by Will Durant
It accepted the Spanish monarchy, and acknowledged the absent Ferdinand VII as the rightful king; however, it placed the sovereignty not in the king but in the nation acting through its elected delegates. The king was to be a constitutional ruler, obeying the laws; and adding to them, and making treaties, only in conjunction with the national Cortes, which was to be a single chamber. A new Cortes was to be chosen every second year, by the adult males of the nation, through three stages of election: parochial, district, and provincial. Laws were to be made uniform throughout Spain; all citizens were to be equal before the law; and the judiciary was to be independent of both the Cortes and the king. The constitution called for the abolition of torture, slavery, feudal courts, and seignorial rights. The press was to be free, except in matters of religion. Uncultivated communal lands were to be distributed to the poor.
Under the circumstances—which included the religious traditions of Spain —it was a brave and progressive constitution. Now, it seemed, Spain would enter the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER XXVI
Italy and Its Conquerors
1789–1813
I. THE MAP IN 1789
IN this period Italy was not a nation but a battleground. Split into jealously separate regions and dialects, the country was too fragmented to stand united against foreign attack, and (north of Naples) too blessed with sun and a fruitful, well-watered soil—beneficent streams curling down from Alps or Apennines—to shoulder arms repeatedly for the difference between native and foreign taxgatherers.
Most of Italy had fallen under the rule or influence of the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which assigned Milan, Mantua, Naples, Sardinia, and their dependencies to the Emperor Charles VI. In the northwest corner of the peninsula Savoy and Piedmont were ruled by the kings of Sardinia. In 1734 the “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies,” with its foci at Naples and Palermo, was transferred from the Hapsburgs to the Bourbons by the able warrior and ruler who became Charles III of Spain. Before passing to Spain he bequeathed the Neapolitan realm to his son Ferdinand IV, who married the Archduchess Maria Carolina; and her domination of her husband brought the entire kingdom of Naples under Austrian influence. When the Empress Maria Theresa died (1780) her sons governed Lombardy, Tuscany, and Modena; her daughters were married respectively to the rulers of Naples and Parma; and Savoy, Piedmont, and Sardinia had fallen under an Austrian protectorate. The only independent regions in Italy were then Venice, Lucca, San Marino, and Genoa. In this division of Italy between the Austrian Hapsburgs in the north and the Spanish Bourbons in the south the Papal States remained papal only because the rival dynasties that embraced them with possessive ardor were restrained by their mutual jealousy and that Catholic piety which alone made Italy one.
Austrian rule in northern Italy was excellent in terms of the time. In Lombardy the feudal and ecclesiastical proprietors were taxed, and their privileges had been considerably reduced; a hundred monasteries were closed, and their revenues were devoted to education or charity; under the scholarly prodding of Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (1764) judicial procedure was reformed, torture was abolished, and the criminal law was made more humane. In Tuscany, between 1765 and 1790, Grand Duke Leopold gave the former territory of the Medici “perhaps the best government in Europe.”1 Florence, his capital, remained a citadel of civilization through all the fluctuations of power and ideas.
Venice, rich, corrupt, and beautiful, was now (1789) visibly nearing her end as a sovereign state. Her eastern empire had long since been lost to the Turks, but her rule was still acknowledged between the Alps and Padua, and between Trieste and Brescia. Formally a republic, actually a closed aristocracy, its government had become listless, oppressive and incompetent. It had the best spies in Christendom, but no army. It had become the playground of Europe, pledged to pleasure, and trusting to its courtesans to keep her enemies amiable. Caught between Austria on the north and Austrian Lombardy on the west, it was clearly fated to be absorbed by Austria whenever France ceased to protect her.
South of Tuscany and the Po the Papal States began their sinuous contour with the Romagna and its “Legations”—Ferrara, Bologna, and Ravenna, each administered by a papal legate; then southward with the “Marches,” or borderlands near the Adriatic—Rimini, Ancona, and Urbino; then across the Apennines through Umbria’s Perugia and Spoleto, and through Latium’s Orvieto and Viterbo to Rome. All this historic region was under the popes, according to the “donations” made to the Church by Pepin, king of the Franks, in 754, and by Charlemagne in 774. After a decisive victory in the Council of Trent (1545–63), the popes had enlarged their authority over the bishops, as the contemporary kings were doing over the feudal lords; power is centripetal.
