Meanwhile the Directory was helping his career by its foolhardy aggression in Italy. Dispatching its armies to the south, it drove one ruling Ferdinand out of Naples and the other one (Peter Leopold’s son) out of Tuscany. By early 1799 it controlled nearly all the peninsula and had set up another brace of republics, the Parthenopean in Naples and a Roman sister to the north. The naivety in establishing such regimes in places where few people wanted them was confirmed by their brisk collapse. While a British force arrived in Naples, Russian and Austrian armies overran the north, destroying the Cisalpine Republic and occupying Turin. Within a few months, the Directory had lost the whole of peninsular Italy except for Genoa.
France itself was saved from invasion not by Bonaparte’s return from Egypt in October 1799 but by Masséna’s victory the previous month against a Russian army at Zurich. Although the Directory thus seemed to have been saved, Bonaparte was nevertheless determined to overthrow it and in November he staged the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire that established him as first consul. One of his first actions was to send Masséna to Italy, where a starving Genoa had to be defended against an Austrian siege, while he himself organized a fresh army to lead through the Alpine snows into Lombardy. In June 1800, at the Piedmontese village of Marengo, Bonaparte was losing the battle until French reinforcements unexpectedly arrived in the afternoon and reversed the fortunes of the contest. Marengo turned out to be the most decisive victory of his career. Had he lost the battle, he would have lost the war and probably the consulship; his narrow win secured his job and won him Italy.
Marengo gave Bonaparte another chance to indulge his passion for changing the names and boundaries of Italian states. Whimsically he transformed the Grand Duchy of Tuscany into the kingdom of Etruria and gave it to the heir of the Bourbon Duke of Parma, whose own duchy he planned to annex. Further north he also annexed Piedmont and reinstated the Cisalpine Republic, enlarging it with Novara, Verona and papal Romagna. Soon he decided also to change the name of the republic, informing cheering Italian delegates whom he had summoned to Lyon that ‘Cisalpine’ would be substituted by ‘Italian’. Bonaparte made himself president of the republic and chose as his deputy Count Francesco Melzi d’Eril, an intelligent Lombard aristocrat. Melzi’s diplomatic skills managed to secure a certain autonomy for the republic, whose president was usually absent, but he made the mistake of believing in his chief’s occasional, insincere talk about Italy and liberty. He hoped that Bonaparte’s presidency would be temporary and that it would give way to a united and independent state in the north. Yet there was never any chance of this happening because, for personal as well as strategic reasons, the first consul refused to relinquish Italy. As he told the Prussian ambassador in Paris, ‘she is a mistress whose favours I refuse to share with anybody else’.
The Italian Republic became redundant when Bonaparte decided he should be the new Charlemagne rather than the new Alexander and that France should be the heart of a new Roman Empire of the West. He loved the idea of a millennial ‘succession’ and promoted it with remarks about his ‘illustrious predecessor’ and a visit to Charlemagne’s Aachen before his coronation as emperor in 1804 – the occasion when in the cathedral of Notre Dame he snatched the crown from the pope’s hands and placed it upon his own head. The relationship between the papacy and the empire was back to where it had been a thousand years earlier. ‘Your Holiness is sovereign of Rome,’ Napoleon told Pius VII, ‘but I am its emperor.’23
In the empire there was no room for republics: its territories were to be ruled by monarchs and viceroys who were relations of the emperor. If Napoleon had Charlemagne’s imperial crown, it was logical for him to have the Italian crown as well, just as it was historically logical for his son (though he did not have one until 1811) to become King of the Romans. Napoleon established the kingdom of Italy in 1805, with his stepson Eugène as viceroy, a move that prompted a further rearrangement of borders. To the territory of the old Italian Republic were added eastern Venetia, the Papal Marches and the Trentino, creating a conglomeration which gave the kingdom some 7 million people, a third of the population of the peninsula.
