ITALY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY AGE
[1790-1794 A.D.]
For the sovereigns of Italy, as well as for the people, the first three years of the revolutionary age formed a time of abortive plans and earnest preparation.
Events of immediate interest cut short two visionary designs, of which, although both must have failed of success, yet either, by the very attempt, might have given another colour to the history of Europe. A few aspiring cardinals, looking back to Gregory VII and Sixtus V, devised an Italian league, to be headed by the pope; and at the court of Turin, which took example from its own more recent annals, there was planned a campaign against its Austrian neighbours. But Rome was destined to fall a passive victim to foreign aggression; and the ambitious king of Sardinia became the scapegoat of the prince whose Lombard crown he had wished to transfer to his own brows.
The emperor Joseph died in the beginning of the year 1790, and Leopold, leaving Tuscany to his second son Ferdinand, received both the hereditary dominions of Austria and the imperial dignity. He extricated himself skillfully from the foreign wars into which his brother had plunged; but neither the internal discontents of the Low Countries, nor the dangers which threatened Louis XVI, were evils so easily remedied. He employed his diplomacy in endeavouring, by means of a European congress, to impose constitutional limitations on all the contending parties in France; but disappointment in this scheme, and fresh revolts among his own provinces, embittered every moment of his life. He was tempted to become a leading party in the fatal Treaty of Pilnitz, which may be truly said to have destroyed the French monarchy; and in the spring of 1792, his death, at the age of forty-four, saved him from beholding the calamities which speedily followed. His hereditary estates descended to his eldest son Francis, who likewise succeeded him as emperor; and the policy of the new reign, warlike as well as anti-revolutionary from its very opening, accelerated the contest which soon desolated Europe.
Two other Italian courts, besides those of Lombardy and Tuscany, were deeply interested in the fate of the royal family in Paris. The queen of Naples was, like Marie Antoinette, a daughter of Maria Theresa; and the two brothers of Louis XVI were sons-in-law of the king of Sardinia. The advisers of Ferdinand prepared for the struggle by strengthening the artillery and marine, by reconciling themselves with the see of Rome, by imposing extraordinary taxes, and by seizing the money deposited in the national banks; but to these measures were added others of a different cast, designed for crushing the dreaded strength of public opinion. Arbitrary commissions were organised for trying political offences; spies were set to watch Cirillo, Pagano, Conforti, Delfico, and other men of liberal views; foreign books and newspapers were excluded; and Filangieri’s work was burned by the hands of the common hangman. In the other extremity of the peninsula, the count d’Artois imitated at Turin, on a smaller scale, the court of emigrant nobles which surrounded Monsieur at Coblenz. Simultaneously with that alliance between the emperor and the king of Prussia, which produced the abortive invasion of France in 1792, there was concluded an Italian league, headed openly by Naples and Rome, and secretly joined by Victor Amadeus, while the grand duke of Tuscany, as well as the Venetians and the Genoese, remained determinedly neutral.
Time of the French Republic under the National Convention
The little cloud which rose over the tennis-court at Versailles, had already overshadowed all the thrones in Europe; and that of Sardinia was the first on which it discharged its tempest. Where both parties were resolved on war, a pretence was readily found. Semonville, sent to negotiate for a passage for the French armies through Piedmont, was reported to have propagated revolutionary doctrines on his way: he was ordered to quit the king’s dominions, and a second envoy was refused leave to cross the frontier.
On the 18th of September, 1792, the national assembly declared war against the king of Sardinia; and an invasion of his states immediately ensued. The Savoyards, discontented and democratic, had no will to fight; the Piedmontese, ill-officered as well as mutinous, had neither will nor ability; and within a fortnight Savoy and the county of Nice were in the possession of the French troops. The atrocities, however, which took place at Paris during the autumn of that year, and the execution of the king in the beginning of the next, not only gave fresh vigour to the operations of the allied sovereigns, but added new members to their league. In 1793 a British fleet occupied Corsica; while the Austrians and Piedmontese vainly tried to fight their way against Kellermann through Savoy to Lyons. During the succeeding summer, the republicans, entering Italy with one army by the Alps, and with another through the neutral territory of Genoa, maintained a more energetic campaign, which left them masters of all the passes leading down into Piedmont. At the same time Pasquale Paoli, supported by England, arranged a constitution for Corsica, which acknowledged George III as its king.
[1793-1795 A.D.]
In the course of the year 1795, the alarm produced by the recent successes of the French not only disarmed some of their most active enemies, but gained for them allies in Italy itself, the stronghold of legitimate monarchy. Ferdinand of Tuscany, a cautious or timid man, anxious to preserve the commerce of Leghorn, and seeing no reason why he should sacrifice his people to the ambition or revenge of the greater European courts, was the first crowned head that recognised the new democratic state. In February of this year, he concluded a treaty with France, disclaiming his enforced connection with the allies, and binding himself to a strict neutrality. Soon afterwards the coalition lost three of its members, Holland, Prussia, and Spain. Within the Alps the war languished; and the Austrians and Piedmontese were able, till the end of the autumn, to keep the invading armies cooped up in the northwestern corner of the peninsula. Meanwhile that fermentation of men’s minds, which had its centre in Paris, was diffusing itself over most of the Italian provinces, among those classes that were predisposed to receive such an impulse.
Tuscany was the quarter in which the new opinions met with the least countenance. Although the grand duke had been tempted to depart from some of his father’s commercial and agricultural laws, his plan of polity remained so far entire that the constitutionalists had really little to complain of. In ecclesiastical matters, however, the priesthood renewed with success those instigations by which many of them long before had crippled the efforts of their bold reformer; and Leopold had not been twelve months at Vienna, when the peasantry clamorously demanded the re-establishment of certain religious fraternities and forms of worship which he had abolished as superstitious and hurtful. In the eastern provinces of the papal state there was much silent discontent among all classes; but in Rome itself, although a few men held democratic opinions, the only outbreak that happened was that of January, 1793, when Bassville, the French secretary of legation, an active republican agent, was stoned to death by the populace. In Parma, Duke Ferdinand had recently alarmed the thinking part of his subjects by introducing the papal Inquisition, and by exhibiting himself, in strong contrast to his early habits, as a religious formalist and devotee. The duke of Modena was perhaps more unpopular than he deserved to be. In the republics opinions were greatly divided, though from dissimilar causes. San Marino was a cipher; Lucca was made passive, not only by her own insignificance, but by a general indifference towards change; the Venetians were distracted by two opposite feelings, their fear of Austrian encroachment and their hatred of Parisian democracy; the Genoese, although the revolutionary party was strong among them, not only dreaded the destruction of their commerce, but were personally interested in the French funds.
