THE NAPOLEONIC ERA (1789-1820)
Now come those great events, most important to Italy, the French
Revolution and the invasion by Napoleon. The storm burst upon a scene of
quiet. Italy was still like a comedy of Goldoni, dukes enjoying taxes
and mistresses, priests accepting oblations and snuff, nobles sipping
chocolate and pocketing rent, while the poor peasants, kept behind the
scenes, sweated and toiled for a bare subsistence.
Before the Revolution came the premonitory breezes of philosophical
philanthropy wafted across the Alps from the Encyclopedists. As they
affected the various rulers differently, it is necessary to descend to
some particulars. In Piedmont no philosophical philanthropy warmed the
king; he wrapped his cloak tighter about him, and deemed the old ways
good enough. He maintained his court in imitation of Versailles, and
drilled his soldiers in imitation of Frederick the Great. Nobles alone
were employed in the higher ranks of the civil service, nobles alone
were made officers in the army; in return, they were treated like
schoolboys, not allowed to leave a prescribed path without permission.
The clergy had the privileges of the old regime; their tribunals had
sole jurisdiction over priests, and tried to maintain jurisdiction over
the laity for all offences that had a smack of sin. King, nobility, and
clergy clung to the autocracy, and were resolved to maintain it in full
vigour. A rash admirer of Montesquieu wrote a treatise upon
"Constitutional Monarchy," and was put in prison.
In Lombardy the House of Austria really plunged into reform; it
reorganized the administration, reapportioned taxes, curtailed clerical
privileges, abolished the Inquisition, improved roads, favoured
agriculture, stimulated trade, and encouraged manufacture. New ideas
were broached. Beccaria published his famous book "On Crimes and
Punishments," which began the attack on the atrocious, old penal
cruelties. French philosophy was discussed. The physicist Volta, famous
for his electrical discoveries, occupied a chair in the university at
Pavia. Austrian garrisons indeed were on duty, but Lombardy prospered as
it had not done since the days of the Sforzas.
In Venice the new ideas did not affect the government. The old system
continued. The Great Council of Patricians sat in conservative
indolence; the ornamental Doge shuffled about, the Senate talked, and
the Council of Ten maintained its petty despotism. Venice was moribund.
Her voice was no more heard in European affairs. Her army had dwindled
to a few undisciplined and inefficient regiments; her arsenal was little
employed. Gayety, luxury, vice, reigned triumphant; all the young blades
of Europe went thither to carouse.
In Parma the flood of philanthropic reform had flowed strong; the
minister of state, a Frenchman, full of Parisian ideas, had introduced
many beneficial changes, but a new duke, dissipated and devout, slipped
back into the old ways; and its little neighbour, Modena, concentrated
its attention on avoidance of all possible offence to its neighbours.
In Tuscany, an appanage of Austria, reform bounded along. The Grand
Duke, Leopold I, proposed to destroy every remnant of the Middle Ages;
he attacked the power of the ubiquitous priests, granted free trade in
grain, and equalized taxes,--without discrimination even in favour of
his own estates. He improved the universities of Pisa and Siena, drained
the marshes of the Maremma, and led the way in abolishing torture and
capital punishment; he rendered a public account of the state's
revenues; and, in short, put in practice the advanced philanthropic
ideas on government.
In the Papal States, on the other hand, mediaevalism lay heavy. There was
no commerce, no manufacture, little agriculture. Priests were
everywhere, greedy relations of the Pope almost everywhere. No laymen
were given office. Ancona, a seaport, and Bologna, with its university,
were the only exceptions to general wretchedness. The finances were in
extreme confusion; the offerings of the faithful, the sale of offices,
the multiplication of taxes, did little more than pay interest on the
bonded debts. Rome was a little, unimportant, ecclesiastical city.
In Naples, however, even the Bourbons felt the fresh breath of
reformation. A reforming minister expelled the Jesuits and tried to
reduce the number of superfluous priests, monks, and nuns, and to root
out the old feudal privileges. In the city itself a goodly company of
men gathered together, cultivated ideas, and followed the lead of the
French philosophers. Poor Sicily, overridden by barons and priests,
lagged behind, a prey to the feudal system, and so unsusceptible to new
ideas that the reforming prime minister could not budge the dead weight
of custom. The people preferred to help one another in their own way,
and resorted to that mysterious society, the _Mafia_.
Thus was Italy, half philanthropically inclined, half despotically, with
few outward indications of the great awakening of the nineteenth
century. One such indication might have been found in the life and
character of a gentleman of Turin. Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) was a
kind of antique Roman, a new Brutus, of passionate and lofty nature. He
embodied his ideas of liberty in classic tragedies, which stirred
Italian manhood in those days, but now are extremely tedious to read. He
boldly gave vent to his hatred of foreign oppression, preached freedom,
and appealed to the "future Italian people." His autobiography, somewhat
condensed and expurgated, might be put into Plutarch. He stands in
history, not as a great tragedian, but as the first example of the
rebirth of that antique virility which was to display itself so
brilliantly in the nineteenth century.