The rest of the north and centre was annexed to the French Empire, usually on the grounds that Italian rulers could not be trusted to enforce the ‘Continental System’, a policy designed to ruin Britain’s trade. Napoleon had already taken Piedmont and now added Liguria, followed by Etruria (and the deposition of its king), then by Parma and Piacenza, and finally by the rest of the Papal States, whose spiritual and temporal leader was imprisoned and kept in France until the empire collapsed. Only in the south did the borders remain much the same, though the rulers were changed. In December 1805 the emperor decreed that ‘the dynasty of Naples has ceased to reign’ and decided its replacement would be the Bonaparte family. His elder brother Joseph, who called himself head of the family and considered himself next in line to the imperial throne, was duly given the crown of Naples. This rather idle, vaguely liberal man enjoyed life in his Mediterranean capital, where he enriched himself, but after two years he was forced to exchange it for the forbidding task of upholding bonapartist rule in Spain. He was replaced by his sister Caroline’s husband, Marshal Murat.
By 1810 all of peninsular Italy – all the territories of the communes, the popes, the republics, the duchies and the sovereign monarchs – had been reduced to three napoleonic blocks, imperial, Italian and Neapolitan. Only from the islands, protected by the British navy, were the Bonapartes excluded. In Sicily, where the Bourbon royal family had fled, power was in the hands of Lord William Bentinck, the commander of a British force. He persuaded Sicilians to accept a constitution and a parliament, though a more enduring consequence of the English presence was the establishment of the Marsala wine industry. As the Continental System had robbed Britain of its usual wine supplies, the country had to promote the cultivation of vines in territories it controlled. In doing so, British entrepreneurs created an abiding affection back home for the fortified wines of Portugal, Madeira, Jerez and Sicily.
Avid republican though he had once been, Napoleon loved the pomp and glamour of monarchy. As much of a nepotist as any Renaissance pope, he offered titles and courts to all his siblings; even Jérôme, the youngest and most frivolous brother, was made King of Westphalia at the age of twenty-two. Italy offered Napoleon several opportunities to park his relations in useful places, opportunities that he took and which later inspired the opening lines of Tolstoy’s War and Peace: ‘Eh bien, mon prince,’ observes the francophone Anna Pávlovna, ‘so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than estates of the Bonaparte family.’ Not only did Napoleon appoint one brother (Joseph) and one brother-in-law (Murat) kings, but one sister (Caroline) became a queen, his stepson (Eugène) a viceroy, and another brother-in-law (Prince Borghese) governor-general of the departments beyond the Alps (Piedmont, Parma and Liguria). One sister (Pauline) was given the small duchy of Guastalla, which she happily sold back to its donor for 6 million francs, while another (Elisa) became Princess of Piombino, Princess of Lucca and Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Neither of the two most independent-minded brothers ruled in Italy, Lucien because he thought Napoleon a megalomaniac, and Louis because he ruled Holland until 1810, when he was sacked for trying to rule as a Dutch king rather than as a French viceroy. The emperor subsequently annexed Holland.
Napoleon gave his relations the lustrous trimmings of monarchy. Eugène’s court in Milan was very grand, its household containing thirty-five chamberlains and twenty-six ladies-in-waiting; in Naples Murat was even grander, employing forty-four chamberlains, among whom were eighteen dukes and sixteen princes.24 Yet the siblings were treated by their powerful brother more as errant subordinates than as dignified heads of state. Theoretically independent, they were effectively vassals, forced to suffix ‘Napoleon’ to their names so that Elisa became Princess Elisa-Napoleon and Murat was known as King Joachim-Napoleon. Like the others, Joseph was repeatedly admonished, ordered about and reminded that he owed everything to the emperor
. Yearning to establish a lasting Bonaparte dynasty, Napoleon tried to improve his family’s status and prospects by marrying his brothers to European royal families. He forced Jérôme to accept an annulment of his first marriage in order to marry a German princess and he exiled Lucien for refusing to divorce his second wife so that he could marry a Spanish infanta. Napoleon left his own wife, Josephine, to espouse the daughter of his defeated foe the Austrian emperor, but he would not allow Louis to leave Hortense, Josephine’s daughter, to whom he was miserably and jealously married.
