Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Constitution of 1795. Insurrection of Vendemiaire, Oct. 4.]

The project thus outlined met with general approval, and gained even that
of the Royalists, who believed that a popular election would place them in
a majority in the two new Assemblies. Such an event was, however, in the
eyes of the Convention, the one fatal possibility that must be averted at
every cost. In the midst of the debates upon the draft-constitution there
arrived the news of Hoche's victory at Quiberon. The Convention gained
courage to add a clause providing that two-thirds of the new deputies
should be appointed from among its own members, thus rendering a Royalist
majority in the Chambers impossible. With this condition attached to it,
the Constitution was laid before the country. The provinces accepted it;
the Royalist middle class of Paris rose in insurrection, and marched
against the Convention in the Tuileries. Their revolt was foreseen; the
defence of the Convention was entrusted to General Bonaparte, who met the
attack of the Parisians in a style unknown in the warfare of the capital.
Bonaparte's command of trained artillery secured him victory; but the
struggle of the 4th of October (13 Vendemiaire) was the severest that took
place in Paris during the Revolution, and the loss of life in fighting
greater than on the day that overthrew the Monarchy.

[The Directory, Oct., 1795.]

The new Government of France now entered into power. Members of the
Convention formed two-thirds of the new legislative bodies; the one-third
which the country was permitted to elect consisted chiefly of men of
moderate or Royalist opinions. The five persons who were chosen Directors
were all Conventionalists who had voted for the death of the King; Carnot,
however, who had won the victories without sharing in the cruelties of the
Reign of Terror, was the only member of the late Committee of Public Safety
who was placed in power. In spite of the striking homage paid to the great
act of regicide in the election of the five Directors, the establishment of
the Directory was accepted by Europe as the close of revolutionary
disorder. The return of constitutional rule in France was marked by a
declaration on the part of the King of England of his willingness to treat
for peace. A gentler spirit seemed to have arisen in the Republic. Although
the laws against the emigrants and non-juring priests were still
unrepealed, the exiles began to return unmolested to their homes. Life
resumed something of its old aspect in the capital. The rich and the gay
consoled themselves with costlier luxury for all the austerities of the
Reign of Terror. The labouring classes, now harmless and disarmed, were
sharply taught that they must be content with such improvement in their lot
as the progress of society might bring.

[What was new to Europe in the Revolution.]

[Absolute governments of 18th century engaged in reforms.]

At the close of this first period of the Revolutionary War we may pause to
make an estimate of the new influences which the French Revolution had
brought into Europe, and of the effects which had thus far resulted from
them. The opinion current among the French people themselves, that the
Revolution gave birth to the modern life not of France only but of the
Western Continent generally, is true of one great set of facts; it is
untrue of another. There were conceptions in France in 1789 which made
France a real contrast to most of the Continental monarchies; there were
others which it shared in common with them. The ideas of social, legal, and
ecclesiastical reform which were realised in 1789 were not peculiar to
France; what was peculiar to France was the idea that these reforms were to
be effected by the nation itself. In other countries reforms had been
initiated by Governments, and forced upon an unwilling people. Innovation
sprang from the Crown; its agents were the servants of the State. A
distinct class of improvements, many of them identical with the changes
made by the Revolution in France, attracted the attention in a greater or
less degree of almost all the Western Courts of the eighteenth century. The
creation of a simple and regular administrative system; the reform of the
clergy; the emancipation of the Church from the jurisdiction of the Pope,
and of all orders in the State from the jurisdiction of the Church; the
amelioration of the lot of the peasant; the introduction of codes of law
abolishing both the cruelties and the confusion of ancient practice,--all
these were purposes more or less familiar to the absolute sovereigns of the
eighteenth century, whom the French so summarily described as benighted
tyrants. It was in Austria, Prussia, and Tuscany that the civilising energy
of the Crown had been seen in its strongest form, but even the Governments
of Naples and Spain had caught the spirit of change. The religious
tolerance which Joseph gave to Austria, the rejection of Papal authority
and the abolition of the punishment of death which Leopold effected in
Tuscany, were bolder efforts of the same political rationalism which in
Spain minimised the powers of the Inquisition and in Naples attempted to
found a system of public education. In all this, however, there was no
trace of the action of the people, or of any sense that a nation ought to
raise itself above a state of tutelage. Men of ideas called upon
Governments to impose better institutions upon the people, not upon the
people to wrest them from the Governments.

