[Sidenote: [1801-1815 A.D.]]
The mind of Bonaparte was capable of exercising the most contrary
qualities in the prosecution of his designs. Having reconciled himself to
the pope, defeated Austria, and deluded Alexander, being also confident
of peace with England, he applied himself to bringing into effect that
which he had so long conceived in his own mind, and had so pertinaciously
pursued. He was anxious that the first impulse should come from Italy,
fearing that a certain residuum of republican opinions in France might
prove a bad consequence, if the way were not smoothed for his design by
some exciting precedent. Thus, having conquered Italy by the arms of
France, he sought to vanquish France by the obsequious concessions of
Italy.
His Italian machinations were opened with imposing effect; and
in Lombardy his most devoted adherents were artfully employed in
disseminating the idea of the insecurity arising to the Cisalpine
Republic from the temporary nature of its government.
[Sidenote: [1801-1802 A.D.]]
Whilst these ideas were disseminated amongst the people, Petiet
negotiated with the chiefs of the republic, in order that the imperative
commands of the consul might appear to be the desires and the spontaneous
supplications of the nation. When the consultations were concluded at
Paris for the design, and at Milan for its execution, a decree was issued
by the legislative council of the Cisalpine Republic, commanding an
extraordinary _consulto_ to proceed to Lyons, in order there to frame the
fundamental laws of the state, and to give information to the consul.[b]
In December, 1801, at Lyons, a deputation of four hundred and fifty
citizens, from the Cisalpine Republic, offered to Napoleon, then first
consul, the presidency of their government for a term of years. He
accepted the gift, and in January, 1802, with the assent of the deputies,
promulgated a constitution for their state, which was now named the
Italian Republic. In June following, the Ligurian Republic likewise
accepted an altered charter, which received modifications in December.
The Piedmontese, wearied of anarchy and of their despot, General Menou,
consented, for the second time, that their country should be made a
province of France; and the formal annexation took place in September of
the same year.
[Illustration: PIAZZA DELLA COLLEGIATE]
The gradual changes of view in Bonaparte and his countrymen are
curiously illustrated by the successive constitutions which their
influence established in Italy. In 1802, at home as well as abroad, they
were immeasurably distant from the universal citizenship and primary
assemblies of 1793; southern polity differed in several prominent
points from that which had been imposed on their own country. It is
best exemplified by the constitution of the Italian Republic, which was
closely copied in the Ligurian; and these charters were considered at the
time, not without probability, as experiments by which, as we have said,
the first consul tried the temper of his future subjects on his own side
of the Alps. In the first place, this system boldly shook off democracy;
for the citizens at large were disfranchised, not indeed in words, but
in reality: a step which had not been fully taken in France, even by
Bonaparte’s consular constitution. Next, the Italian acts divided among
the colleges, or bodies of the middle and upper classes (boards elected
with something like freedom of choice), most of those functions which in
Paris were committed to the consul’s favourite tool, the self-appointed
senate. Lastly, the mass of the people being thus disarmed, and the
educated leaders lulled into acquiescence, the president of the state
received a power far beyond even that which he exercised over his French
fellow-citizens.
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE REPUBLIC
The details of the constitution given to the Italian Republic are
historically curious, in relation both to what went before and to what
followed.
It at once narrowed the franchise, declaring citizenship to be dependent
on a property-qualification, which was to be fixed by the legislature;
but this right carried, by itself, not a particle of political power.
The elective functions were vested exclusively in three colleges and a
board of censors, which were to be convoked once at least in two years,
for short sessions. The college of the _possidenti_ or landholders was
composed of three hundred citizens, rated for the land-tax on property
worth not less than 6,000 Milanese livres, or about £170. It was
self-elected, and met at Milan. The college of the _dotti_ or savants
contained two hundred citizens, eminent in art, theology, ethics,
jurisprudence, physics, or political science. It sat at Bologna. The
college of the _commercianti_ or merchants consisted of two hundred
citizens, elected by the board itself from among the most distinguished
mercantile men or manufacturers. Its seat was Brescia. Members of all
the colleges held their places for life. The censors were a committee
of twenty-one named by the colleges at every sitting. This commission,
assembling at Cremona, nominated the council of state, the legislative
body, the courts of revision and cassation, and the commissaries of
finance, all from lists submitted by the colleges. It was likewise
authorised to impeach public servants for malversation in office.
