In 1814, Napoleon empowered Prince Eugène to adopt whatever attitude he thought best fitted to make head against Austria; for himself, he resigned the Iron Crown, and his Italian soldiers were freed from their oaths. It was not, therefore, Eugene's loyal scruples which prevented him from throwing down a grand stake when he led his 60,000 men to the attack. It was want of genius, or of what would have done instead, a flash of genuine enthusiasm for the Italian idea. In place [Pg.8] of appealing to all Italians to unite in winning a country, he appealed to one sentiment only, fidelity to Napoleon, which no longer woke any echo in the hearts of a population that had grown more and more to associate the name of the Emperor with exactions which never came to an end, and with wars which had not now even the merit of being successful. It is estimated that although the Italian troops amply proved the truth of Alfieri's maxim, that 'the plant man is more vigorous in Italy than elsewhere,' by bearing the hardships and resisting the cold in Russia better than the soldiers of any other nationality, nevertheless 26,000 Italians were lost in the retreat from Moscow. That happened a year ago. Exhausted patience got the better of judgment; in April 1814, the Milanese committed the irremediable error of revolting against their Viceroy, who commanded the only army which could still save Italy: the pent-up passions of a long period broke loose, the peasants from the country, who had always hated the French, flooded the streets of Milan, and allying themselves unimpeded with the dregs of the townsfolk, they murdered with great brutality General Prina, the Minister of Finance, whose remarkable abilities had been devoted towards raising funds for the Imperial Exchequer. Personally incorruptible, Prina was looked upon as the general representative of French voracity; he met his death with the utmost calmness, only praying that he might be the last victim. No one else was, in fact, killed, and next day quiet was resumed, but the affair had another victim—Italy. You cannot change horses when you are crossing a stream. Prince Eugène was in Mantua with a fine army, practically intact, though it had suffered some slight reverses; the fortress was believed to be impregnable; by merely waiting, Eugene [ [Pg.9] might, if nothing else, have exacted favourable terms. But the news of Prina's murder, and the blow dealt at his own authority in Milan, caused him to give over the fortress and the army to the Austrians without more ado; an act which looked like revenge, but it was most likely prompted by moral cowardice. The capitulation signed with Field-Marshal Bellegarde on the 23rd of April, so exasperated the army that the officers in command of the garrison decided to arrest Eugene, but it was found that he was already on his way to Germany, taking with him his treasure, in accordance with a secret agreement entered into with the Austrian Field-Marshal. Such was the end to the Italian career of Eugène Beauharnais.
For the Beau Sabreur another ending was in store. Back on Napoleon's side in 1815, his Austrian allies having given him plenty of reason for suspecting their sincerity, he issued from Rimini, on the 30th of March, the proclamation of an independent Italy from the Alps to Sicily. There was no popular reply to his call. Italy, prostrate and impoverished, was unequal to a great resolve. The Napoleonic legend was not only dead, but buried; Napoleon had literally no friends left in Italy except those of his old soldiers who had managed to get back to their homes, many of them deprived of an arm or a leg, but so toughened that they lived to great ages. These cherished to their last hour the worship of their Captain, which it was his highest gift to be able to inspire. 'I have that feeling for him still, that if he were to rise from the dead I should go to him, if I could, wherever he was,' said the old conscript Emmanuele Gaminara of Genoa, who died at nearly a hundred in a Norfolk village in 1892: the last, perhaps, of the Italian veterans, and the type of them all.
But a few scattered invalids do not make a nation, and the Italian nation in 1815 had not the least wish to support any one who came in the name of Napoleon. So Murat failed without even raising a strong current of sympathy. Beaten by the Austrians at Tolentino on the 3rd of May, he retreated with his shattered army. In the last desperate moment, he issued the constitution which he ought to have granted years before. Nothing could be of any avail now; his admirable Queen, the best of all the House of Buonaparte, surrendered Naples to the English admiral; and Murat, harried by a crushing Austrian force, renounced his kingdom on the 30th of May. After Waterloo, when a price was set on his head in France, he meditated one more forlorn hope; but, deserted by the treachery of his few followers, and driven out of his course by the violence of the waves, he was thrown on the coast of Calabria with only twenty-six men, and was shot by order of Ferdinand of Naples, who especially directed that he should be only allowed half-an-hour for his religious duties after sentence had been delivered by the mock court-martial. His dauntless courage did not desert him: he died like a soldier. It was a better end for an Italian prince than escaping with money-bags to Germany. Great as were Murat's faults, an Italian should remember that it was he who first took up arms to the cry which was later to redeem Italy: independence from Alps to sea; and if he stand on the ill-omened shore of Pizzo, he need not refuse to uncover his head in silence.
When Mantua surrendered, the Milanese sent a deputation to Paris with a view of securing for Lombardy the position of an independent kingdom under an Austrian prince. They hoped to obtain the first by [Pg.11] acquiescing in the second. They were aroused from their unheroic illusions with startling rapidity. Lord Castlereagh, to whom they went first (for they fancied that the English were interested in liberty), referred them 'to their master, the Austrian Emperor.' The Emperor Francis replied to their memorial that Lombardy was his by right of conquest; they would hear soon enough at Milan what orders he had to give them. Even after that, the distracted Lombards hoped that the English at Genoa would befriend them. All uncertainty ceased on the 23rd of May 1814, when Field-Marshal Bellegarde formally took possession of Lombardy on behalf of his Sovereign, dissolved the Electoral Colleges, and proclaimed himself Regent. There was no question of reviving the conditions under which Austria ruled Lombardy while there was still a German Empire: conditions which, though despotic in theory, were comparatively easy-going in practice, and did not exclude the native element from the administration. Henceforth the despotism was pure and simple; for Italians to even think of politics was an act of high treason.
