Modern historians confirm this positive picture. ‘Tuscany, insignificant in terms of Realpolitik,’ writes one British expert on the era, ‘was renowned throughout the civilised world… not only through its unique cultural heritage, but because of its enactment of some of the most enlightened principles of the Enlightenment.’38 The incoming Etrurian management would be hard pressed to match its predecessor.
The formation of a royal government, however, was severely constrained by the king’s French supervisors; all of Lodovico I’s appointments had to be made in consultation with the resident French ambassador and his legation. General Henri-Jacques Clarke (1765–1818), seconded to Florence from other duties in Italy, did not shrink from giving vociferous opinions. The king and the ambassador decided to retain the council of state and its subordinate ministries that had operated under the previous grand-ducal regime, but the French were adamant that no persons of the ‘Austrian persuasion’ could continue to hold senior office. The choice of chief minister fell on Count Odoardo Salvatico. The king and council established their own direct link with France by appointing Count Averardo Serristori as their ambassador to the first consul; in practice, to Talleyrand. A papal nuncio, Mgr Caleppi, was present, though his traditional influence was much reduced. On 29 August 1801 the king addressed his subjects in his first motu proprio or ‘decree’, which enjoined them to put the past into ‘perpetual oblivion’ and to heal their divisions.39 Over him hovered the shadow of 6,000 French troops, one-third of them men from the Polish Legions.
The outlines of local politics were clear to see. Small groups of Jacobin sympathizers and Freemasons existed in the cities, and tended to look to the French for radical measures. Conservative, anti-revolutionary circles were more numerous, especially in the countryside, often enjoying the support of the clergy. The middle ground was held by the so-called ‘Patriotic Party’, attached to Tuscany’s enlightened heritage and aiming to steer between the extremes; the University of Pisa was said to be its powerhouse. The prospects for moderation, however, were favourable. The violent events of ‘il ‘99’ had discredited doctrinaire positions, and the kingdom started life in the year of the Concordat, whereby the first consul was reconciled to the Roman Church. Italy appeared to be stabilizing. The French were making peace with Austria and with Britain, extricating themselves from their disastrous Egyptian expedition and evacuating Naples.
Within Napoleonic Italy, Etruria was surrounded by a patchwork of petty principalities, all dependent on France but each with a different regime. To the north, administered from Milan, lay the enlarged Cisalpine Republic. To the east and south, ruled from Rome, lay the restored but still occupied Papal States. To the north-west, lay the Ligurian Republic of Genoa and the Republic of Lucca.* Further north, Piedmont had been declared a French military district. In each of these places, as in Etruria, French-inspired republicans were vying with papal-backed ‘reactionaries’.40 Etruria found itself in a category in which local rulers possessed some leeway in internal affairs while deferring to France in external affairs.
The arrival of the royal couple in their residence, as described in the queen’s memoir, was less than auspicious. Their predecessor, the Grand Duke Ferdinando, had stripped the Pitti Palace of everything he could carry off, and the queen complained that she had to organize a whip-round of local sympathizers to provide some basic furniture and cooking utensils. As an infanta of Spain, accustomed to dining off gold and silver plate, she was reduced for the first time in her life to eating off porcelain. Worse, she suffered the first of two miscarriages.
Nonetheless, as she recalled, modest progress was made:
My husband’s first object was to try to get rid of the French troops which occupied Tuscany and which pressed very heavily on the people; but under a variety of pretences, his demands… were constantly refused… All that we could obtain was that Murat’s troops should quit the capital as soon as a noble guard would be formed; but they neither quitted Leghorn nor Pisa nor the other parts of the state.41
In 1802, however, Napoleon’s restless spirit destroyed hopes for an extended period of calm. The Cisalpine Republic, now renamed the ‘Italian Republic’, became the focus of his attention. Its constitution required the election of a president, so a consultation was convened at Lyon to consider the candidates and a suitable hint from Talleyrand persuaded the delegates to elect Napoleon himself. Later that year, French troops reoccupied Switzerland. The terms of the treaties of Lunéville and Amiens were flouted everywhere. Napoleon defiantly declared, ‘It is recognized by Europe that Holland and Italy, as well as Switzerland, are at France’s disposal.’
