‘Since the Roman zenith,’ wrote Guicciardini in the sixteenth century, ‘Italy had never known such prosperity or such a desirable condition as that which it enjoyed in all tranquillity in the year of Our Lord 1490 and the years immediately before and after.’1 While the Italian states were enjoying a period of unprecedented amity – the larger ones finally realizing they could not dominate all the others – the peninsula had been spared a full-scale foreign invasion from the north for over 200 years. All this changed in 1494 when Charles VIII became the first of three consecutive French kings to lead a huge army into Italy.
As a relation of the Angevins, Charles had a weak and generally dormant claim to the throne of Naples. But he was encouraged to revive it by Ludovico Sforza, the cultured and crafty ruler of Milan, and so the young king marched down the peninsula almost unopposed and occupied Naples. After an enthusiastic welcome from his new subjects, he enjoyed himself in the city, throwing banquets and tournaments. Yet Charles was too impatient and unintelligent for his popularity to last. As a French army sickened from its first experience of syphilis, he suddenly found himself opposed by a powerful coalition that included Venice, Mantua, Florence, the pope and Ludovico of Milan, who had changed sides. Charles made a run for the north in July 1495 but he was caught at Fornovo by an army of Venetians and Mantuans who outnumbered his diseased and decimated force by three to one. Since the French continued to retreat after the battle, the Italian forces contrived to claim a victory: their commander, the Gonzaga Lord of Mantua, even celebrated the event by building a ‘victory’ church in his capital and commissioning Mantegna to paint the Madonna della Vittoria. Yet everyone else realized that it had been a defeat, that the Italian casualties had been enormous and that the French had been allowed to escape almost unscathed when they should have been crushed.
Luigi Barzini, a perceptive writer and journalist of the twentieth century, considered Fornovo a crucial moment in his country’s history:
If the Italians had won, they would probably have discovered then the pride of being a united people, the self-confidence born of defending their common liberty and independence. Italy would have emerged as a reasonably respectable nation, capable of determining her own future, a country which adventurous foreigners would think twice before attacking. Nobody would have ventured lightly across the Alps, for fear of being destroyed. The European powers would have been discouraged from endlessly quarrelling over Italian politics and from cutting slices of Italian soil, with their defenceless and laborious inhabitants, in order to placate dynastic rivalries and satisfy everybody’s greed. The history of Italy, Europe, and the world would probably have taken different tacks. The Italian national character would have developed along different lines.2
This is, of course, speculation, and it is difficult to agree with all of it. If the Battle of Legnano had not made a nation, why would a victory at Fornovo have done so? And who, apart perhaps from Machiavelli, wanted a nation anyway? Yet, as Barzini suggested, the annihilation of the French army might have discouraged later invasions. Charles’s uncontested march to Naples demonstrated, in the recent words of Giordano Bruno Guerri, that Italy ‘was a very easy land to conquer’.3 Certainly it encouraged the next French king, Louis XII, to emulate his predecessor in 1499, an invasion which, since he had a claim to the Milanese duchy, led to the overthrow and lasting incarceration of the unscrupulous Ludovico. It also spurred his successor, Francis I, to do the same, though his adventures in Italy ended in disaster when he was defeated and captured by the Emperor Charles V at the Battle of Pavia in 1525.
The French invasions brought Spain into the northern half of the peninsula to engage in what was essentially a struggle for supremacy in western Europe. While the peoples of Italy naturally would have preferred this rivalry to have been contested across the Pyrenees, strategic considerations determined that the main battleground would be Lombardy because it lay between Naples, which the Emperor Charles had inherited through his Spanish mother, and the Low Countries and Germany, which had come to him through his Habsburg grandfather. The chief prize in the conflict was Milan, which oscillated between rule by the French and the Sforza until 1535, when, following the death of the last Sforza duke, Charles took control and gave it to his son Philip, the future Spanish king. Thus was the political and cultural independence of Milan extinguished as a consequence of Ludovico’s encouragement of Charles VIII’s aggression in Italy. The rest of the peninsula also suffered as a result of the French invasions: Venice had to fight its Cambrai War; Naples was seized by both the French and the Spanish; Florence went backwards and forwards between republicans and the Medici; and in 1527 Rome was sacked by an imperial army.
