The emperor Joseph died in the beginning of the year 1790, and Leopold, leaving Tuscany to his second son Ferdinand, received both the hereditary dominions of Austria and the imperial dignity. He extricated himself skillfully from the foreign wars into which his brother had plunged; but neither the internal discontents of the Low Countries, nor the dangers which threatened Louis XVI, were evils so easily remedied. He employed his diplomacy in endeavouring, by means of a European congress, to impose constitutional limitations on all the contending parties in France; but disappointment in this scheme, and fresh revolts among his own provinces, embittered every moment of his life. He was tempted to become a leading party in the fatal Treaty of Pilnitz, which may be truly said to have destroyed the French monarchy; and in the spring of 1792, his death, at the age of forty-four, saved him from beholding the calamities which speedily followed. His hereditary estates descended to his eldest son Francis, who likewise succeeded him as emperor; and the policy of the new reign, warlike as well as anti-revolutionary from its very opening, accelerated the contest which soon desolated Europe.
Two other Italian courts, besides those of Lombardy and Tuscany, were deeply interested in the fate of the royal family in Paris. The queen of Naples was, like Marie Antoinette, a daughter of Maria Theresa; and the two brothers of Louis XVI were sons-in-law of the king of Sardinia. The advisers of Ferdinand prepared for the struggle by strengthening the artillery and marine, by reconciling themselves with the see of Rome, by imposing extraordinary taxes, and by seizing the money deposited in the national banks; but to these measures were added others of a different cast, designed for crushing the dreaded strength of public opinion. Arbitrary commissions were organised for trying political offences; spies were set to watch Cirillo, Pagano, Conforti, Delfico, and other men of liberal views; foreign books and newspapers were excluded; and Filangieri’s work was burned by the hands of the common hangman. In the other extremity of the peninsula, the count d’Artois imitated at Turin, on a smaller scale, the court of emigrant nobles which surrounded Monsieur at Coblenz. Simultaneously with that alliance between the emperor and the king of Prussia, which produced the abortive invasion of France in 1792, there was concluded an Italian league, headed openly by Naples and Rome, and secretly joined by Victor Amadeus, while the grand duke of Tuscany, as well as the Venetians and the Genoese, remained determinedly neutral.
Time of the French Republic under the National Convention
The little cloud which rose over the tennis-court at Versailles, had already overshadowed all the thrones in Europe; and that of Sardinia was the first on which it discharged its tempest. Where both parties were resolved on war, a pretence was readily found. Semonville, sent to negotiate for a passage for the French armies through Piedmont, was reported to have propagated revolutionary doctrines on his way: he was ordered to quit the king’s dominions, and a second envoy was refused leave to cross the frontier.
On the 18th of September, 1792, the national assembly declared war against the king of Sardinia; and an invasion of his states immediately ensued. The Savoyards, discontented and democratic, had no will to fight; the Piedmontese, ill-officered as well as mutinous, had neither will nor ability; and within a fortnight Savoy and the county of Nice were in the possession of the French troops. The atrocities, however, which took place at Paris during the autumn of that year, and the execution of the king in the beginning of the next, not only gave fresh vigour to the operations of the allied sovereigns, but added new members to their league. In 1793 a British fleet occupied Corsica; while the Austrians and Piedmontese vainly tried to fight their way against Kellermann through Savoy to Lyons. During the succeeding summer, the republicans, entering Italy with one army by the Alps, and with another through the neutral territory of Genoa, maintained a more energetic campaign, which left them masters of all the passes leading down into Piedmont. At the same time Pasquale Paoli, supported by England, arranged a constitution for Corsica, which acknowledged George III as its king.
[1793-1795 A.D.]
In the course of the year 1795, the alarm produced by the recent successes of the French not only disarmed some of their most active enemies, but gained for them allies in Italy itself, the stronghold of legitimate monarchy. Ferdinand of Tuscany, a cautious or timid man, anxious to preserve the commerce of Leghorn, and seeing no reason why he should sacrifice his people to the ambition or revenge of the greater European courts, was the first crowned head that recognised the new democratic state. In February of this year, he concluded a treaty with France, disclaiming his enforced connection with the allies, and binding himself to a strict neutrality. Soon afterwards the coalition lost three of its members, Holland, Prussia, and Spain. Within the Alps the war languished; and the Austrians and Piedmontese were able, till the end of the autumn, to keep the invading armies cooped up in the northwestern corner of the peninsula. Meanwhile that fermentation of men’s minds, which had its centre in Paris, was diffusing itself over most of the Italian provinces, among those classes that were predisposed to receive such an impulse.
Tuscany was the quarter in which the new opinions met with the least countenance. Although the grand duke had been tempted to depart from some of his father’s commercial and agricultural laws, his plan of polity remained so far entire that the constitutionalists had really little to complain of. In ecclesiastical matters, however, the priesthood renewed with success those instigations by which many of them long before had crippled the efforts of their bold reformer; and Leopold had not been twelve months at Vienna, when the peasantry clamorously demanded the re-establishment of certain religious fraternities and forms of worship which he had abolished as superstitious and hurtful. In the eastern provinces of the papal state there was much silent discontent among all classes; but in Rome itself, although a few men held democratic opinions, the only outbreak that happened was that of January, 1793, when Bassville, the French secretary of legation, an active republican agent, was stoned to death by the populace. In Parma, Duke Ferdinand had recently alarmed the thinking part of his subjects by introducing the papal Inquisition, and by exhibiting himself, in strong contrast to his early habits, as a religious formalist and devotee. The duke of Modena was perhaps more unpopular than he deserved to be. In the republics opinions were greatly divided, though from dissimilar causes. San Marino was a cipher; Lucca was made passive, not only by her own insignificance, but by a general indifference towards change; the Venetians were distracted by two opposite feelings, their fear of Austrian encroachment and their hatred of Parisian democracy; the Genoese, although the revolutionary party was strong among them, not only dreaded the destruction of their commerce, but were personally interested in the French funds.
In the remaining sections of the peninsula, the extreme south and the extreme north, were to be found the most zealous disciples of the Revolution. In the kingdom of Naples, both on the mainland and in Sicily, conspiracies were repeatedly discovered, and the plotters executed, several of them having been previously tortured to enforce a discovery of their accomplices. Even the ministers of state charged each other with treason; and Acton procured the imprisonment of the chevalier De’ Medici, with several other men high in office. The people, although strong in prejudice, were at this time discontented with the increased taxation, and the renewal of arbitrary interference by the government; many of the nobles were as eager as the middle classes in their wishes for general amelioration; and the church herself, whose property the rulers were every day seizing to satisfy the necessities of the exchequer, was not at first able to discover whether republicanism or legitimate monarchy was likely to be her most dangerous enemy. Throughout Austrian Lombardy the desire of change became almost universal. The people at large were disgusted by public burdens heavily augmented, and by the coarse insolence of the German satellites who exacted them; those classes, which had enjoyed the semblance of political power under the constitution of Maria Theresa, were provoked by that mixture of military command and absolute foreign rule which, since Leopold’s death, had been substituted for it; and reflecting men perceived, in the attitude which the cabinet of Vienna had now decidedly assumed, no prospect of improvement or relief if the allied sovereigns should be victorious. Piedmont was a still more favourable soil for republicanism, and there its principles soon rooted themselves very deeply. On the mainland, more than one conspiracy was discovered and punished; while the Sardinians, finding themselves treated as rebels when they sent deputies to demand those reforms which they conceived themselves to have merited by their brave resistance to the French fleet, broke out into open revolt, killed several members of the government, and were with difficulty dissuaded by the viceroy from giving up the island to France.