The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  Scarpia noted with glee that the republicans were soon forced to recognize that these borrowed rites and nomenclature were not enough to inspire loyalty in the ignorant masses. An article in the revolutionary newspaper edited by Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel on the value to the revolution of a successful performance of the city’s famous biannual miracle was the first sign of realism. But such open patronizing of the people’s faith showed how far these prisoners of Reason were from the understanding needed to dominate the people. Scarpia, cleverest of manipulators and bigots, knew that once you cease talking about faith and start talking about religion—even more indiscreetly, about the role of religion in upholding order and maintaining public morale—faith is being discredited, and the true authority of the Church compromised, fatally so. The value of religion! That was a secret never to be mentioned in public. How guileless they were.

  And impotent. For the traditional rites and local omens that alarmed or pacified the superstitious masses were not under the control of the republicans. Take the miracle of the liquefaction of the ampule of dried saint’s blood: the republicans were right to worry that, to demonstrate the withdrawal of heavenly protection from the city, the royalist archbishop would prevent the miracle from taking place. And of course no one could control Vesuvius, all-purpose omen and supreme expression of the force and autonomy of nature. True, the mountain had been behaving well recently. The republicans hoped the people would notice that even if San Gennaro withheld his benediction, the mountain was on the patriots’ side. Vesuvius, quiet ever since 1794, sent up a placid flame, as of rejoicing, on the evening of the fireworks celebrating the proclamation of the republic, wrote the Fonseca woman. More poet’s fancies! But the people were not reassured so easily, although they could always be made more fearful than they already were. What a pity, thought Scarpia, that there is not some way to bring about an eruption. A big eruption. Now.

  How much more to the point was the Queen’s appeal to the people’s faith. She had entrusted her fellow exile and closest confidante, the wife of the British minister, with the task of diffusing packets of the fake republican proclamations she had devised. EASTER ABOLISHED! ALL VENERATION OF THE VIRGIN HEREBY PROHIBITED! BAPTISM AT THE AGE OF SEVEN! MARRIAGE NO LONGER A SACRAMENT! All the English had to do was throw them in the post at Leghorn for Naples, the Queen had told her friend. The Cavaliere, when informed of the plan by his wife, inquired if the Queen expected the English, that is, himself, to pay the postage. No, no, said the Cavaliere’s wife, she pays, out of her own purse. I wonder how many will arrive, said the Cavaliere. Oh, the Queen don’t care if they all arrive or not. She says some will arrive. Some did arrive; Scarpia had seen them passed from hand to hand. Proclamations that flattered the people and praised their courage would be less convincing, he knew, than those that incited fear. People, look what these agents of the French Antichrist have in store for you! For the better-off, money is more effective: the large sums from her own purse the Queen was sending him to retain the loyalty of aristocrats who might have concluded they had no choice but to cooperate with the self-styled patriots.

  Their fairy-tale revolution was under siege from the beginning but, Scarpia saw, although they knew they would be obliged to take up arms, they would never understand the necessary role of state violence. While their constitution invokes the martial spirit of ancient Greece and Rome, they hadn’t a clue how to organize a militia, let alone an army. And what kind of police, thought the former head of the secret police in Naples, was a citizens’ police? No police at all. In fact, their revolution was defenseless.

  * * *

  Alas, Scarpia’s predictions were correct.

  A revolution made by members of the privileged classes in the metropolis, lacking any support in the countryside or among the urban masses, now further pauperized by the exit of capital with the flight of the old regime and the loss of revenues brought in by tourism … a revolution led by the honorable and the scrupulous, who are not only unwilling to use force to suppress popular discontent but have no ambition to increase state power … a revolution threatened with imminent invasion and already encircled by a naval blockade of the capital city (worsening the food shortages) mounted by the great empire of the counter-revolution supporting the government in exile … a revolution protected by occupying troops, hated by the people, of the continent-conquering rival empire … a revolution challenged by a large guerrilla insurgency in the rural areas financed by the government in exile and commanded by a popular émigré grandee … a revolution subverted by the smuggling to its potential supporters among the privileged classes of large cash gifts from abroad, and by a disinformation campaign devised by the government in exile to persuade the people that their most cherished customs are about to be abolished … a revolution immobilized because its leaders, who fully recognize the need for economic reform, include both radicals and moderates, neither of whom gains the upper hand. A revolution without the time to work it all out.

