Chapter XVII: Italy in the Eighteenth Century (2)

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.