XVII. ITALY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY…

XVII. ITALY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: [1701-1800 A.D.]]

Italy’s condition when she left the death-stricken hands of the dynasty of Charles V made a lively impression on her new sovereigns. It showed what could be done towards the unhappiness of a country by foreign rule--a rule which only thought from day to day of gathering fruits of conquest, without even trying to assure those of the morrow.

For a century and a half the governors of Milan and Naples, and following their example the independent sovereigns, egoists, or oppressors, with rare exceptions, had allowed ancient evils to subsist or replaced them by new ones. They had only sought to exploit to their own profit the privileges, the old institutions of the Middle Ages, instead of reforming or ameliorating them. Nobles and clergy in particular had been left in possession of their old rights over the chase, fishing, mills, furnaces, justice even, and were the real instruments of domination. Thence arose the strangest position of affairs.

Legislations, ancient and contradictory customs which in the south went back to the Normans, the Hohenstaufens, and the Angevins, or in the north at Bologna, Florence, Pisa, Siena, survived in institutions of lost republics, formed an inextricable chaos where the arbitrator reaped a rich harvest. Privileges and jurisdictions, both feudal and clerical, confused or perverted the systems of judicial and political administration; taxation varied in every country and for every person; power made itself oppressively but universally felt. The general tax-collectors, to whom finance was given over, and venal officials, who represented authority, still further augmented disorder. Lastly the power of the holy see, taking a more active part in political institutions in Italy than anywhere else, came as a final burden.

In the country the rights of primogeniture, mortgage, trusteeship, and free pasturage condemned the land to sterility. In towns the old corporations, statutes, and recent monopolies killed all commerce and industry. There were hardly any natural products in this the most fertile country of Europe, still less of manufactured products in towns which formerly had filled the markets of Europe with their exports, and the bad condition of the roads overburdened with turnpikes did not allow of transit over a peninsula so admirably situated and which in the Middle Ages had served as a link between Europe and the Levant. Moreover the deserted state of Apulia recalled the times of the decadence of the Roman Empire. In the kingdom of Naples the royal pasturage had an extent of fifty miles in length and fifteen miles in breadth. In Tuscany and the papal states the Maremma reached as far as the Mediterranean coasts. The greater part of the towns in central and southern Italy were depopulated, their palaces deserted, the houses fallen into ruins and never repaired. Even literature and art, which had maintained themselves up to that time, had now shared the common fate.[h]

[Sidenote: [1701-1725 A.D.]]

Politically the eighteenth century, like the sixteenth, began in Italy with fifty years of warfare; but the sufferings of the country, although often heavy, were always much lighter than those which had prevailed during the great struggle between France and the house of Charles V.

There broke out successively four European wars, into all of which the Italians were dragged by their foreign masters.[f] The first of these was the war of the Spanish Succession; the second, the war of the Quadruple Alliance; the third, the war of the Polish Succession; the fourth, the war of the Austrian Succession. A brief review of the effect upon Italy of these wars will form the chief topic of the present chapter. But before taking up the sweep of these political events, it may be of interest to glance at the internal conditions of the most interesting of Italian states, Tuscany, and witness the passing of its famous family of Medici, which now becomes extinct after three centuries of domination. Cosmo III, who occupied the ducal throne at the close of the century, continued to reign until 1723.[a]

Although neither public nor private conditions were very satisfactory under his government, the brilliancy of the court gave no indication that times were bad. There never was a time of greater luxury, nor had so many rich gifts ever found their way into foreign lands before. Cosmo had an abnormal craving for notoriety. He wished to pass for the most magnificent of sovereigns, while his ever-increasing leaning towards piety gave rise to the most singular contrasts between his private and his court life--contrasts which were intensified by the habits and surroundings of his sons and for a time of his own brother also. The latter, Francesco Maria, when cardinal, knew no moderation in his expenditure, and the learned French Benedictines who saw him in Rome, in 1687, report that the grand duke was forced on account of his extravagance to recall him to Siena, and then describe how refreshments alone cost him daily twenty-five louis d’or. Besides monks of all orders, who were always to be found in the palace (the prince had founded near the Ambrogiana an Alcantarian[21] monastery which was maintained at his expense), individuals of all nations presented themselves at court. The ambassadors took the greatest pains to gratify Cosmo’s wishes: Czar Peter sent him four Calmucks, and from the Danish king, Frederick IV, he received Greenlanders. The residences were filled with treasures and curiosities of all kinds, and the princely vineyards and gardens were of the choicest. At the end of the winter of 1719, King Frederick IV of Denmark spent nearly six weeks in Florence, which he had already visited as crown prince in 1692 under the incognito of the count of Schaumburg. The great trouble which the ceremonial gave, in spite of the incognito on that occasion, is described by the prince’s attendant, Hans Heinrich von Ahlefeld, in his account of the journey. An inscription on the archway of the Porta San Gallo commemorates the visit of the Scandinavian monarch, whose predecessor, Christian I, had passed through that very gate 235 years before. Cosmo celebrated the visit of his exalted guest, in spite of the Lenten season, by balls and music. A large print which represents the evening progress of the princess Violante Beatrice at the time of the investment of Siena on April 12th, 1717, gives some idea of the brilliancy and ceremonial as well as of the costumes and uniforms in customary use on official occasions: the princess drove through the gaily decorated town in her state carriage, almost entirely made of crystal and drawn by six horses, surrounded by pages and halberdiers bearing torches, and followed by the magnificent carriages of the nobility on to the Piazza del Campo, whose every tower and roof was brilliantly illuminated and which was filled to overflowing by a surging crowd. The privations and losses of later years so depressed Cosmo, however, that he could think of nothing but his religious exercises, and the distinguished flower of Florentine youth went into foreign lands to seek compensation for the restrictions imposed upon them at home. When in 1720 the electoral princess of the Palatinate, who was by no means a pleasure-seeker, felt it incumbent upon her to break through this severe régime by encouraging the carnival festivities, the whole nation showed unmistakably how hateful this morose existence had been to them.[b]

Cosmo III died at an advanced age on October 31st, 1723, leaving as his successor his son Giovan Gastone. The country at this time was plunged in debt, industries had decayed, prosperity was destroyed. The new archduke drove away the monks and priestly flatterers that had surrounded his father, suppressed several pensions that had been awarded, converted heretics, Turks, and Jews--lightened, in a word, many of the burdens that oppressed the land without displaying the energy necessary to remove the worst evils from which it suffered. He held at a distance his German wife, who had lately entered with alacrity upon the duties of her position as reigning archduchess in Florence. In matters pertaining to exterior politics he followed closely in the footsteps of his father. Entertaining little hope of setting aside the decisions of the Quadruple Alliance, he took good care to fix the allodial estates of the house of Medici and to indicate which portions could be looked upon as territorial and which must be ceded to the electress of the Palatinate as compensation for the future transfer of the feudal tenure to another family of the Medici female line.

A new turn was given to Tuscan affairs in 1725, while the belief still prevailed that the infante Charles would shortly arrive from Spain with an armed force with the intention of so establishing himself in Tuscany that his position and that of his successors could not be shaken either by the negotiations at Cambray or the pretensions of the emperor. Instead of this solution the Madrid court secretly despatched to Vienna Baron de Ripperda, an able Belgian who had recently gone over to the Catholic church. This envoy succeeded in effecting a separate contract between the emperor and Philip V whereby Tuscany and Parma were to be held as possessions of the infante Charles and his successors without the establishment there of foreign garrisons, exactly in accordance with the provisions of the Quadruple Alliance. Although this agreement (which brought to a close the congress of Cambray) dispelled the fears of the archduke as to an irruption of the Spaniards into his domains before his death, and made possible an undisturbed continuance of his dissolute mode of life, fresh mistrust arose between the courts of Vienna and Madrid which created renewed tension in the affairs of the Italian states.[c]

[Sidenote: [1725-1743 A.D.]]

Giovan Gastone loved conviviality, and during the first years of his reign he took part in the social functions given by the most distinguished families in the capital. Florence seemed to be suddenly transformed. The new sovereign put a stop to the prying censorship of morals with which his predecessor had tormented his subjects of all classes. After he had once made the regulations that seemed to him urgently needed, he refused to hear anything more about the affairs of administration, and he prohibited all reports on the life and doings of his subjects. The doors of his palace were closed to all the monks and clergy, and to the converts and neophytes that Cosmo had loved to gather round him. The palace, however, gained nothing by the changed company in which Giovan Gastone indulged, more especially during the last sad years of his reign. When his father’s pensions to his clerical protégés ceased, the ill-deserved gratuities bestowed upon the depraved clients of Giuliano Dami, the ruspanti (as they were called from their weekly doles of the goldpieces known as ruspo) were much worse. The depravity of morals from which the whole of Italy suffered had never been worse. And Giovan Gastone’s indifference increased with his ill-health. “The present court,” writes Johann Georg Keysler in January, 1730, “is very quiet and dreary. The sister of the grand duke has turned dévote and frequents cloisters and churches more than the court. The grand duchess, widow of the elder brother, is of a lively disposition, it is true, and particularly gracious to foreigners, but perhaps she shrinks from the thought of passing for a lover of vanities in the eyes of her sister-in-law. The grand duke himself has not left his room since last July. No traveller or foreign minister is admitted to an audience with him, and he spends most of his time in bed, partly on account of the discomforts of asthma and dropsy from which he suffers, and partly on account of the strong drinks and liquors which he takes.”

The presence of the infante Don Charles roused this gloomy court for the last time. The prince shot hares and game in the Boboli Gardens and drove through the corridor between the palace and the Uffizzi in a little carriage drawn by a stag. As soon as he had gone everything returned to its former gloom. Giovan Gastone did not leave his couch again. Only once, just before the last crisis, when he felt himself a little better, he was carried in his arm-chair to the window on the ground-floor, while the surging crowds thronged the square. He doled out money by handfuls and bought masses of things that were offered to him, such as books, pictures, stuffs and all the thousand and one strange things which were exposed for sale at this curious fair. Thus did the last of the Medici bid his last farewell to the Florentine people.[b]

Gastone had no bounds to his profusion and the dissipation of their wealth; and when he died (1737), his reign had inflicted many deep wounds on the prosperity of Tuscany. The death of his sister, a few years afterwards, completed the extinction of the sovereign house of Medici. A distant collateral branch of the same original stock, descended from one of the ancestors of the great Cosmo, was left to survive even to these times; but no claim to the inheritance of the ducal house was ever recognised in its members. Francis of Lorraine, the consort of Maria Theresa of Austria, to whom this inheritance was assigned by the Peace of Vienna, naturally resided little in Tuscany, and his elevation to the imperial crown seemed to consign the grand duchy to the long administration of foreign viceroys. But the governors chosen by Francis were men of ability and virtue, who strove to ameliorate the condition of the people; and on the death of the emperor Francis (1765), his will, in consonance with the spirit of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, gave to Tuscany a sovereign of its own. This was his second son, Peter Leopold, to whom he bequeathed the grand duchy, while his eldest, Joseph II, succeeded to his imperial crown. Leopold was only eighteen years of age when he commenced a reign which exhibited to admiration the rare spectacle of a patriot and a philosopher on the throne.[e] We shall have occasion to make further reference to the life of this remarkable prince later on. Now we must take up the development of Italian history in general from the beginning of the century. Our first concern is with the wars that grew out of the extinction of the Habsburg dynasty in Spain.[a]

ITALY IN THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION

[Sidenote: [1700-1765 A.D.]]

Charles II of Spain died without sons in the year 1700, and several sovereigns, amongst whom was Victor Amadeus II, laid claim to the throne and made alliances to obtain it, or at least to divide the vast inheritance among themselves. Before dying, Charles had appointed Philip duke of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV, to be his successor, and although the country was exhausted and a terrible war could be foreseen, the king of France accepted the inheritance for his grandson with the famous saying, “The Pyrenees are no more.” Philip V was in fact recognised in Madrid, but a European war of thirteen years’ duration followed.

The duke of Savoy was undecided what side to adopt, but willing or unwilling he was compelled to side with France, and to give in marriage to Philip V his daughter Maria Louisa, who in spite of her youth showed great judgment, and during her husband’s absence on his campaign in Italy, governed the kingdom in a wise and intelligent manner. Clement XI, exalted in that year to the pontifical see, would not side with France, but intervened to prevent war; and, seeing that he was unsuccessful, endeavoured--but in vain--to form a league among the Italian princes to save Italy from again becoming the arena of European wars. To this pope, sincerely and courageously Italian, praise is due. Eugene of Savoy, conqueror of the Turks, was despatched from Hungary to Italy against the Franco-Piedmontese, and it must have grieved him to turn his arms against his kinsman.

For two years the war was continued without any definite results, though the French were worsted at Chiari, and their mediocre General Villeroi was taken prisoner at Cremona; later at Luzzara in Modena the victory was uncertain. Meanwhile Eugene, more than ever disgusted with the arrogance of the French, endeavoured to separate the duke from the league, and had no trouble in persuading him to abandon it. Louis XIV avenged himself by taking prisoner all the Piedmontese on his territory. The duke arrested the French ambassador, and appealed to his people saying, “I prefer the honour of dying arms in hand to the shame of suffering myself to be oppressed.” Having renewed his troops, he confronted the enemy’s arms almost alone (Eugene had returned to fight in Germany); his courage appeared to become stronger in danger.

Fortune does not always favour the good and brave, and Victor lost many towns and was reduced to defending his own capital. A desperate attack was made on the latter, but the citizens maintained their ancient reputation.

[Sidenote: [1706-1714 A.D.]]

Before giving orders for the bombardment, La Feuillade, who commanded the besiegers, sent word to the duke to inquire where he was quartered, that he might spare him. “On the walls of the citadel,” replied the duke. The defence being well ordered, the duke made a sally with a few brave and tried followers. Thus threatened at close quarters, hearing distant rumours of trouble, suffering, and every kind of want, the intrepid men of Turin held out. The fury of the artillery, the laying of mines, the assaults, lasted three months, but day and night the citizens above and below ground watched and combated. Even from the orphanage the orphans came forward to labour in the mines. Aid was expected, but it came not; though the ever active Eugene was commissioned to bring reinforcements. Eventually the two princes met, and together from the hill of Superga they drew up the plan of battle, the duke promising to erect there a church in thanksgiving if the victory was his.

Turin was in peril. On the 29th of August a large number of the enemy reached a postern of the citadel unseen; a mine was laid at the spot, but could not be fired without danger; in this imminent peril Pietro Nicco d’Andorno, of Biella, made the companies retire, and like a new Decius offered himself to die; the match being applied, he was buried with the French under the ruins. This great deed brought glory on Turin, and the fame of it shall live forever in the country. Nevertheless the French occupied the castle of Pianezza, on the left bank of the Dora Riparia; it was imperative that the Piedmontese should dislodge them from this place, but for this it was necessary to take them unawares and they knew not how. But an old peasant woman, by name Maria Bricca, discovered on the night of the 5th of September that instead of keeping watch the French were amusing themselves, and she immediately ran to give the news in the Italian camp. At the head of the soldiers she led the way by a subterranean passage into the castle, and, hatchet in hand, crying “Viva Savoia” she informed the enemy they were prisoners.

Two days later Victor and Eugene, uniting their talents and forces, inflicted on the French a crushing defeat, so that twenty thousand were left dead on the field and the survivors fled beyond the Alps. The Franco-Spaniards evacuated Naples; and the Austrians, solely because they were the new lords, were greeted as friends and liberators. The war was continued outside Italy, and later the exhausted powers were brought to signing the Treaty of Utrecht 1713, confirmed the following year at Rastatt. By this treaty Austria obtained Milan, Naples, and Sardinia; Victor Amadeus obtained the far distant Sicily, Montferrat, Lomellina, and Val di Susa, with the title of king; a few small states were distributed--Mantua, Mirandola, and afterwards, Guastalla.

This aggrandisement of the house of Savoy and also that of Prussia was specially insisted upon by England, then the peacemaker of the continent and arbitrator in this peace, for which reason she intervened between France and Austria, and preserved European equilibrium. Thus were favoured the legitimate ambitions of two minor states, Piedmont and Prussia, that aimed at a high mark, and in the similarity of their fortunes they became the bulwarks of two nations, the hope and pride of two countries.[d]

WAR OF THE QUADRUPLE ALLIANCE

[Sidenote: [1714-1718 A.D.]]

It was by the ambitious intrigues of an Italian princess and an Italian priest, that the repose of the peninsula was again disturbed, only four years after this pacification. Giulio Alberoni, the son of a peasant, and originally a poor curate near Parma, had risen by his talents and artful spirit to the office of first minister of Spain. Philip V, on the death of his queen, Maria Louisa of Savoy, had espoused the princess Elizabeth Farnese; and Alberoni, by means of this marriage, of which he was regarded as the author, enjoyed the favour of the new queen, and acquired an absolute ascendency over the feeble mind of her husband.

His first object was to obtain a cardinal’s hat for himself; and being indulged with that honour by the pope, the next and more comprehensive scheme of his ambition was to signalise his public administration. To his energetic and audacious conceptions, it seemed not too gigantic or arduous an undertaking to recover for the Spanish monarchy all its ancient possessions and power in Italy, which had been totally lost by the Peace of Utrecht. He duped the wily Victor Amadeus, and enlisted him in his views by the promise of the Milanese provinces in exchange for Sicily; and the disgust which the stern and haughty insolence of the imperial government had already excited in the peninsula, rendered the pope, the grand duke of Tuscany, and other Italian princes, not adverse to the designs of the Spanish minister.

But the great powers of Europe looked with far different eyes upon his unquiet ambition. The personal interest and feelings of the duke of Orleans, who now governed France during the minority of Louis XV, placed him in opposition to Philip V; and the duke discovered a plot laid by Alberoni, through the Spanish ambassador at Paris, to deprive him of the regency of France, to which the cardinal persuaded his master to assert his claim as the nearest relative of Louis XV. The intrigues held with the Scottish Jacobites by Alberoni, who had formed a chimerical scheme of placing the pretender on the throne of Great Britain, and thus securing a new and grateful ally for Spain, rendered George I as jealous as the duke of Orleans of the designs of the court of Madrid. For their mutual protection against the machinations of Alberoni, the British monarch and the French regent negotiated a defensive league between Great Britain, France, and Holland, which, by the accession of the emperor to its objects, shortly swelled into the famous Quadruple Alliance (1718).

