The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (54 page)

to neighboring territories was a less drastic recourse, and offi cials in

the Kingdom of Italy estimated that more than twenty thousand eligible men dodged conscription in this manner. Those who did not

escape the French roundup frequently took the fi rst opportunity to

desert. Approximately thirty thousand to forty thousand conscripted

soldiers chose this option in the Italian kingdom between 1803 and

1812, and desertion rates climbed even higher in later years as news

of the terrible losses in Russia and Spain reached Italy.33

276 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

The French authorities dealt with these overt and subtle forms

of resistance aggressively. Not only did their armies need continual

reinforcement after 1805, but as imperial rulers, they could not allow

any expression of defi ance to go unpunished. In 1808, the Kingdom

of Italy created special labor camps to punish captured draft dodgers

and fi ned their families. Villages with too many missing sons risked

being burned to the ground by the
gendarmerie
. Prefects also exercised greater supervision over local draft councils, tightened medical

exemptions, restricted movement through special internal passports,

and even banned the marriage of young men to women over sixty.

Napoleonic offi cials considered desertion an even more serious

offense. Escaping soldiers spread demoralizing news of French defeats

and drained military resources by making off with their uniforms

and weapons. Moreover, many joined the bandit gangs that grew in

size and means in response to the inherent hardships of French rule.

In 1809, the Kingdom of Italy assigned small military detachments

to each of its departments to deal with armed ex-soldiers, and Italian

military courts punished convicted deserters with sentences ranging

from three years at hard labor to the death penalty. French offi cials

considered these punishments too lax and often took matters into

their own hands. In the sections of the Papal States added to the Kingdom of Italy they executed some resisters summarily, and Eugène

personally condemned a few sons of Rome’s leading families to death

for deserting from the
gardes d’honneur
.

Although Napoleon counted the rule of law as one of the most substantial benefi ts of his empire, his men in Italy frequently resorted to

extrajudicial measures to maintain control because local Italian courts

and policemen would not take action against members of their own

communities. In the more settled areas, the political or
haute
(high)

police had the authority to dispense with the formal criminal courts

in dealing with banditry and subversion, but in time they became

embroiled in relatively petty controversies involving violations of

public morality. This was a natural consequence of the amalgamist

project, and French offi cials had to contend with local controversies

involving adultery, wayward priests, and aristocratic intrigue. Italians

rather than imperial offi cials brought many of these charges, and the

French came to detest the spies and informers they needed to control

urban and settled Italy. Imperial offi cials concluded that the Italians

were too petty and depraved to qualify for full imperial citizenship.

Napoleonic

Italy 277

These sentiments ran entirely contrary to their emperor’s goal

of rallying Italian notables, but in practice
ralliement
never stood a

chance of success. Like all imperial conquerors, the French fell victim

to bigotry in mistaking military power for cultural superiority.

Concluding that luxury and superstition had made Italian men vain,

cowardly, and effeminate, French offi cials decided that
amalgame
was

unrealistic and ill-advised. Although they often depicted themselves

as the heirs of classical Rome, they were particularly dismissive of

contemporary Roman society. One senior administrator even refused

to let his wife join him on his posting to Rome because he worried

that the decadent Romans would corrupt an impressionable young

woman.

This disdain for Italian culture did not prevent Frenchmen of all

stations from using imperial privilege to take sexual advantage of

Italian women. Prefects and prosecutors often kept local mistresses,

and a French military veteran recalling his service in Germany could

have just as easily been speaking about the Italians. “The hate which

the Germans have for us should not be too surprising. They cannot pardon us for having for twenty years caressed their wives and

daughters before their very faces.”34 This kind of sexual predation

is an inherent part of the larger exploitive and dehumanizing realities of empire and must be considered alongside French demands for

manpower and revenue in explaining the failure of
ralliement
.

Italian notables thus had good reasons for questioning the sincerity of Napoleon’s invitation to enlist as junior partners and new

Frenchmen in his imperial enterprise. Some of the emperor’s most

important Italian allies hedged their bets by treating with his enemies.

Melzi was careful to maintain his contacts in Austria, and infl uential

Neapolitans sent family members to both Paris and the exiled Bourbon court in Sicily. Most of these fence-sitters made up their minds to

reject
ralliement
when the military tide turned against Napoleon and

French rule became more precarious. Napoleon’s arrest of the Pope

struck a further blow to
ralliement
. Loyal Romans wore papal cockades as part of a passive resistance campaign that shut down the local

administration and courts through a mass retreat from civic life.

While Italians were cool to Napoleon’s call to rally, they were even

more suspicious of his amalgamist project. The Piedmontese nobleman Massimo d’Azegilo was enraged when the French forced him

to send his son to the military academy at Saint-Cyr because he felt

278 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

it violated his paternal right to decide how his children should be

educated. Similarly, the elite families of Parma withdrew their children from the College of Santa Caterina after Napoleonic offi cials

tried to turn it into a military academy, and instead hired exiled

Roman clergymen as tutors. Parents in Genoa and Tuscany shunned

the new French-style schools. Only ex-Giacobini and the urban middle classes that found fruitful employment in imperial service gave

the French full access to their children.