But soon thereafter the Papacy entered into a slow decay as the advances of science and the inroads of philosophy left the Church with a dangerously reduced support in the influential classes of Western Europe; and it was meeting open opposition not only from Protestant rulers but as well from Catholic sovereigns like Joseph II of Austria and Ferdinand IV of Naples. Even in the states of the Church a growing minority of secret skeptics weakened the hold of the clergy upon the people. The Curia or papal court (wrote Joseph II in 1768) “has become almost an object of scorn. Internally its people exist in the deepest misery, wholly depressed, while its internal finances are in complete disorder and discredit.” Joseph, an unbeliever, may have been prejudiced, but the Venetian ambassador reported in 1783 that “the internal affairs of the pontifical state are in the greatest disarray; it is in a progressive decline, and the government daily loses force and authority.”2 Despite their poverty, and the malarial infection of the summer air, the people of Rome made life tolerable by taking full advantage of the churchly indulgence given to their perennial amours and Carnival games; and the clergy itself relaxed under the Italian sun.
Both of the popes in this critical period were pious and honorable men. Pius VI (r. 1775–99), despite his arduous trip to Vienna, failed to win Joseph II of Austria to obedience; and all his culture and gentleness did not save him from losing Avignon to France and dying a prisoner of the Directory. Pius VII (r. 1800–23) did his best to restore Catholicism in France, suffered a long imprisonment under Napoleon, and lived to triumph humbly over the fallen Emperor (1814).
South of the Papal States the Spanish Bourbons grew rich with the prosperity of Gaeta, Capua, Caserta, Naples, Capri, and Sorrento. But there Italian prosperity ceased. Cities like Pescara, Aquila, Foggia, Bari, Brindisi, Taranto, and Crotone remembered Milo, Caesar, Frederick II (Holy Roman emperor, “stupor mundi”), even Pythagoras; but they were burned by an immoderate sun, despoiled with taxes, and comforted only by their creed. Then the taxgatherer crossed from Reggio Calabria to Messina in Sicily (“from Scylla to Charybdis”); and there too the cities dignified their poverty under memories of Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Moslems, Normans, Spaniards, until the taxgatherers stopped at Palermo and attended to the needs and luxuries of kings and queens, merchant princes, brigands, and saints. Such was the colorful realm which the eight-year-old Ferdinand IV inherited in 1759. He grew into a handsome athlete who preferred pleasure and sports to the burdens of power, and mostly left the government to his wife Maria Carolina.
Under the guidance of her Prime Minister and paramour, Sir John Acton, Maria oriented Neapolitan policy from pro-Spain to pro-Austria, and, in 1791, to pro-England. Meanwhile feudal barons exacted every due from an exhausted peasantry; corruption reigned in the court, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary; taxes were high, and fell chiefly upon the lower classes; the city populace was barbarized by poverty, habituated to disorder and crime, and held in check by a numerous police and by an obscurantist clergy skilled in miracles. (In a chapel of the cathedral the relics of Saint Januarius bled annually.) As usual, the Church was lenient with sins of the flesh; after all, these were the only luxury allowed to the poor; and in Carnival days the Sixth Commandment was looked upo
n as an unwarranted imposition upon human nature.
Nevertheless the Queen was jealous of Catherine II of Russia, who had so many philosophers at her call or knee. So she patronized artists, scholars, and professors of wisdom; and though she probably did not know it, Naples had “more educated men and women of modern ideas than any other city in Italy.”3 Many of these men followed with silent hope the news that came from Paris that the people had stormed and taken the Bastille.
