The Helvetic Republic was not even a conquered enemy, like the Dutch, but that did not save it from the depredations which a French army of occupation always brought. Under pressure from Ochs and La Harpe, the Directory promised not to impose requisitions; but the well-stocked treasuries of the main Swiss cities were impounded to pay the army of Italy and to equip the Egyptian expedition being fitted out at Toulon. War taxes were imposed, and pillaging, as everywhere, only sporadically controlled. As early as June 1798 two of the new Swiss Directory were replaced on French insistence because they had not proved co-operative enough towards their protectors. But as 1798 drew to a close, the French proved unable even to guarantee protection. In November, Austrian troops occupied the eastern cantons, making Switzerland for the first time in centuries a theatre of war. Soon the Russians in their turn would be campaigning there. The French now demanded that the Helvetic Republic conscript 18,000 men into a militia to act as auxiliaries to the French armies, but despite the support of Ochs and other leading architects of the new Republic, the legislature refused the demand. All it would authorize was a volunteer army, whose members never reached a quarter of those required. The Swiss still remembered the grisly fate of the last Swiss regiments in French service, butchered at the Tuileries in August 1792. In other respects, however, the new authorities showed themselves eager to follow the French lead. A massive programme of rationalization was announced for the Republic, including abolition of internal tolls and customs barriers, guilds and corporations, the tithe, and feudal dues. Church lands were taken into national possession, and monasteries forbidden to recruit new novices. In Protestant areas, such measures were applauded but had little impact. In Catholic ones, which included some of the remotest valleys whose traditions of self-government were among the most democratic in Europe, they caused deep resentment. The new constitution, declared one mountain priest,9 ‘seeks to rob us of our holy religion, our freedom enjoyed undisturbed for hundreds of years, and our democratic constitution inherited from our blessed ancestors’. And while French troops made short work of the small rebel army assembled by the peasants of the Valais in May 1798, guerrilla resistance continued, and was not so easy to deal with, especially when war engulfed the country and gave the French more pressing priorities. When that happened, too, the initial ban on requisitioning soon broke down, making the Republic’s French defenders barely distinguishable from the Austrian and Russian enemies who throughout 1799 poured across its borders from the Tyrol in the east, and up the Alpine passes from Italy.
It was Bonaparte’s conquests in Italy that had sealed Switzerland’s fate. From Italy, too, came the model for her reorganization. Yet although the first sister republic, the Batavian, was already in existence when the French crossed the Alps in the spring of 1796 nobody, not even Bonaparte, seems to have yet thought of establishing parallel client states in other conquered territories. When in his initial march across the Alps, Bonaparte swept aside the army of Victor Amadeus III of Piedmont, a small group of the latter’s subjects sympathetic to French ideas proclaimed a republic at Alba. They were ignored. Anxious only to remove the Piedmontese army from the military balance, Bonaparte signed an armistice with the defeated king and left him a free hand to deal with the rebels against his authority. It was true that over the winter of 1795–6 various Italian political exiles in France, coordinated by Buonarroti, extolled the prospects for ‘liberating’ Italy and tried to convince the Directory that they could organize an uprising in Piedmont to facilitate the advance of the Republic’s armies. But Buonarroti’s involvement in the Babeuf plot uncovered in May 1796 discredited him and his friends in directorial eyes. His radical social and political ideas would be just as dangerous in occupied territories as they were in France. Suspicions, far from groundless, that the true sympathies of Italian Francophiles lay with Jacobinism and the ideals of the Year II rather than directorial moderation would hamper their prospects throughout the three years of the first French occupation. Equally well founded was the French belief that Italian Jacobins enjoyed scant popular support. ‘There can be no question of republicanising Italy’, reported one consul on the eve of Bonaparte’s triumphs.10 ‘The people are not at all inclined to accept liberty, neither are they worthy of this boon. In view of their degradation, all we can hope for is the silence born of cowardice and the respect born of fear; they execrate our principles as contrary to their passions and their prejudices.’ In any case, the Directory’s strategy in invading Italy was merely to occupy and exploit it, exchanging it for the Rhineland at the final peace.