As the historian Richard Mackenney has noted, the savage wars fought in Italy mainly by foreigners between 1494 and 1530 were the ‘one truly “Italian” experience’ of the age.4 Yet, like other foreign invasions over the following three centuries, they stimulated no Italian national response. Charles VIII may have been chased out of Italy in 1495, but many Italians had applauded and supported him the year before. Venetians and Mantuans may have fought together at Fornovo but at other times they were on opposing sides. Soldiers from Venice and elsewhere may have shouted ‘Italia! Italia!’ as they went into battle against a foreign enemy, but many Italians fought as allies of the foreigners without feeling guilty about betraying any ‘patria’. This was a phenomenon that survived into the 1860s.
Scholars who have searched for signs of a nascent nationalism in the later Middle Ages have not been very successful: people in the peninsula may have thought of themselves as culturally Italian because they were wealthier and more artistic than anyone else, but they had no notion of a political or united Italy. Numerous historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both foreign and Italian, found it more rewarding to speculate about who had been the peninsula’s chief enemies, invariably awarding the prizes to Spain and Austria while remaining oblivious to the claims of France which, with its thousand-year history of invasion, was at least a plausible candidate. Writers lamented ‘the dead hand of Spain’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries just as they regretted ‘the dead hand of Austria’ in subsequent eras. Yet the governments of the Austrian Habsburgs were seldom inert, while the record of their Spanish cousins has been often distorted.
Spanish hegemony on the Italian peninsula was confirmed in 1559 at the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, at which the French renounced their claim to Milan, subsequently left Italy and spent the rest of the century fighting their religious wars. The native peoples were more forgiving towards their new Hispanic overlords than historians have been: they did not particularly resent their arrival and subsequently they welcomed the peace and stability that came with them. Prosperous times continued, and Italians remained the richest people in Europe. The most visible reminder of Spanish rule today is the centre of Naples, where Spanish viceroys built palaces, churches, a castle, the hillside district known as the Quartieri Spagnoli and the Via Toledo, which Stendhal considered to be ‘the busiest, most joyous thoroughfare in the entire universe’.5
Italy in the seventeenth century has traditionally been regarded as weak, poor, decadent and oppressed. The view is partly true and partly exaggerated, but in any case these defects were not always the fault of the Spaniards. If the peninsula became increasingly rural, it was not because its rulers decreed so. Merchants could not be prevented from investing profits in land rather than trade; it was a trend in much of Europe in that era – and in other eras as well. Nor was Spain responsible for the war that broke out in 1613 and spawned other wars that lasted till 1659: the culpability lay with the Duke of Savoy, Charles Emanuel I, who like many of his lineage was intent on territorial aggrandizement. Perhaps Spain may be blamed more justly for supporting the intolerance and rigidity of the Church and the atrocities of the Inquisition, but popes not Spaniards prosecuted Galileo and burned the remarkable scientist and free-thinker Giordano Bruno.
The Spanish have often been accused of ‘corrupting’, ‘provincializing’ and ‘hispanicizing’ southern Italy, introducing duelling and bullfighting and inciting local nobles to become obsessed with matters of status and protocol. Yet since the Lombards under Spanish rule were seldom attracted to these customs, the explanation may be that Sicilians and Neapolitans willingly embraced them. According to the historian Denis Mack Smith, ‘spagnolismo sometimes seemed to characterize the Sicilian ruled more than the Spanish rulers’.6 Sicilians often blamed Spain for their poverty and they rightly objected to the hated macinato, an inequitable tax on the grinding of corn. Yet they made little effort themselves to become richer. Palermo was a parasite city where most of the nobles lived, far from their lands and farther from the desire to develop them. Spanish rulers were surprised by their laziness, their lack of interest in improving their latifondi, their failure to build provincial roads so that, as a result, the wheat their agents planned to export had to be transported on mules to the coasts. Yet the Spaniards, especially those from Castile and Andalusia, must have seen something of themselves in their Sicilian subjects. They also thought it more prestigious to acquire new estates than to improve existing ones; they too liked to petrify their incomes in palaces and religious buildings.
Naples and Sicily belonged to the Spanish Habsburgs until 1700, when the last member of that branch of the family died without choosing between French and Austrian claimants to his throne until the last moment, when he opted for Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. During the consequent War of the Spanish Succession, armies of both the Austrian emperor and the French prince occupied Sicily. At its end the Treaties of Utrecht (1713–14) confirmed the Bourbon contender as Philip V of Spain, but France’s military defeats by the Duke of Marlborough forced it to cede territory in North America to the British and to abandon those interests in Italy it might have inherited from the Spanish crown.
