The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  Calls for Italian unity were now loudly renewed. The issue was becoming more urgent as separate sister republics appeared all over the peninsula. The ancient city-republic of Genoa, quite unable to resist French power, had been transformed into the Ligurian Republic in June 1797, following the crushing of an uprising of Genoese patriots and their French collaborators. The new republic’s constitution, drafted locally, was approved in a plebiscite in December—in striking contrast with Cisalpine experience. At the end of the same month a riot in Rome resulted in the accidental death of a French general, and the ambassador, Bonaparte’s brother Joseph, fled in panic to Florence. The Directory, in renewed anti-clerical mood since Fructidor, ordered an invasion of what was left of the Papal States after the surrender at Tolentino. The Pope had no army, and Rome was occupied without resistance on 10 February 1798. Five days later a small group of Jacobins, most of whom were not native Romans but adventurers from the sister republics of the north, proclaimed a Roman Republic. It was recognized on the spot by the French commander. The Pope was deported. But not until a popular uprising, the so-called ‘Roman Vespers’, was put down on 25 February was the new state securely established. Echoes of it continued for days afterwards in the Alban hills, and hundreds were shot in the mopping-up which followed. Nor was there any question here of native Italians drafting their own constitution. A commission of jurists was sent from Paris. They produced a structure full of ancient Roman terminology, with Consuls, a Senate, and a Tribunate, but modern and Parisian in form. Like the Cisalpine constitution it was to be operated by nominees, not elected officials, for its first year. And nothing was to be enacted without the consent of the French commandant, who was for good measure authorized to make whatever laws he saw fit. Nothing could have stated more explicitly that the new Italian republics existed primarily for the convenience of the Great Nation.

  And the way these latest additions to the constellation of sister republics were treated emphasized the point. The first demand made on the Ligurian Republic, presumed inheritor of the traditional Genoese role as international banker, was for a loan of 800,000 francs. When the legislature refused, the French ambassador engineered a coup (31 August 1798) which purged the leading resisters. Similarly, the continued ferment at Milan, positively encouraged by the more radical elements left in control after the April purge, led to renewed pressure from Paris for French agents to assert themselves. The purpose of the Cisalpine Republic, a new ambassador was told in June 1798,14 was ‘to serve the exclusive interests of the French Republic, and to help it become, over the entire peninsula, the arbiter of all political contests. It must become powerful enough to be useful to us, but never so much that we are damaged.’ More conservative elements, hostile to ideas of Italian unification, should therefore be brought to power. A new constitution, modelled on that of the Roman Republic and with a restricted franchise based on the highest taxpayers, was proposed. Leaked in advance by General Brune, who had been ordered against his will to support its imposition with military force, it raised a furore in both Milan and Paris, where resurgent Jacobins feared that it would be a trial run for constitutional remodelling in France itself. Nevertheless it was imposed on 30 August, and Brune was ordered to ensure that the changes were ratified by primary assemblies. Instead, he secured ratification for the mass expulsion of moderates from the government, deliberately defying orders from Paris in what was effectively the third Cisalpine coup d’état in a year. A fourth followed his inevitable recall, with the 30 August constitution finally being imposed, and Jacobins once more being expelled, in December. This time the response was more muted, for the war of the second coalition had begun, on whose outcome the fate of all the sister republics would depend.

  The first shots, in fact, had been fired in Italy. On 12 November the Neapolitan army invaded the Roman Republic, and within two weeks it had taken its capital, to be welcomed by excited crowds disgusted by the anti-religious excesses of ten months of republican rule. During this time churches had been plundered, pious fraternities dissolved, new monastic vows forbidden, and many religious houses closed down. In a state whose sole resources were religion and tourism, and whose swarming poor relied on clerical charities, these reforms were catastrophic. Paper money issued by the new authorities had plummeted in value almost at once, exacerbating the problems. Even worse was to follow a few weeks later, when the regrouped French forces returned to chase the invaders back to Naples. The Roman Jacobins resurfaced more militant than ever, now banning all public signs of religious practice, restricting ordinations, and imposing forced loans. French exactions were renewed, their total value reaching perhaps 70 millions.

