In Venice the new ideas did not affect the government. The old system continued. The Great Council of Patricians sat in conservative indolence; the ornamental Doge shuffled about, the Senate talked, and the Council of Ten maintained its petty despotism. Venice was moribund. Her voice was no more heard in European affairs. Her army had dwindled to a few undisciplined and inefficient regiments; her arsenal was little employed. Gayety, luxury, vice, reigned triumphant; all the young blades of Europe went thither to carouse.
In Parma the flood of philanthropic reform had flowed strong; the minister of state, a Frenchman, full of Parisian ideas, had introduced many beneficial changes, but a new duke, dissipated and devout, slipped back into the old ways; and its little neighbour, Modena, concentrated its attention on avoidance of all possible offence to its neighbours.
In Tuscany, an appanage of Austria, reform bounded along. The Grand Duke, Leopold I, proposed to destroy every remnant of the Middle Ages; he attacked the power of the ubiquitous priests, granted free trade in grain, and equalized taxes,—without discrimination even in favour of his own estates. He improved the universities of Pisa and Siena, drained the marshes of the Maremma, and led the way in abolishing torture and capital punishment; he rendered a public account of the state's revenues; and, in short, put in practice the advanced philanthropic ideas on government.
In the Papal States, on the other hand, mediævalism lay heavy. There was no commerce, no manufacture, little agriculture. Priests were everywhere, greedy relations of the Pope almost everywhere. No laymen were given office. Ancona, a seaport, and Bologna, with its university, were the only exceptions to general wretchedness. The finances were in extreme confusion; the offerings of the faithful, the sale of offices, the multiplication of taxes, did little more than pay interest on the bonded debts. Rome was a little, unimportant, ecclesiastical city.
In Naples, however, even the Bourbons felt the fresh breath of reformation. A reforming minister expelled the Jesuits and tried to reduce the number of superfluous priests, monks, and nuns, and to root out the old feudal privileges. In the city itself a goodly company of men gathered together, cultivated ideas, and followed the lead of the French philosophers. Poor Sicily, overridden by barons and priests, lagged behind, a prey to the feudal system, and so unsusceptible to new ideas that the reforming prime minister could not budge the dead weight of custom. The people preferred to help one another in their own way, and resorted to that mysterious society, the Mafia.
Thus was Italy, half philanthropically inclined, half despotically, with few outward indications of the great awakening of the nineteenth century. One such indication might have been found in the life and character of a gentleman of Turin. Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) was a kind of antique Roman, a new Brutus, of passionate and lofty nature. He embodied his ideas of liberty in classic tragedies, which stirred Italian manhood in those days, but now are extremely tedious to read. He boldly gave vent to his hatred of foreign oppression, preached freedom, and appealed to the "future Italian people." His autobiography, somewhat condensed and expurgated, might be put into Plutarch. He stands in history, not as a great tragedian, but as the first example of the rebirth of that antique virility which was to display itself so brilliantly in the nineteenth century.
Down into this little world of periwigs and lavender came the French Revolution. All who had applauded Alfieri's tragedies were delighted, except Alfieri himself, who hated the French. But the Italian princes took fright at the democratic volcano, and talked of a general union against France. Piedmont alone was vigorous enough to take action; she made a league with Austria (1792). Nothing important happened until young Napoleon took command of the French army of invasion (1796), and began to tear "the heart out of Glory." It would be useless to relate in detail his wonderful career in Italy. He arranged the peninsula as a housekeeper shifts the furniture in an unsatisfactory room. He took Nice and Savoy from Piedmont, Lombardy from Austria, formed the little states south of the Po into a republic, took the temporal power from the Pope, and set up a Roman Republic. He turned the Kingdom of Naples into a republic and then back again into a kingdom, first for his brother Joseph, and then for his general, Murat (1808). He converted Genoa into the Republic of Liguria. Venice, like old Priam before bloody Pyrrhus, fell at the whiff and wind of the victor's sword; the Great Council resigned without a struggle, and the Republic of St. Mark after an existence of a thousand years came to its end. It was then handed over to Austria, but after Austerlitz taken back again. In 1805, having become Emperor, Napoleon turned the northern part of the peninsula into the Kingdom of Italy, and put the iron crown of Lombardy on his own head, saying, "God has given it to me, woe to him that touches it." In 1806 he put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, and forced the Emperor, Francis II, to resign the Imperial crown.
The old laws of political gravitation ceased to act, and Italy was moulded and broken and moulded anew, as if creation had begun again. The revolutionary ideas on which Napoleon's power at first rested had spread everywhere; liberty, equality, democracy were a part of every man's stock of familiar thoughts, and the conception of an Italian kingdom, vaguely associated with the poetic dreams of Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, had become a political fact. Italy was changed forever, the old Goldoni comedy was gone; Napoleon had given the coup de grâce to the old régime.
There was another side to the Napoleonic domination. A multitude of men had been forcibly enlisted in Napoleon's armies; twenty-six thousand, it is said, perished in the terrible retreat from Moscow. The French were arrogant and they were foreigners. Changes had been made too quickly and with too reckless a disregard for Italian wishes. Nobles and clergy had been despoiled of privileges, peasants had been confused and bewildered, the pious had been scandalized by Napoleon's treatment of the Pope; all these longed for the restoration of the old political divisions and of the old easy ways.
After Napoleon's overthrow the Napoleonic states in Italy fell almost immediately. The viceroy of the Italian kingdom, Napoleon's stepson Eugène Beauharnais, slunk away; and in the south, after some vicissitudes, Murat was caught and shot (1815). Kings, dukes, and Pope came tripping back to their thrones. The Congress of Vienna decided that the doctrines of the French Revolution were quite wrong, that law, order, and the principle of legitimacy were bound up together, that states belonged to their royal families in tail male, and reparcelled Italy among its petty sovereigns, acting quite as despotically as Napoleon had done. It gave Venice to Austria, Genoa to Piedmont, and Parma to Marie Louise, the Austrian wife of Napoleon, for her life, as she had to be decently provided for. The Dukes of Parma received Lucca until her death, when they were to return to Parma, and then Lucca was to be annexed to Tuscany. Metternich, Hardenberg, Castlereagh, Talleyrand, and their associates complimented one another on the happy completion of their task, and the Congress broke up.