After Utrecht Austria hoped to return to Sicily, but the British, illogically and incomprehensibly, persuaded its ally that the island should go to another friend in the recent war, Victor Amadeus, the ambitious ruler of Piedmont and Savoy, who now assumed the title King of Sicily. This was an unwise arrangement because no part of Italy is so unlike Sicily as Piedmont. Victor Amadeus sailed to Palermo in a British ship, the first monarch to visit the island since 1535 and the last to do so till the Bourbon Ferdinand IV fled there to escape the armies of revolutionary France. Coming from Piedmont, where the nobility had a tradition of military and state service, the new king could not understand why Sicilian aristocrats were so unwilling to be soldiers or administrators. He called their assembly in Palermo an ‘ice-cream parliament’ because eating ice-cream seemed to be its members’ most conspicuous activity. The nobles were equally contemptuous of this rustic-looking northerner and regretted the disappearance of Spain’s elegant and elaborate viceregal court. After attempting a few reforms, Victor Amadeus soon tired of trying to rule an ungrateful island from Turin and offered it to Austria provided he was compensated by somewhere else where he could be called a king; eventually he managed to get himself made King of Sardinia. Meanwhile a large Spanish force invaded Sicily, but its navy was destroyed by a British fleet while its army was defeated by Austrian troops coming across the Straits of Messina. The Treaty of The Hague in 1720 confirmed Sicily as a possession of the Austrians, who soon made themselves unpopular on the island by trying to reform institutions which the islanders did not wish to see reformed. In 1734 another Spanish attempt to seize Sicily succeeded, and the Bourbons thereafter ruled it until they were defeated by Garibaldi in 1860.
Each change of Sicilian ruler between 1700 and 1734 was a consequence of a wider European conflict, of the contest between Habsburg emperors (Spanish and Austrian) and French monarchs (first Valois, then – in Spain as well as France – Bourbon) that had been dragging on for 200 years. In the process the chief antagonists altered Italian boundaries and dynasties, usually at treaties negotiated in the Netherlands, with no regard for the wishes or interests of the inhabitants. Sicilians could watch Spanish, Austrian or Piedmontese armies tramping over their island just as they could spy the British navy supporting one force or another off their coasts, yet they had no say in what might happen when the fighting was over.
The rest of Italy was also affected by mysterious decisions taken in the north. Like the Medici in Tuscany, the Farnese in Parma died out in the 1730s through the failure of its last males to procreate. The succession correctly went to the last duke’s acquisitive niece, Elizabeth Farnese, although, as she was living in Madrid as Queen of Spain, the duchy was assigned to her son, Don Carlos, whom the European states had simultaneously selected to be the next Grand Duke of Tuscany. Rushing to Florence with an army ready to take over, the young Spanish prince displayed his life-long obsession with hunting by shooting arrows at the birds woven into the tapestries in the Pitti Palace. But Gian Gastone de’ Medici failed to die as soon as everyone expected, and, by the time he did expire, the War of the Polish Succession (1733–5) had upset all plans and altered Don Carlos’s ambitions. Now, at a moment of Austrian military weakness, Elizabeth Farnese revived Spanish claims to the crowns of Naples and Sicily and told her son to overrun those kingdoms, which he soon did. As Charles VII, he ruled in Naples from 1734 to 1759, when he succeeded his half-brother as Charles III of Spain, the nation he ruled until his death in 1788.
After Charles had taken Naples from Austria, the vanquished power annexed Parma but was soon forced to return it to a Bourbon-Farnese ruler, Philip, a younger brother of the new Neapolitan king. A condition of European acceptance of Charles in Naples was the separation of the southern crowns from Spain, a proviso that later allowed his younger son Ferdinand to create his own dynasty in Naples. A similar condition was attached to the succession in Tuscany that finally settled on Francis Stephen, Duke of Lorraine, who had to be recompensed for the loss of his own duchy, given to ex-King Stanislaw of Poland, the loser in the War of the Polish Succession and the father-in-law of the French monarch Louis XV. Shortly before his death in 1737, the last Medici insisted that Tuscany must never form part of the Habsburg Empire whose heiress, Maria Theresa, was the wife of Francis Stephen. After yet another war over another succession (this time the Austrian), the long game of musical thrones was finally stopped in 1748 at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The peninsula remained dominated by foreign dynasties – the Bourbons in Parma and the south, the Habsburgs in Milan (since the War of the Spanish Succession) as well as Tuscany – but it had now achieved a certain equilibrium of power. A half-century of war was giving way to a half-century of peace.