[In France, the nation itself acted.]

In France alone a view of public affairs had grown up which impelled the
nation to create its reforms for itself. If the substance of many of the
French revolutionary changes coincided with the objects of Austrian or of
Tuscan reform, there was nothing similar in their method. In other
countries reform sprang from the command of an enlightened ruler; in France
it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and aimed at the
creation of local authority to be exercised by the citizens themselves. The
source of this difference lay partly in the influence of England and
America upon French opinion, but much more in the existence within France
of a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by commerce, and keenly
interested in all the speculation and literary activity of the age. This
was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other classes
inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For the
flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but
the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up
monarchical Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed
privilege nor stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing
itself into power. The nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the
Crown sought to reduce them; the nation, elsewhere than in France, did not
intervene and lay hands upon power for itself, because the nation was
nothing but the four mutually exclusive classes of the landlords who
commanded, the peasants who served, the priests who idled, and the soldiers
who fought. France differed from all the other monarchies of the Continent
in possessing a public which blended all classes and was dominated by none;
a public comprehending thousands of men who were familiar with the great
interests of society, and who, whether noble or not noble, possessed the
wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly desire a share in power.

[Movements against governments outside France.]

Liberty, the right of the nation to govern itself, seemed at the outset to
be the great principle of the Revolution. The French people themselves
believed the question at issue to be mainly between authority and popular
right; the rest of Europe saw the Revolution under the same aspect. Hence,
in those countries where the example of France produced political
movements, the effect was in the first instance to excite agitation against
the Government, whatever might be the form of the latter. In England the
agitation was one of the middle class against the aristocratic
parliamentary system; in Hungary, it was an agitation of the nobles against
the Crown; on the Rhine it was an agitation of the commercial classes
against ecclesiastical rule. But in every case in which the reforming
movement was not supported by the presence of French armies, the terrors
which succeeded the first sanguine hopes of the Revolution struck the
leaders of these movements with revulsion and despair, and converted even
the better Governments into engines of reaction. In France itself it was
seen that the desire for liberty among an enlightened class could not
suddenly transform the habits of a nation accustomed to accept everything
from authority. Privilege was destroyed, equality was advanced; but instead
of self-government the Revolution brought France the most absolute rule it
had ever known. It was not that the Revolution had swept by, leaving things
where they were before: it had in fact accomplished most of those great
changes which lay the foundation of a sound social life: but the faculty of
self-government, the first condition of any lasting political liberty,
remained to be slowly won.

[Reaction.]

Outside France reaction set in without the benefit of previous change. At
London, Vienna, Naples, and Madrid, Governments gave up all other objects
in order to devote themselves to the suppression of Jacobinism. Pitt, whose
noble aims had been the extinction of the slave-trade, the reform of
Parliament, and the advance of national intercourse by free trade,
surrendered himself to men whose thoughts centred upon informers, Gagging
Acts, and constructive treasons, and who opposed all legislation upon the
slave-trade because slaves had been freed by the Jacobins of the
Convention. State trials and imprisonments became the order of the day; but
the reaction in England at least stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna
and Naples fear was more cruel. The men who either were, or affected to be,
in such fear of revolution that they discovered a Jacobinical allegory in
Mozart's last opera, [45] did not spare life when the threads of anything
like a real conspiracy were placed in their hands. At Vienna terror was
employed to crush the constitutional opposition of Hungary to the Austrian
Court. In Naples a long reign of cruelty and oppression began with the
creation of a secret tribunal to investigate charges of conspiracy made by
informers. In Mainz, the Archbishop occupied the last years of his
government, after his restoration in 1793, with a series of brutal
punishments and tyrannical precautions.

