The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (52 page)

Most of the Giacobini and patriots, however, were reassured that the

French forces included exiled Italian republicans and were won over

by Napoleon’s rhetoric of revolutionary fraternalism and Italian

nationalism. They therefore welcomed the French in the hope that

they would bring reform and perhaps even unifi cation.

The realities of the Directory’s three years of rule in Italy, from

1796 through 1799 (the
triennio
), ultimately proved Buonarroti right.

The French quickly demonstrated that they were empire builders,

266 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

not liberators. Napoleon’s fi rst priorities in consolidating his victories

over the Austrians and their local allies were stability and plunder.

He worked with the Giacobini and patriots when it suited him, but

he was equally willing to forge alliances with their more moderate

and conservative countrymen. In fact, the Directory actually ordered

Napoleon not to encourage the radicals because they expected to

return northern Italy to the Austrians as part of a negotiated peace.

Consequently, the would-be nationalists in Piedmont who had

cheered the French invasion forces were frustrated when Napoleon

signed an armistice with their king. Equally troubling, the Frenchsponsored sister republics that replaced the ancien régime states

proved to be little more than imperial puppets. The Giacobini and

allied Italian moderates were initially well represented in the new

governments, but they steadily lost infl uence as the French asserted

more direct control. Moreover, Napoleon redrew and juggled their

borders to suit his needs.

In northern Italy, the French turned Genoa into the Ligurian

Republic and engineered the Cisalpine Republic by merging the

Duchy of Milan, the Lombard Republic, the Cispadane Republic (consisting of Bologna, Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio), and parts of the

Papal States. Napoleon appointed himself president, nominated the

representatives to its assemblies, and had veto power over legislation.

As president, he signed an unequal commercial treaty with France

and forced the republic to pay for the twenty-fi ve-thousand-man

French military garrison on its soil.

The southern Italian puppet states were even more haphazard

and tenuous. Napoleon left Italy to pursue grander ambitions in late

1797, but his deputies occupied what was left of the Papal States to

suppress the highly conservative Pope Pius VI and radical democratic

clubs in Rome. They proclaimed a Roman Republic in 1798, which

in turn drew King Ferdinand of Naples into the confl ict. Backed by

Britain and seeking to restore the Pope, Ferdinand provoked a French

counteroffensive that forced him to seek refugee on Sicily under the

protection of the Royal Navy. The power vacuum allowed the professional classes in Naples to create the Parthenopean Republic.

Awakening to the realities of subjecthood, some Italian republicans called for the French to leave as early as 1797, but even then it

was too late. Demonstrating that Napoleon’s grand pronouncements

about liberating Italy from the ancien régime were simple propaganda,

Napoleonic

Italy 267

Frenchmen of every station quickly turned their attention to extraction. The Directory saddled the Italian sister republics with millions

of francs in indemnities in addition to requisitioning an extensive

inventory of military matériel. In Naples, the republican regime’s

marginal popular support evaporated when the French indemnity of

two and a half million ducats and the Directory’s insistence that it

cover the cost of a French garrison forced the government to levy a

range of invasive new taxes. The Directory also ordered Napoleon to

seize great works of art and cultural treasures as compensation for

the sacrifi ces of the French populace in Italy. This high-class plunder included paintings from Milanese churches, papal treasures, four

bronze horses from the façade of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice,

and thirteen volumes of Leonardo’s manuscripts. At the opposite end

of the spectrum, French troopers looted with impunity. Resistance

simply invited violent retribution. Napoleon’s men punished Pavia

for defying French demands by sacking the city, shooting the members of the town council, and burning neighboring villages.

French imperial meddling was so unpopular that moderate

reformers and Giacobini radicals paid a heavy price for cooperating

with Napoleon when the
triennio
came to an abrupt and unexpected

end. In 1799, the French suddenly lost their grip on Italy after Napoleon became bogged down in Egypt and the Austrian and Russian

armies of the Second Coalition invaded from the north. The outbreaks of popular resistance that had cropped up sporadically during the triennio blossomed into full-scale rebellions. In what became

known as the “Black Year,” ancien régime rulers allied with the Catholic Church and peasant communities angered by French meddling

attacked the Giacobini and aspiring nationalists throughout the peninsula. Popular distaste for the French and their radical clients was so

strong that many commoners actually greeted the Austrian armies

as liberators.

The Church was also a popular rallying point. Stories of church

bells ringing by themselves and miraculous cures at religious shrines

refl ected a resurgence of popular faith in response to the radicals’

anticlerical agenda. Putting aside their issues with the Pope, northern Italians shouted “Viva Maria” as they rose in revolt. In Lombardy, peasants rallied to a leader who claimed he had been called by

Christ to punish the French. In the south, a “most Christian armada

of the Holy Faith” of roughly one hundred thousand peasants and

268 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

bandits under Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo marched on Naples singing,

“The French arrived, they taxed us;
liberté
. . .
égalité
, you rob me,

I rob thee!”29 Ruffo’s main goal was to restore papal authority, but in

raising the Armata della Santa Fede (Holy Faith army) he infl amed

long-standing local tensions resulting from the ancien régime’s centralizing agenda. This civil strife simmered just beneath the surface

of what at face value appeared to be a counterrevolutionary popular

rejection of the Parthenopean Republic and its French backers. The

Sanfedists slaughtered thousands when they captured Naples, but

this violence was as much due to widespread opposition to absolutist

reform as it was to anti-French sentiment.

The Giacobini allied with the French conquerors in the hope that

they could turn the Directory’s imperial project to their own ends.

