The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  On March 30, 1806, Napoleon proclaimed his brother Joseph king of Naples, and sent him, with French troops, to evict the unmanageable Ferdinand IV and his demanding Queen. The Emperor seems to have reserved the most difficult assignments for the genial Joseph, and to have judged his performance with small consideration of the difficulties involved. Joseph was a man of culture, who liked the company of educated men, and of women whose education had not ruined their charm.8 With such a modus vivendi, Bonaparte felt, a man could never successfully govern a kingdom. Why appoint him, then? Because the conqueror had more kingdoms than brothers, and felt that he could trust no one but his close relatives.

  Joseph was readily accepted as king of Naples by leaders of the middle class, restless under feudalism; but the populace rejected him as a usurper and an infidel, and Joseph had to steel himself to severe measures to subdue their resistance. The Queen had taken to Sicily all funds in the state bank; a British fleet blockaded the port and stifled maritime trade; and the French troops, victorious but ill-paid, were dangerously insubordinate. Joseph appealed to his brother for some negotiable currency; Napoleon bade him make Naples pay for its liberation. Joseph negotiated a loan from Dutch bankers, and laid a tax upon all incomes, noble or plebeian, clerical or lay. He brought in from Paris Comte Pierre-Louis Roederer, one of Napoleon’s favorite economists, to take charge of the fisc; and soon the state’s finances were in good order. Other experienced administrators established a free school in every commune of the kingdom, and a college in every province. Feudalism was abolished; the lands of the Church were nationalized and sold to the peasantry and to a growing middle class. Laws were harmonized under a variant of the Napoleonic Code. The judiciary was cleansed, procedure was expedited, prisons and penal code were reformed.9

  Joseph was nearing success and public approval when he was suddenly summoned to a throne and task still more difficult and dangerous—to be king of Spain (June 10, 1808). In his place Napoleon, running out of brothers, set up, as king of Naples, Joachim Murat, who was his brother-in-law by marriage with Caroline Bonaparte.

  Murat is remembered chiefly for his showy costumes and his fearless initiative in battle; let us honor him for his reconstruction of the Neapolitan government. He was a man with all the peasant virtues except patience, fitter for herculean tasks than for cunning diplomacy or farsighted statesmanship; a loving husband between squalls, and faithful to his imperious brother-in-law till he thought him mad. We can understand his complaint that the Continental Blockade demanded by Napoleon was ruining Naples’ economic life. Nevertheless, perhaps because of his impatience, he and his aides accomplished much in his four-year reign. They completed the reform of taxation, established a national bank, paid off the national debt (mostly through the sale of ecclesiastical property), abolished internal traffic tolls, and financed substantial public works. Altogether, the administrations of Joseph and Murat, lasting less than eight years, transformed the political, economic, and social life of Naples so fundamentally that when Ferdinand IV was restored to his throne in 1815 he accepted nearly all the reforms that the French had made.

  Dearer than these accomplishments to Joachim’s heart was the army of sixty thousand men which he had organized and trained, and with which he hoped to unite Italy and be its first king. From that dream, and from the sun of Italy, he was peremptorily summoned, in 1812, to join his brother-in-law in the conquest of Russia.

  IV. EMPEROR AND POPE

  Napoleon felt that he had taken substantial steps in transforming Italy from a geographical expression into a nation by organizing the Cisalpine Republic in the north and the kingdom of Naples in the south. But the Austrians, during his absence in Egypt, had put an end to the Roman Republic established by the French only a year before; the Papacy had regained its historic capital, and most of its Papal States; and on March 13, 1800, a conclave of cardinals had elected a new pontiff, Pius VII, to whom nearly all Catholics looked for a firm defense of the “temporal power”—the territorial possessions—of the popes.

