Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  The monastery is built on a circular hill; the building is extremely irregular… [But] there are few subjects in Tuscany which a painter would rather study. The great square within the monastery is surrounded by a colonnade supporting the roof.

  Each hermit has two or three small rooms to himself and a little plot of ground. Some were employed in reading; some cultivated their gardens, while others would mope in gloomy melancholy… they seldom spoke, silence being a virtue of the Order of St Bruno… One of their favourite amusements after meals was to feed some two hundred cats, which came mewing and squalling beneath the windows from the woods below.26

  But the Directory in Paris feared a rescue, so on 28 March 1799 the pope was plucked from his Florentine asylum and transported across the Alps under duress. He died in captivity at Valence after reigning twenty-four years. His death was a black omen for his erstwhile Tuscan hosts.27

  Worse was to follow. In the summer of 1799 Florence was the scene of violent commotions. A republican faction took control of the municipality and invited a small French force into the city. An Albero della Libertà, a ‘Tree of Liberty’, was raised in the Piazza della Signoria, the revolutionary calendar was imposed, together with heavy taxes, and the militants forced the grand duke and many clerics to depart. A violent counter-revolution then broke out in nearby Arezzo. Fomented by the new pope, Pius VII (r. 1800–1823), who had been elected in an emergency conclave in Venice, bloodthirsty peasant bands roamed the countryside to cries of ‘Viva Maria!’ before storming into Florence and slaughtering any Frenchman too slow to escape. The grand duke’s supporters restored order with the help of Austrian troops. They won but a short stay of execution.

  The turbulence in Tuscany coincided with still more gruesome horrors in the south. French difficulties in southern Italy had multiplied in proportion to the extreme violence sanctioned by the royalist Neapolitan opposition. The king of Naples, Ferdinand IV, was a son of the former Spanish king, Charles III; his wife, the Archduchess Maria Carolina, was the daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa and sister of Marie-Antoinette, the executed wife of Louis XVI. After the declaration of the Neapolitan Parthenopean Republic in 1799, they had retired with their court to Palermo in Sicily, whence a ferocious campaign of resistance was organized. The lazzaroni – counterparts of the Spanish guerrillas – fought the French with great courage and cruelty, while a ‘Christian Army of the Holy Faith’, the Sanfedisti, advanced from Calabria under the none-too-Christian Cardinal Ruffo. Fire, plunder and massacre spread far and wide; the cardinal’s irregulars were supported both by a squadron of the Russian navy and by Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was rewarded with the title of duke of Brontë. The return of the royal couple to Naples in December 1800 was attended by mass executions and punitive trials.

  In 1800, having effectively appointed himself first consul in France, Bonaparte returned to Italy with a vengeance. Crossing the Great St Bernard for a second time, he descended onto the plain of Lombardy and blew his enemies away like chaff. At Marengo in June, he defeated the Austrians so thoroughly that the rest of the peninsula lay at his feet. The Second Coalition was dead; the French resurgence was unstoppable. Negotiations began at Lunéville for a comprehensive European settlement that was finally signed the following February. France gained the left bank of the Rhine. Six French-run republics, four of them in Italy, received international recognition; Tuscany was to be disposed of as the first consul thought fit. In October 1800 General Joachim Murat (1767–1815), Napoleon’s aide-de-camp and brother-in-law, led a large French force into Tuscany which occupied the whole region, broke into Florence, sacked churches and perpetrated atrocities. Murat, a cavalryman dubbed the ‘First Horseman of Europe’, placed himself at the head of a provisional Tuscan government. He was accompanied by his eighteen-year-old wife of several months, the former Carolina Buonaparte, the first consul’s youngest sister. She was one of three Buonaparte sisters who would enliven the Florentine scene.

