Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (122 page)

Enlightenment, not popular opinion or class friction, was the chief spur to the Revolution in Italy. The French Republic’s policies acknowledged this by treating Italy’s savants, academics, and intellectuals as a distinct social group, especially favored over others, particularly over the old nobility, courtiers, churchmen, and lawyers presiding over society in the past. In this respect, if in few others, Napoleon later, after capturing control of the French Republic in 1800, continued the General Revolution in Italy. It was a tendency that combined Enlightenment with overturning the ancien régime elites, an impulse strengthened by the form of the new Italian constitutions themselves with their two-stage elections prioritizing the new republican elites of merit and accomplishment over others.

The French interfered mainly to force the old town oligarchies to make way for the new democratic administrations, initiating a vigorous program of municipal “democratisations” designed to eradicate the old elites controlling the Northern Italian cities for centuries and replace them with local Giacobini allied to France. The process began in Milan and extended steadily over the next year across Lombardy. Wherever this purging process succeeded, a fairly robust, new, reformed legal and professional elite emerged. The old town council of Brescia was replaced by local Giacobini in March 1797. By April, “democratization” had reached Verona, and the counterrevolutionary revolt there in April 1797 was in large part a direct reaction to its
democrazione
. Italians were offered autonomous liberty under French protection, but the common
people did not view matters in the same light as the revolutionary leadership, preferring instead the summons of religious authority and tradition. Resistance escalated, leading to a serious rebellion at Lugo in the Romagna in late June 1796, and antirevolutionary revolts at Genoa, Carrara, and Bergamo, besides the Verona revolt, or Pasque Veronesi, of late April 1797.

The Pasque Veronesi insurrection occurred over Easter, following a summons from the local bishop and clergy to rise against the “Jacobins” and slaughter the French garrison. Some dozens were killed. The resistance was widespread but promptly suppressed by French reinforcements. Rather remarkably, these restored order without any looting. Only eight rebel ringleaders were executed, with another fifty or so sent to France for dispatch to Guiana. Napoleon, consulting Barras and the Directoire in Paris, treated this uprising as subversion incited by the Venetian oligarchy. A major international imbroglio resulted, followed by a brief state of war. As the French army advanced to within sight of Venice, however, the Venetian Great Council voted by 537 to 20 to surrender without a fight rather than risk devastating the city. French troops entered Venice on 15 May 1797 and at once began erasing the symbols of patrician rule, dismantling the thousand-year-old noble republic, dismissed by Napoleon (who still had the reputation of being a radical republican at this time) as an obsolete relic. The sculptor Canova, a conservative loyal to the Serenissima and its traditions, like many others, bitterly lamented its passing.
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Most of the Veneto remained under the new Venice, but the republic was now a French dependency, obliged to suppress the nobility, ceremonially burn the famous
Libro d’oro
, which listed Venice’s old ruling patriciate, cede civil equality, transform its universities, and emancipate Jews and Protestants.
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Another major uprising occurred on 23 and 24 May 1797 at Genoa. When this subsided, the ancient, aristocratic Republic of Genoa was also suppressed, and, on 14 June 1797, its democratic successor, the Ligurian Republic, proclaimed. France amnestied those involved in the counterrevolutionary outbreaks under the Convention of Montebello (6 June 1797), but the Genoese had to acknowledge sovereignty to reside in the entire Ligurian people and abolish all forms of oligarchy, “distinction,” aristocracy, and privilege.
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Every Ligurian town received a democratically elected municipality. The only institutions retained intact were the Catholic Church and the ancient Bank of San Giorgio. Liguria’s new constitution was drafted, put to a referendum, and endorsed by more than 100,000 votes to 17,000 against,
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bringing the Ligurian
Republic into existence on 2 December 1797. Liguria’s new constitution failed to provide freedom of conscience and freedom of thought—bowing to popular loyalty to the Church—but was otherwise modeled on the 1795 French Constitution with two legislative chambers and a directory.
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Only later, after Napoleon made himself emperor, did the new antiaristocratic, egalitarian procedures in Liguria lapse and reversion to formal oligarchy occur.

