Contemporary intellectuals sometimes talked of a cultural Italy but not of a political patria: nationalism did not exist before the French Revolution. Most of them accepted what the despots gave in the way of reforms and did not ask for much more. Like the Piedmontese writer Vittorio Alfieri, they might write plays attacking tyranny but they did not criticize the enlightened despots. As Guicciardini had done in the sixteenth century, some accepted and even revered the political disunity and consequent diversity and cosmopolitanism of their country. When one intellectual suggested the possibility of a single Italy, another remarked that he did not want ‘love of country to affect our impartiality as good cosmopolites’.9
After Florence and Austrian-ruled Milan, Naples was the best place for intellectuals to be, living under the sympathetic eyes of its new Bourbon monarchs and their talented ministers. Rome or Turin would not have tolerated the presence of Antonio Genovesi, who inspired many people with his advocacy of radical economic and humanitarian reforms. Yet in the tolerant atmosphere of Bourbon Naples he could enjoy a successful public career as a professor of metaphysics and a professor of ethics before becoming in 1754 the first professor of political economy in Europe.
Charles of Naples was an unusual enlightened despot. He promoted learning, so long as it did not affect himself or his children. He constructed a great opera house, although he disliked music and slept or chatted during performances. He was a keen builder, but mostly of palaces in places convenient for the hunting which he did every afternoon regardless of the weather. Yet however unread and unlearned he was, Charles was an intelligent and conscientious ruler – at least in the mornings – with the knack of picking able ministers to carry out sensible policies. Although he was not greatly interested in economics or legislation, his rule oversaw a doubling in revenue and a decrease in taxation; and he made Naples one of the great capitals of Europe.
As the king’s eldest son was an imbecile and his second was heir to the Spanish crown, the Neapolitan throne went to the third brother, Ferdinand, who was left alone at the age of eight when his parents went to Madrid. While a Council of Regents directed his realm, Ferdinand emerged as a boisterous, bonhomous, rough-edged youth who loved hunting as much as his father and hated reading, writing and even signing his own name. His first complaint about his wife, a Habsburg princess, was that she liked books. His rustic manners and earthy vocabulary may have been ill-suited to the palace of Caserta – ‘the Italian Versailles’ – but they made him popular; he was called the lazzarone king because he empathized with the city’s famous underclass known as lazzaroni, and like them he enjoyed eating maccheroni with his fingers. As in the time of his father, intelligent advisers carried out reforms that the monarch often cared little about. ‘If he remained ignorant,’ observed the aesthete and historian Harold Acton, ‘at least his subjects were becoming enlightened.’10
Ferdinand presided over a huge capital city, containing perhaps half a million people, most of whom lived precariously in the shadow of famine, earthquakes and of course Vesuvius. Its poorest inhabitants were famous for l’arte di arrangiarsi, the skill of getting by, somehow acquiring enough coins for a bowl of maccheroni without worrying too much about where the next one was coming from. Northern Italians have seldom liked Naples, but northern Europeans have usually been more generous. Goethe admired l’arte di arrangiarsi and denied that its practitioners were idlers; Naples was ‘a happy country’, he thought, a ‘paradise’ where everyone lived ‘in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness’, himself included.11 The eighteenth-century city teemed with beggars and vagrants but it was not a violent place. As witnesses and statistics testify, the Neapolitans seldom got drunk or rioted, and the murder rate was low.
For the German poet, Palermo was also a paradise, and Sicily as a whole was ‘the clue to everything’. ‘To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily,’ he bizarrely warned, was ‘not to have seen Italy at all.’12 Yet to see Sicily in the eighteenth century was to see a place with no trace of that epoch except in the profusion of its buildings, for the island was immune to the spirit of the Enlightenment. As the Sicilian historian Rosario Romeo observed, the only European development that the island welcomed was the Counter-Reformation; the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment had virtually no impact. Unlike Naples, Sicily contained only a handful of reformers, and even they were too timid and tepid to advocate the abolition of feudalism.13 King Ferdinand had outstanding ministers in Naples who were unable to do anything with an island where the landed classes wanted nothing to change: if the Prince of Palagonia accepted the abolition of his droit du seigneur (which was nominal in most places anyway), he felt justified in imposing a marriage tax on his vassals for having made an apparent sacrifice. Aristocrats in other parts of Italy were showing increasing interest in visiting their estates and making them more productive, but in Sicily landowners did not follow the trend. Instead of riding from time to time over their latifondi, seeing what was happening on their farms, they stayed in Palermo, trundling up and down the marine front each afternoon in their carriages, attended by their liveried footmen.14 When the great Neapolitan viceroy, the Marquess of Caracciolo, arrived in Palermo in 1781, the nobles united to impede his reforms, especially those that might have led to a reduction of their feudal powers.
