Imperial City: Rome under Napoleon - Softcover

Nicassio, Susan Vandiver

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226579735 ISBN 13: 9780226579733

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2009

Synopsis

In 1798, the armies of the French Revolution tried to transform Rome from the capital of the Papal States to a Jacobin Republic. For the next two decades, Rome was the subject of power struggles between the forces of the Empire and the Papacy, while Romans endured the unsuccessful efforts of Napoleon’s best and brightest to pull the ancient city into the modern world. Against this historical backdrop, Nicassio weaves together an absorbing social, cultural, and political history of Rome and its people. Based on primary sources and incorporating two centuries of Italian, French, and international research, her work reveals what life was like for Romans in the age of Napoleon.

“A remarkable book that wonderfully vivifies an understudied era in the history of Rome. . . . This book will engage anyone interested in early modern cities, the relationship between religion and daily life, and the history of the city of Rome.”—Journal of Modern History

“An engaging account of Tosca’s Rome. . . . Nicassio provides a fluent introduction to her subject.”—History Today

“Meticulously researched, drawing on a host of original manuscripts, memoirs, personal letters, and secondary sources, enabling [Nicassio] to bring her story to life.”—History

About this title

About the Author

Susan Vandiver Nicassio is professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is the author of many books, including Tosca's Rome, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Imperial City

ROME UNDER NAPOLEONBy SUSAN VANDIVER NICASSIO

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Susan Vandiver Nicassio
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-57973-3

Contents

Preface...............................................................7Cast of Characters....................................................9Chapter One: Urbe et Orbe: The City and the World.....................13Chapter Two: The City.................................................31Chapter Three: The People.............................................55Chapter Four: Joys....................................................81Chapter Five: The Turning Year........................................107Chapter Six: Sorrows..................................................131Chapter Seven: Money, School and Work.................................151Chapter Eight: The New Regime.........................................171Chapter Nine: The Empire Versus God...................................195Chapter Ten: Restorations.............................................215Bibliographical Essay.................................................237Bibliography..........................................................245Index of Names........................................................253

Chapter One

URBE ET ORBE: THE CITY AND THE WORLD

In July of 1796, a strange phenomenon was reported in the popular districts of Rome.

Romans traditionally prayed that the Madonna might 'turn her eyes towards them', and now it seemed as if their prayers had been answered in a notably literal way. Marian miracles, already reported in the provincial towns of Ancona and in the Marches, began to occur in Rome itself: in the street-side shrines, the eyes of the madonnas seemed to come alive, moving in their painted faces to look up in supplication, down in grief, or side to side to take in with love and pity the people who clustered around. At the bedside of an elderly nun, it was reported, the radical physician Liborio Angelucci cried out in alarm and fled from the room as the icon above the sick woman looked at him with reproach and gentle disdain. As French invasion seemed to grow ever more inevitable carnival was cancelled in favour of barefoot penitential processions led by cardinals and bishops, and the exposition of relics. None of this would be of any use. Nor would diplomacy, or barely disguised bribery. By 1798 Rome would fall to the armies of revolutionary France; in 1809, Rome would be absorbed into the empire as an imperial city, and ruled directly as if it were part of France. The French in one guise or another would dominate the city until 1814.

In the summer of 1796 Rome stood, as she always had, on the banks of the Tiber, enclosing within her walls the battered glories of the ancient empire of the West, the heart of Catholic Christendom, and a population who considered themselves citizens of the capital of the world. She was a little shabby, more than a little down at the heels. Her theocratic government was hopelessly old-fashioned even before the French Revolution; her economy was a shambling wreck despite the intermittent efforts at reform by a string of popes; her prisons and her hospitals were shining examples of the best that Europe could produce while her universities were outdated, her law courts were strangled in overlapping jurisdictions, and the most charitable thing to say about her police and army is to say nothing at all.

Late eighteenth-century Rome was ruled by the pope, an elected monarch who, in addition to being head of the universal Church, was also the king of the Papal States. These states ran, or straggled, from Terracina and Gaëta in the south, on the edge of the Kingdom of Naples, across central Italy north and east to the borders of Modena and the Republic of Venice. They were a hodgepodge of territories, states and cities including the Legations of the Romagna, Ferrara and Bologna, the Marches, the ports of Ancona and Civitavecchia, and decrepit but once great Renaissance cities like Perugia, Orvieto and Urbino. The pope, usually elderly, ruled along with his often elderly cardinals who served as heads of government departments; the cardinals in turn depended on a semi-clerical body of middle-rank administrators called prelates; and working for the prelates were the secretaries. The whole structure creaked along, increasingly outmoded but apparently eternal. The system was the object of universal scorn among international observers; it was maddening for the few Romans who had an eye for progress; but it was surprisingly popular with the people as a whole.

Eighteenth-century popes had been mild and benevolent rulers. Most had at least attempted to be good shepherds to their city and their world. But while their city remained much the same, by the last decades of the century the world had changed dramatically. The defences of Rome had for a long time been more spiritual than physical, and by 1796 they were clearly on the point of crumbling.