Yet the French were welcomed by more people in Lombardy than in any other territory they invaded except the Dutch Republic. Especially in the cities, middle-class intellectuals accepted outside intervention as a means of breaking the recently reinforced clerical and aristocratic stranglehold on Italian life. During an unprecedented half-century of peace and relative prosperity since 1748, intellectual life had flourished in northern Italy, and the activities of reforming monarchs like Leopold of Tuscany and his elder brother the Emperor Joseph II (ruling the duchy of Milan) had convinced many thinking Italians that Enlightenment would soon triumph throughout the peninsula. But in the early 1790s these hopes were shattered. Joseph died and Leopold went back to Vienna to succeed him, dying himself soon afterwards. And, as horror stories rolled in from France, reforms were abandoned and governments clamped fierce controls on independent intellectual life. The Bourbon monarchies of Parma and Naples were swept by hysteria, and the Pope anathematized reform as a threat to faith itself. More ominously still from the viewpoint of bourgeois radicals, this tide of reaction enjoyed some obvious popular support: when Leopold II left Tuscany, exultant rioters, to cries of Viva Maria!, drove the Jansenistic priests he had installed from their churches and put back the images, relics, and pious trappings that the reformers had tried to banish.
But in 1796, as the French poured into the Lombard plains and smashed every Austrian army sent against them, hitherto frustrated Italian intellectuals were overcome with excitement. They could not believe the invaders would not favour them, and while refugees from Piedmontese persecution of the Alba republicans trailed after Bonaparte on his triumphal march, Jacobins in his path unceremoniously deposed their local rulers and proclaimed the rule of Liberty and Equality. On arrival in Milan Bonaparte found a club of 800 members, mostly lawyers and merchants, waiting to greet him; and within a week this ‘Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality’ was producing its own journal. A few more weeks and it was advocating an ideal most people had thought Utopian until then—Italian unity. Bonaparte in turn recognized how these sentiments, and those expressing them, could be used. In a proclamation issued on 19 May he denounced kings, the rich, and the privileged, and spoke vaguely of achieving ‘the independence of Lombardy, which should bring its happiness’.11 But, he added, the French army could not achieve these lofty ends without supplies, supplies which France could not provide. So the former Austrian provinces would be required to make ‘a very small contribution’ to their expenses, and the new men now in power in Milan would be entrusted with the task of raising it.
So began the inevitable exploitation of Italy, and of France’s Italian friends. A general who had promised his ragged army unlimited booty when they descended into the richest plains in the world was now about to keep his word—to them, at least. A war tax of 20 millions was the ‘very small contribution’ announced in the proclamation. Meanwhile requisitioning of foodstuffs proceeded ruthlessly in the army’s wake. Stockpiles were established for plundered grain and wine, and plans were made to corral 4,000 cattle. Municipal treasuries were everywhere impounded, as were the contents of the public pawnshops so characteristic of Italian cities. Tuscan neutrality was cheerfully violated on the excuse that massive British supplies were stockpiled at Leghorn. When the forewarned islanders evacuated most of them in a remarkable amphibious scratch operation, the city was stripped of all its other resources. Works of art were systematically
removed from churches and palaces, and shipped to France by the cartload. Bullion too: although far more was promised than actually arrived across the Alps. Thanks to the Milanese authorities compounding for irregular exactions to the tune of a million per month, he was also able to pay his soldiers mostly in cash at a time when it was completely unavailable in France, and when requisitions, if paid for at all, were settled up in the ill-fated territorial mandates at face value. Needless to say the commander-in-chief and his main lieutenants made personal fortunes. But scarcely had these depredations begun before they ran into resistance. At Pavia on 25 May, a Jacobin administration, set up by the French army as it passed through like a swarm of locusts, was overthrown as soon as the front had moved on by riotous peasants outraged by anti-religious excesses. Bonaparte himself had to turn aside to deal with the rising, doing so by delivering the city to twenty-four hours of unrestrained sack. Other resistance was less spectacular, but harder to deal with since most of it was rural. Whereas most towns had their kernels of Jacobins ready to greet and—initially at least—co-operate with the invaders in organizing the exploitation of their fellow citizens, in the countryside the French were seen simply as Godless foreign marauders, to be resisted, ambushed, and harassed whenever opportunities occurred. Thus there were peasant uprisings throughout the Lombard plains over the summer of 1796, some of them resulting in massacres of isolated French units. Essentially local, however, they never came together, and the ebb and flow of the war zone made soldiers of all sides the peasants’ enemy.