Etruria saw little of its royal couple. Both of them were frequently indisposed, and the queen took to attending functions alone. Then in September they sailed for Spain to attend a family wedding. The queen gave birth to a premature baby girl aboard ship near Barcelona; the king was so ill from epilepsy that they missed the wedding. They did not return till the end of the year.
By 1803, Napoleon was again preparing for war. To this end, he crudely extracted subsidies from his satraps, disregarded their nominal neutrality and threatened the non-compliant with punishment. He was especially rapacious in his support for the state-sponsored looting of art. Visitors to the Uffizi found that the gallery’s most famous exhibit was missing:
The Venus of the Medici is here no more; she was torn from the pedestal by the French and sent to the depot of spoils in Paris. Her place is now vacant; she stood in the beautiful octagonal hall among the choicest forms of antiquity… You miss her with a peculiarly painful sensation. Florence during two centuries was her assigned abode; every traveller sought her here… and now she is gone.42
Successive events sent ripples of foreboding through the little Etrurian court. One was Napoleon’s cynical resale of Louisiana to the United States for 60 million francs, less than three years after the deal of which the creation of Etruria had formed part. The first consul’s greed seemed boundless. Shortly afterwards, in May 1803, Etruria was cast into mourning by the sudden and unexpected death of its young king, who died from an epileptic fit when barely thirty years old. His body was carried back to Spain and buried in the Pantheon of the Infantes in the Escorial.
Nothing was more shocking for the royalists, however, than the kidnapping and execution of the duc d’Enghien, the last of the French Bourbons and a symbol of the royalist cause throughout Europe. The dashing duke was an émigré who had taken up arms against the French Republic. In March 1804 a military snatch squad crossed the Rhine, raided the duke’s residence in Germany, and carried their captive back to France for trial. Napoleon refused all pleas for mercy, and ordered that the duke be executed in the palace ditch at Vincennes. His judicial murder attracted the comment by France’s chief of police, later attributed to Talleyrand: ‘C’était pire qu’un crime; c’était une faute’ (‘It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake’). After that, no Bourbon or royalist could feel safe, and Napoleon’s reputation plummeted.
Lodovico I was automatically succeeded in Etruria by his infant son, Carlo-Luigi (Charles-Louis), aged four. Executive powers were placed in the hands of the late king’s widow and the child’s mother, herself only twenty years old, who took the title of queen-regent. A 10-lira silver coin, minted at this time, announced the new reign. The inscription reads: ‘carolus Ludovicus dei gratia Rex etruriae et maria aloysia regina rectrix’.43
For four years, as Etruria’s boy monarch grew up, the kingdom was administered by the queen-regent with the guidance of her ministers. Following Salvatico’s dismissal, two men came to the fore. One was Count Fossombroni, a prudent and experienced servant of the previous regime, who still had a long career in front of him, and the other Jean-Gabriel Eynard (1775–1863), an enterprising Franco-Swiss businessman. Eynard came to Florence in 1803 from Genoa, where he had made a fortune supplying the French army with blue denim cloth, ‘Bleu de Gênes’, and is said to be the inventor of ‘blue jeans’. He used his money to bu
y the sole subscription to an Etrurian government bond, which gave him a built-in interest in the kingdom’s welfare. Working in partnership with the queen-regent, he reorganized the tax system, created taxable manufactures, such as tobacco and porcelain companies, and closely monitored military procurement, travelling to Paris in person to ensure that the promised subsidies were paid. Some measure of his success may be seen in the queen-regent’s announcement of an extraordinary levy of 20,000 troops. In total, the Kingdom of Etruria raised no fewer than twenty-six regiments, including the Reggimento Real Toscano, the Compagnia Dragoni d’Etruria, the Pompatori Militari di Firenze and the Corpore Reale dei Cacciatori della Città di Firenze.
