The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (51 page)

than their secular imperial counterparts and often directed both passive and active resistance to French rule. Some historically minded

churchmen even compared the French Empire to the apocalyptical

threat of the “heathen” Umayyad caliphate’s invasion of Christian

Europe. Rejecting Napoleon’s secular legal code, lay Catholics held

priestless masses and sheltered monks and nuns displaced by his closure of the monasteries.

Most popular resistance to Napoleonic rule was local and uncoordinated, but it had the capacity to grow into widespread rebellion

in regions where geography and banditry limited French authority.

Most of the German-speaking lands remained relatively stable, but

large-scale revolts were common in the waning years of the empire

in the Tyrolean Alps, southern Italy, the Illyrian Provinces, and

Iberia. The most serious of these incidents took place in 1808 after

Napoleonic

Italy 261

Napoleon invaded Spain. Although the Spanish Bourbons were technically French allies, they balked at enforcing the continental system.

Napoleon therefore used a dynastic squabble between Charles IV

and his son Ferdinand VII as an opportunity to depose them both

and shift his brother Joseph from the puppet Kingdom of Naples to

the Spanish throne. The consequences of this move reverberated all

the way to the Andes, where the collapse of royal authority brought

nearly four centuries of Spanish rule in Peru to an end.

In Spain, abuses by the hundred-thousand-man imperial invasion

force and Napoleon’s threat to the autonomy and privileges of local

Iberian communities provoked a massive popular backlash. From the

French perspective, it appeared that all of Spain had risen against

them. Guerrilla bands dismembered or crucifi ed captured imperial

soldiers and murdered helpless French hospital patients. The rebel

Spanish government at Cádiz and the local clergy sanctioned the execution of captured troops, and common villagers poisoned unsuspecting Frenchmen or pushed them down wells. The Napoleonic forces

fought back by matching the guerrillas atrocity for atrocity, but they

could neither subdue the Spanish countryside nor dislodge a British expeditionary force from Iberia. The situation grew so bad that

many French units, which often consisted of Poles or conscripted Italians and Germans, lost the will to fi ght. As a result, the Peninsular

War tied down some two hundred thousand imperial troops at a time

when Napoleon desperately needed them in Russia.

Not surprisingly, many Spanish historians depict this widespread

resistance to French empire building in nationalist terms. In reality,

Spanish nationalism was not yet a coherent ideology, and the rebellion

was not a popular mass uprising. In many cases, the guerrillas were

little more than bandits who preyed on the rural population as much

as they did on the French. More signifi cant, Spanish peasants had little concept of a larger Spanish nation in this period, and few of them

were willing to sacrifi ce themselves for the Bourbons. As in the rest

of Napoleonic Europe, they fought the French because they opposed

Napoleon’s more extractive and intrusive form of subjecthood.

Most Italians felt the same way. At fi rst glance, it seems remarkable that the heirs of the Roman Empire and the architects of the

Renaissance would ever experience the harsh realities of imperial subjecthood. One of the great strengths of the ancient Roman

Republic was the sense of unity that enabled local communities

262 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

throughout the Italian peninsula to think of themselves as Roman

and thus share the benefi ts of Roman citizenship. The collapse of the

western empire in the seventh century and ensuing incursions by

a steady parade of invaders including Germanic bands, Byzantines,

Muslim Arabs,

Normans, medieval Germans, and early modern

Spaniards and Austrians fractured the peninsula politically. The

great Renaissance city-states of northern Italy were formidable military powers and centers of learning and culture, but competition

and mutual distrust kept them from turning this shared culture into

larger political units.

These divisions left Italy vulnerable in the fi fteenth and sixteenth

centuries as the Italians became pawns in the wider struggles between

the French, Spanish, and Austrians. Most of the main Italian states

and regional powers became clients or vassals of various foreign rulers, with only Venice and Genoa retaining a measure of autonomy.

Economic stagnation, widespread rural poverty, and the decline of

the great Italian universities accelerated these trends. Europeans still

respected Italians for their humanism, decorative arts, and opera, but

the preeminence that Renaissance Italy had enjoyed throughout the

continent was largely over.

The Spanish Habsburgs exploited this weakness in giving the Italians a strong lesson in imperial subjecthood. Building on his grandfather Ferdinand’s claims to the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, Charles

V drove out the French and assumed control of most of the peninsula.

Spanish rule was far from popular. Common Italians resented paying

taxes to fund the Habsburg wars, and intellectuals looked down on

the Spaniards as barbarians on par with the Turks.

The situation did not improve in the early eighteenth century

when the Austrian Habsburgs became the dominant force on the

peninsula after the War of the Spanish Succession. The change in

masters meant little, and in 1725 a Piedmont diplomat lamented the

Italians’ continued imperial exploitation at the hands of the foreigners. “The provinces of Italy are the Indies of the Court of Vienna

[Habsburgs]. For more than twenty-fi ve years a good part of the silver

of Italy has gone there.”26 Pursuing an agenda of absolutist reform,

Empress Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II sought to improve revenue collection and extraction by asserting their sovereignty over

feudal nobles and checking the power of the Church. Most of the

remaining independent Italian ancien régime rulers followed suite.

Napoleonic

Italy 263

In doing so they introduced many of the centralizing measures that

Napoleon would continue and expand a century later.

The Austrian attempts to create more effi cient forms of

administration did not arrest Italy’s economic decline. In spite of the

cultural and commercial infl uence of the Renaissance city-states, Italian society remained predominantly rural and agrarian on the eve of

the fi rst Napoleonic conquest. Urban areas were the centers of absolutist reform and were the economic engine of the peninsula. They

exercised only marginal infl uence on the mountainous hinterlands

that ran down the spine of the peninsula through patronage and control of the judiciary. Most rural communities, particularly those in

remote and rugged regions, remained largely autonomous. In these

areas the clergy and important local families exercised the greatest

authority.