Aix-la-Chapelle was signed at a time when the ideas of the French philosophes and other writers of the Enlightenment were just beginning to percolate through the minds of Italian rulers and some of their subjects. People were coming to expect more from their monarch, not that he should share power with them but that he should act wisely, as a philosopher-king, educating his subjects, reining in the Church and the nobility, taking a leading part in promoting agriculture and trade. Thus arrived the era of ‘enlightened despotism’, a term applied to an age during which, at least in retrospect, the sovereigns of Europe are made to appear as if they had been competing hard to personify the notion: digging canals and draining marshes, constructing roads and abolishing tolls, reading Voltaire and Montesquieu before expelling the Jesuits and dissolving the monasteries – and all the time building an enlightened paradise with schools, hospitals, universities and academies.
The prince most closely resembling the stereotype in Italy was the second son of Maria Theresa, Peter Leopold, the Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1765 to 1790. Intelligent and energetic, he was driven by the desire for reform in both economic and humanitarian affairs. He attacked monopolies and encouraged free trade, built roads and bridges, made taxes both lower and fairer, and reduced the public debt; he also made a valiant attempt to drain the Maremma’s marshes. In consultation with the Milanese writer Cesare Beccaria he drew up a penal code that made Tuscany the first state in Europe to abolish the death penalty and burn the gallows – a measure so audacious and encouraging to the cause of enlightenment that a Spanish reformer implored his own progressive sovereign to turn his eyes to Tuscany, to ‘reflect upon the mildness of the penalties’, upon ‘the small number of crimes’ committed there, and to ‘read over and over again the penal code’ of its prince.7 Among his other merits, Peter Leopold was conscientious and loyal to a state that had had no connection to either of his parents’ families before 1734. Although from 1770 he was heir to the imperial throne in Vienna, the grand duke kept his father’s promise to defend the rights and maintain the autonomy of his duchy. In 1790 he became the penultimate Holy Roman emperor after the death of his brother, Joseph II, who was the greatest and most innovative of all enlightened monarchs, an emancipator of serfs as well as Jews, although unlike Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia he has not been known as ‘the Great’ – perhaps because at the end of his life he was defeated by the forces of Belgian conservatism. During his brief reign in Vienna, Leopold II (as Peter Leopold became) retained his reforming zeal, abolishing various punishments and ordering the police to be kind to prisoners; he even gave his subjects ‘something of the principle of habeas corpus’.8
Enlightened despotism would not have lasted even without the French Revolution. The phrase is after all an oxymoron, though it seemed to make sense for half a century; ultimately, the ideas of the Enlightenment were bound to lead to demands for constitutional reform and the abolition of despots. Besides, however enlightened the rulers were, there was a limit to how despotic their behaviour could be, even without parliaments. Wherever reforms were attempted – in Florence, Milan, Naples or elsewhere – there were nobles and clerics always ready to dilute, delay and otherwise obstruct them.
The first half of the eighteenth century had been a great age for Italian scholarship, a time when the peninsula housed some of Europe’s finest philosophers and historians, men of the stature of Giambattista Vico, Lodovico Muratori and Pietro Giannone. Later in the century, their followers flocked to the enlightened courts, especially to Florence, the favourite rallying-point for reformers from Spain as well as Italy. They were eager to advise and cooperate with rulers on practical projects and simultaneously to establish a peninsular intelligentsia that could function across Italy’s many boundaries, creating in the process what they hoped would be ‘a republic of letters’. This was a flourishing era for cultural and scientific academies and also for journals, which could disseminate ideas and discoveries beyond the frontiers.
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 parts 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.
‘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.
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.
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.
From the congress the Austrian emperor received the new kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, which he ruled through a viceroy. His brother Ferdinand was returned to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, while his daughter Marie-Louise (Napoleon’s second wife) became Duchess of Parma, a move that required compensation for the Bourbons of Parma in the shape of the former republic of Lucca, a city with which they had no connection. The rest of the peninsula was rearranged along more traditional lines. The papacy got the Papal States, the Habsburg-Este family was back in Modena, and the Bourbon King of Naples returned from Sicily to his mainland capital. In 1815 all the Italian states except Piedmont were ruled by Habsburgs and their relations or by their close and dependent allies.