During the summer of 1797, virtually on his own authority, Napoleon merged the Cispadane into the Cisalpine Republic, now covering much of the northern half of Italy, with its capital at Milan. The new republic comprised the Milanese, Mantua, Venetian Lombardy, and the Valteline area (which in October 1797 broke away from the Swiss federation). The Cisalpine Republic’s constitution, proclaimed on 8 July 1797, again provided for two separate legislative chambers and a five-member Directoire, largely based, like its administration, on the current French model. Its territory was duly divided into departments, creating districts of equal population, with local assemblies of electors each representing, as in France, approximately two hundred people. The two chambers were called the Gran Consiglio, with around eighty members, and a smaller Consiglio dei Seniori. The “people’s representatives” were mostly co-opted, comprising partly Italian revolutionaries with reputations acquired abroad, partly local academics, and partly progressive local notables, including several former friends and disciples of Beccaria, and occasionally also French supervisors. Alfonso Longo (1738–1804), one of Beccaria’s and Pietro Verri’s collaborators on the Milan journal
Il Caffè
in the 1760s, was among ten notables who signed the new constitution alongside Napoleon. “It is not without interest,” observed Roederer, that it is the remaining friends and collaborators of Beccaria—Verri, Lambertenghi, and Longo—who “today occupy the chief places in the new republic, which indeed augurs well for its future.”
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To maintain the revolutionary ardor of the army of Italy, Napoleon established a regular paper in French published every two days, at Milan, the
Courrier de l’armée d’Italie ou le Patriote français à Milan
, which appeared in 248 issues between July 1797 and December 1798, edited in Milan by Jullien.
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The paper’s chief tasks were to help foster discipline and morale and present the commander, Napoleon, to his troops and to all Italy as a paragon of republican probity.

Among the new Italian republics, only the Cisalpine and Ligurian Republics transformed their legal and institutional structures in the later 1790s in anything like a throrough and comprehensive fashion.
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Elsewhere, in Piedmont, Tuscany, Venice, and the Romagna, as well as afterward in Naples, reform of law and institutions was fragmentary and sporadic. Yet, not only Northern but also all Southern Italy was profoundly affected by the changes. By mid-1796, the papacy and Neapolitan court found themselves caught in a severe dilemma. Although almost defenseless against Napoleon, for ideological reasons it was impossible for them to fully make peace with a Revolution they abhorred and dreaded and that would, should it advance further, inevitably despoil them of their authority, power, territory, and wealth. Both courts negotiated but in a prevaricating, halfhearted manner, continuing their ideological-cultural counteroffensive against Enlightenment and democratic values, albeit in a lower key, advisedly toning down their anti-French rhetoric for fear of reprisal. The Vatican also associated less than before with exiled French royalty and aristocracy. Increasingly uncomfortable, as earlier in the Swiss oligarchies, the émigrés were perhaps even deliberately encouraged to leave Rome. In October 1796, Louis XVI’s two aunts, residing there since 1791, transferred to Naples, the French royal coats of arms and insignia being erased from the facade of their Rome residence behind them.
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Naples was widely considered one of the most backward and decayed realms of Western Europe. The admiration of foreigners under the Greeks, “Naples today,” observed Gioia, “is degraded, one might say destroyed.”
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Around one-third of the land, taking mainland Naples and Sicily together, belonged to the Church and provided splendid revenues for the realm’s twenty-two archbishops and 116 bishops, as well as its many baronial abbots, but left most peasants deprived and destitute. What was not owned by the Church belonged to large or medium landowners called “the baronage.” Between them, ecclesiastical and noble landlords possessed practically all the olive oil presses in the kingdom. So entangled were baronial and ecclesiastical ownership, “rights” and tenures with non-noble tenure peasant occupancy, and sharecropping arrangements that the princely administration was unable to determine even how far the elites’ “rights” and fiscal immunities extended, let alone reduce them. Sicily, remarked Gioia in 1797, though once termed the “granary of Italy” enjoyed “not even one third of the prosperity which her soil and climate should provide.”
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The Neapolitan countryside seethed with disputes about land tenure and property rights serviced by an army of lawyers sworn to uphold justice but who mostly, Gorani noted, found it in their interest to support the landowners and Church against both townsmen and peasants.
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The peasantry was practically entirely illiterate; the dominance of the Church went unquestioned. In Naples and Sicily there simply existed no social class or group capable of mounting a revolutionary challenge. Nevertheless, at court, in the administration, and at Naples University, one encountered a highly motivated, enlightened fringe, deeply inspired by Vico, Giannone, Genovesi, and Filangieri. Owing to the many obstacles impeding more moderate reform programs, this group, taking their cue from the great Neapolitan legal reformer, Gaetano Filangieri (1752–88), an admirer of Raynal and Diderot, had become radicalized in recent years and profoundly antagonistic to the baronage and lawyers, and potentially to the bishops and the court.