[Sidenote: [1802-1804 A.D.]]
The administration was vested in a president (who could name a
vice-president), a council of state, a cabinet of ministers, and a
legislative council. The president was elected by the first of these
bodies, and held his office for ten years. He possessed the initiative in
all laws, and in all diplomatic business, and also the whole executive
power, to be exercised through the ministry.
The council of state was particularly designed for advising in foreign
affairs, and for sanctioning by its decrees all extraordinary measures of
the president. The ministers lay under a broad personal responsibility,
both for acts and omissions. The legislative council, chosen, like the
ministry, by the president, had a deliberative voice in all drafts of
law; and the preparation and carrying through of bills were to be mainly
intrusted to it.
The legislative body, which possessed the functions indicated by its
name, consisted of seventy-five members, one-third of whom were to go out
every two years. It was to be convoked and prorogued by the government;
but its sittings were to last not less than two months in every year.
The Catholic clergy were recognised as the ministers of the national
church, and as entitled to possess the ecclesiastical revenues. The
administration named the bishops, who again appointed the parish priests,
subject to the approval of the government. An unqualified toleration was
promised to all other creeds.
The tenor of this charter, and the position which Napoleon held in virtue
of it, made it more natural than usual that he should, as his countrymen
had invariably done in similar cases, nominate for the first time all the
members of the government. The choice was in general wise and popular.
Melzi d’Eril was vice-president.
Under this new order of things, while the Neapolitan government ruled
with jealousy and little wisdom, and the court of Rome with kindness but
feebly, the remainder of the peninsula was subject, either in reality or
both in reality and in name, to the French Republic. Sustained by foreign
influence, the northern and central regions of Italy began to enjoy a
prosperity and quiet to which for years they had been strangers. The new
commonwealths were as far as ever from being nationally independent; some
parts of the country were avowedly provinces of France; and everywhere
the political privileges of individuals had, as we have seen, shrunk
far within the limits to which they had stretched immediately after the
Revolution. But the absence of national independence, although a great
evil, was counterbalanced by many advantages; and the curtailment of
public rights, as bitter experience had proved, was a blessing both to
the state and to its citizens.
NAPOLEON MAKES ITALY A KINGDOM
[Sidenote: [1804-1805 A.D.]]
On the 18th day of May, 1804, the senate declared Napoleon emperor of the
French, “through the grace of God and the principles of the republic.”
The pope, after much hesitation, consented to bestow on the new empire
the sanction of the church; and accordingly, journeying to Paris in the
dead of winter, he officiated at the coronation in Notre Dame.
The Italians could not reasonably expect that they should be allowed to
stand solitary exceptions to the new system of their master; and the
principal citizens in Lombardy were speedily prepared, by arguments or
inducements suited to the occasion, for taking such steps as should place
them, with an appearance of voluntary submission, under the monarchical
polity. The vice-president Melzi was sent to Paris at the head of a
deputation from the Italian Republic. In March, 1805, these envoys
waited on the emperor, and presented to him an instrument purporting to
contain the unanimous resolution of the constituted authorities of the
state, whereby they offered to him and his male descendants, legitimate,
natural, or adopted, the crown of their republic, which they consented
should be transformed into “the kingdom of Italy.” The resolutions were
immediately embodied in a constitutional statute, by which Napoleon
accepted the sovereignty, but pledged himself to resign it in favour
of one who should be born or adopted his son, as soon as Naples, the
Ionian Isles, and Malta should be evacuated by all foreign troops. In
April the emperor-king passed through Piedmont in triumph, and on the
26th of May his coronation was performed in the cathedral of Milan. The
archbishop of the see, Cardinal Caprara, who had been his principal
assistant in negotiating with the pope, attended at the ceremony, and was
allowed to consecrate the insignia; but the “iron crown” of Lombardy, the
distinctive symbol of royal power, was, like the diadem of France, placed
on Napoleon’s head by his own hand.
“This part of the ceremonial,” says Denina,[c] “differed from the
ancient usage. It left no room for supposing that the crowned monarch
acknowledged himself to derive from any other than God, or the power
which by the divine will he held in his hands, that proud ensign of
sovereignty, of which he thus publicly took possession.”