  Such was the state of affairs that prevailed while the diplomatic settlement over Tuscany was being concluded. The full terms were revealed in the final Franco-Spanish Treaty of Aranjuez (21 March 1801) and in the Franco-Neapolitan Treaty of Florence signed by Murat on 28 March 1801. Grand Duke Ferdinando’s Tuscan possessions were to be confiscated and pass to his neighbours, the Bourbons of Parma, who were to be given royal status and the title of ‘kings of Etruria’.28 Ferdinando was to be compensated from lands seized by the secularization of the archbishopric of Salzburg. The Bourbons of Naples, who had ruled over the Stato dei Presidii since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, were required to cede their possession and to withdraw its garrisons. The Stato dei Presidii would then be amalgamated with the territory of the dissolved Grand Duchy of Tuscany to create the Kingdom of Etruria, so reuniting historic Tuscany with much of the adjacent coastline.

  Despite their elevation to nominal royalty, the Bourbons of Parma cannot have been particularly delighted by this turn of events; their home base in Parma was to be annexed directly to France as the Département de Taro (it was contiguous on its western border with Piedmont, which had already been incorporated). What is more, the duke of Parma was to be passed over in Etruria in favour of his son, Lodovico di Borbone, otherwise known as Louis de Bourbon, who was married to a Spanish cousin and was presumably judged more malleable. The new king’s father, who had paid so heavily to sweeten the French, declined in health and shortly died, no doubt rueing his investment.

  The Kingdom of Etruria was the first of Napoleon’s monarchical experiments. All the earlier states and statelets thrown up by the French Revolution, from Batavia to Helvetia, had been republics modelled on the French Republic itself. But by 1801, as first consul for life, Napoleon was free to indulge his own autocratic tendencies. His new attitude was bound up with the growing reaction against republicanism both in France and in Italy, which encouraged him to seek common cause with moderate (and especially with dependent) monarchists. He would continue on this path until in four years he was crowned emperor of the French, and in five, king of Italy.

  By public proclamation, Etruria was declared to be a sovereign kingdom, and as such it would receive foreign ambassadors; in reality, it was a client state which paid tribute to France – partly to maintain the French garrison and partly to swell Napoleon’s general war chest. Because of the Bourbon connection, it is sometimes described as belonging to the Spanish dominions, but this is nominally correct at best. It owed everything to its French sponsors. It had been invented by the French, and could be dismantled by the French. As soon as its existence became inconvenient, it would be wiped out at the stroke of a Parisian pen.

  Etruria’s king, Lodovico I (or Louis Ier d’Étrurie, 1773–1803), was barely twenty-eight years old when handed his kingdom without warning. By royalist standards, his pedigree was impeccable. His father’s family, the Bourbons of Parma, were close relatives of Spain’s ruling house, who called him El Niño, ‘The Child’. His mother’s family, the Habsburg-Lorrainers, linked him both to Austria and to the previous rulers of Tuscany. His nineteen-year-old wife, Maria-Luisa di Borbone, was an infanta of Spain. A famous group portrait, The Family of Charles IV, was painted by Goya in 1800–1801. It shows Lodovico and Maria-Luisa holding their baby son and standing in a place of honour immediately behind the Spanish monarch. Whether or not the half-Spanish client of an increasingly autocratic French dictator could gain control over his manufactured Italian realm was open to question.

  There was no time for a coronation. On hearing of their good fortune, the king and queen rushed from Spain to Paris in May 1801 to undergo a civilian induction, and no doubt to be given advice and instructions. Napoleon organized two military parades in their honour in front of the Tuileries. The royal couple sat in Napoleon’s box at the Opéra during a performance of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide. Commemorative medals were struck, and complimentary verses composed:

  La Toscane autrefois nous donna Médicis,

  Aujourd’hui la vertu v
a régner dans Florence.

