headstrong, passionate, and despotic, doing good to his subjects by
force, and punishing as ungrateful all who refused to be thus benefited,
Joseph was an unconscious instrument in the hand of providence for
advancing in southern Europe the great revolution of his time. One
inveterate evil was extirpated, that another might be substituted for
it, which, being less deeply rooted, was destined in its turn to wither
and die away. “At length,” said a noble-minded Italian in the last stage
of the emperor’s reign, “the obstacles which hindered the happiness
of nations have mainly disappeared. Over the greater part of Europe
despotism has banished feudal anarchy; and the manners and spirit of the
times have already weakened despotism.”
The reforms in the grand duchy of Tuscany went infinitely further than
those of Joseph and his mother in the provinces of the Po. They were
commenced during the life of Francis, by the prince of Craon, his viceroy
at Florence; and the plan was formed, even thus early, for consolidating
into one common code all those contradictory laws which, subsisting in
the old Tuscan communities, had been maintained since the subjection of
all to the duchy. But it was reserved for younger hands to construct this
noble edifice.
Till we reflect that Leopold’s scheme of legislation for Tuscany was
devised and executed long before that change of opinions which the
French Revolution diffused through the whole of Europe, we are not fully
aware how very far he stood in advance of his age. In his new code the
criminal section was especially bold, inasmuch as it swept away at once
torture, confiscation, secret trial, and even the punishment of death.
Imprisonment for debt, forbidden by one of his laws unless the claim
exceeded a certain amount, was afterwards abolished altogether. All
privileged jurisdictions were destroyed, and the public courts fortified
in their independence and authority. Restrictions on agriculture were
totally removed; and large tracts of common were brought into cultivation
by being divided among poor peasants in property, subject only to a small
crown-rent. The grand duke discontinued the ruinous system of farming
out the taxes; he diminished their amount, and abandoned most of the
government monopolies. Notwithstanding, he was able, before he left
Italy, to pay off the greater part of a large national debt; for, under
his new system, and especially through the absolute freedom which he
allowed to commerce, industry flourished so wonderfully, that his revenue
suffered hardly any diminution.
Leopold’s ecclesiastical reforms were equally daring, and gave deep
offence to the papal government. They were chiefly designed for improving
the condition of the parochial clergy, and for curbing the monastic
orders. He suppressed the Inquisition; he imposed severe limitations on
the profession of monks and nuns; he made the regular clergy dependent,
not merely (as his brother had done) on their bishop, but directly on
the priest of the parish; he taxed church-lands like those belonging to
laymen; he even seized arbitrarily several large estates which had been
destined to useless ecclesiastical purposes, and applied their proceeds
towards increasing the insufficient incomes of the priests in rural
parishes. This step, as well as several others, formed parts of his
great scheme against tithes, of which he gradually introduced a general
commutation.
In the system which this great man enforced there were unquestionably
many defects. There was something (though not much) of his brother’s
hasty disregard for obstacles arising from foreign quarters; a fault
which made his scheme for free trade in some respects injurious to
his subjects, and forced him in his later years to resume a few
restrictions. There was a disposition to overstrain the principles of
reform, manifested when he totally abolished trading corporations, or
when, in the last year of the period, he annulled at a blow all rights
of primogeniture, and all substitutions in succession to land. There
was a jealous watchfulness over details, a temper exceedingly useful
but very irritating, which displayed itself with equal force in the
severe system of police, and in the curious circular letter which he
addressed to the nobles, requesting that their ladies might be made to
dress more economically. There was some fickleness of purpose, though
much less than those have believed, who forget the existence of that
chaos of local laws and privileges, through which he had for years to
pilot his way, embarrassed, misled, and thwarted at every step. Lastly,
there were two absolute wants. Leopold did not, because in a single
generation he could not, renovate the heart and mind of his people; and
therefore the degenerate Florentines murmured at his strictness of rule,
and ridiculed his personal peculiarities. He did not give to his subjects
a representative constitution; and therefore his fabric of beneficent
legislation crumbled into fragments the moment his hand ceased to support
its weight.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF THE SIBYL, TIVOLI]
It is said, indeed, that he had sketched a constitution before he left
Tuscany; but, at all events, his reforms in the local administration
went very far towards this great end. His purpose, in which, as in so
much besides, he was obstructed by a multiplicity of special statutes
and customs, was to introduce over the duchy one uniform system of
municipal government, embracing all districts, rural as well as urban.
During his whole reign, step after step led him towards this result,
by organising new communal councils in various provinces, which had at
length comprehended nearly the whole state. At the same time there was
extended to the new boards the privilege conferred first on those in
the Florentine territory, of managing their local patrimony as of old,
without dependence upon the supreme government. The polity of Alessandro
de’ Medici, which still prevailed in Florence, was annulled in 1781; and
the elective board which administered the affairs of the city thenceforth
consisted of a gonfalonier, as president, eleven priors, and twenty
councillors.[f]
_A Tuscan Estimate of Leopold_
The reforms of Leopold I (Emperor Leopold II) did not suffice to drag
Tuscany from the abyss into which she had been cast by the _sbirocracy_
of the Medici. A fallen people would rise again to the enthusiasm of
grand ideas, but what grand idea did Leopold I place at the head of the
regenerative movement? He corrected clerical abuses, but did not enkindle
the religious faith of the people after the example of the ardent
preachers of the Crusades of the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century
reformers. He recognised equality in civil laws, but did not make a
social _credo_ of it like the French republicans.