  Napoleon found Pius reasonable enough in negotiating concordats in Paris and Rome, and in blessing his assumption of imperial powers. But those Papal States (though not, as once claimed, deeded to the Church by the supposed “Donation of Constantine”*) had been given to Pope Stephen II in 754 by Pepin the Short, king of the Franks. Charlemagne in 774 confirmed this “Donation of Pepin,” but “interfered in the government of the Papal States,” and “considered himself Christendom’s head, to whom the Pope had to listen, even in matters theological.”10 Napoleon had developed similar ideas. He had set his heart on countering England’s blockade of France with a Continental Blockade against the entry of British goods; but the Papal Curia, or administrative court of the popes, insisted on keeping the ports of the Papal States open to all trade. Moreover, these states stood as a divisive barrier between north and south Italy. Now the desire to unify Italy under his own hat had become a ruling passion in Napoleon; “this,” he told Joseph, “is the chief and constant goal of my policy.”11 In accord with that policy French troops had occupied Ancona (1797), a strategic port on the Adriatic, commanding a main road between north and south Italy. Now, November 13, 1805, as Napoleon was preparing to face Austria and Russia in battle, Pius VII, stung to uncharacteristic audacity by his Curia, sent to Napoleon a startling challenge: “We owe it to ourselves to demand from Your Majesty the evacuation of Ancona; and if we are met with a refusal, we fail to see how we can reconcile it with the maintenance of friendly relations with Your Majesty’s minister.”12 Hotly resenting the timing of this ultimatum, which he received at Vienna on the eve of Austerlitz, Napoleon answered the Pope with a counterchallenge: “Your Holiness is the sovereign of Rome, but I am its emperor.”13 Having spoken like Charlemagne, he advanced like Caesar, and overwhelmed the Austrians and the Russians at Austerlitz.

  A year later (November 12, 1806), having destroyed the Prussian Army at Jena, Napoleon sent from Berlin to the Pope a demand that the English be expelled from Rome, and that the Papal States join the “Italian Confederation”; for, he said, he could not tolerate, “between his Kingdom of Italy and his Kingdom of Naples,” the existence of “ports and fortresses which, in the event of war, might be occupied by the English, and compromise the safety of his states and his peoples.”14 Pius was given till February, 1807, to obey; he refused, and allowed the British minister to remain in Rome. On his triumphant return from Tilsit Napoleon again demanded the expulsion of the English agents from Rome; Pius again refused. On August 30 Napoleon threatened to seize the Papal Marches. Frightened, Pius agreed to close his ports to the British. Napoleon now demanded that the Pope make common cause with him against the enemies of France. Pius refused. On January 10, 1808, Napoleon ordered General Miollis (then heading a French division in Florence) to march upon Rome.

  From that day events moved forward in one more historic conflict between Church and state. On February 2 Miollis and his troops took Civitavecchia; the next day they entered Rome, and surrounded the Quirinal—the hill that held the papal palace and the offices of the Curia. From that time till March, 1814, Pius VII was a prisoner of France. On April 2, 1808, Napoleon ordered the annexation of the Papal Marches to the kingdom of Italy. Now there was an open corridor between the kingdom of Naples and the kingdom of Italy—between Joseph and Eugène.

  A year intervened, in which Napoleon was busy with Spain. On May 17, 1809, from Vienna again conquered, Napoleon proclaimed the absorption of the Papal States into the French Empire, and the end of the temporal power of the popes. On June 10 the Pope excommunicated Napoleon. On July 6 General Radet led some French troops into the Pope’s audience chamber and gave him a choice of abdication or exile. Pius took only his breviary and a crucifix, and followed his captors to a waiting carriage, which bore him along the Italian coast past Genoa to Savona. There he was kept in polite imprisonment until Napoleon—after publishing an alleged plot to abduct the Pontiff to England—had him transferred to Fontainebleau (June
, 1812). On February 13, 1813, Pius signed a new agreement with Napoleon; on March 24 he revoked his signature. In his palatial jail he lived simply, even to mending his own shirt.15 He remained there through all the events of 1812 and 1813, until, on January 21, 1814, Napoleon, himself facing imprisonment, had him returned to Savona. In April, the Allies, having taken Paris and Napoleon, sent word to the Pope that he was free. On May 24 Pius VII, worn out with physical and mental suffering, reentered Rome. Nearly all the population welcomed him with fervor and acclaim; young Romans competed for the privilege of replacing the horses and drawing his carriage to the Quirinal.16