Italians may have been dejected by the survival of foreign dynasties in the peninsula, but most of them would have recognized that the eighteenth-century representatives of the Habsburgs and Bourbons were superior to native rulers. Travellers usually identified the pope’s domains as the most misgoverned region of Italy. Goethe contrasted the public buildings in Tuscany, ‘beautiful and imposing … combining usefulness with grace’, with the squalor and disorder in the Papal States, which seemed ‘to keep alive only because the earth refuses to swallow them’.15 The countryside was neglected, agriculture was stagnant, and internal trade was obstructed by endless tolls; it was difficult to find signs of any real economic activity except in Ancona, which had been a free port since 1732. Rome was the most violent city in the whole of Italy, with far more murders than in Naples, which was three times the size. The French scholar and traveller Charles de Brosses considered its government ‘the worst imaginable’, exactly the opposite of what Machiavelli and Thomas More had ‘envisaged in their Utopias’. Its population of 150,000 was divided, according to him, into three portions, one-third of them being clergy, another third doing a little work, and the last third doing nothing at all.16 Yet neither popes nor cardinals made a serious attempt to improve matters except one, Benedict IV, an intelligent man who had read Voltaire and the philosophes and knew that the art of government required something beyond an attitude of rigid obscurantism. Yet despite his efforts to improve agriculture and reduce taxation, his reforms had achieved little by the time of his death in 1758.
A hundred years later, the Papal States retained their reputation for bad government and were often contrasted with Piedmont, hailed in the mid-nineteenth century as the most progressive of the peninsular states, prosperous and liberal, the only one capable of welding and leading a brave new Italy. Yet in the seventeenth and eighteenth (and early part of the nineteenth) centuries Piedmont was a very backward and reactionary place. To many Italians it seemed primitive and rather foreign; its people, including its monarchs and aristocrats, spoke in French or in local dialect. Compared to the cities of Lombardy and Emilia, those in Piedmont were culturally meagre and so out of touch with the rest of the Po Valley that even the Renaissance had had little influence; Turin itself has no true Renaissance churches except its cathedral. In many parts of northern and central Italy nobles were happy to be merchants and bankers. In Piedmont their career options were limited to three: the army (the most popular), the Church and public service.
The ruling dynasty was the house of Savoy, the Savoyards or, in Italian, Savoia or Sabaudi. They had been counts and later dukes of Savoy in the Middle Ages, ruling Nice and Savoy on one side of the Alps and p
arts of Piedmont on the other. In 1563 they shifted their capital from Chambéry to Turin because it was clear that the Po Valley offered more room for expansion than Savoy, which was perennially threatened and frequently invaded by France. That military expansion was the dynasty’s principal ambition can be perceived today by anyone wandering around Turin and looking at the many statues of kings, princes and generals waving their swords from the saddle. One of the most martial is in the Piazza San Carlo, where the bronze figure of Emanuel Philibert, mounted on a prancing horse, is pushing his sword back in its scabbard after the Battle of Saint-Quentin, a victory for him and his Spanish allies against the French in 1557. A century later, his successors’ persecution of the Waldensian Protestants in western Piedmont incited John Milton to ask God to avenge his
slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold …
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks …*
When writing of the Savoia in Piedmont, historians have found it difficult to avoid using adjectives such as wily, unscrupulous, ruthless and opportunistic to describe rulers who merited their reputation for choosing the winning side in a conflict. All those adjectives apply to Emanuel Philibert’s son, Charles Emanuel I, who started several wars during his long reign between 1580 and 1630 and swapped sides between France and Spain depending on which seemed likely to reward him with the most territory. In his even longer reign a century later, Victor Amadeus II too played France off against Spain, and both he and his son, Charles Emanuel III, managed to snaffle large slices of Lombardy. Victor Amadeus was also the duke who, without any claim to either island, had himself made King of Sicily and then King of Sardinia, after which his territories were generally known as the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.†