Its conclusions demonstrated that the congress was more concerned with security and balance of power than with a strict interpretation of legitimacy. The two entirely ‘legitimate’ states missing from the post-napoleonic map were the ancient republics of Venice and Genoa, while the republic of Lucca had been converted into a duchy. No doubt the French example had made the powers wary of the word ‘republic’, but European leaders were surely able to differentiate between Robespierre’s gory regime and the Venetian state that had predated it by 1,100 years. Genoa did not want to become part of reactionary Piedmont any more than Venice wished to be ruled by Frenchmen, Austrians or mainland Italians. Yet since they possessed no former dynasties to clamour for restoration, both were considered disposable and so were sacrificed unsentimentally to the territorial ambitions of neighbours.
The ‘Restoration’ has traditionally been seen as the Dark Age of modern Italy, a backward-looking era of clerical control and unenlightened authoritarianism. The word soon became synonymous with ‘reaction’ and ‘repression’ and later also with ‘foreign oppression’, since the Habsburg satellites could (and did) call on Austria to send troops if insurrections threatened them. Yet the picture is only true of certain places. The Duke of Modena may have refused all change and any reform – like his father-in-law, the King of Piedmont – but his neighbour the Duchess of Parma had different views: although she was evidently not pining for her husband, imprisoned on St Helena, she retained his system of administration in her duchy.
The restoration of the pope’s temporal power was indeed a return to a Dark Age, literally so at night because street lighting was regarded as the work of the devil. So were vaccination and railways: Gregory XVI, who was pope from 1831 to 1846, made the equation ‘Chemin de fer, Chemin d’Enfer’ and banned railway construction in the Papal States. Even the conservative Austrian chancellor Metternich, the chief architect of post-napoleonic Europe, was appalled by a ‘detested and detestable’ government that had no idea how to govern. The inhabitants of the Romagna, accustomed to the administrative efficiency of Eugène’s Italian kingdom, were dismayed to be returned to the rule of cardinal-legates. They had never had much affection for Rome on the other side of the Apennines, where the roads were so bad that they found it quicker to reach their capital by sea. As Christopher Duggan has drily observed, ‘While all roads may once have led to Rome, in the 1820s only two did, and neither was very safe.’31
No state was more proudly and profoundly reactionary than Piedmont. Its king, Victor Emanuel I, demonstrated his attitude by returning with his courtiers to Turin coiffured with powder and pigtails and wearing hats that had gone out of fashion with Frederick the Great. He then officially turned the clock back with a royal edict abolishing all laws made by Napoleon and returning his state to its unenlightened eighteenth century. His politics were almost a caricature of obscurantism: noble privileges came back along with guilds, internal customs barriers and the persecution of Jews and Protestants. Virtually nothing of the napoleonic system was retained except an effective police force.
The successors of Victor Emanuel, his brother Charles Felix and his cousin Charles Albert, shared his conservative and intransigent instincts. Although the belated reintroduction of parts of the napoleonic codes helped modernize the administration, Piedmont remained a benighted state until the middle of the century. Ecclesiastical courts survived, education was controlled by the Jesuits, and the government insisted on both civil and religious censorship. Newspapers were banned from printing words such as ‘nation’, ‘revolution’ and even ‘Italy’; you could use the word ‘liberty’ only if you were attacking it.32 Such a stultifying regime understandably encouraged writers and artists to abandon Turin for the freer and more cosmopolitan cities of Florence and Milan.
The restoration in Naples might have been an equally reactionary affair. In 1799 Ferdinand IV had sailed from Sicily intent on retribution and punishment for the defeated supporters of the Parthenopean Republic. Primitive feelings of vengeance overcame the monarch’s more usual good nature and, in violation of the terms of the surrender, he had ordered swift and drastic justice. Although often referred to as the Bourbon ‘Terror’, the repression was not quite on the scale that the dynasty’s enemies later claimed; about 200 people were executed. Yet the cost to the king’s reputation was high and enduring. One of his victims was Eleonora Pimentel, who had once written rhapsodies to the benevolence of Ferdinand’s government and who was hanged for subsequently writing in praise of liberty and equality in the republican newspaper. More dangerously for the future of his dynasty, the king alienated members of his aristocracy by executing several idealistic young noblemen. Most serious of all, his revenge was a propaganda gift for republicans and patriots because it helped to start and later sustain the myth that Italian unification was a saga of heroism and self-sacrifice.
