[1815-1848 A.D.]
In the plenitude of his despotic authority, Napoleon had destroyed all the former order of things. He had trampled down the ancient republics, and obliterated even the names of the most time-honoured principalities. The queenly splendour of Venice had not saved the most glorious of republics from his iron grasp. Lucca had found no safety in those republican institutions, the origin of which is lost in the obscurity of remote antiquity. Imperial Rome herself had attracted no respect to the throne of the vicegerent of heaven upon earth. The pontiff, from whose hands Napoleon had received the chrism that gave him the sacred character of an anointed king, was carried away a prisoner under an escort of French dragoons.
No national government was left. In the worst days of foreign invasion the pontiff, with bitter truth, said to the doge of Venice, “There is nothing Italian left in Italy except my tiara and your ducal hat.” Under the dominion of Napoleon, both the tiara and the ducal hat were gone. The pope was a prisoner in France, and Venice was a province of the emperor’s Italian kingdom. The only remnant of Italian nationality—and, placed on the head of a stranger, it could scarcely be said to belong to Italy—was the Lombards’ iron crown. Such was the condition of Italy with which the sovereigns at Paris, and in the congress of Vienna, had to deal.[b]
[1815-1818 A.D.]
The restoration of the legitimate dynasties, partially effected in 1814, was completed the following year; and all the most important relations of the Italian states were fixed in the course of that period, by successive acts of the congress of Vienna.
The house of Austria received its ancient territories of the Milanese and Mantua; but to these were added Venice and all its mainland provinces, together with those districts which Napoleon had taken from the Grisons. In this manner, profiting by deeds of spoliation which he had professedly taken up arms to avenge, the emperor Francis became master of all Lombardy, as far westward as the Ticino, and as far south as the Po: and on the 7th of April, 1815, he proclaimed the erection of these territories, extending eastward to the mountains forming the right bank of the Isonzo, into a monarchical state called the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom.
The king of Sardinia [Victor Emmanuel I], who still retained his insular dominion, received back Piedmont and Savoy; while in addition to these, by a resolution which excited deep indignation in Italy, and was charged against the English government as a violation of express pledges, were given all the provinces of the Genoese Republic, which their new ruler erected into a duchy. The female line of the house of Este, represented by Francis, grandson of the last duke Ercole, and son of the archduke Ferdinand of Austria, received, as an independent ducal state, the principalities of Modena, Reggio, and Mirandola, to which Massa-Carrara was soon added.
Lucca, proclaimed a duchy, passed to the infanta Maria Louisa, formerly queen of Etruria: but, the court of Madrid having protested against the resolution which disallowed the claims of that princess to the principality of Parma, a new arrangement was concluded in 1817. By the original plan, Parma, with Piacenza and Guastalla, had been bestowed as an independent duchy on the ex-empress of the French, Marie Louise [Napoleon’s wife], with the remainder to her son, the young duke of Reichstadt: the subsequent treaty provided that, on the death of the former, the ex-queen of Etruria or her heirs should receive Parma and its annexed provinces, giving up Lucca to be incorporated into Tuscany.
The archduke Ferdinand returned to that Tuscan duchy which he had inherited from his father Leopold; and, besides the isle of Elba, and some trifling extensions of frontier, he now received uncontrolled possession of the garrison-state.
The pope was confirmed in his sovereignty over the states of the church as far north as the Po, and including the Neapolitan districts of Benevento and Pontecorvo; but his French provinces were not restored.