The queen-regent spent lavishly on educational projects too, founding a Higher School for Science, and a Museum of Natural History; she once threw a party in the Loggia dei Lonzi where 200 poor children were entertained before being told to take the cutlery and crockery home. (Perhaps it was the despised porcelain.) Slowly, she regained her optimism:
When I assumed the reins of government, my sole idea was to promote the happiness of my subjects… An epidemic fever had recently broken out at Leghorn, and a great number had fallen victims to it. The French troops continued to occupy the country, without the least necessity… and occasioned exorbitant expenses. I saw myself reduced to increasing the taxes. At last, however, I succeeded in obtaining a Spanish general to be sent with some troops of that nation in place of the French… I then enjoyed perfect tranquillity.44
She also derived much satisfaction from her children:
The King, my son, was everything I could wish; good, docile, and already gave indications of a noble character. He made great progress in his studies; his health was strong, and every day saw an increase in the tender affection which his subjects bore to him. My only ambition was to be able some day to show him the deplorable state in which I had found the kingdom, and that in which I expected to deliver it into his hands.45
Princess Marie-Louise-Charlotte, three years younger than her brother, had recovered well from the adverse circumstances of her birth.
In December 1803 the queen-regent entertained a surprise visitor to the Pitti in the person of Paolina, Napoleon’s second sister. The two women had met two years earlier at Neuilly. Both had since been widowed; both understood the fragility of their respective positions. In the space of a few months, Paolina had buried her first husband, General Leclerc, who had died campaigning in San Domingo, and had entered a second marriage with a Roman aristocrat, Camillo Borghese, prince of Salmona, to whose estates she was now travelling. She sincerely liked the queen-regent, asked for a portrait and a lock of her hair for keepsakes, and begged to keep in touch. On receiving the keepsakes, she thanked ‘ma chère Louise’ warmly in her none-too-grammatical French: ‘Adieu, ma Louise, adieu! Je vous aime et ce n’est pas pour dire… Si vous désires me sentir heureuse, aimes moi toujours: je suis pour la vie vostre Paulette [sic].’46 The letter was signed, ‘Borghese, née Bonaparte’. Since the queen-regent’s French was not much better, the two wrote henceforth in Italian.
Princess Paolina’s visit must have been all the more intriguing for the Florentines, because she and her siblings were attracting ever more sensational headlines. The first consul’s genius for self-promotion was now extending to the promotion of his four brothers and three sisters, all of whom were showered with offices, titles, marriage partners and publicity. He employed the neo-classical sculptor Antonio Canova, for example, to glorify the Buonaparte brood in marble nudes. In 1804 he commissioned a topless, reclining figure of Paulina Borghese as Venus Victrix, and a vulgar imitation of Michelangelo’s David entitled Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker. The former caused a minor sensation; the latter was so embarrassing that its originator refused to put it on public display.* Nepotism came naturally in such a climate. A fresh French ambassador arrived in Florence, the Marquis François de Beauharnais (1753–1823), the brother of Joséphine’s first husband.
In December 1804 the ‘first consul for life’ invited the pope to Paris to officiate in Notre-Dame at his coronation as the ‘emperor of the French’. As part of the proceedings, he awarded all of his siblings the title of altesse impériale or ‘imperial highness’, while naming his brothers Giuseppe (Joseph) and Luigi (Louis) as his official heirs. At the climatic moment in the service, he took the imperial crown out of the pope’s hands and, spurning divine assistance, placed it on his own head. Six months later, having waved his wand to turn the Italian Republic into the Kingdom of Italy, he organized a second coronation for himself in Milan. He then set up his favourite sister ‘Elisa’, Signora Bacciochi, first as princess of Piombino and then as duchess of Lucca.
Elisa was the family nickname for Maria-Anna Buonaparte, the fourth surviving child of Napoleon’s parents, who had been close to Napoleon since their time together in pre-revolutionary Paris. She was well educated, having attended the Maison Royale de Saint-Louis at St Cyr, and socially ambitious, having run a literary salon with her other brother, Luciano. Above all, she was quite capable of standing up for herself. She was the dominant partner in a long-lasting if unequal marriage to a bumbling Corsican officer, Pasquale Bacciochi Levoy, who had also changed his first name – in his case from Pasquale to Felice/Félix – and who after their wedding in 1797 commanded the citadel at Ajaccio. Many thought that it was Elisa’s idea to turn Italy into a political playground for the Buonaparti, and to put her in charge of the first experiment. In the next year, the district of Massa and Carrara, which contained Europe’s most valuable marble quarries, was specially detached from her brother’s Kingdom of Italy for their benefit. Félix was promoted to the rank of général de division.