II. ITALY AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
An impressive scattering of liberals had prepared the educated classes of Italy for some basic transformation in France. Beccaria and Parini in Milan, Tanucci, Genovesi, and Filangieri in Naples, Caraccioli in Sicily, had already labored, in prose and poetry, in legislation and philosophy, for some of the measures that were now being passed by a French National Assembly apparently pledged to reason and moderation. In Tuscany the Grand Duke Leopold himself hailed the Revolution as promising precious reforms in every country in Europe.4
When Napoleon, as son and general of the Revolution, rushed into Italy (1796), like some wild west wind, and drove the Sardinian and Austrian armies out of Piedmont and Lombardy, nearly all the population welcomed him as an Italian leading French troops to the liberation of Italy. For a while, despite local insurrections at Pavia, Genoa, and Verona, he was able to dispose of Italian states and principalities as if they had fallen into his hands as unconditional gifts. So in July and August, 1797, he bundled Milan, Modena, Reggio Emilia, Bologna, and a slice of Switzerland into a medley called the Cisalpine Republic, and gave it a constitution like that of Revolutionary France.
The liberalism of his early rule in north Italy quieted for a time the local dreams of liberty. The native leaders, softened with sinecures and dignities, recognized that on a continent divided among wolves, one or another of the wolves must be accepted as protector; and better one that spoke excellent Italian and eased taxation and art raids with enlightened laws. But the advancing legislation of the Revolution against the Catholic Church in France checked this Italian sympathy; their religion proved more precious to the Italian populace than a political liberty persecuting priests and smelling of September Massacres.
In Rome, January 13, 1792, a diplomatic agent of France was attacked by a mob, and so severely handled that he died the next day. This created a new crisis for Pope Pius VI, who had already suffered from the Edict of Toleration (1781) of Joseph II in Austria. Now he found himself faced by the Revolution’s expropriation of French Church property, and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12, 1790). Brought up to complete orthodoxy and a trustful respect for tradition, Pius denounced the Revolution, and supported the challenged kings in their efforts to suppress it. At the Peace of Tolentino (February 19, 1797) he was compelled, by the victories and threats of Napoleon, to cede to France the papal enclaves of Avignon and Venaissin, and to the new Cisalpine Republic the city-states of Ferrara, Bologna, and Ravenna.
In December, 1797, a Roman mob killed the French General Léonard Duphot. General Louis Berthier, who had succeeded Napoleon (then in Egypt) in command of the Army of Italy, seized the opportunity to invade Rome and set up a Roman Republic under French rule. Pius VI protested, was arrested, resisted, and was transported from place to place until he died at Valence, as a prisoner of the Directory, on August 29, 1799. Observers innocent of history wondered whether the Papacy had come to an end.5
The situation offered Ferdinand IV of Naples a triple opportunity: to test the new army that had been organized for him by Sir John Acton, to prove himself a loyal son of the Church, and to take a slice of papal territory as an honorarium. Admiral Nelson, who was then tarrying in Naples in thrall to Emma Hamilton, agreed to help by landing a naval force at Leghorn. The King gave command of his army to the Austrian General Karl Mack, and rode with it to the easy conquest of Rome (November 29, 1798). The French regiments left there decided that they were no match for the whole Neapolitan Army, and readily evacuated the city.
While the scattered cardinals were choosing a new pope in Venice, Ferdinand’s troops sampled the art and belles of Rome. Meanwhile a brilliant general, Jean-Étienne Championnet, came down from the north with a fresh French army, led it to a victory over Mack’s disordered troops at Civita Castellana (December 15, 1798), pursued them all the way to Naples, took that city to the joy of its intelligentsia, and set up there the Parthenopean Republic (January 23, 1799). Ferdinand and his Queen, Sir William Hamilton and his Bovary, fled to Palermo on Nelson’s flagship Vanguard.
The new republic lasted less than five months. Championnet and many of his men were summoned north to repel the Austrians; he died in that campaign (1800). Cardinal Fabrizzio Ruffo, aided by the English Captain Edward Foote, organized a new army for Ferdinand, and recaptured Naples with the help of the populace, which looked upon the French garrison as verily damned atheists. The French, with the assistance of a Neapolitan admiral, Francesco Caracciolo, took refuge in two of the harbor’s forts. Cardinal Ruffo and Captain Foote offered them unhindered departure for France if they would surrender. They agreed, but before the pact could be carried out Nelson and his fleet, bearing the royal party, arrived from Palermo; Nelson took command, and, over the protests of the Cardinal, turned his guns upon the forts.6 The French surrendered unconditionally. Caracciolo was caught while trying to sail away; he was hastily tried before a military court on Nelson’s ship, and was hanged from the yardarm of his flagship, La Minerva (June 29, 1799). King and Queen, restored to power, imprisoned hundreds of liberals, and put their leaders to death.