Leopold’s idea was a paternal government, a sort of family council, where
the most touching accord would reign between the prince and the assembly
elected by the commons. He wanted to make another Arcadia of Tuscany,
an Arcadia simply occupied with its well-being and material progress,
foreign to the use of arms and neutral in all aspects of war. But this
was not the way to model character and make free citizens. The shock
given to Europe by the French Revolution and the results therefrom had
quite other effects. When Italy owed to the France of ’89 that moral
shock which stirred up men’s minds and made them enter into communication
with the universal conscience, it did not need more to convict of error
those who reproached the French Revolution with having upset the reforms
of Italian princes without any compensation. Abstention in this gigantic
struggle was impossible. It was imperative to fight either for the powers
of the past or for those of the future; so this worship of principles
became the great passion of souls, and character regained all its old
vigour. The Restoration came to check this salutary movement.
The sleeping _sbirocracy_ inaugurated by Fossombroni went back to
the Medici traditions and the meanness of the old régime was again
substituted for the moral and political grandeur of the French epoch.
But it was thenceforth impossible to stifle the germs of the new life.
We shall see these germs, in spite of most unfavourable conditions,
fructifying in Tuscany as in other parts of Italy; we shall see the
country of Michelangelo coming out of its abasement and paying the
Italian revolution the tribute of its genius, its love, and its blood.[g]
ITALY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY AGE
[Sidenote: [1790-1794 A.D.]]
For the sovereigns of Italy, as well as for the people, the first three
years of the revolutionary age formed a time of abortive plans and
earnest preparation.
Events of immediate interest cut short two visionary designs, of which,
although both must have failed of success, yet either, by the very
attempt, might have given another colour to the history of Europe. A few
aspiring cardinals, looking back to Gregory VII and Sixtus V, devised
an Italian league, to be headed by the pope; and at the court of Turin,
which took example from its own more recent annals, there was planned a
campaign against its Austrian neighbours. But Rome was destined to fall a
passive victim to foreign aggression; and the ambitious king of Sardinia
became the scapegoat of the prince whose Lombard crown he had wished to
transfer to his own brows.
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.
[Sidenote: [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.
_The Campaign of 1796 and its Consequences_
[Sidenote: [1796 A.D.]]
The Italians were soon to learn that their wishes and interests were
matters of as absolute indifference to those who now contended on their
soil, as they had been during the whole preceding course of their modern
history. Their future master, the French general Bonaparte, receiving
from the Directory the command of the army of Italy, avowed on quitting
Paris his determination to finish the war in a month by complete success
or utter defeat. That which seemed to others an idle bravado, suggested
by sudden elevation to a young and self-confident man, was, in the mind
of the speaker himself, a pledge to be literally fulfilled. He began his
attack on the 12th of April, 1796, and on the 15th of May he entered
Milan in triumph as the conqueror of all Lombardy and Piedmont.
This wonderful campaign embraced several of Napoleon’s most celebrated
victories. The battles of Montenotte, Millesimo, and Dego, fought on
three successive days in April, amidst the mountains which lie northwest
from Genoa, drove back into the plain Beaulieu’s Austrian army, and its
Piedmontese allies under Colli. Victor Amadeus, not less inconstant than
imprudent, deserted the contest in premature despair; and in May his
ambassadors at Paris signed a discreditable peace, by which he gave up
Savoy and Nice to the French Republic, admitted garrisons into some of
his fortresses, dismantled the rest, and paid heavy contributions to the
invaders. Bonaparte, pursuing the Austrians into Lombardy, intimidated
the duke of Parma into an armistice, which was purchased by a large
payment in money, and the surrender of twenty works of art, to be
selected by French commissioners, and placed in the museum at Paris. The
bloody passage of the bridge of Lodi, where Napoleon himself, with the
generals of his staff, charged in person up to the mouths of the enemy’s
guns, left the plain of the Po completely open to his armies, and kindled
among the young conqueror’s soldiers that devoted confidence which
bore them onward through years of victory. Milan received a provisional
government and national guard, but had to contribute heavily for the
support of the republican troops; and the duke of Modena, also, could
not obtain an armistice without furnishing liberal supplies, to which,
according to the rule thenceforth invariably followed by the invaders,
was added the surrender of the choicest pictures from his gallery.
Already feared as well as honoured abroad, General Bonaparte next
proceeded to intimidate the government at home. To Carnot’s order for
marching upon Rome and Naples with one division of the army, while
Kellermann, with another, should keep his hold of Lombardy, he replied
by transmitting his resignation, and denouncing the project as ruinous.
In the south, said he, there are no enemies worth conquering; the
possession of Italy must be contested with the Austrians, and the plains
of the Po ought to be the scene of the struggle. While he waited for the
answer to his bold remonstrance, the peasantry, excited by the priests
and some of the nobles, rose in several quarters against him. At Milan
the disturbance was easily quieted; but at Pavia it was not suppressed
till the town was taken by storm, and given up to be plundered by the
soldiery. This terrible example produced its effect; the Italians
trembled and submitted, and the French and Germans were left to fight
their battles undisturbed. Meanwhile, the Directory, aware, as their
general well knew, that they could not dispense with his services,
sent an approval of all his plans, and confirmed him in the undivided
command of the army, stipulating only that he should satisfy the honour
of France by humbling, in his own way, the pope and the king of Naples.
He received these instructions while occupying the line of the Adige;
and, after having distributed troops on different points in the north,
he himself prepared to march as far southwards as might be necessary for
frightening his adversaries in that quarter. Before he had time to cross
the Apennines, the king of Naples had lost heart, and made humiliating
submissions, concluding an armistice, afterwards changed into a treaty
of peace. The pope, left totally defenceless, and seeing the conqueror
holding Bologna in person, concluded a truce on harder terms than any
which had been yet exacted. The citadel of Ancona was to be given up
with all its stores; the French were also to retain possession of the
provinces of Bologna and Ferrara, where both the chief cities had
organised free governments for themselves; the papal treasury was to pay
large contributions in money and provisions; and Paris was to be adorned
by a hundred works of art, and five hundred manuscripts from the Vatican.