In the remaining sections of the peninsula, the extreme south and the extreme north, were to be found the most zealous disciples of the Revolution. In the kingdom of Naples, both on the mainland and in Sicily, conspiracies were repeatedly discovered, and the plotters executed, several of them having been previously tortured to enforce a discovery of their accomplices. Even the ministers of state charged each other with treason; and Acton procured the imprisonment of the chevalier De’ Medici, with several other men high in office. The people, although strong in prejudice, were at this time discontented with the increased taxation, and the renewal of arbitrary interference by the government; many of the nobles were as eager as the middle classes in their wishes for general amelioration; and the church herself, whose property the rulers were every day seizing to satisfy the necessities of the exchequer, was not at first able to discover whether republicanism or legitimate monarchy was likely to be her most dangerous enemy. Throughout Austrian Lombardy the desire of change became almost universal. The people at large were disgusted by public burdens heavily augmented, and by the coarse insolence of the German satellites who exacted them; those classes, which had enjoyed the semblance of political power under the constitution of Maria Theresa, were provoked by that mixture of military command and absolute foreign rule which, since Leopold’s death, had been substituted for it; and reflecting men perceived, in the attitude which the cabinet of Vienna had now decidedly assumed, no prospect of improvement or relief if the allied sovereigns should be victorious. Piedmont was a still more favourable soil for republicanism, and there its principles soon rooted themselves very deeply. On the mainland, more than one conspiracy was discovered and punished; while the Sardinians, finding themselves treated as rebels when they sent deputies to demand those reforms which they conceived themselves to have merited by their brave resistance to the French fleet, broke out into open revolt, killed several members of the government, and were with difficulty dissuaded by the viceroy from giving up the island to France.
The Campaign of 1796 and its Consequences
[1796 A.D.]
The Italians were soon to learn that their wishes and interests were matters of as absolute indifference to those who now contended on their soil, as they had been during the whole preceding course of their modern history. Their future master, the French general Bonaparte, receiving from the Directory the command of the army of Italy, avowed on quitting Paris his determination to finish the war in a month by complete success or utter defeat. That which seemed to others an idle bravado, suggested by sudden elevation to a young and self-confident man, was, in the mind of the speaker himself, a pledge to be literally fulfilled. He began his attack on the 12th of April, 1796, and on the 15th of May he entered Milan in triumph as the conqueror of all Lombardy and Piedmont.
This wonderful campaign embraced several of Napoleon’s most celebrated victories. The battles of Montenotte, Millesimo, and Dego, fought on three successive days in April, amidst the mountains which lie northwest from Genoa, drove back into the plain Beaulieu’s Austrian army, and its Piedmontese allies under Colli. Victor Amadeus, not less inconstant than imprudent, deserted the contest in premature despair; and in May his ambassadors at Paris signed a discreditable peace, by which he gave up Savoy and Nice to the French Republic, admitted garrisons into some of his fortresses, dismantled the rest, and paid heavy contributions to the invaders. Bonaparte, pursuing the Austrians into Lombardy, intimidated the duke of Parma into an armistice, which was purchased by a large payment in money, and the surrender of twenty works of art, to be selected by French commissioners, and placed in the museum at Paris. The bloody passage of the bridge of Lodi, where Napoleon himself, with the generals of his staff, charged in person up to the mouths of the enemy’s guns, left the plain of the Po completely open to his armies, and kindled among the young conqueror’s soldiers that devoted confidence which bore them onward through years of victory. Milan received a provisional government and national guard, but had to contribute heavily for the support of the republican troops; and the duke of Modena, also, could not obtain an armistice without furnishing liberal supplies, to which, according to the rule thenceforth invariably followed by the invaders, was added the surrender of the choicest pictures from his gallery.
Already feared as well as honoured abroad, General Bonaparte next proceeded to intimidate the government at home. To Carnot’s order for marching upon Rome and Naples with one division of the army, while Kellermann, with another, should keep his hold of Lombardy, he replied by transmitting his resignation, and denouncing the project as ruinous. In the south, said he, there are no enemies worth conquering; the possession of Italy must be contested with the Austrians, and the plains of the Po ought to be the scene of the struggle. While he waited for the answer to his bold remonstrance, the peasantry, excited by the priests and some of the nobles, rose in several quarters against him. At Milan the disturbance was easily quieted; but at Pavia it was not suppressed till the town was taken by storm, and given up to be plundered by the soldiery. This terrible example produced its effect; the Italians trembled and submitted, and the French and Germans were left to fight their battles undisturbed. Meanwhile, the Directory, aware, as their general well knew, that they could not dispense with his services, sent an approval of all his plans, and confirmed him in the undivided command of the army, stipulating only that he should satisfy the honour of France by humbling, in his own way, the pope and the king of Naples. He received these instructions while occupying the line of the Adige; and, after having distributed troops on different points in the north, he himself prepared to march as far southwards as might be necessary for frightening his adversaries in that quarter. Before he had time to cross the Apennines, the king of Naples had lost heart, and made humiliating submissions, concluding an armistice, afterwards changed into a treaty of peace. The pope, left totally defenceless, and seeing the conqueror holding Bologna in person, concluded a truce on harder terms than any which had been yet exacted. The citadel of Ancona was to be given up with all its stores; the French were also to retain possession of the provinces of Bologna and Ferrara, where both the chief cities had organised free governments for themselves; the papal treasury was to pay large contributions in money and provisions; and Paris was to be adorned by a hundred works of art, and five hundred manuscripts from the Vatican. Having thus dealt with the enemies of the republic, Bonaparte next proceeded to dispose of the grand duke of Tuscany, its earliest friend. On a pretence that the neutrality had been violated, he seized the port of Leghorn, confiscated the goods of English traders which lay there, and attempted, though unsuccessfully, to capture their merchant-ships.