Eugène had the most difficult job in Italy because his stepfather was always interfering in the affairs of a state with which he was well acquainted and of which he was the official head. The viceroy had to ensure that the kingdom was well defended because the Po Valley was still the most popular battleground in southern Europe, and he also had to provide large numbers of soldiers for service outside Italy. From 1809 the Peninsular War required three Italian divisions, which were forced to fight a merciless and unfamiliar guerrilla war in conditions so bad that the men sometimes had to live off grass soup and bread made from acorns and crushed olive stones; of the 30,000 Italians the kingdom sent to Spain, only 9,000 returned, many of them wounded. The casualties in Russia were even higher: 27,000 men marched with the Grande Armée in 1812, but only 1,000 struggled back through the snows to their homes in northern Italy.25
In 1810 Eugène reported that 40,000 men in the kingdom had either deserted or avoided conscription. Naples and the annexed Papal States, which also had to supply troops for Spain and Russia, had a similar problem plus the additional one that their deserters fled and joined bands of brigands in the hills. Napoleon told Joseph to be tougher with his subjects and to execute more lazzaroni, but both kings of Naples managed to achieve a greater degree of autonomy than Eugène. Murat even preferred Neapolitan ministers to French ones and showed sufficient independence of spirit for Napoleon to consider replacing him.
The happiest place in napoleonic Italy was Lucca, which the emperor treated with untypical indulgence. He awarded it, with Piombino, to Elisa, the sister who most resembled him and the one he was least fond of. Energetic and ambitious, she was so commanding a figure she was nicknamed la Sémiramis de Lucques after the legendary Queen of Assyria who is supposed to have founded Babylon. In her principality, with a population of only 150,000, she behaved like an enlightened despot, encouraging industry, carrying out public works and patronizing the arts, including appointing Niccolò Paganini, the greatest violinist in Europe, her director of music and – so it was rumoured – one of her lovers. Gratifyingly for her brother, she renovated the Carrara marble industry so that it was able to provide the municipalities of the empire with 12,000 busts of their emperor. Napoleon, however, was not sufficiently grateful to reward Elisa with the real state and the real power that she craved. Although she was made Grand Duchess of Tuscany in 1809, she ruled from the Pitti Palace not as an independent sovereign but as an unpopular administrator of a department of the French Empire.
Murat, like Eugène, fought with Napoleon in Russia but afterwards, with the French in retreat, he hurried back to Naples to try to save his throne. He quickly made a pact with the Austrians, who, like the Prussians and Russians, were moving westwards towards France, and he brought an army up from Naples to confront – or pretend to confront – Eugène. At the beginning of 1814, three months before Napoleon’s abdication and exile to Elba, Elisa warned her brother that, although the Tuscans did not like the Neapolitans, ‘the ideas of independence had spread so widely in Italy in the last two months’ that she believed they would submit to them if they could ‘finish up being ruled by a prince of their own’.26 Her subjects did not, however, have the chance to do so because the allies decided that they wanted the Bourbons back in Naples. In March 1815, on hearing that Napoleon had abandoned planting olives in Elba to have another stab at being emperor, a desperate Murat offered his services to his brother-in-law. Rebuffed, perhaps fatally – Napoleon later recognized that Murat’s skills as a cavalry commander might have changed the result at Waterloo – he made a passionate appeal to patriotism, exhorting Italians to follow him towards his unexpected new goal of independence: ‘From the Alps to the Straits of Sicily can be heard a single cry: Italian independence!’27 Yet few people followed him, and his forces were defeated by the Austrians; later, as the defeated Napoleon was sailing into exile at St Helena, he launched a crazy attack on the Calabrian coast, where he was captured and shot. His fate demonstrated that Elisa had been wrong: the cry – if it existed – had not been heard, and the ‘ideas of independence’ had not spread far. A Russian patriotism had resisted Napoleon and driven him out of the tsar’s dominions; in Spain also patriotism had made a significant contribution to the French defeat. Yet in Italy there was no patriotic uprising even when it was clear that Napoleon was done for.
