In fact, Bonaparte—­for he henceforth spelt his name thus—­detected the political weakness of the Hapsburgs’ position in Italy.  Masters of eleven distinct peoples north of the Alps, how could they hope permanently to dominate a wholly alien people south of that great mountain barrier?  The many failures of the old Ghibelline or Imperial party in face of any popular impulse which moved the Italian nature to its depths revealed the artificiality of their rule.  Might not such an impulse be imparted by the French Revolution?  And would not the hopes of national freedom and of emancipation from feudal imposts fire these peoples with zeal for the French cause?  Evidently there were vast possibilities in a democratic propaganda.  At the outset Bonaparte’s racial sympathies were warmly aroused for the liberation of Italy; and though his judgment was to be warped by the promptings of ambition, he never lost sight of the welfare of the people whence he was descended.  In his “Memoirs written at St. Helena” he summed up his convictions respecting the Peninsula in this statesmanlike utterance:  “Italy, isolated within its natural limits, separated by the sea and by very high mountains from the rest of Europe, seems called to be a great and powerful nation....  Unity in manners, language, literature ought finally, in a future more or less remote, to unite its inhabitants under a single government....  Rome is beyond doubt the capital which the Italians will one day choose.”  A prophetic saying:  it came from a man who, as conqueror and organizer, awakened that people from the torpor of centuries and breathed into it something of his own indomitable energy.

And then again, the Austrian possessions south of the Alps were difficult to hold for purely military reasons.  They were separated from Vienna by difficult mountain ranges through which armies struggled with difficulty.  True, Mantua was a formidable stronghold, but no fortress could make the Milanese other than a weak and straggling territory, the retention of which by the Court of Vienna was a defiance to the gospel of nature of which Rousseau was the herald and Bonaparte the militant exponent.

The Austro-Sardinian forces were now occupying the pass which separates the Apennines from the Maritime Alps north of the town of Savona.  They were accordingly near the headwaters of the Bormida and the Tanaro, two of the chief affluents of the River Po:  and roads following those river valleys led, the one north-east, in the direction of Milan, the other north-west towards Turin, the Sardinian capital.  A wedge of mountainous country separated these roads as they diverged from the neighbourhood of Montenotte.  Here obviously was the vulnerable point of the Austro-Sardinian position.  Here therefore Bonaparte purposed to deliver his first strokes, foreseeing that, should he sever the allies, he would have in his favour every advantage both political and topographical.