These were but instances of the effect which the first epoch of the
Revolution produced upon the old European States. After a momentary
stimulus to freedom it threw the nations themselves into reaction and
apathy; it totally changed the spirit of the better governments, attaching
to all liberal ideas the stigma of Revolution, and identifying the work of
authority with resistance to every kind of reform. There were States in
which this change, the first effect of the Revolution, was also its only
one; States whose history, as in the case of England, is for a whole
generation the history of political progress unnaturally checked and thrown
out of its course. There were others, and these the more numerous, where
the first stimulus and the first reaction were soon forgotten in new and
penetrating changes produced by the successive victories of France. The
nature of these changes, even more than the warfare which introduced them,
gives its interest to the period on which we are about to enter.




CHAPTER III.


Triple attack on Austria--Moreau, Jourdan--Bonaparte in Italy--Condition of
the Italian States--Professions and real intentions of Bonaparte and the
Directory--Battle of Montenotte--Armistice with Sardinia--Campaign in
Lombardy--Treatment of the Pope, Naples, Tuscany--Siege of Mantua--
Castiglione, Moreau and Jourdan in Germany Their retreat--Secret Treaty
with Prussia--Negotiations with England--Cispadane Republic--Rise of the
idea of Italian Independence--Battles of Arcola and Rivoli--Peace with the
Pope at Tolentino--Venice--Preliminaries of Leoben--The French in
Venice--The French take the Ionian Islands and give Venice to
Austria--Genoa--Coup d'etat of 17 Fructidor in Paris--Treaty of Campo
Formio--Victories of England at sea--Bonaparte's project against Egypt.


[Armies of Italy, the Danube, and the Main, 1796.]

With the opening of the year 1796 the leading interest of European history
passes to a new scene. Hitherto the progress of French victory had been in
the direction of the Rhine: the advance of the army of the Pyrenees had
been cut short by the conclusion of peace with Spain; the army of Italy had
achieved little beyond some obscure successes in the mountains. It was the
appointment of Napoleon Bonaparte to the command of the latter force, in
the spring of 1796, that first centred the fortunes of the Republic in the
land beyond the Alps. Freed from Prussia by the Treaty of Basle, the
Directory was now able to withdraw its attention from Holland and from the
Lower Rhine, and to throw its whole force into the struggle with Austria.
By the advice of Bonaparte a threefold movement was undertaken against
Vienna, by way of Lombardy, by the valley of the Danube, and by the valley
of the Main. General Jourdan, in command of the army that had conquered the
Netherlands, was ordered to enter Germany by Frankfort; Moreau crossed the
Rhine at Strasburg: Bonaparte himself, drawing his scanty supplies along
the coast-road from Nice, faced the allied forces of Austria and Sardinia
upon the slopes of the Maritime Apennines, forty miles to the west of
Genoa. The country in which he was about to operate was familiar to
Bonaparte from service there in 1794; his own descent and language gave him
singular advantages in any enterprise undertaken in Italy. Bonaparte was no
Italian at heart; but he knew at least enough of the Italian nature to work
upon its better impulses, and to attach its hopes, so long as he needed the
support of Italian opinion, to his own career of victory.

[Condition of Italy.]

Three centuries separated the Italy of that day from the bright and
vigorous Italy which, in the glow of its Republican freedom, had given so
much to Northern Europe in art, in letters, and in the charm of life. A
long epoch of subjection to despotic or foreign rule, of commercial
inaction, of decline in mind and character, had made the Italians of no
account among the political forces of Europe. Down to the peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 their provinces were bartered between the Bourbons
and the Hapsburgs; and although the settlement of that date left no part of
Italy, except the Duchy of Milan, incorporated in a foreign empire, yet the
crown of Naples was vested in a younger branch of the Spanish Bourbons, and
the marriage of Maria Theresa with the Archduke Francis made Tuscany an
appanage of the House of Austria. Venice and Genoa retained their
independence and their republican government, but little of their ancient
spirit. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Austrian influence was
dominant throughout the peninsula, Marie Caroline, the Queen and the ruler
of Ferdinand of Naples, being the sister of the Emperor Leopold and Marie
Antoinette. With the exception of Piedmont, which preserved a strong
military sentiment and the tradition of an active and patriotic policy, the
Italian States were either, like Venice and Genoa, anxious to keep
themselves out of danger by seeming to hear and see nothing that passed
around them, or governed by families in the closest connection with the
great reigning Houses of the Continent. Neither in Italy itself, nor in the
general course of European affairs during the Napoleonic period, was
anything determined by the sentiment of the Italian people. The peasantry
at times fought against the French with energy; but no strong impulse, like
that of the Spaniards, enlisted the upper class of Italians either on the
side of Napoleon or on that of his enemies. Acquiescence and submission had
become the habit of the race; the sense of national unity and worth, the
personal pride which makes the absence of liberty an intolerable wrong,
only entered the Italian character at a later date.

