The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (53 page)

Napoleon delegated the responsibilities of day-to-day rule to

Melzi, who oversaw an administration that followed France’s prefectural bureaucratic template and religious policies. In 1803, he brushed

aside his vice president’s concerns about papal infl uence in negotiating

a concordat that gave him the authority to redraw diocesan boundaries and appoint bishops in return for recognizing the primacy of

Napoleonic

Italy 271

the Church. The French emperor dispensed with Melzi entirely after

crowning himself “king of all Italy” two years later and appointed

his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais as viceroy. His imposition of the

Code Napoleon and introduction of a new catechism acknowledging

him as “the Lord’s Anointed” demonstrated that there was relatively

little difference between Italian subjecthood in the new kingdom and

the
départements réunis
.

This was also the case in the Kingdom of Naples, where Napoleon

handed over the throne fi rst to his brother Joseph and then his

brother-in-law Marshal Joachim Murat. In 1806, Joseph continued

the Bourbon regime’s absolutist reforms by imposing key elements

of the Napoleonic administrative model, selling off Church lands,

closing monasteries, and abolishing feudal institutions. On this score

he attempted to be a relatively benevolent imperial ruler, for his main

goal was to secure French rule by promoting political security and

economic development. In attacking feudalism in the countryside

he sought to create a taxable class of prosperous small to mid-sized

farmers that would have an interest in underpinning his authority.

This was an elusive goal. Feudal elites still had the means to buy up

former Church estates and claim most of the common and municipal

land in the kingdom. Many of the ex-tenants and peasant farmers

who managed to purchase farms could not keep up with their mortgage and tax payments. The very poor lost the right to glean after

harvests, hunt and fi sh on wasteland, and collect nuts and wood from

forests. Consequently, Joseph’s antifeudal reforms made life worse

for the majority of common Italians and heightened rural tensions

by spreading landlessness and poverty.

In 1808, Murat inherited the consequences of these policies when

Joseph abdicated the crown of Naples to become Napoleon’s puppet

king of Spain. Unlike his predecessor, who was a relatively loyal viceroy, the marshal clashed frequently with Napoleon in his efforts to

transform Naples into a truly sovereign kingdom. Murat sought to

build the Army of Naples into an effective power base and fl outed the

continental system by trying to impose tariffs on French imports to

raise revenue and protect local industry.

Napoleon had no patience for this unauthorized empire building.

He forced Murat to drop his tariff barriers and implement the Code

Napoleon. Caring only for the kingdom’s capacity to produce troops

and revenue, the emperor brushed aside Murat’s protests that these

272 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

policies took Naples to the brink of bankruptcy, mass unemployment,

and dangerously high levels of social unrest. Indeed, the kingdom’s

debt to France was almost three times its annual revenue intake, and

the simmering rebellion in the Calabria and Abruzzi hinterlands made

it virtually impossible to collect taxes after 1809. Murat’s troops went

unpaid for months at a time, but Napoleon rebuked his viceroy when

budget shortfalls forced Murat to reduce the kingdom’s interest payments to France.

Given these realities, it might seem surprising that any Italian

would willingly play a role in the Napoleonic imperial project. Yet the

French efforts to rally useful Italians to their cause and amalgamate

them into a new class of imperial intermediaries met with some success. For urban elites and aspiring bureaucrats the Napoleonic empire

held out the promise of public order, patronage, and status. Property

owners feared chaos more than the subjecthood that invariably fell

most heavily on the lower classes. Mob attacks on moderate reformers and Giacobini during the anarchy of the Black Year made them

much more inclined to put up with the indignities of French rule.

They certainly had little reason to lament the demise of the foreign

Bourbon and Habsburg ancien régime rulers.

With Italian nationalism still in its infancy, some elite Italians were

willing to at least tacitly accept a regime that suppressed banditry,

offered the chance of reasonably lucrative employment, and provided

greater security for property via the Code Napoleon. The French antifeudal and anticlerical agenda also offered an opportunity to buy up

Church estates and common land at bargain prices. Those who made

themselves suffi ciently useful could claim fi gurehead ministerial posts

in the kingdoms of Italy and Naples and fl attering ceremonial roles at

Napoleon’s Italian court. Businessmen appreciated Napoleon’s destruction of tariff barriers within the peninsula, and French rule offered

writers, artists, and scholars new opportunities for employment and

patronage. Finally, the inherent corruption of empire allowed the second Cisalpine Republic’s secretary of state, the mayor of Genoa, and

other enterprising new Frenchmen to acquire personal fortunes.

Sometimes these inducements were enough to win over Napoleon’s

harshest Italian critics. At the height of his power, large crowds cheered

his coronation as the king of Italy, and Foscolo’s Venetians honored

his defeat of the Austrians by building him a triumphal arch across

the Grand Canal. The clergymen who balked at the new imperial

Napoleonic

Italy 273

catechism celebrating Napoleon’s divine sanction sang Te Deums in

celebration of his victories.

Napoleon enjoyed this adulation but understood that he needed

more than the praise of a few respectable Italians to rule effectively.

As in the wider empire, his long-term goal was to engineer a new

class of intermediaries by incorporating the offspring of these notables into French imperial society. Operating under the assumption

that their culture had made Italian men soft and unreliable, his amalgamist project focused on recruiting their sons into the military as

a step toward turning them into new Frenchmen. In 1805, French

offi cials in Parma tried to convert the College of Santa Caterina, one

of the most prestigious boarding schools in Italy, into a military academy. They also organized university students in the Kingdom of Italy

into battalions for military training and created an elite military unit

(the
gardes d’honneur
) for aristocratic young men.

