Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (121 page)

The main radical organization in London, the London Corresponding Society, was closely linked to intellectual circles around Godwin, the atheist Thomas Holcroft, and the ousted Cambridge ex-don, William Frend, and, by dispatching delegates and handbills to the provinces, showed some capacity to foment agitation. Among other demonstrations, they secretly organized a public mass rally and petition to Parliament, demanding universal suffrage, annual parliaments, comprehensive parliamentary reform, and an end to Britain’s “unjust war” against the French Republic, to take place in London in July 1797. When the authorities discovered the details of the projected rally, all police leave was canceled. A crowd of some three thousand duly converged on a vacant space at Saint Pancras to endorse a mass petition to be laid before the king, demanding parliamentary reform, universal suffrage, and the other radical desiderata, none of which were in the slightest degree acceptable to conservative opinion. Scarcely had the rally commenced than justices of the peace appeared, declaring the gathering illegal under the Seditious Meetings Act. Royal cavalry appeared and began making arrests. The demonstrators dispersed but only slowly and raucously, booing and hissing, to which the troops replied by heaping abuse on the protesters.
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Outside the zones conquered by the French, European writers courageous enough to applaud the Revolution—Godwin, Holcroft, Fichte, Hölderlin, Cramer, Forster, Wedekind, Thorild, and the Irish republicans Wolfe Tone and Edward Fitzgerald among them—were virulently assailed in the press as dissidents and traitors to Crown and religion.
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By 1796, Italian exiles and revolutionaries had for several years proclaimed the Revolution’s immanent spread to Italy. Giuseppe Gorani (1740–1819), in his
Lettres aux souverains sur la Révolution française
(1792), held that all enlightened men should embrace the Revolution and help overthrow the princely courts and destroy their power, and he was far from alone. Before 1795, though, in Italy the revolutionary challenge, however disturbing to princes and Church, remained distant and theoretical. From 1795 it became real and immanent rather suddenly when the newly formed “army of Italy,” placed under Napoleon’s command by Barras and Carnot, began advancing from Nice. It won a much-trumpeted victory over the Austrians at Lodi on 10 May 1796—the same day as Babeuf’s and Buonarroti’s arrest in Paris. Though a relatively small battle in itself, the success opened the road to Milan, placing Lombardy at Napoleon’s feet. Suddenly, the clarion call of Gorani, Salicetti, and Buonarroti assumed a spellbinding, immediate resonance.

Revolution in Italy (1796–1800)

The year 1796 proved the most decisive in the Italian Peninsula for centuries. In that year, the Italy of the ancien régime simply disintegrated. During the spring, panic gripped the Italian princely courts. On 15 May, the French entered Milan in triumph; on the same day, Piedmontese envoys in Paris signed Piedmont’s surrender, formally ceding Nice and Savoy to France. Napoleon entered Milan accompanied by Salicetti and the new Milanese National Guard in green uniforms with tricolor cockades on their hats, alongside the French troops. The size and enthusiasm of the crowds and the splendor of the triumphal entry were doubtless much exaggerated in subsequent revolutionary propaganda, but this only added to the unnerving of the Italian courts, public, and Church. Within days of Milan’s fall, Italian Patriots set up a local branch of the Jacobins there complete with a local newspaper, the
Giornale della Società degli amici della libertà e dell’uguaglianza
, edited by a young Pavia professor of medical pathology, Giovanni Rasori (1766–1837). On 16 May 1796, a new era was proclaimed, Napoleon ordering all the Lombard communes to submit to revolutionary principles and his enactments unreservedly. As in Holland in 1795, the French tried to avoid their errors in Belgium in 1792 by minimizing organized pillage (except from princely art museums and churches) and leaving political and legal direction as far as possible in local hands. In both respects, they had some success. Pavia resisted; the town was occupied and looted, but mostly the army of Italy, like Jourdan’s in the Low Countries, did its best to curb rapine and pillage. Liberty trees were erected, religious authority drastically curtailed, the universities reformed, aristocracy and privilege abolished, and the important local Jewish communities emancipated from stifling ghetto and papal restrictions, along with numerous other changes, many immediate, fundamental, and deeply symbolic.