The wars of 1796 were not yet at an end. In September a second Austrian army of sixty thousand men, under the veteran marshal Wurmser, marched through the Tyrol; but his active adversary had already returned northwards; and a campaign of six days in the neighbourhood of the Lake of Garda, and along the valley of the Brenta, forced the shattered remains of the imperial forces to take refuge in the strong fortress of Mantua, which the French had already attacked, and now invested anew. In November a third Austrian army, under Alvinzi, placed its enemy in extreme peril; but the desperate battle of Arcola, fought near Verona during three whole days, drove this host likewise back into the mountains. The military events of the year were closed by the revolt of the Corsicans against the English, after which the French envoy Saliceti established in the island a provisional democratic government.
[1796-1797 A.D.]
But there were yet other tasks to be performed. The French had excited in the minds of all the Italians wishes which it was very far from easy to gratify. The Lombards demanded an independent and republican organisation; but the Directory, anticipating the chances of war, which might make it necessary to buy a peace with Austria, dared not as yet to do more than throw out vague encouragements. The pope, whose eastern provinces entertained similar desires, was not so dangerous; and Bonaparte, without consulting his masters, freed them from any embarrassment into which they might have been thrown by their recent treaty with the duke of Modena. That prince’s capital was disaffected, and Reggio had already openly revolted. Napoleon, professing to have discovered that the duke had violated the neutrality, deposed his administration, and declared the provinces free. By his instigation, also, deputies from Bologna, Ferrara, Reggio, Mirandola, and Modena, chosen respectively by the lawyers, landholders, and merchants, assembled in the end of 1796, and erected the two papal legations with the Modenese duchy into a commonwealth. This state, lying wholly between the Po and Rome, was called the Cispadane Republic.
The contest among the foreigners for the soil of Italy was ended in the spring of 1797. In January of that year, Alvinzi’s army, increased by reinforcements to fifty thousand men, attacked that under Bonaparte, amounting to about forty-five thousand, at Rivoli, between the river Adige and the Lake of Garda. This bravely fought battle closed in the total rout of the Austrians; and early next month, Wurmser, compelled by disease and famine, surrendered Mantua. The last effort of the emperor, who sent the archduke Charles across the northeastern frontier of Italy, was as unfortunate as the preceding ones; the hereditary states of Austria were invaded by the victorious general in person; and their sovereign submitted in April, when the French army lay within twenty-five leagues of Vienna.
But, before crossing the Alps, the young conqueror had humbled another enemy. Pius VI, not altogether without provocation, had broken the convention of Bologna, and raised troops to assist the emperor; upon which, Bonaparte, after his victory over Alvinzi, marching rapidly southward, overthrew the papal troops under Colli, and dictated at Tolentino, in February, the terms of a humiliating peace. The pope formally relinquished to the Cispadane Republic, not only the legation of Bologna and Ferrara, already ceded, but the province of Romagna in addition; he yielded to the French Republic his territories of Avignon and the neighbouring Venaissin; he left Ancona in the hands of its troops, till a general peace should be concluded; he engaged to pay large contributions as the ransom of those other provinces which the enemy had just seized; and he renewed the obligation to deliver manuscripts and works of art, which accordingly were soon carried away.
The peace with the emperor was not arranged so easily. Its outlines were contained in the preliminaries of Leoben, signed on the 18th of April, 1797; and the main difficulties were obviated at the expense of Venice, whose government, regarded with dislike by both parties, had acted so as to forfeit all claims on the indulgence of the one, without being able to earn much gratitude from the other. Besides yielding the Austrian Netherlands and the frontier of the Rhine, Francis entirely renounced his provinces in Lombardy, and agreed to acknowledge the new Italian republics. In compensation for these sacrifices, he was to receive, almost entire, the mainland provinces of Venice, including Illyria, Istria, and upper Italy as far west as the Oglio; the districts of Bergamo and Brescia, with the Polesine, all lying beyond that river, being intended to form part of the Cispadane Republic. These Venetian territories were already in revolt, and had declared themselves free commonwealths, demanding protection from the French, who had excited them to insurrection, and now coolly abandoned most of them to a new master. For the injustice contemplated towards these unfortunate Lombards no palliation could be offered, and none was ever attempted; but for the wrong threatened to the Venetian Republic itself, pretexts speedily presented themselves.
Monaco
Before the preliminaries were signed, Colonel Junot had been despatched to Venice, to demand satisfaction for a slaughter of some soldiers in the towns bordering on the Lake of Garda. In Verona also, about the same time, the populace of the city and district, headed by a few of the nobles and clergy, attacked, robbed, and murdered the French and their partisans; and on the 17th of April, there broke out a general massacre. The Veronese mob, and the Venetian troops, drove the foreigners into the citadel, and held the town three days, committing horrible cruelties on all who were suspected of being favourable to the enemy; but, on the 20th of the same month, a detachment of the French stormed the place, and revenged their friends by numerous executions, in the course of which there perished several noblemen, and a Capuchin friar, whose eloquence had been the prop of the insurrection. On the approach of the same evening, a French privateer, in escaping from an Austrian vessel, ran into the harbour of Venice, in violation of the ordinary law; upon which a scuffle ensued with the Slavonian sailors, and the French captain and several of his crew were killed. Bonaparte received at once the welcome news of both occurrences—the taking of Verona, and the outrage on the ship. He instantly ordered the French envoy at Venice to depart, but not till he should have demanded that the commandant of the port and the three inquisitors of state should be put in prison for trial. The cowardly senate, without a moment’s hesitation, arrested those men, ordered the public prosecutors to draw up indictments against them, and instructed the deputies who attended at the general’s headquarters to offer the most humble submissions.