France has a long history, going back to Clovis and then to Charlemagne, of 'protecting' the papacy, with or without the papacy's cooperation. By the Renaissance, Italy was an irresistible prize – rich and virtually undefended, consisting of dozens of small, often mutually hostile, states. The French, the Spanish, and various combinations of German-speakers dominated or outright snatched convenient pieces, and Italy was the treasure chest from which victors were rewarded in European wars. When the balance of peace in Europe was disturbed, the Italian states were inevitably troubled. But what began in France with the fall of the Bastille and continued, changing but not stopping, for the next 25 years until the fall of Napoleon, was far more than a disturbance. A new world was being born, a world that would be the antithesis of everything that Rome represented.

The new world would be much concerned with reason and progress; in Rome, reason would only be valued as a means to faith, while the right to remain unchanged was sacred.

In the new world the state spoke in the name of the people, and in that name claimed the right to change itself and its prerogatives profoundly; in Rome, the state spoke in the name of God, and in that Name the people claimed the right to change not at all, and bitterly resisted any attempts to make them do so.

The new world dissolved the corporations that stood guard between man and the state, be they guilds or extended families; Rome was a corporation and, in the pre-modern sense, a family.

The new world was led by the iron will of a genius whose prerogatives were in theory limited by the will of the people but whose powers were curtailed hardly at all; Rome was governed by a geriatric collection of vaguely benevolent amateurs headed by an elected sovereign whose prerogatives were, in theory, absolute but whose powers were severely curtailed by an entrenched bureaucracy (the curia) and a crushing weight of inertia.

In the new world wealth was exalted and poverty was crime; in Rome, one revelled in the display of wealth, but poverty bore the mark of the Most Holy, a fact that gave the poor an annoying attitude of self-contained superiority.

Most fatally, the new world would be much concerned with military might; for at least a century, Rome's army had been a running joke. It was small, ineffectual, top-heavy with superannuated officers, and existed primarily for parades and to provide guards for theatres and troops for policing the carnival.

Inevitably, the meeting between Rome and the new world was a monstrously bad match, and for 20 years or so, Rome would suffer. In what appeared to be the end, she would triumph, but she would never be the same, and after a half century of twilight, the Rome that had been would disappear forever – the Roma sparita long remembered only in old watercolours and faded memoirs, despised by patriots and apologised for by the pious.

The story of Rome between the outbreak of revolution in France and the triumph of counter-revolution in 1814 and 1815 is the story of a series of more or less cataclysmic military, political, and cultural convulsions, with more than a dozen major changes of governing power and multiple mini-spasms within the convulsions.

Shockwaves from France began to strike Rome almost immediately after 1789, in the form of refugees. After the refugees came the invasions. The pretexts for the first invasion of the city were the violent but mostly accidental deaths of two more or less official French representatives, Nicholas Hugon de Basseville, a sort-of diplomat, and Léonard Duphot, a young general who was there to combine a little rabble rousing with his honeymoon. It is impossible to tell the players or events without a score card, and difficult enough to do so with one. But we shall try. Each number indicates a major change in the governing of Rome.

Despite unmistakable rumblings (which included the deaths of Basseville and Duphot, the Napoleonic conquest of northern Italy, and papal acceptance of the treaty of Tolentino), the first major governmental change in Rome came in February 1798 (1) when the avenging if businesslike General Berthier arrived in response to Duphot's death and, with minimal enthusiasm on either his part or that of almost all Romans, overthrew the tyranny of the popes (Pius VI was summarily deported and soon died) and re-created the classical republic (or such was the plan). This Roman Republic of 1798–99 (2), known by its enemies as the repubblica per ridere, or Ridiculous Republic, was a papier-mâché construct that lasted as long as the French were there to defend it. When their protective hand was briefly withdrawn in November 1798 (General Bonaparte had gone to Egypt with grander geo-political designs), Ferdinand IV of Naples marched up to occupy the city (3); when French troops reappeared a few days later, Ferdinand wisely scampered back home (inspiring one of Pasquino's best: veni, vidi, e fuggi – he came, he saw, he fled). The moribund republic staggered back (4), but as French military control in Italy dissolved, Romans waited for the coalition Allies to move into the city, which they finally did at the end of September, 1799 (5). There they remained, despite the fact that a new pope, Pius VII, was elected in Venice in March 1800; they left only reluctantly after Bonaparte, abandoning his troops in Egypt, returned to Italy and won the battle of Marengo in June 1800. Thereafter, though Bonaparte allowed the newly elected Pius VII to assume the rule of his city – the First Restoration (6) – it was clearly on French terms. The Concordat in 1801 returned the Church to France, and Pius participated more or less enthusiastically in the imperial coronation in 1804. But when Pius proved to be less accommodating than the emperor wished, he was encouraged to obedience by the gradual but inexorable encroachment of French forces. Finally, in February 1808, General Miollis moved into the Castel Sant'Angelo to herald a new French occupation (7). On 10 June 1809 Rome was declared a 'free, imperial city' (8), with an extraordinary committee or Consulta to whip it into shape, and a prefect, the appealing Count Camille de Tournon, to rule in the emperor's name. The intransigent pope immediately excommunicated anyone associated with the new government, starting with the emperor; the pope was then kidnapped (it is not clear if Napoleon ordered it) and forcibly removed from the city and sent under close guard to Savona, where he would remain for the next three years. The Consulta finished its work and was disbanded on the last day of 1810, and Rome was annexed to the empire (9). Although Napoleon declared his intention of ruling benevolently in Rome, and probably meant it, by the spring of 1810 some ugly aspects of coercion were visible: religious orders were suppressed, clerics who refused to sign an oath of allegiance were arrested, and conscription was introduced into a city which had felt itself immune. Romans were unenthusiastic about the birth of Napoleon's son, the King of Rome, in May 1811. While 1812 and 1813 were eventful, including the disastrous Russian campaign and the threat of a march on Rome by an insurgent cleric, nothing substantial changed in Rome until January 1814 (10) when Joachim (Gioachino) Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law and King of Naples, arrived to declare himself head of an amorphous and premature Italian state, allied with Napoleon's enemies, Austria and Prussia. Murat's new Italy received scant support, and five months later Pius VII returned in triumph to his city – the Second Restoration (11). This, one might reasonably assume, was the end of the story; but there was to be a bizarre postscript. During Napoleon's One Hundred Days, Murat again changed sides to join him; the pope fled Rome (12) in March 1815 but returned (13) three months later. There he would remain until his death in 1823. Some 25 years after that, another Roman republic would be declared, but that is no part of our story.