Besides the provision of the contracting parties for their mutual defence, the Quadruple Alliance laboured at once to provide for the continued repose of Italy, and to gratify the ambition both of the family of Austria and of the Spanish house of Bourbon. Although Parma and Piacenza were not feminine fiefs, the approaching extinction of the male line of Farnese gave Elizabeth the best subsisting claim to the succession of her uncle’s states. To the grand duchy of Tuscany she had also pretensions by maternal descent, after the failure of the male ducal line of Medici; which, like that of Farnese, seemed to be fast approaching its termination. As, therefore, the children of the young queen were excluded from the expectation of ascending the Spanish throne, which the sons of Philip by his first marriage were of course destined to inherit, the idea was conceived of forming an establishment in Italy for Don Charles, her first-born; and the Quadruple Alliance provided that the young prince should be guaranteed in the succession both of Parma and Piacenza, and of Tuscany, on the death of the last princes of the Farnese and Medicean dynasties. It was to reconcile the emperor to this admission of a Spanish prince into Italy, that Sicily was assigned to him in exchange for Sardinia. The weaker powers and the people were alone sacrificed. While the princes of Parma and Tuscany were compelled to endure the cruel mortification of seeing foreign statesmen dispose by anticipation of their inheritance, during their own lives, and without their option; and while, with a far more flagrant usurpation of natural rights, the will of their subjects was as little consulted--it was resolved to compel Victor Amadeus to receive, as an equivalent for his new kingdom of Sicily, that of Sardinia, which boasted not a third part of either its population or general value.

The provisions of the Quadruple Alliance were haughtily rejected by Alberoni, who had already entered on the active prosecution of his designs upon the Italian provinces. Having hitherto endeavoured, during his short administration, to recruit the exhausted strength of Spain, he now plunged that monarch headlong into a new contest, with such forces as had been regained in four years of peace; and his vigorous, but overwrought direction of the resources of the state, seemed at first to justify his presumption. A body of eight thousand Spaniards was disembarked on the island of Sardinia, and at once wrested that kingdom from the feeble garrisons of the imperialists (1717). In the following year, a large Spanish fleet of sixty vessels of war, convoying thirty-five thousand land-forces, appeared in the Mediterranean; and notwithstanding the previous negotiations of Alberoni with Victor Amadeus, Sicily was the first object of attack. Against this perfidious surprise, the Savoyard prince was in no condition to defend his new kingdom; and though his viceroy at first endeavoured to resist the progress of the Spanish arms, Victor Amadeus, sensible of his weakness and inability to afford the necessary succours for preserving so distant a possession, made a merit of necessity, and assented to the provisions of the Quadruple Alliance (1718). Withdrawing his troops from the contest, he assumed the title of king of Sardinia, though he yet possessed not a foot of territory in that island.

[Sidenote: [1718-1731 A.D.]]

Meanwhile the powers of the Quadruple Alliance, finding all negotiations hopeless, had begun to act vigorously against the Spanish forces. Even before the open declaration of war, to which England and France had now recourse to reduce the court of Spain to abandon its designs, Sir George Byng, the British admiral in the Mediterranean, had not hesitated to attack the Spanish fleet, which he completely annihilated off the Sicilian coast. This disaster overthrew all the magnificent projects of Alberoni. The British admiral poured the imperial troops from the Italian continent into Sicily; and the Spaniards rapidly lost ground, and made overtures for evacuating the island. The enterprises of the court of Madrid were equally unfortunate in other quarters; and Philip V, at last discovering the impracticability of Alberoni’s schemes, sacrificed his minister to the jealousy of the European powers, and acceded to the terms of the Quadruple Alliance (1719). Victor Amadeus was placed in possession of the kingdom of Sardinia, which his house has retained ever since this epoch with the regal title. The cupidity of the emperor was satisfied by the reunion of the crowns of the Two Sicilies in his favour; and the ambitious maternal anxiety of the Spanish queen was allayed by the promised reversion of the states of the Medici and of her own family to the infante Don Charles (1720).

For thirteen years after the conclusion of the war of the Quadruple Alliance, Italy was left in profound and uninterrupted repose. The first half of the eighteenth century was completely the age of political chicanery; and the intricate negotiations, which engrossed the attention and only served to expose the laborious insincerity of the statesmen of Europe, seemed to be ever threatening new troubles. But the treaties, which followed that of the Quadruple Alliance in thick succession for many years, had no other effect in Italy than to secure the Parmesan succession to the infante Don Charles of Spain. Francesco and Antonio, the two surviving sons of the duke Ranuccio II of Parma and Piacenza, who died in 1694, had both inherited the diseased and enormous corpulence of their family. Neither of them had issue; the duke Francesco terminated his reign and life in 1727; and Antonio, his successor, survived him only four years. The death of the youngest of her uncles realised the ambitious hopes which Elizabeth Farnese had cherished of conveying the states of her own house to her son (1731). The male line of Farnese having thus become extinct, the youthful Don Charles, with a body of Spanish troops, was quietly put in possession of the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, and reluctantly acknowledged by the last prince of the Medici as his destined successor in the grand duchy of Tuscany.

THE WAR OF THE POLISH SUCCESSION

[Sidenote: [1731-1738 A.D.]]

The final settlement of the Parmesan and Tuscan succession seemed to eradicate the seeds of hostilities in Italy; but it had become the unhappy fortune of that country to follow captive in the train of foreign negotiation, and to suffer and to bleed for the most distant broils of her foreign masters. Only two years had elapsed after the elevation of the Spanish prince to the ducal throne of Parma, when Italy was suddenly chosen as the field for the decision of a quarrel which had originated in the disputed election of a king of Poland. Upon this occasion, the two branches of the Bourbon dynasty united in the same league against the house of Austria, and resolved to attack its possessions in Italy. Charles Emmanuel III, the new king of Sardinia, joined their formidable confederacy, and the imperial strength in the peninsula was crushed under its weight.

While Charles Emmanuel, at the head of the French and Piedmontese troops, easily conquered the whole Milanese states in a short time, the Spaniards at Parma, being delivered of all apprehension for the issue of the war in Lombardy, found themselves at liberty to divert their views to the south. A Spanish army of thirty thousand men disembarked in the peninsula under the duke of Montemar, and joined Don Charles; and that young prince, at the age of seventeen, assuming the nominal command-in-chief of the forces of Spain in Italy, led them to attempt the conquest of the Sicilies. The duke of Montemar, who guided his military operations, gained for him a complete and decisive victory at Bitonto in Apulia over the feeble imperial army, which was intrusted with the defence of southern Italy. The opposition of language, and manners, and character, between the Germans and Italians, rendered the cold sullen tyranny of Austria peculiarly hateful to the volatile Neapolitans; and they eagerly threw off a yoke to which time had not yet habituated them. The capital had already opened its gates before the battle of Bitonto; and the provinces hastened to offer a ready submission to the conquerors. The Sicilians imitated the example of their continental neighbours; and at Naples and Palermo Don Charles received the crowns of the Two Sicilies (1735).

For the facility with which the Spaniards had effected these conquests, they were principally indebted to the powerful operations of the French in Lombardy, and to the vigour with which the armies of Louis XV pressed those of the emperor in Germany, and prevented him from despatching sufficient succours to his Italian dependencies. The court of Madrid now began to cherish again the hope of recovering the whole of the Italian provinces, which the Spanish monarchy had lost by the Peace of Utrecht; and the duke of Montemar conducted his army into Lombardy to unite with the French and Piedmontese in completing the expulsion of the Austrians from the peninsula. But the emperor, discouraged by so many reverses, made overtures of peace; and the French cabinet was not disposed to indulge the ambition of Spain with further acquisitions.

Negotiations for a general peace were opened, to which Philip V was compelled to accede; and at length the confirmation of the preliminaries by the Peace of Vienna once more changed the aspect of Italy. The crowns of Naples and Sicily were secured to Don Charles. The provinces of Milan and Mantua were left to the emperor; the duchies of Parma and Piacenza were annexed to his Lombard possessions to recompense him in some measure for the loss of the Sicilies; and the extinction of the house of Medici by the death of the grand duke Giovan Gastone, while the negotiations were yet pending, completed a new arrangement for the succession of Tuscany. Francis, duke of Lorraine, who had lately received the hand of Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter and heiress of the emperor, took possession of the grand duchy, in exchange for his hereditary states; and Charles VI was gratified by this favourable provision for his son-in-law and destined successor in the imperial dignity. Finally, the king of Sardinia, in lieu of the ambitious hopes, with which he had been amused, of possessing all the Milanese duchy, was obliged to content himself with the acquisition of the valuable districts of Tortona and Novara.

THE WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION

[Sidenote: [1738-1742 A.D.]]

This general accommodation among the arbiters of Italy procured only a brief interval of repose for the degraded people of the peninsula, before they were exposed to far greater evils than those which they had suffered in the short course of the late war. The emperor Charles VI died only two years after the confirmation of the Peace of Vienna; and the very powers who by that treaty had guaranteed the famous Pragmatic Sanction--or act by which the emperor, as he had no son, was allowed to settle his hereditary states upon his daughter Maria Theresa--conspired to rob her of those dominions. The furious war of the Austrian Succession which followed, filled Italy during seven years with rapine and havoc.

In the year after the death of Charles VI, a Spanish army under the duke of Montemar, disembarked on the Tuscan coast to attempt further conquests in Italy; and although these troops arrived to attack the territories of his consort, the new grand duke was obliged to affect a neutrality and to permit their free passage through his dominions. On the other hand, the king of the Sicilies, who desired to aid his father’s forces in their operations, was equally compelled to accept a neutrality, by the appearance of a British squadron in the bay of Naples, and the threatened bombardment of that city. This humiliation, to which the exposed situation of his capital reduced him, did not, however, prevent the Neapolitan monarch at a later period from taking part in the war. But his engagement in the contest had only the effect of drawing the Austrian arms into southern Italy, and inflicting the ravages of a licentious soldiery upon the neutral states of the church and the frontiers of Naples (1742).

But northern Italy was the constant theatre of far more destructive hostilities; and the Italian sovereign, who acted the most conspicuous part in the general war of Europe, was Charles Emmanuel III, the king of Sardinia. That active and politic prince, pursuing the skilful but selfish and unscrupulous system of aggrandisement, which had become habitual to the Savoyard dynasty, made a traffic of his alliance to the highest bidder. He first offered to join the confederated Bourbons; but the court of Spain could not be induced to purchase his adherence by promising him an adequate share of the Milanese states, which the Spaniards were confident of regaining. Charles Emmanuel therefore deserted the Bourbon alliance to range himself in the party of Maria Theresa. But it was not until he had extorted new cessions of territory from that princess in Lombardy, and large subsidies from England which protected her, that he entered seriously and vigorously into the war, as the auxiliary of Austria and England. As soon as Charles Emmanuel began to declare himself against the Bourbon cause, his states became immediately the prey of invasion. Although the Spanish dynasty pretended to lay claim to the whole succession of the house of Austria, the real motive which actuated the court of Madrid in these wars was the ambition of the queen of Spain, Elizabeth Farnese, to obtain an establishment in Italy for another of her sons, the infante Don Philip; and that prince, leading a Spanish army from the Pyrenees through the south of France, overran and occupied all Savoy, which was mercilessly pillaged by his troops. But Don Philip was unable to penetrate into Piedmont; and meanwhile the duke of Montemar, with the Spanish army already in Italy, had been oppressed successfully by the Austrians and Piedmontese on these opposite frontiers of Lombardy.

[Sidenote: [1742-1748 A.D.]]

But Charles Emmanuel, even after he had formally pledged himself to England and Austria, was perpetually carrying on secret and separate negotiations with the Bourbons; and it was only because he could not obtain all the terms which he demanded of them, and because he was also as suspicious of their ill-faith as he was conscious of his own, that he maintained his alliances unchanged to the end of the war (1743). His states were almost constantly the theatre of hostilities, equally destructive to his subjects, whether success or failure alternately attended his career. Yet he displayed activity and skill and courage, scarcely inferior to the brilliant qualities which had distinguished his father, Victor Amadeus. When, however, the infante Don Philip had been joined by the prince of Conti with twenty thousand men, all the efforts of the Sardinian monarch, though he headed his troops in person, could not resist the desperate valour of the French and Spanish confederates; who, forcing the tremendous passes of the Alps, broke triumphantly into Piedmont, and for some time swept over its plains as conquerors (1744). But reinforced by the Austrians, Charles Emmanuel, before the end of the same campaign, turned the tide of fortune, and obliged the allies to retire for the winter into France. They still retained possession of the duchy of Savoy, and crushed the inhabitants under every species of oppression.

In the following year, Genoa declared for the Bourbon confederation; and the Spanish and French forces under Don Philip, being thus at liberty to form a junction in the territories of that republic with the second Spanish army from Naples, the king of Sardinia and the Austrians were utterly unable to resist their immense superiority of numbers (1745). In this campaign, Parma and Piacenza were reduced by the duke of Modena, the ally of France and Spain; Turin was menaced with bombardment; Tortona fell to the Bourbon arms; Pavia was carried by assault; and Don Philip, penetrating into the heart of Lombardy, closed the operations of the year by his victorious entry into Milan.

But such were the sudden vicissitudes of this sanguinary war, that the brilliant successes of the Spanish prince were shortly rendered nugatory by a growing misunderstanding between the courts of Paris and Madrid, and by the arrival of large reinforcements for the Austrian army in the peninsula (1746). Don Philip lost, in less than another year, all that he had acquired in the preceding campaign. He was driven out of Milan; he was obliged to evacuate all Lombardy; and the French and Spanish forces were finally compelled, by the increasing strength of the Austrians, to recross the Alps, and to make their retreat into France. The king of Sardinia and his allies carried the war into Provence, without meeting with much success; and the French in their turn endeavoured once more to penetrate into Piedmont. But while that quarter of Italy was threatened with new ravages, the peninsula was saved from further miseries by the signature of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748).

One of the declared purposes of the European powers in their assembled congress was to give independence to Italy; and if that object could have been attained without the restoration of ancient freedom, and the revival of national virtue among the Italians, the provisions of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle would have been wise and equitable. The Austrians were permitted to retain only Milan and Mantua; and all other foreign powers consented to exclude themselves from the peninsula. The grand duke Francis of Lorraine, now become emperor, engaged to resign Tuscany to a younger branch of his imperial house. The throne of the Two Sicilies was confirmed to Don Charles and his heirs, to form a distinct and independent branch of the Spanish house of Bourbon; and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza were elevated anew into a sovereign state in favour of Don Philip, who thus became the founder of a third dynasty of the same family. The king of Sardinia received some further accessions of territory, which were detached from the duchy of Milan; and all the other native powers of Italy remained, or were re-established, in their former condition.

FORTY YEARS OF “LANGUID PEACE” FOR DIVIDED ITALY

[Sidenote: [1748-1789 A.D.]]

Thus was Italy, after two centuries of prostration under the yoke of other nations, relieved from the long oppression of foreigners. A small portion only of her territory remained subject to the empire; and all the rest of the peninsula was divided among a few independent governments.

But after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, Italy was still as little constituted as before to command the respect or the fear of the world. Her people for the most part cherished no attachment for rulers to whom they were indebted neither for benefits nor happiness, in whose success they could feel no community of interest, and whose aggrandisement could reflect no glory on themselves.

The condition of Italy after the nominal restoration of her independence, offers, as a philosophical writer has well remarked, a striking lesson of political experience. The powers of Europe, after having in some measure annihilated a great nation, were at length awakened to a sense of the injury which they had inflicted upon humanity, and upon the general political system of the world. They laboured sincerely to repair the work of destruction; there was nothing which they did not restore to Italy, except what they could not restore--the extinguished energies and dignity of the people. Forty years of profound peace succeeded to their attempt; and these were only forty years of effeminacy, weakness, and corruption--a memorable example to statesmen that the mere act of their will can neither renovate a degraded nation, nor replenish its weight in the political balance; and that national independence is a vain boon, where the people are not interested in its preservation, and where no institutions revive the spirit of honour, and the honest excitement of freedom.

During these forty years of languid peace (from the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to the epoch of the French Revolution) the general history of Italy presents not a single circumstance for our observation; and it only remains for us to pass in rapid review the few domestic occurrences of any moment in the different Italian states of the eighteenth century. The affairs of the Sicilies, of the popedom, of the states of the house of Savoy, of the duchies of Tuscany and Modena, of the republics of Genoa and Venice, and of the Milanese and Mantuan provinces, may each require a brief notice. But the obscure or tranquil fortunes of Lucca, and of the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, would scarcely merit a separate place in this enumeration.

The duchies of Parma and Piacenza, which had once more been separated from that of Milan to form the independent appanage of a Spanish prince, relapsed into the deep oblivion from which the dispute for their possession had alone drawn them. Don Philip reigned until the year 1765, and his son, Don Ferdinand, succeeded him. The administration of both of these princes was, in a political sense, marked by no important event; but the literary and scientific tastes of Don Philip entitle him to be mentioned with respect, and shed some beneficial influence on his ducal states.

THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES AND SICILY

[Sidenote: [1738-1765 A.D.]]

The transition of the crowns of Naples and Sicily, from the extinguished Spanish branch of the house of Austria to the collateral line of Germany, and from that dynasty again to a junior member of the Spanish Bourbons, has already been noticed; and we take up the annals of the Sicilies from the epoch only at which the infante Don Charles was confirmed in the possession of their throne by the Treaty of Vienna. This sovereign, who reigned at Naples under the title of Charles VII, but who is better known by his later designation of Charles III of Spain, governed southern Italy above twenty-one years.

The general reputation of his character has perhaps been much over-rated; but, as the monarch of the Sicilies, he undoubtedly laboured to promote the welfare of his kingdom. The war of the Spanish Succession paralysed all his efforts during the first half of his reign; but after the restoration of tranquillity in 1748, he devoted himself zealously and exclusively to the pacific work of improvement. He was well seconded by the virtuous intentions, if not by the limited talents, of his minister Tanucci. The principal error of both proceeded from their ignorance of the first principles of finance; and the cultivated mind and theoretical knowledge of Tanucci fitted him less for the active conduct of affairs than for the station of professor of law, from which the king had raised him to his friendship and confidence.