Bonaparte told them abruptly that their aristocratic constitution was out of date, and he intended to annul it. Without waiting for an answer he declared war on Venice, whose leaders had already foreseen his sentence, and endeavoured to palliate its effects. A few of the principal nobles held a secret meeting in the apartments of the imbecile Lodovico Manin, the hundred-and-twentieth and last doge, where they resolved to summon the grand council, and propose alterations in the constitution. About the very time when the lords of the Adriatic crouched thus abjectly, the last instance of Venetian spirit was exhibited in Treviso by Angelo Giustiniani, the governor of the province, who, on giving up his sword to the French general, reproached him to his face with his betrayal of Venice. Napoleon listened quietly to his invectives, and dismissed him unharmed.
Next day, while the city resounded with impotent preparations for defence, about half of the members of the grand council met to decree its dissolution. The doge prefaced, by a long speech, a motion for authorising the envoys to treat with the victorious general regarding alterations on the constitution. The motion was seconded by Pietro Antonio Bembo, and carried almost unanimously. Bonaparte, however, insisted that the council should by a formal act depose itself, and create a democracy. His agents used in the city the necessary means of allurement and intimidation; and on the 12th of May, 1797, the grand council met for the last time. The people gathered in the square of St. Mark; the sailors belonging to the ships of war, already ordered to leave the harbour, made a confused noise; and, a few musket-shots being fired, a universal panic seized the nobles. There was a sudden cry for the question; it was put, and the abolition of the constitution was carried by 512 voices to 20, five members declining to vote. The people were surprised to see their chiefs leaving the palace dejected; but the cause was soon explained. A tumult arose; the mob attacked the houses of several French partisans, and finding one man with a tricolour cockade in his pocket, nailed it upon his forehead. Order being restored, a provisional administration was established; and, on the 16th of May, a definitive treaty was signed at Milan between France and the new republic of Venice. The representative form of government was recognised; the infant state received, on its own petition, a garrison of French troops; while a fine, and the delivery of pictures and manuscripts, were secretly stipulated. When, soon afterwards, the Venetian envoys who had signed this convention demanded that Bonaparte should procure a ratification of it, he coolly reminded them of a fact which he himself had probably recollected a few days earlier—that, when the treaty was arranged, their mandate had expired by the dissolution of their constituency, the grand council. He therefore declared that the compact was null, and that the Directory must be left to determine for themselves in relation to the revolutionised state.
At this time, however, it was the conqueror’s wish, by an act equally unjust towards another section of the Italians, to compensate to the Venetians in some measure the spoliation they had suffered. He designed to incorporate with Venice his newly formed Cispadane Republic, while a transpadane republic should contain the Venetian districts of Bergamo and Brescia, in addition to the emancipated provinces in central Lombardy, no longer liable to be claimed by Austria. But Venice was destined to be the victim of a treachery yet more inexcusable. The cession of Mantua to the Austrians, which was involved in the plan sketched at Leoben, was viewed with disapprobation in Paris; while the Venetians were considered at once too aristocratic to be safe neighbours, and too weak to be useful allies. Francis, on the other hand, was extremely desirous to command the head of the Adriatic; and his plenipotentiaries and the French general treated secretly for exchanging the islands and duchy of Venice for the fortress and province of Mantua.
In the meantime, the new position of matters altered Bonaparte’s views as to the organisation of upper Italy. The inhabitants of the Cispadane Republic, whose constitution, though framed, had never been formally approved, were easily induced to accept a plan submitted to them, for uniting all the free provinces of the north into one powerful state; and, on the 30th of June, 1797, was announced the formation of the new commonwealth, which was named the Cisalpine Republic. A proclamation, signed by Bonaparte, declared that the French Republic had succeeded by conquest to the possession of that Italian territory formerly held by the house of Austria and other powers; but that, relinquishing its claims, it pronounced the new state independent, and, convinced equally of the blessings of liberty and the horrors of revolution, bestowed upon it its own constitution, “the fruit of the experience of the most enlightened nation in the world.” The prescribed polity accordingly bestowed the right of citizenship on all men born and residing in the state (except beggars or vagabonds), who should have attained the age of twenty-one, and demanded inscription on the roll. The active franchise was vested in assemblies elective and primary, the executive in a directory of five members, and the making of the laws, with other deliberative functions, in a legislative body and council of ancients—all in close imitation of the French constitution of 1795. Napoleon, as usual, reserved to himself the power of naming, for the first time, the members of the Directory and of both councils. That the choice of these bodies, as well as of such functionaries as were to be appointed by them, would fall on persons zealous in the republican cause, was a thing unavoidable as well as proper; but it was universally admitted that the selection was, with very few exceptions, exceedingly judicious. The president and first director was the ex-duke Serbelloni, who did not long remain in active life; and three of the other directors, men both able and honest, were Alessandri a nobleman of Bergamo, Moscati a physician, and Paradisi a distinguished mathematician. Count Porro of Milan was minister of police; Luosi, a lawyer of Mirandola, was minister of justice; and the secretary of the Directory was Sommariva, a retired advocate of Lodi, who has since been so well known in Paris for his patronage of the fine arts. In the committee who framed the constitution, we find the names of Mascheroni the poet and man of science, and of Melzi d’Eril, whose talents, integrity, and independence were afterwards well proved in a higher sphere. Melzi was a noble Milanese of Spanish extraction, and uncle to Palafox, the defender of Saragossa.
The republic at first embraced the Austrian duchy of Milan, the Venetian provinces of Bergamo, Brescia, and Polesine, the Modenese principalities of Modena, Reggio, Mirandola, and Massa-Carrara, and the three papal legations of Ferrara. Bologna, and Romagna. In the following autumn the province of Mantua was incorporated with it. About the same time the Alpine district of the Valtelline, including Chiavenna and Bormio, was claimed as a dependency by the Grisons, but denied its subjection. Bonaparte, chosen arbiter, adjudged all the disputed territories to be independent, upon which their inhabitants offered themselves, and were received, as members of the Cisalpine Republic.
[1797-1798 A.D.]
The aristocracy of Genoa did not long survive that of Venice. Internal factions were quieted by a convention in June, 1797, in which the principle of democracy was recognised, and a provisional government named by the French commander-in-chief. The defeated nobles, entering into alliance with a few unscrupulous ministers of the church, were able to convince the populace that their foreign friends wished to destroy the ancient faith; and it is said that, for the benefit of the better educated class, there was printed a falsified copy of the proposed constitution, containing an article which declared the Catholic religion to be abolished in the state. In September several thousand armed peasants attacked the city, but were beaten with great slaughter by General Duphot, at the head of the national guards and French troops; and, on the 2nd of December, there was publicly laid before the people, and approved, a constitution of the same sort as the Cisalpine, under which the Genoese state was styled the Ligurian Republic.
