The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 09

by Unknown

NAPOLEON MAKES ITALY A KINGDOM

[1804-1805 A.D.]

On the 18th day of May, 1804, the senate declared Napoleon emperor of the French, “through the grace of God and the principles of the republic.” The pope, after much hesitation, consented to bestow on the new empire the sanction of the church; and accordingly, journeying to Paris in the dead of winter, he officiated at the coronation in Notre Dame.

The Italians could not reasonably expect that they should be allowed to stand solitary exceptions to the new system of their master; and the principal citizens in Lombardy were speedily prepared, by arguments or inducements suited to the occasion, for taking such steps as should place them, with an appearance of voluntary submission, under the monarchical polity. The vice-president Melzi was sent to Paris at the head of a deputation from the Italian Republic. In March, 1805, these envoys waited on the emperor, and presented to him an instrument purporting to contain the unanimous resolution of the constituted authorities of the state, whereby they offered to him and his male descendants, legitimate, natural, or adopted, the crown of their republic, which they consented should be transformed into “the kingdom of Italy.” The resolutions were immediately embodied in a constitutional statute, by which Napoleon accepted the sovereignty, but pledged himself to resign it in favour of one who should be born or adopted his son, as soon as Naples, the Ionian Isles, and Malta should be evacuated by all foreign troops. In April the emperor-king passed through Piedmont in triumph, and on the 26th of May his coronation was performed in the cathedral of Milan. The archbishop of the see, Cardinal Caprara, who had been his principal assistant in negotiating with the pope, attended at the ceremony, and was allowed to consecrate the insignia; but the “iron crown” of Lombardy, the distinctive symbol of royal power, was, like the diadem of France, placed on Napoleon’s head by his own hand.

“This part of the ceremonial,” says Denina,[c] “differed from the ancient usage. It left no room for supposing that the crowned monarch acknowledged himself to derive from any other than God, or the power which by the divine will he held in his hands, that proud ensign of sovereignty, of which he thus publicly took possession.”

He did not leave the peninsula till he had not only organised the government and constitution of his own kingdom of Italy, but completed material changes on the adjacent states. Before the coronation, the doge and senate of Genoa, warned that the independence of the Ligurian Republic could not be guaranteed, and jealously averse, it is said, to a union with the new kingdom, petitioned for annexation to France. Their lord condescendingly granted the prayer which he had himself dictated; and the formal incorporation was completed in October, 1805. In March of the same year, the principality of Piombino had been given to his sister Elisa Bonaparte, as a fief of the French Empire; and in July the territories belonging to the republic of Lucca were erected into another principality for her husband, Pasquale Bacciocchi. The only parts of upper Italy that remained unappropriated were the provinces of the ex-duke of Parma, which, though occupied by the French, were not formally incorporated either with the empire or the kingdom of Italy. The viceroyalty of the latter was conferred on Eugène Beauharnais, the son of the empress Josephine. None of the great powers in Europe acknowledged the new kingdom, and indeed none of them was asked to do so.

[1805-1808 A.D.]

The legitimate sovereigns did not leave their plebeian brother to enjoy unmolested so much as the first year of his reign. An invasion of Italy under the archduke Charles ended in the defeat of the Austrians by Masséna upon the Adige; and in December, 1805, the great battle of Austerlitz forced the emperor Francis to conclude the unfavourable Treaty of Presburg. In respect to the Italian peninsula, he acknowledged Napoleon’s kingly title, and acquiesced in all his other arrangements; but, further, he was compelled to surrender Venice with its provinces as he had received them at the Peace of Campo-Formio, consenting that they should be united with the kingdom of Italy. In January, 1806, the island-city was occupied by French troops under General Miollis.

Napoleon seized the opportunity of the new acquisition, for founding that hereditary noblesse with Italian titles, whose ranks were speedily filled by his most useful servants, civil as well as military. There were specified certain districts which the emperor reserved the right of erecting into dukedoms, appropriating to their titular possessors a fifteenth part of the revenues derived from the provinces in which they lay, and setting aside for the same purpose the price of large tracts of national lands. In Parma and Piacenza were to be three of these fiefs—in Naples, recently conquered, six—and in the Venetian provinces twelve, among which were Dalmatia, Treviso, Bassano, Vicenza, Rovigno, and other demesnes whose titles acquired a new interest from the celebrity of the men who bore them. Two other dukedoms, conferred respectively on Marshal Bernadotte and the minister Talleyrand, were formed from the papal districts of Pontecorvo and Benevento. The emperor of the French, now lord paramount of the kingdom enclosing these territories, seized them without troubling himself to invent any pretext; coolly assuring the pope that the loss would be compensated afterwards, but that the nature of the indemnification would materially depend upon the holy father’s good behaviour.