In 1815 Ferdinand returned to Naples in a more restrained mood. He did not feel very grateful to the British, whose navy had protected him in Sicily, because they had bullied him, removed his queen from the court, appointed his more liberal son as regent and insisted on a constitution in Palermo providing for a free press and a bicameral parliament. Yet he was reluctant to antagonize the winning nations of the napoleonic wars, some of which had flirted with the idea of retaining Murat. In any case he wanted a quieter life and no more enforced sojourns in Sicily. The process of government interested him even less than before, and he entrusted the administration to his minister Luigi Medici so that he could devote his time to the pleasures of eating, hunting and his children’s company. Sometimes he railed against the napoleonic codes and wanted them to be abolished, as they had been in Piedmont, but he was too weak and too indifferent to overrule the astute Medici and his other ministers. The result was that feudal privileges were not brought back, the civil code was not abrogated, and Naples retained the political and institutional reforms of Murat and Joseph Bonaparte. Ferdinand derived some consolation, however, by disregarding the Sicilians and abolishing their British-inspired constitution. At Vienna it had been decided at last to unite the crowns of Naples and Sicily, and as a result he gave up his old titles (Ferdinand IV of Naples and Ferdinand III of Sicily) to become Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies. He now had a constitutional excuse not to permit a separate arrangement for Sicily.
The king died in 1825, sixty-six years after he had ascended the throne left to him on his father’s departure for Madrid. In his final decade he had presided over a reasonably tolerant regime and had stirred himself to combat smallpox, ordering clinics to be built in every village in Sicily and making vaccination compulsory for all (himself included). A perceptive Irish woman, Lady Blessington, who lived in Naples in his final years, described Ferdinand as ‘not a sovereign of superior mental requirements’ but ‘assuredly a good-natured man’. Although she herself was anti-Bourbon and preferred the circle that had supported Murat, she admitted that the people of Naples were not oppressed by their government. ‘We are told that Italians writhe under the despotism of their rulers,’ she wrote, ‘but nowhere have I seen such happy faces.’33
The king was succeeded by his son Francis, who abandoned his liberalism at the start of his short reign, and then by his grandson Ferdinand II, who was also for some time a liberal. Like his recent ancestors, the young Ferdinand was ill-educated but on the whole humane and well-meaning, a prince who dutifully toured his dominions and renounced some of the crown’s hunting reserves. He also encouraged science, deciding to hold a Congress of Italian Scientists in Naples in 1845. Yet in the second half of his reign he became a conservative and was lambasted by liberals and later historians as a stupid, cruel and despotic tyrant. After the Sicilian revolution in 1848 he was nicknamed King ‘Bomba’ for briefly bombarding the walls of Messina, while conditions in Neapolitan prisons, which an outraged William Gladstone (at the time a Tory MP) visited in 1850 and denounced a year later, led to his ostracization by much of Europe, especially France and Britain which accepted Gladstone’s resounding though meaningless judgement of the regime as ‘the negation of God erected into a system of government’. Much of this was unfair or at least one-sided. Victor Emanuel II, King of Piedmont and later King of Italy, was not known as ‘Bomba’ although he had bombarded his own city of Genoa in the same revolutionary period; nor was his government condemned as the negation of God even though prison conditions in Piedmont were as terrible as they were in Naples. But in the 1850s Piedmont was emerging as the great European hope of British liberals, and the fate of Naples was to be cast as its antagonist.
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was widely regarded, in Italy as in the rest of Europe, as a place of sloth and squalor, of grandeur and poverty, a place where landless labourers kept themselves just alive by scratching the parched soil of distant noblemen, where street urchins in the city picked the pockets of wealthy tourists and bands of brigands roamed with impunity in the hills outside, a land exploited and oppressed by an indolent monarchy, a frivolous aristocracy and a swarm of grasping clergy.
This picture was inherited and preserved by generations of historians until recently the stereotype was re-examined. Then it transpired that the kingdom was not just a land of latifondi, of vast desiccated estates in the interior that contained little except scrub for goats and some thin soil for wheat. Naples may not have had the irrigation or the natural advantages of Lombardy, but it was not an entirely backward place; wheat yields there were higher than in the Papal States. As for the latifondisti, it emerged that they were not all absentee landlords frittering away the produce of their workers by living in luxury in the capital. The latifondo was part feudal and part capitalist, part social structure and part business enterprise. Owners used their lands to feed themselves and the people who lived there, but they often grew food for foreign markets as well. The exported produce of the Barracco family, latifondisti from Calabria, included liquorice, olive oil, fine wool and cacciacavallo cheese.34
The state of industry in Naples has been similarly disparaged: travel accounts of the period leave the impression that the inhabitants had never heard of the spinning jenny or the steam engine. Yet a modernized textile industry, aided by a sensible tariff policy, existed in the Apennine foothills in the early nineteenth century; not much later, an engineering industry was established around the capital. Naples in fact enjoyed a number of industrial ‘firsts’. It possessed the largest shipyards in Italy, it launched the first peninsular steamboat (1818) and it enjoyed the largest merchant marine in the Mediterranean; it also built the first iron suspension bridge in Italy, constructed the first Italian railway and was among the first Italian cities to use gas for street lighting. Admittedly, not all these achievements were as impressive as they sound. Naples may have built the first railway, but it was a short one, and its construction did not lead to a rapid expansion of the network. Most of the other states soon caught up and overtook it: by 1860, when the whole of southern Italy had only 125 miles of track, Lombardy had 360 and Piedmont, after a slow start, possessed over 500.