He did not leave the peninsula till he had not only organised the
government and constitution of his own kingdom of Italy, but completed
material changes on the adjacent states. Before the coronation, the
doge and senate of Genoa, warned that the independence of the Ligurian
Republic could not be guaranteed, and jealously averse, it is said, to a
union with the new kingdom, petitioned for annexation to France. Their
lord condescendingly granted the prayer which he had himself dictated;
and the formal incorporation was completed in October, 1805. In March
of the same year, the principality of Piombino had been given to his
sister Elisa Bonaparte, as a fief of the French Empire; and in July
the territories belonging to the republic of Lucca were erected into
another principality for her husband, Pasquale Bacciocchi. The only
parts of upper Italy that remained unappropriated were the provinces of
the ex-duke of Parma, which, though occupied by the French, were not
formally incorporated either with the empire or the kingdom of Italy. The
viceroyalty of the latter was conferred on Eugène Beauharnais, the son of
the empress Josephine. None of the great powers in Europe acknowledged
the new kingdom, and indeed none of them was asked to do so.
[Sidenote: [1805-1808 A.D.]]
The legitimate sovereigns did not leave their plebeian brother to enjoy
unmolested so much as the first year of his reign. An invasion of
Italy under the archduke Charles ended in the defeat of the Austrians
by Masséna upon the Adige; and in December, 1805, the great battle of
Austerlitz forced the emperor Francis to conclude the unfavourable
Treaty of Presburg. In respect to the Italian peninsula, he acknowledged
Napoleon’s kingly title, and acquiesced in all his other arrangements;
but, further, he was compelled to surrender Venice with its provinces
as he had received them at the Peace of Campo-Formio, consenting that
they should be united with the kingdom of Italy. In January, 1806, the
island-city was occupied by French troops under General Miollis.
Napoleon seized the opportunity of the new acquisition, for founding
that hereditary noblesse with Italian titles, whose ranks were speedily
filled by his most useful servants, civil as well as military. There
were specified certain districts which the emperor reserved the right
of erecting into dukedoms, appropriating to their titular possessors a
fifteenth part of the revenues derived from the provinces in which they
lay, and setting aside for the same purpose the price of large tracts of
national lands. In Parma and Piacenza were to be three of these fiefs--in
Naples, recently conquered, six--and in the Venetian provinces twelve,
among which were Dalmatia, Treviso, Bassano, Vicenza, Rovigno, and other
demesnes whose titles acquired a new interest from the celebrity of the
men who bore them. Two other dukedoms, conferred respectively on Marshal
Bernadotte and the minister Talleyrand, were formed from the papal
districts of Pontecorvo and Benevento. The emperor of the French, now
lord paramount of the kingdom enclosing these territories, seized them
without troubling himself to invent any pretext; coolly assuring the pope
that the loss would be compensated afterwards, but that the nature of
the indemnification would materially depend upon the holy father’s good
behaviour.
THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES AND THE PAPACY
The king of Naples, lately the abject vassal of the French, had allowed
a body of Russians and English to land without resistance. Cardinal
Ruffo, who resented the tragedy of 1799, and despised the intriguing of
Acton, was sent to deprecate the conqueror’s wrath, but returned home a
confirmed Bonapartist; and Napoleon, who wanted a throne for one of his
brothers, proclaimed to his soldiers that the dynasty of the Bourbons
in lower Italy had ceased to reign. His army crossed the frontier in
January, 1806, upon which the king fled to Sicily; his haughty wife
lingered to the last moment, and then reluctantly followed. Joseph
Bonaparte, meeting no resistance except from the foreigners who composed
the garrison of Gaeta, entered the metropolis early in February, and,
after quietly hearing mass said by Ruffo in the church of St. Januarius,
was proclaimed king of Naples and Sicily. After some fighting, chiefly
in Calabria, the whole country within the Faro of Messina submitted
to its new sovereign, although in several districts the allegiance
was but nominal. In the following summer Sir Sidney Smith took Capri,
and prevailed on Sir John Stuart to land in the Calabrian Gulf of St.
Eufemia; but the only result was the brilliant victory gained by the
British regiments over the French at Maida. The royalist partisans
disgraced their cause by cruelties which no exertions of the English
officers were able to stop; and, after the enemy had increased materially
in strength, the expedition was compelled to return to Sicily.
