796 started. Where should the main body of the Italians stand up against it? In the Genoese Riviera it has no room to deploy; westward of the Belbo and Tanaro its communications with Alessandria, Lombardy and the peninsula are endangered. The only thing it can do is to advance southward from Alessandria and fall, with joint forces, on the individual columns debouching from the mountains. This, however, presupposes that the defence of the Alpine frontier has been abandoned from the outset, since otherwise all the detachments at the Col di Tenda and west and northwest of it would be cut off. In other words, possession of Nice gives France mastery of the Alps, which then will no longer be a protective wall for Italy, and hence military mastery over Piedmont.

Nice gives France the same flank advantages in the south that Savoy gives it in the north, only still more completely and directly. Now if either Nice or Savoy by itself lays Piedmont proper totally open to a French attack, what power would France have over Piedmont if it had both provinces! Piedmont would be in their grip as in pincers; along the entire line from the Little St. Bernard down to the Col di Nava and the mountain roads above Savona, the inexorable game of feinting attacks could be played in endless variations until finally the real attack comes at a point on the flanks and cuts off all the Italian detachments that have dug in too deeply in the mountains. The only course left to an Italian army would be to concentrate at Alessandria and Casale, to leave the Alps only under observation and, as soon as the main direction of the attack was ascertained, to throw all its forces at it. If this is conceded, it means that not only the chain of the Alps but the entire Piedmontese Po basin is given up to the enemy in advance and that the first defensive position of an Italian army against France is behind the ramparts of Alessandria. With Savoy and Nice as advanced bulwarks Piedmont is the first base of operations of the Italian army; without them Piedmont, militarily speaking, belongs to the French offensive and must first be recovered from it by a victory on Piedmontese soil and by capturing the passes of Savoy and Nice.

The annexation of Savoy and Nice is equivalent, if not to the political, to the military annexation of Piedmont to France. When in the future Victor Emmanuel looks out from the Villa della Regina at Turin at the mighty chain of the Alps, not one of whose mountains will belong to him any more, this will be clear enough to him.

But, it will be said, if a powerful military state takes shape in Upper Italy, France needs Nice and Savoy for its own defence.

It is true, as we have seen, that Savoy would significantly strengthen the French defensive system. Nice would reinforce it further only to the extent that this province too would have to be conquered before the present French Alpine departments could be attacked. The question is, however, whether a strong Italian military state could in any way so threaten France that special protection against it would be required.

Italy, even if entirely united, could, with its 26 million inhabitants, never wage an aggressive war against France except in alliance with Germany. In such a war, however, Germany would always provide the bulk of the military forces and Italy would be the subordinate power. This alone would suffice to shift the main stress of -the attack from the Alps to the Rhine and the Meuse. In addition, there is the position of Paris, the decisive point of attack, in North France. The most dangerous attack on France will always be the one from Belgium; if Belgium is neutral, the one from the German left bank of the Rhine and Baden on the Upper Rhine. Any other attack makes a detour and is more or less eccentric, not aimed directly at Paris. And if Clausewitz (Vom Kriege, Book VI, Chap. 23) already made fun of the way in which in 1814 an army of 200,000 men, instead of marching straight on Paris, let a silly theory lead them by the nose on the detour through Switzerland to the plateau of Langres, what would he now say of campaign plans that would aim the main attack on Paris through Upper Italy and Savoy, or even Nice?[q] Any attack through Savoy is far inferior to the attack from the Rhine because of the longer line of communication, going across the Alps into the bargain, because of the greater distance to Paris, and finally because of the attractive power of the big fortified camp of Lyons, which would bring it to a halt in most cases. Accordingly, the corps invading France through Italy in the 1814 campaign played virtually no role.

With such means of defence, France does not in fact need any extension of its terrain on this, the best protected of its frontiers, and against one of its weakest neighbours. If France's present frontiers were everywhere as far removed from Paris—and as strong by nature and art and owing to difficulties in enemy communications—as its frontier with Italy, France would be unassailable. But if Bonapartism seeks out precisely this point to raise the question of the so-called natural borders on the pretext that they are indispensable to France's defence[r]—how much easier will it be to establish its claims to the Rhine!

Nice will always remain Italian, even if it be temporarily ceded to France. Savoy may, and probably will at some future time, desire to be incorporated into France, when the great European nationalities have further consolidated themselves. But it is quite another matter whether Savoy will voluntarily become French when Germany and Italy have realised their national unity politically and militarily as well and thereby considerably strengthened their position as European powers—or whether a ruler like Louis Napoleon, depending on conquest, wrests it from a still divided Italy in order to perpetuate his mastery over Italy and at the same time provide a first precedent for the theory of natural borders.