A subversive press became operative in Milan in the hands of anticlerical, especially Neapolitan, refugees who by 1797 did not scruple to publish d’Holbach, Volney, and other atheistic authors deemed heinous and sacrilegious by the clergy and ancien régime authorities. A pervasive
Catechismo repubblicano
addressed to “free workers and artisans” by the republican professor Girolamo Rostagni, published at Milan in 1797 (and subsequently reprinted in various Italian regional capitals), was partly a summary of d’Holbach’s
La Politique naturelle
.
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No one could any longer prevent overt displays of irreligion or the influx of revolutionary writings from France, or the return of a motley collection of Italian revolutionary exiles, and their setting up base in the Milanese.

Napoleon distributed his forces to overawe Venetian as well as Austrian Lombardy and also the Austrian border areas. On 1 June, Verona, in the Venetian Republic, was occupied. On 12 June 1796, French troops entered the Papal States, seizing Ferrara and Bologna and obliging the papacy to sign the “armistice of Bologna.” Among the humiliating terms was a clause providing for the punitive transfer of hundreds of artworks to France to be selected by the Republic’s commissaires—a provision that deeply affronted many Italian artists and authors, including Europe’s greatest sculptor at the time, Antonio Canova.
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On 27 June the port of Livorno in Tuscany, Italy’s preeminent commercial entrepot, was seized.

The Revolution had no intention of making war on the people, Napoleon’s Italian decrees proclaimed, only on tyrants.
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All who conducted themselves peacefully would be treated “fraternally” and have their property and persons respected, but resistance would be repressed harshly. Yet, despite the troops’ relatively disciplined conduct, the occupation undoubtedly shocked much or most of the population. Little respect was shown for princes, nobility, or the Church, and none for customs or local authorities. The formal neutrality of Venice, Tuscany, and the papacy was disregarded. Historians often stress that, in Italy, the Revolution enjoyed hardly any support among the people, and that there was considerable resistance. This is true. Nevertheless, there was crucial support from certain groups. Everywhere, local clubs of Giacobini came into existence. These represented the views of only a tiny segment of the general population, but a large proportion of the most educated, literary-minded, and aware, especially professors, lecturers, poets, and students of recently reformed universities like Pavia where Enlightenment ideas prevailed since the 1780s. As in France and Germany, hard-core democratic republicans were predominantly savants, academics, students, tutors, journalists, librarians, book dealers, and medical or legal professionals, especially those bearing grudges against the ruling privileged elites. Prominent among these men were the revolutionary poet Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827), the poet Giovanni Fantoni (1755–1807), the chemist, agriculturalist, and drainage expert Vincenzo Dandolo (1758–1819), and the writer of democratic odes and historical tragedies Giovanni Pindemonte (1751–1812).

