THE RISE OF NATIONAL SPIRIT
When Francis II of Austria renounced the imperial German crown on the 6th of August, 1806, Austria seems to have renounced its authority over Italy, though that country had hitherto found its main support in Austrian rule. In all encroachments of Austria in Italy, outside of its own province, the Italians later took it as a precedent that in 1806 Austria of itself renounced the ancient rights of the Holy Roman Empire.
The political convictions had for long been blunted, the political passions concerning the contributions and frauds of French proconsuls and their tools subsided as the fire of a burnt-out house. The more dangerous Italians were made barons and counts, and Melzi, prominent for his character and intellect, had been made a duke. The rage which still smouldered in individuals over the degradation of Italy is shown in the writings of Count Alfieri, who was born in Piedmont, 1743, and died at Florence, 1804; and of Niccolo Ugo Foscolo, born of a Greek mother, in Venice, 1772, and deceased in London, 1827. While far from stainless themselves, these men were panegyrists of patriotic celibacy and suicide, and possessed a sort of volcanic genius, that urged them on to write something great. Classic antiquity, stalking about in a phenomenally high cothurnus, was their religion. Alfieri declared that the papacy was irreconcilable with the freedom of Italy; both writers arrived at a certain desperate calm out of sheer admiration for England. To teach the Italian people to feel their political misfortune was their mission, and in its performance they remained the grand-masters of the desperate party. Some of the youth of Italy ignited their negative patriotism, their hatred of the tyrant and disdain of the lower classes at the fire of these doctrines; but for all their straining after effect both poets possessed more genuine patriotic passion than was ever evinced by their imitators, and were heroes of patriotic virtue compared to many who coldly traded on the passions of others.
Alfieri
A lasting after-effect of the republic was the complete abolition of feudal rights, which gave the Lombard and Venetian nobles a position of singular freedom.
[1805-1806 A.D.]
In 1805, as we have seen, Napoleon appointed Eugène Beauharnais, son of Josephine, viceroy; later he made him his successor in the kingdom of Italy, with the order to govern it after the simple system: “The emperor wills it!” The new ruler himself wrote to Napoleon that the kingdom of Italy would pay 30,000,000 francs to France yearly. Eugène married the daughter of King Max of Bavaria, with whom he shared Tyrol in the division suggested by their nationality.
Two days after the wedding, the 16th of January, 1806, Napoleon adopted Eugène. Ancona and all Venice being now added to it, the “kingdom of Italy” numbered 6,500,000 souls to 1,530 square miles. Even the courts, or rather their counsellors, worthy of the necessities of the time, observed that from the union of all these fragments the idea of nationality was slowly arising.
[1806-1813 A.D.]
Balbo[e] says of this time: “It was vassalage, no doubt; but a vassalage that shared the pride, the joys, the triumphs of the ruler. It was a time of universal self-respect, and from it dates the first utterance by the people of the name of Italy with increased love and honour; all over Italy the petty municipal and provincial jealousies which had taken root centuries before, and flourished even in the Utopian republic of a day, began to decline.”
We must not forget that Balbo belonged to the Piedmontese; hence the highest military nobility. The families whose sons had to pass through fire and be sacrificed to the Moloch of Napoleon’s ambition, could not then have shared his sentiments. Out of 30,000 Italians scarcely 9,000 returned from Spain. It caused a still more painful impression when Napoleon announced that of the 27,000 men of the kingdom of Italy who had gone to Russia, scarcely a thousand remained, especially as he made the announcement dryly, without a word of acknowledgment, and only ordered the raising of a new army. The remainder of Italy, partly incorporated to France and partly Neapolitan, had similar losses to bear.[f]