Desperate to solve its acute economic and fiscal difficulties, for a time the Neapolitan court tried to compromise with the Enlightenment and accommodate Filangieri and the reformers by displaying some willingness to moderate aristocratic and ecclesiastical power, privilege, and revenues. But after 1789, and especially the first French revolutionary offensive in Western Europe in 1792–93, the Neapolitan court, like those of Tuscany, Modena, and the Rhenish ecclesiastical princes, reversed direction, repudiating reform and the reformers and aligning with Austria, Britain, and the papacy. By 1794, the Neapolitan court had broken completely with enlightened reform and thrown itself especially into the arms of the British.
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This left the reformers, men like Francesco Mario Pagano (1748–99), Vincenzo Russo, and the eminent botanist, Domenico Cirillo (1739–99)—the deceased Filangieri’s friends and followers—marginalized, repudiated, and in some cases stripped of their administrative and university positions with nowhere to turn except Paris, and nothing to invest their hopes in but the Revolution. Thus, Pagano and his friends became subversives and conspirators.
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Pagano’s
Saggi politici
of 1783, reissued in a more republican, radical version in 1791, proclaimed all humanity a single “universal society” mostly so backward and superstitious (and nowhere more so than in Naples), that human salvation is achievable only through vigorous advancement of enlightened thinking. This, in turn, would become possible only through the intensified efforts of academies, theaters, and societies, the sole effective instruments of dissemination of enlightened ideas in Southern Italy.

Following the murder of a French general in Rome in January 1798, the Directoire opted to occupy the papal city and expel the pope (who was escorted into exile at Florence). The French commander was instructed to work with a local group of Giacobini and two special
emissaries, constitutional experts sent from Paris, Daunou and the mathematician Gaspard Monge, to forge a republic also there. On 15 February, the new Roman Republic was proclaimed. But popular resistance remained fiercer and more resolute in Central and Southern than in Northern Italy, and in November 1798, Ferdinand IV of Naples, in alliance with Austria and Britain, invaded the Roman Republic, resulting in a second French expedition to secure Rome, which then also invaded the Neapolitan realm. A French force under General Championnet captured Naples itself in January 1799. The Revolution in Italy continued with the occupation of Florence in March 1799 and the flight abroad of the grand duke of Tuscany. A liberty tree was erected in Florence in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the main square (hitherto the Piazza del Granduca, today the Piazza della Signoria) was renamed the Piazza Nazionale. All Florence’s ducal academies were converted into “patriotic societies.”

With the French troops in Naples, the ill-fated Repubblica Partenopea or Parthenopean (Neapolitan) Republic—named after the ancient Greek colony on which Naples was founded—was proclaimed. Its government was staffed by what was perhaps the most distinguished of the various local teams of Giacobini installed by the French in Italian regional capitals. This Neapolitan task group worked in concert with Marc-Antoine Jullien who had joined Championnet’s staff and was assigned by him to serve as secretary-general of the new Parthenopean Republic. Headed by Pagano, Russo, Cuoco, and other disciples of Filangieri, it was a small but impressive coterie, the Republic’s main newspaper being edited by a woman, the Rome-born poetess of Portuguese noble descent, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel (1752–99). Like their colleagues in the other republics, the Neapolitan revolutionaries set out to abolish aristocracy, privilege, and feudal lordship, and establish an elected representative assembly while attempting to transform the local press, reading public, and the theater. A bill was introduced to confiscate the lands and property of the king’s supporters and those courtiers who had fled with him to Sicily. Francesco Mario Pagano, best known and most distinguished of the Neapolitan revolutionary intellectual leadership, took the lead in formulating such measures and drawing up the constitution.
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