The fate of Venice had been already settled. Its interests formed no part of those difficulties which made the negotiations of the autumn so stormy; and on the 17th of October, 1797, the treaty of Campo-Formio established peace definitively between France and Austria, to which latter the island-city was given up without reserve or conditions. The fleets of the Directory seized the Ionian Islands, the Austrians occupied the mainland, and on the 18th of January, 1798, the French troops, in Venice since the preceding spring, evacuated it, and admitted the soldiers of the emperor.
Though Pius VI still retained his western and southeastern provinces, he was about to lose these also. His subjects were now universally infected with the prevalent love of change; Urbino, Macerata, and other places, repeatedly declared themselves republican and independent; and the Directory watched but for a plausible pretence to strike the last blow. In December, 1797, a quarrel between some of the French partisans in Rome and the papal soldiery produced a riot, in the course of which the democratic party fled for refuge to the Corsini palace, occupied by Joseph Bonaparte, the ambassador of France. The military pursued them, and in the confusion General Duphot was shot upon the staircase. The Parisian government exclaimed against this violation of public law, recapitulated all the offences already committed by the papal court, refused to accept its apologies, and in February, 1798, an army under Berthier occupied its capital. Their general demanded that the pope should resign his temporal sovereignty, retaining his universal bishopric, and receiving a large pension. Pius, obstinately refusing, was carried into Tuscany, and thence into France, where he died. The nobles and cardinals were plundered; and though the people at large were better treated, yet, with the characteristic fickleness of their race, they attempted in the Trastevere a revolt, which was not quelled without much bloodshed. The French soldiers and subalterns themselves, not only defrauded of their pay but disgusted by the rapine of the superior officers and commissaries, mutinied both in Rome and Mantua; and General Masséna, the worst offender, found it prudent to resign his command.
On the 20th of March, 1798, the constitution of the Roman or Tiberine Republic was formally proclaimed. Like the rest, it was a servile copy from that of the French, which, however, it was thought necessary in this instance to disguise under classical names. The state was at first composed of the Agro Romano, with the Patrimony (Patrimonium Petri), Sabina, Umbria, the territories of Orvieto, Perugia, Macerata, Camerino, and Fermo; but the March of Ancona, which had been temporarily formed into a separate commonwealth, was soon added to it.
The Expulsion of the French from Italy (1798-1799 A.D.)
[1798-1799 A.D.]
The years 1798 and 1799 formed a strong contrast to those which immediately preceded them. Within and without, in finance, in diplomacy, and in war, France was alike unfortunate. In the beginning of this period her champion Bonaparte sailed for Egypt with his Italian army; and the fields where these brave men had gained their laurels were now to be the scene of repeated and disastrous defeats, inflicted upon those who attempted to retain their conquests.
The Forum, Pompeii, at the Present Time
The French owed this result in some measure to their own misconduct; for, little as the Italians were able to influence permanently the destiny of their native land, the resentment which was kindled throughout the country by the behaviour of the foreigners, aided materially in precipitating their second change of masters. The policy pursued systematically by the French Republic towards those new commonwealths, which she professed to regard as her independent allies, would have been insufferably irritating even though it had been administered by agents prudent and honourable. Each state was obliged not only to receive a large body of French soldiers, but to defray the expenses of their subsistence. The Cisalpine Republic, by a treaty which its legislative councils long refused to ratify, was compelled to admit an army of twenty-five thousand men, and to pay annually for its support eighteen millions of francs; even its own native troops were placed under the command of the French generals; the members of its administration were forcibly displaced if, like Moscati and Paradisi, they refused to obey orders transmitted from Paris; and some of the most patriotic Lombards, such as Baron Custodi and the poet Fantoni, were imprisoned for that opposition which the foreign rulers called incivism. The constitution itself soon gave way; for, on the last day of August, 1798, an irregular meeting of the councils substituted for it a new one, dictated by Trouvé the French envoy at Milan; and his plan again made room for other changes, enforced by his successor the notorious Fouché, and by Fouché’s successor Rivaud. The opposition party in Paris remonstrated in vain; and the Lombards began to hate equally the French nation, and those of themselves who were unfortunate enough to hold places of authority. A few honest patriots, headed by General Lahoz of Mantua, and the Cremonese Birago, who had been minister at war, organised a secret society for establishing Italian independence; and in the Ligurian and Roman states a similar spirit was rapidly spreading, although it worked less strongly. There, indeed, the grievances were not of so outrageous a kind, and consisted mainly in the extortions and oppressions practised incessantly by the generals and agents of the Directory, than which no government on earth had ever servants more shamefully dishonest.
But the French Republic, before losing its hold of Italy, had the fortune for a short time to possess the whole peninsula. The sovereigns of continental Europe, having lost sight of Napoleon, began to recover courage; and no sooner did the intelligence arrive that Nelson had destroyed the enemy’s fleet at Abukir, than a new league was formed, in which Italy was made one of the principal objects. The first move was made, imprudently and prematurely, by the king of Naples, or rather by his queen and her advisers, who, raising an army of eighty thousand men, invaded the Roman territories. In November, 1798, they seized the capital, where their soldiers behaved with an insolent cruelty which made the citizens, although heartily sick of the French, wish fervently to have them back again. The Austrian general Mack, who had been placed at the head of the Neapolitan troops, showed on a small scale that incapacity which afterwards more signally disgraced him; his soldiers were undisciplined, indolent, and lukewarm; and Championnet, reconquering the papal provinces with a French army not half so large as that of his adversary, pursued him southward, and, almost without striking a blow, became master of the kingdom of Naples.