[Revival after 1740.]

Yet, in spite of its political nullity, Italy was not in a state of
decline. Its worst days had ended before the middle of the eighteenth
century. The fifty years preceding the French Revolution, if they had
brought nothing of the spirit of liberty, had in all other respects been
years of progress and revival. In Lombardy the government of Maria Theresa
and Joseph awoke life and motion after ages of Spanish torpor and misrule.
Traditions of local activity revived; the communes were encouraged in their
works of irrigation and rural improvement; a singular liberality towards
public opinion and the press made the Austrian possessions the centre of
the intellectual movement of Italy. In the south, progress began on the day
when the last foreign Viceroy disappeared from Naples (1735), and King
Charles III., though a member of the Spanish House, entered upon the
government of the two Sicilies as an independent kingdom. Venice and the
Papal States alone seemed to be untouched by the spirit of material and
social improvement, so active in the rest of Italy before the interest in
political life had come into being.

Nor was the age without its intellectual distinction. If the literature of
Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century had little that recalled
the inspiration of its splendid youth, it showed at least a return to
seriousness and an interest in important things. The political economists
of Lombardy were scarcely behind those of England; the work of the Milanese
Beccaria on "Crimes and Punishments" stimulated the reform of criminal law
in every country in Europe; an intelligent and increasing attention to
problems of agriculture, commerce, and education took the place of the
fatuous gallantries and insipid criticism which had hitherto made up the
life of Italians of birth and culture. One man of genius, Vittorio Alfieri,
the creator of Italian tragedy, idealised both in prose and verse a type of
rugged independence and resistance to tyrannical power. Alfieri was neither
a man of political judgment himself nor the representative of any real
political current in Italy; but the lesson which he taught to the Italians,
the lesson of respect for themselves and their country, was the one which
Italy most of all required to learn; and the appearance of this manly and
energetic spirit in its literature gave hope that the Italian nation would
not long be content to remain without political being.

[Social condition.]

[Tuscany.]

Italy, to the outside world, meant little more than the ruins of the Roman
Forum, the galleries of Florence, the paradise of Capri and the Neapolitan
coast; the singular variety in its local conditions of life gained little
attention from the foreigner. There were districts in Italy where the
social order was almost of a Polish type of barbarism; there were others
where the rich and the poor lived perhaps under a happier relation than in
any other country in Europe. The difference depended chiefly upon the
extent to which municipal life had in past time superseded the feudal order
under which the territorial lord was the judge and the ruler of his own
domain. In Tuscany the city had done the most in absorbing the landed
nobility; in Naples and Sicily it had done the least. When, during the
middle ages, the Republic of Florence forced the feudal lords who
surrounded it to enter its walls as citizens, in some cases it deprived
them of all authority, in others it permitted them to retain a jurisdiction
over their peasants; but even in these instances the sovereignty of the
city deprived the feudal relation of most of its harshness and force. After
the loss of Florentine liberty, the Medici, aping the custom of older
monarchies, conferred the title of marquis and count upon men who preferred
servitude to freedom, and accompanied the grant of rank with one of
hereditary local authority; but the new institutions took no deep hold on
country life, and the legislation of the first Archduke of the House of
Lorraine (1749) left the landed aristocracy in the position of mere country
gentlemen. [46] Estates were not very large: the prevalent agricultural
system was, as it still is, that of the _mezzeria_, a partnership between
the landlord and tenant; the tenant holding by custom in perpetuity, and
sharing the produce with the landlord, who supplied a part of the stock and
materials for farming. In Tuscany the conditions of the _mezzeria_ were
extremely favourable to the tenant; and if a cheerful country life under a
mild and enlightened government were all that a State need desire, Tuscany
enjoyed rare happiness.