  (‘Tuscany in former times gave us the Medicis, / today in Florence Virtue is going to reign.’) The appearance of a young Bourbon couple so soon after the end of the revolutionary wars could not fail to intrigue Parisians, not least because they were only thinly disguised as the ‘count and countess of Livorno’. They became the talk of the town, and the subject of gossip in the first consul’s entourage, which knew very well that this was ‘Don Louis I of Etruria’ and ‘Maria-Luisa, infanta of Spain’. They made a mixed impression, as the emperor’s chief valet recalled:

  The King of Etruria was not fond of work, and… did not please the First Consul, who could not endure idleness. I heard him one day severely score his royal protégé (in his absence of course). ‘Here is a prince,’ he said, ‘who… passes his time cackling to old women, to whom… he complains in a whisper of owing his elevation to the chief of this cursed French Republic…’ ‘It is asserted,’ remarked [an officer of the household to Bonaparte], ‘that you wished to disgust the French people with Kings by showing them such a specimen, as the Spartans disgusted their children with drunkenness by exhibiting to them a drunken slave.’ ‘Not so, my dear sir,’ replied the First Consul, ‘I have no desire to disgust them with royalty, but the sojourn of the King of Etruria will annoy a number of good people, who work incessantly to create a feeling favourable to the Bourbons.’29

  Maria-Luisa had some success in creating that favourable feeling:

  The Queen of Etruria was, in the opinion of the First Consul, more sagacious and prudent than her husband… [She] dressed herself in the morning for the whole day, and walked in the garden, her head adorned with flowers or a diadem, and wearing a dress, the train of which swept up the sand of the walk: often also carrying in her arms one of her children…; by night the toilet of her Majesty was somewhat disarranged. She was far from pretty, and her manners were not suited to her rank. But, which fully atoned for all of this, she was good-tempered, much loved by those in her service, and scrupulous in fulfilling the duties of wife and mother. In consequence, the First Consul, who made a great point of domestic virtue, professed for her the highest esteem.30

  A concert and extravagant farewell party were organized for the visitors at the Château de Neuilly by Talleyrand. The chateau and park were illuminated with coloured lights, and one end of the hall was filled by a tableau of the Piazza della Signoria replete with fountains and ‘Tuscans singing couplets in honour of their sovereigns’. There was a grand ball hosted by the first consul’s sister Paolina, and the evening closed with a display of rockets, fireworks and ‘Bengal Fire’. Then the happy couple set off and travelled by stages to Florence. When they entered their capital on 2 August, they were greeted by representatives of the municipality; a new royal flag was flying, and a royal medal had been struck in celebration.31 The streets were thronged with curious people, and General Murat was waiting with his staff and a detachment of cavalry to escort them into their residence in the Pitti Palace.

  The Kingdom of Etruria’s territory of c. 7,700 square miles formed a rough rectangle, bounded in the west by the sea, and in the north, east and south by high mountains. Northern Tuscany was separated from the basin of the Po by the Apennines, which at Monte Cimone rose above 6,000 feet. Travellers coming from the north, from Bologna, faced a wild tract of country:

  Two miles before and after Scarico l’Asino, where the Italian customs house stands, the mountains become so black and barren that you discover nothing but naked crags and crumbled rocks… Farther on, Nature assumes a more cheerful face, the heights and bottoms being clad with spreading forests of chestnuts… Groves of fig-trees succeed them, and these are relieved by extensive plantations of olives, which in Etruria seem to have displaced every other fruit.32

  Florence, the kingdom’s capital, was circled by a ring of ancient Tuscan towns – Prato, Arezzo, Cortona, Siena and San Gimignano – and was linked by the lower valley of the Arno to Pisa and the sea. Southern Tuscany round Pitigliano adjoined the frontier of the Papal States (which had been resuscitated in 1800) and the coastal strip extended southwards for some 90 miles as far as the peninsula of Monte Argentario. Etruria’s main outlet to the sea, Livorno, had been developed by the Medici as a free port, and had attracted an unusually cosmopolitan population. There were colonies of Greeks and Turks, a large Jewish community and, as the Protestant cemetery attests, a prosperous group of English merchants, who called it ‘Leghorn’. It had been relieved from the French occupation of 1796, but in 1798–9 it had been forced to supply ships and men for the Egyptian campaign. Suspicions of its pro-British sympathies persisted. The kingdom’s other ports, formerly part of the Stato dei Presidii, included Piombino, Talamone and Orbetello.33