The only resistance really formidable was offered when the republican troops approached the metropolis. The weak king had already fled, and, embarking on board the English fleet, crossed into Sicily. The peasantry hung on the rear of the invaders, and massacred stragglers; and the lazzaroni, that wild race who formed in those days so large a proportion of the populace, rose in fury on the report that a convention was concluded by the governor Prince Pignatelli. The fierce rabble filled the streets, howling acclamations to the king, the holy Catholic faith, and their tutelary saint Januarius; they drove out the regency, butchered the suspected democrats, and, with arms, though without either discipline or officers, poured out to meet the enemy on the plains. The French cannon mowed them down like grass; but for three whole days they again and again returned to meet the charge, and several thousands of them fell before they gave way. The wrecks of this irrationally brave multitude next defended the city, which the assailants had to gain street by street. Championnet, accompanied by Faypoult, the commissioner of the Directory, took formal possession of Naples, divided all the mainland provinces into departments, and formed them into one state, called the Parthenopean Republic. A commission of citizens was appointed to prepare a constitution, in which the chief part of the task was performed by Mario Pagano. The plan which was finally approved was in substance the same as the other Italian charters; but its author had added to the ordinary features two original ones—a tribunal of five censors, whose functions as correctors of vice were not likely to do much good, and an ephorate or court of supreme revision for laws and magistracies, which promised better fruits.
The nobles in the provinces were much divided in their opinions; but many of them still fondly remembered the lessons which they had learned from Filangieri and his scholars; and the middle classes, having yet experienced no evils but those of absolute and feudal monarchy, listened with eagerness to the promises held out by the republicans. In the huge metropolis the adherents of the king were powerless; many were willing, from the usual motives, to worship the rising sun; a few lettered enthusiasts were sincere in their hopes of witnessing at length that regeneration which their country so greatly needed; and the lazzaroni themselves became submissive and well-disposed, as soon as the saints, through the agency of their accredited servants, had declared in favour of freedom and democracy.
Says Botta:[i] “Championnet understood perfectly the importance which those fiery spirits attached to their religious belief. Accordingly he placed a guard of honour at the church of St. Januarius, and sent to those who had charge of it a polite message, intimating that he should be particularly obliged if the saint would perform the usual miracle of the liquefaction of his blood. The saint did perform the miracle; and the lazzaroni hailed it with loud applause, exclaiming, that after all it was not true that the French were a godless race, as the court had wished them to think; and that now nothing should ever make them believe but that it was the will of heaven that the French should possess Naples, since in their presence the blood of the saint had melted.”
Piedmont had already fallen. Ginguené, who afterwards wrote the history of Italian literature, had failed, as ambassador at Turin, in executing with proper cunning the plans of Talleyrand; but his successor soon contrived to irritate into open resistance the new prince Charles Emmanuel, a weak, bigoted, conscientious man. General Joubert seized the province and citadel of Turin; and the king, executing on the 9th of December, 1798, a formal act of abdication of his sovereignty over the mainland, was allowed to retire into Sardinia. The provisional government named for Piedmont, among whom was the historian Botta, found it impossible to rule the impoverished and distracted country; repose was the universal wish, and a union with the all-powerful neighbour seemed the only probable means of obtaining it. Early in the ensuing spring Piedmont was organised on the model of the French Republic, as the last step but one towards a final incorporation.
There remained to be destroyed no more than two of the old Italian governments. In January, 1799, Lucca, then occupied by French troops under General Miollis, abolished its oligarchy, and assumed a directorial and democratic constitution, after the fashionable example. In March, the Directory, now assured of a fresh war with Austria, seized all the large towns in Tuscany, placed the duchy under the protection of a French commissioner, and allowed the grand-duke Ferdinand to retire to Vienna with a part of his personal property.
But a storm was now about to break upon the heads of the French in every quarter of Italy; and the year 1799 became for the grim Suvaroff that which 1796 had been for Bonaparte. In the end of March the Austrian general Bellegarde crossed the Alps, beat back the republican forces in the north, and joined the Russians, raising the allied army to a strength of sixty thousand, while its opponents in the peninsula did not amount to a third of the number. The gallant Moreau, the French commander-in-chief, had the hard task of fighting for the honour of his nation without a chance of victory; and Macdonald, the new commandant of Naples, was ordered to cut his way to his superior through the whole length of Italy; an undertaking which he accomplished with great loss but signal bravery. The allies overran the Milanese and Piedmont; and the Directory sent two new armies under Championnet and Joubert, both of which were defeated. Most of those Italians who had taken a lead in the republican governments fled into France, and those who remained behind were imprisoned and otherwise punished. The peasantry in almost every province rose and aided the allies. Naples was lost in June, and Rome immediately followed. Ancona, desperately defended by General Monnier, capitulated in October; and at the end of the year Masséna commanded, within the walls of Genoa, besieged, famished, and about to surrender, the only French troops that were left in Italy.
Although the military events of this year do not possess such importance as to deserve minute recital, yet one chapter of its history, embracing the horrible fate which befell Naples, is both painfully interesting in itself, and strikingly illustrative of the disorganised state of society in that quarter. The spectacle which was exhibited in the overgrown metropolis of that kingdom was indeed so unlike anything we should expect to witness in modern times that we endeavour to find a partial solution of the problem in the moral and statistical position of the city. We can find no parallel without reverting to the period of the Roman Empire.
The municipal constitution of Naples, whose main features have already been incidentally described, was the model for all the cities in the kingdom, except Aquila, whose polity was copied from Rome. Thefts and robberies were rare, the homicides were estimated at about forty annually, and some vices the government chose to overlook. The municipal administration, with a jurisdiction extending only over the markets and the university, belonged to the eletti or representatives of the piazze, seggi, or sedili, of which there were six, composed exclusively of nobles. These patricians, meeting in open porticoes, several of which may still be seen in ruins, chose annually deputies in each piazza, and the deputies chose the eletto. A seventh piazza was formed for the popolo or plebeian burghers; but care was taken that this class should have no real power. They were divided locally into twenty-nine wards, for each of which the king every year named a capitano; and the twenty-nine captains, who were held to compose the piazza of the people, appointed as the eletto del popolo a citizen, not noble, suggested by the crown. The seven eletti, with a syndic chosen by the six noble eletti, formed the municipal council, and met twice a week in a convent, from which the board derived its usual name of the tribunal of San Lorenzo. Many functions of the municipality were devolved upon nine deputations of citizens, chosen periodically by the patrician piazze.