The key supporters, then, as in France in 1789, were intellectuals and not least ambitious journalists, like Rasori and Melchiorre Gioia (1767–1829). Gioia, in whose eyes loyalty to monarchy signified only
ignorance and stupidity,
¹⁵
was a democratic publicist who had renounced the priesthood and was steeped in Montesquieu, Helvétius, Diderot, and Rousseau. He had been imprisoned by the Austrians in Milan just before Napoleon’s triumphal entry for publishing a text calling for Italy to be “free, republican and provided with democratic institutions.”
¹⁶
He hoped for “one single indivisible republic in all Italy.” Released by the French, Gioia initiated a campaign in the revolutionized Milan papers, including the paper
Il Monitore italiano
, which between January and April 1798 he edited jointly with Foscolo to explain the meaning of a “costituzione democratica.” Declaring monarchs and aristocrats “the most formidable enemies of Italian liberty,” these prorevolutionary journalists eulogized the French Constitution of 1795.
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Gioia also echoed economic ideas rooted in French radical thought, clashing with Adam Smith’s free trade doctrines, contending that “philosophy had declared war on inequality.” A just and democratic society, held Goioa, necessarily requires scrupulous state regulation, especially of industry and commerce. But he was also at pains to emphasize that philosophy’s conception of “equality” did not mean, as many Italians indignantly assumed, that everyone must be rendered exactly equal in wealth and influence.
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Undoubtedly, Italy’s foremost writers and intellects, like those of the Dutch Republic, were appalled by the Terror, and some were irreversibly disillusioned with the Revolution, even before Napoleon’s arrival. The great investigator into the properties of electricity, Alessandro Volta, resident in Como, though a materialist and atheist, remained politically conservative and pro-Austrian. The greatest Italian dramatist and poet of the age, the Piedmontese Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803), following conversion to radical ideas in 1777–78 under the impact of Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, and Raynal, initially supported the Revolution but then underwent a remarkable volte-face. Before 1789, he had been a fierce critic of absolutism and princely courts, both in Italy and generally.
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Greeting the Revolution of 1789 enthusiastically, he lived in exile in Paris during 1791–92 but became increasingly estranged, especially from the sansculottes and populist militancy. A proud aristocrat at bottom, he was outraged by the journée of August 1792, which jolted him and his mistress into fleeing France, abandoning their books and possessions, and returning to Italy, now avowed foes of the Revolution.
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Whether or not particular Italians supported the General Revolution usually had less to do with national sentiment than education,
background, and views about religion. The more educated, and the less religious, the more likely Italians were to join the Revolution, unless they had a large economic stake in the prevailing system. In the Milanese, so many professors embraced the Revolution, acclaiming Napoleon and the Republic, that when the Austrians briefly recovered Lombardy in 1800, not only were Gioia and some others put back in prison but the entire University of Pavia was closed and all the professors dismissed, some permanently deprived of their chairs and salaries. In Italy, then, just as in Germany, France, and Britain, the solid support for democracy, equality, radical ideas, and what Gioia called “la libertà italiana” was to be found in academic, scientific, literary, and intellectual circles.

The Paris legislature wanted extensive delegation of power to local officials, personalities, and groups, and encouraged Italians to form their own revolutionary institutions, like the Dutch. Napoleon concurred. The new municipalities and
amministrazione generale
in Lombardy became essentially locally staffed bodies.
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By the autumn of 1796, the French-style National Guard, partly consisting of Italian volunteers from outside the Milanese, was widely operative, entrusted, for example, with guarding, without French supervision, many of the thousands of Austrian prisoners captured in recent battles.
²²
With the French urging the establishment of local republics, one of the Lombard
amministrazione
’s first acts in 1796 was to hold a prize competition for political writers to ascertain “which of the free forms of government is most conducive to the happiness of Italy?”
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Gioia’s vehemently antimonarchist thesis was proclaimed the winner. In the occupied northern part of the Papal States, similar procedures were adopted. A republican “senate” was established at Bologna and revolutionary political forms adopted, the first point on the reformers’ agenda being to abolish papal Italy’s old forms of address; the only permissible form of address in future was “citizen.”
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This so-called Cispadane Republic (Repubblica Cispadana) was the first of the Italian sister republics officially inaugurated. It was proclaimed by a congress of 116 representatives from Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, and Reggio Emilia that convened on 16 October 1796. Partly spontaneously but encouraged by the French, the Repubblica Cispadana comprising the northern areas of the Papal States, Emilia and Romagna, took over adjacent areas, including the former duchy of Modena—wholly supplanting the fleeing duke and court of that principality—and formed its own armed force. A constituent assembly convened at Modena in March 1797 to inaugurate the first (partly)
democratic Italian republican constitution. Modeled largely on the French Constitution of 1795, the constitution established two chambers: a council of sixty and a smaller body of thirty. The Repubblica Cispadana acquired its own separate National Guard, embellished with red, white, and green republican cockades and tricolor banners, the ancestor of the modern Italian flag. The deputy who proposed its tricolor banner, Giuseppe Compagnoni (1754–1833), a native of Lugo, was one of Italy’s most prominent revolutionaries and a typical representative of the emerging new republican leadership. A professional intellectual deeply infused with Enlightenment reading, in the 1780s, he had coedited the Bolognese
Memorie Enciclopediche
with special responsibility for philosophy. Fiercely anticlerical well before 1789, he became a leading historian of the American Revolution. Appointed general secretary of the Cisalpine Republic (Repubblica Cisalpina), Compagnoni, besides his political role, was appointed in 1797 to Europe’s first chair in constitutional law at the newly revolutionized University of Ferrara.