It has been objected as a second mistake of Charles, or his minister, that the system of government which they adopted contemplated only the continuance of peace, and contained no provision against the possibility of war. No attempt was made either to kindle a martial spirit in the people, or to rouse them to the power of defending themselves from foreign aggression and insult. The army, the fortifications, and all warlike establishments were suffered to fall into utter decay; and the military force of the kingdom, which was nominally fixed at thirty thousand men, was kept so incomplete that it rarely exceeded half that number. The only security for the preservation of honourable peace at home was forgotten in a system which neglected the means of commanding respect abroad; but Charles occupied himself, as if he indulged the delusive hope of maintaining his subjects in eternal tranquillity. He studiously embellished his capital; and the useful public works, harbours, aqueducts, canals, and national granaries, which preserve the memory of his reign, are magnificent and numerous.

The laudable exertions of Charles were but just beginning to produce beneficial effects, when he was summoned by the death of his elder brother, Ferdinand VI of Spain, who left no children, to assume the crown of that kingdom (1759). According to the spirit of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, his next brother, Don Philip, duke of Parma, should have succeeded to the vacant throne of the Sicilies; but Charles III was permitted to place one of his own younger sons in the seat which he had just quitted. His eldest son betrayed such marks of hopeless idiocy that it was necessary to set him altogether aside from the succession to any part of his dominions; the inheritance of the Spanish throne was reserved for the second, who afterwards reigned under the title of Charles IV; and it was to the third that the sceptre of the Sicilies was assigned.

[Sidenote: [1759-1825 A.D.]]

This prince, who under the name of Ferdinand IV of Naples and Sicily reigned till 1825, was then a boy of nine years of age. Charles appointed a Neapolitan council of regency to govern in his son’s name; but the marquis Tanucci remained the real dictator of the public administration; and the new monarch of Spain continued to exercise a decisive influence over the councils of the Two Sicilies during the whole of his son’s minority, and even for some time after its expiration. It was by the act of Tanucci, and in conjunction with the policy of Charles, that the Jesuits were expelled from the Two Sicilies and from Spain at the same epoch; that the ancient usurpations of the holy see were boldly repressed; and that the progress of other useful reforms was zealously forwarded.

It was the most fatal negligence of Charles III, and the lasting misfortune of his son, that the education of Ferdinand IV was entrusted to the prince of San Nicandro, a man utterly destitute of ability or knowledge. The young monarch, who was not deficient in natural capacity, was thus permitted to remain in the grossest ignorance. The sports of the field were the only occupation and amusement of his youth; and the character of his subsequent reign was deplorably influenced by the idleness and distaste for public affairs in which he had been suffered to grow up. The marriage of Ferdinand with the princess Carolina of Austria put a term to the ascendency of Charles III over the Neapolitan councils. His faithful servant Tanucci lost his authority in the administration; some years afterwards he was finally disgraced; and the ambitious consort of Ferdinand, having gained an absolute sway over the mind of her feeble husband, engrossed the direction of the state. Her assumption of the reins of sovereignty was followed by the rise of a minion, who acquired as decided an influence over her spirit as she already exercised over that of the king. This was the famous Acton, a low Irish adventurer, who, after occupying some station in the French marine, passed into Tuscany, and was received into the service of the grand duke. He had the good fortune to distinguish himself in an expedition against the pirates of Barbary; and thenceforth his elevation was astonishingly rapid. He became known to the queen, and was entrusted with the direction of the Neapolitan navy. Still young, and gifted with consummate address, he won the personal favour of Carolina; he governed while he seemed implicitly to obey her; and without any higher qualifications, or any knowledge beyond the narrow circle of his profession, he was successively raised to the office of minister of war and of foreign affairs. The whole power of government centred in his person; and Acton was the real sovereign in the Sicilies, when the corrupt court and the misgoverned state encountered the universal shock of the French Revolution.[e]

THE STATES OF THE CHURCH

[Sidenote: [1700-1800 A.D.]]

On the outline of government and policy in the ecclesiastical state, as these features presented themselves in the seventeenth century, very little has to be either altered or added, if we would make the picture true for the age that succeeded. It is necessary indeed to pay, at the outset, that tribute of respect which is deserved by the personal character of most of the sovereigns who ruled on the Seven Hills during the eighteenth century. Never had the bishops of Rome been so decorous, so generally unexceptionable in morals; seldom had they numbered so many men of sincere and earnest piety; never had the list included names more illustrious for talent and learning. Two popes in particular, Prospero Lambertini and the accomplished Antonio Ganganelli, would have reflected honour upon any throne in Christendom.

But those venerable priests, who, for a few years before they sank into the grave, left the altar and the closet, the breviary and the pen, to wear the triple crown and wield the keys of St. Peter, discovered by sad experience what everyone who has administered that office must have discovered before he had slept a month under the roof of the Vatican. Genius becomes a public calamity, virtue itself is paralysed into despair, when, after a lifetime spent in the library or the cloister, they are summoned, in the decrepitude of old age, to discharge duties more complicated, more difficult, requiring greater versatility and greater energy in action than those which belong to any other sovereignty in the world. Where the whole edifice of government must be overturned before effectual repair can be wrought upon any of its parts, differences in the character of successive rulers are confined in their results to individual and temporary interests. In regard to the permanent improvement or deterioration of the state, Rodrigo Borgia was as innocent as the irreproachable Barnaba Chiaramonti; Clement VII was as wise as Sixtus V; and the hermit-pope Pietro di Murrhone, with his gentle and pious ignorance, was not more helpless than Julian della Rovere, who wore armour beneath his sacerdotal robe.

The most unpleasing task which the popes of the eighteenth century had to perform was that of accommodating their prerogatives over the Catholic states to those opinions of independence which were now rooted in every cabinet of Europe. The priestly chiefs bowed with infinite reluctance to this hard necessity; some of them disgraced themselves by persecuting foreign inquirers, like Giannone and Genovesi; and, but for the activity and talent of Clement XIV, who yielded gracefully what he had no power to withhold, the papal court might have suffered losses infinitely more injurious than the sacrifice which it was obliged to make of its able servants the Jesuits. Pius VI, on whose head were to break the thunders of the French Revolution, was more a man of the world than any of his recent predecessors. Long employed in offices of the government, and familiar in an especial degree with the business of the Roman exchequer, he distinguished himself by endeavours zealous and incessant, but utterly unsuccessful, to introduce internal ameliorations. The sluggish imbecility of the papal rule cannot be better proved than by the fact that, till the middle of the eighteenth century, while internal taxes and restrictions ground the faces of the people, there was no duty (though, at several points of time, there were absolute prohibitions) on the importation of foreign manufactures; and that one of the most vaunted measures of this reign was the organisation of a force to protect the frontiers against smuggling; a measure of which, amidst all their recent tariffs, the popes do not appear to have ever dreamed.

In the details of his new system of foreign duties on merchandise, as well as in many of his regulations for agriculture and internal trade, Pius and his advisers proved singularly how much they were still in the dark as to the principles of political economy. His partial abolition of the innumerable baronial tolls did not confer benefits half sufficient to counterbalance the evils produced by his arbitrary restrictions on the corn-trade; his expensive operations for draining the Pontine marshes were rendered useless by his gift the reclaimed lands to his nephew; and his depreciation of the currency by excessive issues of paper money was an anticipation of one of the worst errors committed by the leaders of the French Revolution.

THE SARDINIAN KINGDOM

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, the counts of Savoy were precluded from prosecuting further that policy which had gained for them an extensive dominion and a kingly name. But, even amidst the wars which had preceded this period, and still more energetically after their close, the able and ambitious Victor Amadeus continued that system of internal improvement, to whose results he looked forward as likely to make him the sovereign of a people rich as well as warlike, rivals of their southern neighbours in literature and art, as they had already outstripped them in energy and public spirit.

In his endeavours for the intellectual improvement of the higher ranks (for whom exclusively his institutions were designed), he succeeded as ill as an arbitrary king may be expected to succeed when he aims at amending a corrupted, martial, and ignorant aristocracy. For commerce he was able to effect greatly more, through those regulations imposed on the silk-manufacture, which, however alien their narrow spirit may be to the genuine principles of commerce, were found to be not ill-calculated to check an equally narrow spirit abroad, and were accordingly imitated in Milan and the eastern provinces. Several excellent laws aided the rural population. One enactment expressly recognised, in contradiction to all older practice, agricultural leases for a fixed term of years, usually from nine to eighteen; and not only so, but the lawgivers studiously left loopholes for evading a rule which they were in terms obliged to enact, for making the endurance of such leases dependent on the survivance of the landlord who had granted them. This characteristic artifice shows the influence of the higher classes, against whom however Victor Amadeus carried by arbitrary interference his great and beneficial measure for an equalisation of public burdens. For, before he abdicated the throne, all the estates in Piedmont, without distinction of tenure, were subjected to an impartial land-tax, assessed in conformity to a general valuation, which likewise furnished the materials for levying all local burdens on the communes, such as those for roads, schools, and costs of administration.

When we add such improvements as these to the changes which we perceived to be in progress during the seventeenth century, we shall wonder, if we learn nothing more, how it should have happened that the subjects of this kingdom were not only the first to throw themselves into the arms of the revolutionary French, but have since complained of their government more bitterly than any other Italians. It is not difficult to find the reasons. All the reforms of the Piedmontese princes were made for their own ends, not for the sake of the people, who were kept peremptorily in subjection to the king, and left in total dependence on his character for their share of individual comfort; the nobles, likewise, being disarmed as well as the commonalty, the crown was freed from the only check on its conduct; and bitter discontents arose both from that abject submission to the priesthood, and from that childish fear of change, which for the last few generations have distinguished the princes. But, at the same time, amidst the innovations which were introduced after the middle of the seventeenth century, it had been found expedient to conciliate the alarmed aristocracy by leaving its members in possession of many personal and empty, yet invidious privileges; and the consequence was a haughtiness on the part of the upper ranks met by sullen defiance among the multitude, a mutual mistrust among all orders, ready to kindle into deadly hatred.

[Sidenote: [1700-1740 A.D.]]

Charles Emmanuel III, notorious in the early years of his reign for his ingratitude towards a father who had resigned the throne in his favour, was more creditably distinguished in later life by his endeavours to reconcile the conflicting wishes of the different orders of society, and to purify completely the administration of justice. His nobles complained of the number of commoners whom he promoted to public posts: the suitors in the courts of law marvelled at the conduct of a king who so far distrusted his own judgment, and so far honoured the judicial servants of his crown, as to refuse granting any briefs of dispensation from judicial sentences, unless after consultation with the judges by whom the decision had been pronounced. He was less prudent in his management of the military force, which he weakened greatly by the promotion of inefficient officers, the nobility being always preferred, and a commoner finding it all but impossible to rise to high rank. This abuse became greatly more flagrant in the reign of his successor, who gave the last impulse to the growing discontent of his subjects, by his superstitious subservience to confessors and bigots, and not less by increasing his army to an unreasonable size, and taxing the people severely for its pay and subsistence.

Sardinia, rude, poor, and lawless, like other provinces of Spain, was little improved by its new sovereign, Victor Amadeus II. In his son, however, it found the best ruler it had seen for ages. Much was done by him to weaken feudalism, encourage agriculture, and extirpate the bands of robbers; two universities were founded, and the inferior schools somewhat improved; and the year 1738 was a remarkable epoch in the island, from the reforms which it witnessed in every department.

THE FOUR REPUBLICS

[Sidenote: [1736-1768 A.D.]]

The history of Lucca offers no fact worthy of being mentioned. Its oligarchy grew more and more exclusive, and the peasant landholders in its rural districts became impoverished through the excessive division of property by succession.

The miniature republic of San Marino had retreated into its wonted obscurity since 1739, when the fallen intriguer, Cardinal Alberoni, then papal legate in Romagna, repeated at its expense that treachery by which he had formerly convulsed all Europe. Alleging that the government of San Marino had become a narrow oligarchy, which was true but did not justify his interference, he conquered its territory with a single company of soldiers and a few officers of police. The people appealed to Clement XII, who ordered them to determine their own fate in a general meeting: they unanimously voted against submission to the church, and the papal troops were withdrawn.

In 1746, the Genoese commonalty, unsupported by the nobles, showed, in their expulsion of the Austrians, a spirit worthy of their fathers. With this bold insurrection the history of the republic of Genoa closes for half a century. In 1718 it had increased its territory, by purchasing the imperial fief of Finale; but within a few years it lost Corsica.

The revolted Corsicans allowed their country to be formed into a mock kingdom in 1736, by the foolish ambition of Theodore von Neuhof, a German baron; and, after they had been deserted by him, they continued to resist the united forces brought against them by the Genoese and Louis XV of France. The islanders now established a republic, which, from 1755, was headed by the celebrated Pasquale Paoli: and the contest for freedom was maintained manfully till Genoa, tired of an expensive war, and deeply indebted to France, ceded Corsica to that power on receiving an acquittance. Louis renewed the attack with increased vigour, and the besieged republicans resisted bravely till the struggle became utterly hopeless. Paoli emigrated to England, and the island became a French province in 1768, the year before it gave birth to Napoleon Bonaparte.

The commerce of Venice was nearly at a end; her manufactures were insignificant; her flag was insulted on her own Adriatic by every power of Europe. She still, however, possessed an Italian territory, peopled by two millions and a half of subjects; her Dalmatian and Albanian provinces and the Ionian Isles had half a million more. Her taxes had been nearly doubled in the eighteenth century, and amounted, in 1789, to about 11,600,000 ducats (£1,919,800 or $9,599,000); her public credit was bad; and her debt was 44,000,000 ducats (£7,283,300 or $36,416,500). The gloomy government remained unchanged. The Council of Ten had resisted frequent attempts to overturn it: an attack in 1761 was checked by arrests and imprisonments in monasteries; and the Ten and the Three still exercised, though more cautiously than before, their singular functions. Their spies cost annually, in the eighteenth century, about 200,000 ducats; and more than one secret execution was laid to their charge. But licentiousness was more prevalent than cruelty; infamous women were pensioned as informers by the state; and in the public gaming-houses, amidst the masked gamesters, senators, officially appointed, presided undisguised.

In 1768, the nobles, displeased with the church, named a commission to inquire into the state of its revenues. The report, which is still extant, is curious. The commissioners estimate the gross income at 4,274,460 ducats (£719,100, $3,595,500). Of this sum, 2,734,807 ducats were permanent, being derived from lands, money invested, or perpetual rents. The remainder was casual, being made up of the alms bestowed on mendicant orders, and of the prices paid for temporary masses. The whole number of masses for which the clergy received payment was prodigious, being not less than 8,938,459. Of these the parochial and other secular clergymen celebrated 4,250,060; the monastic orders celebrated the rest, being 4,688,399, of which 3,107,682 were masses on perpetual foundations. On the latter class the Venetian commissioners sarcastically remark that the whole number of the monks and friars was 7,638, of which only 3,272 were in priest’s orders, and entitled to say mass; and that, consequently, if the monks performed all the masses for which they took payment, each of their priests would have to officiate fourteen or fifteen hundred times a year.

MILAN AND TUSCANY

[Sidenote: [1755-1790 A.D.]]

For seventeen years after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the duchies of Milan and Mantua, forming one province, and the grand duchy of Tuscany as another, were governed by viceroys appointed by Maria Theresa and her husband Francis. On the emperor’s death in 1765, the two Lombard duchies continued to constitute a province of the empire under his son Joseph II; but Tuscany was formed into an independent sovereignty for Peter Leopold, the new emperor’s younger brother. All these sovereigns were remarkable persons: the sons were worthy of their heroic mother; and Leopold, free from that ambition which stained the names of Maria Theresa and Joseph with the infamous partition of Poland, was one of the greatest men that ever filled a throne.

The statistical results of this period were highly pleasing. Austrian Lombardy, at length enabled to profit in some measure by its singular physical advantages, was, in 1790, by far the most flourishing province in Italy; while Tuscany also was prosperous, and in some respects more decidedly so than Joseph’s duchies. The institutions of both states were wonderfully improved; and the history of these changes is one of the most interesting pages in the annals of modern Italy.

That the long servitude of the Italians had ruined their character as well as their national resources, could not have been more clearly proved than by the bitter opposition with which they met all the reforms introduced by their new masters. There was hardly an improvement of any importance, especially in Lombardy, that was not absolutely forced upon the natives; and the most sweeping changes were skilfully evaded, some of them during more than a generation. Much of this delay was attributable to the wonted slowness of the Austrian court; but much also was produced by the passive resistance of the people. The great system of administration, the first draft of which had been laid before the empress in 1739, did not come into activity till 1755, and its introduction makes that year an important epoch for northern Italy.

A few only of the features which distinguished the plan of taxation can be here described. One of the worst evils to be removed was the subdivision of the state into seven districts, each of which, like a separate kingdom, has its duties on mercantile imports, exports, and transits. This abuse was swept away by a single stroke of the pen; and similar restrictions on agricultural produce shared the same fate. The excise was subjected to good regulations, and the customs based on principles as fair as any that then prevailed in Europe. Lastly, a new survey and valuation formed the rule for an equitable assessment of the land-tax. A dispassionate and well-qualified judge was able to find in the system but four serious defects: an insufficient check on the land-valuators; the retention of the unwise mercantile-tax; the imposition of a capitation-tax on the peasantry and others who paid no land-tax; and the permission to the church, which possessed a third of the lands in the state, and had till now paid no taxes for them, to retain too many of its Spanish privileges.

But the portion of the plan that most interests us is the administrative. In the general government, the obnoxious senate was retained, and formed a very injurious barrier between the subjects and the throne, generating petty cabals, and assisting in keeping up that tendency to secrecy and plotting which had been triumphant under the Spaniards. In the provincial government, the leading principle was, to subject everything in the last instance to the control of the boards of administration at Milan, while the immediate administration of every province was put under a delegate appointed by the sovereign; although, at the same time, a considerable part of the actual management was consigned to a provincial council established in every chief city. The local statutes of the old republics or petty principalities, which it was not in all cases considered safe to touch, created many diversities in the execution of this plan; but the general rule was to introduce in the provincial councils members of three orders: the representatives of the cities, who were nobles, and elected by their own class in each town; the representatives elected by the landholders of the province; and the mercantile men who represented, and were elected by, the corporation of merchants. The council so formed devolved its ordinary powers on a committee of its own body, called the prefects of government. Communal councils were also instituted, according to regulations laid down in a prolix code. Each of them administered the patrimony of the commune, under the presidency of a chancellor appointed by the sovereign. Their own members were five for each commune: three representatives of the landholders, one representative of the mercantile body, and one representative of those who were subject to the capitation-tax. They were elected annually in a meeting of all the landholders rated on the books for the land-tax; soldiers and churchmen, however, being ineligible. The same constituency also elected the consul, who was an inferior criminal judge, and the syndic, who had dignity without any real duties.

