Treaty of Campo Formio

October 17, 1797

Napoleon, unauthorized by Paris, signed the peace with Austria himself - dictating terms from Italian villas. France gained the Austrian Netherlands and Lombardy; Venice, a thousand-year republic, was traded to Austria as consolation. The First Coalition was broken. A young general was now a diplomat too. The extinction of Venice, the oldest republic in Europe, shocked contemporaries and became a symbol of revolutionary ruthlessness.