Even in towns the Jacobin honeymoon did not always last long. In papal Bologna and Ferrara, occupied in June, crackdowns on subversives over the previous two years had left an atmosphere of anti-clerical resentment: the last execution in Bologna had taken place only two months before the French arrived. Bolognese Jacobins, therefore, were encouraged to draw up an independent constitution for their territory, which kept them busy, and grateful, for the rest of the year. Not surprisingly, the end product was based closely on the Constitution of the Year III. But no such freedom was allowed to the turbulent radicals of Milan. By the end of May, their two-week-old club had been dissolved, and it only began cautiously meeting again, as a ‘patriotic society’, two months later. In September it was reborn yet again, as an ‘Academy of Literature and Public Instruction’, with the sanction of Bonaparte, but as soon as it began agitating for a national convention to regenerate the whole of Italy, adopting a distinctive tricolour cockade of red, white, and green, it met renewed French resistance. Neither the Directory in Paris nor Bonaparte had any interest in uniting Italy. So when, in November, a renewed Austrian offensive threatened to expel the French, the club prepared to seize power the moment they withdrew. A demonstration was organized to plant a liberty tree in the city centre and proclaim, with legal formalities, the independence of the Lombard nation. But the Austrians were once more defeated and the French, more firmly in control than ever, crushed the movement and the club which had sponsored it.
Yet Bonaparte realized that to spurn such aspirations was to turn his back on France’s surest source of support. The energies of Italian patriots should be harnessed, if possible, rather than rejected. It was for this reason that, in the autumn, he encouraged those whom French power had placed in control at Bologna and Ferrara, and at Modena (a duchy also swamped by the French tide), to concert their action against local conservative resistance. Nor did he demur when, at the end of December, their representatives meeting at Reggio declared themselves a single one and indivisible Cispadane Republic. In fact, he intervened personally to expedite the drafting of the new state’s constitution, which was eventually proclaimed on 27 March 1797. Thus the first of the Italian sister republics was born, and it was recognized by the Pope, at whose expense it had largely been created, in the treaty of Tolentino in February.
Lombard radicals watched these moves with mounting excitement, although Bonaparte refused to allow them to send representatives to the Reggio congress. When the Cispadanes adopted the new tricolour and, following an example set in Milan the previous autumn, set up a national guard or ‘Italian Legion’ to give armed support to the new state, they saw clear signs of common aspirations. Accordingly, the results of the first elections, held in April 1797 under a constitution once more closely modelled on that of France, came as a shock. Large numbers of conservatives were returned, under the influence of the clergy. Bonaparte too was shocked. Occupied since February with his final pursuit of the Austrians up the Alpine valleys towards Vienna, he had been in no position to control this first free expression of Italian opinion. ‘Like Lombardy,’ he complained,12 ‘the Cispadane Republic needs a provisional government for three or four years, during which the influence of the priests can be lessened; otherwise, you will have done nothing by giving liberty … However … I shall start by joining Lombardy and the Cispadane, under a single provisional government.’ This was on 1 May. Within a few weeks (29 June) the Cisalpine Republic had been created, and the short-lived Cispadane had been incorporated into it.