Joseph, seconded by his excellent viceroy Count Firmian, under whom served Verri, Carli, Neri, and other enlightened Italians, followed out the plan of amelioration which had been thus delineated for him. He improved the courts of justice and the judicial procedure, especially in criminal causes, abolishing, at the suggestion of Beccaria, torture and secret trials. He annulled or diminished the most vexatious of the feudal privileges, and imposed checks on the perpetual destination of estates. He patronised agriculture, and extended commerce and manufactures by the construction of roads, as well as by the abolition of some remaining imposts and restrictions. When the death of his mother, in 1780, freed him from her remonstrances on ecclesiastical matters, he commenced with his accustomed impetuosity a series of changes in that department, which Pius VI considered so dangerous that he made a fruitless journey to Vienna in the hope of procuring their repeal. The most material of those measures were the following: all dissenters were to enjoy toleration; the bishops were forbidden, as they had already been forbidden by other princes, to act upon any papal bull but such as should be transmitted to them by the government; the monastic clergy were declared to be dependent, not on the general of their order who lived in Rome, but directly on the resident bishop of the diocese within which their cloister was situated; lastly, all nunneries were suppressed, except those which pledged themselves to occupy their members in the education of the young. The emperor’s death interrupted the consolidation of his famous system for giving uniformity to his system of government throughout all the Austrian dominions. The decree of 1786, which promulgated this new constitution, divided the Italian provinces into eight circles, in each of which the local administration was to be vested in a chamber closely dependent upon the government. This departure from the late arrangement created in Lombardy universal discontent.

Sometimes unjust and cruel, often misjudging and imprudent, always headstrong, passionate, and despotic, doing good to his subjects by force, and punishing as ungrateful all who refused to be thus benefited, Joseph was an unconscious instrument in the hand of providence for advancing in southern Europe the great revolution of his time. One inveterate evil was extirpated, that another might be substituted for it, which, being less deeply rooted, was destined in its turn to wither and die away. “At length,” said a noble-minded Italian in the last stage of the emperor’s reign, “the obstacles which hindered the happiness of nations have mainly disappeared. Over the greater part of Europe despotism has banished feudal anarchy; and the manners and spirit of the times have already weakened despotism.”

The reforms in the grand duchy of Tuscany went infinitely further than those of Joseph and his mother in the provinces of the Po. They were commenced during the life of Francis, by the prince of Craon, his viceroy at Florence; and the plan was formed, even thus early, for consolidating into one common code all those contradictory laws which, subsisting in the old Tuscan communities, had been maintained since the subjection of all to the duchy. But it was reserved for younger hands to construct this noble edifice.

Till we reflect that Leopold’s scheme of legislation for Tuscany was devised and executed long before that change of opinions which the French Revolution diffused through the whole of Europe, we are not fully aware how very far he stood in advance of his age. In his new code the criminal section was especially bold, inasmuch as it swept away at once torture, confiscation, secret trial, and even the punishment of death. Imprisonment for debt, forbidden by one of his laws unless the claim exceeded a certain amount, was afterwards abolished altogether. All privileged jurisdictions were destroyed, and the public courts fortified in their independence and authority. Restrictions on agriculture were totally removed; and large tracts of common were brought into cultivation by being divided among poor peasants in property, subject only to a small crown-rent. The grand duke discontinued the ruinous system of farming out the taxes; he diminished their amount, and abandoned most of the government monopolies. Notwithstanding, he was able, before he left Italy, to pay off the greater part of a large national debt; for, under his new system, and especially through the absolute freedom which he allowed to commerce, industry flourished so wonderfully, that his revenue suffered hardly any diminution.

Leopold’s ecclesiastical reforms were equally daring, and gave deep offence to the papal government. They were chiefly designed for improving the condition of the parochial clergy, and for curbing the monastic orders. He suppressed the Inquisition; he imposed severe limitations on the profession of monks and nuns; he made the regular clergy dependent, not merely (as his brother had done) on their bishop, but directly on the priest of the parish; he taxed church-lands like those belonging to laymen; he even seized arbitrarily several large estates which had been destined to useless ecclesiastical purposes, and applied their proceeds towards increasing the insufficient incomes of the priests in rural parishes. This step, as well as several others, formed parts of his great scheme against tithes, of which he gradually introduced a general commutation.

In the system which this great man enforced there were unquestionably many defects. There was something (though not much) of his brother’s hasty disregard for obstacles arising from foreign quarters; a fault which made his scheme for free trade in some respects injurious to his subjects, and forced him in his later years to resume a few restrictions. There was a disposition to overstrain the principles of reform, manifested when he totally abolished trading corporations, or when, in the last year of the period, he annulled at a blow all rights of primogeniture, and all substitutions in succession to land. There was a jealous watchfulness over details, a temper exceedingly useful but very irritating, which displayed itself with equal force in the severe system of police, and in the curious circular letter which he addressed to the nobles, requesting that their ladies might be made to dress more economically. There was some fickleness of purpose, though much less than those have believed, who forget the existence of that chaos of local laws and privileges, through which he had for years to pilot his way, embarrassed, misled, and thwarted at every step. Lastly, there were two absolute wants. Leopold did not, because in a single generation he could not, renovate the heart and mind of his people; and therefore the degenerate Florentines murmured at his strictness of rule, and ridiculed his personal peculiarities. He did not give to his subjects a representative constitution; and therefore his fabric of beneficent legislation crumbled into fragments the moment his hand ceased to support its weight.

It is said, indeed, that he had sketched a constitution before he left Tuscany; but, at all events, his reforms in the local administration went very far towards this great end. His purpose, in which, as in so much besides, he was obstructed by a multiplicity of special statutes and customs, was to introduce over the duchy one uniform system of municipal government, embracing all districts, rural as well as urban. During his whole reign, step after step led him towards this result, by organising new communal councils in various provinces, which had at length comprehended nearly the whole state. At the same time there was extended to the new boards the privilege conferred first on those in the Florentine territory, of managing their local patrimony as of old, without dependence upon the supreme government. The polity of Alessandro de’ Medici, which still prevailed in Florence, was annulled in 1781; and the elective board which administered the affairs of the city thenceforth consisted of a gonfalonier, as president, eleven priors, and twenty councillors.[f]

A Tuscan Estimate of Leopold

The reforms of Leopold I (Emperor Leopold II) did not suffice to drag Tuscany from the abyss into which she had been cast by the sbirocracy of the Medici. A fallen people would rise again to the enthusiasm of grand ideas, but what grand idea did Leopold I place at the head of the regenerative movement? He corrected clerical abuses, but did not enkindle the religious faith of the people after the example of the ardent preachers of the Crusades of the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century reformers. He recognised equality in civil laws, but did not make a social credo of it like the French republicans.

Leopold’s idea was a paternal government, a sort of family council, where the most touching accord would reign between the prince and the assembly elected by the commons. He wanted to make another Arcadia of Tuscany, an Arcadia simply occupied with its well-being and material progress, foreign to the use of arms and neutral in all aspects of war. But this was not the way to model character and make free citizens. The shock given to Europe by the French Revolution and the results therefrom had quite other effects. When Italy owed to the France of ’89 that moral shock which stirred up men’s minds and made them enter into communication with the universal conscience, it did not need more to convict of error those who reproached the French Revolution with having upset the reforms of Italian princes without any compensation. Abstention in this gigantic struggle was impossible. It was imperative to fight either for the powers of the past or for those of the future; so this worship of principles became the great passion of souls, and character regained all its old vigour. The Restoration came to check this salutary movement.

The sleeping sbirocracy inaugurated by Fossombroni went back to the Medici traditions and the meanness of the old régime was again substituted for the moral and political grandeur of the French epoch. But it was thenceforth impossible to stifle the germs of the new life. We shall see these germs, in spite of most unfavourable conditions, fructifying in Tuscany as in other parts of Italy; we shall see the country of Michelangelo coming out of its abasement and paying the Italian revolution the tribute of its genius, its love, and its blood.[g]

ITALY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY AGE

[Sidenote: [1790-1794 A.D.]]

For the sovereigns of Italy, as well as for the people, the first three years of the revolutionary age formed a time of abortive plans and earnest preparation.

Events of immediate interest cut short two visionary designs, of which, although both must have failed of success, yet either, by the very attempt, might have given another colour to the history of Europe. A few aspiring cardinals, looking back to Gregory VII and Sixtus V, devised an Italian league, to be headed by the pope; and at the court of Turin, which took example from its own more recent annals, there was planned a campaign against its Austrian neighbours. But Rome was destined to fall a passive victim to foreign aggression; and the ambitious king of Sardinia became the scapegoat of the prince whose Lombard crown he had wished to transfer to his own brows.

The emperor Joseph died in the beginning of the year 1790, and Leopold, leaving Tuscany to his second son Ferdinand, received both the hereditary dominions of Austria and the imperial dignity. He extricated himself skillfully from the foreign wars into which his brother had plunged; but neither the internal discontents of the Low Countries, nor the dangers which threatened Louis XVI, were evils so easily remedied. He employed his diplomacy in endeavouring, by means of a European congress, to impose constitutional limitations on all the contending parties in France; but disappointment in this scheme, and fresh revolts among his own provinces, embittered every moment of his life. He was tempted to become a leading party in the fatal Treaty of Pilnitz, which may be truly said to have destroyed the French monarchy; and in the spring of 1792, his death, at the age of forty-four, saved him from beholding the calamities which speedily followed. His hereditary estates descended to his eldest son Francis, who likewise succeeded him as emperor; and the policy of the new reign, warlike as well as anti-revolutionary from its very opening, accelerated the contest which soon desolated Europe.

Two other Italian courts, besides those of Lombardy and Tuscany, were deeply interested in the fate of the royal family in Paris. The queen of Naples was, like Marie Antoinette, a daughter of Maria Theresa; and the two brothers of Louis XVI were sons-in-law of the king of Sardinia. The advisers of Ferdinand prepared for the struggle by strengthening the artillery and marine, by reconciling themselves with the see of Rome, by imposing extraordinary taxes, and by seizing the money deposited in the national banks; but to these measures were added others of a different cast, designed for crushing the dreaded strength of public opinion. Arbitrary commissions were organised for trying political offences; spies were set to watch Cirillo, Pagano, Conforti, Delfico, and other men of liberal views; foreign books and newspapers were excluded; and Filangieri’s work was burned by the hands of the common hangman. In the other extremity of the peninsula, the count d’Artois imitated at Turin, on a smaller scale, the court of emigrant nobles which surrounded Monsieur at Coblenz. Simultaneously with that alliance between the emperor and the king of Prussia, which produced the abortive invasion of France in 1792, there was concluded an Italian league, headed openly by Naples and Rome, and secretly joined by Victor Amadeus, while the grand duke of Tuscany, as well as the Venetians and the Genoese, remained determinedly neutral.

Time of the French Republic under the National Convention

The little cloud which rose over the tennis-court at Versailles, had already overshadowed all the thrones in Europe; and that of Sardinia was the first on which it discharged its tempest. Where both parties were resolved on war, a pretence was readily found. Semonville, sent to negotiate for a passage for the French armies through Piedmont, was reported to have propagated revolutionary doctrines on his way: he was ordered to quit the king’s dominions, and a second envoy was refused leave to cross the frontier.

On the 18th of September, 1792, the national assembly declared war against the king of Sardinia; and an invasion of his states immediately ensued. The Savoyards, discontented and democratic, had no will to fight; the Piedmontese, ill-officered as well as mutinous, had neither will nor ability; and within a fortnight Savoy and the county of Nice were in the possession of the French troops. The atrocities, however, which took place at Paris during the autumn of that year, and the execution of the king in the beginning of the next, not only gave fresh vigour to the operations of the allied sovereigns, but added new members to their league. In 1793 a British fleet occupied Corsica; while the Austrians and Piedmontese vainly tried to fight their way against Kellermann through Savoy to Lyons. During the succeeding summer, the republicans, entering Italy with one army by the Alps, and with another through the neutral territory of Genoa, maintained a more energetic campaign, which left them masters of all the passes leading down into Piedmont. At the same time Pasquale Paoli, supported by England, arranged a constitution for Corsica, which acknowledged George III as its king.

[Sidenote: [1793-1795 A.D.]]

In the course of the year 1795, the alarm produced by the recent successes of the French not only disarmed some of their most active enemies, but gained for them allies in Italy itself, the stronghold of legitimate monarchy. Ferdinand of Tuscany, a cautious or timid man, anxious to preserve the commerce of Leghorn, and seeing no reason why he should sacrifice his people to the ambition or revenge of the greater European courts, was the first crowned head that recognised the new democratic state. In February of this year, he concluded a treaty with France, disclaiming his enforced connection with the allies, and binding himself to a strict neutrality. Soon afterwards the coalition lost three of its members, Holland, Prussia, and Spain. Within the Alps the war languished; and the Austrians and Piedmontese were able, till the end of the autumn, to keep the invading armies cooped up in the northwestern corner of the peninsula. Meanwhile that fermentation of men’s minds, which had its centre in Paris, was diffusing itself over most of the Italian provinces, among those classes that were predisposed to receive such an impulse.

Tuscany was the quarter in which the new opinions met with the least countenance. Although the grand duke had been tempted to depart from some of his father’s commercial and agricultural laws, his plan of polity remained so far entire that the constitutionalists had really little to complain of. In ecclesiastical matters, however, the priesthood renewed with success those instigations by which many of them long before had crippled the efforts of their bold reformer; and Leopold had not been twelve months at Vienna, when the peasantry clamorously demanded the re-establishment of certain religious fraternities and forms of worship which he had abolished as superstitious and hurtful. In the eastern provinces of the papal state there was much silent discontent among all classes; but in Rome itself, although a few men held democratic opinions, the only outbreak that happened was that of January, 1793, when Bassville, the French secretary of legation, an active republican agent, was stoned to death by the populace. In Parma, Duke Ferdinand had recently alarmed the thinking part of his subjects by introducing the papal Inquisition, and by exhibiting himself, in strong contrast to his early habits, as a religious formalist and devotee. The duke of Modena was perhaps more unpopular than he deserved to be. In the republics opinions were greatly divided, though from dissimilar causes. San Marino was a cipher; Lucca was made passive, not only by her own insignificance, but by a general indifference towards change; the Venetians were distracted by two opposite feelings, their fear of Austrian encroachment and their hatred of Parisian democracy; the Genoese, although the revolutionary party was strong among them, not only dreaded the destruction of their commerce, but were personally interested in the French funds.

In the remaining sections of the peninsula, the extreme south and the extreme north, were to be found the most zealous disciples of the Revolution. In the kingdom of Naples, both on the mainland and in Sicily, conspiracies were repeatedly discovered, and the plotters executed, several of them having been previously tortured to enforce a discovery of their accomplices. Even the ministers of state charged each other with treason; and Acton procured the imprisonment of the chevalier De’ Medici, with several other men high in office. The people, although strong in prejudice, were at this time discontented with the increased taxation, and the renewal of arbitrary interference by the government; many of the nobles were as eager as the middle classes in their wishes for general amelioration; and the church herself, whose property the rulers were every day seizing to satisfy the necessities of the exchequer, was not at first able to discover whether republicanism or legitimate monarchy was likely to be her most dangerous enemy. Throughout Austrian Lombardy the desire of change became almost universal. The people at large were disgusted by public burdens heavily augmented, and by the coarse insolence of the German satellites who exacted them; those classes, which had enjoyed the semblance of political power under the constitution of Maria Theresa, were provoked by that mixture of military command and absolute foreign rule which, since Leopold’s death, had been substituted for it; and reflecting men perceived, in the attitude which the cabinet of Vienna had now decidedly assumed, no prospect of improvement or relief if the allied sovereigns should be victorious. Piedmont was a still more favourable soil for republicanism, and there its principles soon rooted themselves very deeply. On the mainland, more than one conspiracy was discovered and punished; while the Sardinians, finding themselves treated as rebels when they sent deputies to demand those reforms which they conceived themselves to have merited by their brave resistance to the French fleet, broke out into open revolt, killed several members of the government, and were with difficulty dissuaded by the viceroy from giving up the island to France.

The Campaign of 1796 and its Consequences

[Sidenote: [1796 A.D.]]

The Italians were soon to learn that their wishes and interests were matters of as absolute indifference to those who now contended on their soil, as they had been during the whole preceding course of their modern history. Their future master, the French general Bonaparte, receiving from the Directory the command of the army of Italy, avowed on quitting Paris his determination to finish the war in a month by complete success or utter defeat. That which seemed to others an idle bravado, suggested by sudden elevation to a young and self-confident man, was, in the mind of the speaker himself, a pledge to be literally fulfilled. He began his attack on the 12th of April, 1796, and on the 15th of May he entered Milan in triumph as the conqueror of all Lombardy and Piedmont.

This wonderful campaign embraced several of Napoleon’s most celebrated victories. The battles of Montenotte, Millesimo, and Dego, fought on three successive days in April, amidst the mountains which lie northwest from Genoa, drove back into the plain Beaulieu’s Austrian army, and its Piedmontese allies under Colli. Victor Amadeus, not less inconstant than imprudent, deserted the contest in premature despair; and in May his ambassadors at Paris signed a discreditable peace, by which he gave up Savoy and Nice to the French Republic, admitted garrisons into some of his fortresses, dismantled the rest, and paid heavy contributions to the invaders. Bonaparte, pursuing the Austrians into Lombardy, intimidated the duke of Parma into an armistice, which was purchased by a large payment in money, and the surrender of twenty works of art, to be selected by French commissioners, and placed in the museum at Paris. The bloody passage of the bridge of Lodi, where Napoleon himself, with the generals of his staff, charged in person up to the mouths of the enemy’s guns, left the plain of the Po completely open to his armies, and kindled among the young conqueror’s soldiers that devoted confidence which bore them onward through years of victory. Milan received a provisional government and national guard, but had to contribute heavily for the support of the republican troops; and the duke of Modena, also, could not obtain an armistice without furnishing liberal supplies, to which, according to the rule thenceforth invariably followed by the invaders, was added the surrender of the choicest pictures from his gallery.