III. ITALY UNDER NAPOLEON: l800-I2
For nine months after his return from Egypt Napoleon devoted himself to reconciling the French nation to his definition of political liberty as periodical plebiscites foreseeably approving enlightened despotism. France was tiring of democratic liberty just when Italian liberals, fretting under restored Austrian rule, were longing for it. When would that brilliant Italian-become-Frenchman come again to Italy, boot out those Austrians, and give Italy an Italian government?
The crafty Consul took his time, for careful preparation was the first principle of his strategy. When at last he came it was by a dash more brilliant even than the onrush of 1796: a climb up and slide down the Alps, dividing the Austrians in two, taking their main army in the rear, hemming it in, holding it and its old commander prisoners until the Austrian wolf surrendered to the Gallic fox all of its Italian possessions west of Venezia (1801). Napoleon juggled his winnings into something much like the configuration that he had made in 1797. The Cisalpine Republic, centering around Milan, and the Ligurian Republic at Genoa were given relative independence, with Italian governors under a French protectorate. The Papal States were as yet left undisturbed. Concordats were being prepared with the Church, and Napoleon had ceased to be a Mohammedan. By a treaty of March 18, 1801, Ferdinand IV of Naples agreed to close Neapolitan ports to British shipping; Nelson could not help, for he was busy attacking Copenhagen (April 2, 1801). Italians sensed a fine Italian hand behind the consummations, and rejoiced.
Then the hand closed in the grasp of power. In January, 1802, a delegation of 454 delegates from the Cisalpine Republic met in Lyons, adopted a new constitution drawn up by Napoleon, and accepted Talleyrand’s inspired proposal to elect Napoleon president of the new Republica Italiana. After he made himself emperor of the French (1804), the title President of Italy seemed incongruously modest; so, on May 26, 1805, Napoleon received in Milan the old and revered Iron Crown of the Lombard kings, and became sovereign of (north) Italy. He introduced the Code Napoléon, equalized educational opportunity by milking the richer provinces to help the poorer, and promised to keep “my people of Italy… the least heavily taxed of all the nations of Europe.” Departing, he left with them, as his viceroy and a pledge of solicitude, his beloved stepson Eugène de Beauharnais.
For the next eight years the new kingdom (mainly Lombardy) enjoyed a general prosperity, and a vigorous political life, which would lo
ng be blessed in Italian memory. The government made no pretense to democracy; Napoleon had no faith in the ability of the populace, there or elsewhere, to wisely choose its leaders and its policy. Instead he advised Eugène to gather about him the most experienced and competent administrators. They served him with enthusiasm and skill. They organized a competent bureaucracy; they set on foot extensive public works—roads, canals, parks, housing, schools; they reformed sanitation, prisons, and the penal code; they spread literacy and fostered music and art. Taxes rose from 82 million francs in 1805 to 144 million in 1812, but part of this reflected inflation of the currency to finance war, and part of it was a redistribution of concentrated wealth for the public good.
Meanwhile the Emperor continued to Napoleonize Italy. In September, 1802, he annexed Piedmont to France. In June, 1805, he charmed the government of Genoa into asking for the incorporation of its Ligurian Republic into the French Empire. In September, 1805, he absorbed the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. In December, 1805, after almost annihilating the Austrian Army at Austerlitz, he persuaded the Emperor Francis II to surrender Venezia to Eugène’s new kingdom. Venice was so grateful for this partial atonement of Napoleon’s disgraceful bartering of her in 1797 that when he visited the city in 1807 it exhausted itself in festivities.7 In May, 1808, he took over the grand duchy of Tuscany, where Austrian administration had been at its best. His sister Elisa had ruled Lucca so well that Napoleon transferred her to Tuscany, where, under her wise and conciliatory government, Florence became a haven of letters and arts reminiscent of its Medicean days.