Elisa threw herself into her task with zest. She created an Academy of Fine Arts in Lucca, founded the Banque Elisienne, reformed the clergy and promulgated new legal codes. She was assiduous in financing her extravagances through the confiscation of Church property. Her methods could not fail be compared to those of the queen-regent in Etruria; the Palazzo Lucchese and the Palazzo Pitti were in open competition. Yet the two women behaved to each other with propriety. Letters and gifts were exchanged. Maria-Luisa sent a pair of pure bred horses to Lucca; Elisa responded by sending a consignment of fine Parisian dress materials in return.
In Florence, it was easy to feel that the Bonaparte tribe were getting uncomfortably close. It was no secret that they were looking for suitable lands and titles for themselves in Italy, rather than elsewhere. When Napoleon was overheard saying ‘Luciano would restore the glory of the Medici’, strong rumours spread that the emperor’s second brother, who was performing well in Paris as the minister of the interior, had been earmarked to take over Etruria. In the event, Luciano (Lucien), who was a convinced republican, had to be content with the title of prince of Canino; Luigi was made king of Holland, Girolamo king of Westphalia, Paolina duchess of Guastalla, and Eugène de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s stepson, viceroy of Italy. The emperor was losing the patience to work with foreign royals.
In the years 1805–7 Napoleon was preoccupied with the affairs of northern Europe. His great victories of Austerlitz, Jena, Auerstadt and Friedland destroyed the Holy Roman Empire, reduced Prussia to ruins, drew the French into Poland and threatened Russia. Problems in Spain and Portugal also demanded his attention. In Italy, left to its own devices, crushing taxation and merciless recruiting were provoking popular resistance. Pope Pius VII was unreconciled to the French regime. Rome spawned a rebellion. Southern Italy was in uproar and the French hold on Naples tenuous. When cities like Genoa caused trouble, the instinctive reaction was to incorporate them into France. Napoleon grew especially impatient with the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples, and, as he saw it, with the king’s ingratitude. Both Giuseppe Bonaparte and Joachim Murat were still waiting for thrones. When he discovered that the Neapolitans had been conspiring yet again with the British, he abruptly announced: ‘The Bourbon dynasty has ceased to reign.’ Giuseppe arrived in Naples in February 1806 to replace them
.
In that same year, Napoleon systematized his attempts to stifle Britain’s trade with the Continent. His Berlin Decrees (November 1806) forbade the import of British goods, thereby initiating the ‘Continental System’; his Milan Decree (December 1807) ordered the confiscation of any vessel that had called at a British port. The System held firm in France and Germany, but was widely circumvented in the Mediterranean and came at a high political cost. None of the French-occupied countries liked being told what they could or could not buy. The Kingdom of Etruria, which as the Grand Duchy of Tuscany had been suspected by the French of ‘Austrophilism’, now gained the reputation of being ‘Anglophile’. Livorno was seen as the port where the Continental System leaked most.
Napoleon’s growing problems in Spain were compounded by yet another showdown with the ruling Bourbons. Charles IV and Maria-Luisa, parents of the Etrurian queen-regent, had reigned since 1788. The king was rated ‘despotic, sluggish and stupid’, a former wrestler who spent his time hunting; the queen, ‘coarse, passionate and narrow-minded’, acted as their political manager. Together, they were the most reactionary couple still seated on a European throne. Through the 1790s, they had been unswerving opponents of the French Revolution, and during the negotiations at San Ildefonso they had fought hard to uphold Bourbon interests. In the following years, however, they sought an accommodation with France. Their one-time chief minister, Godoy, duke of Alcudia, who contrived to be both the king’s favourite and the queen’s lover, was restored to power by the first consul, and set out to satisfy French demands.47 Spain undertook to pay France a monthly tribute of 6 million francs and to prevent Portugal from breaking the continental blockade. Neither obligation was fulfilled. Godoy was deeply unpopular, and the heir apparent, Ferdinand, led an abortive plot against him.
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