Already feared as well as honoured abroad, General Bonaparte next proceeded to intimidate the government at home. To Carnot’s order for marching upon Rome and Naples with one division of the army, while Kellermann, with another, should keep his hold of Lombardy, he replied by transmitting his resignation, and denouncing the project as ruinous. In the south, said he, there are no enemies worth conquering; the possession of Italy must be contested with the Austrians, and the plains of the Po ought to be the scene of the struggle. While he waited for the answer to his bold remonstrance, the peasantry, excited by the priests and some of the nobles, rose in several quarters against him. At Milan the disturbance was easily quieted; but at Pavia it was not suppressed till the town was taken by storm, and given up to be plundered by the soldiery. This terrible example produced its effect; the Italians trembled and submitted, and the French and Germans were left to fight their battles undisturbed. Meanwhile, the Directory, aware, as their general well knew, that they could not dispense with his services, sent an approval of all his plans, and confirmed him in the undivided command of the army, stipulating only that he should satisfy the honour of France by humbling, in his own way, the pope and the king of Naples. He received these instructions while occupying the line of the Adige; and, after having distributed troops on different points in the north, he himself prepared to march as far southwards as might be necessary for frightening his adversaries in that quarter. Before he had time to cross the Apennines, the king of Naples had lost heart, and made humiliating submissions, concluding an armistice, afterwards changed into a treaty of peace. The pope, left totally defenceless, and seeing the conqueror holding Bologna in person, concluded a truce on harder terms than any which had been yet exacted. The citadel of Ancona was to be given up with all its stores; the French were also to retain possession of the provinces of Bologna and Ferrara, where both the chief cities had organised free governments for themselves; the papal treasury was to pay large contributions in money and provisions; and Paris was to be adorned by a hundred works of art, and five hundred manuscripts from the Vatican. Having thus dealt with the enemies of the republic, Bonaparte next proceeded to dispose of the grand duke of Tuscany, its earliest friend. On a pretence that the neutrality had been violated, he seized the port of Leghorn, confiscated the goods of English traders which lay there, and attempted, though unsuccessfully, to capture their merchant-ships.

The wars of 1796 were not yet at an end. In September a second Austrian army of sixty thousand men, under the veteran marshal Wurmser, marched through the Tyrol; but his active adversary had already returned northwards; and a campaign of six days in the neighbourhood of the Lake of Garda, and along the valley of the Brenta, forced the shattered remains of the imperial forces to take refuge in the strong fortress of Mantua, which the French had already attacked, and now invested anew. In November a third Austrian army, under Alvinzi, placed its enemy in extreme peril; but the desperate battle of Arcola, fought near Verona during three whole days, drove this host likewise back into the mountains. The military events of the year were closed by the revolt of the Corsicans against the English, after which the French envoy Saliceti established in the island a provisional democratic government.

[Sidenote: [1796-1797 A.D.]]

But there were yet other tasks to be performed. The French had excited in the minds of all the Italians wishes which it was very far from easy to gratify. The Lombards demanded an independent and republican organisation; but the Directory, anticipating the chances of war, which might make it necessary to buy a peace with Austria, dared not as yet to do more than throw out vague encouragements. The pope, whose eastern provinces entertained similar desires, was not so dangerous; and Bonaparte, without consulting his masters, freed them from any embarrassment into which they might have been thrown by their recent treaty with the duke of Modena. That prince’s capital was disaffected, and Reggio had already openly revolted. Napoleon, professing to have discovered that the duke had violated the neutrality, deposed his administration, and declared the provinces free. By his instigation, also, deputies from Bologna, Ferrara, Reggio, Mirandola, and Modena, chosen respectively by the lawyers, landholders, and merchants, assembled in the end of 1796, and erected the two papal legations with the Modenese duchy into a commonwealth. This state, lying wholly between the Po and Rome, was called the Cispadane Republic.

The contest among the foreigners for the soil of Italy was ended in the spring of 1797. In January of that year, Alvinzi’s army, increased by reinforcements to fifty thousand men, attacked that under Bonaparte, amounting to about forty-five thousand, at Rivoli, between the river Adige and the Lake of Garda. This bravely fought battle closed in the total rout of the Austrians; and early next month, Wurmser, compelled by disease and famine, surrendered Mantua. The last effort of the emperor, who sent the archduke Charles across the northeastern frontier of Italy, was as unfortunate as the preceding ones; the hereditary states of Austria were invaded by the victorious general in person; and their sovereign submitted in April, when the French army lay within twenty-five leagues of Vienna.

But, before crossing the Alps, the young conqueror had humbled another enemy. Pius VI, not altogether without provocation, had broken the convention of Bologna, and raised troops to assist the emperor; upon which, Bonaparte, after his victory over Alvinzi, marching rapidly southward, overthrew the papal troops under Colli, and dictated at Tolentino, in February, the terms of a humiliating peace. The pope formally relinquished to the Cispadane Republic, not only the legation of Bologna and Ferrara, already ceded, but the province of Romagna in addition; he yielded to the French Republic his territories of Avignon and the neighbouring Venaissin; he left Ancona in the hands of its troops, till a general peace should be concluded; he engaged to pay large contributions as the ransom of those other provinces which the enemy had just seized; and he renewed the obligation to deliver manuscripts and works of art, which accordingly were soon carried away.

The peace with the emperor was not arranged so easily. Its outlines were contained in the preliminaries of Leoben, signed on the 18th of April, 1797; and the main difficulties were obviated at the expense of Venice, whose government, regarded with dislike by both parties, had acted so as to forfeit all claims on the indulgence of the one, without being able to earn much gratitude from the other. Besides yielding the Austrian Netherlands and the frontier of the Rhine, Francis entirely renounced his provinces in Lombardy, and agreed to acknowledge the new Italian republics. In compensation for these sacrifices, he was to receive, almost entire, the mainland provinces of Venice, including Illyria, Istria, and upper Italy as far west as the Oglio; the districts of Bergamo and Brescia, with the Polesine, all lying beyond that river, being intended to form part of the Cispadane Republic. These Venetian territories were already in revolt, and had declared themselves free commonwealths, demanding protection from the French, who had excited them to insurrection, and now coolly abandoned most of them to a new master. For the injustice contemplated towards these unfortunate Lombards no palliation could be offered, and none was ever attempted; but for the wrong threatened to the Venetian Republic itself, pretexts speedily presented themselves.

Before the preliminaries were signed, Colonel Junot had been despatched to Venice, to demand satisfaction for a slaughter of some soldiers in the towns bordering on the Lake of Garda. In Verona also, about the same time, the populace of the city and district, headed by a few of the nobles and clergy, attacked, robbed, and murdered the French and their partisans; and on the 17th of April, there broke out a general massacre. The Veronese mob, and the Venetian troops, drove the foreigners into the citadel, and held the town three days, committing horrible cruelties on all who were suspected of being favourable to the enemy; but, on the 20th of the same month, a detachment of the French stormed the place, and revenged their friends by numerous executions, in the course of which there perished several noblemen, and a Capuchin friar, whose eloquence had been the prop of the insurrection. On the approach of the same evening, a French privateer, in escaping from an Austrian vessel, ran into the harbour of Venice, in violation of the ordinary law; upon which a scuffle ensued with the Slavonian sailors, and the French captain and several of his crew were killed. Bonaparte received at once the welcome news of both occurrences--the taking of Verona, and the outrage on the ship. He instantly ordered the French envoy at Venice to depart, but not till he should have demanded that the commandant of the port and the three inquisitors of state should be put in prison for trial. The cowardly senate, without a moment’s hesitation, arrested those men, ordered the public prosecutors to draw up indictments against them, and instructed the deputies who attended at the general’s headquarters to offer the most humble submissions.

Bonaparte told them abruptly that their aristocratic constitution was out of date, and he intended to annul it. Without waiting for an answer he declared war on Venice, whose leaders had already foreseen his sentence, and endeavoured to palliate its effects. A few of the principal nobles held a secret meeting in the apartments of the imbecile Lodovico Manin, the hundred-and-twentieth and last doge, where they resolved to summon the grand council, and propose alterations in the constitution. About the very time when the lords of the Adriatic crouched thus abjectly, the last instance of Venetian spirit was exhibited in Treviso by Angelo Giustiniani, the governor of the province, who, on giving up his sword to the French general, reproached him to his face with his betrayal of Venice. Napoleon listened quietly to his invectives, and dismissed him unharmed.

Next day, while the city resounded with impotent preparations for defence, about half of the members of the grand council met to decree its dissolution. The doge prefaced, by a long speech, a motion for authorising the envoys to treat with the victorious general regarding alterations on the constitution. The motion was seconded by Pietro Antonio Bembo, and carried almost unanimously. Bonaparte, however, insisted that the council should by a formal act depose itself, and create a democracy. His agents used in the city the necessary means of allurement and intimidation; and on the 12th of May, 1797, the grand council met for the last time. The people gathered in the square of St. Mark; the sailors belonging to the ships of war, already ordered to leave the harbour, made a confused noise; and, a few musket-shots being fired, a universal panic seized the nobles. There was a sudden cry for the question; it was put, and the abolition of the constitution was carried by 512 voices to 20, five members declining to vote. The people were surprised to see their chiefs leaving the palace dejected; but the cause was soon explained. A tumult arose; the mob attacked the houses of several French partisans, and finding one man with a tricolour cockade in his pocket, nailed it upon his forehead. Order being restored, a provisional administration was established; and, on the 16th of May, a definitive treaty was signed at Milan between France and the new republic of Venice. The representative form of government was recognised; the infant state received, on its own petition, a garrison of French troops; while a fine, and the delivery of pictures and manuscripts, were secretly stipulated. When, soon afterwards, the Venetian envoys who had signed this convention demanded that Bonaparte should procure a ratification of it, he coolly reminded them of a fact which he himself had probably recollected a few days earlier--that, when the treaty was arranged, their mandate had expired by the dissolution of their constituency, the grand council. He therefore declared that the compact was null, and that the Directory must be left to determine for themselves in relation to the revolutionised state.

At this time, however, it was the conqueror’s wish, by an act equally unjust towards another section of the Italians, to compensate to the Venetians in some measure the spoliation they had suffered. He designed to incorporate with Venice his newly formed Cispadane Republic, while a transpadane republic should contain the Venetian districts of Bergamo and Brescia, in addition to the emancipated provinces in central Lombardy, no longer liable to be claimed by Austria. But Venice was destined to be the victim of a treachery yet more inexcusable. The cession of Mantua to the Austrians, which was involved in the plan sketched at Leoben, was viewed with disapprobation in Paris; while the Venetians were considered at once too aristocratic to be safe neighbours, and too weak to be useful allies. Francis, on the other hand, was extremely desirous to command the head of the Adriatic; and his plenipotentiaries and the French general treated secretly for exchanging the islands and duchy of Venice for the fortress and province of Mantua.

In the meantime, the new position of matters altered Bonaparte’s views as to the organisation of upper Italy. The inhabitants of the Cispadane Republic, whose constitution, though framed, had never been formally approved, were easily induced to accept a plan submitted to them, for uniting all the free provinces of the north into one powerful state; and, on the 30th of June, 1797, was announced the formation of the new commonwealth, which was named the Cisalpine Republic. A proclamation, signed by Bonaparte, declared that the French Republic had succeeded by conquest to the possession of that Italian territory formerly held by the house of Austria and other powers; but that, relinquishing its claims, it pronounced the new state independent, and, convinced equally of the blessings of liberty and the horrors of revolution, bestowed upon it its own constitution, “the fruit of the experience of the most enlightened nation in the world.” The prescribed polity accordingly bestowed the right of citizenship on all men born and residing in the state (except beggars or vagabonds), who should have attained the age of twenty-one, and demanded inscription on the roll. The active franchise was vested in assemblies elective and primary, the executive in a directory of five members, and the making of the laws, with other deliberative functions, in a legislative body and council of ancients--all in close imitation of the French constitution of 1795. Napoleon, as usual, reserved to himself the power of naming, for the first time, the members of the Directory and of both councils. That the choice of these bodies, as well as of such functionaries as were to be appointed by them, would fall on persons zealous in the republican cause, was a thing unavoidable as well as proper; but it was universally admitted that the selection was, with very few exceptions, exceedingly judicious. The president and first director was the ex-duke Serbelloni, who did not long remain in active life; and three of the other directors, men both able and honest, were Alessandri a nobleman of Bergamo, Moscati a physician, and Paradisi a distinguished mathematician. Count Porro of Milan was minister of police; Luosi, a lawyer of Mirandola, was minister of justice; and the secretary of the Directory was Sommariva, a retired advocate of Lodi, who has since been so well known in Paris for his patronage of the fine arts. In the committee who framed the constitution, we find the names of Mascheroni the poet and man of science, and of Melzi d’Eril, whose talents, integrity, and independence were afterwards well proved in a higher sphere. Melzi was a noble Milanese of Spanish extraction, and uncle to Palafox, the defender of Saragossa.

The republic at first embraced the Austrian duchy of Milan, the Venetian provinces of Bergamo, Brescia, and Polesine, the Modenese principalities of Modena, Reggio, Mirandola, and Massa-Carrara, and the three papal legations of Ferrara. Bologna, and Romagna. In the following autumn the province of Mantua was incorporated with it. About the same time the Alpine district of the Valtelline, including Chiavenna and Bormio, was claimed as a dependency by the Grisons, but denied its subjection. Bonaparte, chosen arbiter, adjudged all the disputed territories to be independent, upon which their inhabitants offered themselves, and were received, as members of the Cisalpine Republic.

[Sidenote: [1797-1798 A.D.]]

The aristocracy of Genoa did not long survive that of Venice. Internal factions were quieted by a convention in June, 1797, in which the principle of democracy was recognised, and a provisional government named by the French commander-in-chief. The defeated nobles, entering into alliance with a few unscrupulous ministers of the church, were able to convince the populace that their foreign friends wished to destroy the ancient faith; and it is said that, for the benefit of the better educated class, there was printed a falsified copy of the proposed constitution, containing an article which declared the Catholic religion to be abolished in the state. In September several thousand armed peasants attacked the city, but were beaten with great slaughter by General Duphot, at the head of the national guards and French troops; and, on the 2nd of December, there was publicly laid before the people, and approved, a constitution of the same sort as the Cisalpine, under which the Genoese state was styled the Ligurian Republic.

The fate of Venice had been already settled. Its interests formed no part of those difficulties which made the negotiations of the autumn so stormy; and on the 17th of October, 1797, the treaty of Campo-Formio established peace definitively between France and Austria, to which latter the island-city was given up without reserve or conditions. The fleets of the Directory seized the Ionian Islands, the Austrians occupied the mainland, and on the 18th of January, 1798, the French troops, in Venice since the preceding spring, evacuated it, and admitted the soldiers of the emperor.

Though Pius VI still retained his western and southeastern provinces, he was about to lose these also. His subjects were now universally infected with the prevalent love of change; Urbino, Macerata, and other places, repeatedly declared themselves republican and independent; and the Directory watched but for a plausible pretence to strike the last blow. In December, 1797, a quarrel between some of the French partisans in Rome and the papal soldiery produced a riot, in the course of which the democratic party fled for refuge to the Corsini palace, occupied by Joseph Bonaparte, the ambassador of France. The military pursued them, and in the confusion General Duphot was shot upon the staircase. The Parisian government exclaimed against this violation of public law, recapitulated all the offences already committed by the papal court, refused to accept its apologies, and in February, 1798, an army under Berthier occupied its capital. Their general demanded that the pope should resign his temporal sovereignty, retaining his universal bishopric, and receiving a large pension. Pius, obstinately refusing, was carried into Tuscany, and thence into France, where he died. The nobles and cardinals were plundered; and though the people at large were better treated, yet, with the characteristic fickleness of their race, they attempted in the Trastevere a revolt, which was not quelled without much bloodshed. The French soldiers and subalterns themselves, not only defrauded of their pay but disgusted by the rapine of the superior officers and commissaries, mutinied both in Rome and Mantua; and General Masséna, the worst offender, found it prudent to resign his command.

On the 20th of March, 1798, the constitution of the Roman or Tiberine Republic was formally proclaimed. Like the rest, it was a servile copy from that of the French, which, however, it was thought necessary in this instance to disguise under classical names. The state was at first composed of the Agro Romano, with the Patrimony (Patrimonium Petri), Sabina, Umbria, the territories of Orvieto, Perugia, Macerata, Camerino, and Fermo; but the March of Ancona, which had been temporarily formed into a separate commonwealth, was soon added to it.

The Expulsion of the French from Italy (1798-1799 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1798-1799 A.D.]]

The years 1798 and 1799 formed a strong contrast to those which immediately preceded them. Within and without, in finance, in diplomacy, and in war, France was alike unfortunate. In the beginning of this period her champion Bonaparte sailed for Egypt with his Italian army; and the fields where these brave men had gained their laurels were now to be the scene of repeated and disastrous defeats, inflicted upon those who attempted to retain their conquests.

The French owed this result in some measure to their own misconduct; for, little as the Italians were able to influence permanently the destiny of their native land, the resentment which was kindled throughout the country by the behaviour of the foreigners, aided materially in precipitating their second change of masters. The policy pursued systematically by the French Republic towards those new commonwealths, which she professed to regard as her independent allies, would have been insufferably irritating even though it had been administered by agents prudent and honourable. Each state was obliged not only to receive a large body of French soldiers, but to defray the expenses of their subsistence. The Cisalpine Republic, by a treaty which its legislative councils long refused to ratify, was compelled to admit an army of twenty-five thousand men, and to pay annually for its support eighteen millions of francs; even its own native troops were placed under the command of the French generals; the members of its administration were forcibly displaced if, like Moscati and Paradisi, they refused to obey orders transmitted from Paris; and some of the most patriotic Lombards, such as Baron Custodi and the poet Fantoni, were imprisoned for that opposition which the foreign rulers called incivism. The constitution itself soon gave way; for, on the last day of August, 1798, an irregular meeting of the councils substituted for it a new one, dictated by Trouvé the French envoy at Milan; and his plan again made room for other changes, enforced by his successor the notorious Fouché, and by Fouché’s successor Rivaud. The opposition party in Paris remonstrated in vain; and the Lombards began to hate equally the French nation, and those of themselves who were unfortunate enough to hold places of authority. A few honest patriots, headed by General Lahoz of Mantua, and the Cremonese Birago, who had been minister at war, organised a secret society for establishing Italian independence; and in the Ligurian and Roman states a similar spirit was rapidly spreading, although it worked less strongly. There, indeed, the grievances were not of so outrageous a kind, and consisted mainly in the extortions and oppressions practised incessantly by the generals and agents of the Directory, than which no government on earth had ever servants more shamefully dishonest.