During that year Napoleon was occupied with the war against Prussia,
which was terminated by the battle of Jena; and in 1807 he had commenced
his system of intrigue in Spain, the first fruit of which was another
appropriation in Italy. The widowed queen of Etruria, who acted as regent
for her son Charles Louis, was unceremoniously ejected from his states,
which in May, 1808, were formed into three departments of France, while
the princess of Piombino was established at Florence with the title
of grand duchess of Tuscany. About the same time--upon the proposal
or pretext that the Bourbons of Parma should be made sovereigns of
Portugal--their duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla were finally
annexed to France.
[Sidenote: [1808-1811 A.D.]]
The principal event of that year was the opening campaign of the French
in Spain and Portugal. The schemes of the military autocrat in that
quarter, destined to be the first step in his road to destruction, led
him to recall his brother Joseph from the throne of Naples, which, on
his leaving Italy for Madrid, was bestowed on Joachim Murat, grand
duke of Berg and Cleves, one of the emperor’s bravest generals, and
husband of his sister Caroline. The new king’s only title was an edict
issued by Napoleon at Bayonne, on the 15th of July, 1808, in which he
announces that he has granted to Joachim the throne of Naples and Sicily,
vacant by the accession of Joseph to that of Spain and the Indies.
The showy and gallant soldier began his reign by driving Sir Hudson
Lowe out of the island of Capri;[23] and when the Carbonari, a sect of
republicans recently organised, had co-operated with the royalists in
raising disturbances throughout Calabria, he sent into the province
his countryman, General Manhés, recommended for such service by having
previously pacified, or depopulated, the Abruzzi. The envoy, executing
his commission with heartless severity, made that secluded region orderly
and peaceful, for the first time perhaps in its modern history.
The next year overturned the papal throne. The turmoil which the
Revolution raised in the Gallican church had been quieted by the
concordat of 1801; but a code of regulations issued by the first consul
for carrying the principles of that compact into effect in France, and
a decree issued by the vice-president Melzi for the same purpose in
Lombardy, had been both disavowed by Pius as unauthorised by him, and as
contrary not only to the spirit of the concordat, but to the principles
of the church of Rome. The reconciliation which ensued was but hollow;
and Napoleon determined that his dominion over Italy, now extending
from one end of the peninsula to the other, should not be defied; and
the papal state was openly claimed as a fief held under Napoleon, the
successor of Charlemagne. The remonstrances of Pius on ecclesiastical
matters, indeed, were urged in a tone that could not have failed to
irritate a temper like that of the emperor.
In January, 1808, as is more fully described in the history of France,
seven thousand soldiers under Miollis, professing to march for Naples,
turned aside and seized Rome; and in April an imperial decree, founding
its reasons on the pope’s refusal of the alliance, on the danger of
leaving an unfriendly power to cut off communication in the midst
of Italy, and on the paramount sovereignty of Charlemagne, annexed
irrevocably to the kingdom of Italy the four papal provinces of Ancona,
Urbino, Macerata, and Camerino.
In May, 1809, Napoleon dated from the palace of Schönbrunn at Vienna a
decree which annexed to the French Empire those provinces of the papal
state which had not been already seized. The pope was to receive an
annuity of two millions of francs, and to confine his attention to the
proper duties of his episcopal office. Pius issued a very firm manifesto,
went through the form of excommunicating Napoleon and all ecclesiastics
who should obey him. On the night between the 5th and 6th of July, the
French soldiers and the police broke into his apartments, and seized his
person. He was transported into France, and thence back to Savona, where
he was kept a close prisoner till 1811. In June, 1810, the kingdom of
Italy received its last accession of territory, the southern or Italian
Tyrol being then incorporated with it.
[Sidenote: [1810-1814 A.D.]]
It appears, as the result of the events which have now been summarily
related, that, from the middle of 1810 till the fall of Napoleon in 1814,
the political divisions of Italy were the following:
The mainland was divided into four sections, or, more properly, into
three, since Lucca falls really under the first. (1) A large proportion
of it had been incorporated with France, whose territories on the western
coast now stretched southward to the frontier of Naples. These Italian
provinces of the French Empire lay chiefly on the western side of the
Apennine, where they included the following districts--Nice, with Savoy,
since 1792; Piedmont, since 1802; Genoa, since 1805; Tuscany, since 1808;
and the western provinces of the Roman see, since 1809. On the northeast
of the mountain chain, France had only Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla,
which were annexed to it in 1808. Within the Neapolitan frontier it
had the duchies of Benevento and Pontecorvo. (2) On the western side
of the mountains, the imperial territory was interrupted by the little
independent principality comprehending Lucca and Massa-Carrara. This
petty state, however, was possessed by members of the emperor’s family,
and was practically one of his French provinces. (3) Central and eastern
Lombardy, with some districts of the Alps, and a part of the peninsula
proper, composed the kingdom of Italy, of which Napoleon wore the crown.
