Treaty of Campo Formio

Treaty of Campo Formio, settlement concluding the War of the First Coalition (1793-1797), during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1796, Napoleon I became commander of the French forces in Italy. There, against the odds, he defeated a number of Austrian generals, forcing the Austrian government to sign a preliminary peace treaty with France on April 18, 1797, in Leoben, Austria. The final treaty, signed on October 17 of the same year at Campo Formio, had three main provisions, each allowing France to retain recently gained portions of Italian territory. With the first provision, the Austrian Netherlands and the Ionian Islands were ceded to France outright. In the second provision, the Austrian emperor agreed, by a secret clause, to help France secure a great part of the left bank of the Rhine River; a congress of the Holy Roman Empire was to be assembled at Rastatt, Germany, to bring this clause into effect. In the final provision, Austria agreed to recognize the two Italian states recently founded under French sponsorship: the Ligurian Republic and the Cisalpine Republic. The former republic was composed of Genoese territory, and the latter of Milan, Modena, a portion of Venetia, and a strip of papal territory.

The treaty allowed France to achieve an objective it had been pursuing since the early 17th century: to return to what it considered its natural boundaries. The Rhine and the Scheldt rivers were now its frontiers, and its influence in Italy was paramount. These newly won gains, however, proved far from secure. Britain was not accepting of the new state of affairs, and Austria refused to relinquish hope of regaining its lost possessions and prestige.