Having thus dealt with the enemies of the republic, Bonaparte next
proceeded to dispose of the grand duke of Tuscany, its earliest friend.
On a pretence that the neutrality had been violated, he seized the port
of Leghorn, confiscated the goods of English traders which lay there, and
attempted, though unsuccessfully, to capture their merchant-ships.
The wars of 1796 were not yet at an end. In September a second Austrian
army of sixty thousand men, under the veteran marshal Wurmser, marched
through the Tyrol; but his active adversary had already returned
northwards; and a campaign of six days in the neighbourhood of the Lake
of Garda, and along the valley of the Brenta, forced the shattered
remains of the imperial forces to take refuge in the strong fortress
of Mantua, which the French had already attacked, and now invested
anew. In November a third Austrian army, under Alvinzi, placed its
enemy in extreme peril; but the desperate battle of Arcola, fought near
Verona during three whole days, drove this host likewise back into the
mountains. The military events of the year were closed by the revolt of
the Corsicans against the English, after which the French envoy Saliceti
established in the island a provisional democratic government.
[Sidenote: [1796-1797 A.D.]]
But there were yet other tasks to be performed. The French had excited
in the minds of all the Italians wishes which it was very far from
easy to gratify. The Lombards demanded an independent and republican
organisation; but the Directory, anticipating the chances of war,
which might make it necessary to buy a peace with Austria, dared not
as yet to do more than throw out vague encouragements. The pope, whose
eastern provinces entertained similar desires, was not so dangerous;
and Bonaparte, without consulting his masters, freed them from any
embarrassment into which they might have been thrown by their recent
treaty with the duke of Modena. That prince’s capital was disaffected,
and Reggio had already openly revolted. Napoleon, professing to have
discovered that the duke had violated the neutrality, deposed his
administration, and declared the provinces free. By his instigation,
also, deputies from Bologna, Ferrara, Reggio, Mirandola, and Modena,
chosen respectively by the lawyers, landholders, and merchants, assembled
in the end of 1796, and erected the two papal legations with the Modenese
duchy into a commonwealth. This state, lying wholly between the Po and
Rome, was called the Cispadane Republic.
The contest among the foreigners for the soil of Italy was ended in the
spring of 1797. In January of that year, Alvinzi’s army, increased by
reinforcements to fifty thousand men, attacked that under Bonaparte,
amounting to about forty-five thousand, at Rivoli, between the river
Adige and the Lake of Garda. This bravely fought battle closed in the
total rout of the Austrians; and early next month, Wurmser, compelled by
disease and famine, surrendered Mantua. The last effort of the emperor,
who sent the archduke Charles across the northeastern frontier of
Italy, was as unfortunate as the preceding ones; the hereditary states
of Austria were invaded by the victorious general in person; and their
sovereign submitted in April, when the French army lay within twenty-five
leagues of Vienna.
But, before crossing the Alps, the young conqueror had humbled another
enemy. Pius VI, not altogether without provocation, had broken the
convention of Bologna, and raised troops to assist the emperor; upon
which, Bonaparte, after his victory over Alvinzi, marching rapidly
southward, overthrew the papal troops under Colli, and dictated at
Tolentino, in February, the terms of a humiliating peace. The pope
formally relinquished to the Cispadane Republic, not only the legation
of Bologna and Ferrara, already ceded, but the province of Romagna in
addition; he yielded to the French Republic his territories of Avignon
and the neighbouring Venaissin; he left Ancona in the hands of its
troops, till a general peace should be concluded; he engaged to pay large
contributions as the ransom of those other provinces which the enemy had
just seized; and he renewed the obligation to deliver manuscripts and
works of art, which accordingly were soon carried away.
The peace with the emperor was not arranged so easily. Its outlines
were contained in the preliminaries of Leoben, signed on the 18th of
April, 1797; and the main difficulties were obviated at the expense of
Venice, whose government, regarded with dislike by both parties, had
acted so as to forfeit all claims on the indulgence of the one, without
being able to earn much gratitude from the other. Besides yielding the
Austrian Netherlands and the frontier of the Rhine, Francis entirely
renounced his provinces in Lombardy, and agreed to acknowledge the new
Italian republics. In compensation for these sacrifices, he was to
receive, almost entire, the mainland provinces of Venice, including
Illyria, Istria, and upper Italy as far west as the Oglio; the districts
of Bergamo and Brescia, with the Polesine, all lying beyond that river,
being intended to form part of the Cispadane Republic. These Venetian
territories were already in revolt, and had declared themselves free
commonwealths, demanding protection from the French, who had excited
them to insurrection, and now coolly abandoned most of them to a new
master. For the injustice contemplated towards these unfortunate Lombards
no palliation could be offered, and none was ever attempted; but for
the wrong threatened to the Venetian Republic itself, pretexts speedily
presented themselves.
[Illustration: 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.
[Sidenote: [1797-1798 A.D.]]
The aristocracy of Genoa did not long survive that of Venice. Internal
factions were quieted by a convention in June, 1797, in which the
principle of democracy was recognised, and a provisional government
named by the French commander-in-chief. The defeated nobles, entering
into alliance with a few unscrupulous ministers of the church, were
able to convince the populace that their foreign friends wished to
destroy the ancient faith; and it is said that, for the benefit of
the better educated class, there was printed a falsified copy of the
proposed constitution, containing an article which declared the Catholic
religion to be abolished in the state. In September several thousand
armed peasants attacked the city, but were beaten with great slaughter
by General Duphot, at the head of the national guards and French troops;
and, on the 2nd of December, there was publicly laid before the people,
and approved, a constitution of the same sort as the Cisalpine, under
which the Genoese state was styled the Ligurian Republic.