  There was scarcely time to extend this pattern to the last of the sister republics, and the shortest-lived—the Parthenopean Republic proclaimed at Naples by Championnet on 26 January 1799. By this time the Directors wanted no more of such satellites. As the Austrians and Russians prepared to march into Switzerland and Italy, the French armies were already dangerously stretched, and the poor, remote Neapolitan kingdom had limited strategic value. Championnet knew this, and after the flight of Ferdinand IV’s forces was at first content to conclude an armistice under which he occupied the northern provinces but not the city of Naples—by far Italy’s largest. All he demanded there was that Nelson and his British squadron should be denied a landing. But the panic-stricken king and queen abandoned Naples, sailing off to Sicily with Nelson. Chaos gripped the city as the volatile Neapolitan poor, the notorious lazzaroni, armed to confront the French and ended up lynching noblemen and sacking the empty royal palace. The city’s Jacobins, emerging from three years of prudent obscurity since the breakup of their clubs in 1795, appealed to Championnet to intervene. He could not resist this opportunity to emulate Bonaparte, but a thousand Frenchmen and three times that number of lazzaroni lay dead or wounded before the blue, red, and yellow tricolour of the Parthenopean Republic flew over Naples. A provisional government of Jacobins now set about drafting a constitution, while a club dedicated to ‘public instruction’ elaborated a whole range of Utopian reform projects. Championnet, however, was recalled in disgrace after expelling a critical civil commissioner from Naples in true Bonapartist style. His dismissal was the last triumph under the Directory of the civil arm over the military, and even that rebounded in June when a court-martial failed to convict him. And by then the Republic he had created in southern Italy had disappeared. The Russians had arrived in Lombardy, and in order to avoid being cut off the new French commander in Naples, MacDonald, abandoned the city in a desperate march northwards. His collaborators were left with no force to rely on but a few hundred French troops garrisoning strong points. This might be enough to contain the lazzaroni, but it was certainly no match for the royalist forces now making for Naples from the south—the ‘Christian Army of the Holy Faith’ led by a fighting prince of the Church, Cardinal Ruffo.

  Ruffo was a Calabrian who had served in the papal curia but had found more favour at the Neapolitan court. Sailing with the royal family to Sicily, he offered to raise his native province for the king before the French got there. Feeling he had nothing to lose, Ferdinand IV accepted the offer, and Ruffo landed in Calabria with a handful of companions and a banner bearing the cross and the royal arms on 7 February. Within weeks his followers had swelled to an army of 17,000 and were in control of the whole toe of Italy. Soon the neighbouring provinces of Apulia and Basilicata had fallen to them as well. Ruffo’s technique was to appeal pointedly to social antagonisms in an area recently ravaged by natural disasters, over-populated, deeply impoverished, and groaning under heavy indirect taxes and feudal burdens. He proclaimed the latter abolished while the Jacobins in Naples were merely toying with the idea, thus inferring that the French and their friends represented the rich and powerful. He also whipped up the deep-rooted antagonism of peasants for the towns, knowing that if all townsmen were not Jacobins, all Jacobins were certainly townsmen. As everywhere, political labels were stuck on innumerable long-sta
nding local antagonisms and vendettas and provided new justifications for pursuing them. The march of the ‘Sanfedist’ army was a peasants’ revolt which in other circumstances might just as easily have been against the Bourbon government. Like other such revolts, it was chaotic, undisciplined, and largely local in its impetus and effects. Law and order in Calabria did not recover from it for decades. Even so, enough of those involved were prepared to march with Ruffo up to defenceless Naples, where they arrived on 13 June as British ships threatened the city from the bay. A week of confused siege and renewed anarchy followed.