Ralliement
and
amalgame
were never open to the common Italians

who bore the real weight of French rule. Rural communities that had

striven to thwart the centralizing reforms of ancien régime princes

had no reason to accept the far more burdensome demands of a foreign imperial power. Admittedly, Napoleon’s efforts to impose his will

on the Italian countryside were an extension of his efforts to force the

resistive populations of western and southern France to respect his

authority. The difference, however, was that Napoleon considered the

peoples of the Vendée and the Midi to be Frenchmen whether they

liked it or not. He was far more ruthless with the peoples of the wider

empire who dared to stand in the way of his extractive ambitions.

The necessity of intruding into rural communities to meet their

emperor’s treasure and manpower requirements forced Napoleonic

offi cials to develop even more aggressive methods of disciplining

their subjects. Special local guard formations and the National Guard

in the Kingdom of Italy and the Civic Guard in Naples augmented

French authority throughout the peninsula. French rule was relatively effective in Piedmont, but it grew weaker the further south one

traveled. It waned considerably in the rural hinterlands where local

institutions of authority remained largely immune to
ralliement
,

much less
amalgame
. Although they disdained feudal institutions,

necessity forced the French to depend on the rural clergy to execute

imperial policy at the village level. They also needed vigilante groups

to control banditry and maintain rural order. These irregular units,

known popularly as
sbirri
(cops), were a holdover from the ancien

régime era, and the imperial regime’s efforts to control them through

French offi cers were barely successful. More often than not, the
sbirri

bands were more inclined to prey on local communities instead of

enforcing French rule.

As in much of early nineteenth-century Europe, rural opposition

to the imposition of central authority, imperial or otherwise, often

Napoleonic

Italy 279

took the form of banditry. Peasants, herdsmen, sharecroppers, day

laborers, draft dodgers, and military deserters, whose resistance the

French criminalized as “brigandage,” sought primarily to protect

feudal-era rights and local privileges. Some of the lawless groups were

indeed made up of criminals, but classifying resisting rural peoples as

brigands, a particularly barbaric type of bandit, allowed Napoleonic

offi cials to employ harsh extralegal measures against them. Military

tribunals routinely handed down death sentences to brigands, and

gendarmerie
units punished resisters summarily without bothering

to refer them to the courts at all. Imperial offi cials tried to improve

security by banning the production and sale of daggers, but they could

not prevent deserters from arming rural communities throughout

the peninsula. Although property owners and feudal elites generally

supported French efforts to promote rural order, few were willing to

assist the imperial regime actively in confronting the outlaws.

Persistent and endemic banditry was a fertile medium for local

discontent to grow into more serious mass challenges to the Napoleonic regime. As in the Black Year, these rebellions often took on an

overtly Catholic veneer, but they were more concerned with thwarting French-led centralization than with defending the Church. The

fi rst signifi cant uprising began near Genoa in 1805 and 1806. Led

by a former militia captain and an innkeeper, local communities in

Piacenza struck back against taxation, conscription, the closure of

monasteries, and wartime requisitioning. Although it took French

gendarmes
and Italian reservists only a few weeks to restore order,

the revolt unnerved the imperial authorities. Special military commissions in Parma and Piacenza sent captured rebels to the gallows

or enslavement in Mediterranean galleys. The imperial authorities

also turned the
sbirri
loose on defi ant rural communities under the

guise of imposing collective punishment. These draconian measures

were out of proportion to the seriousness of the unrest, but Napoleonic offi cials rightly viewed any form of coordinated resistance as a

threat to their hold on the rural majority. Lacking the manpower and

resources to govern the countryside directly, they relied on intimidation and terror to extend their authority into upland Italy.

This imperial bluff largely collapsed in 1809. Encouraged by

Austrian propaganda and infl amed by a new milling tax, the Kingdom

of Italy’s hinterlands again erupted in revolt. With the Armée d’Italie

distracted by the war with Austria, the rebels killed policemen, drove

280 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

off imperial offi cials, and burned tax and conscription records. The

collapse of authority in the highlands gave bands of peasants numbering in the thousands the freedom to move on the urban areas that

anchored Napoleonic rule in the region.

Further north, similar revolts broke out in the Tyrolean regions

that Napoleon had added to the puppet Kingdom of Bavaria. Once

again, peasant grievances centered on taxation, conscription, and the

unwelcome expansion of state authority. They too attacked government offi ces, burned bureaucratic records, and chased off the imperial regime’s local representatives. Swelled by the addition of military

deserters, smugglers, and common criminals, the revolt lasted into

1810 and blocked commerce on the Po River. Austrian propaganda

and subversion defi nitely played a role in instigating these revolts.

Archduke John’s attacks on Napoleonic exploitation, covert missions

to the Tyrol, and short-term military victories gave the rebels hope

that they might drive out the French. Some peasants even waved

Austrian fl ags and shouted support for the Austrian emperor, but the

vast majority of the rural people who took part in the 1809 uprisings

were no more Habsburg partisans than they were Italian nationalists.

Like the Catholic façade of the Black Year, the Austrians simply provided a useful rallying point for the defense of local autonomy.

Yet if localism drove the revolts, it was also the primary cause of

their failure. The tendency of the rebels to resort to banditry cost

them popular support, and their inability to unite left them fatally

divided once Napoleon’s troops turned back the Austrian invasion. It

was then a relatively simple matter for
gendarmes
, civil guardsmen,

and soldiers to hunt down the small, lightly armed groups. Thousands