  Such a revolution doesn’t have a chance. Indeed, it is the classic design, confected in that decade, reused many times since, for a revolution that doesn’t have a chance. And will go down in history as naïve. Well-intentioned. Idealistic. Premature. The sort of revolution that gives, to some, a good name to revolution; and to everyone else confirms the impossibility of a governance that lacks an appetite for repression.

  Of course the future will prove these patriots right. The future will make of the doomed leaders of the Vesuvian republic heroes, martyrs, forerunners. But the future is another country.

  In the country that is the only one the revolutionaries have, there is dearth and unfamiliar kinds of disorder. The revolutionaries have not exactly inherited a balanced economy. Everything had to be imported except silk stockings, soap, tortoiseshell snuffboxes, marble tables, ornamental furniture, and porcelain figure groups, the kingdom’s principal manufactures. The silk and ceramic factories offered paid drudgery to a select few; many were servants or artisans; and a large portion of the city’s population was accustomed to subsisting on beggary, theft, and tips for menial services rendered to nobs and to tourists. But the robbery of the entire treasury by the King and Queen, which had left the kingdom without any money, had shriveled patronage, halted the construction boom that had begun with the arrival of the Bourbon monarchy in 1734 (the building of new public works, of palaces and residences for the rich, of churches and theatres, had been one of the few steady sources of employment), and suspended tourism (there was no Grand Tour of revolution). Food prices soared. Hardly anyone had work now.

  The necessity of eliminating corruption—indeed, of reorganizing the whole society on a natural, rational basis by the science of legislation—was obvious to all the leaders of the new government, who were not so naïve as to think that there was no more to governing than educating. But the rift widened between moderates and radicals, with the moderates advocating the taxation of the rich and the reduction of Church exemptions, and the radicals urging the abolition of titles and the confiscation of all aristocratic and ecclesiastical property. When one of the government committees proposed public lotteries as a way of replenishing the empty treasury, the proposal was denounced as inadequate or impractical or immoral, the last argument being advanced by Fonseca Pimentel in the pages of her newspaper. The instruction of the people and their conversion to republican ideas—propaganda—was the only one of the revolution’s tasks on which everyone could agree. New, uplifting names—Modesty, Silence, Frugality, Triumph—were given to the Toledo, the Chiaia, and other principal streets. Fonseca Pimentel proposed bringing out a gazette and almanacs for the people in Neapolitan dialect. She wrote an article about the need for theatre and opera reform. The people were to have open-air puppet shows with more edifying escapades for their Punchinellos, and at the San Carlo—already renamed the National Theatre—the educated classes would have operas with allegorical subjects such as those being staged in France: The Triumph of Reason, Sacrifice on the Altar of Liber
ty, Hymn to the Supreme Being, Republican Discipline, and The Crimes of the Old Regime.

  The whole thing lasted five months. Five renamed months: Piovoso (rainy), Ventoso (windy), Germile (budding), Fiorile (flowering), and Pratile (meadowed) …

  The first acts of resistance were in outlying villages and small towns—there were more than two thousand settled villages and small towns in the kingdom. The patriots in the capital were astonished at the unrest, and went back into committee to discuss their plans for appropriating great estates and distributing them to landless peasants.

  The news worsened. The republican forces sent to the provinces proved no match for the small landing parties from English frigates they encountered. Ruffo’s self-styled Christian army was taking village after village. It now included thousands of convicts released by royal order from prisons in Sicily and transported in English ships to the Calabrian coast. Besieged from without and confronting increasing disaffection and civil disturbances in Naples itself, the republic redoubled its efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people.

