THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES AND THE PAPACY
The king of Naples, lately the abject vassal of the French, had allowed a body of Russians and English to land without resistance. Cardinal Ruffo, who resented the tragedy of 1799, and despised the intriguing of Acton, was sent to deprecate the conqueror’s wrath, but returned home a confirmed Bonapartist; and Napoleon, who wanted a throne for one of his brothers, proclaimed to his soldiers that the dynasty of the Bourbons in lower Italy had ceased to reign. His army crossed the frontier in January, 1806, upon which the king fled to Sicily; his haughty wife lingered to the last moment, and then reluctantly followed. Joseph Bonaparte, meeting no resistance except from the foreigners who composed the garrison of Gaeta, entered the metropolis early in February, and, after quietly hearing mass said by Ruffo in the church of St. Januarius, was proclaimed king of Naples and Sicily. After some fighting, chiefly in Calabria, the whole country within the Faro of Messina submitted to its new sovereign, although in several districts the allegiance was but nominal. In the following summer Sir Sidney Smith took Capri, and prevailed on Sir John Stuart to land in the Calabrian Gulf of St. Eufemia; but the only result was the brilliant victory gained by the British regiments over the French at Maida. The royalist partisans disgraced their cause by cruelties which no exertions of the English officers were able to stop; and, after the enemy had increased materially in strength, the expedition was compelled to return to Sicily.
During that year Napoleon was occupied with the war against Prussia, which was terminated by the battle of Jena; and in 1807 he had commenced his system of intrigue in Spain, the first fruit of which was another appropriation in Italy. The widowed queen of Etruria, who acted as regent for her son Charles Louis, was unceremoniously ejected from his states, which in May, 1808, were formed into three departments of France, while the princess of Piombino was established at Florence with the title of grand duchess of Tuscany. About the same time—upon the proposal or pretext that the Bourbons of Parma should be made sovereigns of Portugal—their duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla were finally annexed to France.
[1808-1811 A.D.]
The principal event of that year was the opening campaign of the French in Spain and Portugal. The schemes of the military autocrat in that quarter, destined to be the first step in his road to destruction, led him to recall his brother Joseph from the throne of Naples, which, on his leaving Italy for Madrid, was bestowed on Joachim Murat, grand duke of Berg and Cleves, one of the emperor’s bravest generals, and husband of his sister Caroline. The new king’s only title was an edict issued by Napoleon at Bayonne, on the 15th of July, 1808, in which he announces that he has granted to Joachim the throne of Naples and Sicily, vacant by the accession of Joseph to that of Spain and the Indies. The showy and gallant soldier began his reign by driving Sir Hudson Lowe out of the island of Capri;[23] and when the Carbonari, a sect of republicans recently organised, had co-operated with the royalists in raising disturbances throughout Calabria, he sent into the province his countryman, General Manhés, recommended for such service by having previously pacified, or depopulated, the Abruzzi. The envoy, executing his commission with heartless severity, made that secluded region orderly and peaceful, for the first time perhaps in its modern history.
The next year overturned the papal throne. The turmoil which the Revolution raised in the Gallican church had been quieted by the concordat of 1801; but a code of regulations issued by the first consul for carrying the principles of that compact into effect in France, and a decree issued by the vice-president Melzi for the same purpose in Lombardy, had been both disavowed by Pius as unauthorised by him, and as contrary not only to the spirit of the concordat, but to the principles of the church of Rome. The reconciliation which ensued was but hollow; and Napoleon determined that his dominion over Italy, now extending from one end of the peninsula to the other, should not be defied; and the papal state was openly claimed as a fief held under Napoleon, the successor of Charlemagne. The remonstrances of Pius on ecclesiastical matters, indeed, were urged in a tone that could not have failed to irritate a temper like that of the emperor.
In January, 1808, as is more fully described in the history of France, seven thousand soldiers under Miollis, professing to march for Naples, turned aside and seized Rome; and in April an imperial decree, founding its reasons on the pope’s refusal of the alliance, on the danger of leaving an unfriendly power to cut off communication in the midst of Italy, and on the paramount sovereignty of Charlemagne, annexed irrevocably to the kingdom of Italy the four papal provinces of Ancona, Urbino, Macerata, and Camerino.
In May, 1809, Napoleon dated from the palace of Schönbrunn at Vienna a decree which annexed to the French Empire those provinces of the papal state which had not been already seized. The pope was to receive an annuity of two millions of francs, and to confine his attention to the proper duties of his episcopal office. Pius issued a very firm manifesto, went through the form of excommunicating Napoleon and all ecclesiastics who should obey him. On the night between the 5th and 6th of July, the French soldiers and the police broke into his apartments, and seized his person. He was transported into France, and thence back to Savona, where he was kept a close prisoner till 1811. In June, 1810, the kingdom of Italy received its last accession of territory, the southern or Italian Tyrol being then incorporated with it.
[1810-1814 A.D.]
