Halt at Fort Bard (1800)

On 14 May 1800 a French army of 40,000 was halted at Fort Bard in the Aosta Valley by a garrison of 400 Austro-Piedmontese soldiers. The legacy row attributes command of the French forces to General Louis-Alexandre Berthier, but the supplied passages do not confirm that Berthier commanded the army at Bard, so the attribution is corrected rather than asserted.

Episodes

Background and detail

Background. Fort Bard is a fortified complex built in the 19th century by the House of Savoy on a rocky prominence above the town of Bard in the Aosta Valley region of northwestern Italy. Its position above the town made it a strongpoint in the valley.

The Halt. On 14 May 1800 a French army numbering 40,000 was stopped at Fort Bard by only 400 Austro-Piedmontese soldiers. The disparity between the size of the French force and the small garrison made the halt a striking episode of the period.

The Command Question. Louis-Alexandre Berthier was a French military commander who served in the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, and he acted as chief of staff to Napoleon Bonaparte from the first Italian campaign of 1796 until the first abdication of 1814. The supplied passages do not, however, place Berthier in command of the French army halted at Fort Bard in May 1800, so the legacy attribution of command to him cannot be confirmed from the retrieved evidence.

People involved

Sources

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.