Such reforms as the government undertook in the early eighteenth century owed little to the Enlightenment: they were inspired by the absolutist example of Louis XIV rather than by any ideas of the philosophes. Thus the armed forces were strengthened and the tax system made more efficient for the purpose of increasing state power. Censorship and political repression were so heavy that several of Piedmont’s small number of intellectuals decided to emigrate. Vittorio Alfieri, the distinguished poet and dramatist, was one who chose to escape, preferring to write in France or Florence where he lived happily with the Countess of Albany, the wife of the Stuart pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie. Others, less fortunate, were prevented from leaving and confined for long periods in prison. Pietro Giannone, the great anti-papal historian who inspired Gibbon, was kidnapped by Piedmontese agents working with the Inquisition and died in gaol in 1748 after a captivity of twelve years.
NAPOLEONIC ITALY
‘Peoples of Italy!’ the young General Bonaparte proclaimed in April 1796, ‘the French army is coming to break your chains … We shall respect your property, your religion and your customs.’ His words doubtless sounded encouraging to people in Italy who had not heard another speech made by the same officer a month earlier. ‘Soldiers!’ he had told his army, ‘you are hungry and naked; the government [the Directory in Paris] owes you much but can give you nothing … I will lead you into the most fertile plains on earth. Rich provinces, opulent towns, all shall be at your disposal; there you will find honour, glory and riches.’ Here was the voice not of the liberator but of Alaric and Attila, of the eternal barbarian coming through the Alps in search of plunder. For all his Italian and Corsican ancestry, Napoleon would not have been outraged by the comparison; the following year he warned the Venetians he would indeed be their Attila – and he kept his word.
The two speeches reveal some of the ambiguity in Napoleon’s attitudes to Italy. There was another strand as well, not fully formed as yet but apparent in a question he asked subordinates after his Italian victories in 1796. ‘Do you suppose that I triumph in Italy to make the reputations of the lawyers of the Directory?’17 It was not difficult to guess the answer. Of all his many conquests, Italy was his favourite, the territory he regarded as his special domain. As first consul, and even more as emperor, he thought increasingly of Italy not as a French interest or a nation to be liberated but as a possession of his own, a fief to be exploited for the aggrandizement of himself and his acquisitive family.
In 1793 Georges Danton had persuaded the revolutionary government in Paris that France’s borders should be its ‘natural frontiers’ – the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees – even though these contained the whole of the Austrian Netherlands (the future Belgium) as well as other Habsburg territories and Savoy. For France the most important of the natural frontiers was the Rhine because beyond the river lay the heartland of the Austrian Empire, its most powerful continental enemy. In 1796 the Directory resolved that Bonaparte should defeat the Austrian and Piedmontese armies in Italy and occupy Milan so that it could use the resulting gains as a bargaining counter, to be offered back to Vienna in exchange for concessions in the Rhineland.
Aged twenty-six, the commander of the Army of Italy possessed little martial experience except for his dogged performance as an artillery officer at the Siege of Toulon in 1793. Yet he came through the Maritime Alps with magnificent self-assurance, brushed aside the Piedmontese in a few days and defeated the Austrians in a series of battles with names still resonant for students of military history: Lodi, Castiglione, Arcola, Rivoli. As he moved eastwards along the Po Valley, Bonaparte offered Venice an alliance against Austria, but the republic – perhaps honourably, certainly foolishly – insisted on remaining neutral. Furious at this defiance, the general declared war, ranting in Italian at the Venetian delegates, ‘I want no more senate, I want no more inquisitors, I shall be an Attila for the Venetian state.’ The state was duly destroyed and replaced by a ‘democratic’ republic, which Bonaparte quickly and brazenly betrayed. He had conquered so much territory that he no longer needed to think of equations between Lombardy and the Rhineland. France could have both, he realized, if he gave Venice and eastern Venetia to Austria. The Treaty of Campoformio in October 1797 formally and conclusively destroyed the Venetian Republic and divided it along the line of the River Adige; its western areas were incorporated into Lombardy and became, under napoleonic rule, successively part of the Cisalpine Republic, the French Republic and the Kingdom of Italy.