But the French Republic, before losing its hold of Italy, had the fortune for a short time to possess the whole peninsula. The sovereigns of continental Europe, having lost sight of Napoleon, began to recover courage; and no sooner did the intelligence arrive that Nelson had destroyed the enemy’s fleet at Abukir, than a new league was formed, in which Italy was made one of the principal objects. The first move was made, imprudently and prematurely, by the king of Naples, or rather by his queen and her advisers, who, raising an army of eighty thousand men, invaded the Roman territories. In November, 1798, they seized the capital, where their soldiers behaved with an insolent cruelty which made the citizens, although heartily sick of the French, wish fervently to have them back again. The Austrian general Mack, who had been placed at the head of the Neapolitan troops, showed on a small scale that incapacity which afterwards more signally disgraced him; his soldiers were undisciplined, indolent, and lukewarm; and Championnet, reconquering the papal provinces with a French army not half so large as that of his adversary, pursued him southward, and, almost without striking a blow, became master of the kingdom of Naples.

The only resistance really formidable was offered when the republican troops approached the metropolis. The weak king had already fled, and, embarking on board the English fleet, crossed into Sicily. The peasantry hung on the rear of the invaders, and massacred stragglers; and the lazzaroni, that wild race who formed in those days so large a proportion of the populace, rose in fury on the report that a convention was concluded by the governor Prince Pignatelli. The fierce rabble filled the streets, howling acclamations to the king, the holy Catholic faith, and their tutelary saint Januarius; they drove out the regency, butchered the suspected democrats, and, with arms, though without either discipline or officers, poured out to meet the enemy on the plains. The French cannon mowed them down like grass; but for three whole days they again and again returned to meet the charge, and several thousands of them fell before they gave way. The wrecks of this irrationally brave multitude next defended the city, which the assailants had to gain street by street. Championnet, accompanied by Faypoult, the commissioner of the Directory, took formal possession of Naples, divided all the mainland provinces into departments, and formed them into one state, called the Parthenopean Republic. A commission of citizens was appointed to prepare a constitution, in which the chief part of the task was performed by Mario Pagano. The plan which was finally approved was in substance the same as the other Italian charters; but its author had added to the ordinary features two original ones--a tribunal of five censors, whose functions as correctors of vice were not likely to do much good, and an ephorate or court of supreme revision for laws and magistracies, which promised better fruits.

The nobles in the provinces were much divided in their opinions; but many of them still fondly remembered the lessons which they had learned from Filangieri and his scholars; and the middle classes, having yet experienced no evils but those of absolute and feudal monarchy, listened with eagerness to the promises held out by the republicans. In the huge metropolis the adherents of the king were powerless; many were willing, from the usual motives, to worship the rising sun; a few lettered enthusiasts were sincere in their hopes of witnessing at length that regeneration which their country so greatly needed; and the lazzaroni themselves became submissive and well-disposed, as soon as the saints, through the agency of their accredited servants, had declared in favour of freedom and democracy.

Says Botta:[i] “Championnet understood perfectly the importance which those fiery spirits attached to their religious belief. Accordingly he placed a guard of honour at the church of St. Januarius, and sent to those who had charge of it a polite message, intimating that he should be particularly obliged if the saint would perform the usual miracle of the liquefaction of his blood. The saint did perform the miracle; and the lazzaroni hailed it with loud applause, exclaiming, that after all it was not true that the French were a godless race, as the court had wished them to think; and that now nothing should ever make them believe but that it was the will of heaven that the French should possess Naples, since in their presence the blood of the saint had melted.”

Piedmont had already fallen. Ginguené, who afterwards wrote the history of Italian literature, had failed, as ambassador at Turin, in executing with proper cunning the plans of Talleyrand; but his successor soon contrived to irritate into open resistance the new prince Charles Emmanuel, a weak, bigoted, conscientious man. General Joubert seized the province and citadel of Turin; and the king, executing on the 9th of December, 1798, a formal act of abdication of his sovereignty over the mainland, was allowed to retire into Sardinia. The provisional government named for Piedmont, among whom was the historian Botta, found it impossible to rule the impoverished and distracted country; repose was the universal wish, and a union with the all-powerful neighbour seemed the only probable means of obtaining it. Early in the ensuing spring Piedmont was organised on the model of the French Republic, as the last step but one towards a final incorporation.

There remained to be destroyed no more than two of the old Italian governments. In January, 1799, Lucca, then occupied by French troops under General Miollis, abolished its oligarchy, and assumed a directorial and democratic constitution, after the fashionable example. In March, the Directory, now assured of a fresh war with Austria, seized all the large towns in Tuscany, placed the duchy under the protection of a French commissioner, and allowed the grand-duke Ferdinand to retire to Vienna with a part of his personal property.

But a storm was now about to break upon the heads of the French in every quarter of Italy; and the year 1799 became for the grim Suvaroff that which 1796 had been for Bonaparte. In the end of March the Austrian general Bellegarde crossed the Alps, beat back the republican forces in the north, and joined the Russians, raising the allied army to a strength of sixty thousand, while its opponents in the peninsula did not amount to a third of the number. The gallant Moreau, the French commander-in-chief, had the hard task of fighting for the honour of his nation without a chance of victory; and Macdonald, the new commandant of Naples, was ordered to cut his way to his superior through the whole length of Italy; an undertaking which he accomplished with great loss but signal bravery. The allies overran the Milanese and Piedmont; and the Directory sent two new armies under Championnet and Joubert, both of which were defeated. Most of those Italians who had taken a lead in the republican governments fled into France, and those who remained behind were imprisoned and otherwise punished. The peasantry in almost every province rose and aided the allies. Naples was lost in June, and Rome immediately followed. Ancona, desperately defended by General Monnier, capitulated in October; and at the end of the year Masséna commanded, within the walls of Genoa, besieged, famished, and about to surrender, the only French troops that were left in Italy.

Although the military events of this year do not possess such importance as to deserve minute recital, yet one chapter of its history, embracing the horrible fate which befell Naples, is both painfully interesting in itself, and strikingly illustrative of the disorganised state of society in that quarter. The spectacle which was exhibited in the overgrown metropolis of that kingdom was indeed so unlike anything we should expect to witness in modern times that we endeavour to find a partial solution of the problem in the moral and statistical position of the city. We can find no parallel without reverting to the period of the Roman Empire.

The municipal constitution of Naples, whose main features have already been incidentally described, was the model for all the cities in the kingdom, except Aquila, whose polity was copied from Rome. Thefts and robberies were rare, the homicides were estimated at about forty annually, and some vices the government chose to overlook. The municipal administration, with a jurisdiction extending only over the markets and the university, belonged to the eletti or representatives of the piazze, seggi, or sedili, of which there were six, composed exclusively of nobles. These patricians, meeting in open porticoes, several of which may still be seen in ruins, chose annually deputies in each piazza, and the deputies chose the eletto. A seventh piazza was formed for the popolo or plebeian burghers; but care was taken that this class should have no real power. They were divided locally into twenty-nine wards, for each of which the king every year named a capitano; and the twenty-nine captains, who were held to compose the piazza of the people, appointed as the eletto del popolo a citizen, not noble, suggested by the crown. The seven eletti, with a syndic chosen by the six noble eletti, formed the municipal council, and met twice a week in a convent, from which the board derived its usual name of the tribunal of San Lorenzo. Many functions of the municipality were devolved upon nine deputations of citizens, chosen periodically by the patrician piazze.

But of the popolo, a very large number, said to have amounted in the end of the eighteenth century to thirty thousand or more, were known in ordinary language by the name of lazzari or lazzaroni. These were the lowest of the inhabitants, including, of course, many who had no honest means of livelihood, but consisting mainly of those who, though they gained their bread by their labour, did not practise any sort of skilled industry. Their distinctive character, as compared with the populace of other great cities, lay in two points. First, the usual cheapness of fruits and other vegetables enabled them to subsist on the very smallest earnings; while the mildness of the climate made them, during the greater part of the year, nearly independent both of clothing and shelter. Accordingly, many of them were literally homeless, spending the day in the streets as errand-porters, fruit-sellers, day-labourers, or mere idlers, and sleeping by night on the steps of churches or beneath archways; while all of them were for a great part of their time unemployed. These circumstances produced their second peculiarity, that strong spirit of union which had at one time extended to a regular organisation. They were the only class in Italy whom the Spaniards feared; the viceroys named them in their edicts with deference, and received deputations from them to complain of grievances; and in the seventeenth century they were even allowed to meet tumultuously once a year in the piazza del Mercato, and name by acclamation their temporary chief or capo-lazzaro. Since the accession of the Bourbons, it is true, they were less closely banded together, and their custom of electing an annual head seems to have fallen into disuse; but we have already seen, and shall immediately discover still more dreadful proofs, that the ancient temper was not yet extinct.

We cannot fail to be struck with the likeness which this unwieldy and dangerous commonalty bore to the populace of imperial Rome; and the system which was pursued for furnishing the city with provisions was another point of close resemblance. During four hundred years every conceivable plan for preventing scarcity by restrictive laws had been tried without effect. An assize of bread and flour, fixed in 1401, was followed in 1496 by the building of public magazines, in which the eletti kept a large stock of grain; and at the same time there was established a strict monopoly in favour of a prescribed number of flour-merchants and bakers. The municipality lost enormously by this system; for dearths became frequent, and the corporation then, exactly like the Roman senate and emperors, sold their corn at a heavy loss, and lowered the price of the bread. Since 1764 the city had been supplied by eighteen privileged bakers, by the macaroni-makers, and one or two subordinate crafts; these tradesmen paid rent to the government for their shops; and not only were they obliged to buy the greater part of their flour from the public granaries, but had to deposit corn of their own in large quantities, as a security for their engagements, being bound likewise to purchase this grain from the distant provinces. In the year 1782 it was ascertained from official returns that, in the nineteen years preceding, the corporation had lost 2,632,645 ducats, or about £436,000. They had spent this money without earning so much as thanks; for there was a general prejudice against their establishments, and, both at Naples and at Palermo, where there was a similar system, more than two-thirds of the people made their own bread at home, except when the price of grain rose, on which everyone flocked to the public bakehouses.

Such was the scene, and such were the principal actors, in that fearful tragedy of which we are now to be spectators.

Scarcely had the Parthenopean Republic been proclaimed when the ferocious cardinal Ruffo landed at Reggio, bringing with him from Sicily a patent as royal vicar. In Calabria, and the other southern provinces, he soon organised numerous tumultuary hordes, several of whose captains were the most practised robbers, a few bands being commanded by military subalterns, and some by parish priests. Proni, one of the leaders, was a convicted assassin; De’ Cesari was a notorious highwayman, as was Michele Pezzo, better known by the name of Fra Diavolo, or Friar Beelzebub; and Mammone Gaetano, a miller of Sora, was the worst monster of all. The brigands crowded to serve under their favourite captains; many old soldiers enlisted, and the peasants, aroused by their clergymen, joined in thousands, and quickly learned the trade of murder. The French despatched against them General Duhesme, who was accompanied by a young Neapolitan, Ettore Caraffa, count of Ruvo, a man every way worthy to be pitted against the cardinal and his associates. The two parties swept over the kingdom like a plague, from Reggio to the mountains of the ulterior Abruzzo; and the war, if it deserves the name, soon became on both sides a struggle of revenge and extermination. Prisoners were put to the torture; villages and towns were burned, and their inhabitants massacred; Caraffa had the barbarous satisfaction of exterminating his rebellious vassals; and Ruffo’s followers, enamoured of bloodshed and pillage, speedily ceased to ask whether their victims were republicans or royalists.

The cardinal, soon reducing the southern districts, advanced upon Naples; and the French, unable to cope with him, evacuated the city, leaving but weak garrisons in the three castles. The republican government lost authority at once, and the legislative councils were insulted in their halls by bands of armed ruffians. No plan of defence seems to have been matured, although the leading men did all they could to inspirit the people. In the theatres, which continued open, Alfieri’s tragedies were received with shouts, and interrupted by vehement addresses from persons in the crowd; friars preached freedom and resistance in the churches and on the streets; and the superstitious lazzaroni were for a time kept in check, by seeing the saints anew manifest their favour to the revolution.[22] The few native troops which still were under arms were sent out and defeated in the plain; and, when the royalists approached, abject terror alternated with the resolution of despair. Most members of the councils and administration retired into the lower forts, the Castel dell’Ovo and Castelnuovo.

There were in Naples about two thousand Calabrese, men of all ranks, nobles, priests, and peasants, driven from their homes by Ruffo’s hordes. They alone were firm. A part of them took up their post in the city; the rest, unprovided with artillery, marched out and garrisoned the castle of Viviena, beyond the bridge of the Maddalena. The royalists surrounded them, their heavy guns battered down the walls of the fort, and the assailants entered by storm. The republicans fought like hungry tigers, not a man surrendered or fled; and, when all but a handful had fallen, Antonio Toscani, a priest of Cosenza, who commanded this little remnant, threw a match into the powder-magazine beside him, and perished in the common destruction of friends and enemies. The streets were for a time defended by the remaining Calabrese, while Prince Caraccioli, the king’s admiral, who had joined the popular party, kept up a fire on the royalists from a few small vessels in the harbour; but a body of the lazzaroni suddenly attacked the republicans in the rear, their ranks were broken, and the city was lost. Ruffo took possession of it on the 14th of June, 1799.

Dark as are the crimes which stain the history of our race, humanity has seldom been disgraced by scenes so horrible as those which followed. Universal carnage was but one feature of the atrocity; the details are sickening, many of them utterly unfit to be told. Some republicans were strangled with designed protraction of agony; others were burned upon slow fires; the infuriated murderers danced and yelled round the piles on which their victims writhed; and it is even said that men were seen to snatch the flesh from the ashes, and greedily devour it. The lazzaroni, once more loyal subjects, eagerly assisted in hunting down the rebels; during two whole days the massacre was uninterrupted, and death without torture was accepted as mercy.

The two lower castles surrendered on a capitulation with the cardinal which stipulated that the republicans should, at their choice, remain unmolested in Naples or be conveyed to Toulon; and two prelates with two noblemen, who were prisoners in the forts, were consigned to Colonel Méjean, the French commandant of the Castel Sant’ Elmo, as hostages for the performance of the convention. The last incidents of this bloody tale cannot be told without extreme reluctance by any native of the British Empire; for they stain deeply one of the brightest names in the national history. While the persons protected by the treaty were preparing to embark, the English fleet under Nelson arrived, bringing the king, the minister Acton, and the ambassador Sir William Hamilton, with his wife, who was at once the queen’s confidante and the evil genius of the brave admiral. The French commandant, treacherous as well as cowardly, surrendered the castle, and gave up the hostages without making any conditions. The capitulation was declared null, although the cardinal indignantly remonstrated, and retired from the royal service on failing to procure its fulfilment. The republicans were searched for and imprisoned; and arbitrary commissions sat to try them. Under the sentences passed by such courts, in the metropolis and the provinces, four thousand persons died by the hand of the executioner.

Among them were some whose names appeared with distinction on the file of literature: Domenico Cirillo, the naturalist, who refused to beg his life; the eloquent and philosophical Mario Pagano; Lorenzo Baffi, the translator of some of the Herculanean manuscripts, who rejected poison offered to him by his friends in prison; Conforti, a learned canonist, and writer on ethics and history; Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, a woman of much talent, who had edited a democratic newspaper. Mantonè, an artillery officer, who had been the republican minister-at-war, made on his trial no defence but this, “I have capitulated.” On board one of the ships was executed the aged Admiral Caraccioli, with whose name we are but too well acquainted. Another victim, the count of Ruvo, does not inspire so much compassion, unless we are to believe, as his whole conduct leads one to suspect, that he was absolutely insane. Being sentenced to be beheaded, he insisted on dying with his eyes unbandaged, laid himself upon the block with his face uppermost, and watched steadily the descending axe. Superstitious folly closed scenes which had begun in treachery and revenge. St. Januarius, for having wrought republican miracles, was solemnly deposed by the lazzaroni, with the approval of the government; and in his place was substituted, as patron of the city, St. Anthony of Padua, who, through the agency of the church, had revealed a design said to have been formed by the advocates of democracy, for hanging all the loyal populace. The new protector, however, proved inefficient; and the old one was soon reinstated.

Bonaparte Reconquers Italy

[Sidenote: [1799-1801 A.D.]]

The fortunes of France, sunk to the lowest ebb, were about to swell again with a tide fuller than ever. While the restored sovereigns of Italy were busied in reorganising their states and punishing their revolted subjects, Paris saw the “heir of the Revolution” take possession of his inheritance. Bonaparte, having returned from the East, was master of France, and resolved to be master of Europe. He was nominated first consul under the constitution called that of the year Eight, which was proclaimed on the 26th day of December, 1799.

In May, 1800, the main body of the French army, led by Napoleon in person, effected its celebrated passage of the Great St. Bernard. The invaders, pouring from the highlands, overran Lombardy, and attacked Piedmont. The Austrian general Melas, with forty thousand men, was stationed near Alessandria, when the first consul, somewhat inferior in strength, advanced against him; and on the 14th of June the two hosts encountered each other on the bloody field of Marengo. In the evening, when the French had all but lost the battle, Desaix came up and achieved the victory at the cost of his life; the Austrians were signally defeated, and the reconquest of Italy, so far as it was judged prudent to attempt it, was already secured. Melas concluded an armistice which gave the enemy possession of Genoa, Savona, and Urbino, with all the strong places in Piedmont and Lombardy as far east as the Oglio. Napoleon reorganised the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics, created a provisional government in Piedmont, and returned to Paris.