  The populace [reported Ruffo, appalled at the savagery now unleashed], and many outlaws who have come to fight for the King … are robbing and plundering without let or hindrance. All respectable folk are fleeing to the country. Our better soldiers are guarding the houses against pillage, but to little purpose. Often the pretext is Jacobinism: that is what they call it, but in fact it is plunder that often produces Jacobin proprietors. I find the same in small places. To the cry of ‘Long live the King!’ they dare anything with impunity.15

  He could see no point in further draconian reprisals once calm returned; but his royal master, his fearsome Habsburg queen, and their British advisers thought otherwise. They demanded victims, and show trials followed the royal return to Naples. In consequence, 120 Jacobins were hanged and over 1,100 more imprisoned.

  By now the whole of Italy was in revolt against the French and their protégés. Briefly, as the forces of the coalition massed, the invaders attempted to seize control of the whole peninsula. Piedmont, surrounded as a result of the previous war by French, or French-controlled, territory, had been browbeaten into a treaty of alliance in October 1797. The following June the Republic’s troops were allowed to garrison the citadel at Turin, from where they encouraged local sympathizers to demonstrate against the monarchy. Matters came to a crisis when the French demanded that the lands of dissolved Cisalpine monasteries on Piedmontese territory should be sold. King Charles Emmanuel IV refused, unless the citadel was returned. The French response was to demand yet more military facilities, and when the king held out, they occupied the whole country (December 1798) and forced him to abdicate. Exhorting his former subjects to obey the French, he left for the island kingdom of Sardinia that was still his. Piedmontese patriots rejoiced, but not for long. In February 1798 a carefully rigged referendum approved the annexation of Piedmont to France. Such a solution was not contemplated in Tuscany, further south, but as war resumed in the spring the French decided they needed to occupy it and draw on its still untouched resources. In March 1799 they marched in, packing the Grand Duke Ferdinand off to his brother in Vienna. But no sooner was this control asserted than it was challenged—by the Austro-Russian invasion from outside, and by indigenous revolts from within.

  All over the peninsula there were anti-French outbreaks, especially as the Republic’s overstretched forces withdrew to concentrate in the north. Taken together they probably represented the greatest and most spectacular repudiation of the French Revolution and its principles that this turbulent decade had produced. For the Italian peasants who were the mainstay of the revolts, the French stood for military marauding and looting, and heavy impositions. All too often, despite grandiloquent denunciations of feudalism, they prolonged the exactions of landlords as a convenient source of revenue. Worse, the French stood for impiety, with their plunder of churches and contempt for religious customs and superstitions. Bonaparte was not alone among their generals in seeing what damage such behaviour could do. They eagerly curried support among the quite numerous prelates and clerics who were ready to establish a working relationship with them, and distributed copies of sermons proclaiming that Liberty, Equality, and Christianity were perfectly compatible. But they could not control the everyday behaviour of soldiers who knew from years of experience, at home and abroad, that priestcraft was the most persistent and insidious enemy of the Revolution. Producing acts of casual blasphemy and sacrilege, such beliefs were self-confirming. Finally the French stood for the rule of Jacobins: rich, educated townsmen more intent, in peasant eyes, on seizing power for themselves, often again with a show of gratuitous anti-religious excess, than in addressing the problems country people thought important. Peasants knew that these people owed their power to the French, and kept it by doing the foreign invaders’ bidding, and used it to enrich themselves by expropriating the Church and buying up the proceeds. Frenchmen often compared rural revolts in Italy to the Vendée, or called the rebels chouans; and in the mixture of religious and material resentments, and country versus town antagonisms, there was a good deal in common between Italian insurgents and France’s own archetypal anti-revolutionaries.

