by Will Durant
Who were these Spaniards who called themselves Liberales? They were apparently the first political faction to use that name. They meant by it to signalize their desire for liberty—of the mind from censorship, of the body from degradation, of the soul from tyranny. They had received gratefully the Luces coming in from the French Enlightenment. They welcomed the entry of a French force into Spain (1807); indeed, half of the population welcomed it as an army of liberation; no protest was heard when Charles IV resigned and his son Ferdinand VII was enthroned under the protection of Murat’s soldiery. Goya painted a portrait of the new ruler.
But the mood of the people, and of Goya, changed when Napoleon summoned Charles IV and Ferdinand VII to Bayonne, deposed both of them, exiled one to Italy, the other to France, and made his brother Joseph king of Spain. An angry crowd gathered before the royal palace; Murat ordered his soldiers to clear the square; the crowd fled, but reassembled, twenty thousand strong, in the Plaza Mayor. When French and Mameluke troops marched toward the plaza they were fired on from windows and arcades; infuriated, they entered houses, killing indiscriminately. Troops and crowd entered into an all-day battle, the famous Dos de Mayo (May 2, 1808); hundreds of men and women fell. From some nearby vantage Goya saw part of the massacre.123 On May 3 thirty of the prisoners taken by the soldiers were executed by a firing squad, and every Spaniard found with a gun in his hands was put to death. Nearly all Spain was now in revolt against the French. A “War of Liberation” spread from province to province, disgracing both sides with bestial ferocities. Goya saw some of these, and was haunted by their memory till his death. In 1811, fearing the worst, he made his will. In 1812 Josefa died. In 1813 Wellington took Madrid; Ferdinand VII was again king.
Goya celebrated the triumph of Spain by painting two of his most famous pictures (1814).124 One, Dos de Mayo, was his reconstruction of what he had seen, heard, or imagined of the battle between the populace of Madrid and the French and Mameluke troops. He placed the Mamelukes in the center, for it was their participation that stirred the hottest resentment in Spanish memory. We need not ask if the picture is accurate history; it is brilliant and powerful art, from the gradations of gleaming colors on the horse of the falling Mameluke to the faces of men terrified and brutalized by the choice between killing and being killed. Even more vivid is the companion picture, The Shooting of the Third of May —a. squad of French riflemen executing Spanish prisoners; nothing in Goya is more impressive than the contrast of terror and defiance in the central figure of that massacre.
Still a pensioned pintor de cámara, but no longer a favorite at the court, Goya, widowed, silenced, and deaf, retired into the world of his art. Perhaps in 1812 he made the most powerful of his engravings, The Colossus 125—a Hercules with the face of Caliban, seated on the edge of the earth, a Mars resting after triumphant war. Ever since 1810 he had been drawing little sketches which he later engraved and printed, and to which he gave the title The Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte, and other Caprichos. He did not dare publish these eighty-five drawings; he bequeathed them to his son, whose son sold them to the Academy of San Fernando, which published them in 1863 as Los Desastres de la Guerra.
These sketches are not usual battle scenes, which disguise killing as heroism and glory; they are moments of terror and cruelty in which the frail restraints of civilization are forgotten in the ecstasy of conflict and the intoxication of blood. Here are houses on fire, collapsing upon their inmates; women rushing to the battle with stones or pikes or guns; women raped; men tied to posts before firing squads; men shorn of a leg, an arm, or a head; a soldier cutting off a man’s genitals;126 corpses impaled upon the sharp stumps or limbs of trees; dead women still clutching their infants at their breast; children gazing in horror at the slaughter of their parents; dead men cast in heaps into pits; vultures feasting upon the human dead. Under these pictures Goya added sardonic captions: “This is what you were born for”;127 “This I saw”;128 “It happened like this”;129 “To bury the dead and be silent.”130 At the end Goya expressed his despair and his hope: No. 79 is a woman dying amid gravediggers and priests, and is captioned “Truth dies”; but No. 80 shows her radiating light, and asks, “Will she rise again?”