Its territories comprehended, first, the whole of Austrian Lombardy;
secondly, the Valtelline, with Chiavenna and Bormio; thirdly, Venice and
its mainland provinces, from the Oglio on the west to the Isonzo, which
had been latterly fixed as the eastern frontier; fourthly, that part of
the Tyrol which forms the valley of the Adige; fifthly, the territories
of the dukes of Modena and Reggio, except Massa-Carrara; sixthly, the
papal provinces of Ferrara, Bologna, and Romagna, of Urbino, Macerata,
Camerino, and Ancona. (4) The kingdom of Naples consisted of the same
provinces on the mainland which had been governed by the Bourbons; and
since the year 1806, it had been ruled by sovereigns belonging to the
imperial family of France. The legitimate monarchs still possessed the
two great islands--the ex-king of Naples holding Sicily, the king of
Sardinia the isle which gave him his title.
[Sidenote: [1806-1814 A.D.]]
To the Neapolitan[24] as well as the papal states, no change of masters
or of polity could at the time of the Revolution have been an evil; the
Venetian provinces, likewise, were then ill-governed and oppressed;
upon Lombardy, the leaden hand of Austria had again begun to lie heavy;
and in Tuscany itself there was much that required amendment, both in
the character of the new rulers and in that of the people. The spirit
of local jealousy, too, and the total want of military spirit not less
than of national pride, were things that the Revolution aided powerfully
in rooting out, although the Italians paid dearly for the benefit. The
resources of the country, in agriculture and in manufactures, were
developed with a success which nothing in its modern history had yet
paralleled; and the prosperity was checked only, and driven into new
channels, by that unwise and revengeful policy by which Napoleon for
years, beginning with the Berlin decree of 1806, attempted to place the
British Empire and its colonies in a state of blockade.
Even that arbitrary temper which, in the later years of his reign,
converted his rule into an unmixed despotism, was never shown on the
south of the Alps with the same fierceness which it assumed in the
other provinces of his kingdom. In his secret soul, Napoleon Bonaparte
was proud of that southern pedigree which, by every artifice down to
the petty trick of misspelling his family name, he strove to make his
transalpine subjects forget; himself an Italian in feeling, much rather
than a Frenchman, he understood and sympathised with the character of his
countrymen, in its weakness as well as in its strength, in its capacities
for improvement as well as in its symptoms of decay; he flattered the
populace, he breathed his own fiery spirit into the army, he honoured the
learned and scientific, he employed and trusted those intelligent men
who panted for a field of political action. He taught the people to feel
themselves a mighty nation; and those whom he so ennobled have not yet
forgotten their stern benefactor. If Napoleon chastised Italy with whips,
he chastised France with scorpions; and the one region not less than the
other has profited by the wholesome discipline.
After the fall of the popedom, an attempt was made to give unity and a
show of independence to the Italian provinces of the empire, by uniting
them into one general government, the administration of which, conferred
at first on Louis Bonaparte, was afterwards given to the prince Borghese,
the head of a noble Roman family of the first rank, who had married
Pauline, one of the emperor’s sisters. The French scheme of taxation was
introduced, with very slight modifications; and in 1812, the Italian
provinces (excluding Nice) yielded to the exchequer fully half as much
as was contributed by all the other territories lately added to the
empire, including as these did some of the richest commercial cities
in Europe. The gross sum raised by taxes of all kinds during that year
was 95,712,349 francs, or nearly four millions sterling, which gave
62,644,560 francs as the net return to the treasury; and it is worthy of
notice, likewise, that the cost of collection here was considerably less,
in proportion, than in the other recent acquisitions. The revenue was
liberally spent in organising efficient courts of law (whose text-book
was of course the Code Napoléon), in executing works of usefulness
as well as pomp, such as roads, bridges, and public buildings, in
investigating the antiquities of Rome and other places, and in advancing
arts and manufactures, by premiums and similar encouragements.