The fate of Venice had been already settled. Its interests formed no
part of those difficulties which made the negotiations of the autumn so
stormy; and on the 17th of October, 1797, the treaty of Campo-Formio
established peace definitively between France and Austria, to which
latter the island-city was given up without reserve or conditions. The
fleets of the Directory seized the Ionian Islands, the Austrians occupied
the mainland, and on the 18th of January, 1798, the French troops,
in Venice since the preceding spring, evacuated it, and admitted the
soldiers of the emperor.
Though Pius VI still retained his western and southeastern provinces,
he was about to lose these also. His subjects were now universally
infected with the prevalent love of change; Urbino, Macerata, and other
places, repeatedly declared themselves republican and independent; and
the Directory watched but for a plausible pretence to strike the last
blow. In December, 1797, a quarrel between some of the French partisans
in Rome and the papal soldiery produced a riot, in the course of which
the democratic party fled for refuge to the Corsini palace, occupied
by Joseph Bonaparte, the ambassador of France. The military pursued
them, and in the confusion General Duphot was shot upon the staircase.
The Parisian government exclaimed against this violation of public
law, recapitulated all the offences already committed by the papal
court, refused to accept its apologies, and in February, 1798, an army
under Berthier occupied its capital. Their general demanded that the
pope should resign his temporal sovereignty, retaining his universal
bishopric, and receiving a large pension. Pius, obstinately refusing,
was carried into Tuscany, and thence into France, where he died. The
nobles and cardinals were plundered; and though the people at large were
better treated, yet, with the characteristic fickleness of their race,
they attempted in the Trastevere a revolt, which was not quelled without
much bloodshed. The French soldiers and subalterns themselves, not only
defrauded of their pay but disgusted by the rapine of the superior
officers and commissaries, mutinied both in Rome and Mantua; and General
Masséna, the worst offender, found it prudent to resign his command.
On the 20th of March, 1798, the constitution of the Roman or Tiberine
Republic was formally proclaimed. Like the rest, it was a servile copy
from that of the French, which, however, it was thought necessary in
this instance to disguise under classical names. The state was at first
composed of the Agro Romano, with the Patrimony (_Patrimonium Petri_),
Sabina, Umbria, the territories of Orvieto, Perugia, Macerata, Camerino,
and Fermo; but the March of Ancona, which had been temporarily formed
into a separate commonwealth, was soon added to it.
_The Expulsion of the French from Italy (1798-1799 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1798-1799 A.D.]]
The years 1798 and 1799 formed a strong contrast to those which
immediately preceded them. Within and without, in finance, in diplomacy,
and in war, France was alike unfortunate. In the beginning of this period
her champion Bonaparte sailed for Egypt with his Italian army; and the
fields where these brave men had gained their laurels were now to be
the scene of repeated and disastrous defeats, inflicted upon those who
attempted to retain their conquests.
[Illustration: THE FORUM, POMPEII, AT THE PRESENT TIME]
The French owed this result in some measure to their own misconduct;
for, little as the Italians were able to influence permanently the
destiny of their native land, the resentment which was kindled throughout
the country by the behaviour of the foreigners, aided materially in
precipitating their second change of masters. The policy pursued
systematically by the French Republic towards those new commonwealths,
which she professed to regard as her independent allies, would have been
insufferably irritating even though it had been administered by agents
prudent and honourable. Each state was obliged not only to receive a
large body of French soldiers, but to defray the expenses of their
subsistence. The Cisalpine Republic, by a treaty which its legislative
councils long refused to ratify, was compelled to admit an army of
twenty-five thousand men, and to pay annually for its support eighteen
millions of francs; even its own native troops were placed under the
command of the French generals; the members of its administration were
forcibly displaced if, like Moscati and Paradisi, they refused to obey
orders transmitted from Paris; and some of the most patriotic Lombards,
such as Baron Custodi and the poet Fantoni, were imprisoned for that
opposition which the foreign rulers called incivism. The constitution
itself soon gave way; for, on the last day of August, 1798, an irregular
meeting of the councils substituted for it a new one, dictated by Trouvé
the French envoy at Milan; and his plan again made room for other
changes, enforced by his successor the notorious Fouché, and by Fouché’s
successor Rivaud. The opposition party in Paris remonstrated in vain;
and the Lombards began to hate equally the French nation, and those of
themselves who were unfortunate enough to hold places of authority. A
few honest patriots, headed by General Lahoz of Mantua, and the Cremonese
Birago, who had been minister at war, organised a secret society for
establishing Italian independence; and in the Ligurian and Roman states a
similar spirit was rapidly spreading, although it worked less strongly.
There, indeed, the grievances were not of so outrageous a kind, and
consisted mainly in the extortions and oppressions practised incessantly
by the generals and agents of the Directory, than which no government on
earth had ever servants more shamefully dishonest.
But the French Republic, before losing its hold of Italy, had the
fortune for a short time to possess the whole peninsula. The sovereigns
of continental Europe, having lost sight of Napoleon, began to recover
courage; and no sooner did the intelligence arrive that Nelson had
destroyed the enemy’s fleet at Abukir, than a new league was formed,
in which Italy was made one of the principal objects. The first move
was made, imprudently and prematurely, by the king of Naples, or rather
by his queen and her advisers, who, raising an army of eighty thousand
men, invaded the Roman territories. In November, 1798, they seized the
capital, where their soldiers behaved with an insolent cruelty which
made the citizens, although heartily sick of the French, wish fervently
to have them back again. The Austrian general Mack, who had been placed
at the head of the Neapolitan troops, showed on a small scale that
incapacity which afterwards more signally disgraced him; his soldiers
were undisciplined, indolent, and lukewarm; and Championnet, reconquering
the papal provinces with a French army not half so large as that of his
adversary, pursued him southward, and, almost without striking a blow,
became master of the kingdom of Naples.