Meanwhile, the old pope having died the preceding year, a conclave, which opened at Venice in March, 1800, had raised to the papal chair Cardinal Chiaramonti, a native of Cesena and bishop of Imola, who, since the annexation of his see to the Cisalpine commonwealth, had favoured liberal opinions in politics. He was allowed by all parties to return to Rome, and assume the government of the provinces which had formed the Tiberine Republic. The king of Naples was left unmolested, but Tuscany, at first given up to the Austrians, was seized in a short time by the French.

The negotiations for a lasting peace proved abortive, and a new war speedily commenced, which was chiefly waged on the northern side of the Alps, and ended in December, 1800, with Moreau’s victory over the Austrians at Hohenlinden. In the beginning of the following year, the Peace of Lunéville restored matters in northern Italy nearly to the same position which they had occupied under the Treaty of Campo-Formio; but Tuscany was erected into the kingdom of Etruria, and given to Louis, son of the duke of Parma, though the French were to retain Elba, Piombino, and the coast-garrisons. The new king’s father (whose duchy was given to France), and the grand duke of Tuscany, were to be compensated in Germany for the loss of their Italian states. The king of Naples, after invading the Roman provinces, and giving Murat the trouble of marching an army as far as Foligno to meet him, abandoned his engagements with England, and concluded an alliance with the French Republic.

Napoleon, restoring the Catholic religion in France, and endeavouring to maintain a good understanding with the court of Rome, proceeded to rearrange the republican states of Italy. According to his usual policy, however, he tried to make all his changes appear to have proceeded from the wish of the people themselves; and, through honest conviction in many cases, and selfish subserviency in many more, he was easily able to procure converts to his opinions.[f]

THE GROWING DESIRE FOR LIBERTY

If the great desire of Italy at the end of the eighteenth century was incontestably to become a nation, a desire all the more ardent because it was so recent, since it dated back only forty years, was she ready to take action and undertake her own government? It is doubtful. Not that the Italian middle-class educated in the school of French philosophers and convinced of the principles of ’89 was not thenceforth capable to assume the power, and even to obtain the adhesion of the rural masses to the new ideas, in spite of their ignorance and submission to the clergy; but because a nation cannot exist without a leader--and there was no leader. Under the successive domination of so many foreign tyrannies, all these noble towns, each of which had formerly been a small state and had astonished the world with its magnificence, had fallen, one after the other, to the rank of prefectures without moral authority and without credit. As she had borne the burden of her cosmopolitism for three centuries, Italy was now about to expiate, during a shorter period, but still severely, this hatred of all concentration which had been, since the fall of the Roman Empire, the strongest and most constant of her passions. The municipal spirit of antiquity, which had inspired all the towns of the peninsula during the whole of the Middle Ages, had been, even more than the Catholic and universal spirit of papacy, the rock on which the modern principle of national unity had been wrecked. The Ghibellines had incarnated this principle in the house of Hohenstaufen, and the Guelfs for many years in the house of Anjou, but it had been overthrown in Italy at the very moment when it was triumphing over all the rest of Europe. And hence it doubtless was that arose the incomparable lustre of Italian civilisation at the dawn of the Renaissance, that universal blossoming of literature and art even in the most humble towns where there was then more intellectual culture than in the greatest cities of Germany, of England, or even of France. But from the same cause also arose that marvellous and fruitful intensity of individual and municipal life, that phenomenon, almost unique in history, of a nation repulsing the idea of unity, similar to a nebula refusing to take form. The law of development carried into effect by the various states of Latin Europe had been the successive agglomeration of all the elements of the same or similar origin round a central nucleus, their crystallisation round a concrete sovereignty, and if the expression may be allowed, one soul in common. But Italy had systematically evaded this law of centralisation, a law not only historical but physical, which in politics as in nature is the indispensable condition of all progress. She was therefore at the end of the fifteenth century the hydra with a hundred heads. Then the hundred heads fell one after the other under the blows of the great French, German, and Spanish invasions; the nation itself had almost perished. And now that the nation had slowly formed again she sought for a head in vain. If she wished to live, and she wished it with invincible passion, she in turn must realise what all the other nations of Europe had accomplished so many centuries ago, and, forsaking her past, she must set to work to take a central sovereignty. Nationality is unity, and unity can only be formed round a common centre.[j]

FOOTNOTES

[21] Alcantarians, an order of Franciscan monks.

[22] “In the midst of this confusion, the customary annual procession of St. Januarius took place. Before it began, the democratic leaders sent to the keepers of the church, desiring them to pray heartily that the saint might perform the miracle. The keepers did pray heartily, and the blood bubbled up in less than two minutes. The lazzaroni shouted that St. Januarius had become a republican.”--BOTTA.[i]

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XVIII. THE NAPOLEONIC REGIME

[Sidenote: [1801-1815 A.D.]]

The mind of Bonaparte was capable of exercising the most contrary qualities in the prosecution of his designs. Having reconciled himself to the pope, defeated Austria, and deluded Alexander, being also confident of peace with England, he applied himself to bringing into effect that which he had so long conceived in his own mind, and had so pertinaciously pursued. He was anxious that the first impulse should come from Italy, fearing that a certain residuum of republican opinions in France might prove a bad consequence, if the way were not smoothed for his design by some exciting precedent. Thus, having conquered Italy by the arms of France, he sought to vanquish France by the obsequious concessions of Italy.

His Italian machinations were opened with imposing effect; and in Lombardy his most devoted adherents were artfully employed in disseminating the idea of the insecurity arising to the Cisalpine Republic from the temporary nature of its government.

[Sidenote: [1801-1802 A.D.]]

Whilst these ideas were disseminated amongst the people, Petiet negotiated with the chiefs of the republic, in order that the imperative commands of the consul might appear to be the desires and the spontaneous supplications of the nation. When the consultations were concluded at Paris for the design, and at Milan for its execution, a decree was issued by the legislative council of the Cisalpine Republic, commanding an extraordinary consulto to proceed to Lyons, in order there to frame the fundamental laws of the state, and to give information to the consul.[b]

In December, 1801, at Lyons, a deputation of four hundred and fifty citizens, from the Cisalpine Republic, offered to Napoleon, then first consul, the presidency of their government for a term of years. He accepted the gift, and in January, 1802, with the assent of the deputies, promulgated a constitution for their state, which was now named the Italian Republic. In June following, the Ligurian Republic likewise accepted an altered charter, which received modifications in December. The Piedmontese, wearied of anarchy and of their despot, General Menou, consented, for the second time, that their country should be made a province of France; and the formal annexation took place in September of the same year.

The gradual changes of view in Bonaparte and his countrymen are curiously illustrated by the successive constitutions which their influence established in Italy. In 1802, at home as well as abroad, they were immeasurably distant from the universal citizenship and primary assemblies of 1793; southern polity differed in several prominent points from that which had been imposed on their own country. It is best exemplified by the constitution of the Italian Republic, which was closely copied in the Ligurian; and these charters were considered at the time, not without probability, as experiments by which, as we have said, the first consul tried the temper of his future subjects on his own side of the Alps. In the first place, this system boldly shook off democracy; for the citizens at large were disfranchised, not indeed in words, but in reality: a step which had not been fully taken in France, even by Bonaparte’s consular constitution. Next, the Italian acts divided among the colleges, or bodies of the middle and upper classes (boards elected with something like freedom of choice), most of those functions which in Paris were committed to the consul’s favourite tool, the self-appointed senate. Lastly, the mass of the people being thus disarmed, and the educated leaders lulled into acquiescence, the president of the state received a power far beyond even that which he exercised over his French fellow-citizens.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE REPUBLIC

The details of the constitution given to the Italian Republic are historically curious, in relation both to what went before and to what followed.

It at once narrowed the franchise, declaring citizenship to be dependent on a property-qualification, which was to be fixed by the legislature; but this right carried, by itself, not a particle of political power. The elective functions were vested exclusively in three colleges and a board of censors, which were to be convoked once at least in two years, for short sessions. The college of the possidenti or landholders was composed of three hundred citizens, rated for the land-tax on property worth not less than 6,000 Milanese livres, or about £170. It was self-elected, and met at Milan. The college of the dotti or savants contained two hundred citizens, eminent in art, theology, ethics, jurisprudence, physics, or political science. It sat at Bologna. The college of the commercianti or merchants consisted of two hundred citizens, elected by the board itself from among the most distinguished mercantile men or manufacturers. Its seat was Brescia. Members of all the colleges held their places for life. The censors were a committee of twenty-one named by the colleges at every sitting. This commission, assembling at Cremona, nominated the council of state, the legislative body, the courts of revision and cassation, and the commissaries of finance, all from lists submitted by the colleges. It was likewise authorised to impeach public servants for malversation in office.

[Sidenote: [1802-1804 A.D.]]

The administration was vested in a president (who could name a vice-president), a council of state, a cabinet of ministers, and a legislative council. The president was elected by the first of these bodies, and held his office for ten years. He possessed the initiative in all laws, and in all diplomatic business, and also the whole executive power, to be exercised through the ministry.

The council of state was particularly designed for advising in foreign affairs, and for sanctioning by its decrees all extraordinary measures of the president. The ministers lay under a broad personal responsibility, both for acts and omissions. The legislative council, chosen, like the ministry, by the president, had a deliberative voice in all drafts of law; and the preparation and carrying through of bills were to be mainly intrusted to it.

The legislative body, which possessed the functions indicated by its name, consisted of seventy-five members, one-third of whom were to go out every two years. It was to be convoked and prorogued by the government; but its sittings were to last not less than two months in every year.

The Catholic clergy were recognised as the ministers of the national church, and as entitled to possess the ecclesiastical revenues. The administration named the bishops, who again appointed the parish priests, subject to the approval of the government. An unqualified toleration was promised to all other creeds.

The tenor of this charter, and the position which Napoleon held in virtue of it, made it more natural than usual that he should, as his countrymen had invariably done in similar cases, nominate for the first time all the members of the government. The choice was in general wise and popular. Melzi d’Eril was vice-president.

Under this new order of things, while the Neapolitan government ruled with jealousy and little wisdom, and the court of Rome with kindness but feebly, the remainder of the peninsula was subject, either in reality or both in reality and in name, to the French Republic. Sustained by foreign influence, the northern and central regions of Italy began to enjoy a prosperity and quiet to which for years they had been strangers. The new commonwealths were as far as ever from being nationally independent; some parts of the country were avowedly provinces of France; and everywhere the political privileges of individuals had, as we have seen, shrunk far within the limits to which they had stretched immediately after the Revolution. But the absence of national independence, although a great evil, was counterbalanced by many advantages; and the curtailment of public rights, as bitter experience had proved, was a blessing both to the state and to its citizens.

NAPOLEON MAKES ITALY A KINGDOM

[Sidenote: [1804-1805 A.D.]]

On the 18th day of May, 1804, the senate declared Napoleon emperor of the French, “through the grace of God and the principles of the republic.” The pope, after much hesitation, consented to bestow on the new empire the sanction of the church; and accordingly, journeying to Paris in the dead of winter, he officiated at the coronation in Notre Dame.

The Italians could not reasonably expect that they should be allowed to stand solitary exceptions to the new system of their master; and the principal citizens in Lombardy were speedily prepared, by arguments or inducements suited to the occasion, for taking such steps as should place them, with an appearance of voluntary submission, under the monarchical polity. The vice-president Melzi was sent to Paris at the head of a deputation from the Italian Republic. In March, 1805, these envoys waited on the emperor, and presented to him an instrument purporting to contain the unanimous resolution of the constituted authorities of the state, whereby they offered to him and his male descendants, legitimate, natural, or adopted, the crown of their republic, which they consented should be transformed into “the kingdom of Italy.” The resolutions were immediately embodied in a constitutional statute, by which Napoleon accepted the sovereignty, but pledged himself to resign it in favour of one who should be born or adopted his son, as soon as Naples, the Ionian Isles, and Malta should be evacuated by all foreign troops. In April the emperor-king passed through Piedmont in triumph, and on the 26th of May his coronation was performed in the cathedral of Milan. The archbishop of the see, Cardinal Caprara, who had been his principal assistant in negotiating with the pope, attended at the ceremony, and was allowed to consecrate the insignia; but the “iron crown” of Lombardy, the distinctive symbol of royal power, was, like the diadem of France, placed on Napoleon’s head by his own hand.

“This part of the ceremonial,” says Denina,[c] “differed from the ancient usage. It left no room for supposing that the crowned monarch acknowledged himself to derive from any other than God, or the power which by the divine will he held in his hands, that proud ensign of sovereignty, of which he thus publicly took possession.”

He did not leave the peninsula till he had not only organised the government and constitution of his own kingdom of Italy, but completed material changes on the adjacent states. Before the coronation, the doge and senate of Genoa, warned that the independence of the Ligurian Republic could not be guaranteed, and jealously averse, it is said, to a union with the new kingdom, petitioned for annexation to France. Their lord condescendingly granted the prayer which he had himself dictated; and the formal incorporation was completed in October, 1805. In March of the same year, the principality of Piombino had been given to his sister Elisa Bonaparte, as a fief of the French Empire; and in July the territories belonging to the republic of Lucca were erected into another principality for her husband, Pasquale Bacciocchi. The only parts of upper Italy that remained unappropriated were the provinces of the ex-duke of Parma, which, though occupied by the French, were not formally incorporated either with the empire or the kingdom of Italy. The viceroyalty of the latter was conferred on Eugène Beauharnais, the son of the empress Josephine. None of the great powers in Europe acknowledged the new kingdom, and indeed none of them was asked to do so.

[Sidenote: [1805-1808 A.D.]]

The legitimate sovereigns did not leave their plebeian brother to enjoy unmolested so much as the first year of his reign. An invasion of Italy under the archduke Charles ended in the defeat of the Austrians by Masséna upon the Adige; and in December, 1805, the great battle of Austerlitz forced the emperor Francis to conclude the unfavourable Treaty of Presburg. In respect to the Italian peninsula, he acknowledged Napoleon’s kingly title, and acquiesced in all his other arrangements; but, further, he was compelled to surrender Venice with its provinces as he had received them at the Peace of Campo-Formio, consenting that they should be united with the kingdom of Italy. In January, 1806, the island-city was occupied by French troops under General Miollis.

Napoleon seized the opportunity of the new acquisition, for founding that hereditary noblesse with Italian titles, whose ranks were speedily filled by his most useful servants, civil as well as military. There were specified certain districts which the emperor reserved the right of erecting into dukedoms, appropriating to their titular possessors a fifteenth part of the revenues derived from the provinces in which they lay, and setting aside for the same purpose the price of large tracts of national lands. In Parma and Piacenza were to be three of these fiefs--in Naples, recently conquered, six--and in the Venetian provinces twelve, among which were Dalmatia, Treviso, Bassano, Vicenza, Rovigno, and other demesnes whose titles acquired a new interest from the celebrity of the men who bore them. Two other dukedoms, conferred respectively on Marshal Bernadotte and the minister Talleyrand, were formed from the papal districts of Pontecorvo and Benevento. The emperor of the French, now lord paramount of the kingdom enclosing these territories, seized them without troubling himself to invent any pretext; coolly assuring the pope that the loss would be compensated afterwards, but that the nature of the indemnification would materially depend upon the holy father’s good behaviour.

THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES AND THE PAPACY

The king of Naples, lately the abject vassal of the French, had allowed a body of Russians and English to land without resistance. Cardinal Ruffo, who resented the tragedy of 1799, and despised the intriguing of Acton, was sent to deprecate the conqueror’s wrath, but returned home a confirmed Bonapartist; and Napoleon, who wanted a throne for one of his brothers, proclaimed to his soldiers that the dynasty of the Bourbons in lower Italy had ceased to reign. His army crossed the frontier in January, 1806, upon which the king fled to Sicily; his haughty wife lingered to the last moment, and then reluctantly followed. Joseph Bonaparte, meeting no resistance except from the foreigners who composed the garrison of Gaeta, entered the metropolis early in February, and, after quietly hearing mass said by Ruffo in the church of St. Januarius, was proclaimed king of Naples and Sicily. After some fighting, chiefly in Calabria, the whole country within the Faro of Messina submitted to its new sovereign, although in several districts the allegiance was but nominal. In the following summer Sir Sidney Smith took Capri, and prevailed on Sir John Stuart to land in the Calabrian Gulf of St. Eufemia; but the only result was the brilliant victory gained by the British regiments over the French at Maida. The royalist partisans disgraced their cause by cruelties which no exertions of the English officers were able to stop; and, after the enemy had increased materially in strength, the expedition was compelled to return to Sicily.

During that year Napoleon was occupied with the war against Prussia, which was terminated by the battle of Jena; and in 1807 he had commenced his system of intrigue in Spain, the first fruit of which was another appropriation in Italy. The widowed queen of Etruria, who acted as regent for her son Charles Louis, was unceremoniously ejected from his states, which in May, 1808, were formed into three departments of France, while the princess of Piombino was established at Florence with the title of grand duchess of Tuscany. About the same time--upon the proposal or pretext that the Bourbons of Parma should be made sovereigns of Portugal--their duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla were finally annexed to France.

[Sidenote: [1808-1811 A.D.]]

The principal event of that year was the opening campaign of the French in Spain and Portugal. The schemes of the military autocrat in that quarter, destined to be the first step in his road to destruction, led him to recall his brother Joseph from the throne of Naples, which, on his leaving Italy for Madrid, was bestowed on Joachim Murat, grand duke of Berg and Cleves, one of the emperor’s bravest generals, and husband of his sister Caroline. The new king’s only title was an edict issued by Napoleon at Bayonne, on the 15th of July, 1808, in which he announces that he has granted to Joachim the throne of Naples and Sicily, vacant by the accession of Joseph to that of Spain and the Indies. The showy and gallant soldier began his reign by driving Sir Hudson Lowe out of the island of Capri;[23] and when the Carbonari, a sect of republicans recently organised, had co-operated with the royalists in raising disturbances throughout Calabria, he sent into the province his countryman, General Manhés, recommended for such service by having previously pacified, or depopulated, the Abruzzi. The envoy, executing his commission with heartless severity, made that secluded region orderly and peaceful, for the first time perhaps in its modern history.

