The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (55 page)

of peasants lost their lives, and special courts ordered the execution of

more than one hundred captured “brigands.” All the same, the scope

of the revolt forced Napoleon’s viceroy Eugène to repeal most of the

new unpopular taxes.

Local resistance to Napoleonic centralization and extraction was

even more pronounced and violent in the Kingdom of Naples, where

French demands for tribute infl amed the already bitter opposition to absolutist reform. Beginning in 1806, rural poverty in the

Calabria and Abruzzi regions, exacerbated by land privatization,

increased taxation, and the closure of charitable religious institutions, led to an explosion of banditry. British forces in Sicily fanned

these fl ames by funding bandit leaders such as the notorious Fra

Napoleonic

Italy 281

Diavolo, or “Brother Devil,” who had earned a reputation for brutality during the Black Year and continued to commit atrocities in

the nominal service of the exiled Bourbon regime. Unlike the disorganized and lightly armed peasant rebels in the north, the guerrilla bands in Naples were a serious threat to the Napoleonic regime.

They killed or wounded approximately twenty thousand imperial

soldiers and made it impossible to collect taxes or conscripts in more

than one-third of the kingdom.

As in Spain, the French met this overt defi ance of imperial authority with equal ruthlessness and brutality. In 1806, Napoleon fi rmly

told his brother Joseph: “Grant no pardons, execute at least six hundred rebels, for they have murdered a great many of my soldiers. Let

the houses of at least thirty of the principal heads of the villages be

burned and distribute their property among the troops. Disarm all the

inhabitants and pillage fi ve or six of the villages that have behaved the

worst.” Three years later, Murat issued similar instructions to his commanders when the rebellion showed no sign of breaking. “Remember,

I want no more amnesty, and it is a war of extermination that I want

waged against these miserable creatures.”35 Given these orders, the

imperial forces castrated, fl ayed, impaled, crucifi ed, and burned captured rebels. Unable to defeat the bandit bands directly, they tried to

starve them into submission by making it a capital offense to feed

them. In a particularly notorious incident, Murat’s men slaughtered

a group of women caught taking lunch to their men in the fi elds.

These sorts of atrocities were hardly a new innovation in imperial

control. The Romans, Umayyads, and Spaniards used similar tactics

against subject peoples who challenged their authority. But detailed

accounts of their misdeeds are largely missing from the historical

record. The vicious French counterinsurgency tactics in the Kingdom

of Naples, coupled with the savagery that the British used to regain

control over northeastern India after the mass uprising of 1857,

brought the underlying brutality of imperial rule into sharper focus.

Terror, intimidation, and barbarity had always been the unseen cornerstones of empire, but they were now more obvious at the dawn of

the modern era. Moreover, they began to lose their effectiveness. The

French imperial forces and the Neapolitan bandits essentially fought

to a bloody stalemate in southern Italy. The guerrillas never overthrew the imperial regime, but Murat was equally unable to master

the hinterlands.

282 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

It is tempting to attribute Napoleon’s downfall in Italy to the

strength of popular nationalism. But it would be anachronistic to

suggest that defi ant rural peoples refused to become imperial subjects

because they were beginning to see themselves as Italians, Germans,

or some other nationality. Most continued to identify with their local

communities rather than a still-abstract notion of a larger nation, and

if they resisted Napoleon, it was primarily because he continued and

improved upon the ancien régime’s centralizing reforms. The respectable and propertied classes in the cities and the settled countryside

were more inclined to appreciate the improved security and opportunities that came with French rule. Indeed, nationalist sentiments were

still weak enough at this time that many of these notables might well

have followed the lead of earlier generations of elite Britons, Iberians,

Andeans, and Bengalis in rallying to the new imperial order if French

rule in Europe had lasted long enough.

In fact, Napoleon’s European empire was remarkably short-lived

in comparison to the venerable Roman, Umayyad, Spanish, and East

India Company empires. It fell primarily because the main European

powers would not share the continent with an expansionist power

that aspired to become a new Rome. Napoleon therefore met his

demise on the wider battlefi elds of Europe rather than in the hills of

Italy or Spain. The British naval blockade goaded him into imposing

the continental system on unwilling subjects and allies, which in turn

made French rule increasingly unbearable. It soon became apparent

to Europeans of all stations that there were no equal partners in the

Napoleonic imperial enterprise. An alliance or treaty with the French

brought a humiliating loss of sovereignty for princes, while overt

subjecthood entailed the full weight of imperial exploitation for the

wider population. Napoleon’s empire was mighty but precarious, and

its vulnerability gave Europeans the confi dence to reject his call to

ralliement
and resist their subjecthood.

Enforcing the continental system drew France into the long festering Peninsular War and the even more disastrous invasion of

Russia. Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of tsarist forces and the ravages of the Russian winter cost him the core of the Grande Armée,

and only about 14 percent of the 650,000 soldiers who followed him

into Russia survived the campaign in fi ghting condition. The incompatibility of empire and
ralliement
meant that he had to replace these

losses with conscripts and tribute wrung from conquered territories.

Napoleonic

Italy 283

The imperial budget ran a substantial defi cit in the last years of the

empire, and it took massive manpower sweeps to raise a new army to

confront the combined forces of Britain, Russia, Austria, Spain, and

the German powers that rolled back Napoleon’s conquests in 1813.

