Although Napoleon had governed Italy despotically he had introduced a great many important reforms. He had established political equality and an orderly administration, and had forwarded public improvements; the vestiges of the feudal régime had vanished at his approach. Moreover, he had held out the hope of a united Italy, from which the foreign powers who had plagued and distracted her for centuries should be banished. But his unscrupulous use of Italy to advance his personal ambitions disappointed those who at first had placed their hopes in him, and they came to look for his downfall as eagerly as did the nobility and the dispossessed clergy, whose hopes were centered in Austria. It became clear to the more thoughtful Italians that Italy must look to herself and her own resources if she were ever to become an independent European state.
Reaction in Italy after Napoleon's downfall.
The Carbonari.
The downfall of Napoleon left Italy seemingly in a worse state than that in which he had found it. The hold of Austria was strengthened by her acquisition of Venice. The petty despots of Parma, Modena, and Tuscany, reseated on their thrones by the Congress of Vienna, hastened to sweep away the reforms of the Corsican and to reëstablish all the abuses of the old régime, now doubly conspicuous and obnoxious by reason of their temporary abolition. The lesser Italian princes, moreover, showed themselves to be heartily in sympathy with the hated Austria. Popular discontent spread throughout the peninsula and led to the formation of numerous secret societies, which assumed strange names, practiced mysterious rites, and plotted darkly in the name of Italian liberty and independence. By far the most noted of these associations was that of the Carbonari, i.e., charcoal burners. Its objects were individual liberty, constitutional government, and national independence and unity; these it undertook to promote by agitation, conspiracy, and, if necessary, by revolution.
Temporary constitutions in Spain and Naples, 1820.
The Italian agitators had a superstitious respect for a constitution; they appear to have regarded it not so much as a form of government to be carefully adapted to the needs of a particular country and time, as a species of talisman which would insure liberty and prosperity to its happy possessor. So when the Neapolitans heard that the king of Spain had been forced by an insurrection to grant a constitution, they made the first attempt on the part of the Italian people to gain constitutional liberty by compelling their king to agree to accept the Spanish constitution (July, 1820). However, at the same time that he was invoking the vengeance of God upon his own head should he violate his oath of fidelity to the constitution, he was casting about for foreign assistance to suppress the revolution and enable him to return to his old ways.
Austria intervenes in Italy (1821), in support of absolutism.
262. He had not long to wait. The alert Metternich invited Russia, Prussia, France, and England to unite in order to check the development of "revolt and crime." He declared that the liberal movements, if unrestrained, would prove "not less tyrannical and fearful" in their results than that against which the allies had combined in the person of Napoleon. "Revolution" appeared to him and his conservative sympathizers as heresy appeared to Philip II,—it was a fearful disease that not only destroyed those whom it attacked directly, but spread contagion wherever it appeared and justified prompt and sharp measures of quarantine and even violent intervention with a view of stamping out the devastating plague.
To the great joy of the king of Naples, Austria marched its troops into his territory (March, 1821) and, meeting but an ill-organized opposition, freed him from the limitations which his subjects had for the moment imposed upon him. An attempt on the part of the subjects of the king of Sardinia to win a constitution was also repressed by Austrian troops.