Bellevue believed that an army of forty thousand was enough to flatten every rebellious region, but in truth, Sacco's forty thousand main troops couldn't even deal with the guerrillas in the Coastal Mountains.
Compared with the guerrillas openly operating in the mountains, the ones darting everywhere and blending in among civilians were far more troublesome.
As Frenchmen, they had no way to tell one Italian from another. They couldn't even distinguish other Austrian peoples from Italians when they spoke a few halting words of Italian.
Suppressing the guerrillas was far more difficult than Bellevue had imagined, so every measure he took reeked of arrogance and stupidity.
An incompetent general could exhaust an entire army, and he wasn't the only one who thought that way. Under the sway of such thinking, the problem of suppressing the rebellion could easily become an ideological issue—or even a tool for striking at political opponents.
Bellevue had executed three presidents in succession. He seemed to have realized something, but he had run out of time.
Neither Franz nor Cavaignac wanted to drag things out any longer.
After receiving authorization from the Assembly, Cavaignac's first act was to put down the rebellion in Paris. His second was to begin peace talks with the German Confederation.
The Pro-British Faction in the French Second Republic was still around, but Cavaignac was unlike Lamartine and Roland. He was a soldier, and he had an army at his disposal.
Cavaignac knew France had reached the point where it had to make peace, but he still harbored some illusions. He hoped to reach a secret agreement with the German Allied Forces.
That way, the two sides could effectively cease fighting without having to hold formal negotiations.
Such a secret agreement was utterly unreliable, since tearing it up would come at little