One of the goals of the Directory’s foreign policy was the accumulation of foreign wealth. Foreigners, the government decided, should pay for the privilege of being liberated by France and not protest if liberty was accompanied by high taxes, conscription and the theft of their best paintings. Curiously, neither napoleonic nor revolutionary leaders seemed to realize how unpopular this policy would make them. Sometimes they even tried to delude themselves and others about what they were doing: eighteen months after Bonaparte had occupied Milan, his army’s newspaper addressed the people of the Cisalpine Republic: ‘You are the first example in history of a people who became free without sacrifice, without revolution, without torment. We gave you liberty, know how to conserve it.’18 By then the actual sacrifices of the republic’s capital, Milan, included the extortion of 20 million francs, the city itself looted by French soldiery, and the removal of many art treasures, though Bonaparte had a tender moment when he saw the poor condition of Leonardo’s Last Supper and gave orders that its convent home should not be used as a billet for his troops.
Two types of pillage were favoured by the occupying forces. One was the immediate sacking of a town after its capture, a practice often condoned by the generals. Bonaparte himself permitted the sacking of the Piedmontese town of Mondovi and the Lombard city of Pavia. One of his divisional commanders, General Masséna, was a notorious looter who did not discourage his soldiers from following his example: after one victory they had gone off plundering when they were surprised by some Austrian battalions, who routed them and captured their guns. Masséna, it was reported, had to flee from a woman’s bed in his nightshirt.19
The second form of plunder was
more official. French armies would occupy a city, seize its banks and munitions, and demand food and clothing for their soldiers. In their wake officials arrived to collect indemnities and take away paintings. The great treasures of Italy were not stolen and sold to buy provisions for the army: they were stolen to embellish Paris and furnish the Louvre. When the Duke of Parma pleaded with Bonaparte to let him keep a painting by Correggio – and even offered to pay him its value in cash – the general ignored him, insisting that it should adorn the French ‘capital for ages, and give birth to similar exertions of genius’.20 In Venice the French commander was both greedy and vindictive. Apart from looting numerous works by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, he ordered officials to destroy the Venetian emblem – the Lion of St Mark – wherever they found it on the terraferma, and in the city itself he took down the lion from its pillar in the Piazzetta and sent it with the famous bronze horses of St Mark’s to Paris. Even his ‘improvements’, such as the Public Gardens and the west side of the Piazza, required a spate of demolitions.
After the conquest of so much territory, the French government’s goal of ‘natural frontiers’ was superseded by the idea of ‘sister republics’, which led later, under the empire, to the concept of satellite states. In Italy Bonaparte set up sister republics in the north but frequently changed their borders and sometimes abolished them altogether. After eighteen months in the peninsula he tired of his Italian work and became eager to find somewhere to fight England, the country that had captured so many of France’s overseas possessions over the previous half-century. Realizing that an attempt to cross the English Channel might end in catastrophe, he encouraged the Directory to give him an army to take to Egypt with the aim of cutting communications between Britain and its expanding empire in India. As always with Bonaparte, however, personal ambition was the prime determinant of action. ‘We must go to the Orient,’ this aspiring Alexander told his secretary, Bourrienne, ‘all great glory has always been acquired there.’21‡ Although he won a number of battles against Mamelukes and Turkish forces, the expedition to Egypt was a failure. Bonaparte’s fleet was destroyed by Admiral Nelson at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, and his army was repulsed by a Turkish garrison assisted by British ships at the city of Acre. After a year in Egypt he felt stranded and frustrated with nothing much to do. Yearning to be in Paris and to be part of the next power struggle there, he sneaked away by boat, abandoning his soldiers without even telling them he was going.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 16
