re stopped for a
season. Jealous of his success, or deterred by dissensions which raged
in Paris, the directory stayed the progress of the armies of the Rhine,
without whose co-operation it would have been imprudent in that of Italy
to advance. Under these circumstances Napoleon sent to the archduke
proposals of peace; and after some delay a preliminary treaty was signed
at Leoben, on the 18th of April. By this treaty Austria ceded to the
republic Belgium and the countries of Italy as far as the Oglio; for
which she was to receive in return the Venetian territory from the Oglio
to the Po and the Adriatic Sea, Venetian Istria, and Daimatia; and when
general peace should be re-established, Mantua and Peschiera. "This
peace," says Rotteck, "concluded when the hour of great decision was
approaching: more yet, its conditions, unexpectedly favourable to the
vanquished, proved the mutual fear of those that made peace. For
Austria, the fall of Vienna would have been a severe and humiliating
blow. But could Buonaparte advance so far after he actually stood in
danger of being surrounded, and, perhaps, annihilated by the swelling
masses of the enemy? On the one side approached the Hungarian
insurrection army, on the other and around, the Austrian land-storm. But
in Venice a general revolt had broken out against the French, which the
aristocratic government had excited out of hatred towards the democratic
revolutionary system. In this situation a reverse might be ruinous to
Buonaparte: he therefore concluded peace."

The insurrection in Venice had not been commenced by the aristocracy,
but by the democracy. It broke out in the towns of Brescia and
Bergamo, and the senate, in its turn, raised the mountaineers and the
anti-revolutionary peasants, who proceeded to every species of atrocity:
their watchword being "Death to Frenchmen and Jacobins." On Easter
Monday more than four hundred Frenchmen are said to have been massacred
at Verona. But the knell of Venice itself was rung. Napoleon having made
peace at Leoben, brought his cannon to the edge of the lagoons, and the
panic-stricken senate and cowardly doge, passed a decree to dissolve
their ancient constitution, and to establish a species of democracy.
Venice fell after a political existence of more than one thousand years.
The aristocracy of Genoa, also, succumbed to the same storm; but they
were permitted to retain an independent government, under the name of
"the Ligurian republi