A glance at its economic statistics reveals how separate Naples as a trading partner was from the rest of Italy. In 1855 85 per cent of its exports were sent to Britain, France and Austria, while only 3 per cent crossed the border into the Papal States; Neapolitan trade with Britain was three times greater than that with all the other Italian states added together.35 Feelings of separateness were not confined to commerce; Naples possessed its own remarkable legal system, widely regarded as superior to any other in the peninsula. Outsiders noticed that the place was different, a distinct, cosmopolitan entity, a kingdom (with or without Sicily) with an ancient history and borders which, almost uniquely in Italy, were not subjected to rearrangement after every war. Moreover, Naples itself was still by far the largest city in Italy – indeed the third-largest in Europe after London and Paris – and had been a capital since Charles of Anjou had established himself there 600 years earlier. It was the only Italian city, thought Stendhal, that had ‘the true makings of a capital’; the rest were ‘glorified provincial towns like Lyon’.36 Before 1860 hardly anyone contemplated the idea that the kingdom might be destroyed and its territory annexed by an all-Italian state; and little in the subsequent history of that state indicates that the Neapolitans would have been unhappier if they had been left to govern themselves.
In their propaganda Italian patriots of the nineteenth century identified the Neapolitan Bourbons as the chief home-grown tyrants and Austrian Habsburgs as their foreign equivalents. Yet even they were unable to convince themselves that the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was an oppressive state. It was governed by Ferdinand III, son of the great Peter Leopold and brother of the Austrian emperor whose armies had lost four wars against Napoleon and whose daughter had been sacrificed to the French emperor’s desire to beget an heir. Ferdinand’s return to Florence in 1814 did not lead to a persecution of bonapartists or to the abolition of reforms. As in the eighteenth century, Tuscany was a tolerant and civilized place that preferred Jews to Jesuits and welcomed exiles from Piedmont and from other states. Tariffs were low, censorship was feeble, and the armed forces were almost non-existent, though in an emergency the state could call for Austrian troops. Ferdinand was succeeded in 1824 by his son Leopold II, another benevolent ruler until the revolutions of 1848 converted him – along with Pope Pius IX and the King of Naples – to conservatism. In the early part of his reign he reduced taxes, carried out liberal reforms, encouraged science and returned to that perennially elusive project of Tuscan rulers, the draining of the Maremma marshlands on the Tyrrhenian coast. Under Habsburg rule neither Mazzini nor Garibaldi nor anyone else could muster revolutionary support in Tuscany. Even at the time of the 1848 revolution few of their followers were found outside Florence and Livorno.
An easier target for nationalistic passion was Lombardy-Venetia, which, unlike Tuscany, was part of a foreign empire. Patriotic intellectuals fulminated against Austria not because it was a bad ruler but because it was an occupier, though for propaganda purposes they had to claim that it was both. They needed to label Austria as the oppressor to justify their title to be considered liberators. Thus a regime that matched Tuscany in providing the best government in the peninsula became the victim of myths and traducers.
The Emperor Francis had spent his childhood in Florence and retained his affection for Italy despite the repeated defeats of his armies there at the hands of Napoleon. Having no desire to revive the Ancien Régime, he presided distantly over a stable and generally peaceful state served by an efficient bureaucracy and an uncorrupted police force. Under Austrian rule Lombardy possessed the most productive agriculture and the most prosperous industry in Italy. Its inhabitants grumbled about taxation and conscription, but only a minority grumbled about the nature of the regime. The emperor’s chief error was to insist that his mentally deficient son Ferdinand should succeed him after his death in 1835.