The only resistance really formidable was offered when the republican
troops approached the metropolis. The weak king had already fled,
and, embarking on board the English fleet, crossed into Sicily. The
peasantry hung on the rear of the invaders, and massacred stragglers;
and the _lazzaroni_, that wild race who formed in those days so large a
proportion of the populace, rose in fury on the report that a convention
was concluded by the governor Prince Pignatelli. The fierce rabble
filled the streets, howling acclamations to the king, the holy Catholic
faith, and their tutelary saint Januarius; they drove out the regency,
butchered the suspected democrats, and, with arms, though without either
discipline or officers, poured out to meet the enemy on the plains. The
French cannon mowed them down like grass; but for three whole days they
again and again returned to meet the charge, and several thousands of
them fell before they gave way. The wrecks of this irrationally brave
multitude next defended the city, which the assailants had to gain street
by street. Championnet, accompanied by Faypoult, the commissioner of the
Directory, took formal possession of Naples, divided all the mainland
provinces into departments, and formed them into one state, called the
Parthenopean Republic. A commission of citizens was appointed to prepare
a constitution, in which the chief part of the task was performed by
Mario Pagano. The plan which was finally approved was in substance the
same as the other Italian charters; but its author had added to the
ordinary features two original ones--a tribunal of five censors, whose
functions as correctors of vice were not likely to do much good, and an
ephorate or court of supreme revision for laws and magistracies, which
promised better fruits.
The nobles in the provinces were much divided in their opinions; but
many of them still fondly remembered the lessons which they had learned
from Filangieri and his scholars; and the middle classes, having yet
experienced no evils but those of absolute and feudal monarchy, listened
with eagerness to the promises held out by the republicans. In the huge
metropolis the adherents of the king were powerless; many were willing,
from the usual motives, to worship the rising sun; a few lettered
enthusiasts were sincere in their hopes of witnessing at length that
regeneration which their country so greatly needed; and the lazzaroni
themselves became submissive and well-disposed, as soon as the saints,
through the agency of their accredited servants, had declared in favour
of freedom and democracy.
Says Botta:[i] “Championnet understood perfectly the importance which
those fiery spirits attached to their religious belief. Accordingly he
placed a guard of honour at the church of St. Januarius, and sent to
those who had charge of it a polite message, intimating that he should
be particularly obliged if the saint would perform the usual miracle of
the liquefaction of his blood. The saint did perform the miracle; and
the lazzaroni hailed it with loud applause, exclaiming, that after all
it was not true that the French were a godless race, as the court had
wished them to think; and that now nothing should ever make them believe
but that it was the will of heaven that the French should possess Naples,
since in their presence the blood of the saint had melted.”
Piedmont had already fallen. Ginguené, who afterwards wrote the history
of Italian literature, had failed, as ambassador at Turin, in executing
with proper cunning the plans of Talleyrand; but his successor soon
contrived to irritate into open resistance the new prince Charles
Emmanuel, a weak, bigoted, conscientious man. General Joubert seized
the province and citadel of Turin; and the king, executing on the 9th
of December, 1798, a formal act of abdication of his sovereignty over
the mainland, was allowed to retire into Sardinia. The provisional
government named for Piedmont, among whom was the historian Botta, found
it impossible to rule the impoverished and distracted country; repose was
the universal wish, and a union with the all-powerful neighbour seemed
the only probable means of obtaining it. Early in the ensuing spring
Piedmont was organised on the model of the French Republic, as the last
step but one towards a final incorporation.
There remained to be destroyed no more than two of the old Italian
governments. In January, 1799, Lucca, then occupied by French troops
under General Miollis, abolished its oligarchy, and assumed a directorial
and democratic constitution, after the fashionable example. In March,
the Directory, now assured of a fresh war with Austria, seized all the
large towns in Tuscany, placed the duchy under the protection of a French
commissioner, and allowed the grand-duke Ferdinand to retire to Vienna
with a part of his personal property.
But a storm was now about to break upon the heads of the French in every
quarter of Italy; and the year 1799 became for the grim Suvaroff that
which 1796 had been for Bonaparte. In the end of March the Austrian
general Bellegarde crossed the Alps, beat back the republican forces in
the north, and joined the Russians, raising the allied army to a strength
of sixty thousand, while its opponents in the peninsula did not amount to
a third of the number. The gallant Moreau, the French commander-in-chief,
had the hard task of fighting for the honour of his nation without a
chance of victory; and Macdonald, the new commandant of Naples, was
ordered to cut his way to his superior through the whole length of Italy;
an undertaking which he accomplished with great loss but signal bravery.
The allies overran the Milanese and Piedmont; and the Directory sent two
new armies under Championnet and Joubert, both of which were defeated.
Most of those Italians who had taken a lead in the republican governments
fled into France, and those who remained behind were imprisoned and
otherwise punished. The peasantry in almost every province rose and aided
the allies. Naples was lost in June, and Rome immediately followed.
Ancona, desperately defended by General Monnier, capitulated in October;
and at the end of the year Masséna commanded, within the walls of Genoa,
besieged, famished, and about to surrender, the only French troops that
were left in Italy.
Although the military events of this year do not possess such importance
as to deserve minute recital, yet one chapter of its history, embracing
the horrible fate which befell Naples, is both painfully interesting in
itself, and strikingly illustrative of the disorganised state of society
in that quarter. The spectacle which was exhibited in the overgrown
metropolis of that kingdom was indeed so unlike anything we should expect
to witness in modern times that we endeavour to find a partial solution
of the problem in the moral and statistical position of the city. We can
find no parallel without reverting to the period of the Roman Empire.