The bloodshed of the Black Year demonstrated that they overreached

dangerously in trying to harness the power of revolutionary absolutism. The Sanfedists executed the republicans in Naples, and northern

mobs attacked radical reformers, Jews, and any other constituency

that appeared to have prospered under French rule. Ever mindful of

the threat of further revolution, the Austrians sent hundreds of Giacobini in the Cisalpine Republic to Balkan prisons.

Cardinal Ruffo and more sober aristocrats soon worried that

this counterrevolutionary crusade might spin out of their control.

It was not too far-fetched to imagine that the peasants and urban

mobs might turn on the bastions of privilege and property once they

fi nished with the Giacobini. Consequently, some Italian elites were

receptive to Napoleon’s offer of
ralliement
when the French retook

control of Italy in 1800 after his victory over the Austrians at the

Battle of Marengo. The ensuing Peace of Lunéville one year later recreated the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics that the Austrians and

their ancien régime allies had so carefully dismantled.

This did not mean, however, that the Giacobini regained their infl uence. Much in the way that British empire builders dismissed western-educated Indians as useless after the violence of 1857, Napoleon

gave up on the radicals because they proved poor imperial proxies

during the Black Year. Instead he courted Italian moderates and pragmatic ancien régime notables. In turn, many disillusioned Giacobini

and patriots joined the multitude of vaguely nationalist secret societies that sprang up throughout Italy at the turn of the nineteenth

century. These disorganized and fractious cabals never constituted a

Napoleonic

Italy 269

serious threat, and the Giacobini either made their peace with the

French or faded into obscurity.

With his hold on France secure and his victory over the Second

Coalition complete, Napoleon had the means to reorder Italy to suite

his grand imperial designs. In the ensuing years, he annexed Piedmont,

Tuscany, Umbria, Parma, Rome, and the Ligurian Republic as fourteen

départements réunis
. The restored Cisalpine Republic became the Italian Republic (later the Kingdom of Italy) with the addition of the unannexed parts of the Papal States and territory in northern Italy taken

from the Austrians. Napoleon did not get around to tinkering with the

Kingdom of Naples until 1805, when he deposed the restored Bourbon

regime. By the end of the decade, virtually every Italian experienced

Napoleonic rule as a new Frenchman in the
départements réunis
or a

subject of the puppet kingdoms of Italy and Naples.

In the fi rst case, annexation should have spared Italians from the

full weight of imperial extraction because they technically became

French. Not since the days of romanization had an empire been so

committed to assimilating subject communities, but as in Roman

times, the realities of imperial subjecthood remained harsh and fundamentally oppressive. In Piedmont, French became the required language of education and business, while the Grand Armée absorbed its

eight-thousand-man army. As in metropolitan France, prefects and

subprefects administered each new department in accordance with

Napoleon’s centralizing program. Similarly,
gendarmerie
brigades

imposed and enforced the Code Napoleon. The legitimizing ideology

of the Napoleonic empire held that this expanded bureaucracy was

open to assimilated men of talent, but in the Italian
départements

réunis
the prefects, subprefects, gendarmes, judges, and policemen

were overwhelmingly French.

Assimilated Piedmontese were the only new Frenchmen to play a

signifi cant role in the imperial bureaucracy. Although the French general who oversaw Piedmont’s annexation initially warned that “generally [the people] heartily detest us,” it was relatively easy to absorb

the kingdom because the Piedmontese shared a similar culture with

their French conquerers.30 As a result, some ambitious young men

embraced the opportunities of Napoleonic rule after an initial period

of resistance. They were the only Italians to assume senior positions

in the administration, police, and courts in noteworthy numbers. Yet

French imperial offi cials never really accepted the Piedmontese as

270 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

equals and held them to be slow, clannish, and incapable of grasping

the complexities of the Code Napoleon.

In Rome, the French hoped to win over the notable and propertied

classes after the city’s annexation in 1809 through effi cient rule and

improved law and order. Cosmopolitan Romans, however, resented

being treated as imperial subjects and disliked the Piedmontese who

monopolized senior positions in the courts and administration. The

Pope’s call for mass nonviolent resistance to French rule after his exile

also made it diffi cult to recruit suitable local men to staff the lower

levels of the imperial administrative machinery.

French offi cials soon grew frustrated by their inability to exercise

power at the local level. Not surprisingly, the Code Napoleon was

simply too alien to impose on a rural population that had long practice in resisting centralized absolutist reform. However, the Napoleonic authorities blamed the Italians for their failure to recognize the

benefi ts of French rule and civilization. If the assimilated Piedmontese were not worthy of full imperial citizenship in French eyes, then

it was hardly surprising that they disdained the mass of Italian new

Frenchmen as backward, if not blatantly barbarous.

In the rest of the peninsula, the theoretically autonomous status

of the kingdoms of Italy and Naples offered no greater protection

from the worst aspects of Napoleonic imperial rule than the paper citizenship the French imposed on the
départements réunis
. Napoleon

himself resumed the presidency of the Italian Republic after both his

brother Joseph and his Milanese ally Francesco Melzi turned it down

on the grounds that the reconfi gured government was too weak. In

accepting the vice presidency, Melzi hoped to lay the groundwork

for an elite-ruled unifi ed Italian state, but he was never able to raise

the Italian Republic above the status of a French puppet. Additionally, Napoleon banned all political parties and retained the power to

appoint ministers and conduct foreign affairs. Most important, he had

total control over the republic’s Armée d’Italie, which was essentially

part of the regular French army.