It is not generally known that a British army ultimately sent to Spain was intended for Italy,[[1]] but its destination was changed because the Italians showed so little disposition to rise against Napoleon. The English Government was continually advised by its agents in Italy to make Sicily, which was wholly in its power, the point d'appùi for a really great intervention in the destinies of the peninsula. 'The grand end of all the operations in the Mediterranean,' wrote one of Lord Castlereagh's correspondents, 'is the emancipation of Italy, and its union in one great state.' Lord William Bentinck urged that if Sicily were reunited to Naples under the Bourbons, liberty, [Pg.12] established there by his own incredible efforts, would be crushed, and the King would wreck vengeance on the Constitution and its supporters. Universal terror, he said, was felt at 'the unforgiving temper of their Majesties.' He strongly supported a course proposed for her own reasons by Queen Caroline: the purchase of Sicily by the English Government which could make it 'not only the model but the instrument of Italian independence.'
This way of talking was not confined to private despatches, and it was no wonder if the Italians were disappointed when they found that England declined to plead their cause with the Allies in Paris, and afterwards at Vienna. When charged directly with breach of faith before the House of Commons, Lord Castlereagh said that Austria, being 'in truth the great hinge on which the fate of mankind must ultimately depend,' had to be paid (this was exactly the sense, though not the form, of his defence) by letting her do what she liked with Italy. There is a certain brutal straightforwardness in the line of argument. Lord Castlereagh did not say that independence was not a good thing. He had tried to obtain it for Poland and had failed; he had not tried to obtain it for Italy, because he was afraid of offending Austria. At least he had the courage to tell the truth, and did not prate about the felicity of being subjects of the Austrian Emperor, as many English partisans of Austria prated in days to come.
The political map of Italy in the summer of 1814 showed the Pope (Pius VII.) reinstated in Rome, Victor Emmanuel I. at Turin, Ferdinand III. of Hapsburg-Lorraine in Tuscany, the Genoese Republic for the moment restored by the English, Parma and Piacenza assigned to the Empress Marie-Louise, and Modena to the Austrian Archduke Francis, who was heir through the female line to the last of the Estes. Murat was still [Pg.13] at Naples, Ferdinand IV. in Sicily, Austria acknowledged supreme in Lombardy and Venetia, and the island of Elba ironically handed over to Napoleon. These were the chief features, so far as Italy was concerned, of the Treaty of Paris, signed on the 30th of May 1814. Next year the Congress of Vienna modified the arrangement by providing that the Spanish Infanta Maria Louisa, on whom had been bestowed the ex-republic of Lucca, should have the reversion of Parma and Piacenza, while Lucca was to go in the end to Tuscany. Murat having been destroyed, the Neapolitan Bourbons recovered all their old possessions. San Marino and Monaco were graciously recognised as independent, which brought the number of Italian states up to ten. The Sardinian monarchy received back the part of Savoy which by the Treaty of Paris had been reserved to France. It was also offered a splendid and unexpected gift—Genoa.
Lord William Bentinck entered Genoa by a convention concluded with the authorities on the 18th of April 1814. A naval demonstration following an ably-conducted operation, by which Bentinck's hybrid force of Greeks and Calabrese, with a handful of English, became master of the two principal forts, hastened this conclusion, but the Genoese had no reluctance to open their gates to the English commander, who inspired them with the fullest confidence. He came invested with the halo of a constitution-maker-under-difficulties; it was known that he had stopped at nothing in carrying out his mission in Sicily; not even at getting rid of the Queen, who found in Bentinck the Nemesis for having led a greater Englishman to stain his fame in the roads of Naples. Driven rather than persuaded to leave Sicily, Marie Antoinette's sister encountered so frightful a sea voyage that she died soon after [Pg.14] joining her relations at Vienna. Lord William had acquired the art of writing the finest appeals to the love of freedom; a collection of his manifestoes would serve as handy-book to anyone instructed to stir up an oppressed nationality. He immediately gave the Genoese some specimens of his skill as a writer, and by granting them at once a provisional constitution, he dispelled all doubts about the future recognition of their republic. What was not, therefore, their dismay, when they were suddenly informed of the decision of the Holy Alliance to make a present of them to the people whom, of all others, they probably disliked the most. Italians had not ceased yet from reserving their best aversion for their nearest neighbours.
Bentinck did not mean to deceive; perhaps he thought that by going beyond the letter of his instructions he should draw his government after him. That he did, in effect, deceive, cannot be denied; even Lord Castlereagh, while necessarily refusing to admit that definite promises had been made, yet allowed that, 'Of course he would have been glad if the proclamation issued to the Genoese had been more precisely worded.' The motive of the determination to sacrifice the republic was, he said, 'a sincere conviction of the necessity of a barrier between France and Italy, which ought to be made effectual on the side of Piedmont. The object was to commit the defence of the Alps and of the great road leading round them by the Gulf of Genoa, between France and Italy, to the same power to which it had formerly been entrusted. On that principle, the question relating to Genoa had been entertained and decided upon by the allied sovereigns. It was not resolved upon because any particular state had unworthy or sordid views, or from any interest or feeling in favour of the King of [Pg.15] Sardinia, but solely to make him, as far as was necessary, the instrument of the general policy of Europe.'
A better defence might have been made. Piedmont was destined to serve as a bulwark, not so much against France, which for the time was not to be feared, as against Austria, absolute except for the subalpine kingdom in all Italy. But this belongs to the shaping of rough-hewn ends, which is in higher hands than those of English ministers. The ends then looked very rough-hewn.