5. Decrescendo
In February, 1819, he bought a country house on the other side of the Manzanares. It was shaded by trees, and though he could not hear the music of the brook that bordered it, he could feel the lesson of its placid continuance. The neighbors called his home La Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf. As Javier had married and made a separate household, Goya took with him Doña Leocadia Weiss, who served him as mistress and housekeeper. She was a lusty shrew, but Goya was immune to her eloquence. She brought with her two children—a boy, Guillermo, and a lively little girl, María del Rosario, who became the solace of the artist’s declining life.
He badly needed so wholesome a stimulus, for his mind was on the edge of lunacy. Only so can we understand the pinturas negras with which he covered many walls of the house that was his asylum. As if reflecting the darkness of his mind, he painted chiefly in black and white; and as if faithful to the vagueness of his visions, he gave no certain contours to the forms, but used rough daubs to quickly fix upon the walls the fleeting images of a dream. On one of the long side walls he represented The Pilgrimage of San Isidro— the same festival that he had painted joyfully in 1788, thirty-one years before; but now it was a gloomy panorama of bestial and drunken fanatics. On the opposite wall he gathered even more horrible figures in a Sabbath of Witches awesomely worshiping a huge black goat as their Satan and commanding god. At the farther end of the room rose the most hideous form in the history of art, Saturn Devouring His Offspring —a giant crunching a naked child, having eaten the head and one arm, and now gorging himself on the other, splashing blood;131 perhaps it is an insane symbol of insane nations consuming their children in war. These are the visions of a man who is obsessed with macabre imaginings, and madly paints them to drive them out of himself and immobilize them on the wall.
In 1823 Leocadia, whose Freemason activities had made her fear arrest, fled to Bordeaux with her children. Goya, left alone with the madness that he had painted on his walls, decided to follow them. But if he went without royal permission he would forfeit the official salary that he was receiving as pintor de cámara. He asked for several months’ leave to take the waters at Plombières; it was granted. He deeded the Quinta del Sordo to his grandson Mariano, and in June, 1824, he made his way to Bordeaux, Leocadia, and María of the Rosary.
As he neared death his love for his grandson Mariano became his dominant passion. He settled an annuity on the boy, and offered to pay expenses if Javier would bring Mariano to Bordeaux. Javier could not come, but he sent his wife and son. When they arrived Goya embraced them with such emotion that he broke down and had to take to his bed. He wrote to his son: “My dear Javier, I only want to tell you that all this joy has been too much for me. … May God grant that you can come and fetch them, and then my cup of happiness will be full.”132 The next morning his voice was gone, and half his body was paralyzed. He lingered for thirteen days, impatiently awaiting Javier, in vain. He died on April 16, 1828. In 1899 his remains were brought from Bordeaux to Madrid and were interred before the altar of the Church of San Antonio de la Florida, where, 101 years before, he had painted under the dome the pains and griefs, the joys and loves, of Spanish life.
CHAPTER XII
Vale, Italia
1760-89
I. FAREWELL TOUR
IF we indulge ourselves in one more look at Italy we shall find her, even in this seeming siesta, warm with life: Turin nursing Alfieri, Lucca publishing Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Florence flowering again under Grand Duke Leopold, Milan reforming law with Beccaria, Pavia and Bologna thrilling with the experiments of Volta and Galvani, Venice suffering Casanova, Naples challenging the papacy, Rome caught in the tragedy of the Jesuits, and a hundred breeding grounds of music exporting opera an
d virtuosi to tame the savage transalpine breast. We shall meet in Italy a hundred thousand foreigners coming to study her treasures and bask in her sun. There, in this age, Goethe, choked with Weimar dignitaries, came to renew his youth and discipline his Muse.
Goethe’s first impression, as he came down from the Alps into Venezia Tridentina (September, 1786), was of the mild and luminous air, which “gave exquisite enjoyment to mere existence, even to poverty.”1 And next, the uncaged life: “the inhabitants are always out of doors, and, in their lightheartedness, think of nothing” but to live. He thought that the fruitful soil must readily provide for the modest wants of these simple people; yet the poverty, and the lack of sanitation in the smaller towns, dismayed him.
When I asked the waiter for a certain place he pointed down into the courtyard, “qui abasso puo servire.’” “Dove ?” I asked. “Da per tutto, dove vuol” was the friendly reply. … Forecourts and colonnades are all soiled with filth, for things are done in the most natural manner.2
Sensory adaptation gradually reconciled him.