  There were food riots. More French soldiers were ambushed. Trees of Liberty burned at night in the public squares.

  The Tree of Liberty is an artificial plant, Scarpia wrote the Queen. As it has taken no roots here, it does not need to be uprooted. Even now it is being shaken vigorously by Your Majesty’s loyal subjects, and without the protection of the French it will topple on its own, as soon as the enemy departs.

  In May, France, defeated in a number of battles with the newly formed Second Coalition in the north of Italy, withdrew its forces from Naples. British frigates occupied Capri and Ischia. A few weeks later Ruffo and his army of sullen peasants and country bandits poured into the city, merged with crowds of the witty urban poor chanting slogans such as “Whoever has anything worth stealing must be a Jacobin,” and embarked on an extraordinary spree of pillage and atrocity. The rich were hunted down in their mansions, the young medical students with republican sympathies in their hospitals, the prelates of conscience in their churches. Nearly fifteen hundred patriots managed to regain their refuge in the sea-forts of Ovo and Nuovo.

  The liquid crowd poured into every crevice of the city, sucking into its lethal embrace anyone who did not belong to it. A hunting crowd, looking for the telltale signs of Jacobin identity (apart from having something worth stealing): a soberly dressed man with unpowdered hair; someone with trousers; someone with spectacles; someone who dared to walk on the street alone or seemed to panic at the sight of the crowd surging round the corner. Oh, yes, and since every male patriot had a Tree of Liberty tattooed at the top of one thigh, those not immediately killed or seriously wounded were stripped and then paraded through the streets, to be mocked and reviled by the clothed. It didn’t matter that no one had ever found such a tattoo on the naked captives. Don’t they invite a pinch, a blow, a jeer. A baiting crowd, loudly enjoying itself. Here comes another Jacobin! Let’s look for his tattoo! And here comes a woman strapped in a cart with a sheet barely covering the upper part of her limp naked body in rough allusion to some ideal antique dress: Look, another Goddess of Reason!

  The crowd doesn’t torment like Scarpia. The work of the true torturer is guided by the fact that, in order to register pain, consciousness is necessary. The crowd is no less gratified if the person being tormented is already unconscious. It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

  A rock through the window, the hand tightening around the wrist, the crack of the staff to the head, the blade or the penis intruding in soft flesh, the ear or nose or foot in the gutter or sticking out of someone’s pocket. Smite, stomp, shoot, throttle, clobber, stone, impale, hang, burn, dismember, drown. A full debauch of homicidal modes whose purpose is much more than just to exact revenge or express a sense of grievance. The revenge of the country against the city, the uneducated against the educated, the poor against the privileged—these explanations don’t name the deeper energy released in such havoc. The river of tears and blood that is swamping, carrying away, engulfing the revolution menaces the restoration as well. For this is something like nature—which, notoriously, does not act in its own interest or make judicious discriminations. Even before this energy exhausts itself, it will doubtless be reined in by the rulers who have sanctioned it.

  Ruffo was appalled by the butchery he had unleashed. A moderate amount of looting, battery, rape, and mayhem was what he had in mind. But not wholesale slaughter: that is, the clubbing, knifing, shooting, and burning of several thousand of the inhabitants whom, because of their rank and distinction, he was obliged to regard as individuals. But not so much rape. And not cannibalism, no. He had not envisaged the pyres of bodies, dead and still dying, the smell of burning flesh, the sight of two young boys feasting on the pale arms and legs of a duchess whose confessor and lover he had once been. It was time to rein in this energy. The final act of Ruffo’s royalist hordes, just before the cardinal called a halt to the killing and looting, was to attack the royal palace and carry off its contents. Even the lead from the windows was taken.

  * * *

  Now the masters must assume control of what the people have impulsively, justly, but crudely begun. And not shrink from the task that masters must perform.