The municipal constitution of Naples, whose main features have already
been incidentally described, was the model for all the cities in the
kingdom, except Aquila, whose polity was copied from Rome. Thefts
and robberies were rare, the homicides were estimated at about forty
annually, and some vices the government chose to overlook. The municipal
administration, with a jurisdiction extending only over the markets
and the university, belonged to the _eletti_ or representatives of
the _piazze_, _seggi_, or _sedili_, of which there were six, composed
exclusively of nobles. These patricians, meeting in open porticoes,
several of which may still be seen in ruins, chose annually deputies
in each piazza, and the deputies chose the _eletto_. A seventh piazza
was formed for the _popolo_ or plebeian burghers; but care was taken
that this class should have no real power. They were divided locally
into twenty-nine wards, for each of which the king every year named a
capitano; and the twenty-nine captains, who were held to compose the
piazza of the people, appointed as the _eletto del popolo_ a citizen, not
noble, suggested by the crown. The seven _eletti_, with a _syndic_ chosen
by the six noble _eletti_, formed the municipal council, and met twice
a week in a convent, from which the board derived its usual name of the
tribunal of San Lorenzo. Many functions of the municipality were devolved
upon nine deputations of citizens, chosen periodically by the patrician
_piazze_.
But of the _popolo_, a very large number, said to have amounted in the
end of the eighteenth century to thirty thousand or more, were known in
ordinary language by the name of _lazzari_ or _lazzaroni_. These were
the lowest of the inhabitants, including, of course, many who had no
honest means of livelihood, but consisting mainly of those who, though
they gained their bread by their labour, did not practise any sort of
skilled industry. Their distinctive character, as compared with the
populace of other great cities, lay in two points. First, the usual
cheapness of fruits and other vegetables enabled them to subsist on the
very smallest earnings; while the mildness of the climate made them,
during the greater part of the year, nearly independent both of clothing
and shelter. Accordingly, many of them were literally homeless, spending
the day in the streets as errand-porters, fruit-sellers, day-labourers,
or mere idlers, and sleeping by night on the steps of churches or
beneath archways; while all of them were for a great part of their time
unemployed. These circumstances produced their second peculiarity, that
strong spirit of union which had at one time extended to a regular
organisation. They were the only class in Italy whom the Spaniards
feared; the viceroys named them in their edicts with deference, and
received deputations from them to complain of grievances; and in the
seventeenth century they were even allowed to meet tumultuously once a
year in the piazza del Mercato, and name by acclamation their temporary
chief or _capo-lazzaro_. Since the accession of the Bourbons, it is true,
they were less closely banded together, and their custom of electing an
annual head seems to have fallen into disuse; but we have already seen,
and shall immediately discover still more dreadful proofs, that the
ancient temper was not yet extinct.
We cannot fail to be struck with the likeness which this unwieldy and
dangerous commonalty bore to the populace of imperial Rome; and the
system which was pursued for furnishing the city with provisions was
another point of close resemblance. During four hundred years every
conceivable plan for preventing scarcity by restrictive laws had been
tried without effect. An assize of bread and flour, fixed in 1401,
was followed in 1496 by the building of public magazines, in which
the _eletti_ kept a large stock of grain; and at the same time there
was established a strict monopoly in favour of a prescribed number of
flour-merchants and bakers. The municipality lost enormously by this
system; for dearths became frequent, and the corporation then, exactly
like the Roman senate and emperors, sold their corn at a heavy loss, and
lowered the price of the bread. Since 1764 the city had been supplied
by eighteen privileged bakers, by the macaroni-makers, and one or two
subordinate crafts; these tradesmen paid rent to the government for their
shops; and not only were they obliged to buy the greater part of their
flour from the public granaries, but had to deposit corn of their own
in large quantities, as a security for their engagements, being bound
likewise to purchase this grain from the distant provinces. In the year
1782 it was ascertained from official returns that, in the nineteen years
preceding, the corporation had lost 2,632,645 ducats, or about £436,000.
They had spent this money without earning so much as thanks; for there
was a general prejudice against their establishments, and, both at Naples
and at Palermo, where there was a similar system, more than two-thirds of
the people made their own bread at home, except when the price of grain
rose, on which everyone flocked to the public bakehouses.
Such was the scene, and such were the principal actors, in that fearful
tragedy of which we are now to be spectators.
Scarcely had the Parthenopean Republic been proclaimed when the ferocious
cardinal Ruffo landed at Reggio, bringing with him from Sicily a patent
as royal vicar. In Calabria, and the other southern provinces, he soon
organised numerous tumultuary hordes, several of whose captains were
the most practised robbers, a few bands being commanded by military
subalterns, and some by parish priests. Proni, one of the leaders,
was a convicted assassin; De’ Cesari was a notorious highwayman, as
was Michele Pezzo, better known by the name of Fra Diavolo, or Friar
Beelzebub; and Mammone Gaetano, a miller of Sora, was the worst monster
of all. The brigands crowded to serve under their favourite captains;
many old soldiers enlisted, and the peasants, aroused by their clergymen,
joined in thousands, and quickly learned the trade of murder. The French
despatched against them General Duhesme, who was accompanied by a young
Neapolitan, Ettore Caraffa, count of Ruvo, a man every way worthy to be
pitted against the cardinal and his associates. The two parties swept
over the kingdom like a plague, from Reggio to the mountains of the
ulterior Abruzzo; and the war, if it deserves the name, soon became on
both sides a struggle of revenge and extermination. Prisoners were put
to the torture; villages and towns were burned, and their inhabitants
massacred; Caraffa had the barbarous satisfaction of exterminating his
rebellious vassals; and Ruffo’s followers, enamoured of bloodshed and
pillage, speedily ceased to ask whether their victims were republicans or
royalists.