The next year overturned the papal throne. The turmoil which the Revolution raised in the Gallican church had been quieted by the concordat of 1801; but a code of regulations issued by the first consul for carrying the principles of that compact into effect in France, and a decree issued by the vice-president Melzi for the same purpose in Lombardy, had been both disavowed by Pius as unauthorised by him, and as contrary not only to the spirit of the concordat, but to the principles of the church of Rome. The reconciliation which ensued was but hollow; and Napoleon determined that his dominion over Italy, now extending from one end of the peninsula to the other, should not be defied; and the papal state was openly claimed as a fief held under Napoleon, the successor of Charlemagne. The remonstrances of Pius on ecclesiastical matters, indeed, were urged in a tone that could not have failed to irritate a temper like that of the emperor.

In January, 1808, as is more fully described in the history of France, seven thousand soldiers under Miollis, professing to march for Naples, turned aside and seized Rome; and in April an imperial decree, founding its reasons on the pope’s refusal of the alliance, on the danger of leaving an unfriendly power to cut off communication in the midst of Italy, and on the paramount sovereignty of Charlemagne, annexed irrevocably to the kingdom of Italy the four papal provinces of Ancona, Urbino, Macerata, and Camerino.

In May, 1809, Napoleon dated from the palace of Schönbrunn at Vienna a decree which annexed to the French Empire those provinces of the papal state which had not been already seized. The pope was to receive an annuity of two millions of francs, and to confine his attention to the proper duties of his episcopal office. Pius issued a very firm manifesto, went through the form of excommunicating Napoleon and all ecclesiastics who should obey him. On the night between the 5th and 6th of July, the French soldiers and the police broke into his apartments, and seized his person. He was transported into France, and thence back to Savona, where he was kept a close prisoner till 1811. In June, 1810, the kingdom of Italy received its last accession of territory, the southern or Italian Tyrol being then incorporated with it.

[Sidenote: [1810-1814 A.D.]]

It appears, as the result of the events which have now been summarily related, that, from the middle of 1810 till the fall of Napoleon in 1814, the political divisions of Italy were the following:

The mainland was divided into four sections, or, more properly, into three, since Lucca falls really under the first. (1) A large proportion of it had been incorporated with France, whose territories on the western coast now stretched southward to the frontier of Naples. These Italian provinces of the French Empire lay chiefly on the western side of the Apennine, where they included the following districts--Nice, with Savoy, since 1792; Piedmont, since 1802; Genoa, since 1805; Tuscany, since 1808; and the western provinces of the Roman see, since 1809. On the northeast of the mountain chain, France had only Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, which were annexed to it in 1808. Within the Neapolitan frontier it had the duchies of Benevento and Pontecorvo. (2) On the western side of the mountains, the imperial territory was interrupted by the little independent principality comprehending Lucca and Massa-Carrara. This petty state, however, was possessed by members of the emperor’s family, and was practically one of his French provinces. (3) Central and eastern Lombardy, with some districts of the Alps, and a part of the peninsula proper, composed the kingdom of Italy, of which Napoleon wore the crown. Its territories comprehended, first, the whole of Austrian Lombardy; secondly, the Valtelline, with Chiavenna and Bormio; thirdly, Venice and its mainland provinces, from the Oglio on the west to the Isonzo, which had been latterly fixed as the eastern frontier; fourthly, that part of the Tyrol which forms the valley of the Adige; fifthly, the territories of the dukes of Modena and Reggio, except Massa-Carrara; sixthly, the papal provinces of Ferrara, Bologna, and Romagna, of Urbino, Macerata, Camerino, and Ancona. (4) The kingdom of Naples consisted of the same provinces on the mainland which had been governed by the Bourbons; and since the year 1806, it had been ruled by sovereigns belonging to the imperial family of France. The legitimate monarchs still possessed the two great islands--the ex-king of Naples holding Sicily, the king of Sardinia the isle which gave him his title.

[Sidenote: [1806-1814 A.D.]]

To the Neapolitan[24] as well as the papal states, no change of masters or of polity could at the time of the Revolution have been an evil; the Venetian provinces, likewise, were then ill-governed and oppressed; upon Lombardy, the leaden hand of Austria had again begun to lie heavy; and in Tuscany itself there was much that required amendment, both in the character of the new rulers and in that of the people. The spirit of local jealousy, too, and the total want of military spirit not less than of national pride, were things that the Revolution aided powerfully in rooting out, although the Italians paid dearly for the benefit. The resources of the country, in agriculture and in manufactures, were developed with a success which nothing in its modern history had yet paralleled; and the prosperity was checked only, and driven into new channels, by that unwise and revengeful policy by which Napoleon for years, beginning with the Berlin decree of 1806, attempted to place the British Empire and its colonies in a state of blockade.

Even that arbitrary temper which, in the later years of his reign, converted his rule into an unmixed despotism, was never shown on the south of the Alps with the same fierceness which it assumed in the other provinces of his kingdom. In his secret soul, Napoleon Bonaparte was proud of that southern pedigree which, by every artifice down to the petty trick of misspelling his family name, he strove to make his transalpine subjects forget; himself an Italian in feeling, much rather than a Frenchman, he understood and sympathised with the character of his countrymen, in its weakness as well as in its strength, in its capacities for improvement as well as in its symptoms of decay; he flattered the populace, he breathed his own fiery spirit into the army, he honoured the learned and scientific, he employed and trusted those intelligent men who panted for a field of political action. He taught the people to feel themselves a mighty nation; and those whom he so ennobled have not yet forgotten their stern benefactor. If Napoleon chastised Italy with whips, he chastised France with scorpions; and the one region not less than the other has profited by the wholesome discipline.

After the fall of the popedom, an attempt was made to give unity and a show of independence to the Italian provinces of the empire, by uniting them into one general government, the administration of which, conferred at first on Louis Bonaparte, was afterwards given to the prince Borghese, the head of a noble Roman family of the first rank, who had married Pauline, one of the emperor’s sisters. The French scheme of taxation was introduced, with very slight modifications; and in 1812, the Italian provinces (excluding Nice) yielded to the exchequer fully half as much as was contributed by all the other territories lately added to the empire, including as these did some of the richest commercial cities in Europe. The gross sum raised by taxes of all kinds during that year was 95,712,349 francs, or nearly four millions sterling, which gave 62,644,560 francs as the net return to the treasury; and it is worthy of notice, likewise, that the cost of collection here was considerably less, in proportion, than in the other recent acquisitions. The revenue was liberally spent in organising efficient courts of law (whose text-book was of course the Code Napoléon), in executing works of usefulness as well as pomp, such as roads, bridges, and public buildings, in investigating the antiquities of Rome and other places, and in advancing arts and manufactures, by premiums and similar encouragements.

Arbitrary as was his method of imposing the new law-book, nothing which Napoleon did for Italy was half so distinguished a benefit. Another importation from France was the military conscription, which, in some particulars advantageous, was in most respects a severe evil. The annual levies ordered during the six years which ended with 1814, amounted in all to ninety-eight thousand men, rising from six thousand in 1806, to fifteen thousand, which was the demand during each of the last four years; but only a portion of these troops were ever called into active service. Still the emperor’s foreign wars, especially those in Spain and Russia, cost to his Cisalpine provinces the lives of thousands. That restoration of hereditary aristocracy which was effected in France, took place in Italy likewise, by a decree of 1808, bestowing on the sovereign the power of conferring titles, and allowing the nobles so created to institute majorats, or devises of lands in favour of their eldest sons, or others whom they might select to transmit their honours.

We have yet to survey the finances of the kingdom, that branch of its polity which, in both its departments, the receipt and the expenditure, has been more loudly blamed than any other. Part of the censure is fully deserved; but very much of it is overcharged, and not a little is utterly unfounded. Two heavy faults pervaded the whole system: first, that multiplication of taxes, both in number and amount, which Napoleon, constantly immersed in foreign wars, imposed with a more direct view to the filling of his own exchequer than to the comfort or prosperity of his subjects; secondly, that dependent situation of Lombardy which caused her interests to be sacrificed in several instances to those of France.

THE ISLANDS OF SICILY AND SARDINIA

[Sidenote: [1801-1814 A.D.]]

In the meantime, while the whole peninsula was subject to the French emperor, or to his vassal-princes, the English had preserved Sicily for King Ferdinand.

When the court first removed to that island, the discontent of the lower orders was general; and on its breaking out into violence at Messina and elsewhere, the marquis Artali subdued the spirit of the people by cruelties which no remonstrances of the British could stop. The British, indeed, were not popular; and they soon lost the favour of the imperious queen, who entered into secret dealings with Napoleon. The reckless extravagance of the court, rendering necessary an excessive taxation, completed the disgust of the nation; and the barons, in their parliament of 1810, besides protecting themselves and others by refusing the supplies, except on conditions which made the collection of them all but impossible, voluntarily aided the popular cause, by abolishing many of their own feudal privileges.

Matters were coming to a bloody crisis, when Lord William Bentinck, the new ambassador at Palermo, executed the resolutions of the English government. The queen was forced to consent that her husband should resign his power to his son, as vicar or regent, while Bentinck was named captain-general of Sicily. Parliament was summoned in 1812, and framed a charter which, after violent resistance from Caroline, was ratified by the prince-vicar.

The history of Sardinia, during the French reign on the mainland, possesses neither interest nor importance enough to detain us long. Its king, Charles Emmanuel, weary of the world, abdicated in 1802 and retired to Rome, where he lived many years in devotional exercises, receiving a pension from Napoleon on his seizure of the city, and becoming a Jesuit when that order was restored. His brother and successor, Victor Emmanuel, held his island-crown by the same tenure as his Sicilian neighbour, or, in other words, by the protection of the English fleet.[d]

THE RISE OF NATIONAL SPIRIT

When Francis II of Austria renounced the imperial German crown on the 6th of August, 1806, Austria seems to have renounced its authority over Italy, though that country had hitherto found its main support in Austrian rule. In all encroachments of Austria in Italy, outside of its own province, the Italians later took it as a precedent that in 1806 Austria of itself renounced the ancient rights of the Holy Roman Empire.

The political convictions had for long been blunted, the political passions concerning the contributions and frauds of French proconsuls and their tools subsided as the fire of a burnt-out house. The more dangerous Italians were made barons and counts, and Melzi, prominent for his character and intellect, had been made a duke. The rage which still smouldered in individuals over the degradation of Italy is shown in the writings of Count Alfieri, who was born in Piedmont, 1743, and died at Florence, 1804; and of Niccolo Ugo Foscolo, born of a Greek mother, in Venice, 1772, and deceased in London, 1827. While far from stainless themselves, these men were panegyrists of patriotic celibacy and suicide, and possessed a sort of volcanic genius, that urged them on to write something great. Classic antiquity, stalking about in a phenomenally high cothurnus, was their religion. Alfieri declared that the papacy was irreconcilable with the freedom of Italy; both writers arrived at a certain desperate calm out of sheer admiration for England. To teach the Italian people to feel their political misfortune was their mission, and in its performance they remained the grand-masters of the desperate party. Some of the youth of Italy ignited their negative patriotism, their hatred of the tyrant and disdain of the lower classes at the fire of these doctrines; but for all their straining after effect both poets possessed more genuine patriotic passion than was ever evinced by their imitators, and were heroes of patriotic virtue compared to many who coldly traded on the passions of others.

A lasting after-effect of the republic was the complete abolition of feudal rights, which gave the Lombard and Venetian nobles a position of singular freedom.

[Sidenote: [1805-1806 A.D.]]

In 1805, as we have seen, Napoleon appointed Eugène Beauharnais, son of Josephine, viceroy; later he made him his successor in the kingdom of Italy, with the order to govern it after the simple system: “The emperor wills it!” The new ruler himself wrote to Napoleon that the kingdom of Italy would pay 30,000,000 francs to France yearly. Eugène married the daughter of King Max of Bavaria, with whom he shared Tyrol in the division suggested by their nationality.

Two days after the wedding, the 16th of January, 1806, Napoleon adopted Eugène. Ancona and all Venice being now added to it, the “kingdom of Italy” numbered 6,500,000 souls to 1,530 square miles. Even the courts, or rather their counsellors, worthy of the necessities of the time, observed that from the union of all these fragments the idea of nationality was slowly arising.

[Sidenote: [1806-1813 A.D.]]

Balbo[e] says of this time: “It was vassalage, no doubt; but a vassalage that shared the pride, the joys, the triumphs of the ruler. It was a time of universal self-respect, and from it dates the first utterance by the people of the name of Italy with increased love and honour; all over Italy the petty municipal and provincial jealousies which had taken root centuries before, and flourished even in the Utopian republic of a day, began to decline.”

We must not forget that Balbo belonged to the Piedmontese; hence the highest military nobility. The families whose sons had to pass through fire and be sacrificed to the Moloch of Napoleon’s ambition, could not then have shared his sentiments. Out of 30,000 Italians scarcely 9,000 returned from Spain. It caused a still more painful impression when Napoleon announced that of the 27,000 men of the kingdom of Italy who had gone to Russia, scarcely a thousand remained, especially as he made the announcement dryly, without a word of acknowledgment, and only ordered the raising of a new army. The remainder of Italy, partly incorporated to France and partly Neapolitan, had similar losses to bear.[f]

THE FALL OF NAPOLEON

In the winter of 1812 the emperor’s great army perished among the snows of Russia. Germany rose against him as one man; the battle of Leipsic completed his ruin; and before the end of 1813, he retained none of his foreign territories but Italy. As he had used the influence of religion to strengthen his rising power, so he now again caught at its support to arrest his fall. Calling the imprisoned pope to Fontainebleau after his return from the fatal campaign in the north, he prevailed on him to subscribe a concordat, which yielded some of the disputed points, and gave again to the French Empire the patronage of the see of Rome. But the advisers of Pius in this step had been Cardinal Ruffo and men who, like him, watched the times from a secular point of view: and different sentiments were suggested to the pontiff by those other friends, the cardinals Pacca, Gabrielli, Litta, and De Pietro, who were next admitted to his closet. He retracted his consent, and Napoleon lost the hold which he had thus hoped to gain both on France and Italy.

In the meantime, the nation had been called on to take an active share in the closing struggle maintained by their conqueror; the kingdom of Italy, except the sullen aristocracy of Venice, came forward with cheerfulness and spirit to furnish extraordinary contributions of men and money. Piedmont was equally zealous and active. Little was done to aid Napoleon, and nothing whatever to secure the independence of Italy after his dethronement. Jealousies, local and personal, though they had been lulled asleep, were not destroyed; opinions and desires differed by innumerable shades; and, above all, there was no chief, no man that could have led the nation into battle, defying the fearful odds which would have been brought against it. Neither for the establishment of an independent peninsular monarchy, nor for that of a federation or a single republic, were there materials among those who guided the destinies of the country; Murat and Eugène Beauharnais were equally ill-fitted to sustain the part of Robert the Bruce; and among all their Italian generals there was no Kosciuszko.

[Sidenote: [1813-1815 A.D.]]

In the summer of 1813, the Austrian armies defiled from the southern passes of the Alps; and after several indecisive engagements with the forces of Eugène, they had gained, before the end of the campaign, a great part of northern Italy. Meanwhile, King Joachim, marching his troops northwards, seized the papal provinces, and astonished Europe by proclaiming himself the ally of Austria. He had concluded a bargain, by which Francis, on condition of receiving his assistance, guaranteed the Neapolitan throne to himself and his heirs. In the ensuing spring, a body of English and Sicilians took Leghorn (Livorno) and were thence led by Lord William Bentinck against Genoa, which surrendered without resistance.

But the contest was already over; for on the 11th of April, 1814, Napoleon signed, at Fontainebleau, his act of abdication. Upon receiving this intelligence, Eugène attempted to secure Lombardy for himself. The senators declined to comply with his wish. A riot ensued, in which Prina, the unpopular minister of finance, was torn in pieces by the mob, and Méjean with difficulty escaped. The viceroy sought refuge with the king of Bavaria, one of whose daughters was his wife. German armies forthwith took possession of all the chief towns and places of strength in the peninsula.

In the course of the same year, the legitimate princes of Italy returned one by one to their thrones, as the congress of Vienna settled their claims. But the history of Napoleon’s empire will not be closed until we have anticipated a period of some months, in order to behold the fall of the last of those sovereignties which he had erected on the south of the Alps.

This was Naples, which for some time remained in an anomalous position. The emperor Francis, however desirous he might be, durst not break his own engagements; but France, Spain, and Sicily protested against all resolutions of the congress, so long as Joachim should be permitted to retain his kingdom. His own imprudence soon removed the difficulty. In March, 1815, on hearing that Napoleon had left Elba and effected a landing, he offered to Austria to join in the war against him, on condition of receiving a general acknowledgment of his title. The answer was evasive, and he hastened to gain for himself all he could. With an army of fifty or sixty thousand men, ill-trained, and not well inclined, he marched as far as Ravenna, whence a German force of ten thousand drove him back within his own frontier. He fled by sea, while his metropolis surrendered to the English fleet; and, in June, 1815, Ferdinand landed at Baja, and took possession of all his old provinces on the mainland.

After the battle of Waterloo, the dethroned Joachim wandered through France, and crossed to Corsica; whence, with about two hundred followers, he sailed for Italy, in the chimerical hope of conquering his lost kingdom. He landed in Calabria, where the soil yet reeked with the blood shed by Manhés; the peasants seized him, and delivered him to the military. A court-martial, receiving its commission from Naples, convicted him of treason; and on the 13th of October, 1815, he was shot in Pizzo, meeting an inglorious death with the same courage which he had always shown in the field of battle.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[23] [“This general, later Napoleon’s jailer, surrendered and was released on parole.”--DE CASTRO.[g]]

[24] [Of Joachim Murat’s administration of Naples, De Castro says: “Joachim’s government, assisted by good and energetic ministers, amongst whom was Ricciardi, Count di Camaldoli, proposed to enforce and amplify the good laws of Joseph, and to impress upon the Neapolitans the duty of improving themselves. At the same time, the necessity of punishments being less, they wished to modify the rigours of the law, and obliterate if possible all traces of past storms. Many partisans of the Bourbons, or accused of being so by the authorities, were released from prison and returned from exile. The education of the young was provided for by the establishment of a suitable college at Naples, and a school for girls was opened in every commune. There were to be four universities, Naples, Attamura, Chiti, and Catanzaro, each one with a faculty of five. New professorships were established, lyceums and schools were founded according to the promises of the previous king. Elementary education became widespread, replacing the confusing and superficial encyclopædia instruction. Inspections and examinations were combined with great prudence.”[g]]

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