  In their brief control of the Papal States Napoleon’s French administrators, helped by native liberals, transformed the economic and political scene with perhaps painful vigor and speed. Feudalism and the Inquisition were ended. Over five hundred religious houses were closed, giving an uncomfortable freedom to 5,852 monks and nuns. Corrupt officials were dismissed; public accountancy was introduced. Roads were repaired and policed; brigandage was almost stopped. Streets were cleaned and lighted; a quarter of the Pontine Marshes was drained and put under cultivation. Religious liberty was proclaimed; the Jews moved freely from their ghetto; Masonic lodges flourished. Hospitals multiplied; prisons were improved; schools were built and manned; a new university was opened in Perugia. The excavation of classic remains was continued, and Canova was put in charge of a museum that housed the findings. But taxes were collected with unheard-of insistence, and men were conscripted into the national Army. The merchants complained of the restrictions laid upon trade with England. The majority of the population frowned upon the sudden transformation of their traditional institutions, and the scandalous treatment of a Pope whom even the atheists had begun to love. “The populace looked back with regret to the soft and indolent rule of the Pope.”17

  All in all, Napoleon’s imprisonment of Pius VII was an astonishing blunder for so astute a ruler. The concordats and the coronation had brought to the Consul and the Emperor a helpful reconciliation with Catholics throughout Europe, and even a formal acceptance of his rule by nearly all the kings of Europe; but his later treatment of the Pope alienated nearly all Catholics and many Protestants. The Papacy was strengthened by Napoleon’s attempt to make it his political instrument; the French Catholic Church, which till his time had been “Gallican”—i.e., antipapal—now gave its reverence and loyalty to the Papacy. The Jesuits, who had been expelled by a politically intimidated Pope, were restored throughout Christendom by the gentle but resolute Pius VII in 1814. The temporal power of the Papacy was renewed in that year, and its spiritual power was increased by the quiet resistance of the imprisoned Pope. Napoleon himself, between abdications, admitted his misjudgment of Pius VII. “I always believed the Pope to be a man of very weak character. … I treated him harshly. I was wrong. I was blind.”18 Pius, on the other hand, had never underestimated Napoleon, had in many ways admired him, and showed a certain tenderness for him when his former jailer became a prisoner in turn. When Napoleon’s mother complained to the Pope that the English were mistreating her son on St. Helena, Pius begged Cardinal Consalvi to intercede for his fallen foe.19 The Pope outlived the Emperor by two years. He died in 1823, murmuring, in delirium, “Savona, Fontainebleau.”20

  V. BEHIND THE BATTLES

  Battles are the technical fireworks of the historic drama; behind them are the loves and hates of men and women, the toil and gambles of economic life, the defeats and triumphs of science, literature, and art, the desperate longings of religious faith.

  The Italian may have been a hurried lover, but he attended lustily to the continuance of the species, and so littered the golden peninsula with his like that one function of the battles was to reduce the pullulating crowd. The Church discouraged childlessness more than adultery, for so she could disarm dissent with multiplication. She smiled on Eros, and laid no puritan pall upon Carnival ecstasies. Girls were almost always virginal, for marriage came early, and premarital surveillance was severe; but after marriage—since this was usually a union of properties—a woman might take a cavaliere servente, or even a lover, and still be respectable; if she employed two or three lovers she was accounted “a little wild.” This, however, is the testimony of Byron,21 who liked to believe every woman accessible. Perhaps he meant to speak only of Venice, where Venus seemed especially at home, but Stendhal gave a similar picture of Milan in his Chartreuse de Parme.

  Despite such easy morals, the life of the Milanese in 1805 seemed dull to Mme. de Rémusat, who mourned “the absolute nonexistence of family life—the husbands strangers to their wives, leaving them to the care of a cavaliere servente”;22 and Mme. de Staël, who shone in bisexual discourse, was displeased with what she considered the superficiality of conversation dominated by males; “the Italians,” she thought, “shrink from the fatigue of thinking.”23 The Italians could have reminded her that the Church frowned upon audible thinking; and the great majority of them agreed with the Pope that a religion with a settled creed and transalpine revenues was a beneficent institution in Italy. Even so, there was much quiet free thought among the educated minority,24 and considerable political heresy. Alfieri could rhapsodize over the French Revolution until it confiscated his property, and hundreds of Italians applauded the news of the fallen Bastille. Italy had bisexual societies of polite learning like the Accademia dell’ Arcadia; and that once famous congregation of learned men and women, the Accademia della Crusca, was reconstituted in 1812. In 1800 a woman, Clotilda Tambroni, was teaching Greek in the University of Bologna.