In the fertile lowlands, the Church and great noble families dominated agricultural production through large estates worked primarily

by sharecroppers. In the eighteenth century, urban elites sought security in rural holdings as the Italian manufacturing and commercial

sectors contracted. Wealthy aristocrats and infl uential rural families

enclosed common lands, squeezed greater returns from their tenants,

and evicted peasant farmers. Stagnant wages, unemployment, and

escalating food prices made life worse for the agrarian classes, and the

result was a substantial increase in poverty, vagabondage, and outright banditry.

These sharp class and regional divisions prevented Italians from

emulating the French. Overall, they shared a pride in their Roman

heritage and Renaissance achievements, but they had no sense of how

to create a unifi ed nation-state. Their
patria
(fatherland) usually was

their city or region of birth, and only a small handful of intellectuals

aspired to create a
nazione
(nation). Men such as the playwright Vittorio Alfi eri, the choreographer Gasparo Angiolini, and the philosopher Count Francesco Algarotti were immensely proud of Italy’s vast

cultural achievements and lamented that centuries of alien French,

Spanish, and Austrian rule had left its people backward and divided.27

In the late eighteenth century, the poet and novelist Ugo Foscolo had

his character Jacopo Ortis lay out a plan for producing “Italians”:

There can be a country without inhabitants; but there can never be a

people without a country. . . . Let’s transform the masses, if not all at

264 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

least many of them, into well-to-do citizens who own land. But be

careful! This must all be accomplished without bloodshed, without

religious reforms that are sacrilegious, without factions, without proscriptions and exiles, without the aid and blood and plundering of

foreign troops, without the division of lands with agrarian laws and

the looting of a family’s property.28

Yet neither Foscolo nor any of the other nation-minded thinkers

had a specifi c blueprint for getting the common peoples of the peninsula to recognize that they were Italians. For the
popolani
(lower

classes),
campanilismo
(village patriotism) was far more potent than

nebulous Italian nationalism. As was the case in most of continental Europe, the identities of the vast majority of the peoples of Italy

remained decidedly local.

This was the situation when the French revolutionary armies

invaded Italy in 1796. At that time, the peninsula’s ten major political units consisted of the Papal States, the kingdoms of Naples and

Piedmont-Sardinia, the republics of Venice, Genoa, and Lucca, and

the duchies of Modena, Parma, Milan, and Tuscany. Children or

grandchildren of Empress Maria Theresa ruled Tuscany, Modena,

Naples, Parma, and Milan, which, to varying degrees, placed them

within the Austrian sphere of infl uence. Many of these rulers

attempted to adopt the Habsburgs’ centralizing absolutist agenda

to break down entrenched feudal institutions, but only Piedmont,

Milan, and Tuscany achieved any degree of success. Moreover, none

of these largely foreign rulers had any intention of trying to unify

the peninsula or granting their Italian subjects greater political

rights.

Frustrated reform-minded Italians therefore saw an opportunity

in the demise of the ancien régime in France. Viewing the revolutions

in France and America as models for change, intellectuals, protonationalists (“patriots”), Freemasons, and university students followed

the events in Paris closely. Each faction had its own distinct agenda,

and in most cases all these groups had in common was a commitment

to challenge the status quo in Italy. The most radical of them took the

revolutionary regime in France as inspiration and founded Jacobin

clubs. Even though these Italian Jacobins (Giacobini) and patriots were

far less anticlerical and extreme than their French counterparts, they

had relatively little popular support. Still, even the hint of subversion

alarmed the foreign rulers of Italy. Most governments therefore tried

Napoleonic

Italy 265

to limit the revolutionary contagion by censoring newspapers and

banning imports of subversive literature.

Despite these efforts, radical jargon still found its way into the

language of local resistance as peasants shouted revolutionary slogans and threatened to “act like the French” during riots in Piedmont,

Bologna, and Naples. Few had any real knowledge of Jacobinism,

but they understood that it scared ancien régime rulers. Even more

alarming to those in authority, the Giacobini drew some support from

minor nobles, young middle-class professionals, junior army offi cers,

and lower clergymen who were frustrated by the slow pace of reform.

In time, the various Italian kings and dukes cracked down on the radicals and allied more closely with Austria when evidence emerged that

the Convention was actively trying to instigate revolutions in Italy.

The Italian governments’ aggressive tactics and retreat from enlightened reform led many Giacobini to look more directly to the French

revolutionary regime for relief. In 1793, the Convention sent agents

to Italy to organize them to assist a French invasion, but it eventually

decided the Italian radicals were too divided and tradition-bound to be

of much use. It fell to the Directory to launch the conquest of Italy

two years later. Some of the directors backed the operation to gain bargaining chips in their peace negotiations with the Austrians, but others

saw an opportunity to restructure the northern Italian states as model

sister republics. None of them foresaw the consequences of choosing

Napoleon to lead the expedition.

The Corsican general’s rapid conquest of northern Italy far

exceeded the Directory’s and the Italian radicals’ most ambitious

expectations. From the Italian perspective, only a few patriots, such as

the Tuscan nobleman Filippo Buonarroti, were farsighted enough to

recognize the risks of allying with an imperial conqueror. Buonarroti

tried to organize a pan-Italian revolt to preempt the French invasion, but the Italian authorities uncovered the plot and arrested him.