Insurrections broke out and conspiracies were discovered in much of Italy (including Lombardy) in the 1820s and 1830s, but the Venetians showed little desire to remove a benign government and take part in them. While disappointed that they had been denied the chance to govern themselves, they were pleased that their city was the joint capital of the kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and relieved that they were no longer governed by the French. Napoleon had stolen the bronze horses of St Mark’s and displayed them in Paris, but Austria brought them back and, with due ceremony, reinstated them on the cathedral’s façade.
The most engaging witness of French and Austrian rule in northern Italy was Henri Beyle, the charming and irrepressible Frenchman who wrote books as Stendhal and called himself Brulard in his memoirs. As a youth of seventeen, he came over the Great St Bernard in 1800, intent on joining General Bonaparte’s army as a subaltern of dragoons. Within weeks of his arrival in Lombardy, he had encountered the three great passions of his adult life: music, love and Italy. One evening he saw Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto and was overwhelmed by the experience. ‘To live in Italy and hear such music,’ he recalled in his autobiography, ‘became the basis of all my reasoning.’37 In Milan he went to La Scala several times a week; he also became addicted to falling in love with difficult and sometimes unattainable women.
Stendhal spent Napoleon’s imperial years in the army, stationed in Brunswick and later serving on the quartermaster’s staff in the Russian campaign of 1812. Throughout this time he dreamed of returning to his ‘dear Italy’, which was his ‘true country’ and ‘in harmony’ with his nature. A print of Milan cathedral made him feel so nostalgic that he could not bear to look at it; the smell of veal cutlets cooked in breadcrumbs alla milanese made his yearning still more acute. He wanted his epitaph to begin with the words, ‘Arrigo Beyle, milanese’.
After the emperor’s abdication in 1814, Stendhal returned, unemployed but delighted, to Italy, where he lived for seven years and acquired a second identity, one that was less cynical and more enthusiastic than the one he had left behind in France. A romantic, though an untypically unlyrical one, he sympathized with the nascent patriotic feelings he found in the salons of Milan. But he did not greatly admire the patriotic intellectuals or believe that their aspirations for a united Italy were practical: for him even Naples was hardly Italian while Florence had no more in common with Otranto than it did with Le Havre.38 He knew there was much wrong with contemporary Italy but he could not bring himself to be harsh about the land of love and music even when he tried: The Charterhouse of Parma, apparently a novel about conspiracy, despotism and imprisonment, is really a love letter to Italy.
Stendhal was a bonapartist who ensured that the style of The Charterhouse was plain and unromantic by reading a few pages of Napoleon’s civil code each morning before writing. He claimed the emperor had ‘rudely transformed’ Milan, turning a city ‘hitherto renowned for nothing save over-eating into the intellectual capital of Italy’; he also claimed, in 1818, that Milan and Florence were mourning Napoleon, though feelings of bereavement were seldom evident outside the liberal circles he frequented. Yet although he was in the anti-Austrian camp, he did not pretend that Italians were suffering under rule from Vienna, and he admitted that people were happier and freer in Milan than they were in Rome or papal Bologna. Novels and operas that would have been banned in Turin could be published and performed in the Habsburg capitals of Venice and Milan. At La Scala in 1845 Giuseppe Verdi encountered no problems with his opera Giovanna d’Arco, but in Rome the censors stripped poor Joan of Arc of her name and even of her nationality so that eventually she appeared before audiences as Orietta of Lesbos, a Genoese heroine leading Greek islanders against the Turks.
Generations of European schoolchildren were taught that Napoleon had brought the idea of unity to Italy, that his defeat had led to a dismal interlude of oppression and reaction, and that Italy’s destiny had finally been fulfilled by the heroic endeavours of its patriots. Yet the determinist theory is completely unhistorical. Italy was no more preordained to unite than Scandinavia, Yugoslavia or North America. Equally mistaken are the ideas that Naples was a foul despotism deserving of destruction, that Lombardy-Venetia was a monument to foreign tyranny and that Piedmont was the liberal knight predestined to rescue Italy and lead her to glory and to unity. Two of the most distinguished Piedmontese of the era – both of them future prime ministers in Turin – realized that the propaganda was all nonsense. Count Cavour knew the truth about Habsburg rule in Lombardy but admitted that in his journalism of the 1840s he was ‘obliged to be over-patriotic and cry out against Austria along with everyone else’. As for the Marquess d’Azeglio, a more genuine patriot than Cavour, the propaganda seemed to him grotesque. ‘To call the present rulers of Italy tyrants,’ he wrote in 1846, ‘would be a childish absurdity.’39