  There and in other Italian universities science and medicine were flourishing. In 1791, at the University of Bologna, Luigi Galvani (1737–98) showed that if the muscle of a frog’s leg is connected with a piece of iron, and its nerve is connected with a piece of copper, an electric current will be generated and will cause the muscle to contract. In 1795, at the University of Pavia, Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) invented the “Voltaic pile,” or storage battery, which so astonished Europe that he was called to Paris in 1801 to demonstrate it at the Institute; and on November 7, before an audience that included Napoleon, he read a paper “On the Identity of the Electric Fluid with the Galvanic Fluid.” In 1807 Luigi Rolando published his epochal researches in the anatomy of the brain. “Thoughtless” Italy was teaching Europe a revolution greater than the French.

  The Italian theater languished because Italians found it so natural to transform speech into song, and drama into opera. The populace flocked to simple plays in the style of the commedia dell’ arte; the maturer spirits went to such dramas as those in which Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803) had proclaimed his hatred of tyranny and his longing for the liberation of Italy from foreign rule. Nearly all his plays antedated the French Revolution;25 but his passionate treatise Della tirannide, written in 1777, published in Baden in 1787, and at last in Italy in 1800, became one of the classics of Italian philosophy and prose. Finally, in Misogallo (1799), nearing the end of his troubled life, he appealed to the Italian people to rise and throw off all alien rule and become a united nation. Here the Risorgimento of Mazzini and Garibaldi found its first clear voice.

  The extroverted ardor, the melodious language, and the musical bent of the Italians lent themselves to poetry. This brief age—even after surrendering Alfieri to the past and Leopardi to the future—had a hundred poets climbing Parnassus. Happiest of them was Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828), who had a good word to say for every promising subject. La Bassevilliana (1793) defended religion against the French Revolution, and won him acceptance at the papal court; in Il bardo della Selva Nera (1806) he gloried in Napoleon’s liberation of Italy, and he was appointed by the conqueror to a professorship in the University of Pavia; after the fall of Napoleon he discovered and proclaimed the faults of the French and the virtues of the Austrians. Through all these leaps he continued to praise La bellezza dell’ universo. He surpassed these flights in his translation of the Iliad (1810); he knew no Greek, but merely versified a
prose version, so that Foscolo called him gran traduttor dei traduttore d’Omero.

  Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827) was a greater poet and sadder man. Being a poet, he was sensuous passion rather than ordered thought; he indulged his desires, passed from one romance to another, from one country or gospel to another, and ended with a longing for old dreams. But through all his phases he was a patient craftsman, seeking perfect form for his verses, even when discarding, as specious ornaments, not only rhyme but rhythm, and seeking perfection in a language-music all his own.

  He was born between two worlds—on the Ionian island of Zante between Greece and Italy, from an Italian seed in a Greek womb. After fifteen years in Zante he moved to Venice, sampled its frail beauties, fell in love with its decadent charm, and learned to hate the neighborly grasp of Austria. He rejoiced when Napoleon came like a torrent from Nice to Mantua; he hailed the hero of Arcole as Buonaparte liberatore; but when the unprincipled savior surrendered Venice to Austria he turned upon him in a romantic novel, Le ultime lettere di lacopo Ortis (1798)—the last letters of a Venetian Werther who recounts, in letters to a friend, the double loss of his inamorata to a rival, and of his beloved Venice to a Teutonic ogre.

  When the Austrians set out to reconquer north Italy, Foscolo joined the French Army, fought bravely at Bologna, Florence, Milan, and served as a captain in the forces that Napoleon prepared for the invasion of England. When that dream faded, Foscolo abandoned the bayonet for the pen, returned to Italy, and published there his finest work, I sepolcri (1807). In these classically polished, romantically emotional three hundred pages he defended tomb inscriptions as the inspiring remembrance of great men; he honored the Church of Santa Croce in Florence for carefully preserving the remains of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo; he asked how a people that had through many centuries produced so many heroes of thought and action, so many masterpieces of philosophy, poetry, and art, could rest content with alien masters; and he exalted the legacy of great men as their real immortality, and as the soul and spiritual life of the nation and the race.