But of the popolo, a very large number, said to have amounted in the end of the eighteenth century to thirty thousand or more, were known in ordinary language by the name of lazzari or lazzaroni. These were the lowest of the inhabitants, including, of course, many who had no honest means of livelihood, but consisting mainly of those who, though they gained their bread by their labour, did not practise any sort of skilled industry. Their distinctive character, as compared with the populace of other great cities, lay in two points. First, the usual cheapness of fruits and other vegetables enabled them to subsist on the very smallest earnings; while the mildness of the climate made them, during the greater part of the year, nearly independent both of clothing and shelter. Accordingly, many of them were literally homeless, spending the day in the streets as errand-porters, fruit-sellers, day-labourers, or mere idlers, and sleeping by night on the steps of churches or beneath archways; while all of them were for a great part of their time unemployed. These circumstances produced their second peculiarity, that strong spirit of union which had at one time extended to a regular organisation. They were the only class in Italy whom the Spaniards feared; the viceroys named them in their edicts with deference, and received deputations from them to complain of grievances; and in the seventeenth century they were even allowed to meet tumultuously once a year in the piazza del Mercato, and name by acclamation their temporary chief or capo-lazzaro. Since the accession of the Bourbons, it is true, they were less closely banded together, and their custom of electing an annual head seems to have fallen into disuse; but we have already seen, and shall immediately discover still more dreadful proofs, that the ancient temper was not yet extinct.
We cannot fail to be struck with the likeness which this unwieldy and dangerous commonalty bore to the populace of imperial Rome; and the system which was pursued for furnishing the city with provisions was another point of close resemblance. During four hundred years every conceivable plan for preventing scarcity by restrictive laws had been tried without effect. An assize of bread and flour, fixed in 1401, was followed in 1496 by the building of public magazines, in which the eletti kept a large stock of grain; and at the same time there was established a strict monopoly in favour of a prescribed number of flour-merchants and bakers. The municipality lost enormously by this system; for dearths became frequent, and the corporation then, exactly like the Roman senate and emperors, sold their corn at a heavy loss, and lowered the price of the bread. Since 1764 the city had been supplied by eighteen privileged bakers, by the macaroni-makers, and one or two subordinate crafts; these tradesmen paid rent to the government for their shops; and not only were they obliged to buy the greater part of their flour from the public granaries, but had to deposit corn of their own in large quantities, as a security for their engagements, being bound likewise to purchase this grain from the distant provinces. In the year 1782 it was ascertained from official returns that, in the nineteen years preceding, the corporation had lost 2,632,645 ducats, or about £436,000. They had spent this money without earning so much as thanks; for there was a general prejudice against their establishments, and, both at Naples and at Palermo, where there was a similar system, more than two-thirds of the people made their own bread at home, except when the price of grain rose, on which everyone flocked to the public bakehouses.
Such was the scene, and such were the principal actors, in that fearful tragedy of which we are now to be spectators.
Scarcely had the Parthenopean Republic been proclaimed when the ferocious cardinal Ruffo landed at Reggio, bringing with him from Sicily a patent as royal vicar. In Calabria, and the other southern provinces, he soon organised numerous tumultuary hordes, several of whose captains were the most practised robbers, a few bands being commanded by military subalterns, and some by parish priests. Proni, one of the leaders, was a convicted assassin; De’ Cesari was a notorious highwayman, as was Michele Pezzo, better known by the name of Fra Diavolo, or Friar Beelzebub; and Mammone Gaetano, a miller of Sora, was the worst monster of all. The brigands crowded to serve under their favourite captains; many old soldiers enlisted, and the peasants, aroused by their clergymen, joined in thousands, and quickly learned the trade of murder. The French despatched against them General Duhesme, who was accompanied by a young Neapolitan, Ettore Caraffa, count of Ruvo, a man every way worthy to be pitted against the cardinal and his associates. The two parties swept over the kingdom like a plague, from Reggio to the mountains of the ulterior Abruzzo; and the war, if it deserves the name, soon became on both sides a struggle of revenge and extermination. Prisoners were put to the torture; villages and towns were burned, and their inhabitants massacred; Caraffa had the barbarous satisfaction of exterminating his rebellious vassals; and Ruffo’s followers, enamoured of bloodshed and pillage, speedily ceased to ask whether their victims were republicans or royalists.
An Italian Peasant Woman
The cardinal, soon reducing the southern districts, advanced upon Naples; and the French, unable to cope with him, evacuated the city, leaving but weak garrisons in the three castles. The republican government lost authority at once, and the legislative councils were insulted in their halls by bands of armed ruffians. No plan of defence seems to have been matured, although the leading men did all they could to inspirit the people. In the theatres, which continued open, Alfieri’s tragedies were received with shouts, and interrupted by vehement addresses from persons in the crowd; friars preached freedom and resistance in the churches and on the streets; and the superstitious lazzaroni were for a time kept in check, by seeing the saints anew manifest their favour to the revolution.[22] The few native troops which still were under arms were sent out and defeated in the plain; and, when the royalists approached, abject terror alternated with the resolution of despair. Most members of the councils and administration retired into the lower forts, the Castel dell’Ovo and Castelnuovo.
There were in Naples about two thousand Calabrese, men of all ranks, nobles, priests, and peasants, driven from their homes by Ruffo’s hordes. They alone were firm. A part of them took up their post in the city; the rest, unprovided with artillery, marched out and garrisoned the castle of Viviena, beyond the bridge of the Maddalena. The royalists surrounded them, their heavy guns battered down the walls of the fort, and the assailants entered by storm. The republicans fought like hungry tigers, not a man surrendered or fled; and, when all but a handful had fallen, Antonio Toscani, a priest of Cosenza, who commanded this little remnant, threw a match into the powder-magazine beside him, and perished in the common destruction of friends and enemies. The streets were for a time defended by the remaining Calabrese, while Prince Caraccioli, the king’s admiral, who had joined the popular party, kept up a fire on the royalists from a few small vessels in the harbour; but a body of the lazzaroni suddenly attacked the republicans in the rear, their ranks were broken, and the city was lost. Ruffo took possession of it on the 14th of June, 1799.