The Confederation of the Rhine, the duchies of Berg and Westphalia, and the Italian puppet states began to collapse or defect after

this Sixth Coalition won a decisive victory at the Battle of Nations in

October 1813. Six months later, the French overthrew their emperor

as his enemies bore down on Paris. The victorious powers sent

Napoleon into exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba and reset the

French borders to their 1792 frontiers. But the coalition’s attempt to

restore the Bourbon king Louis XVIII to the French throne provoked

those who were not willing to surrender the glory of the revolution

and empire. Many Frenchmen therefore rallied to Napoleon when he

returned from Elba in March 1815. This popular support allowed him

to regain control of France for the next one hundred days. It took a

seventh and last coalition of European armies, which won the decisive

victory at Waterloo, to bring down Napoleon and send him to his

fi nal exile and death on St. Helena in the south Atlantic.

The aftermath of Napoleon’s demise is remarkable. It stood as one

of the rare moments in the larger history of empire when it seemed

possible to reverse the consequences of imperial conquest and rule.

Having fi nally defeated the self-styled heir of ancient Rome, the victorious alliance of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia set about dismantling his empire at the Congress of Vienna. This time they succeeded

in forcing the French to accept the restoration of Louis XVIII. As punishment for returning to Napoleon during the One Hundred Days,

the allies imposed an indemnity of seven hundred million francs and

moved the French borders back to those of 1789. This meant France

gave up what was left of the
départements réunis
. It also lost most of

what was left of its original overseas empire, which succeeding French

governments spent the following century rebuilding in Africa and

Southeast Asia.

Despite these measures, the European powers could not dispense

entirely with the primary innovations of the revolutionary and

Napoleonic era. Absolutism was dead, and a constitution and Chamber

of Deputies limited the power of the restored Bourbon monarchs.

Ancien régime nobles regained some of their prestige, but much of

their property was gone. They also had to accept Napoleon’s new

284 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

imperial aristocracy as relative equals. Surprisingly, there were no

wholesale purges of Napoleonic offi cials, and even the widely hated

minister of police, Joseph Fouché, escaped sanction. Institutionally, the

Bourbons had to retain Napoleon’s Bank of France, prefectural system, schools, and civil code to govern the new postimperial France.

It was equally diffi cult to turn back the clock in the rest of Europe.

Napoleon’s conquests swept away the decaying Holy Roman Empire,

and in its place the Congress of Vienna created a German Confederation of thirty-nine German-speaking states ranging in size from

Austria and Prussia to a handful of free cities. Although they wanted

to make a clear break with the Napoleonic era, the restored rulers

of these states retained many of the French emperor’s more useful

innovations. These included mass conscription, the
gendarmerie
,

secular legal codes, and effi cient local administrative systems. Conversely, the Catholic Church and most noblemen never regained their

lost property. Further east, Napoleon’s infl uence waned in the lands

conquered after 1804, but the nationalistic gentry in Poland drew on

his centralizing legacy in teaching, if not forcing, local communities

to be Polish.

In Italy, there was no repeat of the violence of the Black Year when

French authority collapsed because the invading Austrians and the

respectable Italian classes shared a strong interest in preserving law

and order. As a result, the elites who had rallied to the Napoleonic

regime did not suffer the bloody fate of the Giacobini and patriots

some fi fteen years earlier. Italians, however, were at a loss as to what

to do after the French retreat. Some advocated declaring an Italian kingdom to preempt the Austrians, but they could not agree on

who would wear the crown. Most ordinary people were happy to see

Napoleon go, but they were not ready to embrace unifi cation or condemn Napoleon’s allies and intermediaries as traitors to an imagined

Italian nation. The French sponsorship and manipulation of Italian

nationalism undercut its popular appeal by linking it to extraction,

conscription, and intrusively centralized state authority. This helps

to explain why Italians ignored Lord William Bentinck’s nationalistic

call to arms when he landed with a British force in Livorno in 1814:

“Italians hesitate no longer; be Italians, and let Italy in arms be convinced that the great cause of the country is in your hands!”36

Murat similarly tried and failed to stay in power in Naples by recasting himself as a national leader. With armies of the Sixth Coalition

Napoleonic

Italy 285

closing in, he pledged to attack the Kingdom of Italy in return for

recognition by Austria but reneged on his promise during the One

Hundred Days. Expecting that Napoleon would keep the Austrians

and British busy, he invoked Italian nationalism in a bid for popular

support:

Italians! The hour has come in which the great destiny of Italy must

be fulfi lled. Providence is summoning you at last to be an independent nation. From the Alps to the straits of Sicily one cry can be

heard: ‘The independence of Italy!’ . . . Away with all foreign domination! You were once masters of the world, and you have paid for that

perilous glory with twenty centuries of subjugation and slaughter.

Let it be your glory now to break free from your masters.37

No one was fooled, and the Neapolitan Bourbons executed him

after they returned to power.

Eugène de Beauharnais and the Kingdom of Italy fared only

slightly better in the wake of the French collapse. Unlike Murat, the

viceroy remained loyal to his stepfather, but the Austrians sent him

into exile in Munich, where he married a daughter of the king of

Bavaria. His fi nance minister Giuseppe Prina, whose role in enforcing

the Napoleonic regime’s tribute demands made him widely hated, did

not get off as easily. Incited by vengeful nobles, an angry mob murdered him in 1814.

These internal divisions meant that Italians had little infl uence at

the Congress of Vienna, where the delegates decided to return the Pope

to Rome and the Bourbons to Naples. The various Habsburg princes

got their duchies back in northern Italy, and an enlarged Kingdom

of Piedmont and Sardinia acquired Genoa. Yet as in the rest of the

former Napoleonic empire, these restored rulers kept its most useful

centralizing tools in continuing the ongoing process of asserting state