Monaco
Before the preliminaries were signed, Colonel Junot had been despatched to Venice, to demand satisfaction for a slaughter of some soldiers in the towns bordering on the Lake of Garda. In Verona also, about the same time, the populace of the city and district, headed by a few of the nobles and clergy, attacked, robbed, and murdered the French and their partisans; and on the 17th of April, there broke out a general massacre. The Veronese mob, and the Venetian troops, drove the foreigners into the citadel, and held the town three days, committing horrible cruelties on all who were suspected of being favourable to the enemy; but, on the 20th of the same month, a detachment of the French stormed the place, and revenged their friends by numerous executions, in the course of which there perished several noblemen, and a Capuchin friar, whose eloquence had been the prop of the insurrection. On the approach of the same evening, a French privateer, in escaping from an Austrian vessel, ran into the harbour of Venice, in violation of the ordinary law; upon which a scuffle ensued with the Slavonian sailors, and the French captain and several of his crew were killed. Bonaparte received at once the welcome news of both occurrences—the taking of Verona, and the outrage on the ship. He instantly ordered the French envoy at Venice to depart, but not till he should have demanded that the commandant of the port and the three inquisitors of state should be put in prison for trial. The cowardly senate, without a moment’s hesitation, arrested those men, ordered the public prosecutors to draw up indictments against them, and instructed the deputies who attended at the general’s headquarters to offer the most humble submissions.
Bonaparte told them abruptly that their aristocratic constitution was out of date, and he intended to annul it. Without waiting for an answer he declared war on Venice, whose leaders had already foreseen his sentence, and endeavoured to palliate its effects. A few of the principal nobles held a secret meeting in the apartments of the imbecile Lodovico Manin, the hundred-and-twentieth and last doge, where they resolved to summon the grand council, and propose alterations in the constitution. About the very time when the lords of the Adriatic crouched thus abjectly, the last instance of Venetian spirit was exhibited in Treviso by Angelo Giustiniani, the governor of the province, who, on giving up his sword to the French general, reproached him to his face with his betrayal of Venice. Napoleon listened quietly to his invectives, and dismissed him unharmed.
Next day, while the city resounded with impotent preparations for defence, about half of the members of the grand council met to decree its dissolution. The doge prefaced, by a long speech, a motion for authorising the envoys to treat with the victorious general regarding alterations on the constitution. The motion was seconded by Pietro Antonio Bembo, and carried almost unanimously. Bonaparte, however, insisted that the council should by a formal act depose itself, and create a democracy. His agents used in the city the necessary means of allurement and intimidation; and on the 12th of May, 1797, the grand council met for the last time. The people gathered in the square of St. Mark; the sailors belonging to the ships of war, already ordered to leave the harbour, made a confused noise; and, a few musket-shots being fired, a universal panic seized the nobles. There was a sudden cry for the question; it was put, and the abolition of the constitution was carried by 512 voices to 20, five members declining to vote. The people were surprised to see their chiefs leaving the palace dejected; but the cause was soon explained. A tumult arose; the mob attacked the houses of several French partisans, and finding one man with a tricolour cockade in his pocket, nailed it upon his forehead. Order being restored, a provisional administration was established; and, on the 16th of May, a definitive treaty was signed at Milan between France and the new republic of Venice. The representative form of government was recognised; the infant state received, on its own petition, a garrison of French troops; while a fine, and the delivery of pictures and manuscripts, were secretly stipulated. When, soon afterwards, the Venetian envoys who had signed this convention demanded that Bonaparte should procure a ratification of it, he coolly reminded them of a fact which he himself had probably recollected a few days earlier—that, when the treaty was arranged, their mandate had expired by the dissolution of their constituency, the grand council. He therefore declared that the compact was null, and that the Directory must be left to determine for themselves in relation to the revolutionised state.
At this time, however, it was the conqueror’s wish, by an act equally unjust towards another section of the Italians, to compensate to the Venetians in some measure the spoliation they had suffered. He designed to incorporate with Venice his newly formed Cispadane Republic, while a transpadane republic should contain the Venetian districts of Bergamo and Brescia, in addition to the emancipated provinces in central Lombardy, no longer liable to be claimed by Austria. But Venice was destined to be the victim of a treachery yet more inexcusable. The cession of Mantua to the Austrians, which was involved in the plan sketched at Leoben, was viewed with disapprobation in Paris; while the Venetians were considered at once too aristocratic to be safe neighbours, and too weak to be useful allies. Francis, on the other hand, was extremely desirous to command the head of the Adriatic; and his plenipotentiaries and the French general treated secretly for exchanging the islands and duchy of Venice for the fortress and province of Mantua.
In the meantime, the new position of matters altered Bonaparte’s views as to the organisation of upper Italy. The inhabitants of the Cispadane Republic, whose constitution, though framed, had never been formally approved, were easily induced to accept a plan submitted to them, for uniting all the free provinces of the north into one powerful state; and, on the 30th of June, 1797, was announced the formation of the new commonwealth, which was named the Cisalpine Republic. A proclamation, signed by Bonaparte, declared that the French Republic had succeeded by conquest to the possession of that Italian territory formerly held by the house of Austria and other powers; but that, relinquishing its claims, it pronounced the new state independent, and, convinced equally of the blessings of liberty and the horrors of revolution, bestowed upon it its own constitution, “the fruit of the experience of the most enlightened nation in the world.” The prescribed polity accordingly bestowed the right of citizenship on all men born and residing in the state (except beggars or vagabonds), who should have attained the age of twenty-one, and demanded inscription on the roll. The active franchise was vested in assemblies elective and primary, the executive in a directory of five members, and the making of the laws, with other deliberative functions, in a legislative body and council of ancients—all in close imitation of the French constitution of 1795. Napoleon, as usual, reserved to himself the power of naming, for the first time, the members of the Directory and of both councils. That the choice of these bodies, as well as of such functionaries as were to be appointed by them, would fall on persons zealous in the republican cause, was a thing unavoidable as well as proper; but it was universally admitted that the selection was, with very few exceptions, exceedingly judicious. The president and first director was the ex-duke Serbelloni, who did not long remain in active life; and three of the other directors, men both able and honest, were Alessandri a nobleman of Bergamo, Moscati a physician, and Paradisi a distinguished mathematician. Count Porro of Milan was minister of police; Luosi, a lawyer of Mirandola, was minister of justice; and the secretary of the Directory was Sommariva, a retired advocate of Lodi, who has since been so well known in Paris for his patronage of the fine arts. In the committee who framed the constitution, we find the names of Mascheroni the poet and man of science, and of Melzi d’Eril, whose talents, integrity, and independence were afterwards well proved in a higher sphere. Melzi was a noble Milanese of Spanish extraction, and uncle to Palafox, the defender of Saragossa.
The republic at first embraced the Austrian duchy of Milan, the Venetian provinces of Bergamo, Brescia, and Polesine, the Modenese principalities of Modena, Reggio, Mirandola, and Massa-Carrara, and the three papal legations of Ferrara. Bologna, and Romagna. In the following autumn the province of Mantua was incorporated with it. About the same time the Alpine district of the Valtelline, including Chiavenna and Bormio, was claimed as a dependency by the Grisons, but denied its subjection. Bonaparte, chosen arbiter, adjudged all the disputed territories to be independent, upon which their inhabitants offered themselves, and were received, as members of the Cisalpine Republic.
[1797-1798 A.D.]