Arbitrary as was his method of imposing the new law-book, nothing which
Napoleon did for Italy was half so distinguished a benefit. Another
importation from France was the military conscription, which, in some
particulars advantageous, was in most respects a severe evil. The annual
levies ordered during the six years which ended with 1814, amounted in
all to ninety-eight thousand men, rising from six thousand in 1806, to
fifteen thousand, which was the demand during each of the last four
years; but only a portion of these troops were ever called into active
service. Still the emperor’s foreign wars, especially those in Spain and
Russia, cost to his Cisalpine provinces the lives of thousands. That
restoration of hereditary aristocracy which was effected in France, took
place in Italy likewise, by a decree of 1808, bestowing on the sovereign
the power of conferring titles, and allowing the nobles so created to
institute majorats, or devises of lands in favour of their eldest sons,
or others whom they might select to transmit their honours.
We have yet to survey the finances of the kingdom, that branch of its
polity which, in both its departments, the receipt and the expenditure,
has been more loudly blamed than any other. Part of the censure is
fully deserved; but very much of it is overcharged, and not a little is
utterly unfounded. Two heavy faults pervaded the whole system: first,
that multiplication of taxes, both in number and amount, which Napoleon,
constantly immersed in foreign wars, imposed with a more direct view to
the filling of his own exchequer than to the comfort or prosperity of his
subjects; secondly, that dependent situation of Lombardy which caused her
interests to be sacrificed in several instances to those of France.
THE ISLANDS OF SICILY AND SARDINIA
[Sidenote: [1801-1814 A.D.]]
In the meantime, while the whole peninsula was subject to the French
emperor, or to his vassal-princes, the English had preserved Sicily for
King Ferdinand.
When the court first removed to that island, the discontent of the lower
orders was general; and on its breaking out into violence at Messina
and elsewhere, the marquis Artali subdued the spirit of the people by
cruelties which no remonstrances of the British could stop. The British,
indeed, were not popular; and they soon lost the favour of the imperious
queen, who entered into secret dealings with Napoleon. The reckless
extravagance of the court, rendering necessary an excessive taxation,
completed the disgust of the nation; and the barons, in their parliament
of 1810, besides protecting themselves and others by refusing the
supplies, except on conditions which made the collection of them all but
impossible, voluntarily aided the popular cause, by abolishing many of
their own feudal privileges.
Matters were coming to a bloody crisis, when Lord William Bentinck,
the new ambassador at Palermo, executed the resolutions of the English
government. The queen was forced to consent that her husband should
resign his power to his son, as vicar or regent, while Bentinck was named
captain-general of Sicily. Parliament was summoned in 1812, and framed a
charter which, after violent resistance from Caroline, was ratified by
the prince-vicar.
The history of Sardinia, during the French reign on the mainland,
possesses neither interest nor importance enough to detain us long. Its
king, Charles Emmanuel, weary of the world, abdicated in 1802 and retired
to Rome, where he lived many years in devotional exercises, receiving a
pension from Napoleon on his seizure of the city, and becoming a Jesuit
when that order was restored. His brother and successor, Victor Emmanuel,
held his island-crown by the same tenure as his Sicilian neighbour, or,
in other words, by the protection of the English fleet.[d]
THE RISE OF NATIONAL SPIRIT
When Francis II of Austria renounced the imperial German crown on the
6th of August, 1806, Austria seems to have renounced its authority
over Italy, though that country had hitherto found its main support in
Austrian rule. In all encroachments of Austria in Italy, outside of its
own province, the Italians later took it as a precedent that in 1806
Austria of itself renounced the ancient rights of the Holy Roman Empire.