Ultimately, however,
amalgame
usually required force. The

authorities in Piedmont threatened to confi scate the property of elite

students who refused to attend the military academy at Saint-Cyr. In

1811, French offi cials subjected elites throughout the peninsula to a

“golden levy” that pressed them to send their sons into the imperial

military and civil services. In Umbria, the French prefect invited the

heads of the twelve most prominent families of the department to a

dinner party. The
gendarmes
that delivered the invitations sent a clear

message that there would be serious consequences if they refused to

cooperate. The French authorities in Rome jailed a renowned count

for refusing to give up his son, and in the Kingdom of Italy they

exiled the heads of four leading families to Paris to convince them to

send their sons into the
gardes d’honneur
.

Amalgame
also imposed French values and culture on an uncomfortable populace. Napoleonic offi cials in Rome introduced French currency

and shifted clocks to Paris time. Ignoring Napoleon’s various concordats

with the Pope, they abolished the Inquisition and restrictions on the

city’s Jewish ghetto. Italian dialects remained the language of administration throughout most of the peninsula, but the French seeded it with

new words refl ecting their imperial needs. These included
funzionario

(civil servant),
controllo
(control), and
processo verbale
(court record).31

As in all empires, these policies refl ected Napoleon’s arrogant assumption that military power could remake subject societies to suit his purposes. Moreover, he naively believed that assimilation and cooperation

274 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

with the French imperial enterprise would not unduly compromise the

amalgamated notables’ infl uence over common Italians.

In reality, both
ralliement
and
amalgame
failed in Italy because

there was no disguising the exploitation of imperial subjecthood.

Some Italians may have forgiven Napoleon for his cynical and selfserving manipulation of Italian nationalism, but the majority of the

population bitterly resented the extractive demands that made their

lives measurably worse. French imperial economic policy treated Italy

as a mercantilist colony. French offi cials tore down protective tariff

barriers throughout the peninsula and dismantled the silk industries

in Lombardy and Piedmont to clear the way for metropolitan French

weavers. Their ultimate goal was to accelerate the ongoing decline of

Italian industry that began during the ancien régime era and free up

raw materials and foodstuffs for export to France.

Typically, the greatest burden of these exploitive policies fell on

common Italians. Napoleon’s refusal to let the kingdoms of Italy and

Naples use tariffs to generate revenue meant that it took intrusive

new taxes to meet tribute expectations. These included a poll tax and

duties on salt, food, and milling grain. This unwelcome intervention

came at a time when French demands for raw materials, wartime

shortages, and the continental system made food scarce and drove up

prices. Infl ation, food exports to the wider empire, land shortages due

to the sale of common land, and the closure of Church-run charitable

organizations led to widespread poverty and the threat of famine. It

is therefore hardly surprising that more and more Italians turned to

crime and banditry to cope with the burden of Napoleonic rule.

Subject peoples had suffered under this kind of imperial exploitation since Roman times. Napoleon’s empire, however, imposed a new

kind of extraction in the form of his ravenous demand for masses of

conscripted soldiers. To be sure, the Romans and their successors often

turned their subjects into unwilling auxiliaries, but this coerced military service never approached the scale of conscription that Napoleon

levied on the
départements réunis
and satellite kingdoms. He won

over Ermolao Federigo and other patriots by manipulating their

nationalist aspirations, but relatively few common Italians shared

these sentiments. Thus, while cooperative Italian offi cers commanded

Napoleon’s Italian divisions, the vast majority of their rank-and-fi le

soldiers were resentful conscripts. The French justifi ed this wholesale

impressment not on the grounds that Italians were imperial citizens

Napoleonic

Italy 275

but by claiming that French military service civilized barbarous

mountain peasants and degenerate townsmen.

In the Kingdom of Italy, Melzi accepted this logic and supported

the creation of the Armée d’Italie in the hope that it would pave the

way for independence and unifi cation. Rural elites often used conscription to get rid of their most troublesome tenants and sometimes

even ill-disciplined sons. Notables in the
départements réunis
played

a similar role in sweeping the most marginal and vulnerable members

of society into the army. Altogether, these respectable Italians helped

the French round up roughly two hundred thousand troops during

the Napoleonic era, of whom only about 10 to 15 percent were volunteers. When Joseph Bonaparte and Murat tried to limit conscription

in the Kingdom of Naples, Napoleon forced them to meet his manpower demands. Common people went to great lengths to avoid the

dragnet. Italian troops earned less than metropolitan French soldiers,

and they suffered enormous casualties during the brutal fi ghting in

Spain and Russia. Estimates vary, but it appears that only thirteen

thousand of the eighty-fi ve thousand men from the Kingdom of Italy

who fought in Russia returned home.32

Mass resistance to conscription in northern Italy began as early

as 1802 when mobs turned on the Italian bureaucrats who conducted

the draft. Similarly, angry Roman women attacked recruiting parties after the city’s annexation. These incidents were a prelude to the

most serious mass opposition to Napoleon’s manpower demands. In

1809, armed bands in the Kingdom of Italy burned draft lists as part

of a larger uprising against French rule. But challenging the empire

directly was risky, and many Italians opted to resist conscription

through more subtle means. Their tactics included faking medical disabilities, falsifying birth certifi cates, or marrying elderly women to

claim a marriage exemption. Some went so far as to cut off their trigger fi ngers or pull the canine teeth needed to hold cartridges. Flight