Thus, the chronological outline. But there were, of course, wheels within wheels. While the major part of our story lies with the Roman republic of 1798–99 and the direct rule instituted unofficially in 1808 and officially in 1809, it is difficult to understand those events without a closer look at events that preceded them (the deaths of Basseville and Duphot), and followed them (papal rule between 1800 and 1808, and the doomed attempts by both Napoleon and the pope to come to mutually acceptable arrangements).

Prelude: Hugon de Basseville, Léonard Duphot, and General Bonaparte

When France began her rapid slide into revolution in 1789, it did not take Rome long to notice that something potentially unpleasant was going on beyond the Alps. Almost from the start, for a whole complex of reasons, revolutionary France had been anti-Christian in general and anti-Roman in particular. By the summer of 1789, Europeans who read newspapers, or heard them read, were nervous; future events did nothing to calm their fears. By 1791, when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy brought the property and personnel of the Church in France under the direct control of the government and demanded an oath of loyalty to the state, the bitter clash between Rome and her disobedient daughter France was unavoidable. Pius VI, elderly and never terribly decisive at the best of times, vacillated while the Church in France dissolved into hostile camps: on one side, accused of greed, those who accepted the loyalty oath; on the other side, accused of intransigence, those who refused.

As the wars began refugees from France flooded into Rome, from the sisters of the king to half-starved curés from the provinces. Revolution arrived in Rome in the urbane person of Nicholas Hugon de Basseville, amateur poet, physician, faithful servant of the regime in Paris and emissary of the republic via the French ambassador at Naples. Among the problems he was instructed to solve was the fact that the court of Rome would receive no such ambassador, and refused to allow the consul – a banker named Mont, or Mutte – the right to change the lilies of France over the ambassadorial door to the revolutionary tricolour.

Basseville wisely left the lilies in place, but undiplomatically encouraged the revolutionary ardour of the young men at the French Academy (who hardly needed encouragement), and cultivated the company of Romans thought to be open to new ideas – among them haute bourgeois like the banker Torlonia and more modest members of the middle class like the intellectual obstetrician Liborio Angelucci, as well as potentially radical nobles like Santa Croce and the intellectual Sigismondo Chigi.

While Bassville found some receptive ears, he also aroused the less amiable interest of two groups: one, relatively harmless – the Roman curia; the other, much more dangerous – the people of Rome, always liable to casual violence. Romans murdered one another at an astonishing rate [see chapter 6], but rarely threatened foreigners. They would be happy to make an exception in the case of Basseville.

Nothing much happened until the catalyst arrived, in the person of Charles de la Flotte, in November 1792. When his official diplomatic request for permission to place the arms of the republic over the ambassadorial residence was diplomatically refused, de la Flotte took the offensive. After a January 1793 banquet at which tricolour cockades featured prominently, Basseville ordered the change in emblems and the artists of the Academy leapt into the breach, cobbling one together in an overnight work session. It was promptly put up and even more promptly torn down and trampled underfoot by a group of angry Romans of the popular class. From that point on, matters deteriorated rapidly, until that afternoon when Basseville, his wife and de la Flotte made the fatal error of sallying forth in a carriage decked out with revolutionary insignia and escorted by servants flaunting the offensive red, white and blue.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Imperial Cityby SUSAN VANDIVER NICASSIO Copyright © 2005 by Susan Vandiver Nicassio. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226579735
• ISBN 13: 9780226579733
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 255