The political convictions had for long been blunted, the political
passions concerning the contributions and frauds of French proconsuls
and their tools subsided as the fire of a burnt-out house. The more
dangerous Italians were made barons and counts, and Melzi, prominent for
his character and intellect, had been made a duke. The rage which still
smouldered in individuals over the degradation of Italy is shown in the
writings of Count Alfieri, who was born in Piedmont, 1743, and died at
Florence, 1804; and of Niccolo Ugo Foscolo, born of a Greek mother, in
Venice, 1772, and deceased in London, 1827. While far from stainless
themselves, these men were panegyrists of patriotic celibacy and suicide,
and possessed a sort of volcanic genius, that urged them on to write
something great. Classic antiquity, stalking about in a phenomenally
high cothurnus, was their religion. Alfieri declared that the papacy
was irreconcilable with the freedom of Italy; both writers arrived at
a certain desperate calm out of sheer admiration for England. To teach
the Italian people to feel their political misfortune was their mission,
and in its performance they remained the grand-masters of the desperate
party. Some of the youth of Italy ignited their negative patriotism,
their hatred of the tyrant and disdain of the lower classes at the fire
of these doctrines; but for all their straining after effect both poets
possessed more genuine patriotic passion than was ever evinced by their
imitators, and were heroes of patriotic virtue compared to many who
coldly traded on the passions of others.
[Illustration: ALFIERI]
A lasting after-effect of the republic was the complete abolition of
feudal rights, which gave the Lombard and Venetian nobles a position of
singular freedom.
[Sidenote: [1805-1806 A.D.]]
In 1805, as we have seen, Napoleon appointed Eugène Beauharnais, son of
Josephine, viceroy; later he made him his successor in the kingdom of
Italy, with the order to govern it after the simple system: “The emperor
wills it!” The new ruler himself wrote to Napoleon that the kingdom
of Italy would pay 30,000,000 francs to France yearly. Eugène married
the daughter of King Max of Bavaria, with whom he shared Tyrol in the
division suggested by their nationality.
Two days after the wedding, the 16th of January, 1806, Napoleon adopted
Eugène. Ancona and all Venice being now added to it, the “kingdom
of Italy” numbered 6,500,000 souls to 1,530 square miles. Even the
courts, or rather their counsellors, worthy of the necessities of the
time, observed that from the union of all these fragments the idea of
nationality was slowly arising.
[Sidenote: [1806-1813 A.D.]]
Balbo[e] says of this time: “It was vassalage, no doubt; but a vassalage
that shared the pride, the joys, the triumphs of the ruler. It was a
time of universal self-respect, and from it dates the first utterance by
the people of the name of Italy with increased love and honour; all over
Italy the petty municipal and provincial jealousies which had taken root
centuries before, and flourished even in the Utopian republic of a day,
began to decline.”
We must not forget that Balbo belonged to the Piedmontese; hence the
highest military nobility. The families whose sons had to pass through
fire and be sacrificed to the Moloch of Napoleon’s ambition, could not
then have shared his sentiments. Out of 30,000 Italians scarcely 9,000
returned from Spain. It caused a still more painful impression when
Napoleon announced that of the 27,000 men of the kingdom of Italy who had
gone to Russia, scarcely a thousand remained, especially as he made the
announcement dryly, without a word of acknowledgment, and only ordered
the raising of a new army. The remainder of Italy, partly incorporated to
France and partly Neapolitan, had similar losses to bear.[f]
THE FALL OF NAPOLEON
In the winter of 1812 the emperor’s great army perished among the snows
of Russia. Germany rose against him as one man; the battle of Leipsic
completed his ruin; and before the end of 1813, he retained none of his
foreign territories but Italy. As he had used the influence of religion
to strengthen his rising power, so he now again caught at its support
to arrest his fall. Calling the imprisoned pope to Fontainebleau after
his return from the fatal campaign in the north, he prevailed on him to
subscribe a concordat, which yielded some of the disputed points, and
gave again to the French Empire the patronage of the see of Rome. But
the advisers of Pius in this step had been Cardinal Ruffo and men who,
like him, watched the times from a secular point of view: and different
sentiments were suggested to the pontiff by those other friends, the
cardinals Pacca, Gabrielli, Litta, and De Pietro, who were next admitted
to his closet. He retracted his consent, and Napoleon lost the hold which
he had thus hoped to gain both on France and Italy.
In the meantime, the nation had been called on to take an active share in
the closing struggle maintained by their conqueror; the kingdom of Italy,
except the sullen aristocracy of Venice, came forward with cheerfulness
and spirit to furnish extraordinary contributions of men and money.