  But not all those who rejected the rule of the French were peasants. French occupation, looting, and exactions brought severe disruption to urban life, too. The anti-French rallying cry of Vive Maria! was heard most loudly in Rome in 1798 or Florence in 1799. Here again, however, local conflicts often underlay the resistance—resentment at attacks on the Church which in Tuscany went back to the 1760s, outrage that the French and their clients did not revoke the free-trade policies that had pushed up the price of subsistence in the swollen cities, again since the 1760s. Jews, too, whose ambiguous status all Jacobins vowed to improve, came under popular attack when the French withdrew. By 1799, in fact, increasing numbers of the Italian Jacobins themselves were turning against their benefactors. They had never been united. Everywhere moderates who hoped only for a resumption of the steady, ordered reforms of the 1780s, in the individual territories of the peninsula, struggled with radicals who sought its prompt unification, if necessary by methods of terror. Consistently thwarted once French control was well established, the latter by 1798 had begun to hatch ambitious plots, sometimes in concert with anti-directorial Jacobins in France itself, ‘There can be no doubt’, wrote a well-informed directorial agent in October 1798,16 ‘that at this moment a vast plot is being hatched to assassinate Frenchmen … Scoundrels are planning a new Sicilian vespers against the Italian governments. They have been listened to by many people, and mystery still shrouds part of the horrors that have been prepared to make the war more deadly for the hated nation, if fighting should start again.’ In Piedmont the conspirators actually managed to enlist peasant sympathies, and in February 1799, although their plot was uncovered, peasants in the Langhe district rose in protest at impending French annexation, carrying not (ultimate irony) pious objects and symbols, but miniatures of the Jacobin martyrs Le Peletier and Marat.

  The Year VII, therefore, beginning in September 1798, was marked by popular uprisings against the French and their Revolution in most of the areas where they had penetrated—Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Italy. Although a new wave of unrest swept the distant Russian steppes in 1796–8, and may have owed something to garbled rumours of upheaval far to the west, the only pro-French uprising of any significance occurred in a place Frenchmen never reached until it was over. Even there it was obvious that Irish peasants had no idea what they stood for. ‘God help these simpletons’, remarked one of Humbert’s officers.17 ‘If they knew how little we cared for the Pope or his religion, they would not be so hot in expecting help from us.’ By the late 1790s, the fact is that whereas the friends of revolutionary France beyond her borders still ran into thousands, their numbers were rapidly diminishing. Her enemies, on the other hand, ran into millions, and were increasing all the time. Combined with the organized forces of the second coalition, who on paper at least could muster between them armies of over 400,000, they constituted a threat to the revolutionary Republic more mortal than any it had faced since the Year II. And although the outbreaks of resistance had been contained or reduced to a sustainable level of defiance by the time military campaigning began in earnest in the spring of 1799, in Italy they completely outran French resources.

  Yet the arrogance born of four years of uninterrupted success died hard. It was the French who declared war on Austria, and they began i
t by taking the offensive on all fronts. In Germany Jourdan crossed the Rhine and marched towards Vienna. Despite being outnumbered three to one, he gave battle to the Archduke Charles at Stockach on 25 March and suffered a paralysing defeat. Armies that had advanced from Switzerland now had to fall back, pursued by Austrian and Russian forces. Equally outnumbered in Italy, and confronted by the redoubtable Suvorov, the French fought a bloody rearguard campaign. By the end of June they were penned into a coastal strip around Genoa. The sister republics collapsed in a welter of revenge and reprisal, and Suvorov proclaimed the restoration of Charles Emmanuel IV in Turin. Only in distant Egypt did the general who, more than any other single person, had precipitated this new crisis continue to win victories. But nobody in Europe knew this, and Bonaparte in turn was unaware of French disasters in the new war. Late in June he was writing to Paris asking for more troops to be sent. It was not until the beginning of August that, by courtesy of a British admiral, he received newspapers already two months old announcing defeat upon defeat. Already disillusioned about what might be achieved in Egypt, he now foresaw nothing but ultimate surrender. The Directory took the same view. On 25 May, in fact, it had ordered him to evacuate Egypt. But these orders had still not arrived when, on 24 August, he sailed secretly for France of his own accord, leaving the army he had taken to the east to shift for itself. Two years later, depleted by two-thirds, its diseased and demoralized remnants surrendered to the British, who transported them back at last to a France now ruled by the general who had abandoned them.