[Illustration: AN ITALIAN PEASANT WOMAN]
The cardinal, soon reducing the southern districts, advanced upon Naples;
and the French, unable to cope with him, evacuated the city, leaving
but weak garrisons in the three castles. The republican government lost
authority at once, and the legislative councils were insulted in their
halls by bands of armed ruffians. No plan of defence seems to have been
matured, although the leading men did all they could to inspirit the
people. In the theatres, which continued open, Alfieri’s tragedies were
received with shouts, and interrupted by vehement addresses from persons
in the crowd; friars preached freedom and resistance in the churches
and on the streets; and the superstitious _lazzaroni_ were for a time
kept in check, by seeing the saints anew manifest their favour to the
revolution.[22] The few native troops which still were under arms were
sent out and defeated in the plain; and, when the royalists approached,
abject terror alternated with the resolution of despair. Most members of
the councils and administration retired into the lower forts, the Castel
dell’Ovo and Castelnuovo.
There were in Naples about two thousand Calabrese, men of all ranks,
nobles, priests, and peasants, driven from their homes by Ruffo’s hordes.
They alone were firm. A part of them took up their post in the city;
the rest, unprovided with artillery, marched out and garrisoned the
castle of Viviena, beyond the bridge of the Maddalena. The royalists
surrounded them, their heavy guns battered down the walls of the fort,
and the assailants entered by storm. The republicans fought like hungry
tigers, not a man surrendered or fled; and, when all but a handful had
fallen, Antonio Toscani, a priest of Cosenza, who commanded this little
remnant, threw a match into the powder-magazine beside him, and perished
in the common destruction of friends and enemies. The streets were for a
time defended by the remaining Calabrese, while Prince Caraccioli, the
king’s admiral, who had joined the popular party, kept up a fire on the
royalists from a few small vessels in the harbour; but a body of the
_lazzaroni_ suddenly attacked the republicans in the rear, their ranks
were broken, and the city was lost. Ruffo took possession of it on the
14th of June, 1799.
Dark as are the crimes which stain the history of our race, humanity has
seldom been disgraced by scenes so horrible as those which followed.
Universal carnage was but one feature of the atrocity; the details are
sickening, many of them utterly unfit to be told. Some republicans were
strangled with designed protraction of agony; others were burned upon
slow fires; the infuriated murderers danced and yelled round the piles on
which their victims writhed; and it is even said that men were seen to
snatch the flesh from the ashes, and greedily devour it. The _lazzaroni_,
once more loyal subjects, eagerly assisted in hunting down the rebels;
during two whole days the massacre was uninterrupted, and death without
torture was accepted as mercy.
The two lower castles surrendered on a capitulation with the cardinal
which stipulated that the republicans should, at their choice, remain
unmolested in Naples or be conveyed to Toulon; and two prelates with two
noblemen, who were prisoners in the forts, were consigned to Colonel
Méjean, the French commandant of the Castel Sant’ Elmo, as hostages for
the performance of the convention. The last incidents of this bloody
tale cannot be told without extreme reluctance by any native of the
British Empire; for they stain deeply one of the brightest names in
the national history. While the persons protected by the treaty were
preparing to embark, the English fleet under Nelson arrived, bringing
the king, the minister Acton, and the ambassador Sir William Hamilton,
with his wife, who was at once the queen’s confidante and the evil
genius of the brave admiral. The French commandant, treacherous as well
as cowardly, surrendered the castle, and gave up the hostages without
making any conditions. The capitulation was declared null, although the
cardinal indignantly remonstrated, and retired from the royal service
on failing to procure its fulfilment. The republicans were searched for
and imprisoned; and arbitrary commissions sat to try them. Under the
sentences passed by such courts, in the metropolis and the provinces,
four thousand persons died by the hand of the executioner.
Among them were some whose names appeared with distinction on the file
of literature: Domenico Cirillo, the naturalist, who refused to beg his
life; the eloquent and philosophical Mario Pagano; Lorenzo Baffi, the
translator of some of the Herculanean manuscripts, who rejected poison
offered to him by his friends in prison; Conforti, a learned canonist,
and writer on ethics and history; Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, a woman of
much talent, who had edited a democratic newspaper. Mantonè, an artillery
officer, who had been the republican minister-at-war, made on his trial
no defence but this, “I have capitulated.” On board one of the ships was
executed the aged Admiral Caraccioli, with whose name we are but too well
acquainted. Another victim, the count of Ruvo, does not inspire so much
compassion, unless we are to believe, as his whole conduct leads one to
suspect, that he was absolutely insane. Being sentenced to be beheaded,
he insisted on dying with his eyes unbandaged, laid himself upon the
block with his face uppermost, and watched steadily the descending axe.
Superstitious folly closed scenes which had begun in treachery and
revenge. St. Januarius, for having wrought republican miracles, was
solemnly deposed by the _lazzaroni_, with the approval of the government;
and in his place was substituted, as patron of the city, St. Anthony of
Padua, who, through the agency of the church, had revealed a design said
to have been formed by the advocates of democracy, for hanging all the
loyal populace. The new protector, however, proved inefficient; and the
old one was soon reinstated.
_Bonaparte Reconquers Italy_
[Sidenote: [1799-1801 A.D.]]
The fortunes of France, sunk to the lowest ebb, were about to swell again
with a tide fuller than ever. While the restored sovereigns of Italy
were busied in reorganising their states and punishing their revolted
subjects, Paris saw the “heir of the Revolution” take possession of
his inheritance. Bonaparte, having returned from the East, was master
of France, and resolved to be master of Europe. He was nominated first
consul under the constitution called that of the year Eight, which was
proclaimed on the 26th day of December, 1799.