Piedmont was equally zealous and active. Little was done to aid Napoleon,
and nothing whatever to secure the independence of Italy after his
dethronement. Jealousies, local and personal, though they had been lulled
asleep, were not destroyed; opinions and desires differed by innumerable
shades; and, above all, there was no chief, no man that could have led
the nation into battle, defying the fearful odds which would have been
brought against it. Neither for the establishment of an independent
peninsular monarchy, nor for that of a federation or a single republic,
were there materials among those who guided the destinies of the country;
Murat and Eugène Beauharnais were equally ill-fitted to sustain the part
of Robert the Bruce; and among all their Italian generals there was no
Kosciuszko.
[Sidenote: [1813-1815 A.D.]]
In the summer of 1813, the Austrian armies defiled from the southern
passes of the Alps; and after several indecisive engagements with the
forces of Eugène, they had gained, before the end of the campaign, a
great part of northern Italy. Meanwhile, King Joachim, marching his
troops northwards, seized the papal provinces, and astonished Europe by
proclaiming himself the ally of Austria. He had concluded a bargain, by
which Francis, on condition of receiving his assistance, guaranteed the
Neapolitan throne to himself and his heirs. In the ensuing spring, a body
of English and Sicilians took Leghorn (Livorno) and were thence led by
Lord William Bentinck against Genoa, which surrendered without resistance.
But the contest was already over; for on the 11th of April, 1814,
Napoleon signed, at Fontainebleau, his act of abdication. Upon receiving
this intelligence, Eugène attempted to secure Lombardy for himself. The
senators declined to comply with his wish. A riot ensued, in which Prina,
the unpopular minister of finance, was torn in pieces by the mob, and
Méjean with difficulty escaped. The viceroy sought refuge with the king
of Bavaria, one of whose daughters was his wife. German armies forthwith
took possession of all the chief towns and places of strength in the
peninsula.
In the course of the same year, the legitimate princes of Italy returned
one by one to their thrones, as the congress of Vienna settled their
claims. But the history of Napoleon’s empire will not be closed until we
have anticipated a period of some months, in order to behold the fall of
the last of those sovereignties which he had erected on the south of the
Alps.
This was Naples, which for some time remained in an anomalous position.
The emperor Francis, however desirous he might be, durst not break his
own engagements; but France, Spain, and Sicily protested against all
resolutions of the congress, so long as Joachim should be permitted to
retain his kingdom. His own imprudence soon removed the difficulty.
In March, 1815, on hearing that Napoleon had left Elba and effected
a landing, he offered to Austria to join in the war against him, on
condition of receiving a general acknowledgment of his title. The answer
was evasive, and he hastened to gain for himself all he could. With an
army of fifty or sixty thousand men, ill-trained, and not well inclined,
he marched as far as Ravenna, whence a German force of ten thousand drove
him back within his own frontier. He fled by sea, while his metropolis
surrendered to the English fleet; and, in June, 1815, Ferdinand landed at
Baja, and took possession of all his old provinces on the mainland.
After the battle of Waterloo, the dethroned Joachim wandered through
France, and crossed to Corsica; whence, with about two hundred followers,
he sailed for Italy, in the chimerical hope of conquering his lost
kingdom. He landed in Calabria, where the soil yet reeked with the
blood shed by Manhés; the peasants seized him, and delivered him to
the military. A court-martial, receiving its commission from Naples,
convicted him of treason; and on the 13th of October, 1815, he was shot
in Pizzo, meeting an inglorious death with the same courage which he had
always shown in the field of battle.[d]
FOOTNOTES
[23] [“This general, later Napoleon’s jailer, surrendered and was
released on parole.”--DE CASTRO.[g]]
[24] [Of Joachim Murat’s administration of Naples, De Castro says:
“Joachim’s government, assisted by good and energetic ministers, amongst
whom was Ricciardi, Count di Camaldoli, proposed to enforce and amplify
the good laws of Joseph, and to impress upon the Neapolitans the duty
of improving themselves. At the same time, the necessity of punishments
being less, they wished to modify the rigours of the law, and obliterate
if possible all traces of past storms. Many partisans of the Bourbons,
or accused of being so by the authorities, were released from prison
and returned from exile. The education of the young was provided for
by the establishment of a suitable college at Naples, and a school for
girls was opened in every commune. There were to be four universities,
Naples, Attamura, Chiti, and Catanzaro, each one with a faculty of five.
New professorships were established, lyceums and schools were founded
according to the promises of the previous king. Elementary education
became widespread, replacing the confusing and superficial encyclopædia
instruction. Inspections and examinations were combined with great
prudence.”[g]]
[Illustration]