Venice was enjoying her amiable decay. About 1778 Carlo Gozzi described with righteous exaggeration what seemed to him a general dissolution of morality:
The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men and women turned into monkeys; all of them immersed … in the whirligig of fashion; corrupting and seducing one another with the eagerness of hounds on the scent, vying in their lusts and ruinous extravagance, … burning incense … to Priapus.3
In 1797 he blamed the collapse on philosophy:
Religion, that salutary curb on human passion, has … become a laughingstock. I am bound to believe that the gallows benefit society, being an instrument for punishing crime and deterring would-be criminals. But our newfangled philosophers have denounced the gallows as a tyrannical prejudice, and by so doing they have multiplied murders on the highway, robberies and acts of violence, a hundredfold. . . .
It was pronounced a musty and barbarous prejudice to keep women at home for the supervision of their sons and daughters, … their domestic service and economy. At once the women poured forth, storming like Bacchanals, screaming, “Liberty! liberty!” The streets swarmed with them. … Meanwhile they abandoned their vapory brains to fashions, frivolous inventions, . . .amusements, amours, coquetries, and all sorts of nonsense. … The husbands had not the courage to oppose this ruin of their honor, their substance, their families. They were afraid of being pilloried with that dreadful word prejudice. … Good morals, modesty, and chastity received the name of prejudice. … When all the so-called prejudices had been put to flight, … many great and remarkable blessings appeared: … irreligion, respect and reverence annulled, justice overturned, … criminals encouraged and bewept, heated imaginations, sharpened senses, animalism, indulgence in all lusts and passions, imperious luxury, … bankruptcies, … adulteries.4
But of course the basic causes of decay were economic and military; Venice no longer had the wealth to defend her former power. By contrast her rival, Austria, had grown so strong in manpower that she commanded all land approaches to the lagoons, and fought some of her campaigns on the soil of the neutral but helpless republic.
On March 9, 1789, Lodovico Manin was elected to head the government—the last of the 120 doges who had presided over Venice in an impressive continuity since 697. He was a man of great riches and little character, but poverty and courage would not have prevented his tragedy. Four months later the Bastille fell; the religion of liberty captured the imagination of France; and when the religion came with the legions of Napoleon it swept nearly all Italy under its banner and ecstasy. On the ground that Austrian forces had used Venetian territory, and on the charge that Venice had secretly aided his enemies, the victorious Corsican, backed by eighty thousand troops, imposed upon the Queen of the Adriatic a provisional government dictated by himself (May 12, 1797). On that day Doge Manin, resigning, gave his cap of state to an attendant, and bade him “take it away; we shall not want it again.”5 A few days later he died. On May 16 French troops occupied the city. On October 17 Bonaparte signed at Campoformio a treaty that transferred Venice and nearly all her territorial possessions to Austria in exchange for Austrian concessions to France in Belgium and on the left bank of the Rhine. It was exactly eleven hundred years since the first doge had been elected to rule and defend the lagoons.
Parma was a Spanish protectorate, but its Duke, Don Felipe, son of Philip V and Isabella Farnese, married Louise Elisabeth, daughter of Louis XV; he adopted her expensive habits, and made his court a miniature Versailles. Parma became a center of culture, gaily mingling cosmopolitan ways. “It seemed to me,” said Casanova, “that I was no longer in Italy, for everything had the air of belonging to the other side of the Alps. I heard only French and Spanish spoken by the passers-by.”6 An enlightened minister, Guillaume du Tillot, gave the duchy stimulating reforms. Here were made some of the finest textiles, crystals, and faïence.
Milan now experienced an industrial expansion modestly prefiguring its economic pre-eminence in the Italy of today. Austrian rule gave loose rein to local ability and enterprise. Count Karl Joseph von Firmian, governor of Lombardy, co-operated with native leaders in improving administration, and reduced the oppressive power of feudal barons and municipal oligarchs. A group of economic liberals led by Pietro Verri, Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, and Giovanni Carli adopted the principles of the physiocrats, abolished taxes on internal trade, ended the farming of taxes, and spread the burden by taxing ecclesiastical property. The textile industry grew till in 1785 it comprised twenty-nine firms, operating 1,384 looms. The land was surveyed, the state financed irrigation projects, the peasants worked with a will. In the twenty-one years between 1749 and 1770 the population of the duchy rose from 90,000 to 130,000.7 It was in this period of Milanese exhilaration that the community built the Teatro alla Scala (1776-78), seating 3,600 spectators amid palatial decorations, and offering facilities for music, conversation, eating, playing cards, and sleeping; and, surmounting all, a reservoir of water designed to extinguish any fire. Here Cimarosa and Cherubini now enjoyed resounding victories.