  When the news of the French evacuation and the retreat of the patriots to their Masada reached Palermo, the Queen feared that Ruffo would not treat the rebels with the necessary, defining severity their crimes deserved. She summoned the hero to the royal palace and requested that he go to Naples to receive their unconditional surrender and mete out justice—that is, punishment—in the King’s name. She says, said the Cavaliere’s wife, who was rendering the Queen’s French into English for the monoglot hero, You should treat Naples like it was an Irish town in a similar state of rebellion.

  Ah, said the hero.

  Ireland had had its French-inspired revolution the year before, and the Queen had been most impressed by the thoroughness with which it had been crushed by the English.

  Of course, it was inconceivable that the hero undertake this mission without the aid, counsel, and language skills of the Cavaliere and his wife.

  For the Cavaliere’s wife, it was an ideal mission, one in which she would prove herself indispensable both to the Queen and to the man she adored. For the Cavaliere, it was a duty he could not refuse. But he wanted nothing to disturb the beautiful images he preserved of Naples. He certainly hoped to be spared the sight of the horrors reported to be taking place in the city. We can force ourselves to look, squirming a little, at a great painting of the flaying of Marsyas, or look with equanimity, especially if we’re not women, at a lively rendering of the rape of the Sabine women … these were canonical subjects for painting. And Piranesi had made images of the most unspeakable tortures taking place in corners of ingeniously vast prisons. But it would be something else to see a real flaying, or the mass rape that had been going on in Naples, or the sufferings of the thousands who survived their humiliations and wounds at the hands of the crowds and lay penned in the stifling granaries, without food, sleeping in their excrement.

  On June 20th, having shifted his flag from the disabled Vanguard to the eighty-gun Foudroyant, the hero left Palermo with a squadron of seventeen sail-of-the-line, three more than the number under his command at the Battle of the Nile. Four days later the flagship entered the Gulf of Naples, and Mars in full regalia with all his decorations paced the quarter-deck beside his Venus in a dress of fine white muslin with a long tasseled sash around her waist and a broad-brimmed hat trimmed with ribbons and crowned with ostrich plumes. The Cavaliere, dozing in his cabin, felt the walls shudder as the Foudroyant dropped its anchor into thirty fathoms of the turquoise water. What a calm trip, he said, as he joined them. There was the dear geography, the familiar splendors of the cityscape—give or take a few new details. Fires were still burning in the city. Flags of truce were flying from Ovo and Nuovo. Plumed Vesuvius, the Cavaliere noted, was smoking benignly. And
there was not a French ship in sight.

  The next day the hero received Ruffo in the Great Cabin, as his headquarters in the rear of the ship was called, and through the Cavaliere informed the cardinal that he, he alone, now represented the monarchs in Palermo. Ruffo made his case for the need to halt the bloodshed and restore order. What started as a frigid interview soon turned into a shouting match. The Cavaliere knew Ruffo, he knew his friend, he would explain each to the other. But the room was so hot, he felt staggery—his wife and the hero begged him to retire to his cabin. The Cavaliere’s wife was acting as the interpreter when Ruffo explained the treaty he had made with the rebels barricaded in the sea-forts. As the Queen feared, he had accepted a capitulation with terms. The rebels were to be allowed several days to put their affairs in order, and then have passage out of the country into permanent exile. Fourteen transports lay in the harbor, and many of the rebels had gone aboard with their families and possessions. The first ship, already loaded, was to leave for Toulon tomorrow at dawn.

  Ruffo stood while the British admiral looked up from his desk and asked the Cavaliere’s wife to tell the cardinal that the arrival of the British fleet has completely destroyed the treaty. When the cardinal protested that it had already been signed and solemnly ratified by both sides, the hero replied, agitating the stump of his lost arm, that he would have Ruffo arrested if he persisted in his treachery. Then the hero ordered the transports boarded, the rebels taken off in chains and put in prison to await speedy punishment for their crimes. And summoned Captain Troubridge and issued orders for the deploying of British troops to retake the last French strongholds in Sant’Elmo, Capua, and Gaeta.

  We must set an example, the hero said later to the Cavaliere.

  Setting an example meant being merciless—the Cavaliere knew that.