From Paris it looked like the deliberate creation of a personal client state, and the imperious way in which the general went on to dictate its constitution, and rule it by decree all that summer from lordly surroundings in the palace of Mombello, suggested long-meditated ambitions in this direction. In fact the concept seems to have emerged much more haphazardly, and at every stage strategic considerations seem to have been paramount. The Cispadane Republic was a buffer against attack from the south, with viable natural frontiers. Nothing comparable could have been created in Lombardy until the Austrians were expelled from Mantua: and Venetian territory marched with the eastern and northern limits of French occupation along purely jurisdictional lines of no strategic logic. Venice had remained neutral in the conflict but, straddling as it did all the main Austrian lines of communication with Italy, its territory was a major theatre of war throughout the campaign. When Bonaparte disappeared northwards towards Leoben, there were vicious outbreaks of hostility to the garrisons he had left to guard his lines of communication through the terraferma, culminating on 17 April with the massacre of 400 French soldiers in Verona. In response he issued blood-curdling threats against the Doge and Senate of Venice. But when the Austrians, at Leoben, asked for compensation for their losses in Belgium and Lombardy, the outrages offered a perfect occasion for a diplomatic deal. Venetia would be given to the Habsburgs, shorn of a number of outlying territories which would consolidate French conquests further west. When, therefore, two months later, the Cisalpine Republic came into being, it had a coherent frontier to the east, at least, along the Adige; which the Austrians accepted, along with their own acquisition of the rest of Venetia, at Campo Formio the following October.
In these circumstances the creation of a consolidated north Italian sister republic was logical. The alternative—to incorporate the conquered territories into France—would have made little sense and would have outraged all her Italian friends. As it was they were outraged enough. Expecting to draft their own constitution in the Cispadane manner, they found it dictated to them by Bonaparte. And all but the most moderate found themselves excluded from positions of authority in the new state. Although the new constitution, promulgated on 9 July, was elective, Bonaparte decreed that, so that the passage from a military to a constitutional regime should occur ‘without shocks, without anarchy’, he would nominate all members of executive and legislature for the first year of its operation. In the event the constitution only lasted fourteen months, and the republic itself only seven more. But during that time it became a byword both for French exploitation of allies (‘We do not wish to allow ourselves to be cisalpinised’, complained a Swiss official,13 as French requisitions began) and for radical turbulence. Milan rapidly became a centre for Jacobin refugees fleeing from Venice, from Piedmont, from the Papal States, and from Naples. They agitated constantly for an Italian republic, freedom of the press, and anti-noble and anti-clerical legislation. So long as Bonaparte rema
ined in Italy, he acted decisively against such activity. The constitution made no explicit provision for clubs, and when, imitating post-Fructidorian France, a constitutional circle was set up in November 1797, it was closed within a few days as a hotbed of ‘anarchists’. Not until he had left, a month later, was it allowed to reopen, and then it became an organ for all the views and opinions he had feared. Only too clearly the Jacobins of Milan dreamed of an Italian Year II to sweep away all obstacles: one female enthusiast even offered to marry the man who would bring her the Pope’s head. The terms which France imposed on her latest sister republic were further grist to their mill. In February 1798 a treaty of alliance was signed. It stipulated that a French army of 25,000 would be stationed in the Republic and maintained at its expense. It was also required to raise and maintain an army of its own of 22,000 men—which it had no prospect of doing without resort to the always-explosive conscription. Preferential tariffs were to be extended to French goods, while British ones were to be totally excluded. Given that the republic was a French creation, and depended utterly on France for its survival, these terms were perhaps not excessively onerous, but they shocked a wide range of opinion. While clubs, in Milan and other cities, denounced the treaty, the legislature refused to confirm it. Eventually they yielded, but not before orders had gone out from Paris, at the suggestion of the Cisalpine ambassador there, for a ‘Cisalpine Fructidor’. In April 1798, accordingly, the legislative councils and the Directory were purged, removing the most conservative of Bonaparte’s nominees (much to his fury), and leaving in control elements much more sympathetic to the radicals of the clubs.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution Page 52