[Naples and Sicily.]

[Piedmont.]

Far different was the condition of Sicily and Naples. Here the growth of
city life had never affected the rough sovereignty which the barons
exercised over great tracts of country withdrawn from the civilised world.
When Charles III. ascended the throne in 1735, he found whole provinces in
which there was absolutely no administration of justice on the part of the
State. The feudal rights of the nobility were in the last degree
oppressive, the barbarism of the people was in many districts extreme. Out
of two thousand six hundred towns and villages in the kingdom, there were
only fifty that were not subject to feudal authority. In the manor of San
Gennaro di Palma, fifteen miles from Naples, even down to the year 1786 the
officers of the baron were the only persons who lived in houses; the
peasants, two thousand in number, slept among the corn-ricks. [47] Charles,
during his tenure of the Neapolitan crown, from 1735 to 1759, and the
Ministers Tanucci and Caraccioli under his feeble successor Ferdinand IV.,
enforced the authority of the State in justice and administration, and
abolished some of the most oppressive feudal rights of the nobility; but
their legislation, though bold and even revolutionary according to an
English standard, could not in the course of two generations transform a
social system based upon centuries of misgovernment and disorder. At the
outbreak of the French Revolution the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was, as
it still in a less degree is, a land of extreme inequalities of wealth and
poverty, a land where great estates wasted in the hands of oppressive or
indolent owners, and the peasantry, untrained either by remunerative
industry or by a just and regular enforcement of the law, found no better
guide than a savage and fanatical priesthood. Over the rest of Italy the
conditions of life varied through all degrees between the Tuscan and the
Neapolitan type. Piedmont, in military spirit and patriotism far superior
to the other Italian States, was socially one of the most backward of all.
It was a land of priests, nobles, and soldiers, where a gloomy routine and
the repression of all originality of thought and character drove the most
gifted of its children, like the poet Alfieri, to seek a home on some more
liberal soil.

[Professions and real intentions of the Directory and Bonaparte, 1796.]

During the first years of the Revolution, an attempt had been made by
French enthusiasts to extend the Revolution into Italy by means of
associations in the principal towns; but it met with no great success. A
certain liberal movement arose among the young men of the upper classes at
Naples, where, under the influence of Queen Marie Caroline, the Government
had now become reactionary; and in Turin and several of the Lombard cities
the French were not without partisans; but no general disaffection like
that of Savoy existed east of the Alps. The agitation of 1789 and 1792 had
passed by without bringing either liberty or national independence to the
Italians. When Bonaparte received his command, that fervour of Republican
passion which, in the midst of violence and wrong, had seldom been wanting
in the first leaders of the Revolutionary War, had died out in France. The
politicians who survived the Reign of Terror and gained office in the
Directory repeated the old phrases about the Rights of Man and the
Liberation of the Peoples only as a mode of cajolery. Bonaparte entered
Italy proclaiming himself the restorer of Italian freedom, but with the
deliberate purpose of using Italy as a means of recruiting the exhausted
treasury of France. His correspondence with the Directory exposes with
brazen frankness this well-considered system of pillage and deceit, in
which the general and the Government were cordially at one. On the further
question, how France should dispose of any territory that might be
conquered in Northern Italy, Bonaparte and the Directory had formed no
understanding, and their purposes were in fact at variance. The Directory
wished to conquer Lombardy in order to hand it back to Austria in return
for the Netherlands; Bonaparte had at least formed the conception that an
Italian State was possible, and he intended to convert either Austrian
Lombardy itself, or some other portion of Northern Italy, into a Republic,
serving as a military outwork for France.

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