The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (47 page)

A people united by a shared sense of kinship might be defeated, but

it was harder to turn them into imperial subjects because cooperation

with a conquering power became much riskier. Of course, nationalism also had a dark side. Particularism became intolerable, and often

it took compulsion to teach members of once distinct local communities to think nationally. In this sense, nation building could be even

more oppressive than empire building. Imperial rulers were invariably authoritarian and often brutal, but they had to tolerate, if not

respect, local identities because they played a central role in imperial

administration and extraction. Nation-states, however, gave ethnic

and religious minorities the choice of assimilation, marginalization,

persecution, or emigration.

The French nationalism that underwrote Napoleon’s imperial

project refl ected these liberating but coercive realities. Much like the

Roman proconsuls who used military triumphs as a springboard to

the imperial throne, Napoleon did not create his imperial state from

scratch. Instead, he inherited the tools of empire from the Bourbon

monarchs and their revolutionary successors. The architects of the

French Revolution may have executed Louis XVI for treason in

1793, but they retained the centralizing instruments of his enlightened absolutism. Revolutionary changes made the royal guard into a

Napoleonic

Italy 241

national guard and the royal army into a national one. Yet although

the members of the national assembly abolished feudal privilege,

seized Church lands, and affi rmed the natural rights of all men to

liberty, property, and security, they shared the Bourbons’ conviction

that they could use state power to transform all levels of society. Their

ambitious agenda included drafting a new calendar, inventing new

children’s names, and creating a “cult of reason” to break the power

of the Catholic Church. While they fell far short of their egalitarian

ambitions, they bequeathed Napoleon a strong centralized state.

In seeking a break with the past, the revolutionaries initially disavowed the centralized despotism of empire as a sin of the ancien

régime. In 1790, the Constituent Assembly responsible for drafting

a new constitution proudly declared: “The French nation renounces

any intention of engaging in a war of conquest and will never employ

its forces against the liberty of any people.”13 Nevertheless, the republican Girondins who controlled the assembly from 1791 to 1792 soon

overcame their anti-imperial scruples once they acquired the means

to build an empire. This began when they called upon the newly

enfranchised French citizenry to defend the revolution from royalist

conspiracies. Led by Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the Girondins forced the

king to declare war on Austria and Prussia to rally popular support

for the new regime. In convincing peasants and artisans to volunteer

for the National Guard, Brissot harnessed the power of nationalism

to the revolution.

The even more radical National Convention, which replaced the

National Assembly in the summer of 1792, went a step further and

declared France’s intention to export the revolution by offering

“fraternity and assistance to all peoples who seek to recover their liberty.”14 Suitably provoked, the Austrians and Prussians played their

role by invading and, after some initial successes, losing to the better led and better-motivated French national forces. This allowed the

radical regime to occupy the left bank of the Rhine and Belgium (the

Austrian Netherlands), thereby inciting the British, Dutch, Spanish,

Portuguese, and northern Italian states to join the Austrians and

Prussians in the anti-revolutionary First Coalition.

The threat of a hostile united Europe exacerbated simmering

domestic disagreements over the shape and character of the new

French nation that led the revolutionaries to turn on themselves.

In 1793, the execution of the king, military reverses at the hands

242 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

of the First Coalition, and economic trouble in Paris weakened the

Girondins to the point where an extremist faction of Jacobins, known

as the Montagnards, took control of the National Convention. Led by

Maximilien Robespierre, their Committee of Public Safety suspended

the constitution and coordinated the defense of France. For a little

more than a year, this group of twelve deputies ruled as dictators and

unleashed the infamous Reign of Terror against the real and imagined enemies of the revolution.

One of the committee’s fi rst actions was to introduce widespread

conscription to fi ll out the fl agging revolutionary armies. Surrounded

by foreign enemies and facing a shortfall of three hundred thousand

troops, the Convention ordered each French department (province)

to produce a set quota of men. Theoretically, this
levée en masse
was

a temporary requisition of manpower for the defense of the nation,

but the conscripts’ required service gradually stretched from months

to years.

The defi ant peasantry of Brittany and the Vendée refused to play

their roles as revolutionary Frenchmen and allied with the Catholic

clergy and royalist nobles in a localist counterrevolutionary revolt.

The Committee of Public Safety responded with a brutal, near genocidal campaign against this “Christian army.” The revolutionary

forces destroyed crops, burned towns, and sometimes massacred resistant communities. Showing no sympathy for his fellow “citizens,”

General François-Joseph Westermann assured his superiors in Paris:

The Vendée no longer exists. I’ve just buried it in the marshes and forests of Savenay. Following the orders I have received, I have crushed

children beneath the hooves of our horses, and massacred women so

that they don’t spawn any more brigands. You can’t reproach me with

having taken any prisoners, the roads are littered with corpses.15

Westermann’s ruthless treatment of the Vendée previewed the

counterinsurgency measures that Napoleonic generals would use

against rebels in Spain and the Kingdom of Naples. But these scorchedearth tactics weren’t particularly effective in either western France or

the wider empire. The fi ghting in the Vendée was so intractable that

Napoleon refused a posting to the region on the assumption his military career would suffer in fi ghting a largely unwinnable war.