It appears, as the result of the events which have now been summarily related, that, from the middle of 1810 till the fall of Napoleon in 1814, the political divisions of Italy were the following:
The mainland was divided into four sections, or, more properly, into three, since Lucca falls really under the first. (1) A large proportion of it had been incorporated with France, whose territories on the western coast now stretched southward to the frontier of Naples. These Italian provinces of the French Empire lay chiefly on the western side of the Apennine, where they included the following districts—Nice, with Savoy, since 1792; Piedmont, since 1802; Genoa, since 1805; Tuscany, since 1808; and the western provinces of the Roman see, since 1809. On the northeast of the mountain chain, France had only Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, which were annexed to it in 1808. Within the Neapolitan frontier it had the duchies of Benevento and Pontecorvo. (2) On the western side of the mountains, the imperial territory was interrupted by the little independent principality comprehending Lucca and Massa-Carrara. This petty state, however, was possessed by members of the emperor’s family, and was practically one of his French provinces. (3) Central and eastern Lombardy, with some districts of the Alps, and a part of the peninsula proper, composed the kingdom of Italy, of which Napoleon wore the crown. Its territories comprehended, first, the whole of Austrian Lombardy; secondly, the Valtelline, with Chiavenna and Bormio; thirdly, Venice and its mainland provinces, from the Oglio on the west to the Isonzo, which had been latterly fixed as the eastern frontier; fourthly, that part of the Tyrol which forms the valley of the Adige; fifthly, the territories of the dukes of Modena and Reggio, except Massa-Carrara; sixthly, the papal provinces of Ferrara, Bologna, and Romagna, of Urbino, Macerata, Camerino, and Ancona. (4) The kingdom of Naples consisted of the same provinces on the mainland which had been governed by the Bourbons; and since the year 1806, it had been ruled by sovereigns belonging to the imperial family of France. The legitimate monarchs still possessed the two great islands—the ex-king of Naples holding Sicily, the king of Sardinia the isle which gave him his title.
[1806-1814 A.D.]
To the Neapolitan[24] as well as the papal states, no change of masters or of polity could at the time of the Revolution have been an evil; the Venetian provinces, likewise, were then ill-governed and oppressed; upon Lombardy, the leaden hand of Austria had again begun to lie heavy; and in Tuscany itself there was much that required amendment, both in the character of the new rulers and in that of the people. The spirit of local jealousy, too, and the total want of military spirit not less than of national pride, were things that the Revolution aided powerfully in rooting out, although the Italians paid dearly for the benefit. The resources of the country, in agriculture and in manufactures, were developed with a success which nothing in its modern history had yet paralleled; and the prosperity was checked only, and driven into new channels, by that unwise and revengeful policy by which Napoleon for years, beginning with the Berlin decree of 1806, attempted to place the British Empire and its colonies in a state of blockade.
Even that arbitrary temper which, in the later years of his reign, converted his rule into an unmixed despotism, was never shown on the south of the Alps with the same fierceness which it assumed in the other provinces of his kingdom. In his secret soul, Napoleon Bonaparte was proud of that southern pedigree which, by every artifice down to the petty trick of misspelling his family name, he strove to make his transalpine subjects forget; himself an Italian in feeling, much rather than a Frenchman, he understood and sympathised with the character of his countrymen, in its weakness as well as in its strength, in its capacities for improvement as well as in its symptoms of decay; he flattered the populace, he breathed his own fiery spirit into the army, he honoured the learned and scientific, he employed and trusted those intelligent men who panted for a field of political action. He taught the people to feel themselves a mighty nation; and those whom he so ennobled have not yet forgotten their stern benefactor. If Napoleon chastised Italy with whips, he chastised France with scorpions; and the one region not less than the other has profited by the wholesome discipline.
After the fall of the popedom, an attempt was made to give unity and a show of independence to the Italian provinces of the empire, by uniting them into one general government, the administration of which, conferred at first on Louis Bonaparte, was afterwards given to the prince Borghese, the head of a noble Roman family of the first rank, who had married Pauline, one of the emperor’s sisters. The French scheme of taxation was introduced, with very slight modifications; and in 1812, the Italian provinces (excluding Nice) yielded to the exchequer fully half as much as was contributed by all the other territories lately added to the empire, including as these did some of the richest commercial cities in Europe. The gross sum raised by taxes of all kinds during that year was 95,712,349 francs, or nearly four millions sterling, which gave 62,644,560 francs as the net return to the treasury; and it is worthy of notice, likewise, that the cost of collection here was considerably less, in proportion, than in the other recent acquisitions. The revenue was liberally spent in organising efficient courts of law (whose text-book was of course the Code Napoléon), in executing works of usefulness as well as pomp, such as roads, bridges, and public buildings, in investigating the antiquities of Rome and other places, and in advancing arts and manufactures, by premiums and similar encouragements.
Arbitrary as was his method of imposing the new law-book, nothing which Napoleon did for Italy was half so distinguished a benefit. Another importation from France was the military conscription, which, in some particulars advantageous, was in most respects a severe evil. The annual levies ordered during the six years which ended with 1814, amounted in all to ninety-eight thousand men, rising from six thousand in 1806, to fifteen thousand, which was the demand during each of the last four years; but only a portion of these troops were ever called into active service. Still the emperor’s foreign wars, especially those in Spain and Russia, cost to his Cisalpine provinces the lives of thousands. That restoration of hereditary aristocracy which was effected in France, took place in Italy likewise, by a decree of 1808, bestowing on the sovereign the power of conferring titles, and allowing the nobles so created to institute majorats, or devises of lands in favour of their eldest sons, or others whom they might select to transmit their honours.
We have yet to survey the finances of the kingdom, that branch of its polity which, in both its departments, the receipt and the expenditure, has been more loudly blamed than any other. Part of the censure is fully deserved; but very much of it is overcharged, and not a little is utterly unfounded. Two heavy faults pervaded the whole system: first, that multiplication of taxes, both in number and amount, which Napoleon, constantly immersed in foreign wars, imposed with a more direct view to the filling of his own exchequer than to the comfort or prosperity of his subjects; secondly, that dependent situation of Lombardy which caused her interests to be sacrificed in several instances to those of France.