Revolutionaries, Royalists, and Rome
The Battle of Marengo. Consul of the Roman Republic. General Melas.
The historical references in Tosca pass so quickly that listeners are sometimes left scratching their heads. Yet knowing the intricacies of the turbulent politics of the late 1790s is crucial for understanding the opera’s plot.
In 1796, an ambitious young French general named Napoleon Bonaparte launched his first military campaign in Italy. His progress was swift, and the French soon established satellite republics around Milan (the Cisalpine Republic, est. 1797), Genoa (the Ligurian Republic, est. 1797), Rome (the Roman Republic, est. 1798), and Naples (the Parthenopean Republic, est. 1799). Napoleon banished the pope from Rome and sent the powerful Neapolitan queen Maria Carolina—daughter of the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and sister of the murdered French queen Marie Antoinette—into exile in Sicily. Then, believing Italy was safely under French control, Napoleon headed to Egypt.
In underestimating Maria Carolina’s determination to win back her lost territory, however, Napoleon made a fatal error. Once her nemesis was out of the way in North Africa, Maria Carolina attacked Naples with the full might of her army. She retook her home city and then turned her sights toward Rome. When the Roman Republic fell to Maria Carolina in September 1799, retribution against the Republic’s supporters was swift. Thousands of people were rounded up and imprisoned or killed in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Rome was now governed from Naples, and the Neapolitan court sent (in Sardou’s telling) the brutal Scarpia to bring the city to heel.
A few months later, Napoleon returned to Paris from Egypt. His first order of business was acquiring political power. He wrangled (through not entirely honest means) an appointment as First Consul of the French Republic, the most powerful position in France. Then he set about planning a military victory that would enhance his public image. In May 1800, he led his troops across the Swiss Alps and set up camp at Marengo, some 30 miles outside of Genoa, where he planned to meet the Austrian army in battle.
Tosca’s contradictory reports of the battle’s outcome may seem like only a clever narrative ploy, yet the reality was just as dramatic as anything Sardou could write. The expected battle came on June 14—but it was the Austrians who attacked the French, not the other way around. Due to faulty intelligence, Napoleon was caught completely off guard. As the battle drew to a close it seemed that the Austrians, led by General Michael von Melas, had won a decisive victory. A messenger was dispatched to Vienna to share the good news. Napoleon asked his general, Louis-Charles Desaix, for an opinion: “It’s three o’clock, the battle is lost,” the general reportedly said, “but there’s still time to win another battle.” Napoleon turned his army around and launched a surprise attack on the exhausted Austrians. After many more hours of brutal fighting, the Austrian army capitulated, and Napoleon’s victory was declared.