  Etruria was not poor. The Tuscan countryside was productive as always, and the cities maintained strong ties with international commerce; hence the continuing British interest. Foreign visitors were pleasantly surprised by the relatively low cost of living: ‘This city is not calculated to drain the traveller’s pocket… Bread and wine are still cheaper than in Rome; and a pot of excellent coffee with cream and cakes cost only five grazie. This coin, worth about a penny, appears to have taken its name from the Austrian kreutzer… It is singular that the Austrian ducats are all over Italy…’34 Indeed, multiple currencies operated. The Florentine system, which was similar to the £, s., d. of England, was different from the Pisan. One Tuscan pound or lira was equivalent to 20 soldi, and 1 soldo to 12 denari. Intermediate coins called paoli and quatrini also circulated. Austrian gold ducats and Maria Theresa silver thalers were highly valued.

  An Englishwoman living in Tuscany at the time has left some vivid descriptions of the condition of the people and the country. In addition to the grand duchy’s artistic heritage, she writes enthusiastically about the vitality of urban life, the vigour of the peasantry and the enlightened nature of the prevailing laws. In Florence, for example, she was excited by the ceremonies surrounding the Feast of St John, the city’s patron, which took place every June. There were chariot-races, exhibitions of pallone, a game said to be the ancestor of baseball, and elaborate processions:

  On the morning of the festa of S. Giovanni homage is paid by all the Tuscan cities to their prince; and this ceremony passes in the Piazza del Granduca; the throne of the sovereign being erected under the Loggia, which is hung with a fine tapestry, as is the royal box. The balconies and scaffoldings for the people are likewise handsomely decorated. No sooner has the prince ascended the throne (which is surrounded by the household and the great officers of state) than the procession commences with men on horseback dressed in ancient habits…; then come gentlemen [from] the neighbourhood of Pisa, then come immense wooden towers representing the several cities of Tuscany…; but when the citizens of Siena arrive, they are summoned to stop and their leader makes an oration expressing sorrow for the revolt some hundred years ago and promising they will always be loyal in future… After the Sanesi come the citizens of Florence followed by the little Tuscan army, which pays the military compliments to its sovereign and closes the procession.35

  The English resident found the Florentines very hospitable, ‘fond of learning, the arts and sciences’, and ‘generally speaking, good-humoured, warm-hearted and friendly’. The greatest impression, however, was made by the peasants of the countryside:

  The Tuscan peasantry, considered collectively, are pure in their morals and pastoral in their lives; and the peculiar comeliness of both sexes is very striking, especially in the environs of Florence… The men are tall, robust, finely proportioned, and endowed with that self-possession, which at once excites respect… The women are of a middle stature, and were it not for bad stays, would be well made. They have large, languishing black eyes accompanied by that expressive brow which constitutes the most captivating part of an Italian countenance. Their manners are uncommonly graceful, and instead of curtseying, they gently bow their bodies and kiss the hand of a superior… The upper class of farmers u
sually possess a horse, a waggon or two, and a pair of large, dove-coloured oxen, whose beauty is as remarkable as their masters… Shoes and stockings are deemed superfluous even by the women, who carry them in baskets on their heads until they reach town… The phraseology of Florentine peasants is wonderfully elegant, indeed their Italian is said to be the purest now spoken; but the most remarkable quality in these people is their industry: for during the hottest weather they toil all day without sleep… yet they live almost entirely upon bread, fruit, pulse, and the common wine of the country. Though their diet is light and their bodily exertions are almost perpetual, they commonly attain old age.36

  In the two preceding decades, Tuscany had benefited greatly from the progressive social policies of the Habsburg grand dukes, who were paragons of the ‘enlightened despotism’ then in fashion. The contrast with England could not have been greater:

  According to the law of the late Emperor Leopold, no one can be imprisoned for debt, though creditors have power to seize the property of their debtors; and no offence is punishable with death, though murderers are condemned to perpetual labour as galley-slaves; and to these and many other wise regulations are attributable the almost total exemption from robbery and murder which this country enjoys and the increase to its population… I have never heard of house-breaking, nor of more than one highway-robbery (and that committed by an Irishman) during my long residence…37