This was the heroic age of Corsica. That mountainous isle was already surfeited with history. The Phocaeans from Asia Minor had established a colony there toward 560 B.C.; they were conquered by the Etruscans, who were conquered by the Carthaginians, who were conquered by the Romans, who were conquered by the Byzantine Greeks, who were conquered by the Franks, who were conquered by the Moslems, who were conquered by the Tuscan Italians, who were conquered by the Pisans, who were conquered by the Genoese (1347). Two thirds of the population, in that century, died from the Black Plague. Under Genoese rule the Corsicans, harassed by pestilence and piratical raids, barred from major offices and taxed beyond bearing, sank into a semisavagery in which violent vendettas were the only honored law. Periodical revolts failed because of internecine feuds and lack of foreign aid. Genoa, fighting for its own life against Austrian armies, appealed to France for help in maintaining order in Corsica; France responded lest the island be taken by the British as a citadel for control of the Mediterranean; French troops occupied Ajaccio and other Corsican strongholds (1739-48). When peace seemed secure the French withdrew, Genoese domination was resumed, and the historic revolt of Paoli began.
Pasquale di Paoli anticipated by a century the exploits of Garibaldi. Lord Chatham called him “one of those men who are no longer to be found but in the pages of Plutarch.”8 Born (1725) the son of a Corsican rebel, he followed his father into exile, studied in Naples under the liberal economist Genovesi, served in the Neapolitan army, returned to Corsica (1755), and was chosen to lead a rebellion against Genoa. In two years of fighting he succeeded in driving the Genoese from all but some coastal towns. As elected head of the new republic (1757-68) he proved himself as brilliant in legislation and administration as he had shown himself in the strategy and tactics of war. He established a democratic constitution, suppressed the vendetta,
abolished the oppressive rights of feudal lords, spread education, and founded a university at Corte, his capital.
Unable to overcome him, Genoa sold the island to France (May 15, 1768) for two million francs. Paoli now found himself fighting against repeatedly reinforced French troops. His secretary and aide at this time was Carlo Buonaparte, to whom a son Napoleone was born at Ajaccio on August 15, 1769. Overwhelmed by the French at Pontenuovo (May, 1769), Paoli abandoned the hopeless struggle and took refuge in England; there he received a government pension, was celebrated by Boswell, and numbered Johnson among his friends. The National Assembly of Revolutionary France recalled him from exile, acclaimed him as “the hero and martyr of liberty,” and made him governor of Corsica (1791). But the French Convention judged him insufficiently Jacobin; it sent a commission to depose him; British troops came to his aid, but the British general took control of the island and sent Paoli back to England (1795). Napoleon dispatched a French force to expel the British (1796); the islanders welcomed the French as coming from “the Corsican”; the British withdrew, and Corsica submitted to France.
Tuscany flourished under the Hapsburg grand dukes who succeeded the Medici (1738). Since its nominal ruler, Francis of Lorraine, resided in Austria as the husband of Maria Theresa, the government was deputed to a regency under native leaders, who rivaled the Milanese liberals in economic reforms; seven years before Turgot’s similar attempt in France, they established free internal trade in grains (1767). When Francis died (1765) he was followed as grand duke by his younger son Leopold, who developed into one of the most enterprising and courageous of the “enlightened despots.” He checked corruption in office, improved the judiciary, the administration, and the finances, equalized taxation, abolished torture, confiscation, and capital punishment, helped the peasantry, drained marshes, ended monopolies, extended free trade and free enterprise, allowed self-government in the communes, and looked forward to setting up a semidemocratic constitution for the duchy. Goethe was impressed by the comparative cleanliness of the Tuscan cities, the good condition of roads and bridges, the beauty and grandeur of the public works.9 Leopold’s brother Joseph, on becoming sole emperor, supported Leopold in abolishing most feudal privileges in Tuscany, in closing many monasteries, and in reducing the power of the clergy.