Dark as are the crimes which stain the history of our race, humanity has seldom been disgraced by scenes so horrible as those which followed. Universal carnage was but one feature of the atrocity; the details are sickening, many of them utterly unfit to be told. Some republicans were strangled with designed protraction of agony; others were burned upon slow fires; the infuriated murderers danced and yelled round the piles on which their victims writhed; and it is even said that men were seen to snatch the flesh from the ashes, and greedily devour it. The lazzaroni, once more loyal subjects, eagerly assisted in hunting down the rebels; during two whole days the massacre was uninterrupted, and death without torture was accepted as mercy.
The two lower castles surrendered on a capitulation with the cardinal which stipulated that the republicans should, at their choice, remain unmolested in Naples or be conveyed to Toulon; and two prelates with two noblemen, who were prisoners in the forts, were consigned to Colonel Méjean, the French commandant of the Castel Sant’ Elmo, as hostages for the performance of the convention. The last incidents of this bloody tale cannot be told without extreme reluctance by any native of the British Empire; for they stain deeply one of the brightest names in the national history. While the persons protected by the treaty were preparing to embark, the English fleet under Nelson arrived, bringing the king, the minister Acton, and the ambassador Sir William Hamilton, with his wife, who was at once the queen’s confidante and the evil genius of the brave admiral. The French commandant, treacherous as well as cowardly, surrendered the castle, and gave up the hostages without making any conditions. The capitulation was declared null, although the cardinal indignantly remonstrated, and retired from the royal service on failing to procure its fulfilment. The republicans were searched for and imprisoned; and arbitrary commissions sat to try them. Under the sentences passed by such courts, in the metropolis and the provinces, four thousand persons died by the hand of the executioner.
Among them were some whose names appeared with distinction on the file of literature: Domenico Cirillo, the naturalist, who refused to beg his life; the eloquent and philosophical Mario Pagano; Lorenzo Baffi, the translator of some of the Herculanean manuscripts, who rejected poison offered to him by his friends in prison; Conforti, a learned canonist, and writer on ethics and history; Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, a woman of much talent, who had edited a democratic newspaper. Mantonè, an artillery officer, who had been the republican minister-at-war, made on his trial no defence but this, “I have capitulated.” On board one of the ships was executed the aged Admiral Caraccioli, with whose name we are but too well acquainted. Another victim, the count of Ruvo, does not inspire so much compassion, unless we are to believe, as his whole conduct leads one to suspect, that he was absolutely insane. Being sentenced to be beheaded, he insisted on dying with his eyes unbandaged, laid himself upon the block with his face uppermost, and watched steadily the descending axe. Superstitious folly closed scenes which had begun in treachery and revenge. St. Januarius, for having wrought republican miracles, was solemnly deposed by the lazzaroni, with the approval of the government; and in his place was substituted, as patron of the city, St. Anthony of Padua, who, through the agency of the church, had revealed a design said to have been formed by the advocates of democracy, for hanging all the loyal populace. The new protector, however, proved inefficient; and the old one was soon reinstated.
Bonaparte Reconquers Italy
[1799-1801 A.D.]
The fortunes of France, sunk to the lowest ebb, were about to swell again with a tide fuller than ever. While the restored sovereigns of Italy were busied in reorganising their states and punishing their revolted subjects, Paris saw the “heir of the Revolution” take possession of his inheritance. Bonaparte, having returned from the East, was master of France, and resolved to be master of Europe. He was nominated first consul under the constitution called that of the year Eight, which was proclaimed on the 26th day of December, 1799.
In May, 1800, the main body of the French army, led by Napoleon in person, effected its celebrated passage of the Great St. Bernard. The invaders, pouring from the highlands, overran Lombardy, and attacked Piedmont. The Austrian general Melas, with forty thousand men, was stationed near Alessandria, when the first consul, somewhat inferior in strength, advanced against him; and on the 14th of June the two hosts encountered each other on the bloody field of Marengo. In the evening, when the French had all but lost the battle, Desaix came up and achieved the victory at the cost of his life; the Austrians were signally defeated, and the reconquest of Italy, so far as it was judged prudent to attempt it, was already secured. Melas concluded an armistice which gave the enemy possession of Genoa, Savona, and Urbino, with all the strong places in Piedmont and Lombardy as far east as the Oglio. Napoleon reorganised the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics, created a provisional government in Piedmont, and returned to Paris.
Meanwhile, the old pope having died the preceding year, a conclave, which opened at Venice in March, 1800, had raised to the papal chair Cardinal Chiaramonti, a native of Cesena and bishop of Imola, who, since the annexation of his see to the Cisalpine commonwealth, had favoured liberal opinions in politics. He was allowed by all parties to return to Rome, and assume the government of the provinces which had formed the Tiberine Republic. The king of Naples was left unmolested, but Tuscany, at first given up to the Austrians, was seized in a short time by the French.
The negotiations for a lasting peace proved abortive, and a new war speedily commenced, which was chiefly waged on the northern side of the Alps, and ended in December, 1800, with Moreau’s victory over the Austrians at Hohenlinden. In the beginning of the following year, the Peace of Lunéville restored matters in northern Italy nearly to the same position which they had occupied under the Treaty of Campo-Formio; but Tuscany was erected into the kingdom of Etruria, and given to Louis, son of the duke of Parma, though the French were to retain Elba, Piombino, and the coast-garrisons. The new king’s father (whose duchy was given to France), and the grand duke of Tuscany, were to be compensated in Germany for the loss of their Italian states. The king of Naples, after invading the Roman provinces, and giving Murat the trouble of marching an army as far as Foligno to meet him, abandoned his engagements with England, and concluded an alliance with the French Republic.
Napoleon, restoring the Catholic religion in France, and endeavouring to maintain a good understanding with the court of Rome, proceeded to rearrange the republican states of Italy. According to his usual policy, however, he tried to make all his changes appear to have proceeded from the wish of the people themselves; and, through honest conviction in many cases, and selfish subserviency in many more, he was easily able to procure converts to his opinions.[f]