The debit side of napoleonic rule in Italy is easy to catalogue: the loss of life in the endless wars, the taxes and indemnities, the looting of art, the decline of foreign trade, the executions of men unwilling to be conscripted to fight wars they had no interest in. Yet there were some credits too, outweighed though they may have been. Napoleon was seen by many, however mistakenly, as a protector of nationalities and a liberator of the oppressed. The Genoese artist Felice Guascone refused to criticize him and painted a series of pictures celebrating his rule and deploring the return of reaction afterwards.28 Many people benefited from the introduction of divorce, the improvement in roads, the new and fairer system of inheritance, the religious liberty that demolished ghetto walls, the opportunities provided by la carrière ouverte aux talents. Later some of them realized that the introduction of the napoleonic codes of law, together with fiscal and institutional reforms, were essential foundations for a modern state.
Less easy to quantify than the debits and credits is the effect of French rule on the future of Italy. Revolutionary France had a huge impact on the peninsula for it overturned much of the Ancien Régime, but the republics it imposed south of the Po were disliked by nearly everyone except lawyers and professors. The French made few jacobins in Italy and hardly any in places with traditions of reform such as Tuscany, where the reintroduction of the death penalty in the annexed duchy caused resentment. In the imperial decade Napoleon was no more popular and he ended up being hated by those Italians who believed he had betrayed their hopes of an independent Italy – a state he had never had any intention of creating. Yet he did help indirectly to foster a sense of nation. Italians suffered terribly in his armies, but survivors retained a certain loyalty to their new tricolore flag – the green, white and red adopted in various shapes in the different mutations of napoleonic north Italy – and to its implied recognition of a patria. One veteran of the Russian campaign fought half a century later with Garibaldi.29
Napoleon’s influence on the future of Italy was real if unintentional. He encouraged a nationalist mentality with his talk, his armies and his demolition of ancient duchies; and he stimulated a form of adversarial though seldom violent nationalism with his oppression, his arrogance, his exactions and his art thefts. Above all, he showed Italy that it did not need to carry on with its old ways and its old systems; he let it glimpse the possibility of a different future. If the peninsula’s myriad entities could be reduced to three, might they not one day end up as one? In 1805 Napoleon had made himself King of Italy; he did not make himself king of a geographical expression.
ITALY AND THE RESTORATION
In September 1814 Napoleon’s opponents gathered in Vienna to restore the Europe with which their enemy had so compulsively tampered. Although their work was interrupted by the bogeyman’s return and the Battle of Waterloo, they completed their task quickly and without acrimony. They had set out to restore the ‘legitimist’ pre-1789 order but soon understood the need to be flexible about borders and dynasties. In Italy the three territorial units of Napoleon’s reign were transformed into nine states, two fewer than in 1789.
; Some Italians, chiefly in Milan, lobbied against the new arrangements. One of them told the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, that Italians were no longer the same people who twenty years earlier had been ‘happy and lethargic under the paternal rule of Austria’; they had now acquired ‘a greater love’ of their country and, furthermore, they had ‘learned to fight’.30 Castlereagh was not interested, and nor were his allies from Russia, Prussia and Austria. As in the eighteenth century, the European powers saw Italy as a diplomatic games board, a lucky resource for compensating and rewarding allies. If the Habsburgs renounced the Austrian Netherlands (which were briefly united to Holland before choosing to disunite to become Belgium), then they had to be allowed back into Italy. Since none of the powers wanted to see nationalism, independence or jacobinism in the peninsula, they were happy to let Austria keep control and act as a barrier to the infiltration of French influence and ideas. Piedmont was awarded the republic of Genoa for a similar reason – the need to strengthen a state on the French border.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 17