In May, 1800, the main body of the French army, led by Napoleon in
person, effected its celebrated passage of the Great St. Bernard. The
invaders, pouring from the highlands, overran Lombardy, and attacked
Piedmont. The Austrian general Melas, with forty thousand men, was
stationed near Alessandria, when the first consul, somewhat inferior in
strength, advanced against him; and on the 14th of June the two hosts
encountered each other on the bloody field of Marengo. In the evening,
when the French had all but lost the battle, Desaix came up and achieved
the victory at the cost of his life; the Austrians were signally
defeated, and the reconquest of Italy, so far as it was judged prudent
to attempt it, was already secured. Melas concluded an armistice which
gave the enemy possession of Genoa, Savona, and Urbino, with all the
strong places in Piedmont and Lombardy as far east as the Oglio. Napoleon
reorganised the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics, created a provisional
government in Piedmont, and returned to Paris.
Meanwhile, the old pope having died the preceding year, a conclave, which
opened at Venice in March, 1800, had raised to the papal chair Cardinal
Chiaramonti, a native of Cesena and bishop of Imola, who, since the
annexation of his see to the Cisalpine commonwealth, had favoured liberal
opinions in politics. He was allowed by all parties to return to Rome,
and assume the government of the provinces which had formed the Tiberine
Republic. The king of Naples was left unmolested, but Tuscany, at first
given up to the Austrians, was seized in a short time by the French.
The negotiations for a lasting peace proved abortive, and a new war
speedily commenced, which was chiefly waged on the northern side of
the Alps, and ended in December, 1800, with Moreau’s victory over the
Austrians at Hohenlinden. In the beginning of the following year, the
Peace of Lunéville restored matters in northern Italy nearly to the same
position which they had occupied under the Treaty of Campo-Formio; but
Tuscany was erected into the kingdom of Etruria, and given to Louis, son
of the duke of Parma, though the French were to retain Elba, Piombino,
and the coast-garrisons. The new king’s father (whose duchy was given to
France), and the grand duke of Tuscany, were to be compensated in Germany
for the loss of their Italian states. The king of Naples, after invading
the Roman provinces, and giving Murat the trouble of marching an army as
far as Foligno to meet him, abandoned his engagements with England, and
concluded an alliance with the French Republic.
Napoleon, restoring the Catholic religion in France, and endeavouring
to maintain a good understanding with the court of Rome, proceeded to
rearrange the republican states of Italy. According to his usual policy,
however, he tried to make all his changes appear to have proceeded from
the wish of the people themselves; and, through honest conviction in
many cases, and selfish subserviency in many more, he was easily able to
procure converts to his opinions.[f]
THE GROWING DESIRE FOR LIBERTY
If the great desire of Italy at the end of the eighteenth century was
incontestably to become a nation, a desire all the more ardent because
it was so recent, since it dated back only forty years, was she ready to
take action and undertake her own government? It is doubtful. Not that
the Italian middle-class educated in the school of French philosophers
and convinced of the principles of ’89 was not thenceforth capable to
assume the power, and even to obtain the adhesion of the rural masses to
the new ideas, in spite of their ignorance and submission to the clergy;
but because a nation cannot exist without a leader--and there was no
leader. Under the successive domination of so many foreign tyrannies,
all these noble towns, each of which had formerly been a small state
and had astonished the world with its magnificence, had fallen, one
after the other, to the rank of prefectures without moral authority
and without credit. As she had borne the burden of her cosmopolitism
for three centuries, Italy was now about to expiate, during a shorter
period, but still severely, this hatred of all concentration which
had been, since the fall of the Roman Empire, the strongest and most
constant of her passions. The municipal spirit of antiquity, which had
inspired all the towns of the peninsula during the whole of the Middle
Ages, had been, even more than the Catholic and universal spirit of
papacy, the rock on which the modern principle of national unity had
been wrecked. The Ghibellines had incarnated this principle in the house
of Hohenstaufen, and the Guelfs for many years in the house of Anjou,
but it had been overthrown in Italy at the very moment when it was
triumphing over all the rest of Europe. And hence it doubtless was that
arose the incomparable lustre of Italian civilisation at the dawn of the
Renaissance, that universal blossoming of literature and art even in the
most humble towns where there was then more intellectual culture than
in the greatest cities of Germany, of England, or even of France. But
from the same cause also arose that marvellous and fruitful intensity of
individual and municipal life, that phenomenon, almost unique in history,
of a nation repulsing the idea of unity, similar to a nebula refusing
to take form. The law of development carried into effect by the various
states of Latin Europe had been the successive agglomeration of all the
elements of the same or similar origin round a central nucleus, their
crystallisation round a concrete sovereignty, and if the expression may
be allowed, one soul in common. But Italy had systematically evaded this
law of centralisation, a law not only historical but physical, which in
politics as in nature is the indispensable condition of all progress.
She was therefore at the end of the fifteenth century the hydra with a
hundred heads. Then the hundred heads fell one after the other under the
blows of the great French, German, and Spanish invasions; the nation
itself had almost perished. And now that the nation had slowly formed
again she sought for a head in vain. If she wished to live, and she
wished it with invincible passion, she in turn must realise what all the
other nations of Europe had accomplished so many centuries ago, and,
forsaking her past, she must set to work to take a central sovereignty.
Nationality is unity, and unity can only be formed round a common
centre.[j]
FOOTNOTES
[21] Alcantarians, an order of Franciscan monks.
[22] “In the midst of this confusion, the customary annual procession of
St. Januarius took place. Before it began, the democratic leaders sent
to the keepers of the church, desiring them to pray heartily that the
saint might perform the miracle. The keepers did pray heartily, and the
blood bubbled up in less than two minutes. The lazzaroni shouted that St.
Januarius had become a republican.”--BOTTA.[i]
[Illustration]