Abroad, the Convention’s promise to bring liberty and fraternal assistance to the subject peoples of Europe was as hollow as its

Napoleonic

Italy 243

declarations of national solidarity with the common people of the

Vendée. In July 1794, mass mobilization, high revolutionary morale,

and better generalship enabled the French army to turn back an invasion by the First Coalition and push the boundaries of the revolution

to the Rhine, Alps, and Pyrenees. These successes were not enough to

defuse popular anger over the Committee of Public Safety’s excesses,

which included the arrest and execution of hundreds of thousands of

enemies of the revolution. Two days after the great French victory at

Fleurus, the more moderate members of the Convention ended the

Reign of Terror by sending Robespierre and his most radical allies to

the guillotine. By 1795, the result was a new constitution and a more

moderate government under a fi ve-man council known as the Directory. The Directory brought an end to the worst domestic abuses of

the revolution, but its members had no intention of giving up the

Convention’s foreign conquests. In annexing borderlands deemed

within France’s “natural frontiers,” the Directory implicitly acknowledged that the revolutionary regime had acquired an empire.

Ultimately, the promised returns of imperial rule proved as seductively irresistible to the French revolutionaries and republicans as

they had been to their Bourbon predecessors. It took enormous fi nancial resources to build a powerful centralized state, and the Directory insisted that the newly conquered territories had to reimburse

France for the expense of their “liberation.” Their continental French

Empire consisted of annexed territories known as
départements réu-

nis
(reunited departments) and puppet “sister republics.” The former

category included most of the Kingdom of Piedmont, the left bank of

the Rhine, Geneva, and the lands comprising modern Belgium and

Luxembourg. French administrators swept away the ancien régime’s

borders in these lands and subdivided their conquests into French

departments. The Dutch United Provinces and what was left of the

Swiss Confederation became the sister Batavian and Helvetic republics. Apart from Piedmont, which the French annexed, most of the

Italian peninsula met a similar fate.

Napoleon carried out this imperial engineering as nothing more

than a French general, but just as Julius Caesar used his victories in

Gaul as a stepping-stone to power, Napoleon similarly made his reputation as the conqueror of northern Italy. Although he was the son of

a noble Italian family that settled in Corsica when it was under Venetian control, he was very much a member of the French military caste.

244 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Christened Napoleone Buonaparte, he became Napoleon Bonaparte

after entering the École Militaire in Paris and earning a commission

in the French military. Like many of his peers, the young offi cer, who

spoke French with an Italian accent, found that the fl ight of senior

royalists after the revolution created considerable opportunities for

promotion in the nationalist army. It also helped that he became the

protégé of Paul Barras, one of the fi ve members of the Directory.

In 1795, Napoleon reached the rank of general after distinguishing

himself fi ghting royalist counterrevolutionaries, and one year later

the Directory chose him to lead the invasion of Italy. The Directory

designed the campaign as a feint to draw the First Coalition forces

away from Germany, but Napoleon had other ideas. Demonstrating

his superior generalship, he infl icted heavy casualties on the Austrians and drove them out of Italy entirely within the year. By October

1797, he was well on his way to Vienna when the Habsburgs dissolved the First Coalition by negotiating a peace treaty with France

at Campo Formio.

As the supreme commander of French forces in Italy, Napoleon

consequently found himself in control of most of the peninsula. Not

unlike Clive and the Bengali nabobs, he was generally free to do as

he pleased. Ignoring local appeals for an independent Italian republic,

he grouped Bologna, Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio together to create the Cispadane Republic. In 1797, he folded this puppet state into

the Cisalpine Republic along with the ex-Austrian Duchy of Milan

and the Lombard Republic, in addition to transforming Genoa into

the Ligurian Republic. Napoleon left Italy in 1798, but tensions with

the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples drew his successors

southward, and their victories produced the Roman and Parthenopean

republics.

These sister republics were little more than French client states.

Napoleon assigned them restricted constitutions based on the Constitution of the Year III, which had brought the Directory to power

in France. He had no intention of allowing them to challenge French

interests and required his Italian allies to pay staggering amounts of

tribute in the form of cash and requisitioned food and military supplies. Not surprisingly, this rapacious behavior soon provoked popular revolts against the French liberators.

The Italian experience of subjecthood under the empire of the

Directory was fairly typical. The Dutch Batavian Republic had to pay

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Italy 245

one hundred million guilders to secure French diplomatic recognition,

in addition to supporting a garrison of twenty-fi ve thousand French

troops. This was imperial extraction. Seeking to make this new empire

pay, the Directory stripped conquered territories of useful machinery

and destroyed what remained to ensure that it did not compete with

French industry. As part of their plan to turn Paris into a new Rome,

they similarly requisitioned great works of art and manuscripts from

the museums, national archives, and stately homes of their sister

republics. Predictably, the French revolutionary armies were even

less restrained. Revolutionary generals may have cast France as the

defender of western civilization, but they had more in common with

the Ostrogothic plunderers of ancient Rome when they looted much

of northern Italy. Chauvinistic rank-and-fi le French soldiers placed

even less weight on the importance of solidarity with liberated peoples and followed the lead of their offi cers in living off the land.

Typically, the Directory’s imperial accomplishments brought little security at home. Imperial tribute was not enough to offset the

expense of nearly constant warfare, and the resulting economic instability undercut the regime’s popular support. Additionally, the temporary truce in the Vendée collapsed when British meddling stirred

up a new round of unrest. When the elections of 1797 returned a

substantial number of conservatives to local assemblies and brought