Down into this little world of periwigs and lavender came the French
Revolution. All who had applauded Alfieri's tragedies were delighted,
except Alfieri himself, who hated the French. But the Italian princes
took fright at the democratic volcano, and talked of a general union
against France. Piedmont alone was vigorous enough to take action; she
made a league with Austria (1792). Nothing important happened until
young Napoleon took command of the French army of invasion (1796), and
began to tear "the heart out of Glory." It would be useless to relate in
detail his wonderful career in Italy. He arranged the peninsula as a
housekeeper shifts the furniture in an unsatisfactory room. He took Nice
and Savoy from Piedmont, Lombardy from Austria, formed the little states
south of the Po into a republic, took the temporal power from the Pope,
and set up a Roman Republic. He turned the Kingdom of Naples into a
republic and then back again into a kingdom, first for his brother
Joseph, and then for his general, Murat (1808). He converted Genoa into
the Republic of Liguria. Venice, like old Priam before bloody Pyrrhus,
fell at the whiff and wind of the victor's sword; the Great Council
resigned without a struggle, and the Republic of St. Mark after an
existence of a thousand years came to its end. It was then handed over
to Austria, but after Austerlitz taken back again. In 1805, having
become Emperor, Napoleon turned the northern part of the peninsula into
the Kingdom of Italy, and put the iron crown of Lombardy on his own
head, saying, "God has given it to me, woe to him that touches it." In
1806 he put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, and forced the Emperor,
Francis II, to resign the Imperial crown.
The old laws of political gravitation ceased to act, and Italy was
moulded and broken and moulded anew, as if creation had begun again. The
revolutionary ideas on which Napoleon's power at first rested had spread
everywhere; liberty, equality, democracy were a part of every man's
stock of familiar thoughts, and the conception of an Italian kingdom,
vaguely associated with the poetic dreams of Dante, Petrarch,
Machiavelli, had become a political fact. Italy was changed forever, the
old Goldoni comedy was gone; Napoleon had given the _coup de grace_ to
the old regime.
There was another side to the Napoleonic domination. A multitude of men
had been forcibly enlisted in Napoleon's armies; twenty-six thousand, it
is said, perished in the terrible retreat from Moscow. The French were
arrogant and they were foreigners. Changes had been made too quickly and
with too reckless a disregard for Italian wishes. Nobles and clergy had
been despoiled of privileges, peasants had been confused and bewildered,
the pious had been scandalized by Napoleon's treatment of the Pope; all
these longed for the restoration of the old political divisions and of
the old easy ways.
After Napoleon's overthrow the Napoleonic states in Italy fell almost
immediately. The viceroy of the Italian kingdom, Napoleon's stepson
Eugene Beauharnais, slunk away; and in the south, after some
vicissitudes, Murat was caught and shot (1815). Kings, dukes, and Pope
came tripping back to their thrones. The Congress of Vienna decided that
the doctrines of the French Revolution were quite wrong, that law,
order, and the principle of legitimacy were bound up together, that
states belonged to their royal families in tail male, and reparcelled
Italy among its petty sovereigns, acting quite as despotically as
Napoleon had done. It gave Venice to Austria, Genoa to Piedmont, and
Parma to Marie Louise, the Austrian wife of Napoleon, for her life, as
she had to be decently provided for. The Dukes of Parma received Lucca
until her death, when they were to return to Parma, and then Lucca was
to be annexed to Tuscany. Metternich, Hardenberg, Castlereagh,
Talleyrand, and their associates complimented one another on the happy
completion of their task, and the Congress broke up.
In Piedmont the king, loyally welcomed home, put back everything to the
position in which it was before the disturbances; the old dispossessed
nobles were restored to their places in the civil and military service,
and the _carriere ouverte aux talents_ was closed. In Lombardy and
Venice Austrian officials held a tight rein, and a watchful secret
service (_sbirri_) prowled about ready to pounce on plotting youth like
owls upon field mice. In Parma and Modena the eye of the Austrian
government was always peering and peeping. In Tuscany Austrian influence
also was dominant; but the Grand Duke was a gentle, kindly, paternal
person, and his subjects were placidly content, for the old Tuscan fire
had died out, and no Tuscan was so crazy as to dream of revolution or of
a united Italy. In the Papal States the reaction was complete; the
Inquisition was restored, the Jesuits recalled, the civil service
limited to priests. But in Naples the reaction was worst. The
despicable Ferdinand, who dropped his number IV of Naples to become
Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, restored the old regime, and swept away
the autonomy of Sicily, which had had a separate parliament for hundreds
of years, and since 1812 a constitution also. Ferdinand humbly followed
every hint from Austria. The will of Austria was supreme from Venice to
Naples, and behind Austria was the conservative judgment of the ruling
classes of all Europe, still frightened by the Revolution. European
nobles and landowners agreed that the riotous desires of the middle
class and proletariat for political privileges must be crushed down.